Australia comes in 35th on RSF’s freedom of the press list behind countries including Ghana, Lithuania, Bosnia, Cyprus and even New Zealand. It’s a complete and utter national disgrace, but not surprising really, our Federal Government jails journalists for not revealing their sources, video bloggers will shortly potentially need to be licensed to do video online, and libel laws are headed in the wrong direction in terms of the publics right to know. We should be top of this list! Of course, you won’t read much about it in the MSM either, after all, we all know about the great relationships our media owners have with the Government. It really is a sad day when you realise that your own country isn’t as free as it once was, nor should be.
Archives For General
My post for another week at The Blogging Times was on video (again)…and naturally I had some fun with video editing 🙂
Enjoy:
As Darren writes, rather than have a meetup of our own we’ve decided to tag on to another meetup, the Mesh meetup at the Irish Embassy Pub at 6pm, November 15 in Toronto. You’ll get to meet yours truly, Darren Rowse of course and a whole pile of other cool people including Mark Evans, Matthew Ingram and others. Unlike Darren I won’t be requiring a hug, however we’re not taking bets on the first thing I’m going to say when I get off the plane, because I already know what it’s going to be “F*ck it’s cold”…the only question is I guess, should I buy a drizabone before I leave or go local and purchase something Jeremy refers to as an Anorak when I get there? 🙂
Jeff Jarvis ways in on Pay Per Post via Jason Calacanis, who brings it up (yet) again. I know Jason has called Pay Per Post a cancer, and whilst I’ve previously disagreed on some levels (essentially I’m not against others using it, but they should force disclosure), if it is indeed cancer, Jarvis and Calacanis writing about it is like continuing to smoke when you’ve got lung cancer, it only makes things worse. Every single time Pay Per Post gets mentioned as a company, it’s free publicity for them: there is no such thing as bad publicity really, sure a few people might decide that they don’t like you or your product, but statistically more people will actually discover the product for the first time….and are more likely to use it, after all, people do tend to be able to make their own decisions of various products, no matter what I, or any one else for that matter has to say about them.
Now here’s throwing something to the wind: even the fake blog/ astroturfing scandal surrounding Eldeman at the moment is actually going to HELP Eldeman write more business. The fact that they did the wrong thing is pretty much a given, but the publicity and name exposure Eldeman has received as a result of it is something that even money would find difficult to buy. How many firms out there looking for PR advice now know the name Eldeman as a result of whats occured? How many potential clients now know that Eldeman can and does delivered strategies that include blogging? Sure, a whole pile of people already did before the scandal, but chances are a lot more do now…and trust me, 99% of the time the net result is positive long term even when the publicity is the result of a scandal, not negative. Indeed the only real negative scandals are those that either result in the company closing down (there can be no positives from ceasing to trade), or it’s directors facing legal threats, including jail.
Tags: Jason Calacanis, Jeff Jarvis, Eldeman, Payperpost
Two years for this. As a parent reading this I varied between anger, disgust, and at times tears. The mother and her partner should have gotten a lot, lot longer behind bars. Once again our justice system applies a wet feather in it’s application of punishment.
SEOmoz has a brilliant post researching metrics using real log file data and comparing it to available metrics. Their conclusion:
“This survey represents only a tiny sampling of sites in a niche sector, albeit a relatively popular one in the blogosphere and webdev/tech space. Based on the evidence we’ve gathered here, it’s safe to say that no external metric, traffic prediction service or ranking system available on the web today provides any accuracy when compared with real numbers”
Halayuya brother!
Darren posts about our forthcoming trip to Toronto. Darren gets the easier of our trips. Bunbury is roughly 2 1/2 hours South of Perth, and Perth is literally at the arse end of the world…they say it’s the most remote capital city in the world, and they aren’t lying. Unlike Darren’s trip, god must of been on my side when I booked the flights because despite trying to make sure I went the cheapest route, Craptus..sorry, Qantas wasn’t the cheapest option, nor the easiest in terms of flights either, so I’m heading to Toronto via Hong Kong flying Cathay Pacific, which I’m told has won awards for being the best airline in the world or something similar.
For anyone in Toronto who might want to say g’day, I’m in Toronto from 12 November through to 23 November. I’ve also got stop overs in Hong Kong both ways due to the way the flights worked out. Look out shops, here I come. 🙂
Viidoo. This is probably illegal…but the quality is amazing. A full review at Web TV Hub (via Digg). Free US TV channels…Im sitting here watching as clear as day NBC11 from the West Coast of the States…it’s apparently warm there at the moment, not that I’ve got any idea what the temps are in Celcius..worth a look :-)…PS, if you’ve got problems viewing the channels turn Skype off to use it, Skypes a bandwidth hog.
OK, fun with webcams and video, but here’s the preview for my weekly column at The Blogging Times this week which will be online shortly…and yes, interesting light affects when I have the blinds open in my office 🙂
Tags: The Blogging Times
Some interesting new experiences over the last week. b5media started to look for a designer(s) to help us roll out some new blogs. Now to clarify this, this isn’t designing a new template work, that’s going to be happening next year, but it’s taking one of our existing templates (which I might add we have full copyright on) and adding colour and a header to it. Work which isn’t too hard, right?. Now we were talking fairly urgently about 20 odd layouts in a week, with somewhere between 30 to 100 after that. Potentially, particularly if the applicant was an individual, there was the consideration that we might even employ that person on a proper p/t or f/t basis as well if we were happy with their work and if they were interested.
So we advertise the role on Sitepoint, and get 20-25 odd applications. Most of them were embarassing. You know, you’d think if you were applying for work you’d include more than 1-2 lines or text, or on the other hand actually provide samples of your work, or links to your portfolio. Nope. Apparently it’s not the done thing in designer circles. Apparently some designers are too self important to indulge in actually trying to win a contract, after all, as the company owner we should know them by their reputation, right?
We’ll fast forward and I short list 6. Some of them I’ve never heard of before, having said that though, they were courteous enough to write a decent application and provide links to portfolios or sample of their work. So I send out an email, as advised to from a high, to the short listed applicants discussing where we are at, and asking them whether they could mock up, with some colours, a b5media template so I can get some idea who to pick. Not unreasonable, right? I was wary of the fact that designers are picky about doing so-called work for free, which is why I stated things in the email like it doesn’t have to be on a webpage for us to see, just a jpg or similar, after all, how the hell are we suppose to select a final designer? AND I’D NOTE, I”M NOT EVEN TALKING SCRIPTING EITHER. COLOURS AND A LOGO TO AN EXISTING TEMPLATE. They could claim copyright on the mock up all they wanted, I mean shit, it would have taken most of them 10 minutes in photoshop to take a jpg or png of the test site they were given, and inject some colour into it. Now remember this is thousands of dollars of work we’re talking about, potentially over the longer term tens of thousands, or even a p/t or f/t job for someone….so what happened next? one of the designers leaks to 9rules that apparently we’re trying to rip them off. To that designer, which ever of the 6 you are, if you’re reading this, have the guts to own up to who you are, then stick your application up your arse. If you had a problem with what I requested, you could have taken it up with me, indeed a simple email saying that you’d prefer to have not done so would have sufficed. Indeed we could have chatted on your “vision” as to how the template would have looked…anything alternatively that could have convinced me you wanted the work and were deserving of it…but so it would seem, the fact is that you’re probably too far up yourself anyway for us to want to hire you.
And here’s another thing, we got a pile of applications for web designers out of India and Eastern Europe, some with some pretty impressive portfolios. A couple were on the short list. Given what’s gone on here, is it little wonder that companies take their design work outside of North America? We’ll see how things go.
Update: we are now offering the shortlisted candidates reasonable compensation should they wish to mock up a template for us. Having said this though, is there any other job out there that you’d get paid for just to apply for? Go figure.
