This is a start-of-year get-together for IT journalists and the vendors who wish to spruik to them. There is also drinking. Allegedly. I’ll be there along with the usual suspects from Sunday 26 February.

In episode 21 of Patch Monday, a few suggestions for what your IT people can do while it’s quiet over the summer holidays.

I speak with Harold Melnick, who’s Microsoft’s senior product marketing manager for Unified Communications; Del from open source consultancy Babel Com Australia; and independent IT consultant Kate Carruthers

And there is, as usual, quick run-through of the week’s news headlines, should you have missed them.

You can listen below. But it’s even better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Please, let me know what you think. Feedback very, very welcome. And do let me know if there’s any topics I should cover, or guests we should interview.

Yes, I know it’s Tuesday. The podcast did go live yesterday afternoon. I just didn’t get around to blogging about it. Maybe I’ll automate that somehow. Any suggestions for the best way to do that in WordPress?

• Academic Earth: “Video lectures from the world’s top scholars”, it says. Provided they’re American. The universities included so far are Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA and Yale.
• [Air-L] Trivial tweeting: Another viewpoint on the “Twitter is pointless babble” rubbish, this time from Cornelius Puschmann, PhD, in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Düsseldorf.
• Power of Information | UK Cabinet Office: The February 2009 report from the UK government’s taskforce on Government 2.0.
• My #blogpostfriday post | Scripting News: Dave Winer is worried about the cloud. “We pour so much passion into dynamic web apps hosted by companies we know very little about. We do it without retaining a copy of our data. We have no idea how much it costs them to keep hosting what we create, so even if they’re public companies, it’s very hard to form an opinion of how likely they are to continue hosting our work.”
• 8129.0 – Business Use of Information Technology, 2007-08 | Australian Bureau of Statistics: Detailed indicators on the incidence of use of information technology in Australian business, as collected by the 2007-08 Business Characteristics Survey (BCS).
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction | Wikipedia: Someone — I forget who — told me to read this 1935 essay by German cultural critic Walter Benjamin. It’s been influential in the fields of cultural studies and media theory. It was produced, Benjamin wrote, in the effort to describe a theory of art that would be “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art&”. “In the absence of any traditional, ritualistic value, art in the age of mechanical reproduction would inherently be based on the practice of politics. It is the most frequently cited of Benjamin’s essays”, says Wikipedia. Sounds like I should indeed read it.
• How Tim O’Reilly Aims to Change Government | ReadWriteWeb: Tim O’Reilly posits “government as platform”, where the government would supply raw digital data and other forms of support for private sector innovators to build on top of. That’s the writer’s version. Does this fit with the Rudd government’s idea of the government as an enabler, as outlined in their Digital Economy Future Directions paper?
• CHART OF THE DAY: Smartphone Sales To Beat PC Sales By 2011 | Silican Valley Insider: This is based on worldwide sales figures, and it makes sense. The Third World could really use a low-power, rugged smartphone at a sensible price, rather than a laptop or even a netbook to lug around.
• News Corp pushing to create an online news consortium | latimes.com: By “consortium” they mean “cartel”, right? “Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller has positioned News Corp as a logical leader in the effort to start collecting fees from online readers because of its success with the Wall Street Journal Online, which boasts more than 1 million paying subscribers. He is believed to have met with major news publishers including New York Times Co, Washington Post Co, Hearst Corp and Tribune Co, publisher of the Los Angeles Times.”
• Us Now : watch the film: “In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?” This entire film can be watched online.
• Morons with mobiles sour the tweet life | theage.com.au: Jacqui Bunting writes some of the dumbest words about Twitter which have ever been written. Note to editors: Anyone who starts from the premise that Twitter is meant to be a “commentary on life” needs to be taken out the back and slapped around a bit. It’s 2009. Please catch up.
• The Conversation | Now That I Have Your Attention: The creator of Father Ted and The IT Crowd, Graham Linehan, also has a few words on Pear Analytics’ cod research on Twitter. He makes the point that for the first time we’re truly having a global conversation.
• Pointless babble | The New Adventures of Stephen Fry: The redoubtable Stephen Fry rips into that Pear Analytics research on Twitter, with more brevity and wit than I did the other day. Well said, Sir!
• Top 100 Aussie Web Startups – August 09 | TechNation Australia: The latest league table of Australian web businesses, for those who like to have winners and losers in clearly-defined categories.
• Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule | Flickr: Proof that you don’t need the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology to be boringly anal-retentive about your scheduling.
• Bruce Schneier: Facebook should compete on privacy, not hide it away | The Guardian: Another thought-provoking essay by Bruce Schneier.
• Hype Cycle Book | Gartner: Mastering the Hype Cycle is the book explaining Gartner’s regular Hype Cycle reports.
• How It All Ends | YouTube: A follow-up to the video The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See, which presented a risk analysis showing that we cannot afford to ignore the potential risk of climate change, even if it all turns out to be wrong. This version skips over the main argument and addresses the potential objections.
• Climate change cage match | Crikey: A delightful comment from a Crikey reader, Stephen Morris, who likens the tactics of climate change denialist Tamas Calderwood to the mating habits of the Satin Bowerbird, which is totally obsessed by the colour blue. “It will actively search through a wide variety of brightly coloured objects that might suitably decorate its bower, but the only colour that interests it and it wants to collect are those coloured blue. Tamas in his scientific objectivity (and unfortunately often his logic) is very Satin bowerbird like. It doesn’t matter what large amounts of available data says about global warming, the only titbits of data of interest to Tamas, are those that can be seen to indicate cooling. Once a data set loses its blueness (or coolness), it seems interest in it is lost and other blue data sets are sought.”
• Senator Lundy describes her Public Sphere initiative | Net Traveller: A ten minute video in which Senator Kate Lundy describes her Public Sphere initiative, made for students at ANU studying Information Technology in Electronic Commerce COMP3410.
• AP contradiction: Move forward but restore | Pursuing the Complete Community Connection: Steve Buttry points out the problem with Associated Press’ content protection plan: How can you “move forward” and “restore the past” at the same time?

• 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.

• The Australian Sex Party: “The Australian Sex Party is a political response to the sexual needs of Australia in the 21st century. It is an attempt to restore the balance between sexual privacy and sexual publicity that has been severely distorted by morals campaigners and prudish politicians.”
• Measuring the Information Society: The ICT Development Index 2009: Australia is ranked #14 based on figures from 2007. In 2003 it was at #13.
• Ho Hum, Sweden Passes new anti File Sharing Legislation | Perceptric Forum: Tom Koltai’s analysis of that new Swedish law: It’ll make no difference long term.
• As Sweden’s Internet anonymity fades, traffic plunges | Ars Technica: A new Swedish law that went into effect 1 April makes it possible for copyright holders to go to court and unmask a user based on an IP address. Sweden’s Internet traffic dropped 40% overnight.
• Study: online sexual predators not like popular perception | Ars Technica: This survey rejects the idea that the Internet is an especially perilous place for minors, and finds that while the nature of online sex crimes against minors changed little between 2000 and 2006, the profile of the offenders has been shifting — and both differ markedly from the popular conception.
• What Is Fail Whale?: The complete history of the Twitter’s error-bringing Fail Whale, along with all the art and craft it’s inspired to date.
• Voda/Hutch merger rattles ACCC | ZDNet Australia: Australia’s competition watchdog tonight issued a strongly worded statement of concern that the proposed merger of mobile carriers Hutchison and Vodafone could lead to increased retail prices on mobile telephony and broadband services.
• All the news that’s fit to tweet | guardian.co.uk: The Guardian has also announced a new 140-character commenting system. “You’ll never again need to wade through paragraphs of extended argument, looking for the point, or suffer the unbearable tedium of having to read multiple protracted, well-grounded perspectives on the blogs you love.”
• Share This Lecture! | Viddler.com: Mark Pesce’s annual lecture for “Cyberworlds” class, Sydney University, 31 March 2009. About the significance of sharing across three domains: sharing media, sharing knowledge, and how these two inevitably lead to the sharing of power.
• Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink | The Guardian: One of the better April Fools’ Day pieces. I particularly like the extracts from the Twitterised news archive. 1927: “OMG first successful transatlantic air flight wow, pretty cool! Boring day otherwise *sigh*”
• Flappers, wine, cocaine and revels (Pt II) | The Vapour Trail: A few hours after five Melbourne girls were arrested for vagrancy in late March 1928, the headline of Melbourne’s Truth broadcast their misdeeds: “White Girls with Negro Lovers. Flappers, Wine, Cocaine and Revels. Raid Discloses Wild Scene of Abandon”.
• A Blacklist for Websites Backfires in Australia | TIME: Time‘s take on the leak of the Australian Internet censorship blacklist portrays it as a joke and a scandal. There are some factual errors in the story, but this looks like how it’ll end up being perceived internationally.

• 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.

This year’s Sydney symposium is next week, but tonight Gartner consultants are previewing their Vision to a bunch of folks from the blogosphere.

I’ll be live blogging it right here from 6.30pm or shortly thereafter, depending on when the food and drinks get served. I won’t be live blogging anything, as it wasn’t that kind of event. However I did have good drinks and conversation with interesting people. More in due course.

• Social networking comes of age, sort of | MISaustralia.com: Renai LeMay’s article for the Australian Financial Review, based on material gathered at PubCamp.
• IT List | Skippy’s List: “42 Things That I Am No Longer Allowed To Do in IT”, beginning with “1 Not allowed to randomly rickroll users upon login to the application”. Somewhat amusing.
• Seven dirty words | Wikipedia: The seven English words comedian George Carlin listed in his monologue “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”, and a history of the furore this routine started.
• 7 things you can’t say on the Internet | evolvingWe: Following comedian George Carlin’s death, Josh Legard compiled this list. Read it, digest it, help prevent groupthink.
• La Boheme – Restaurant Reviews | smh.com.au: I’m told we should go to this restaurant some time. Gotta love a review which starts, “Those of us who fancy a bit of porcine action…”.
• Direct Note Access :: celemony_: Peter Neubäcker’s new Melodyne version 2 software can identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material. This is extremely cool, and extremely important.
• Top 500 supercomputers: Welcome to the petaflop generation | NetworkWorld.com Community: Welcome to the petaflop generation. The new most powerful supercomputer in the world is IBM’s US$100 million Roadrunner system at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The irony about the CeBIT email flood is that it makes them look desperate — yet their PR person told me yesterday that at this point, three weeks out from the start, they’ve already got more registrations than they did on opening day last year. So why do the emails keep coming? My guess is that at some point weeks ago, some executive somewhere signed off on a marketing plan, and now everyone’s dutifully following it. How… old-fashioned.

Hannover Fairs, the organisers of the CeBIT Australia IT trade show, must be shitting themselves about poor ticket sales or something. They certainly seem desperate.

These guys are spammy at the best of times, sending at least one email a week every week. But this year I’ve received three “Exclusive Limited Offer: Free Exhibition Entry” emails this month alone, plus today another one via the Australian Computer Society — yeah, that’s fuckin’ exclusive, eh? They’ve emailed a “Dear Bloggers” media release and phoned. Gawd!

I was underwhelmed last year and annoyed with the marketing wank-words.

Do these shows actually achieve anything any more? I mean, if you’ve got a new IT product you just tell TechCrunch and the geek world’s blogosphere of feral goldfish do the rest, right? Why herd everyone into a room, except to fuel an industry of hangers-on who make t-shirts and lame promotional giveaways?

[P.S. I am actually going. If nothing else I can collect some high-grade sarcasm for my podcast. But enough with the spam already, Hannover!]

• 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!

But this morning I knew that the 1GB memory stick I had in stock would be compatible with the client’s computer. I know my memory specs, all is under control. I am a professional. And besides, we’re in a hurry.

Um, what’s that burning smell…?

The result of today’s professionalism? One fried memory stick. One fried motherboard. A client’s computer which must now be replaced at my expense. A thousand dollars out of pocket and a day’s work lost.