Tag: fairfax

Posted on

Press conference with Det Supt Brian Hay

Here is the full audio recording of the press conference held this morning by Detective Superintendent Brian Hay, head of the Fraud and Corporate Crime Group of the Queensland Police Service in relation to the arrest of Fairfax journalist Ben Grubb.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:24 — 16.7MB)

For background, here are the related ZDNet Australia stories, and I’ll post further linkage when I have the time. That’ll include a fairly full collection of media stories.

Note that the Facebook hack was not demonstrated at the AusCERT Conference but the Security BSides Australia conference. There’s a few more misconceptions in some of the media reportage, but I’ll do another post about them I figure.

Posted on

Weekly Wrap 23

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and so on and so forth.

Articles

Podcasts

Media Appearances

  • On Monday I spoke with Fiona Wyllie on ABC Radio’s Statewide Afternoons and the Fairfax tracking cookie beat-up and a father who installed a radio jammer to kill the internet so his kids wouldn’t spend so much time online. Alas, there is no recording. That’s a shame. It’s not often you’ll hear me giving parenting advice on the radio.

Geekery

  • I learned how to use Google Site Search by plugging it into the Fender Australia website. It’s fairly straightforward, but it quickly shows you the problems with how your site is constructed. As an aside, if you’re a web developer visiting that site for the first time you’ll be horrified to see that in many places it uses tables for layout. That’s because the site was originally built in 2001 and has just been re-skinned a couple of times since. It’s also maintained manually, all 950 pages of it. There’s little business case for a major overhaul — the numbers are not compelling — but we’re planning to build a proper modern database-driven site early in 2011.

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: Old bar sign at the Town Hall Hotel, Newtown. Gender roles were a little different back then.]

Posted on

Live Blog: Media 2010

Photo of Simon Gallagher and Moeed Ahmad: click for Media 2010 website

This Friday 19 February I’m liveblogging from Media 2010 in Sydney, billed as “the Annual Forecast for Digital Media Professionals”.

The highlights for me are likely to be Simon Gallagher (pictured, left) from Hulu and Moeed Ahmad (pictured, right), Head of New Media at Al Jazeera, but I suspect there’ll be some surprises.

Later today I’ll review my live blog from Media 09 and post some reflections. [Update 20 February 2010: Nope, I didn’t get time for that.]

Given the changes in the media landscape it should be interesting — to say the least. What I can say already, though, is that I’m hoping Media 2010’s afternoon sessions aren’t like Media 09’s, which were mostly agencies pimping their showreels.

For now, though, just bookmark this page and pop back on the day. The event runs 9am to 5pm Sydney time, and I’ll cover as much as I can.

I’ll also issue reminders via my Twitter stream and tag everything #media_2010. Sorry about the irritating underscore. Blame Fairfax Digital.

Continue reading “Live Blog: Media 2010”

Posted on

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”

Posted on

Twitter babble twaddle

Crikey logo

Forty percent of the messages on Twitter are “pointless babble”, claims a story doing the rounds at Fairfax and ABC News and elsewhere this morning. It’s rubbish.

In a piece for Crikey today, I dismantle this claim by market intelligence firm Pear Analytics. Their categorisation is vague and arbitrary, and completely misses the point of phatic communication.

Marketer Stephen Dann is even more scathing. In the comments Sarah, who works for Pear Analytics, digs an even deeper hole as she explains her methodology.

If some DJ posted on there they were playing at a club tonight, I counted that as Self Promotion. If some guy tweeted that he was “at the club with his niggaazz and ho’s”, I put it into babble.

So, if they’re a DJ it’s “promotion”, but “some guy” it’s “babble”. How is Sarah judging people’s value here? By whether they’re a DJ or not? By whether they’re communicating business and work needs rather than social? By whether they use “correct grammar” rather than street slang? That’s just snobbery, and possibly even racism.

It’s all just tawdry low-rent pseudo-science at the level of the Ponds Institute. And, as my Crikey piece explains, t’was all just to pimp a product.

The reason the original bullshit story was picked up and spread so fast, though, was that a Twitter backlash has been foretold. More about that tomorrow.

[Hat-tip to @crikey_news for the headline.]

Posted on

Whaddyareckon of the Ruddblog?

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's new blog

Kevin Rudd launched his prime ministerial blog yesterday. I’m not sure it’s going to work — as I already told the Fairfax newspapers.

In addition to the common prohibitions on defamatory and abusive content, the rules for Mr Rudd’s blog say that comments will be accepted for only “five business days” from the time the post is published, be moderated by his staff strictly during business hours, cannot include links to other websites, and are limited to 300 words.

“Not allowing links to other websites is just dumb,” one blogger, Stilgherrian, told the Herald. “Links are the currency of the web. They allow you to reference work that’s already out there. If you can’t do that, and you’re limited to 300 words, then the discussion won’t ever get past repeating slogans.”

It was a sentiment shared by “An Onymous Lefty” blogger, Jeremy Sear, who posted a response to the Prime Minister’s blog titled “Kevin Rudd is hip to the kids… of 2004”.

“The strict moderation will remove the livelier aspects of discussion,” Mr Sear said.

I also reckon the first post, about climate change, sounds like a prepared political speech, with a question tacked on the end to make it look bloggy.

How do you think we can make Australians more aware that we need to act on climate change now?

I thought we’d mostly moved well past “creating awareness” and the biggest criticism of the government’s climate change policy was the lack of actual action so far.

But what do you think?

[Note: The original Fairfax piece doesn’t have links: I’ve added them in myself. Fairfax is still too rude or daft or whatever to link out to the things they mention. It’s nice that they included my quote, given that.]