Tag: james purser

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Talking geek stuff on Purser Explores the World

Angry Beanie logoA curious article claiming that We are in the final years of our internet — I disagree — led to a conversation on Twitter which led, in turn, to me appearing on a podcast.

The podcast in question was in James Purser’s series Purser Explores the World, and the episode was entitled Tomorrow’s Geek.

I ended up talking about my path into geekery via an interest in the space program, railways, and the Angle Park Computing Centre; old-school programming styles; my thoughts on how the internet is changing power relationships; my opinion of consumer pseudo-geeks; how future geeks will be hacking DNA and drones, and other stuff.

Also appearing in this episode are network engineer Mark Newton and notable geek Liz Quilty.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:12 — 31.7MB)

That audio is precisely as posted by Mr Purser, i.e. I haven’t turned it into my usual Conversations format.

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Tweeting your way out of Paranoia

I was invited to present the closing keynote at last week’s NSW Local Government Web Network Conference in Sydney. Give ’em something light at the end of the day, I was told.

Here’s the result.

My argument, such that it is, is that corporations like local governments avoid change because they’re paranoid, so they need to get themselves some mental health. I present an anonymous theory about “The Three Pillars of Mental Health”. Twitter, I then argue, is the perfect low-risk exercise for a government starting to involve itself in social media and social networking to start overcoming that paranoia. I then present some suggestions for how they might tweet.

Tweeting your way out of Paranoia from Stilgherrian on Vimeo.

The articled I mentioned in the video, the one I wrote about using Twitter, is Twitter: a guide for busy paranoids.

The Flip Video delivered fairly shitty footage of me speaking, as you can see, so I decided to keep the slides in screen for most of the time instead. James Purser recorded the audio.

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Weekly Wrap 42

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — which this week wasn’t much because I was mostly working on invisible things for clients.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 81, “Twitter turns five: will it rule?” Despite its immense media profile, the vast majority of internet users do not use Twitter. Is that because they just haven’t taken up the service yet? Or is Twitter simply not for everyone? My guests were Kate Carruthers, Jeff Waugh and James Purser.

Articles

None. Oh dear.

Corporate Largesse

None. It turns out that, no, I couldn’t be bothered coming down to Sydney yesterday just for a party.

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: The Blue Mountains Hotel, Lawson, photographed from the railway station platform on 24 March 2011. I had lunch there, and it was quite adequate.]