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Weekly Wrap 26

05 December 2010 in Internet, Politics, Privacy, Weekly Wrap by Stilgherrian | 3 comments

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and so on and so forth.

Articles

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 67, “Cybercrime: the FBI’s worldview”. Edited highlights of a presentation to the eCrime Symposium by Will Blevins, the FBI’s assistant legal attaché to Australia for cybercrime issues.
  • A Series of Tubes episode 120. Richard Chirgwin and I have a long chat about the National Broadband Network. Was the business case document worth the wait? Is there a black hole in the NBN financials? What’s the product roadmap? And what about this Points of Interconnect issue?

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Low-grade reindeer is low-grade, taken earlier today at the Broadway Shopping Centre, Sydney.]

Mark Day perpetuates Internet us-and-them

08 February 2010 in Internet, Media by Stilgherrian | 2 comments

Once upon a time Mark Day (pictured) was relevant. As publisher of The Australian from 1977 and then its Editor-in-Chief, he ran what is still Australia’s only true national newspaper and didn’t fuck it up.

But today his column Net-gen forces state-sanctioned double standard tries to perpetuate the divide between old and new media, casting it as a generation gap using last week’s kerfuffle over South Australia’s electoral laws as a hook.

(As it happens, I wrote about that kerfuffle in a ZDNet.com.au opinion piece, SA’s Govt 2.0 became mob rule. I’m rather pleased that ITjourno.com.au‘s Phil Sim called it “a smart, thought-provoking column”. It generated a few good comments too. Thanks.)

Mark Day can be a bit of a fossil, says meta-journalist Margaret Simons. I agree, and in this case I reckon he’s got it wrong.

Since there’s no guarantee The Australian will post my comments, I’ve written him this open letter…

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Links for 15 October 2009

15 October 2009 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | No comments

Here are the web links I’ve found for 15 October 2009, posted almost automatically. Almost

Does the Internet get second-rate news coverage?

26 August 2009 in Internet, Media by Stilgherrian | No comments

Crikey logo

On Sunday, Pipe International‘s new PPC-1 undersea fibre-optic data link from Guam to Sydney was fired up. As I wrote in Crikey in May, when the cable was landed at Collaroy on Sydney’s northern beaches, PPC-1 will increase Australia’s international data capacity by almost 50%. That’s like adding the third runway at Sydney Airport. So where was the media coverage?

I wrote about that in Crikey today, and it’s free to read: They’re building data pipes under the ocean: why no media coverage?

OK, there were some reports, in The Australian and in IT-related sites like iTnews, iTWire and ZDNet Australia. But where was the ABC? Fairfax papers?

There was a “robust discussion” on Twitter this afternoon between The Australian‘s Andrew Colley, ZDNet Australia‘s Renai LeMay, myself and others, and I’ll try to summarise that later. There were certainly key areas of disagreement!

For now, though, have a read of my Crikey piece and tell me what you think.

Tom Connell: When the last ink’s dried

04 May 2009 in Internet, Media by Stilgherrian | 4 comments

[Recently I was interviewed by Tom Connell, a journalism student at RMIT University, about the future of newspapers. Here's his resulting feature article. I haven't edited it, apart from imposing my own idiosyncratic typographical pedantry and linky goodness. You read it now, and I'll add my own comments tonight. It's long, but I think it outlines the key issues rather well.]

Newspapers are folding in the United States at an astonishing rate. According to Paper Cuts, a website tracking the newspaper industry, more than 120 have folded since January, 2008. While Australian broadsheets have not succumbed just yet, there is a real possibility that they may not survive in the long-term. But is that such a bad thing? Tom Connell reports.

Mark Scott’s recent comments about the Australian newspaper industry would have sent chills through journalists and editors across the country.

“It does strike me that much of the bold and creative thinking about the future of print seems to be happening outside the major publishers — probably because the talented people within are too busy simply attending to the fire in the building,” Scott said, in and article in The Age on 9 April.

This was hardly the first doomsday article on newspapers, but what set this apart is that Scott, current head of the ABC, was until 2006 a newspaper executive at Fairfax Media –- the second largest newspaper owner in Australia.

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