My own piece of the Internet
 
Category: <span>Philosophy</span>

Category: Philosophy

The Internet is a tenuous place: finding the dumb boy #1

If you haven’t been to my About page, then you wouldn’t know that my digital journey started with writing bad poetry on what was called a digital diary. It was great fun and due to the tenuous state of the Internet is thankfully lost to your consumption. Before that I wrote a series of poems called the Dumb Boy poems. I was 24 and trying to be an artist and they were pretty well received by the 10 people who read them. A mate of mine made a video of one of them some years later and recently put it …

Chan and Sukumaran don’t deserve to be put to death

I have 2 young children and when one does something that annoys the other, like use the indoor trapeze for too long, the aggrieved child will lash out wishing horrible things upon their sibling, sometimes they use their fists and feet trying to inflict as much pain as possible. It can get ugly. I was reminded by this pre-school logic when considering an article about the mother of a drug overdose victim who said that the condemned Bali 9 drug smugglers Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan deserved to die. Her reasoning was that her daughter died of a heroin overdose and Chan and Sukumaran …

A letter to my local Member of Parliament about Mandatory Data Retention

Here is a letter I will be sending to my local Member of Parliament, Mr Jason Wood. Dear Mr Wood, I write regarding the Mandatory Data Retention bill, Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014 and would like you to clarify your position. I have deep concerns about the proposed scheme and request that you vote against it in Parliament. My first concern is that metadata is not adequately defined in the proposed legislation. Moreover, the Attorney General and Minister for Communications have repeatedly failed to define metadata. If the most senior members of your government cannot explain …

Connecting the digital dots

Digital means many things to many people. To some digital describes the nexus between new technologies and marketing/business resulting in new ways to connect consumers and marketers. To others digital is an ethos. It describes a new way of working, conceptualising ideas, seeing the future, and testing, learning and iterating. Digital involves a different way of doing business. For Steve Sammartino there is no digital. Sammartino believes that technology is innate, that there have always been technologies which help us do things better, faster, differently. For him a digital strategy is just a strategy. People come first. Digital is just a set of …

Google, The Right to be Forgotten, and (monetised) Free Speech

There have been a lot of words written about the European Court of Justice ruling in May this year which forced Google to remove links to content when requested. Here are some I’ve written to expose how the issue is being handled in a simplistic way by most of the media. The European Courts ruled that according to personal data protections search engines (Google & Bing) are “obliged to remove from the list of results displayed following a search made on the basis of a person’s name links to web pages” if they are “inadequate, irrelevant or excessive”.

6,009 reasons why list posts are boring

List posts are everywhere. 7 ways Google+ can help me rank better or will be a critical part off social business or will triumph over twitter and Facebook. Or perhaps you may have seen the 10 best of the 10 best devices from this years CES. Again and again and again. Perhaps you missed the 9 different reasons you should be mating with a goat at the full moon to improve your Google ranking. If you didn’t let me know how it went, I am genuinely interested. List posts bore me beyond belief. They are a lazy way of getting …

What utilitarianism can teach us about product development

Building something truly useful is a fantasy for most designers, entrepreneurs, and product people. Most will build something that is a reasonable copy of something truly useful and along the way convince themselves that it is gonna be great, that the folks are gonna love it. The truth is that there are very few transformative tools with a genuine utility. Transformative products create a new space for utility by solving a problem that we didn’t know we had. Twitter, Facebook, Google,  Get Satisfaction, Amazon’s EC2, Amazon are just a few businesses that have become an integral part of our lives …