Yesterday I said I’d create a proof-of-concept video podcast last night. Later I decided I couldn’t be arsed, but didn’t bother telling you. I hope you’re not too disappointed. I haven’t decided when I’ll do it yet. You’ll just have to live with this additional uncertainty in the world.
The problem with changing what you do…
… is that if you want to do a New Thing, you have to choose an Old Thing to stop doing. Otherwise you run out of hours in the day. And that doesn’t work.
I’ve written before how I’m starting a business called Skank Media, and the new Topic 9 website is the first project out of the starting gate. Certainly since the beginning of this year I’ve been spending more time writing too: 133 posts in January 2008 compared with just 16 a year before. I’ve spent more time in dialogues online too, re-establishing links with my community.
What’s the Old Thing that’s stopped?
I’ve been getting less sleep, certainly. And less exercise. But I’ve also been doing less work for my “old” business, Prussia.Net — and therein lies a problem. Prussia.Net is what generates the income.
Oops.
Yes, cashflows are down. And because I wanted to change Prussia.Net itself, that change process takes more time of its own too. Some client projects are running terribly late. I even lost a wonderful long-term client a few weeks ago because I couldn’t dedicate enough time to their change process.
Big Oops.
So for me, today’s the day I start sorting out that chronological challenge. Here’s how I’ll proceed…
Creating podcasts on a Mac, Part 1
Podcasting is now far, far easier and cheaper even than I’d imagined — even for complex productions. I’ve been experimenting. Here’s a very quick summary of what I’ve learned so far about doing this on a Mac, my platform of choice.
Now if your podcast is just you talking then you can take a much simpler approach. Read no further.
However this investigation was inspired by the “live recording” of the 2 Web Crew. Having an audience contributing comments and questions via text chat created an interesting dynamic — similar to talkback radio but less formal. I wanted to explore further.
The technical challenge is combining all of the audio elements before the audio or video stream is piped up to Ustream or wherever. There’s probably quite a few ways to do this, but my starting-point was The UStream Tool Kit — which also covers Windows.
Setting up Skype
I’ve finally gotten around to setting up Skype properly. My ID is “stilgherrian”, oddly enough. If I should have your own Skype details, please let me know.
No evidence that porn causes harm
One book on my to-buy list is the recently-released The Porn Report by Alan McKee, Katherine Albury and Catharine Lumby. Until I get around to that, Danny Yee’s review has some juicy tidbits (ooherr).
[T]he common stereotypes are wrong: unsurprisingly, given that pornography users make up about a third of Australian adults, they are fairly representative of the broader population, with the major exception being that fewer than one in five of the respondents were women…
Detailed analysis of the most popular Australian DVD titles shows that, even with broad definitions, fewer than 2% of scenes have any kind of violence. The total ban on violence in the Australian X-rated category seems to have worked. Another finding was that “pornography does not really objectify women more than men… On some measures, men are the more active sexual subjects… on others, it’s the women.” The Internet is a lot more diverse, but despite extensive efforts the authors managed to find not a single site with actual rape photographs, and only a handful of sites with faked ones.
There is no evidence that pornography causes harm to its users: the studies that suggest this have involved pushing pornography on non-users in artificial laboratory experiments. In contrast, there has been almost no attempts to study the beneficial effects of pornography, even though consumers overwhelmingly report positive effects…
Part 2 of the book covers issues such as censorship, and notes:
“Protecting the children” has been a rallying call for censorship for a long time. It turns out that actual child pornography — the police prefer to call it “child abuse material” — is extremely hard to find. And evidence-based education has to be central to protecting children from harm, whether from cyberstalking or contact with material they will find disturbing.
Essential reading, I’d have thought, for anyone wanting to discuss censorship of the Internet, eh Senator Conroy?
Interviewed for The Sunday Age
I’ve just been interviewed by journalist Melinda Houston of Melbourne’s The Sunday Age for a piece which should appear this weekend. A fascinating conversation about the future of television in the Internet era.