Stilgherrian » social media

Twitter buys Summize!

Stilgherrian — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:17:08 +0000

Summize, the Twitter search engine, has just been bought by Twitter and rebranded search.twitter.com. Read all about it.

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Politics & Technology Forum videos & tweets

Stilgherrian — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 22:36:45 +0000

Until I get time to write my essay about last week’s Politics & Technology Forum in Canberra, you can relive it on your own.

Thanks to Microsoft’s Nick Hodge, you can view videos of Matt Bai’s keynote address, Panel 1 on Blogging, social networks, political movements and the media with Annabel Crabb, Peter Black and Mark Textor, and Panel 2 on Politics 2.0: information technology and the future of political campaigning with Joe Hockey, Senator Andrew Bartlett, Senator Kate Lundy and Antony Green.

You can also trawl back through the Twitter stream using Summize.com. There’s a lot of material, though, so unless you’re a complete political junkie and want to read through it while listening to the discussions you may want to wait for my essay.

[Disclosure: I was in Canberra as a guest of Microsoft.]

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At PubCamp Sydney today

Stilgherrian — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:37:11 +0000

I will be at PubCamp Sydney this afternoon. Will I see you there?

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At Mobile Content World tomorrow

Stilgherrian — Wed, 28 May 2008 08:17:33 +0000

For my sins, I now have a media pass to the Mobile Content World Australasia conference at Sydney’s Star City Casino. I missed Day 1 today, but from the programme Day 2 will be more interesting from my perspective. Centrally-planned control-freak TV organisations and telcos try to control what’s on mobile phone screens. Fail. We control what’s on our screens, thank you very much! From one clueful attendee today, “Folks all seem like deers in the iPhone headlights.”

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Covering the Federal Budget for Crikey

Stilgherrian — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:43:27 +0000

Joy (I think). I’m part of Crikey’s commentary team for Australia’s 2008 Federal Budget to be announced tonight at 7.30pm Sydney time. It’s the first budget for Chairman Rudd’s Labor government, and the first for treasurer Wayne Swan, so it’s bound to interesting.

My role — at least as I understand it, ‘cos I haven’t actually spoken with my editor yet — is to look at it from a geek perspective. That’ll include, I imagine, issues I’ve previously covered for Crikey: Internet censorship, the ABC’s move into Internet TV, social media, the national broadband network…

But what else should I look out for?

When I asked on the Link mailing list, here’s a partial list of the suggestions I got:

Functional separation of Telstra into wholesale / retail / pay TV entities.
The laptops for schools program — what hardware? networking? training? maintenance?
Copyrights & patents, including government-funded enforcement of music copyrights — something the music industry has been lobbying for.
Assistance for IT startups, both hardware and software.

I’m also wondering just how forward-looking the budget will be. The brain cells are already firing. What can you add to the list?

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Social networks: the Nuclear Option

Stilgherrian — Mon, 05 May 2008 06:18:22 +0000

I’d planned to write something else today, but if I don’t mention this article now then I’ll appear way out of touch. Mark Pesce has just posted another magnificent essay: The Nuclear Option.

It’s a commentary on how Twitter and similar tools which help us create instantaneously-connected global social networks are changing the world. Entertainingly written too, as always — and not just because he mentions me.

I won’t quote it. Just read it. Then make a cup of tea, read it again, and stare out of the window for a while.

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Oh you poor, dear record companies…

Stilgherrian — Fri, 02 May 2008 09:32:34 +0000

You’ve got to hand it to “the music industry”. This week they released a propaganda film Australian Music In Tune which asks us to sympathise with musicians because they’re all poor struggling artists. Diddums.

The only reason musicians trying to “make it” are poor is that as soon as they do get that sought-after recording contract they still pay for everything from there on. Before they see a single cent from their music, they have to pay off the studio hire, recording engineer, video director, stylists, set designers, editor and dozens of other parasites — including music company executives with their nice lunches and their BMW leases.

An entire industry — “the music industry” and their retail outlets — sits between the musicians and their audience, sucking out something like 90% of the money in the process.

And they have the gall to rope musicians into their propaganda film under false pretences, telling people like Frenzal Rhomb’s Lindsay McDougall that it was a movie about life as an artist.

He said he was told the 10-minute film, which is being distributed for free to all high schools in Australia, was about trying to survive as an Australian musician and no one mentioned the video would be used as part of an anti-piracy campaign.

OK, so who are the guys in the photo? Jared Madden (left) and Adam Purcell (right) have created tune-out.com in response to the industry crying poor.

They know that thanks to teh intenetz, we can distribute that music from musician to audience for a fraction of a cent. They know that the audience is deciding for themselves what’s hot or not through this social media thing, and that the entire music industry is becoming irrelevant.

You the Music Industry have failed to move with us in our discovery of new and exciting ways to interact, collaborate, and communicate. We have embraced the digital space and the opportunities it affords us, and we have changed because of this. We are developing new forms of entertainment which have transformed the way we interact with each other, with you, and with music. This is an ongoing process, and we are excited about what we will discover tomorrow.

For some reason you assume that we are the same as yesterday, and you are kidding yourself.

You wrongly place the blame of declining CD sales on others. Our source of entertainment has diversified, and we are no longer as interested in the concept of the ‘album’.

There is no digital music battle or piracy war. That is a figment of your imagination, and, every time you preach our digital crimes to us, we ‘tune out’ of your deranged ranting. Your declining profits are the symptom of a business model that is fast becoming irrelevant.

You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.

Hear hear. I have signed their letter. I look forward to the video they’re producing this weekend.

Meanwhile, read Mark Pesce’s essay, Unevenly Distributed: Production Models for the 21st Century. I’ve linked to it before, but it’s especially apt today. Or read about 1000 True Fans.

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I came for the gin, I stayed for the social revolution

Stilgherrian — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:23:41 +0000

“Television, the drug of the nation / Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation,” rapped American poet and musician Michael Franti of the Disposable Heroes of ~~Hipocrisy~~ Hiphoprisy”, now of Spearhead. Could this literally be true?

I’ve just read the most amazing speech, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Sharky, which you can also watch on Blip.tv. It begins:

A British historian [argued] that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing — there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders — a lot of things we like — didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

Sharky goes on to argue that when WWII ended, we suddenly had to cope with another social surplus: all that leisure time thanks to a 5-day working week and all those new-fangled gadgets which made household chores a breeze. So what did we do? We slothed in front of the TV. For a generation.

As we turn off our TVs and connect to each other, this cognitive surplus is creating things like Wikipedia. An estimated 100 million hours of work has gone into it. Yet this is but a drop in the ocean…

How much time do we spend watching TV?

Two hundred billion hours, in the US alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the US, we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads… People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is.”

Back in 1992, David Gelernter asked, in his book Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox… How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean, where the great public institutions of the information age were. Where were the equivalents of the great cathedrals? The grand Victorian railway stations and bridges?

Obviously Gelernter asked that before the web, and before Wikipedia and Google and YouTube and Facebook and… and… OK, some of those are commercial projects. But as Sharky points out, we could have 2000 new Wikipedia-sized projects every year.

The information revolution has only just begun…

I do recommend you check out the entire speech. Hat-tip to Daring Fireball via Garth Roxburgh-Kidd.

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Laurel Papworth on 9am

Stilgherrian — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 03:37:28 +0000

Social networks guru Laurel Papworth was on Channel Ten’s 9am with David and Kim this week. Have a look, ‘cos it’s interesting to see how out of touch mainstream media professionals are in all of this. I write about that in my comment to Laurel’s post.

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My submissions for Australia 2020

Stilgherrian — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 02:19:58 +0000

For various reasons I didn’t have much time to write submissions yesterday. Yet I’ve said so much about still believing the Australia 2020 Summit to be important — despite plentiful shortcomings — that I felt obliged to write something. In 500 words or less. So I wrote from the heart…

What emerged were two pieces:

For the governance topic: Managing continual, rapid change with a clear framework of values.
For the topic on “the economy”, which is where discussions of broadband policy ended up: Broadband: It’s about symmetry, not speed.

I’m well aware that they don’t really provide a properly-researched, well-argued case. Nevertheless I hope that in some way they’ll help influence debate. Comments appreciated — perhaps over where the submissions themselves are blogged.

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Twitter tools, tweaks and theories

Stilgherrian — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:13:59 +0000

Twitter Tools, Tweaks and Theories is a great collection of observations about how Twitter works and how it can be built upon. I’ll be running through these over the next week or so and commenting. Or not.

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Anti-Emo riots break out across Mexico

Stilgherrian — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:59:16 +0000

Attacks began on 7 March when, according to Wired, “several hundred people went on an emo-beating rampage in Querétaro, a town of 1.5 million about 160 miles north of Mexico City.”

The next week punks and rockabillys harassed emo kids in Mexico City, prompting police protection and a TV news story. Meanwhile the emos have organised anti-violence protests (pictured).

Hat-tip to Alex Willemyns for one of the oddest headlines — but this is for real.

The core issue is a clash between Mexico’s macho culture and emo’s sexual ambiguity. Yep, it’s just good old-fashioned gay-bashing.

[O]nly in the past year have emos begun to make their presence felt in the streets. In response, many of the established so-called tribus urbanas like punks and metalheads are responding with violence…

[B]y some accounts, the emo subculture is identified with homosexuality in Mexico. As Mexico City youth worker Victor Mendoza told Time.com: “At the core of this is the homophobic issue. The other arguments are just window dressing for that.”

Perhaps not so old-fashioned: we can drag a web 2.0 angle into this…

Many of the attacks have been planned, or at least fomented, on violently anti-emo websites like Movimiento Anti Emosexual, which features videos of physical violence sprinkled liberally with anti-gay sentiment. Last.fm’s Anti Emo Death Squad group has almost 4,000 members.

Weirdly enough, Gustavo Arellano, the author of Ask a Mexican and an editor at OC Weekly, thinks this could all be a positive for Mexico.

“It’s a great clusterfuck for the American mind’s idea of Mexico,” Arellano said. “This teaches the rest of the world that Mexico is not just a bunch of cactuses and sombreros.”

Yeah, Gustavo. It teaches the rest of the world that Mexico is populated by ignorant, medieval fuckwits who are a long, long way from being fit to inhabit the 21st Century.

More at the Intersections blog, and Mexican newspapers La Jornada’s stories on the original attacks an the follow-up.

[Photo: "Protesta de emos en la ciudad de México el miércoles pasado" from La Jornada. Photographer: María Meléndrez Parada.]

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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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Social media in Saudi Arabia — for women!

Stilgherrian — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:51:22 +0000

Social media’s pink-toned guru, as I called her, Laurel Papworth is currently in Saudi Arabia helping launch an online social network for Arab women. And she’s nervous. Her first post from Jeddah is fascinating. “No matter how naive I may be in some things, no waaaaaay can I pretend this community is just another oh, dating site, or tv show, social network. It’s a game changer, a rule breaker. Newsflash: social media is disruptive!”