/ blog · 2006
Archive
Posts from 2004 to 2017. This was a personal blog during a fairly chaotic decade in independent publishing — some of it tech commentary, some of it Australia, some of it ephemera. It’s kept here in full for anyone who arrives via an old link.
Current writing lives at SiliconANGLE.
Putting Apple in its place
Video as follows (not viewable in the RSS feed, sorry):
Bigpong still smells
Benjamin Haslem writes at Corporate Engadget about experiencing poor customer service from Foxtel, and suggests that it’s evidence that Telstra’s pathetic customer service. I’ve got relatives here who just moved house: Telstra for phone and Telstra Bigpong for the net. The phone went across ok, but the stupid thing is, despite both the line and […]
Even spooks are using Wikis
Reuters reports that the U.S. intelligence community on Tuesday unveiled its own secret internal wiki, saying that Wikipedia’s format is key to the future of American espionage. Struth. No word as to what wiki platform they are running on, but given the comparisons to Wikipedia you’d guess they’re using mediawiki. Unfortunately the service wasn’t named […]
A serious Alexa competitor?
Greg Sterling at Search Engine Journal points to Compete’s Snapshot, a new service offering Alexa like stats. From what I can gather the company compares itself more to comScore in it’s methodology, promoting the service as the “First premium web metrics tool made available for free”. The stats come from over 2 million users of […]
TPN and News hook up
Congrats to Cam on the news that TPN and News Corp have hooked up to produce a celebrity podcast for news.com.au, one of Australia’s leading online news sites. Nice to see Australian companies looking at doing deals like this, now if only they’d get their chequebooks out and fund TPN so we can keep it […]
Yahoo! to buy AOL?
Fortune reports that Yahoo! is in talks with Time Warner to acquire AOL. Naturally it makes business sense but every time one of the bigger companies are gobbled up, that’s one less major site/ competitor out there, and further consolidates internet traffic at the top. OK, so we all know the barrier to entry onto […]
Will the person asking “do you want fries with that” be in India?
FortWayne.com reports on the rise in the use of call centres to take orders at fast food outlets. At the moment they (the call centres) are in the same town, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that if your using a call centre to take an order in a drive thru line it’s […]
TechCrunch Party wait list open
Mike Arrington with the good news for those who cant get a ticket. I’m not sure I’m allowed to say from who, but I managed to get a ticket so I’ll be in NY on the 16th. My first trip to the States as well, and all for a tech party, so here’s hoping it’s […]
Leaving the United States?
This Slashdot comment thread is probably one of the more interesting reads I’ve had lately…altough be warned, to read it all takes quite some time. As one commenter noted, it’s nice not to see just another flamewar but some interesting discussion.
Chaser Classic Clips: dumb Americans
For RSS readers there’s video below:
Free cards!
Darren has the details at Problogger, but there doesn’t seem to be the usual we only send to the States b.s. you get with a lot of these offers. I’ve just ordered mine. As a concept though they are rather cool, it will be interesting to see the quality once they’re delivered.
Freedom is fickle: the national disgrace of press freedom, or the lack there of
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 […]
A slippery slope?
TechDirt on Weblogs Inc vs Newsgator. My natural inclination (dare I say once again) is to side with Jason Calacanis on this, however Mike does make an interesting point. It’s an issue I still struggle with when it comes to full vs part feeds..how do you actually measure the return on these sorts of things, […]
Video killed the Podcasting Star
My post for another week at The Blogging Times was on video (again)…and naturally I had some fun with video editing 🙂 Enjoy:
I see red
Nick Carr on the growing communist tones in Web 2.0. He’s not the only person to have seen it. You can see it in Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail book as well. Web 2.0 shouldn’t be about ideology in terms of being a purist pursuit, it should only be about freedom of choice and anything […]
This is fucking hillarious
Scoble reports that Tim Bray of Sun fame is in strife after dropping the f word. OK, so sometimes even humble I self censor myself here at duncanriley.com at times, after all you never really want to offend people too much, however sometimes there really is no reasonable alternative to using fuck, or even fucking […]
The bandwidth conundrum
Scoble on Video: First, the videos I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢m putting up are around 200MB a piece. The bandwidth distributors I know are charging $.14 or more PER GIGABYTE to distribute those videos. So, that comes to $28, or more for 1,000 downloads (if my math is right). Wait a second here. We?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢re going to collect $10 in […]
Why the Pay Per Post folks are rubbing their hands with glee: it’s all free publicity
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 […]
OMG They’ve seen the light: Daylight Savings in WA?
This from The West. We might even get daylight savings by December 1. Now if only they’d allow the shops to open on a Sunday we could really join the 20th 21st century.
So the YouTube secret is out: the big guys took a stake as well
The Blogging Times has the scoop:Universal, Sony BMG Music entertainment and the Warner Music Group have all taken small share holding in YouTube. In you can’t beat them, join them I guess, but on a deeper note are the big record and movie houses finally changing their tune? (pardon the pun 🙂 ).