Live Blog: Media 09

This Friday 13 February I’m liveblogging from Media 09, billed as “the Annual Forecast for Digital Media Professionals”.

The event runs all day from 9am to 5pm Sydney time, and I’ll cover as much as I can. Bookmark this page and come back on the day. I’ll also issue reminders via my Twitter stream and tag everything #media09.

I’m rather amused that the event is being staged by Fairfax Digital, since arguably they’re well behind Murdoch’s News Limited. Maybe they wanted expert advice, couldn’t afford it, so decided to invite others and charge admission.

One keynote speaker is Ben Self, Director and Founding Partner of Blue State Digital, the guy who ran Barack Obama’s online campaign.

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Live Blog: ALIA Information Online 2009, Day 1

Information Online 2009 logo

Senator Stephen Conroy is apparently opening today’s proceedings of Information Online 2009, a 3-day conference in Sydney organise by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA). I’ll be live blogging some of the proceedings here.

I’ll start my live blog at about 9am Sydney time — in just under two and a half hours — on this page. See you then!

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Gonzo Liveblog 2: Last Sunday before Christmas

I’m caving in to pressure. Following the success of my first experiment, Gonzo Twitter 1: Saturday Evening in Newtown, at 6.30pm or thereabouts I will liveblog from King Street, Newtown, or wherever the mood takes me on this fine Sunday evening.

Wow, that’s in just a few minutes! [Update 22 December: No, it was last night. But you can still see what happened in the CoveritLive tool immediately below the fold. The timestamps seem to be an hour early though.]

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Live Blog: Internet censorship forum

Australia’s controversial plans to “filter” (i.e. censor) the Internet are being discussed in a major forum tomorrow — and I’ll be blogging it live on this very page. Bookmark it for reference!

The forum is at the UNSW Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre from 10am Sydney time on Thursday 27 November, through to 2.30pm, and there’s a fantastic array of speakers.

There’s three sessions: technical and social/legal to set the bounds of what’s actually possible, and then one focussing on how we actually protect the interests of children given this background — both preventing children seeing “inappropriate material” and stamping out child pornography.

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Live Blog: Gartner Symposium Preview

Every year Gartner, one of the Big Consulting Firms, runs the Gartner Symposium where they disgorge their predictions for the IT industry into the eager minds of Big End of Town clients with deep pockets. Imagine a crow feeding its young, but wearing a suit.

This year’s Sydney symposium is next week, but tonight Gartner consultants are previewing their Vision to a bunch of folks from the blogosphere.

I’ll be live blogging it right here from 6.30pm or shortly thereafter, depending on when the food and drinks get served. I won’t be live blogging anything, as it wasn’t that kind of event. However I did have good drinks and conversation with interesting people. More in due course.

Live Blog: Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer in Sydney

Steve Ballmer poster image

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is doing his Power to Developers shtick in Sydney today. I’ll be live-blogging it right here.

The Big Deal is that he’s talking about Microsoft’s strategy for cloud computing or “software as a service” (SaaS) — which I notice Microsoft is calling “software-plus-services”. Is there a difference? I think an essay could be written on that point alone!

Now I must admit I’m fairly sceptical about this whole “cloud computing” thing. Not that it’s a Bad Idea, just that it’s nothing new.

Unless your computer isn’t connected to the global grid we call the Internet, then it’s always been about having a service running on a remote computer (“the server”) and some software on your own computer the mediate your access to same (“the client”).

It seems to me, though, that every few years someone wants to make some big song-and-dance about the idea that they’ve put stuff in their data centre for you to access… and this year’s buzzterm is “cloud computing”. Wow.

Still, it’ll be interesting to hear what Mr Ballmer has to say. And probably more amusingly, how he says it.

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