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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.
Big Brother on Second Life
Another reason to join the community at Second Life. I must get on more often, every 2 weeks or so just isn’t enough 🙂
You know decisions you’ve made in the past were right when….
A blogger has been invited on to the set of the TV show she blogs about to exclusively meet the cast and crew of the show! As I write this Sheila is in a hotel getting ready to visit the set of Medium. Congrats Sheila. Amazing stuff. There’s a tie up directly with a major […]
Not going to Techcrunch now
Sorry to those who had emailed me saying they had looked forward to meeting me, or catching up either at Techcrunch, or the day after it in New York. Unfortunately I’ve had my permission to attend removed and am unable to leave work in Toronto for the trip. Maybe another time, or even in the […]
Take a stand for freedom online
My article this week at The Blogging Times is dedicated to Reporters Sans Frontiers 24-hour online demo against Internet censorship (more details at RSF here). I wrote the article on Monday morning. 24 hours later and what do I read in Bloglines: The Guide: On November 3rd, US telecom giant Verizon says it will disconnect […]
Another day, another set of refreshing feeds
Am I currently the only person out there who is sick and tired of refreshing feeds? If you’re using Bloglines and you’re subscribed to any feed that uses feedburner you’ll know what I mean. I just re-read the last 2 days posts for Techcrunch for the third time today. Blogaholics I saw 1 month old […]
The Blog Herald is hiring
Details at The Blog Herald. I’m biased, but it would be a good gig 🙂
Vox doesn’t suck, and thinking outside the square in Web 2.0
Ben Bleikamp posts that SixApart, and in particular, Vox sucks. He has a go at some of SixApart’s other products, and sure, there’s been some mistakes in the past, decisions that certainly I’ve been very vocally against, but their products (MT, TypePad, LiveJournal) work for the people who use them, and I would presume have […]
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, […]