• Viral Wedding Video’s 10M Views Drive Chris Brown Buzz and Sales | Nielsen Wire: That “viral” (by which they just mean “popular”) video of a wedding party dancing into the church [was it a church?] reminded everyone of Chris Brown’s tedious autotune’d song again, with the result that it ended up in iTunes’ Top 10. Yet another example of how something being given away increases its sales.
• Who needs newspapers when you have Twitter? | Salon News: A massive troll by Wired editor Chris Anderson, seeking attention for his new book Free, which is not free. He starts by saying he doesn’t use the words “media” or “news” or “journalism”, but doesn’t offer any alternatives. Wanker.
• Techfest 2009 | NICTA: On 12 August 2009, NICTA showcases some of the new ICT research and development they’ree working on at this most-of-the-day event in Sydney. Let me know if you’d like to join me.
• Women In Film | YouTube: A morph-montage of some of the most famous female faces in film. Note how the eyes are so similar.
• Men In Film | YouTube: A morph-montage of some of film’s most famous male faces. It’s a challenge to spot all of them. Note how similar most of the noses are.
• Ashes 09: Hughes’ Twitter drop – Gen Y meets the Baggy Green | Crikey: Twitter, Criket Australia style: “We get the Twitter from Phillip and I feed them into our IT guy.” Somehow I don’t think they get this “personal” and “spontaneous” stuff.
• 栏目（目录): China’s PLA Daily offers free downloads of (military) music, plus some cheesy animated GIFs.
• Real Black Hats Hack Security Experts on Eve of Conference | Wired.com: Infosec “expert” Dan Kaminsky has been pwn3d, and his lame choice for passwords exposed.
• Tesla_Downunder: Some amazing photos of electrical effects from an Australian who’s been building large Tesla coils.
• AdViews: A digital archive of thousands of vintage TV commercials from the 1950s to 1980s, created or collected by ad agency Benton & Bowles or its successor, D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B).
• Profile: Gary McKinnon | guardian.co.uk: 43yo Gary McKinnon, diagnosed last August with Asperger’s syndrome, admits to hacking US military computers to fuel his UFO obsession.
• Template Twitter strategy for Government Departments | UK Cabinet Office: The UK has developed a standard 20-page template which departments can use for their own Twitter strategy. I can’t help think that it’ll kill spontaneity before it starts. “All other tweets will be cleared by staff at Information Officer grade and above in the digital media team, consulting relevant colleagues in comms and private offices as necessary.” Gawd.
• The Mind Of A US Army Sniper | newmatilda.com: A fine article on what it means for a soldier, particularly a sniper, to kill a person. And then do it again. Not an easy read, but an important read.
• Reconceptualising “time” and “space” in the era of electronic media and communications | Australian Policy Online: “This paper examines to what extent electronic media and communications have contributed to currently changing concepts of time and space and how crucial their role is in experiencing temporality, spatiality and mobility.”
• Cutthroat Capitalism: An Economic Analysis of the Somali Pirate Business Model | Wired: “Like any business, Somali piracy can be explained in purely economic terms. It flourishes by exploiting the incentives that drive international maritime trade. The other parties involved — shippers, insurers, private security contractors, and numerous national navies — stand to gain more (or at least lose less) by tolerating it than by putting up a serious fight. As for the pirates, their escalating demands are a method of price discovery, a way of gauging how much the market will bear.”
• Mark Thomas Info: I first encountered Mark Thomas by reading his book As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandala: underground adventures in the arms & torture trade. The stand-up comedian and activist for human rights is worth paying attention to.
• The Arms Trade | A Stubborn Mule’s Perspective: Sean Carmody turns his data analysis skills to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Arms Transfer Database, which I mentioned the other day. This initial foray generates some nice maps.
• The Coming Upstream Revolution. And We Need It | Gigaom: Just as I thought, increasingly two-way communication on the web leads to increased demand for fast uplinks as well as downlinks.
• Metadata for news | BuzzMachine: Jeff Jarvis’ write-up of Associated Press and the Media Standards Trust proposal for a new standard for metadata for news, plus his own thoughts.
• SIPRI Arms Transfers Database | Stockholm International Peace Research Institute: A searchable database of all international transfers in seven categories of major conventional weapons from 1950 to the most recent full calendar year.

• Conroy’s clean feed | Background Briefing: ABC Radio’s 45-minute exploration. “In the name of protecting children, the government will decree we’ll be forbidden to see ‘unwanted’ and ‘inappropriate’ things on the web. But exactly what that means is a secret, and the thin end of the censorship wedge. Reporter, Wendy Carlisle.”
• The Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time | What’s My Pass?: Humans are remarkably predictable. Even when they think they’re being obscure.
• One Laptop per Child trial | Centre for Learning Innovation: ’Pong’s video about the first Australian trial of the OLPC, showing kids using the XOs in a primary school in rural New South Wales. Interviews with Pia Waugh and the educators involved. For soem reason, DET have cut the credits off the end, which seems a bit rude.
• The real facts about Telstra and the Fake Stephen Conroy | nowwearetalking: Telstra’s first official response comes via their blog.
• Telstra man behind Fake Stephen Conroy | smh.com.au: Leslia Nassar has revealed himself as the man behind Fake Stephen Conroy. And now the shitfight begins…
• Social networking & social norms | Aide-Memoire: My friend Kate Carruthers links to some interesting discussions about how we’re creating and negotiating new social norms for online social networks. A good a starting point as any.
• File Sharing Has Become the “New Normal” for Most Online Canadians | Daily Exchange: New Canadian research on attitudes to “file sharing”. 45% say people who use peer-to-peer file sharing services to download music and movies are regular Internet users doing what people should be able to do on the Internet. Only 3% believe file-sharers are criminals who should be punished by law.
• Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day | smh.com.au: Websites linking to Wikipedia and an anti-abortion website have been threatened with fines.
• ABC Mobile Web Site Failed Accessibility Test | Link: “Currently I am teaching mobile and accessible web design to second year and postgraduate students at The Australian National University in the course ‘Networked Information Systems’ (COMP2410). The ABC
  [Mobile] home page would not be of an acceptable standard for student work on this course.”
• You can’t spell Lowest Common Denominator without “ABC Mobile” | Department of Internets: A less-than-complimentary review of the ABC Mobile website.
• ABC Mobile: The new supposedly-mobile-friendly website from Australia’s ABC. But…
• We Have Lasers!!!!!!!!!!: Just like “Sexy People” but… with lasers! Lasers improve everything, right?
• Sexy People: Billed as “a celebration of the perfect portrait”, this collection of over-produced and overly-sentimental portrait photography reminds us just how bad the 1970s and 1980s really were.
• A gentle introduction to video encoding | dive into mark: A set of six articles providing an orientation to to issues involved in video encoding, written with a suitably cynical tone given the dog’s breakfast of formats available.
• Happy 20th Birthday WWW | Link: 13 March 2009 marked the 20th anniversary of the CERN paper outlining what would become the World Wide Web.
• Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Amendment (Search Powers) Bill 2009 | NSW Parliament: This Bill proposes giving far more extensive search powers to NSW Police, including the ability to secretly enter premises next to the suspect without notifying the owner or tenant, and to secretly install monitoring software on third-party computers.
• Unicorns and Cupcakes: Two of the worst styles of kitsch collide in an explosion of… kitsch.
• An interview with an anonymous blog commenter | Joanna Geary: A regular commenter on the Birmingham Post‘s website, “Clifford” chats about his experience.
• australian screen: Australia’s audiovisual heritage online. “Explore over 1,000 Australian film and television titles produced over the last 100 years, with clips, curator notes and other information.”
• Gary Hayes Emerging Media Diagrams | Flickr: “A range of charts created by Gary Hayes across games, social networks, cross-media, broadband services, virtual worlds. Used in various presentations already and all marked as creative commons – attribution, non-derivative, non-commercial.”

• Kruddiversary: The internet thanks you for 12 months of achieving nothing, my Crikey article looking at the first year of the Rudd government from an Internet geek’s perspective.
• Thailand’s political crisis: an introduction, though later pieces in The Economist are better than my amateur efforts.
• Journalism in a hyperconnected world.
• @KevinRuddPM stumbles into the Twitterverse, a Crikey article which includes links to the previous three essays I’d written about the PM’s entrance into modern social media.
• Gonzo Twitter 1: Saturday Evening in Newtown, my experiment in live-tweeting a descriptive essay and still one of the best things I’ve written all year.
• How Dell fixed my monitor order, which is being used by clever consultants as an example of how to use social media for quality customer service.
• Sunday Thoughts about Journalism, a rather lengthy essay with many links to background on the Death of Newspapers this year.
• Finally, The Shave, a rather wonderful film we made.
• The Great Firewall of China: how it works, how to bypass it.
• Note to “old media” journalists: adapt, or stfu! This piece triggered an entire wave of discussion and was quoted globally.
• Winter Solstice Meditation.
• Anzac Day Rememberings.
• ABC Playback: so this is the future of television…? Nope! A review of what’s now called ABC iView.
• There ain’t no shortcuts to professionally-managed IT.
• Remembering the Space Age: Arthur C Clarke dead at 90.
• Super Hornets are Go.
• Jason Calacanis and the Evil Cult of the Internet Start-up. I don’t really think Jason is evil, but I do worry about the self-centred anti-human attitude of many people connected with Internet start-ups.
• New national anthem: I am So an Aussie, when the Snarky Platypus and I created, yes, a new national anthem. Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!
• Is it really so wrong to mix business and politics (and religion)?
• Leaving room for elephants: a chat with David Attenborough, a personal fave since it harks back to an interesting time in my life. This is still one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve done. Ever.
• Angry geeks: “Don’t waste money on internet filters”, one of many articles I posted about censorship, but which outlined the key issues way back in January.
• Post 801: Kill the Hallucinating Goldfish.

• Danger Room Debrief: How to do Defense, When the Money’s Gone | Danger Room from Wired.com: “The current global economic and financial meltdown may yet become something worse: a protracted global depression. As with the last century’s Depression, which spawned fascism and WWII, it could recast the world at a fundamental level. As such, it may soon represent our biggest security challenge in over 50 years.”
• The Power of Nightmares | YouTube: The 2.5-minute introduction to The Power of Nightmares, to give you a flavour of the full 3-hour documentary series.
• The Power Of Nightmares (DVD) | Internet Archive: This film explores the origins in the 1940s and 50s of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East, and Neoconservatism in America, parallels between these movements, and their effect on the world today: “Both [the Islamists and Neoconservatives] were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. And both had a very similar explanation for what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today’s nightmare vision of a secret organized evil that threatens the world, a fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.” The full DVD image is free to download.
• Irrelevant Al Qaeda | Jon Taplin’s Blog: Is it time to declare Al Qaeda irrelevant and downgrade the War on Terror a police action that’s just mopping up the stragglers?
• Mother Earth Mother Board | Wired 4.12: A massive 1993 feature article in which Neal Stephenson toured six countries following the roll-out of fibre optic cables. It introduced me to his writing and it remains an excellent read today.
• The End | Flickr: A collection of classic “The End” title cards from a wide variety of films.
• Fiscal Conservative vs. Tax & Spend Liberal | Be the signal: Another variation of an infographic pointing out that the Republicans don’t have the best track record for the US economy.
• Opinion graph | Junk Charts: On average, the US stock market does much better under Democrat Presidents than Republicans, as this graph shows.
• How Twittering Critics Brought Down Motrin Mom Campaign | Advertising Age: A groundswell of opinion on Twitter caused Johnson & Johnson to pull an adverting campaign.
• Thesis Theme for WordPress | DIY Themes: A high-quality but not-free theme framework for WordPress. While I currently use the free Tarski theme for my website maybe this is worth a look at some point.
• NSW Parliamentary Research: Mandatory ISP filtering is not what it seems | Internet Industry Association: Research by the NSW Parliamentary Library shows that Senator Conroy’s claims about other nations’ compulsory Internet censorship regimes are wrong.
• Kerr's curse | ABC Unleashed: If nothing else, I love this essay for the phrase “cardboard cutout think tanks”. But there are many other reasons to like it.
• Internet Censorship and the Irukandji Jellyfish | First Dog on the Moon: Only First Dog on the Moon could successfully combine Senator Conroy’s Internet censorship plan and jellyfish in one cartoon.
• PG Nation | ABC Unleashed: An interesting essay about the neo-wowserism of the Rudd government.
• Europa Film Treasures: An archive of European cinematographic treasures. It looks like there’s a lot of material here.
• The Trojan Horse | Business Spectator: “The current government policy of forcing ISPs to offer their customers a so-called ‘clean feed’ has the overt intention of helping parents to protect their kids while surfing the Internet. It is, we are told, all about child protection. However, the use of content filtering to make the Internet ‘safer’ for kids is already available, to the extent that any statistically significant real demand exists to solve it.”
• Failing hard drive sounds | Datacent: A collection of the sounds made by dying hard disc drives. Yes, they can be used in music provided you contact these guys first.
• 19-year-old Commits Suicide on Justin.tv | NewTeeVee: Abraham K Biggs committed suicide on Wednesday while broadcasting himself on video site Justin.tv. Apparently the 19yo Floridian was egged on by commenters on Justin.tv and forum users on bodybuilding.com. The article canvasses some of the legal and ethical issues.

• Interpreting Privacy Principles | Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre: The Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre is holding a 1-day Symposium o 2 October to discuss the Australian Law Reform Commission’s Report on Privacy (August 2008), and to take stock of the NSW Law Reform Commission’s Consultation Paper 3: Privacy Legislation in New South Wales (July 2008). The Symposium is part of the Interpreting Privacy Principles Project, an Australian Research Council Discovery Project.
• Electing a US President in Plain English | YouTube: A quick explanation of the US Presidential voting system from the wonderful people at Common Craft.
• The Grand Twitter Experiment | Widgify: One guy’s experiment to increase his Twitter followers so his “channel” is one of “greater influence”. He seems to miss the two far more important aspects of Twitter: how he’s contributed to the conversation to improve his reputation, and what connections he’s made.
• My current backup strategy | eirikso.com: A nice explanation of how one media producer stores his backups, with other suggestions in the comments.
• 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business | chrisbrogan.com: What it says. The thread through all of it is “be human”.
• The Anatomy of a Successful Music Broadcast Event | The Ustream.TV Blog: Nice set of tips on doing live music stuff on this Internet thing.
• Explanation before information | Made to Stick: A nice little article explaining why explanations need to come before the low-level facts, not the other way around.
• Twitter demystified and debunked | The Fluent Self: Havi Brooks has written a fine, playful piece about Twitter.
• Oedipus (with vegetables) | YouTube: The story of Oedipus in 8 minutes performed by vegetables in the tradition of Ben-Hur. Featuring a Potato, a Tomato, Broccoli, Garlic, and Billy Dee Williams as the Bartender. Official Selection 60+ film festivals including Sundance

If the embedded video doesn’t work for you, try here.

We decided on the desaturated look rather than going all the way to black and white — though you can see that version in Stilgherrian Live Alpha episode 8.

For those interested in the technicals, it was shot using the built-in iSight camera on my MacBook Pro. We sat the computer on books piled on a milk crate sitting on the kitchen table, and used desk lamps for lighting. We recorded it using Apple’s Photo Booth software. ’Pong edited it using iMovie. Whaddyareckon?

• Scoble, Brainstorm & Braided Journalism | Global Neighbourhoods: Shel Israel adds an extremely sensible contribution to the eternal journalists vs bloggers whingefest. If you know any journalists, tie them to a chair and force them to watch this twice before they’re allowed any more beer.
• Blade Runner sweded | YouTube: Forget the Director’s Cut, this 4-minute version of Blade Runner is superb. I love the release of the white dove.
• Sweded Films (and Movies): Films: An A-Z listing of Sweded films.
• Be Kind Rewind | Wikipedia: Just in case you don’t know what the term “Sweded” means, here’s the explanation from the Wikipedia entry for the movie Be Kind Rewind.
• Tron, a video from freres-hueon | Dailymotion: A Sweded version of the lightcycles scene from the movie TRON. Using live stop-frame animation to recreate a CGI movie? Priceless!
• Digital futures report: the internet in Australia | CCI: Findings from the first survey by the Australian component of the World Internet Project. This survey is a major piece of research undertaken by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Innovation at Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research.
• Large Hadron Collider nearly ready | The Big Picture: Beautiful photography of The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27km long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests.
• Atomic Weapons Tests: TRINITY through BUSTER-JANGLE | Internet Archive: A 1952 film providing an overview for security-cleared members of US Congress committees and military. Declassified 1997, but some technical details still redacted. 22 minutes.
• Kosovo Parody Song | YouTube: A Seattle radio DJ created a parody song to criticise US involvement in Kosovo. Norwegian peacekeepers then shot a video clip parodying the original. Fun.
• Tabloid remarks | 12seconds.tv: Sitting sideways in the video, I rant about the Daily Telegraph for 12 seconds.
• Foveaux: We haven’t tried this fine restaurant in Surry Hills, Sydney, but the cocktail bar downstairs is excellent. The website still shows the summer menu drinks list, fools.

• ITRadio.com.au: The tagline is "IT news and analysis: Technology podcasts for busy IT professionals." Simon Sharwood is one of the folks here. I intend to check this out before recording my own podcasts.
• Get Satisfaction: People-Powered Customer Service: "People powered", like "self-service" before it, means NO service. Leave it for someone else to fix. Irresponsible. Mind you, transparency helps. Companies' customer service performance improves when their actions are public. Transparency always helps, lo
• CamTwist: Free live video-switching software for OS X.
• celtx: Integrated cross-platform collaborative software for media pre-production. Film, theatre, radio, AV. And it's free open source!

• My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones.
• I will not interrogate my enemies in the inner sanctum — a small hotel well outside my borders will work just as well.
• If my advisors ask “Why are you risking everything on such a mad scheme?”, I will not proceed until I have a response that satisfies them.
• My vats of hazardous chemicals will be covered when not in use. Also, I will not construct walkways above them.

Sure, the list is a decade old, but I only found out about it just now from author John Birmingham, who continues the discussion. ]]> http://stilgherrian.com/media/become_evil_overlord/feed/ 0