Doing Words

Social media won’t achieve every goal: an example…

// May 29th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Advertising, Green, Media relations, Social Media

Yolanda is a smart person (MBA candidate and chemical engineer — I’m impressed) and since I got to do the social media work for TEDxSydney on the weekend, I now consider myself a real social media expert (yes, I’m that vain and deluded). So I’m offering free social media advice (hey, at least I’m not charging for it, I’m not that deluded… though I’d like to be…)

Here’s Yolanda’s question:

Feeling like a gen x, needing some social media lessons…

I have been following LinkedIn for 6 months, just got a facebook page two weeks ago (yes, hard to believe…when did I become a luddite…). Phase 1 – my neighbours and I produced a short film entry to the Origin Sustainability Drive competition, so proved that we could take an idea into reality (check it out on link). Phase 2 – We need at least 2000 votes for the $10K people’s choice award, but sitting at just 65. We have formed an alliance with the community not-for-profit Moreland Energy Foundation (we would donate half if we win). We have interviewed for an article that will appear in The AGE next week. But how do we use social media? It is much harder than I imagined!! (I am studying an MBA, so super keen to develop these new world skills!) Will appreciate your help and advice.

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Social media for TEDxSydney

// December 17th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Issues, My work, TEDxSydney

TEDxSydney 2010 was Sydney’s first direct experience of TED, the innovation festival phenomenon. Now TEDxSydney is back for its second year, scheduled for May 28, 2011 at Redern’s Carriageworks complex.

TED’s reputation has grown partly thanks to an open and engaging approach to sharing ideas with the internet community. TEDx is an endeavour designed to spread TED even further and give people not just the chance to attend a mini-TED event, but to plan and host their own TED-like conference, reflecting the spirit and purpose of TED while addressing their own local cultural values and issues.

I was fortunate enough to attend TEDxSydney 2010, and it blew my socks off — the calibre and the scale of the event went far beyond my expectations, encompassing science, politics, gender and sexuality, design, art, music, indigenous culture and more. Although auditorium space was limited, TEDxSydney included a second stage outside the auditorium with live crosses, vox pops and post-presentation interviews with speakers, as well as an active Twitter stream. For a first effort from the organisers it was hugely impressive. You can still watch the presentations, available on YouTube.

Now I’m utterly stoked to post that I’ll be a member of TEDxSydney 2011′s all-volunteer organising committee, helping as Social Media Director.

I’ll be working on helping people who can’t attend TEDxSydney get the most out of the live and archived content we’ll be publishing, helping people interact with each other and the speakers, and using social media to learn about what people like/don’t like about TEDxSydney 2011.

If you’ve got thoughts about that, please let me know, follow @TEDxSydney on Twitter and join the Facebook Page.

Here’s one of my favourite sessions from last year, featuring Michael Kirby on the separation of Church and State.

Sell the armed forces and do something constructive with the money

// June 11th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Other news, World Peace

“I say cut defence. I dont mean nibble at it or slice it. I mean cut it, all £45bn of it. George Osborne yesterday asked the nation “for once in a generation” to think the unthinkable, to offer not just percentage cuts but “whether government needs to provide certain public services at all”.What do we really get from the army, the navy and the air force beyond soldiers dying in distant wars and a tingle when the band marches by? Is the tingle worth £45bn, more than the total spent on schools? Why does Osborne “ringfence” defence when everyone knows its budget is a bankruptcy waiting to happen, when Labour ministers bought the wrong kit for wars that they insisted it fight?”

- Simon Jenkins, of The Guardian, brought to my attention by the easy-care and dry-cleanable Lloyd Shepherd of I’ve Said Too Much.

Israel’s indefensible act: censoring Gaza flotilla journalists

// June 3rd, 2010 // 0 Comments // Media, Other news, World Peace

I wasn’t going to write about the tragic incident between Israeli forces and the Gaza relief flotilla — this is usually a blog about my work and the issues facing my profession. And so much of it seemed inevitable from the moment the flotilla was first organised — a motley collection of dodgy vessels carrying people representing a broad spectrum of issues would limp towards the Gaza coast, it would be intercepted by the Israeli military, who would arrest those on board with maximum gusto, jail or deport those on-board, confiscate everything and then claim it’s own investigation would prove that it had done nothing wrong. Initial condemnation of Israel’s action in the West would be limited to strong words, the pro-Israel community would try to explain that the State of Israel was indeed threatened by a few liberals and journalists and a rusty Turkish cruise liner, and then to finish up, we’d see a reaction to that suggesting that the event might not be as black-and-white as “Israel = bad, flotilla = good.”

Andrew Günsberg’s post, “Reading Then Thinking Speaking Then Listening” is a great example of the latter. He discloses his conflict of interest up front and encourages his readers to think twice, that it might not be all black-and-white and good-versus-evil. He encourages them to read a book about the background to the occupation of Gaza and talks about how the Israeli population isn’t always in favour of the way its government and its military behaves.

It’s all good, reasonable stuff, but it misses a crucial question: what was the only action committed by the Israeli forces during this incident for which there’s no justification? Firing shock grenades and tasers at the occupants of a foreign-registered vessel while in international waters? Use of high-velocity paintball rounds and live ammunition at close quarters against non-combatants? Taking foreign nationals from outside Israel’s borders and detaining them indefinitely or deporting without access to legal representation or appeal?

No. The only indefensible act of the state of Israel in this matter was the effective and almost total censorship of all communication arising from the incident so that the only significant record of events will be that provided by Israeli military video crews.

Flotilla activists interviewed by a journalist immediately prior to the attack (AP Photo/IHH)

According to eyewitness accounts, journalists were the first target of the Israeli action, including blocking cellphone and satellite communications from well prior to the incident to well after it had concluded, to prevent video, audio and text evidence being broadcast from the scene. Two Australian ABC reporters were immediately detained, with one, photographer Kate Geraghty reportedly tasered as she tried to upload images via satellite.

These Australian journalists aren’t Hamas apologists, anti-Israeli propagandists or easily-duped greenhorn reporters. They are both seasoned, professionally unbiased reporters working for an international broadcaster with an unblemished and rigidly enforced code of non-bias and independence. Israeli forces had been informed they were on the vessel, they identified themselves to the commandos storming the vessel, but they were nevertheless assaulted and had their equipment not just confiscated but methodically destroyed, even to the point of tearing up the notebook journalist Paul McGeough had been writing his reports into once satellite and cellphone communication had been blocked.

So far, Israel’s government has refused widespread calls for an inquiry into the incident from many UN nations including Australia, so maybe an inquiry will never happen. But if there ever is an inquiry by the Israeli military or anyone else, the only significant body of evidence will be eyewitness accounts and the video footage recorded by the Israeli military’s own video teams. You can easily discount the evidence of the flotilla’s eyewitnesses as being the rantings of terrorist sympathisers, as Israeli military inquiries habitually do. Which leaves the only version of events those recorded by the Israeli military itself.

Sorry, but I’ve got a degree in journalism and media studies, and I know how easy it is to influence opinion by selective editing, or just by pointing the camera one way and not another. The only hope we ever had of knowing the truth of the flotilla incident would be to compare and contrast the Israeli military’s own footage with that supplied by the independent professional media accompanying the flotilla. Now that there’s only one source of video footage, there’s no hope of knowing what really happened.

I’m as prepared as the next realist to remain open to the idea that Israeli forces may have done their best to minimise casualties and separate combatants from non-combatants on-board the flotilla vessels. That injuries and deaths on board happened accidentally and without intent in the heat of the moment. That some of the flotilla’s occupants were aggressors and initiated some of the violence that occurred. Perhaps even that Israel would have delivered the cargo of aid intact and in a timely fashion as they’d offered to do if the flotilla diverted to the Israeli port of Ashdod.

But — and it’s a huge but — there’s only one motivation I know of for blocking independent news coverage of the incident, and that is to hide the truth of what really occurred from the world community, from the international Jewish community and the citizens of Israel.

If you feel like being realist about this incident, by all means reserve judgement until ‘we know more about what happened’ but ask yourself who’s made sure you’ll never really know for sure, and what their motivation could possibly be.

Paul McGeough on the rise of Hamas, while remaining independent, unbiased and unassaulted. (ABC Fora)

All you need is an idea… and lots of time

// May 10th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Video, Work

The democratisation of media technology means if you have something to say in words, you can tweet it, blog it, print it and get 1,000 copies done in perfect-bound full-colour before close-of-business tomorrow. If you ache to express yourself with images you can grab a digital still camera, video camera or mobile phone, edit it there and go straight to the web or to DVD. And if you want to create music all you need is a laptop, a midi interface or a microphone, a copy of Garageband and publish your music straight to the web.

But there are still two limits to self-expression:

• Ideas; and
• Time.

You need at  least one idea and you need lots (loads, masses, heaps) of time.

In fact, I can define a new genre of art that is defined primarily by the time taken to produce it. Vimeo is full of examples where the idea itself wasn’t so inventive but the artist has distinguished themselves and found an audience by devoting an enormous amount of time to the expression of the idea.

Here’s an example where the idea’s not a big deal (anybody who’s bounced a ball for a while has heard rhythms in the bounce) but the art is in the expression and the time taken to express it in video. It’s very well done.

It’s been said by people much smarter than me that the most precious commodity of our age is time. I’d humbly suggest that without an idea, time will achieve nothing, yet without time, an idea will remain unrealised.

Gravité from Renaud Hallée on Vimeo.

Seven steps to finding the dream job and work/life balance

// November 4th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Work

Miles Campbell, founder of TTA.edu.au and I like to discuss the big issues, whether over a beer at our regular Pub Night talk fest, at events like Interesting South, or often when we’re meant to be watching the kids and making sure they don’t fall off the swings. Miles is far too busy thinking big thoughts to have time to blog, though not too busy to email me when an idea occurs to him (yes, I’ve tried explaining that blogging can be just as quick as emailing but he’s so old skool.)

The following post, on finding a healthy work/life balance and how to recognise one when you find it, is essentially one of Miles’ emails, slightly edited by me. Over to you, Miles… (more…)

Is burnout just around the corner? (wait, just lemme reply to this email)

// October 2nd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Startup, Work

Derek Featherstone in Box Of Chocolates has a great post today on the very modern disease of working crazy hours. He says in part,

I’m tired of seeing my friends across the globe at the wrong times. I shouldn’t be awake and neither should they! My friends on the west coast of North America? If you’re still awake and working at 3am when I’m waking up at 6 or 7 am, then something is wrong. Those in the UK and Europe? When I’m doing a bit of extra work at 9pm at night and its 3am for you? Not cool. My Kiwi and Aussie friends? Get. To. Bed.

And later,

Over the past few months I’ve realized that the sacrifices I have made haven’t always been the right ones — partly because I’m conflicted. I’m sure we all feel this pressure in some way: in order to provide for my family I feel more pressure for the business to do more — take on more work, expand what we’re doing, have more income so that I can provide more comfort, more food, more whatever. more. more. more. But at the end of the day, it just feels like less and less and less.

Great post, and I agree. Why is it happening? I think there’s three reasons: technology, knowledge work and wealth.

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Internet filtering: stop Australia importing stupidity from China

// October 27th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Issues, Privacy

Richard Giles from Recommendation Ventures and I often think alike (such as his recent post on ‘Marketing 101 for Web Startups‘ which nicely parallels my ‘tips on media relations for web startups‘.)

Richard’s further ahead on the curve – but probably right where I should be – when it comes to worrying about proposals to introduce internet content filters in Australia.

Tweaking Richard’s analogy a little, attempts to introduce compulsory internet content filters is like forcing everyone to be breath-tested before they drive their car. It risks significant impact to innocent Australian websites wrongly filtered, slows the internet down for everyone, infringes our freedom of speech and potentially increases the cost of bandwidth for consumers and businesses.

There’s no evidence that internet filtering is effective even in extremely regulated societies such as China. I can’t believe the enlightened Rudd government would try and import such ridiculous ‘command-and-control’ thinking. There’s no way an Australian government can achieve anything effective here other than impose an additional cost on bandwidth users and make the internet harder and slower to access for us all.

Senator The Hon Stephen Conroy is wrong, Richard is right, and the most effective way you can register your objections to this absurd proposal is to blog and Tweet about it. Let’s get to work.

New Google Maps feature: massive privacy invasion

// May 30th, 2007 // 0 Comments // Privacy

Only in the US is there a geek market large enough to have even the faintest
hope of making a profit out of serving people 3-D photo maps, though I remain sceptical that Google can ever make this pay. Not that “make it pay” is a common goal for most Google development teams.

In my testing, I found that flying around the streets of San Francisco was a little bit nausea-inducing much of the time; either spinning out of control with injudicious mouse movements or getting completely lost by the time I’d navigated the intersection. Even those with an unshakeable internal compass (who presumably don’t need maps like the rest of us anyway) may be slightly creeped-out by flying through a frozen moment in time, like a scene from Twilight Zone – people, vehicles and objects frozen forever in time (or at least
until the next update of the database).

The fun folks from Immersive Media have crews of drones (presumably associate producers) in white vans kitted with 360-degree photo cameras, slowly crawling through every major intersection in the US, building a navigable database of images that can be overlaid (presumably at great expense) on mapping data that Google has licensed from Sanborn and NAVTEQ (at less expense, since it’s legacy data.)

I expect it’ll be a matter of hours before people are blogging about all the weird sh*t they’ve discovered while zooming in on all the people caught on street corners.

Drug dealers prospecting, crimes in progress, lovers soon to become ex-, partners cheating on other partners, businessmen captured with the opposition in mid-betrayal, an eventually, no doubt, a chubby middle-aged guy who dies of a heart attack crossing the street shortly after the Immersive Media van trundles past, leaving as his last legacy on this mortal coil a blurry, poorly-exposed shot of him juggling an over-full briefcase, an extra-tall latte and that last
fatal cigarette on the way to an office never reached. A mourning wife bookmarking the URL sent by a web-savvy nephew in the weeks after the funeral, returning again and again to that haphazard moment, never closing the browser or even allowing the screensaver to kick in for fear that when she returns, it will be gone. Then one day, of course, it will be gone; deleted as randomly as it was captured by another refresh from another trundling white van.

But hey; it’s not all bad news. It can’t be long before someone hacks together something that lets you add speech bubbles to the photos and share them with other Google Maps users!

Can’t have it both ways? We need it more than two ways!

// November 23rd, 2006 // 0 Comments // Green

As the Australian Federal government tries to push through its nuclear energy agenda, I was catching up with an Australian renewable energy startup that’s not only setting up a new HQ in Silicon Valley, it’s actively discussing a major pilot program for one of the world’s biggest technology companies.

Federal Minister for Acting a Complete Twat for Photo Opportunities, Ian Campbell, was criticising State governments for reacting against the proposal to install 25 nuclear power stations in Australia, saying, “They can’t have it both ways… You can’t say ‘I care about climate change’ on the one hand, but say ‘We’re not going to even look, even have a debate about nuclear’ on the other.”

You absolutely can, Mr Campbell, as long as you then say, “Let’s have a debate about all the possible energy generation alternatives – coal, gas, nuclear and renewables. Not just nuclear. An inquiry that limits itself to considering nuclear energy only is a sham.” …or words to that effect.

Sham strategies for the energy industry have long been policies for governments of all persuasions in Australia. Too much attention is paid to supporting industries in return for guaranteeing jobs and export income , burning some of the world’s worst-polluting coal and running some of the least clean power stations in the western world so that by this decade, we’re in the position of having a carbon footprint far in excess of our tiny population.

It’s a difficult environment in which to setup an alternative energy startup, and yet my good friend Max (not his real name) has been developing a world-first, ground-breaking solar technology for many years, getting by on the smell of an oily rag and infrequent, insufficient drabs of grant money.

Their pilot scale generation plant has proven the technology has a real future as a supplement for existing power station generation, and now is the time for commercialisation.

Except… (If you’re in the startup business, you already know what comes next) they haven’t been able to attract any investor support or government interest in Australia. So someone from a Silicon Valley VC firm contacts them out of the blue, and a few weeks and a few plan trips later, there’s a short-form deal in place, and the company’s relocating to Palo Alto, CA before Christmas.

That was a couple of weeks ago, and already the VC has them in to see one of the world’s largest technology companies. It has a problem because its huge server farms draw a lot of power, and electricity in California is expensive, in short supply and famously unreliable. Plus, as a large international company, they’d like to begin reducing their carbon emissions.

So my friend and his team go in to meet the operations and facilities heads of the company, to do a quick introduction meeting, show the powerpoints, etc. My friend’s hoping that maybe they can win some small support for their dream of building a pilot-scale generation plant in the US. Before the diet sprites are even warm, the discussion has progressed waayyy beyond that, and by the end of the meeting, the company is arranging to send my friend’s team and their own senior execs down south to a possible greenfields site that they think just might be ideal for building a full-scale plant.

Just to recap: what we’re reading about here is one of the world’s largest technology companies, looking at investing in its own private national power grid, and considering driving all or part of its generation using a green, renewable, revolutionary technology from a tiny little Australian company that I guarantee nobody outside of the renewable energy community here has ever heard of.

And instead of homegrown technologies like this even being considered by Australian governments and industry as a possible means of reducing Australia’s carbon emissions, the whole company will go offshore, taking its IP, its future earnings and some incredibly bright minds with it.

Wish I could disclose who the friend is, who the startup company is, and who the giant US technology company is, but I can’t at this time. Hopefully I’ll be able to soon.

Technorati Tags: renewable, carbon, nuclear, power, electricity, startup, silicon valley