Fox Force Five

Smart Company has published an article on Online Reputation Management which quotes me talking about crisis management. Brad Howorth kindly edited my rather stilted interview (it was my first ever as an interviewee!) so I sound coherent. And he called me a social media advisor, which I much prefer to the cringe-inducing “Social Media Expert” moniker. Thanks, Brad.

I’m also one of the presenters on Byte into IT, the weekly tech show on radio RRR here in Melbourne.  If you can’t catch the show Wednesdays at 7pm, it’s released as a podcast too.

The latest podcast includes discussion of new open source blogging and social community, Dreamwidth, as well as some news about tools for Google Android developers, and nice examples of Drupal in use. You can download the podcast here. I should mention here (since I forgot to say on air) that the Drupal sites were done by Development Seed, which is based in Washington DC.

I wrote this post for my students over at our class community on Ning, then realised I really wanted to share it here too.
I think I’ve mentioned CoPress before, but I’ve just been reading a few of their latest posts, and they just have so much useful info I wanted to mention them again.

CoPress is “a non-profit organization dedicated to providing college news outlets with the technical resources and support network they need to innovate online.” Among other things, they’ll host your student publication for you! And yes, before you ask, they’re happy to work with Australian unis, I already asked them.

The CoPress blog is awesome, packed with useful info and links. Here are two recent posts I thought you’d find helpful:

A awesome walkthrough of a multimedia “deep journalism” website put together by the Amherst Wire. You’ll see they even show you the flowcharts they drew to help them design their site.

A recent “link sharing” post they made looked at the recent big changes in newspaper publishing including the closure of the Seattle PI but it also has some really handy links about how student publications are using WordPress (and some recommendations of good plugins).

If you browse recent posts on the blog you’ll see they constantly mention new web tools (or how to get the most out of existing ones) – this post made me want to check out BlogTalkRadio – a way to record podcasts and then let listeners ‘call in’ with questions.

Hopefully at least some of those links will be helpful to you.

Interesting. I got an email from the Mayne Report overnight which revealed that Stephen Mayne’s 4 year (!) non-compete clause with Crikey has expired (he founded Crikey and  sold the biz to Private Media for $1M some time ago).

Stephen has continued to contribute news stories to Crikey since the sale, but I’m not sure if that arrangement will stay in place or not. The expiring of the non-compete clause means  he’s free to increase his subscriber base from a cap of 500 people, and he can start covering politics and media for his own project. Here’s what he said about it in the email:

The 4-year non-compete agreement with Crikey expired on Monday so we’re now able to write about politics and media, plus send emails to more than 500 people at a time and freelance material anywhere we like. However, the focus will still very much remain on delivering a strong weekly corporate governance newsletter and this latest edition has plenty of juicy material.

The Mayne Report, for those who don’t know, is where Stephen does business reporting, with a large focus  shareholder activism. It includes a fair amount of video reporting too.

Will be interesting to see what he does with the politics/media stuff now he’s off the leash from Crikey.

(I also notice that he’s selling subs to The Mayne Report for $55 until June 30, in case you’re interested. Thought it was worth a plug.)

It opened with a call for website creators to help save the world, and closed with a call for Web 2.0 to grow up already… In the course of just two days, speakers at New Zealand’s Webstock conference evoked the perils of ecological disaster, suggested that computer games might be able save the world and performed a eulogy for Web 2.0. A heady, visionary blend of themes, attitudes and exhortations – this was Webstock 2009.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m heading to Wellington, New Zealand on Wednesday to attend Webstock 2009. It will be my first Webstock and indeed my first trip to the land of the hobbits. 

Check out the program here – I’m particularly keen to hear from Ben Goodger (who was project lead for Mozilla’s Firefox browser before he moved to Google where he is the User Interface Tech Lead for the Chrome browser project), Bruce Sterling and Annalee Newitz (longtime tech writer and sci fi blogger at io9) . Actually, the list of speakers is pretty damn impressive, rather than namecheck a bunch of people you can browse the list yourself.

I’m covering the conf for ZDNet and I’m also filming an interview with Annalee which will be published on the Webstock site. Fun! Exciting!   Hopefully I’ll also have time to do some sightseeing in gorgeous NZ.

Welcome to students visiting from today’s NEWS09 conference. Please feel free to ask a question or leave a comment. Keep me posted if you decide to try out any of the ideas or tools that were mentioned today – I would love to hear how you get on.

As promised, here’s a copy of the presentation I gave today on How to get your student publication online.

Just a quick one to point out that Laneway Festival has published a response to criticisms of its Melbourne event on the website here. The piece discusses the problems in some detail, and while it stops short of an apology, it “acknowledges” issues and is “deeply disappointed” that the experience was marred for some festival goers.

I liked that it ended by saying “We would also like to acknowledge that we have had personal letters and we will respond to them all next week when we return from the last three dates of the festival.”

Here’s a tip – if you’re the organiser of a (nominally) smoke free event sponsored by Quit Victoria, it’s probably best not to smoke on the night. Oh, and your staff should probably be trained to be able to give people prompt first aid assistance when required.

The Age ran a story today about disgruntled patrons complaining about the lack of organisation of Melbourne’s Laneway Festival. But I’m surprised it didn’t pick up the smoking angle.  One unhappy punter, jametheil-bane,  posted to the Melbourne Maniacs online community today,  saying that he (I’m assuming gender here) had an asthma attack because so many people were smoking in full sight of security guards.  Worse, he was stuffed around by event staff when trying to find first aid. You can see jametheil-bane’s post about the event here.

The post is a copy of the letter of complaint sent to the Festival organisers and includes the following little gem:

The guard came back and told us that he couldn’t ask the third gentleman to put his cigarette out as the third gentleman was one of the event organizers. Lighting up at a non-smoking event, not 5 metres away from the first aid tent.

Assuming this is true, I’m sure Quit Victoria will be thrilled to hear that.

Update: Ugh, I just had another look at the Laneway website, which proudly proclaims “Leave your lighter at home for Australia’s first smokefree music festival. I think every nonsmoker who attended should ask for their $99 back.

Update 2: The Enthusiast published a detailed story about all the other organisational stuffups patrons experienced at the Laneway Festival including queues and overcrowding. Apparently there’s a petition and a Facebook group for disgruntled patrons to demand a refund. Thanks Angus!

Update 3: Thanks Jason for the link to this awesome Tunebinder photo showing the horrendous queue waiting to see the headline act, Girl Talk. You can read the Tunebinder story here.

Last night on Byte Into IT’s first radio show for 2009, we made predictions for the year ahead in tech. The podcast will be online soon, but I thought I’d share mine here. Let’s count them down…

3. This is the year that Microsoft’s browser domination will finally end. Internet Explorer’s market share will drop to 65%, having its lead eroded by two open source browsers  - Firefox (which will stay about steady at 20%) and Google’s Chrome (launched late last year) which will claw 15% of the market away from IE by the end of 2009.
(This prediction inspired by a conversation with Rusty Russell last week at LCA.)

2. The awesome philanthropic venture, One Laptop Per Child, will become hardware independent in 2009, meaning that it won’t be sidetracked by arguments or politics about hardware (or software, for that matter) and won’t be limited by the number of its own XO laptops it can produce. So the folk who create and support Sugar – software designed to be a tool for kids to learn, even if they’ve never used a computer before – will be able to get on with taking this awesome learning tool to kids who need it, everywhere in the world.

1. The Australian Minister for IT, Senator Stephen Conroy will resign in 2009. He’ll resign to take up a posting as the ambassador to China, where he’ll be a special attache to the Ministry for Internet Censorship. He’ll be replaced in his IT portfolio by Deputy PM Julia Gillard, whose first announcement as IT Minister will be that the Rudd government is going to make good on its promise to fund laptops for *all* Australian secondary school kids – and will be extending the program to include primary school kids too. The government will also announce it is working with OLPC to ensure that kids in remote and poor areas of Australia won’t be left behind. 

2009. The year we conquered the digital divide. 

We can hope.

There’s a student media conference coming up here in Melbourne and I’m happy to announce that I’ll be teaching a class in web publishing as part of it.

NEWS09 is a conference for student editors being held over the weekend of 6 and 7 January 2009. This cool sounding event is run by Express Media.

There’s not a lot of info online yet about NEWS09 but I suspect the website will be expanded soon as they’re just finalising the running sheet for the day.

My session is about online publishing, and will cover the basics of getting online, from registering a domain name, to creating an effective web publication, and how to promote and network successsfully. All in an hour, so it’s going to be a whirlwind tour.

I’m really looking forward to meeting some student editors from this century. When I was at uni, the student media types were Dave Penberthy, Annabel Crabb and Sam Maiden. See, lots of student editor types go on to be Real Journalists.