• Shorpy Photo Archive | Best Pix on the Net: A vintage photography blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to the 1950s. I could lose days here.
• Top 10 services you can use so you don’t have to stick to your monitor like “a mouse on cheese” (Jesus, is he gone yet?) | PR Week: Some useful tips on monitoring where you blip up in the social media universe. YMMV.
• Untitled | Pain on the posterior: Are we really living in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four? Or is it really Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?
• A New Publication on Media Legislation in Africa | UNESCO-CI: “Media Legislation in Africa: A Comparative Legal Survey” is an overview of existing media legislation in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia, and a comparative analysis, putting the laws in perspective with regional and international standards and best-practices.
• Rules of Engagement for Journalists on Twitter | MediaShift: It is what it says, and not a bad place to launch your own news organisation’s discussions.

• VideoLAN: I was surprised to discover quite a few people who didn’ know about this free open source video player. It’s very good, you know, handling both downloaded files and live streams.
• The Iremonger Award | Allen & Unwin: A $10,000 prize for someone who was an idea for a non-fiction book which will “contribute to public debate on a contemporary Australian political, social or cultural issue”. Entries close 1 September 2009.
• Control freaks don’t get it: the web works best in a free-for-all | The Observer: John Naughton says it all on the 50th anniversary of C P Snow’s famous meme, the mutual incomprehensible “two cultures” of science and the “literary intellectuals”. But now, the two cultures are very different.
• Defence needs a plan for the Internet age | Tom Worthington via Link: Tom says the Australian government’s new defence white paper is deficient in not mentioning “Internet” or “web” at all. The section on cyber warfare envisages military personnel and scientists operating a “Cyber Security Operations Centre”. But without civilian support from organisations such as AusCERTt, the ADF will be vulnerable to cyber attack.
• Mogulus Live Broadcast: I’ve been using Ustream.TV to do Stilgherrian Live. This new (?) service still officially in beta offers the full mix of live video streaming, video on demand of previous programs, and 24/7 streaming of pre-sequenced programs. I will definitely be exploring this properly soon!

• Twittering away standards or tweeting the future of journalism? | Reuters Blogs: Reuters News editor David Schlesinger tweets from Davos, beats his own news wires, and then blogs about the experience. If Twitter is changing journalism, his response is “Bring it on!”
• The LEGO Turing Machine | YouTube: The Turing Machine was a hypothetical computing device created by Alan Turing in 1936 to explain basic theoretical concepts in computing. While very simple, a Turing Machine is mathematically equivalent to any other general purpose computer, if slower. So, these guys have built one using LEGO Mindstorms components. The video has a bonus soundtrack via The A-Team.
• A radical idea: Charge people for your product | 37signals: The blog post is from November 2008, but the message is current given all the media flutter about Twitter — which has yet to earn a single dollar of revenue. Need income? Um, charge for your product!
• FORA.tv: “Videos Covering Today’s Top Social, Political, and Tech Issues.” I haven’t checked them out properly yet, so this is really a reminder to self.
• GoodBarry: These guys provide an integrated “Software as a Service” (SaaS) system for small business, covering eCommerce, content management (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing and analytics. All hooked together, and all at good prices. I’m checking them out for a client.
• Life Matters’ Mandatory Internet Filter Transcript | Off Topic with Ashley: An unofficial transcript of ABC Radio National’s Life Matters program with network engineer Mark Newton and Jim Wallace, Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby.
• Mandatory internet filter | ABC Life Matters: On Thursday, ABC Radio National’s Life Matters interviewed network engineer Mark Newton and Jim Wallace, Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby. Audio available for download.
• The Economy According To Mint | TechCrunch: Mint is an online accounting system for consumers. Tracing their 900,000 customers through 2008 shows how their spending patterns have changed as the Global Financial Crisis worsens.
• Labor’s “deafening silence” as web censorship trials delayed | theage.com.au:
• Newspapers Saw the Digital Train A-Coming | Advertising Age: Bradley Johnson points out that the newspapers themselves were exploring digital delivery of news in the 1980s, but failed to do anything about it in terms of reviewing their business models.
• OpenNet Initiative: “ONI’s mission is to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance, and to promote and inform wider public dialogs about such practices.”
• The Unmistakable Smell Of Decay | newmatilda.com: With the NSW Labor zombie army smelling worse all the time, party hacks are considering swapping their front-line cadaver, writes Bob Dumpling.

• McDonald’s partners with earthwave to provide Australians with “Family Friendly” internet services | LinuxWorld: A company called earthwave has scored the deal to provide Australia’s McDonald’s stores with “clean” Internet links. That’s more than 720 locations.
• How to nap | Boston.com: A nice overview of how to take effective nap breaks. I’d have congratulated Boston.com on using a good wide-screen format too, but discovered they’ve done it with images rather than live text on the page. Still, it’s good material.
• What’s your profit : pain ratio? | Bad Language: Very apropos for me this week: an article pointing out that some clients simple aren’t worth the trouble.
• Best advice I’ve heard all week | Wired Blogs: A reminder that humans are really very bad at assessing risk.
• Tanner eyes web 2.0 tools | Australian IT: Australia’s federal government says it'll trial online public consultation through blogs and other social media tools. Good luck, guys, because the first thing you’ll have to learn is how to have an authentic conversation with people, rather than just parroting the party line.
• Bush: “Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over” | The Onion: Written when George W Bush was inaugurated in 2001, this is a scarily prescient piece of satire. Well worth a read today.
• Barack Obama’s acceptance: the transcript | Crikey: The full text of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. Very powerful writing.
• Not Quite Art | ABC TV: The official ABC website for Marcus Westbury’s series Not Quite Art including full downloadable files of all episodes of series 1 and 2 (provided you’re in Australia).
• The next President of the United States | The Big Picture: Boston.com provides yet another glorious photo essay: this time it’s images of the president-elect of the US, some bloke called Barry.
• Australian Internet Censorship | halans.com: Another powerful analogy to explain why centralised Internet censorship is wrong.
• 6 Nov 2008 – Liberation Day | Microsoft Australia: The Australian launch event for Microsoft’s Azure services platform. I blogged this live previously, and will soon write a more reflective post about it. This page now includes the video of Steve Ballmer’s speech.
• Blog censorship silences free speech around the world | Worldfocus: Thirteen/WNET, the respected PBS station in Boston, blogs about Internet censorship censorship and surveillance around the world, including a link to little old me.
• What Ray Ozzie didn’t tell you about Microsoft Azure | The Register: A nice discussion of the problems Microsoft will face selling its new platform Azure when compared with Amazon’s EC2 and Google’s App Engine.
• 750,000 lost jobs? The dodgy digits behind the war on piracy | ars technica: A nice discussion of where the numbers for “what piracy costs us” come from. This is American rather than Australian, but the points are still valid.
• DVD pirating costing industry $1.7b: Debus | ABC News: Australia’s Home Affairs minister Bob Debus parrots the DVD industry’s claim that illegal copying (which they call “piracy”) costs $1.7B. The bogeyman of “child pornography” is raised to make it sound even scarier.
• “Mankind Is No Island” | One Plus One Equals Three: The winning film in the Tropfest New York short film competition, shot using a mobile phone and found typography in Sydney and NY.

• 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.

[Note: This is a slightly edited version of an article I wrote for Crikey this morning. The main difference is a bit more linkage. There's more CeBIT / Transaction 2.0 material to come.]

In 1980 futurist Alvin Toffler wrote The Third Wave. Following the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, he said, we’re now experiencing the Third Wave, or what might be called post-industrial society. Australia’s surfing prowess means nothing here, though. We’re still pissing in the shallows, barely held up by leaking floaties.

Why is tech-literate, well-educated Australia so bad at marketing and profiting from its own innovation, from the fisheye lens to gene shears? We do innovate, you know.

“Australians expect the government to do everything for them — but the government’s clueless,” explained journalist and evangelist Duncan Riley at yesterday’s Transaction 2.0 conference. “The Australia 2020 Summit is a classic example. The Internet was seen as an ‘emerging’ industry. Emerging? We’ve had it for 20 years! In the US alone it employs 7 million people.”

Riley, a one-time Howard government staffer, has successfully created his own internet start-ups. Until recently he wrote for Web 2.0 bible TechCrunch. Now he runs The Inquisitr.

“Why would you invest in some Internet business when there’s no tax advantage?” he asks. “If you want to make a movie you get tax benefits. If I had a farm I’d be a millionaire by now, there’s so many special benefits.”

Riley isn’t impressed with Australia’s broadband plans: a 12Mb/sec network by 2012 when, as Crikey has reported, others already do 100Mb/sec. “We’re still stuck in the dark ages,” he says. “Once we get this always-on culture, once we get the iPhone next month we’ll finally, hopefully, get unlimited data plans, Dear God!”

Compare Australia to Israel…

With a third of the population, Israel generates 10 times as many start-ups. “Israel is the second largest contributor of companies to NASDAQ after the US,” says Israeli-born Gilad Greenbaum, Director of IT for conference organisers Hannover Fairs Australia. “In the Tel Aviv – Herzelya – Natalia triangle alone [with a population the same as Adelaide] there are 3000 technology companies.” They’re not supporting the boom. They’re 3000 businesses with their own tech to sell.

Riley is frustrated at Australian businesses’ ignorance — even those attending Sydney’s massive CeBIT trade show. “I walked out there today and said ‘Web 2.0′ and ‘Google Docs’ and people just stared at me blankly.”

Meanwhile watch out for GoodBarry and their everything-for-business-online service. Winning “Best Aussie Business 2.0 Start-Up” yesterday, they’ve just opened an office in San Fran and were last seen talking to venture capitalist Jason Calacanis. An American.

[Disclosure: I attended CeBIT and Transaction 2.0 as a guest of Hannover Fairs Australia.]

• Is Your Consumer Using Social Media? | Advertising Age: Nine Profiles of Who Your Targets Are and Where They Might Be Online
• Staralicious: The guy behind this Australian-run celebrity gossip site was interviewed by 2web Crew today. The podcast should be online soon
• RedZee: A new search engine (still in Beta) with a very cute animation on the home page and an interesting visualisation technique inside. Will this slow things down and annoy regular users? Or does it actually provide something of value? No time to explore today
• The Inquisitr: a new website about "Tech, Pop and Penguins", or something, from former TechCrunch writer and damn nice guy Duncan Riley. good luck, mate!
• the global microbrand rant | gapingvoid: Hugh MacLeod's excellent overview of how you can leverage yourself into a global brand using The Power of he Internet.
• How Little Do Users Read? | Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

• Detroit Digital Vinyl | Submerge Digital E-store: Classic Detroit techno vinyl converted to 320kps MP3 with (generally) no DRM protection. Detroit Digital vinyl started out as collaboration between legendary Techno label Submerge, Underground Resistance and Electrofunk Records.
• Latest T-Shirts | Royaltech by Benn Glazier: If you like techno, real techno, you may well like these t-shirts.
• Tony Abbott – Friend of the Long Nosed Bandicoot | First Dog on the Moon: One of the funniest cartoons ever from First Dog, though you do have to know who Tony Abbott is. (He's an Australian politician.)
• Alison Young BarCamp Twitter Talk | SlideShare: "What the heck is this Twitter thing about? The why & how for max fun." Alison Young's presentation from BarCampSydney, April 2008. Eight slides, real quick.
• Chips, gravy & cheese FTW! | BrightKite: So this is the future? "Here's what I had for lunch." With a location map. This WILL become normal.
• Mark Pesce's "The Nuclear Option" | YouTube: "Our social networks, now so accelerated by hyperconnectivity, allow the perfect meeting of message and audience. Oh, and some stuff about how cool Twitter is! From the Walkley Public Affairs Conference on Social Media, Sydney, 5 May 2008."
• Bill Bailey Kraftwerk Tribute | YouTube: The Hokey Kokey sung live in the style of Kraftwerk.
• Enterprise 2.0 – What is it good for? | CIO: "A 12-step guide to getting the most out of Web 2.0 tools and making it safe-for-purpose." excellent sound bits from Stephen Collins.

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.

• Webby Nominees 2008: Nearly 70 categories, with lots of truly excellent things to explore.
• Saasu.com | the web finance engine: I've been using this online accounting software for nearly a year after dumping MYOB. I've been very happy. They've just launched a new version and it's very swish.
• Overheard in the USA: A new blog which collects random eavesdroppings of stupid Americans.

“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 Shirky, 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.

Shirky 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 Shirky 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.

• 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!