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Eurovision at the Pub tonight!

Stilgherrian — Sat, 24 May 2008 23:03:32 +0000

Only hours to go! Eurovision at the Pub is tonight at our local “Irish” pub, Kelly’s On King, 258 King Street, Newtown. The SBS broadcast starts at 7.30pm, but we’ll be there from 5pm or so to, um, ensure sufficient fuel for a long evening of big hair, tacky costumes and dodgy choreography.

There’s a Facebook event page, but even if you don’t use Facebook please RSVP here or to my Twitter stream or somehow. The more confirmed guests, the more free stuff the pub gives us.

I’ll be Twittering the event, as will many others, with the tag #eurovision. If I have enough bandwidth, I’ll also provide an audio commentary via Ustream.

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Facebook finally understands politics (kind of)

Stilgherrian — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:56:49 +0000

Are you frustrated with Facebook because your profile only lists “Political Views” chosen from an American list (as opposed to being frustrated by all the other Facebook annoyances)? Be frustrated no more! “Political Views” is now a write-in field. Hat-tip to Mushroom and Rooster via Lavartus Prodeo’s Facebook group.

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Thoughts on Twitter

Stilgherrian — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 01:12:41 +0000

In just two months, Twitter has become one of my core communication tools. Non-Twitter instant messaging and Facebook have all but disappeared from the mix. Here’s why.

Actually, before that… If you don’t use Twitter, or if you’ve taken a look but don’t “get it”, watch this 2.5-minute video Twitter in Plain English from those wacky Canadians Common Craft. Love their style.

OK, back?

Like the character in the video, I was sceptical about Twitter. Why do people need to know every little detail of my life? Who cares? I said as much to Perth’s Twitterati late last year. But then I actually tried using it — and I “got it” immediately.

It’s not about what people need to know, but what they want to know. And, as the video, says, the people who care about you are interested in what you’re doing.

Perfectly-named

Calling this service “Twitter” was genius. Listen to real birds twittering, especially during their dawn chorus, and you’ll hear a constant stream of status messages. “I’m alive and healthy.” “This is still my territory, stay clear.” “I’m hungry, feed me.” “I’ve found some food over here.” “Storm coming! Quick! Quick!”

None of these messages necessarily requires an answer — just like typical tweets on Twitter. But you can act upon them or reply if you want.

I’m hungry, going to lunch” can elicit “Hey I’m around the corner, I’ll join you.”
“Firefox has just crashed again” can elicit “Have you tried clearing your cache? That worked for me.”
“Stuck in traffic on the M4″ lets you know that another person, also coming via the freeway, could be late for a meeting — even if they don’t use Twitter themselves.
“Finishing an article before 4pm deadline” tells you not to interrupt that person.
“Finished!’ means you can now ask that person if they’d like a beer.
“Great blog post about Julia Gillard [with a link here]” could lead you in a whole new direction. Beer or no beer.

Or not.

Twitter is, almost literally, the background clucking of so many chickens.

If you need to concentrate on work or a TV program, just tune out. It’s a permanent window onto my world — but that doesn’t mean I need to sit and watch what’s out the window all the time.

I also have tweets coming from ABC News, BBC News and 37signals (which tell me if there’s a problem with Basecamp). One courier company uses Twitter to inform customers of any delays.

Why Twitter works for me

The key factor is that Twitter adheres to the philosophy of small pieces, loosely joined. It’s a clear, simple tool that’s easy to connect to other tools.

I can send or view tweets from the Twitter website, the mobile version at m.twitter.com, the Twitterific application for Mac OS X (that’s what I use most of the time), via SMS or via other instant messaging services. Whatever’s handy at the time.
Ditto for the people following my tweets. They choose whatever’s handy for them. I don’t have to think about where they are at the time.
Everything’s interconnected by RSS, which means I can do things like plug my tweets into this website.

Permanent versus Ephemeral

Twitter helps me distinguish between the things I want to publish for all time, like my longer essays, and the random day-to-day stuff which might be vital at the time but meaningless the next day.

OK, I’m still having trouble with that, because some tweets are worth keeping. But this is experimental stuff.

What do you think? If you already use Twitter, does your experience match mine? If you don’t, please join Twitter and follow me, and let me know how it goes.

[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh's cartoons published online, it's free to use.]

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The compulsory “Sorry Day” post

Stilgherrian — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:35:14 +0000

Originally I wasn’t going to write about today’s Parliamentary Apology to the Stolen Generations. But the event has so captured the nation that writing will clarify my own thoughts. So here goes…

I’ll get the obvious comments out of the way first. Kevin Rudd delivered the Apology with dignity and grace. Brendan Nelson’s speech was moving in parts, but fortunately his attempts to weasel it failed to sour the overall occasion. I agree with Paul Keating’s comment that Nelson missed the point of the day.

I was disgusted to hear that Chris Pearce, the Member for Aston, was reading a magazine and cracking jokes during Rudd’s speech.

As Chris Graham, editor of The National Indigenous Times reports in Crikey:

At the part where Rudd was talking about the tragedy of infant mortality, the “little ones” in Rudd’s words, Pearce was cracking a joke to the rather uncomfortable looking member of parliament sitting next to him.

In fact, Pearce was so against an apology, that he also sat and read through his own leader’s entire speech. When Rudd finished and received a standing ovation, Pearce was the only member of parliament to remain seated. It begs the question, why did he even show up?

Who voted this ignorant yobbo into Parliament? Mr Pearce, you’re entitled to hold an opinion, but at least show some manners in the House. You could hardly accuse Wilson Tuckey of being Australia’s best-mannered parliamentarian, but at least when he decided against the Apology he didn’t turn up.

The negative radio talkback callers were the people we always hear on these occasions: the whining, selfish, ignorant, bitter white-trash who seem incapable of seeing the world through anyone else’s eyes.

HEART FM Hobart 09:44 AM: Caller Ron says white man and the Aboriginal men will never assimilate, like in the north of America. As the white man made the farming lands Ron is looking at now. Ron says an Aboriginal burned an Australian flag that soldiers fought under…

2UE Sydney 09:37 AM: Caller Helen doesn’t agree with the apology to the Stolen Generations because Governments shouldn’t apologise every time there is a bad law. Says she has Aboriginal friends but says there are Aboriginal people out there that, no matter what you do for them, are never happy.

When I worked for ABC Radio I produced some 4000 hours of talk and talkback programs, and I heard far, far too many of these people complaining about the riches and luxuries supposedly showered on the blacks, dole-bludgers, single mothers, poofters, arts students, immigrants and anyone else who didn’t precisely match their own experience. They, of course, had always suffered through the depression, or the War, drought, floods, bushfires, poor health, hard work and high interest rates and were deserving of their handouts.

There probably weren’t ever that many of these folks. They just seemed to have so much spare time in which to phone talkback programs — probably because they’d driven away all their friends through constant whingeing.

Thankfully, it won’t be long before they’re all dead. It’s just a shame that certain legal impediments prevent us from hurrying things up a bit.

But I digress…

Chairman Rudd has set himself an interesting challenge with talk of a bi-partisan “war cabinet” and a referendum. Once the emotion of today’s grand symbolic gesture fades, how will all unfold, I wonder?

A grass-roots call rippled through Facebook for people to change their status message to “…is sorry”. Of the 65 of my friends who’d updated their status recently enough to count, 60% of them had done so — roughly two-thirds of them with the simple “…is sorry”, the rest with additional comments. Another 8% changed their status to some acknowledgement of the day.

By any measure, today was a major milestone in Australia’s history.

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Rainy Sunday reading

Stilgherrian — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 02:20:18 +0000

Nothing better than spending a rainy Sunday reading some thoughtful articles and listening to raindrops and corellas and koels chattering away — in between arguing with Laurel Papworth, of course! I’ve been reading some stuff Mark Pesce has posted recently, including his own essay Unevenly Distributed: Production Models for the 21st Century, as well as The Register saying that people are tiring of social network websites and a piece explaining why Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book The Tipping Point is bullshit. I may reflect upon some of them later.

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Quote of the Day, 31 January 2008

Stilgherrian — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:04:24 +0000

Why is Facebook so popular? Sunrise presenter Pete Blasina has the explanation: “It’s because of the Internet.” Gotcha, Pete. Note, this man is paid to present this segment on technology. Obviously Channel 7 have scoured teh internetz for only the best of the best. Hat-tip to Cameron Reilly.

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Facebook’s neocon financier

Stilgherrian — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:09:19 +0000

Speaking about politics and business, Laurel Papworth has posted a fascinating piece on The Philosophy behind the Men behind Facebook. Venture capitalist and “futurist philosopher” (whatever that is) Peter Thiel is an anti-multicultural neocon who sounds like a complete arsehole.

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What is “data portability” and why should you care?

Stilgherrian — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 21:22:41 +0000

Data portability is the capability to control, share, and move data from one system to another, says Wikipedia. Michael Pick of Smashcut Media has made a very short video explaining it more clearly.

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

Data portability will become more important as more are more of our lives are conducted online. And the issues need to be thrashed out it advance — especially when people like Facebook reckon that even if you delete your account they get to keep your information forever. The Data Portability Workgroup is discussing it as the IT industry level, but where are are politicians and non-government organisations on this?

Thanks to Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ for the pointer.

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Arrest of “teen party host” highlights stupidity of law

Stilgherrian — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:37:02 +0000

Yesterday a Melbourne teenager was charged with creating a public nuisance and producing child pornography. Reuters tells us he “became a controversial media star after a wild party at his parents’ house became a near riot, forcing police to call in a helicopter and the dog squad”. Hands up if you think you know his name.

Now, keep your hands up if you’re completely bloody sure you know his name.

OK, hands down.

Yet again we see how Australia’s laws have failed to adapt to the Internet age.

Everybody and their dog, globally, has been reporting the rise to fame of glamorous Melbourne socialite Corey Worthington Delaney. I’ve written two essays already [1, 2], and this third one probably won’t be the last. My friends at Crikey published The Corey Timeline yesterday (republished by Peter Black too, if the Crikey original is behind their paywall).

Now, under Victorian law, as in many other democracies, the media cannot identify minors charged with criminal offences. Nor can they identify who’s brought before the children’s court. Fair enough. Once upon a time we all agreed that youthful indiscretions shouldn’t mar our reputation for life.

So now we have the ludicrous situation where National Nine News and The Age and everyone else is talking about “a 16-year-old boy” as if we haven’t noticed a flood of media reports about a specific, named 16yo who — in an amazing coincidence — held a wild party on the weekend where the police were called, including a helicopter and the dog squad.

Happens all the time. Could well be someone else.

Even before the Internet this law was flawed. Radio and TV broadcasts were ephemeral (at least until we all got recorders), and newspapers could stop mentioning a name. But that couldn’t prevent you popping down the library to check last week’s edition. And it couldn’t stop people talking about what they already knew.

Today, thanks to blogs, Twitter and Facebook and the rest, even casual gossip is on the public record. Forever. Even if a web page is removed, we can still recover it thanks to Google’s cache and the Internet archive’s Wayback Machine.

You can’t take the piss out of the swimming pool.

Yet those tireless, dedicated soldiers of the mainstream media trudge through the ritual, typing “the youth, who cannot be named for legal reasons” and pixelating photos — even though we can still recognise faces we know.

So what do we do here? Do we ban all media identification of minors? Or just accept that The Truth Is Out There and drop the charade? Maybe we can do the latter and make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of anything we did as minors.

[Note: The pixelated image is for illustration purposes only. I pixelated an image of Corey Worthington Delaney (right) and a friend taken from Channel 7. I have no idea whether he was one of the youths arrested yesterday. How could I possibly know? The police have not said.]

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Retreating into the walled garden, for safety

Stilgherrian — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 02:29:26 +0000

Why do people pour their lives into proprietary environments like Facebook when everything they need to communicate with their friends is already on their desktops? Or their phones. The inimitable Stephen Fry has once again written complete sense, theorising that it’s deep human nature.

What an irony! For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, into closed-border republics and independent city states? The systole and diastole of history has us opening and closing like a flower: escaping our fortresses and enclosures into the open fields, and then building hedges, villages and cities in which to imprison ourselves again before repeating the process once more. The internet seems to be following this pattern.

How does this help us predict the Next Big Thing? That’s what everyone wants to know, if only because they want to make heaps of money from it. In 1999 Douglas Adams said: “Computer people are the last to guess what’s coming next. I mean, come on, they’re so astonished by the fact that the year 1999 is going to be followed by the year 2000 that it’s costing us billions to prepare for it.”

But let the rise of social networking alert you to the possibility that, even in the futuristic world of the net, the next big thing might just be a return to a made-over old thing.

Another possibility, I guess, is that most people are overwhelmed by the choices available. Facebook and the rest just give them a few obvious options and they can get on with it. Or are both Mr Fry and I completely missing it?

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Don’t poke me, take up drugs instead

Stilgherrian — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 19:56:32 +0000

Spotted on Facebook: “Eric TF Bat reckons all these people with their biting and requests and poking have too much time on their hands and should take up drugs or something.” Agreed.

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Are you someone’s user-generated content?

Stilgherrian — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 07:06:12 +0000

Brian Clark has published an excellent piece which explains why I prefer to publish things here, on my own website, rather that on my Facebook profile. Worth reading in its entirety, but it concludes: “Valuable content on a site you own is a classic win-win for readers and the site owner, while publishing on Facebook is a lopsided relationship that favors Zuckerberg and his data-hoarding cronies. While I think social networking is useful in small quantities, I’ve no interest in becoming someone’s user-generated content, especially at the expense of my privacy.”

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2007: Social media goes mainstream (except for business and politics)

Stilgherrian — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 11:36:46 +0000

If 2006 was the year of Web 2.0 then 2007 is the year of social media. For individuals anyway. Australian businesses and politicians generally don’t “get it”.

Social media is mainstream. Two million Australians have Facebook pages and 3.5 million read blogs. MSN Messenger has 7 million users here, and even Ja’mie King says “I’ll MSN u 2nite” without explanation.

But few businesses use social media. Why? I suspect there’s two reasons, apart from an endemic inability to adapt and change. One is about the tools, the other is about business culture.

So far most social media tools have come from start-ups with funny names like Flickr and Twitter and YouTube. Media reports of the Next Big Thing are usually pitched as “look what those weird young folk are doing”. When the Next Big Thing becomes mainstream, the media ADHD attention span has moved on. So the impression is that it’s all a plaything for kiddies.

The second problem is that social media goes against the grain of how most businesses operate.

Back before the federal election, I said that politicians only see social media as a kind of TV, another outlet for their centrally-planned Soviet-style “campaigns”. Businesses have the same problem. They see 2 million Australians on Facebook and want to push their advertising at them. They see the social media websites as just another advertising medium to buy into.

That misses the point. Social media is about conversation.

Businesses are very bad at conversation.

Business usually want to pretend everything’s always perfect, and control all communication so it’s “on brand”.

As a result, when they try working with social media they tend to take one of two fundamentally wrong approaches.

They act like boors at a party, loudly parroting their brand message without actually participating in the conversation. No matter what’s being said around them, they hold up a sign with their logo and shout “Product X will make you trim and sexy.” Or whatever.
They set up their own private conversation forum — and then edit out anything negative.

Either way, people soon stop listening.

The first problem might be solved when social media tools come from mainstream providers like Microsoft. Windows Live Writer, a free blogging tool for Windows, kicks that off.

Interestingly, Microsoft itself is encouraging their staff to write blogs. Their corporate blogging policy isn’t 45 pages of legalese but a simple set of bullet points.

The second problem is harder, because it means businesses themselves need to change to embrace honesty, transparency and authenticity of communication.

Even Microsoft recognises this is a generational change. As one young employee said, “The old guard is highly competitive, the new guard is more collaborative… It’ll be at least another decade before the outside world starts recognizing the change that’s currently happening internally.”

Coincidentally, Hugh MacLeod has written about this very issue only today, in a piece about what’s starting to be called The New Marketing. His key points for me are:

3. The most important asset in The New Marketing is “having something worth talking about”. This makes certain marketing people squeamish. A lot of us grew up in an era of flashy commercials for rather uninspiring products, and something in our DNA makes us believe that’s the proper way to go about things.

4. If I had one big insight from the last year, is how The New Marketing has everything to do with how your product or service acts as a “Social Object“. Kudos to Jyri Engestrom for turning me on to it.

And:

10. Why is it so hard to explain The New Marketing to large companies? Because the people who work there are simply not prepared to relinquish the idea of control. Live by metrics, die by metrics etc.

The “mass media” of the industrial age allowed you to mass-produce your message for… well, the masses. The “social media” of the post-industrial age allow you to hold many, individual conversations, en masse.

Disclosure: Some of the ideas in this article emerged during a geek dinner where Microsoft paid the bill. This is an expanded version of an article originally written for Crikey.

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So much for Facebook’s contextual advertising…

Stilgherrian — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 07:23:37 +0000

So, Facebook now has advertising which is tailored to the user. OK, I’m an attached gay man. What ads do I see?

Back to the drawing board I think, chaps. Unless you think my wedding day should be something really special?

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Flickr’s 2 billionth photo

Stilgherrian — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 03:27:09 +0000

I suppose it’s nice that the 2 billionth photo on Flickr is from Sydney, but does it have to be a picture of that stupid gold-plated dead tree in Chinatown? As an aside, there are now 4.1 billion photos on Facebook. Hat-tip to Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ.