Tag: names

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Talking about names on ABC Radio’s “Life Matters”

I had the very great pleasure last week of joining ABC Radio National’s Life Matters for a talkback about names, nicknames and pseudonyms — live via Skype from my hotel room in San Francisco.

“What’s in a name?” We have heard these famous words of Shakespeare’s many times, but have you ever considered just how much of our identities are wrapped up in our names?

It’s often the first thing we’re asked. It’s how we identify ourselves to others. But do you like the name you’ve been given? Are your parents to blame, do you think?

You have the ability to change it — would you? Have you? Have you taken your partner’s surname? Is your name hard to pronounce? Do you constantly correct people on how to say or spell it?

Maybe you have a nickname which has basically become your ‘real’ name? How did you get it? Do you use it to go online to chat or date anonymously? Or on social media?

I smile at the title of the session, because that was also used as the headline for my story for ABC’s The Drum last year.

Here’s the full hour of the program, embedded from the ABC website.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (25.4MB)

Obviously the audio is ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

[Photo: Live from San Francisco: me at my desk at the Omni San Francisco Hotel connecting to ABC Radio National in Australia via Skype.]

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Fine posts for 2011

Since the list of most popular posts for 2011 was pretty disappointing, just like the previous year, here’s my personal selection of seven more timeless posts for this year. Happy reading!

As usual, this does not include the material I wrote elsewhere, for Crikey, ZDNet Australia, ABC The Drum, Technology Spectator, CSO Online and the rest. That’s all listed on my Media Output page.

  1. Right, Google, you stupid cunts, this is simply not on! This was my first critique of the Google+ Real Names Policy, and still the most widely read.
  2. LinkedIn’s inadequate response to privacy stupidity, which was when they opened up people’s profiles for use in third-party advertising without asking first.
  3. Twitter: a guide for busy paranoids, adapted from a piece I wrote for the NSW Local Government Web Network.
  4. Tweeting your way out of Paranoia, a video of the presentation I did for the NSW LGWN conference. Yes, it’s related to the previous item.
  5. 50 to 50 #9: The Space Age, and the companion piece…
  6. 50 to 50 #9A: The Real Space Age. They’re about my personal experience of the Space Age.
  7. Goodbye, Artemis, a very personal experience.

You might also like to check out my personal favourites from 2010, 2009 and 2008.

[Update 27 December 2011: Minor corrections to text and HTML markup.]

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Talking Google and names on ABC 105.7 Darwin

On Tuesday I did another radio interview about Google’s stupid names policy, as outlined in my expletive-filled blog post and an op-ed for ABC The Drum.

This time the conversation was with ABC 105.7 Darwin presenter Annie Gastin, in the context of the full range of unusual names. Quite fun.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (5.2MB)

The audio is of course ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but since they don’t usually post it online here it is.

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Weekly Wrap 69: Teeth and little productivity

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — and a remarkably unproductive week it was. I’m even posting this summary late!

In part that’s because the Tooth and Shoulder Situation lingered, but also because I reacted poorly to some negative comments on some of my writing. I’ll write more about that soon.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 107, “Cyberwar: back to basics”. A conversation with Nigel Phair, a director of the Centre for Internet Safety at the University of Canberra.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Tuesday I had lunch at Wildfire Restaurant, Circular Quay, courtesy of Bass PR. The event was a security roundtable presented by some of their clients, including Websense, WatchGuard and VMinformer, and analysts Frost & Sullivan. I’ll write something about this in due course.

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: My first beer after nearly three weeks of illness and heavy-duty antibiotics. Much deserved. It’s a Coopers Pale Ale at The Grand View Hotel, Wentworth Falls. This event actually happened the previous week, but I’m slow.]

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Weekly Wrap 65: Better late than never, perhaps

A supposedly-weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers Monday 29 August to Sunday 4 September 2011, a week during which I was so mentally exhausted I needed to take a bit of a break — hence the relatively low level of media output.

I also did about a day’s worth of geek-for-hire stuff for some long-standing clients. That was primarily web development, not the sort of thing I detail here unless there’s something interesting to show you.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 103, “Google’s real names a real disaster”. A conversation with Kirrily “Skud” Robert, about which I have already written stuff.

Articles

Media Appearances

None.

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.

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Crikey: Google+ is a goddam Trojan horse

So, there’s a reason Google is being so stubborn over this “real names” policy. Google+ isn’t a social network at all, despite the fact that it looks like one. It’s actually the core of an identity service.

I wrote about this for Crikey today, a piece that includes Google chair Eric Schmidt’s confirmation of that plan and some observations that suggest Google+ is failing to reach critical mass.

The continuing bad press over what’s been dubbed #nymwars won’t help. Yet I suspect that Google’s need and desire to prevent Facebook Connect becoming the planet’s default identity service will override most concerns.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Schmidt has always been the go-for-profits guy. Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page is reportedly aware of the problem, although an informative post by Stephen R van den Berg says it’s unclear whether he’s being properly informed about the criticism. That post was written a week ago, however, so I daresay Page has seen at least some of the news reports since. And the other co-founder, Sergey Brin, has been notably silent.

It feels like things have come a long way since my original expletive-filled rant.

Oh, and thank you to everyone who said they liked the Patch Monday podcast on this topic. That’s especially pleasant given my fears over the rushed recording.