Word-whore. I write 'em. I talk 'em. Information, politics, media, and the cybers. I drink. I use bad words. 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!
I haven’t written anything new for Anzac Day this year. I’ve said it all before in 2011, and before that in Anzac Day Rememberings and Anzac Day 2009: Sacrifice.
They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning
We will remember them.
Lest we Forget
[Photo credit: The rosemary sprig was taken from Matthew Hall‘s Twitter page from 2008. If I owe someone for that usage, I’ll make good.]
So this is a bit weird. Just as someone on Twitter asked whether I was hanging out at Hellfire Club, the robot @hyper_mpesce mentioned it too. WTF?
I’m not sure who @fivewalls is, but he asked: “You’re not hanging out at hellfire again are you?” That’s the column on the right, people who mention me or direct their conversation towards me.
@hyper_mpesce, which is a robot that repeats things Mark Pesce says, rearranging and making everything hyper, said: “hyper-If hyper-you hyper-even hyper-if hyper-you hyper-read hyper-the hyper-Hellfire hyper-Club. hyper-” hyper-#DISCONNECT.” As one would. That’s the column on the left, which is everyone I follow.
I can think of no explanation for this coincidence.
My usual weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers the week from Monday 16 to Sunday 22 April 2012.
No photo again this week because camera-dearth.
Busy. Monday morning you’ll see articles at ABC The Drum and CSO Online that I’ll have written overnight, as well as the Patch Monday podcast.
Then I’ll continue work on the feature story I’m writing for ZDNet Australia and my presentation that’ll be delivered at DigitalMe in Perth on Friday. You’ll be able to hear a preview of that on ABC 720 Perth on Thursday afternoon some time. And while in Perth I’ll be recording the following week’s Patch Monday podcast. Whew!
In terms of my movements, the new plan is that I’ll be in Sydney until I fly to Perth on Thursday, and then in Sydney overnight Sunday night upon my return.
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 (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.
So there was a student who tweeted at me the other night to ask if they could ask me some questions for their marketing and public relations course at some university somewhere and I said yeah sure because I’m like polite and stuff and they emailed me questions and I sent off some answers today and because it took me ages and it was all about the nature of journalism and shit I thought I should share them with you to see what you think.
Here’s what I said, unedited. Well, except for fixing a few obvious mistakes.
Continue reading “Stilgherrian’s advice to a PR student, uhoh”
I reckon Benno Rice was right when he tweeted that this card is definitely for me. Consider this little sequence from Twitter early this morning.
Leslie Nassar had just tweeted that he’d had a dream where Channel Seven’s Sunrise program was “throwing One Direction celebretweens at super-fat versions of TV chefs carrying butterfly nets”.
I responded thusly (here with some minor improvements to the flow):
In the last dream I recall, the hipster wouldn’t shut up so I slowly sawed off both his hands at the wrist with a knife.
At first he thought I was joking, but as the blade worked through the tendons he realised in terror that I was serious. Blood everywhere.
I threw his hands onto the floor in front of where he was sitting against the wall and left him there, whimpering. His friend went quiet.
And then I woke up. Pulse racing. Sweating. Breath gasping. I couldn’t go to sleep after that, so I made coffee and read the news.
Why am I telling you this? Well, a week from today I’ll be flying to Perth to… to… [gulp] to speak at #DigitalMe. Yes. Speak. That’s it.
I would like to have a dream with butterfly nets. I think butterfly nets would be quite lovely fun.
I think I will make a coffee now. And read the news.
The title of this post comes from a subsequent tweet by the Snarky Platypus. “Are you going Wolf Creek on hipsters again?” He makes it sound like a bad thing…
Incidentally, if you do a Google Images search for the text “I don’t get nearly enough credit for managing to not be a violent psychopath” you will discover moist, sticky muffins and a dwarf-eating hippo. You’re welcome.
Sean Carmody aka the Stubborn Mule has demonstrated, using chart porn, that my Twitter followers follow Benford’s Law.
Or more precisely, that Benford’s Law is followed by the distribution of the number of Twitter followers that each of my Twitter followers has in turn.
“Benford’s Law of Anomalous Numbers states that for many datasets, the proportion of data points with leading digit n will be approximated by log10(n+1) – log10(n),” says Carmody with a straight face.
So, if you look at the chart, you’ll see that there’s more followers with a follower count starting with a “1” (so 1, 11-19, 100-199, 1000-1999 etc) than with a “2” (2, 20-29, 200-299, 2000-2999 etc) than with a “3” (3, 30-39, 300-399, 3000-3999 etc) and so on.
He does note in another chart that there seems to be a spike of followers with just one follower each. I’m wondering whether that’s about spammers.
