All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris. Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
You are currently browsing articles tagged tv.
A quick heads-up. I’m about to post all of the media spots I did this week relating to Apple’s release of the iPhone 4S and the death of Steve Jobs.
That’s in addition to the pieces I did for Crikey:
Normal service, on a wider range of topics, will doubtless resume tomorrow. Or Monday. Or… somewhen.
I am so many different kinds of expert these days. On Friday I was on SBS TV’s World News talking about the UK’s High Court decision to order the country’s largest internet service provider BT to block access to a website that provides links to pirated movies.
The video of the news story is embedded in the website article.
SBS has also posted the complete 7-minute video of the interview they recorded.
Yes, I’m wearing a hoodie on national television. At least it was a clean hoodie. I’d taken a cab to SBS straight from the airport. It’s actually a small miracle I had any clean clothes with me at all. Besides, the cameraman chose the hoodie over my black shirt because he wanted to “break things up a bit”. The TV news has too many men in suits and business shirts for his liking, it seems.
A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Most of it seemed to be about Google+.
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: Kent Street, Sydney, photographed on Friday 15 July 2011.]
[Update 7pm: I didn't think that last article for CSO would be posted today, but it was, so I've added it to the "Articles" list.]
Amongst all the strange things that happened yesterday, one has stuck strangely in my mind even after sleeping and waking up strangely. A question. Could Stilgherrian Live return?
It’s almost two years since the last episode of my curious little live video webcast when, curiously enough given this week’s curious news about News, James Murdoch was voted “Cnut of the Week”. No, that’s not a typo, that’s what the segment was called.
Yesterday, within an hour of the moment of Full Moon, several different people suggested or even called for the program’s return — including two completely unrelated people who recently discovered the program archives, one who used to watch it every week back in 2008 and 2009, and one who thought… um, suggested… um, no… I can’t say any more. Bloody television.
So what do you think? Should the program remain a thing of its time, with the shows that were made sitting in the archive? Should Stilgherrian Live return? If it did return, which components should be continued? And when should it be produced?
My own thoughts are quite jumbled on this which is why I am asking you, Dear Reader…
I was interviewed by ABC TV’s current affairs program 7.30 yesterday for a story about voicemail hacking, More allegations against Murdoch media.
Interestingly, most of the soundbites we recorded were about how easy it is to access someone’s voicemail, but the resulting story was more about whether something like the News of the World scandal could already be happening in Australia.
Recording this piece was a pleasant reminder of working in daily live radio. The pace is kinda fun. The ABC called me at 2.15pm, and arranged for the crew to meet me at 3.15pm. We drove to a nearby park and recorded the main interview as well as the cutaways in a total of 45 minutes. And that was in between the noise of aircraft taking off, motor cycles, and pedestrians and cyclists walking between me and the camera.
I’m shown using both laptop and phone. Does that put me into the category of mouse-using TV expert?
A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Last week I said something’s gotta give. This week it gave.
Stress and exhaustion and a much lower productivity level than the previous two weeks has led to this post being two days late.
None.
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: The Wilds of Lilyfield, the view eastwards towards the Sydney CBD from the corner of Lilyfield and Balmain Roads.]
What a week! I’ve written five articles. Another two are due for Monday. I’ve done my usual Patch Monday podcast. I’ve done five radio appearances on five different topics. I’ve been interviewed for Phil Dobbie’s BTalk podcast, and that’ll appear next week.
I’ve even been interviewed by an anthropologist for his PhD project. I’m talking to a new editor about more writing. And even — this is weird — to a television production company about a TV project.
That all comes after a month or, really, six weeks or more of travel, intense work, intense and deeply personal events and the tightly-tangled ball of stress, depression and anxiety that can trigger. Which it did.
I’m knackered.
And there’s still plenty of work to do and decisions to make over the next couple of weeks.
I mention all this for a variety of reasons…
I write in so many places these days — ZDNet Australia, Crikey, Technology Spectator, ABC’s The Drum, even occasionally at places like CRN Australia. And, as I mentioned, there’s probably more to come. That’s all writing for other people.
This here is my place, and it’ll be about writing for me.
No, I’m not sure what form that’ll take.
I’m not sure what it even means.
Do those bullet points flow from the intro? No, not really. But that’s where my head is this morning. I’m sure things will become clearer as the day unfolds.
[Photo: That's me (embiggen) photographed with my webcam just now at Rosella Cottage, the somewhat bigger house that's the "family home" of the owners of Bunjaree Cottages. It isn't normally rented out to punters. I've been here at the cottages alone for a week, and I haven't bothered shaving. I'm staring to look like I did before ’Pong and I shot that short film The Shave back in 2008. It's not a good look.]
Hey Livestream, your This Week On Livestream email depresses me. Every time it arrives it looks like you still reckon the most worthy thing to aspire to is being an old-fashioned broadcast TV network. Stars, celebrities, musicians, TV chefs, sportspeople, American Idol contestants, and this week — yay! — a royal wedding.
In other words, you’re promoting Livestream as being a wonderful new source of video, so very different from TV, by pointing to the exactly the kinds of people and things we can already see on TV. Gosh, there’s a unique selling proposition!
Now I get that you need to attract the attention of the great unwashed masses. Even though the royal wedding will probably be available on free-to-air and pay TV everywhere on the goddam planet, you still feel the need to wrap your lips around that revenue tit just like every other media business. You can’t help yourself. It’s in your blood.
But how about each week you highlight one, just one, innovative use of online video that simply wouldn’t have been possible before we had services like Livestream? Something made by and featuring no-one we’ve ever heard of before. Something that might only have an audience of a hundred people, maybe even only ten.
One.
Just one.
Please.
Because that might demonstrate how the ability for simply anyone to stream live video to a global audience will radically transform the media and, as a result, society itself. I’m assuming you do actually get that, right? And it’ll show people how Livestream can be a part of that.
Oh, and a few more things that aren’t white middle-class Americans speaking English wouldn’t go astray either. President Obama doesn’t count: see “celebrity”, above.
[This post is part of the series 50 to 50, started last year to mark my 50th birthday. One post per year, y'see. The series ground to a halt due to a combination of work and personal pressures, as well as finding that such intense reminiscences of my own past were emotionally draining. The series has now been resumed.]
The 1960s were the Space Age. And since I was a bright male child of that decade, my thoughts were dominated by the events, images and themes of space exploration.
It doesn’t look much now, but this photo was the very pinnacle of all that. Or perhaps the apogee. Neil Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the Moon. One small step etc, taken from the original TV footage.
I was mesmerised — even though half the time my nine-year-old self couldn’t figure out what was going on. I’d been following the story as it unfolded in the newspapers, reading every word and memorising every diagram. It was front page news every day. But the TV images were just crap.
Of course the reason they were crap was the circuitous journey they took from the Apollo mission’s slow-scan TV cameras. The signal was compressed from arsehole to breakfast time and bounced from the Moon to the Parkes Radiothermal Telescope in rural New South Wales, then somehow to NASA Mission Control in Houston where the audio was mixed in, then back to Australia to the TV stations, and finally out through the normal broadcast chain.
It’s a miracle they arrived at all, as the film The Dish portrayed — along with its historical inaccuracies.
But historians and popular culture tell us that the world stopped to watch these blurry images, and we all remember where we were. And it’s true.
Given that I didn’t get around to writing any sort of general round-up of 2010, you might as well enjoy Charlie Brooker’s 2010 Wipe, broadcast on the BBC earlier this week.
It’s not anywhere “official” that I can discover yet, but of course it’s already on YouTube in four parts: 1, 2, 3, 4.
It doesn’t hold a candle to His Benevolence Stilgherrian’s Christmas Message from 2008, but it’ll do.
ABC The Drum
Crikey
CSO Online
Delicious
Dopplr
Flickr
LinkedIn
newmatilda.com
Patch Monday
Posterous
Qik
Stilgherrian Live (Ustream)
Technology Spectator
Twitter
Viddler
Recent Comments