Category: Conversations

Conversations is an umbrella category of posts containing the full versions of the interviews and other guest spots I do for other people’s media products, including radio, podcasts and television. RSS Feed

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Talking Twitter trolling on ABC Local Radio

Tuesday was the night for radio. I also spoke with ABC Brisbane’s Rebecca Levingston about people’s terrible behaviour on Twitter and Facebook.

Oh, that makes it sound all a bit twee. Terrible manners these days, and all that. It was actually a great conversation during which I managed to mention theory of mind as well as allude to my Crikey piece, Twitter is humanity, warts and all. Where’s the story in that?

ABC Radio has posted their version of the audio at Why are we so nasty to each other on the internet? Here’s mine.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (3.8MB)

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It was broadcast on ABC Local Radio across Queensland.

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Talking Facebook banking on Balls Radio, FM 99.3

For my sins, I’ve agree to do a regular spot on Phil Dobbie’s Balls Radio, originally a podcast and now also a program on FM 99.3 Northside Radio in Sydney every Tuesday night at 7pm.

The first broadcast edition was this week, Tuesday 17 July. Since it was fresh in my mind, I spoke about the Commonwealth Bank’s plans for us to do our banking on Facebook — which I also covered on this week’s Patch Monday podcast.

We also spoke briefly about Microsoft’s plans for Windows 8 and Office 2013 and how they fit into the company’s strategy.

Here’s the audio of my segment. If you’d like more, Mr Dobbie has posted the full episode.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:07 — 5.8MB)

I’m fairly sure that copyright remains with Mr Dobbie rather than being transferred to Northside Radio, but I’ll figure that out later.

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Talking DNSChanger on ABC Local Radio

I was surprised at all the media attention given to the DNSChanger thing last week. I even did a radio spot about it — even though the DNS turnoff affected just 0.015% of computers on the internet.

Just in case you missed it, read the Wikipedia article and Paul Vixie’s first-hand account of swapping in the good DNS servers to replace the criminals’.

The radio spot was last Monday night on ABC Local Radio across NSW with host Dom Knight.

Here’s almost all of the audio recording. There’s an annoying gap around 50 seconds in, and what’s missing is my explanation of the internet’s domain name system (DNS). So if you don’t know what that is, read this first.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (7.0MB)

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, archived here because it isn’t being archived anywhere else.

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Talking Microsoft Surface and Fairfax on ABC Local Radio

I spoke about two things on ABC Local Radio earlier this week: Microsoft’s Surface tablet-cum-laptop and the staff cutbacks at the Fairfax media group.

I’d covered Surface in this week’s Patch Monday podcast, so my comments on air with Dom Knight reflected the feedback I’d received.

And the comments I made about the Fairfax cuts was based heavily on what I wrote four years ago, “Trouble at t’paper”.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (7.8MB)

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, archived here because it isn’t being archived anywhere else.

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Talking new internet domains on ABC RN Sunday Extra

The other day ICANN, the organisation responsible for overseeing the internet’s domain name system, published the list of all the planned new top level domains — including everything from four entities competing for get .pizza to a cancer research charity after .cancerresearch.

It certainly generated some media interest. One of said media interests was the presenter of ABC Radio National’s Sunday Extra, Jonathan Green, who asked me to explain what it was all about on Sunday morning.

Alas, with only around seven minutes left before the 0900 news, there was really only time to explain what the thing was about — and no time to discuss the various opinions strengths weaknesses and potential for dodginess it all entails.

The ABC has posted the audio on the Sunday Extra website, but here’s my version.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.3MB)

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

I’ll post my own opinions on this another time, or perhaps not at all.

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Talking about freelancing and globalisation in Katoomba

Monday night’s discussion about freelancing in a globalised marketplace went rather well, I think, so I’ve decided to post the full audio.

The event was organised by Publish! Blue Mountains, and as I said previously the title was “Surviving and thriving as a freelancer in a globalised market”.

Radical changes will hit a freelancer’s world over the next two years or so as we move to a globalised marketplace. Firstly there is the rapid rise of internet-enabled outsourcing through sites like Freelancer.com, allowing projects to be advertised globally and often awarded to the lowest bidder who may be in a country where $10 is a decent day’s wage.

Secondly, increasingly sophisticated and intelligent automated systems are now taking over many tasks that historically required human creative input. Just in the writing field alone, we already have US college sports coverage written completely by computer.

Where will this technology (and the marketplace driving it) take us? And what can we creatives do to ensure we’re not replaced by cut-price doppelgangers and robo-scribes?

Naturally things like Freelancer.com and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (named after the original chess-playing robot hoax) and even 99designs came up.

We also drifted into the idea that Australians are the most spoiled people on the planet and we’re too used to our expensive lifestyles. Yet we also recognised that the Australian character provides something that’s worth paying for. And I threw in the idea that we shouldn’t try to imitate Silicon Valley because that was a unique collision of US defence money with Californian counterculture.

Other things mentioned were Seth Godin’s book Linchpin (others recommended him, but truth be told I’m not a fan myself), and my rant about crowdsourcing.

While some of it sounded a tad depressing, I think it ended up being quite positive. Either way, it was fun.

Here’s the full audio, starting off with the voice of Publish! Blue Mountains chairman Steve Krinks.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (29.5MB)

If you notice anything particularly fascinating while listening, do feel free to add it into the comments.

This audio is ©2012 Stilgherrian, since I recorded it and, heck, I led the discussion. But if you want to use this anywhere do feel free to ask because I’m usually quite generous in such matters.