Todays philosophical thought.

Does your collective wisdom and experience mean diddly squat when no body believes you?

Is it futile in trying when those parallel to you or above you won’t accept facts because those facts are inconvenient to their overall picture of how things should be?

Is it futile trying to persuade the unpersuadable? do you as a consequence accept that you have no place in which to make input that will be listened to, or do you take your bat and ball and leave, seeking greener pastures elsewhere?

Is a key sign that all is lost one where the answer to your questions in relation to a wanted outcome or issue is inevitably no, and yet others act without even asking the question to start with and with no actual consequences to these actions?

Is doing the “right” thing, discussing things prior to action, and by association seeking permission, a flawed concept in modern business practice? Do those who inevitably win the day those that don’t play by these rules? Indeed, are these rules dead?

Food for thought.

Lots of coverage on the November launch of the Nintendo Wii. No word yet on it’s Australian release date or how much it will cost here, although if it’s $250 in the US you’d guess it would be somewhere between $300-$350 AUD. Obviously the price is a little disappointing, it would have been nicer if it was say $50 USD less, but it does come with a game which is a bonus, after all, we all know how much games costs on modern consoles. You also get two cordless controllers which is all good.

I do have to disagree with Jeremy’s take on it. You’ve heard of beer goggles, here we’ve got geek goggles. Jeremy mate, you aren’t the target market and I doubt you ever will be. Wii is about non-geeks, those that may not own a console currently, who probably a bit like me fell out of love with modern gaming consoles as they became obsessed with blood and gore shot em ups. It’s literally about going back to basics, about embracing fun. I doubt many hardcore gamers will buy the Wii, but lets look at the marketplace, and although these guys drive sales for the 360 and the PS franchise, they are still but a small part of the overall potential market. Nitendo lost the last generation console war…indeed, they lost it big time, coming a distant third to Sony and Microsoft. If you know you can’t compete on hardcore gamers then why try again with your next gen product? Congrats to Nintendo for thinking outside the square on this one, hopefully there will be a pre-Christmas release for the product in Australia and I’ll have one sitting under my Christmas tree 🙂

Tags: Wii

Target is in trouble. Sure, it’s not captchas alone but I’ll bet money that the biggest thing they’ll get pinged on is Captchas. If the legal action is sucessful it won’t be the last. Particularly if you’re running a business can you afford to expose yourself to the possibility of legal action because you’ve decided to discriminate against those with visual impairments?

The SMH reports that Lonelygirl15, one of YouTubes biggest stars is a fraud….interesting given the debate over at Digg lately. Of course some people will say money is the root cause of all evil here, but I’d argue differently, because it’s not directly rewarding people for their efforts that causes the corruption in the first place, after all it’s poverty or low pay that corrupts in 99% of cases, and although the wealthy my get greedy it’s statistically insignificant compared to the have nots….and things are only going to get worse before they get better.

Food for thought.

Scoble points to Bold Moves, and online video blog produced by Ford aimed at employees, investors and influencers.

It’s bloody amazing.

It’s candid, it’s frank, and it’s honest.

Indeed, having watched the current video on the site (episode #10) I feel like I’ve just woken up and watched the start of a revolution in corporate America, or for that matter, the start of a world wide revolution in the way corporations do business.

Sure, one could look at it as spin, and in a way it is, but it’s good spin. It’s good because it’s actually honest. There’s no fluff here, there’s no trying to gloss over the bad in marketing new speak that is so typical of large corporations.

The one quote that stood out more than anything else in the video came from Mark Fields, Executive Vice President, Ford:

I want everyone in the organisation to know the reality, the good things that are going on in the company, and the bad things that are going on. The way to keep people motivated is to keep them informed. People can deal with the truth.

Jeezus. OMG. I’m lost for words.

Why couldn’t I have had a boss like Mark Fields in a number of organisations I’ve worked for in the past that were imploding from within. People respect the truth, even when it’s not pretty. Corporate newspeak that avoids negatives at all costs is a cancer on business. Mark Fields just gave us a cure.

Kudos to Ford. Like Scoble I’m rooting for you, even if the Falcon is a poor quality car.

Tags: Ford

I’ve had some interesting (to say the least) comments and emails on my posts in relation to Steve Irwins death, indeed a number of people have expressed a desire to see me stabbed through the heart by a stingray, others have stated that they hope that people spit on my grave when I’m dead as well. The common theme was criticism that I dared to suggest that people found Steve Irwin an annoying, walking, talking clich?É?í?Ǭ©, and that as such I was being disrespectful to not only his family, but to the man himself, dead as he now is.

Bite me.

Are you trolls also attacking the mainstream media who in their numerous reports have also noted the same thing? Probably not. You’re too busy attacking me and the team over at The Spin Starts Here.

The fact is that many of us did find Steve Irwin annoying, but it didn’t mean we didn’t love him as one of our own, nor have a great level of respect or admiration for him for both his success as an entertainer, and for the many good things he did for conservation.

Most people love Paul Hogan, but the clich?É?í?Ǭ©d version of Australia he presented to others did make many cringe. For many years in my days before blogging and the internet, when my interaction with Americans was limited to occasionally meeting some of them out and about in Sydney, I, along with my friends, really wanted to smash the next American in the face (metaphorically of course) that asked us whether we could throw a shrimp of the barbie for them. Aside from the fact that we don’t have shrimp (they’re prawns for god sake!), American’s were shaped in their views of Australia by Paul Hogan. These days this view was shaped by Steve Irwin, and not always for the better. In assessing a man it serves in nobodys interest only to look at his life past through rose coloured glasses, particularly those who have obtained such a cultural prominence. I did nothing more than give a reasoned assessment on the life of the man. Like many Australians I was deeply shocked at his passing, and indeed I support the calls for him to have a State Funeral.

But just in case I die tomorrow, I’ll write my own eulogy now.

Vale Duncan Riley

Loved by as many as whom disliked him
He was never afraid to call a spade a f*cking shovel
and he enjoyed a good and fair debate.
He made a difference, maybe not to many, but to some,
and in achieving something, be it small, he was proud to have achieved it at all.

He leaves behind him a beautiful son who is already addicted to the internet.

There may be less vile and rubbish in the world now that he is no longer with us, but the colours left behind are none the slightly diminished now he has gone.

Tags: Steve Irwin

My latest weekly column at The Blogging Times. And yes, I’m quite serious, and no, it’s not PC BS, god, anyone who knows me knows how anti-PC I am (indeed, I think I regularly make my business partners in b5media blush), but just because I’m anti-PC doesn’t mean that I think that people choosing to discriminate against people with vision impairments is fair when it is quite the opposite.

Techcrunch reports on the latest from the Om Malik empire: Web Worker Daily. As Mike Arrington correctly points out, the logo of the site is a play on the Cyrillic alphabet signage typically used by the Soviet Union.

My question is this though: why is communist chic so cool?

I see kiddies and trendy types wearing CCCP and hammer and sickle t-shirts and track suits and I can’t help but cringe. Indeed, as much as I personally support concepts and ideas such as Open Source and Creative Commons, I sometimes hesitate in supporting them because they also tend to use such symbology.

Sure, I’m not that old (31 yesterday), but I can still remember the Cold War. I can still remember things like the Doomsday Clock, and the threat of Nuclear War. I can remember doing absurd fallout drills in Primary School where you practiced crouching under your desk in the event of a Nuclear explosion (yep, they use to teach that in the NSW Public School system). I can even remember many years ago a Beyond 2000 special on Channel 7 Sydney where they discussed how many people would be killed if a Nuclear Missile hit Sydney, and how fewer people would be killed if the bomb hit Cronulla instead of the city itself… which was of no solace to me given Cronulla was just down the road from where I lived at the time.

You see, for me, communism sucked. It represented all that was wrong in the world as it was then. Indeed, although the Cold War is dead, a footnote in the history books of Generation Y, I still find it an insidious, evil form of government, one that impedes the rights of the individual, individual freedom being the core fundamental of a free and democratic society (although given the actions of Governments in Australia of late, sometimes I wonder.).

And for these reasons, I don’t get communist chic. Something still makes me feel ill when I see the symbols of the Soviet Union used with no regards to the past. The 40 million odd Russians slaughtered by Stalin, the precipice of global extinction experienced by the world thanks to leaders such as Khrushchev, Andropov and Chernenko seem all forgotten by a generation that has either no knowledge of the past, or has no regards for it. It’s not socially acceptable to wear and use swastikas and German symbology circa WW2, but why has it become cool to wear and use Soviet symbology?

Food for thought.

Ok, it’s probably not cool to laugh about the dead, but this is a little funny (from Fark):

Tags: Steve Irwin

Here’s an interesting question: should Steve Irwin get a State Funeral. Despite some of his more annoying characteristics, there’s little doubt that as a man Irwin did far, far more than many others in the past in promoting Australia abroad, and after all, we’ve given them to people far less worthy than of one than Steve Irwin. Personally I’d reckon yes.

Update: Steve Irwins family was offered a state funeral, looks like they might turn it down according to this story at news.com.au

Tags: Steve Irwin