Blog – Page 118 – Stilgherrian

02 February 201403 February 2014

Announcing 5at5, my new daily email letter

I come across a lot of fascinating stuff in the course of my alleged media work. It’s stuff worth sharing more widely. Back in December, I decided that I’d start sending out a daily email linking to the best. That email launches tomorrow, Monday 3 February.

It’s called 5at5, and it’ll bring you five items every weekday at around 5pm Sydney time.

They’ll be connected to [my] interests in some way — the politics of the internet and how technology is changing power relationships at every level of society, security and surveillance, military technology and history, language, journalism and human nature. And more.

I was amused to see Alexis Madrigal, technology editor at The Atlantic, launch his own daily email recently, 5 Intriguing Things. Five is the magic number, it seems.

I’ve chosen to use the same platform at Madrigal, TinyLetter, which is a subsidiary of email marketing platform MailChimp. Why? Mostly because it’s free. TinyLetter is limited to 3000 subscribers, but I’ll worry about that when it happens.

So now you’re going to click through to subscribe, right? Good puppy. Smart puppy.

02 February 2014

Weekly Wrap 191: Loving the bomb and Bitcoin, with trees

My week of Monday 27 January to Sunday 2 February 2014 was, as I’d suspected it would be, the clear beginning of the start of the working year.

OK, the week hasn’t quite finished yet. It’s still relatively early on Sunday. But the day will be spent pottering around various work-related things, so I feel confident about that opening paragraph.

It’s pretty much an Australian tradition that the media silly season ends on Australia Day — although I did see someone suggest that in Sydney the summer holiday season runs from the Queen’s Birthday long weekend in early October through to the Mardi Gras parade at the cusp of February-March. We are a proud nation.

Articles

It’s strange, but we never really had to learn to love the bomb, Crikey, 29 January 2014. It’s a reflection on the Cold War on the 50th anniversary of the release of Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Akamai’s HTTPS fail sets a bad example, ZDNet Australia, 29 January 2014.
Can Startupland bridge the smartphone generation gap?, ZDNet Australia, 31 January 2014.

Media Appearances

On Tuesday I spoke about Bitcoin, in the light of the arrests of a Bitcoin evangelist and a currency trader on money laundering charges, on ABC Radio’s The World Today.

Corporate Largesse

None. I’m clearly doing this wrong.

The Week Ahead

I’ll be in the Blue Mountains until Friday, in all likelihood. It’s the first week of a new month, so I daresay I’ll be keeping a low profile because none of those bastard clients have paid their invoices yet.

My writing slate includes two columns for ZDNet Australia, one for Corrupted Nerds — that’s one of the two pieces I still owe my Pozible supporters — and probably one for CSO Online.

I’m also doing the research and scripting for a panel discussion I’m moderating the week after — that’s due to be announced on Monday.

[Photo: Eucalypt Bark , photographed on 27 January 2014 at Bunjaree Cottages near Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains.]

01 February 201426 December 2014

Kicking off a better year for my media work, probably

I’m claiming that January presented clear signs that I’m reversing the decline of revenue that I’d been suffering, thanks to depression and arsehattery — something that I’ve become very aware of in recent months.

If you don’t like these personal reflections that I write from time to time, then stop reading now. Read this instead.

I started this planning process at the end of 2012, because I’d noticed that until then I hadn’t actually been planning my media work, let alone taking the next step of having some kind of strategy.

I’d just plodded along doing much the same thing every week. If an income stream died, I did no real work to replace it. When new work was offered, I generally took it on unless the idea was clearly daft.

You can see what happened in my newly-updated “media objects” chart, which counts how many things I did for each masthead, regardless of complexity or income.

Chart of media objects produced by Stilgherrian since 2011

Continue reading “Kicking off a better year for my media work, probably”

31 January 201405 February 2014

Adventures in Identity: Still struggling with Google+

On Wednesday I decided to see if I could finally sort out my Google+ profile, which was suspended around two and a half years ago. I didn’t really get anywhere, but I did discover some new and different frustrations.

First, the back story…

Google+ screenshot 1: see text for a description

As the first screenshot (above) says, “Your profile [that is, my profile] was suspected because it violates our names policy.” That’s because back in 2011, Google required that names consist of at least two words. To get something that looked close to my single-word name (a “mononym”), I’d entered it as “Stilgherrian .” But the full stop (“period” for American readers) isn’t allowed, and the profile was suspended.

I was so frustrated by that, and even more so by Google’s arrogant-seeming error messages, that I wrote an infamous expletive-filled blog post — which got more than 100,000 unique viewers on the first day. Even now, two and a half years later, it sometimes gets a couple hundred readers a month.

Since then, Google had supposedly started allowing people to display their “nicknames” (that is, pseudonyms”), at least in some contexts, so I figured that I’d give it another go. It wouldn’t worry me too much if I was “Stilgherrian Stilgherrian” under the hood, as long as my name was displayed properly.

So I clicked on “Take action”…

Continue reading “Adventures in Identity: Still struggling with Google+”

27 January 201429 January 2014

Weekly Wrap 190: Wattle you know, some productivity!

My week of Monday 20 to Sunday 26 January 2014 saw the return of something approaching productivity, as well as a stabilisation of the chaos. Excellent.

I’ve also started to get a clearer idea of where I want to take my media work in 2014, but more about that another time.