Category: Blogging

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Topic 9 website finally launched!

I’ve finally launched the website for my adventures to the Australia 2020 Summit and beyond: Topic 9 at topic9.com.au.

It’s pretty sparse to begin with, and I’m not quite sure exactly what I’ll be doing there — so suggestions are more than welcome. Some thoughts so far are:

  • Gathering links to everyone else’s writing about this topic area for the Summit.
  • Articles on people or ideas on how government could work in the future.
  • Interviews with the delegates before they hit Canberra.
  • Act as a central point of contact for whatever media coverage we can generate out of the summit, whether I go or not.

I certainly need to spice up the design a bit. I’ve kept the Tarski theme as used on this website and Skank Media for consistency, but it needs a tad more differentiation. soon, my precious ones, soon…

Any other ideas?

[Update 17 February 2010: The website at topic9.com.au has been killed. For the moment, I’ve linked to the pages at the Internet Archive.]

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Twitter versus Del.icio.us versus blog posts

I’m starting to think that my “here’s what I’ve found” items should move from Twitter to Del.icio.us or maybe even Tumblr [no account there yet, will explore soon] and just be summarised here daily. Then Twitter can be just the day-to-day status stuff — which needn’t be archived here at all, but maybe elsewhere.

Are you OK with that one, Mat F?

There seems to be a surge in “RSS aggregator” products like FriendFeed to create a unified “life stream”. But the more I think about it, the more I think “one stream that contains everything” is wrong. It might be fine for archiving — for your needs. But what about those following you? Dumping everything into a single sewer of undifferentiated crap seems to throw the burden of understanding you onto you audience. And all successful media creation is about what the audience wants — no matter what the scale.

It’s better, I think, to separate out the threads into different streams. People can subscribe to the combination they want. And they can choose to view them in the aggregator of their choice.

Business contacts get your business posts. Family and friends get the status reports about your lunch. A select few choose to view the reports of your illicit camel sex. where they want them, when they want them.

Well, that’s what I think today, anyway. What do you think?

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8 Random Facts about Stilgherrian

Oh, I get it. Social media “guru” Laurel Papworth has to kill time before her Saudi trip gets sorted out. So what does this visionary of society’s future do? She ropes me into a blogging meme. How modern. How avant garde!

How… 2005.

Laurel was tagged three months ago and is only getting to it now. And they’re not even real ropes!

Is that enough slagging-off? Shall I get on with it now?

Actually this will be fun on a Saturday morning. It’s been ages since I’ve done one of these. Here goes…

Continue reading “8 Random Facts about Stilgherrian”

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Not happy with how the Twitter digests work

Hmmm… No, I’m not really happy with how the Twitter digests are presented. They dominate the website’s home page when in fact they’re very much secondary material. More thought required… but I’ll leave them as they are until I have a better answer.

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Twitter digests: an experiment

As an experiment, I’m going to publish daily digests of my Twitter updates. Let me know what you think. If you don’t know WTF I’m talking about, go to Twitter and then look at twitter.com/stilgherrian. The most recent 10 tweets are visible on my website, but I’m starting to do quite a few more than that every day.

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Post 1010: Half-way to Australia 2020

A witty headline, eh? OK, well, only a little bit witty. But I missed marking the major milestone of Post 1000 on this website, so I thought this would be the next best thing.

The annoying thing is, I don’t have anything to say about the Australia 2020 Summit right now, and I have plenty of other things to write about. So let’s pretend you didn’t see this post, and I’ll write the update later, OK?