Tag: apple

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Weekly Wrap 40

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Despite succumbing to a random fever for two or three days, I got quite a bit of writing done — and then forgot to post this until Monday. Sigh.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 79, “Cybercrime convention: civil liberties risk?”. Australia intends to sign on to the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime. My guests? Cybercrime specialist Nigel Phair from the Surete Group, who’s previously been with the Australian High Tech Crime Centre. His second book has just been published, Cybercrime: The Challenge for the Legal Profession. And Electronic Frontiers Australia chair Colin Jacobs.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None.

Elsewhere

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. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Tea Tree Cottage, one of the Bunjaree Cottages at Wentworth Falls, where I’ve been living. I’ll write more about this experience very soon.]

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Weekly Wrap 33

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. It’s already Monday, which makes this post late. You’ll cope. There isn’t a photo this week either. You’ll cope with that too.

Articles

Podcasts

Media Appearances

  • On Thursday I spoke with Liz Ellis, the former Australian netball captain and now radio presenter on ABC Radio 702 Sydney about the great work the Queensland Police did using their official Twitter and Facebook accounts during the recent floods.

Corporate Largesse

Elsewhere

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. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

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Yes, I wrote about iPad, but not here

Not posting here for a week makes it look like I’ve vanished. But increasingly, more of my work is elsewhere. Like my Crikey piece It’s called iPad, and the Kindle is rooted. Like the 2000-word feature I’m slaving to finish today for ZDNet.com.au. Look in the sidebar under “More Stilgherrian”. My online presence is now scattered amongst so many streams of data!

There’s an essay here about the meaning of all this fragmentation. But if I write that essay, I’ll end up having to admit this is precisely why Facebook has been so successful. So much of your life can happen through Facebook and its myriad third-party data-sucking privacy-perverting applications, from organising a BBQ to marketing a business.

The ease with which Facebook can become your all-encompassing social portal means Facebook will win.

That means I’ll probably never write that essay. I don’t want to admit Facebook will win. Because it’s ugly. And because they’re cunts.

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Links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009

Stilgherrian’s links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009:

See what happens when you don’t curate your links for ten days, during which time there’s a conference which generates a bazillion things to link to? Sigh.

This is such a huge batch of links that I’ll start them over the fold. They’re not all about Media140 Sydney, trust me.

Continue reading “Links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009”

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Links for 15 October 2009 through 19 October 2009

Stilgherrian’s links for 15 October 2009 through 19 October 2009, gathered with bile and soaked in vinegar:

  • 50 Years of Space Exploration | Flickr: A brilliant infographic summarising interplanetary exploration. In an excellent demonstration of Chaos, the landing on asteroid 443 Eros is accidentally tagged as “443 Eris”. All hail Discordia!
  • They Shoot Porn Stars Don’t They: Susannah Breslin’s fascinating and somewhat challenging feature article on the recession-hit US porn industry.
  • ISP in file-sharing wi-fi theft | BBC News: UK ISP TalkTalk staged a wireless stunt, illustrating why it thinks Lord Mandelson’s plans to disconnect illegal file sharers is “naive”. It’s easy to blame others just by hacking WiFi connections.
  • Prince Philip tussles with technology | ABC News: This story is a few days old, however I found it curious that a perfectly good story about the design of technology was tagged as “offbeat” and the teaser written to make Prince Phillip look like a silly old man.
  • NPR News Staff Social Media Policy: Another example of a good corporate social media policy. There’s plenty of these policies around now, so there’s no excuse for any big organisation not to have caught up.
  • Federal Court of Australia Judgements: Some judgements have been recorded on video. “The Court is keen to continue to improve public access with the use of live streaming video/audio. Further live and archived broadcasts of judgement summaries are posted on this page as they become available.”
  • Televised Patel trial an Australian first | ABC News: The trial of Dr Jayent Patel for manslaughter to be held in a Brisbane court will be shown in Bundaberg, where the deaths happened, via closed-circuit TV. Given this “local interest”, one wonders why it couldn’t also be available anywhere there were interested parties.
  • Vivian Maier – Her Discovered Work: Maier was a Chicago street photographer from the 1950s to 1970s who died earlier this year. Some 40,000 negatives have been found, and they’e now being blogged.
  • 100 years of Big Content fearing technology — in its own words | Ars Technica: Copyright-holders have objected to pretty much every advance in media technology, it seems.
  • Mac Sales Spike When A New Version Of Windows Comes Out | Business Insider: A curious interpretation of the figures, but they reckon that when Microsoft releases a new version of Windows it drives people to buy Macs instead.
  • The Federal Trade Commission’s Coming War on Bloggers | Valleywag: While I normally don’t read Valleyway, I caught someone mentioning this article and was caught by one useful new term: conceptual gerrymandering. If the US FTC wants to give tax breaks to “news organisations” they’ll have to define what they are. Could it be old journalists versus bloggers battle writ large?
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Smartphones as sexual display

On one of my recent visits to NSW Parliament House on Macquarie Street the security guard who X-rayed my bag noted that while it contained plenty of Apple kit, such as my MacBook Pro, I carried a Nokia phone rather than an iPhone. “That’s because I haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid,” I replied. “Plus they’re all just tools for a job.”

Many people do seem to choose their devices more through brand identity than practical value. I was going to write more about that, but that renowned bastard Stephen Fry has beaten me to it. It’s all about sexual display.

When two businessmen drop down in neighbouring aeroplane seats and each gets out a smartphone an electricity will crackle between them like that between two sexually heated adolescents whose thighs have accidentally touched in the backseat of the school bus. If one businessman fishes from his shirt pocket a BlackBerry while the other gets out an iPhone a whole range of complex thoughts will begin to boil in the brains of each: resentment, contempt, insecurity and irritation are merely the emotions bubbling closest to the surface: deep down, dark and primal forces stir. We do not possess antlers, horns or tusks, we cannot display fans of feather or manes of fur, the best we can do is express our personality, aspirations, beliefs, outlook, sexual potency, status, right to breed and place in the hierarchy through the choices we make in our possessions: and no possession, here in the early part of the twenty-first century, speaks quite so loudly as our smartphone. Once upon a time it was our motorcar and in the future it may well be a robot, a rocket-pack or a hoverpenis that defines us, but for the moment it is, for good or ill, a smartphone.

Many women reading this will detect that the foregoing is an issue almost entirely for males, who remain the prime sufferers in this kind of tribal status war. My suspicion is that women are, if not immune, far less emotionally bound up in the business than men. I may be wrong and welcome clarification either way on this point.

I do realise that quoting Stephen Fry doesn’t make up for writing an original piece, but at least it means I’m trying to keep up to date with my writing.