Blog – Page 234 – Stilgherrian

19 April 200919 April 2009

Links for 08 April 2009 through 19 April 2009

Stilgherrian’s links for 08 April 2009 through 19 April 2009. Yes, I really do need to find a way to vet these and get them online more quickly. Still, here’s some Sunday reading for you.

“Storm” by Tim Minchin | 3quarksdaily: I’m perhaps well behind the pace in being exposed to this wonderful 9-minute Beat poem, but I still think it’s worth sharing.
Free speech? Only if you’re a charity | Memex 1.1: Science Fiction author Harlan Ellison explains why he doesn’t speak for free. A gloriously eloquent rant.
Back to the Future at Tenenbaum Copyright Trial | TechLaw: In 1993, Prof Pamela Samuelson’s The Copyright Grab warned that large copyright owners were planning a "maximalist agenda" for the digital age. Most of their eight action items made it into the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998. Yet as this recent copyright cases shows, many of the issues are also still raw and open to discussion.
Thailand’s royal sub-plot | Inside Story: Increasingly, discussions of Thailand's chronic political schisms are mentioning the monarchy. Here’s one such excellent backgrounder.
The Luckiest or Unluckiest Man in the World? Tsutomu Yamaguchi, double A-bomb victim | Times Online: Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived not one but two atomic bombs. And he’s not the only one.
Goodbye dolly, hello Nintendo | smh.com.au: Apparently little girls are giving up playing with dolls at an earlier age to use more “structured” playthings and interact with their peers. This article pitches that as a moral panic, with quotes from two psychologists who, presumably, make their living from kids who are developing “abnormally”.
Finding Utility in the Jumble of Twittered Thoughts | NYTimes.com: Despite starting off with this hackneyed pair of sentences — “The first reaction many people have to Twitter is befuddlement. Why would they want to read short messages about what someone ate for breakfast?” — this is another good article covering the possibilities for Twitter. Mind you, I wouldn’t want my urgent medical alerts sent by a low-reliability system like Twitter!
Newspapers Begin to Push Back on the Web | NYTimes.com: A nice backgrounder on the current moves by Associated Press to prevent people linking to its content. It doesn’t cover everything — it’s a complicated issue! — but it’s part of the picture.
Super-fast trip to a world full of surprises | smh.com.au: Mark Pesce’s op-ed piece for Fairfax on the National Broadband Network.
Predators vs. cyberbullies: Reality check | SafeKids.com: “Compare the figure of 100 adult-to-minor predation cases in 2005 to 6.9 million ‘cases’ of teen-to-teen cyberbullying in 2006.” Indeed, let’s focus on where the real risks are, not the imaginary or extremely rare ones.
WDM-PON blurs the boundary between metro and last mile | ibresystems.org: WDM-PON (wavelength-division multiplexed passive optical network) could provide broadband operators with an elegant way to simplify and futureproof their access network architecture. Here’s a summary of recent developments.

14 April 2009

Talking NBN on Melbourne’s 3RRR

I’ll be on Melbourne radio 3RRR tomorrow morning 15 April talking the National Broadband Network at about 7.45am. They’re on 102.7 FM, or you can listen to the live stream.

12 April 200913 December 2012

So what is Stilgherrian, exactly?

I’ve been taking time out across the Easter weekend to ponder my future. As part of that, I’ve started collecting other people’s impressions of me.

There’s three key issues. One, I need to simplify the massive range of media projects I’m doing or have dreamed up, and cut them back to what’s actually possible to achieve. Two, I have to find the right balance between income-generating media projects, purely playful or “public service” media projects which don’t earn money, and perhaps still a few geek-related things which do pay well. Three, how to reach this state of nirvana without pissing off clients or screwing up my cashflows.

Tricky, eh?

Anyway, more on that anon.

Thanks to that Internet thing, I’ve found a few curious descriptions of me already. Can you provide any others?

Continue reading “So what is Stilgherrian, exactly?”

12 April 2009

Mark Scott: NBN will re-shape everything

Crikey logo

Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC, used his Annual Media Studies Lecture at La Trobe University to explain how the government’s proposed National Broadband Network will change the entire media landscape. Television, music, newspapers, the journalism — the lot. Crikey published the entire text of the speech. It’s worth a read. Twice.

12 April 200912 April 2009

NBN: Everyone’s got an opinion

RuddNet Day 3. The armchair-expert “network engineers” who infest Whirlpool, people who’ve never built a network more complex than the one linking their porn stash to the TV, are suddenly spouting off about national-scale infrastructure not just there but everywhere. Pity their friends.

So began the article I wrote for Crikey on Thursday 9 April.

As John Safran once said, thanks to the internet, “We can all now chip in and pool our ignorance.” The Dunning-Kruger Effect operates full force. As always.

And nowhere was that ignorance better represented than on Twitter.

I’m such a hypocrite. I’ve previously slagged off journalists for simply copying comments from Twitter without adding any value. And this piece is, essentially, a summary of what’s been said on Twitter. Oh dear. Anyway, you too can be a journalist by following the same technique. The Crikey piece explains how.

You can use Twitter Search to find every tweet mentioning “nbn”. But for a richer experience, the much prettier Twitterfall lets you view an animated twitterstream, pearls of wisdom dropping as Manna from Heaven.

Just imagine. With the NBN it won’t just be typed words, you’ll be able to see and hear all this in living colour and surround sound. Ah, $43 billion…

I’ll probably have a summary of some of the better commentary when I return to work mode on Tuesday.

12 April 200916 June 2009

NBN featured on A Series of Tubes, oddly enough

On this week’s A Series of Tubes podcast I quite naturally spoke about the National Broadband Network proposal. Richard Chirgwin also interviewed m.net Research Director Dr Marisa Maio Mackay about what’s changing the way we use mobile data services. Sorry about the late notice, but I’ve actually been having a relaxing time away over Easter in my Sekrit Eyrie.