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

Category: Uncategorized

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 …

Tell the truth or show empathy

Telling the truth is powerful. It’s also one of the hardest things to do if you’re an empathetic person. Most of us who are capable of empathy and not psychopaths don’t like making people feel bad, sad, or angry. But it isn’t always possible to make people feel good. Sometimes as part of my job I need to make someone feel bad about their strategy, their product, their approach, their ideas, their website. The way I approach this is to stand in the space of truth. Being committed to telling the truth means you’re not settling for an emotional debate between right …

Why we still need a minimum wage

My first job was as a dish-pig in the long since closed Yarra’s Restaurant in South Yarra. I got $10 cash per hour and a knock-off drink. The hours were long, the work dirty, and the chefs were either belligerent or incompetent. Sometimes both. I rolled up hungover one morning and was told, “don’t bother”. While it was a relief, the consequences weren’t great, with rent and bills due.

The myth of being indispensable

When you first get a job, you turn up early, take instructions, work diligently, keep your head down and try and do your job as best you can. If you do a good job, one day you might make team leader, become a manager, and help other young people develop up through the system. The story is the same whether you work in a factory, an office, a parliament, a kinder, or at home answering service requests for an international software business. Work hard, develop skills, be awesome, save money, raise kids, buy a house, retire to praise, go on a cruise, …

Does the .melbourne domain name have a future?

Melbourne has always been both the hippest and most normcore Australian city. Obsessed with cafes, coffee, fashion, sport, the right schools, and real estate Melbourne is either incredibly hip or dull and boring depending on which end of the Hume Hwy you live. What Melbourne does have, is a vanity domain space – the new .melbourne domain name. I recently spotted a puff piece in B&T cheerily titled “5 Marketing Benefits Of .melbourne And .sydney Domain Names”. As a former employee of a domain registrar who was deeply involved in the release of a lot of new domain names like .kiwi, .club, the awesome .tattoo, and many others, I …

What would Seth do?

Seth Godin is an Internet legend, the master of short, focussed and very entertaining paragraphs, an author of an incredible 17 books, and a revolutionary into the transformative force of technology. It’s probably not fashionable anymore, but Seth is an inspiration. A free thinker, a visionary, an amazing communicator. Seth is the man unafraid of bright coloured glasses whereas I am petrified. Seth is a man who can write huge lists to inspire, provoke, and get you to act. He is a reminder that you can smash down the mighty walls with creativity, words, and a little lot of pizazz. If …

What wearables need is a unifying purpose

The hype about wearables is pretty relentless. At the latest CES, smart watches (I know wearable watches, what will they think of next) were everywhere with CNET calling it a “swarm of smartwatches”. I’ve been lukewarm on smartwatches and wearables because nothing I’ve seen justifies the buzz. There hasn’t been an iPhone/Tesla/iPad moment when I’ve thought, Wow, I need that. The reason is that the manufacturers don’t seem to be clear about the problem they are solving. Wearables and smartwatches need a purpose. Sure there are fitness and health apps, the Samsung Gear smartwatch that could be a genuine phone replacement, but, well there …