Planet Gold Coast

petaj posted a photo:

In the Citadel, Hue, Vietnam

I’m so excited!

In March last year I asked whether Brisbane, an hour and a half drive north of where I live on Australi’s east coast, was ready for a Social Media Club.  .

Entering 2009 it is clear that Brisbane was ready: Social Media Club Brisbane has an event scheduled for next week (see below). But not just Brisbane.

Gold Coast, the region where I live, and the Australian National Capital city of Canberra are not just ready but launchingt their own Social Media Clubs.

My guess is that other Australian cities, including the major conurbations of Sydney and Melbourne, will join in sooner rather than later.

Social Media Club Canberra, with the leadership of social media expert Stephen Collins (@trib on Twitter), kicks off tomorrow morning, Friday Jan 16, with a breakfast at Cafe CREAM in Bunda St, Civic, 8 am to 10 am. I noticed at least a couple of Twitter-savvy politicians have been pinged on Twitter to come. On Friday, in Canberra? Well, you never know. You can join SMC Canberra at the Facebook site. And you can RSVP (please, so Steve and the cafe have an idea) at the event site also on FB.

Social Media Club Gold Coast has a committee let by Associate Professor Michael Rees - a social media enthusiast par excellence - from Bond University and we have our inaugural event at Bond on Thursday January 29, at 6 pm. We also have a Facebook site. If you would like to join and get all the info about events, use the contact form on this site.

The inaugural event for the year for Social Media Club Brisbane is next week, on Tuesday January 20, commencing at 5.30 pm. This will be at what looks to me from the website as being rather more stylish than your average pub, the Melbourne Hotel in West End, Brisbane.  Co-hosting this event with SMC Brisbane, and generously covering venue costs and providing refreshments, is the blogger advertising network Nuffnang, established recently in Australia. Nuffnang Co-Founder, Cheo Ming Shen is flying in from Singapore that afternoon and will be at the function, explaining for 15 minutes or so how interested bloggers might be able to benefit from being part of the Nuffnang network. Should be great fun as well as informative.  RSVP (please) at the Facebook site for this event.

So much for the idea of us all lazing around on the beach in mid-summer. It’s not even Australia Day yet and it looks as if Social Media Club in Australia is Going Off!

By the way, you don’t have to be in a city to have or be part of a Social Media Club. Whether you are in Sydney or the Back of Bourke, and want to know more, please contact me via the contact page, or go to the top via the main Social Media Club site.

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These are the 5 stages of Twitter acceptance according to Rohit Bhargava:

I think I have successfully made it to stage 5, but would be interested in the opinion of my Twitter followers.

• Filtering in Oz: Australia's Foray into Internet Censorship - Brooklyn Law School, Legal Studies Paper No 125 Critique of Australian Government's plans for Internet censorship (tags: Internetcensorship Australia Conroy)

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petaj posted a photo:

I confess to having only just now really focused on the extraordinary development, in just under twelve months, of the Coaching Commons site. The Coaching Commons describes itself as “a non-partisan ‘big tent’ under which coaches can freely create the future together in a non-commercial setting on the world-wide-web”.

Writing on the site, philanthropist Ruth Ann Harnisch says the cornerstone of her philosophy of philanthropy - and by extension her aim in her amazingly generous work of supporting coaching and specifically the Coaching Commons - is “unleashing untapped capacity”.

Reading the various contributions on the site you cannot avoid seeing that there are big dreams at work here, dreams about the potential of coaching to make a substantial positive difference to our world.

It would have been very helpful to me, back when I was first encouraged by a friend to consider coaching as a profession, to have a site like this. There is plenty of information about coaching. More important, in my opinion, there is plenty of activity: people contributing, news items about coaching, an events calendar, blog posts encouraging and attracting questions and discussion.

And for those who, like me, like to know the antecedents, the history of things, there is a virtual museum of coaching and a coaching hall of fame.

I found touring the site a very informative and stimulating experience, although I could not figure out whether there was a formal online “Coaching Commons” community I could join, or whether the idea is just for the site to be a place for people to visit and hang out.

I’ve signed up for the newsletter, so I am assuming more will be revealed as time goes by.

In the meantime, for anyone involved, interested in or just curious about coaching, this is a site to visit and bookmark.

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A number of people I know such as @spidie and @SarahStewart have entered into the spirit of the Flickr365 project where you upload a photo a day for a year. This is an excellent way of recording your personal history in significant detail. @spidie even went further and found a convenient site, TwitterGram, to upload the daily photo to Flickr and to generate an alerting tweet. Even with this aid it still is a not insignificant daily chore to take the photo and upload to Flickr, even though the benefits are substantial.

In trying to think of an automated solution brought to mind a lifelogging experiment I tried a couple of years ago with a modified version of my DotWikIE single-page wiki tool, which records contents of the clipboard every 5 seconds, and subsequently with the TimeSnapper application. I also used the ControlC site to keep an online encrypted copy of my clipboard contents. Sheepishly I have to admit I ran this in the background for several months before I remembered about it. On checking the site I discovered lots of embarrassing information like credit card numbers, login names and passwords, product keys, and so on in my clipboard stream. Touch wood, their encryption must have been strong as I have yet to knowingly suffer any consequences, and have deleted all entries on their site and disabled the ControlC capture service.

I decided to have another look at TimeSnapper and discovered in the intervening 2 years their product has progressed significantly. It even was able to update the screen snapshots from 2007 into their new format. They have optimised the screen capture rate and lowered the storage requirements. I decided to look at my computing activities on 1 February 2007 in their viewer and generated a quick screencast (somewhat blurry to protect exact details):

This movie showed a varied workload across 3 or 4 main time segments shown across the top of the screen, in fact the TimeSnapper stats show I used my computer for only 4.75 hours in total. However the activities include:

• check of weather radar and download of podcasts (prior to cycle ride)
• reading emails
• checking Bookcrossing.com activity
• creating and populating a SharePoint site before coffee
• a little blog reading
• a long spell of curriculum/course outline generation in Word
• creating and installing a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine
• check the notes online and then act as co-MC for a student awards evening
• start Visual Studio install then watch (a lot of) TV
• check movie times, play music, read email and more blogs

In other words, my day in screen dumps, all generated automatically, and recalled easily after 2 years.

So I am running TimeSnapper again rather than joining in with Flickr365.

I’ve been a fan of Alltop - “We’ve got all the top stories covered all the time” - from early on and I admit that having this site listed on the social media page there has helped. Alltop describes itself as an “online magazine rack” of popular topics. It’s an amazing resource for finding blogs from a great range of topics.

I had an example just today of how helpful Alltop can be in that regard.

I was responding to a friend who is thinking of setting up a travel blog. I wanted to send her some examples of quality travel blogs and - this is not an area of specialization for me - the only one I could think of, off the top of my head, was Sheila Scarborough’s excellent Family Travel Logue.

Then the penny dropped. Alltop, of course! Assuming they had a travel section, which I quickly discovered that indeed they did. I counted 56 sites listed on the Alltop travel page. Authors included kitchen expose guy Anthony Bourdain who writes about travel and food, Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler, the FareCompare guy Rick Seaney, the dynamic Travelling Mamas and the inimitable Sheila Scarborough as previously mentioned.

Back in November last year there were, according to Alltop co-founder Guy Kawasaki, some 350 topics on the site overall. There are no doubt plenty more now. And there is an email update system so that fans like me or the just plain interested can receive direct notification of new topics when they are launched.

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I thought I would have a crack at Project 365. You basically take a picture every day for a year - I know a few people doing it - so thought it would be fun joining in. Today was a Refactor lab day - so my picture for the day is fairly boring... my laptop keyboard which has been getting a pounding lately and is starting to look pretty grubby.

Anyway - I'm not going to post every day's photo to the blog - I'll just put them in a flckr set and comment on them there. I need a very very simple way of doing it to make sure I do it every day and I procrastinate too much on the blog. If you click on the image above it takes you to the set.

Aaron Spence from Panedia also took a rather nice picture of my Kahdo as he came over to drop some stuff off:

http://photos.panedia.com/p1013038409/h3a82fafc#h3a82fafc

I enter just a short note that 20 years today I started work at Bond Uni. It is customary to expand on the occasion but I am not in a reflective frame of mind in this post-festive time. For the moment I simply recall the initial euphoria and community spirit when money was no object, the dark days of Bond in receivership, near-fail and the threat of moving to Robina Town Centre, the impecunious years of long hours with no reward before Bond became truly independent, and then the current expansionary period. The years have gone quickly but I am left feeling ambivalent about whether for me these years might have been better spent on other endeavours. Certainly the Gold Coast itself has been a great place to live although the population explosion is starting to take its toll on our infrastructure.

It's 2009 already! My how the time flies. I started blogging in February 08 and after a few months of experimenting, changed things round in July 08 and settled on a new approach. My goals from then until the end of 2008 were:

• Establish and maintain a clear focus and purpose
• Build a loyal base of subscribers
• Raise my profile and reputation

How'd I do?

Although both the topics and tone on my blog vary wildly, there are some common threads that tie everything together. I've discovered I have four styles of writing - playful, objective, personal and soapbox.

I write playfully when I want to say 'gee, the world is a huge mixed-up place and isn't it fun to be here'. I write objectively when I tackle a serious issue and try to help people understand it from all sides. I write personally when I'm going through a new experience myself and want to share it as I go. I get on my soapbox when I'm feeling idealistic about something I think is important.

The underlying theme of my blog is a sense of learning and discovery about life. I love to learn new things and new ways of thinking about old things. I love to share what I know and what I've discovered, and give people opportunities to think in new ways about what they know.

So far, everything has been mixed in and thrown together. The clear focus and purpose isn't something I planned, it's something that has emerged. I started out writing the blog just for myself, as a way to get things off my chest, but since then I've discovered there is actually an audience who's interested in what I have to say about things.

The next step is to restructure the blog to better communicate what it's about and make it easier for people to find what they want. Expect some changes to the layout in the coming weeks and months.

By subscribers, I meant regular readers, rather than feed subscribers in the technical sense. Looking at the numbers, I'm calling this one a success: (click on an image to enlarge)

Look at the graph of visits for the year - it's been on an upward trajectory since July when I made the changes and set these goals. The split between new visitors and returning visitors is about 50/50, which suggests a fair amount of the traffic growth is being converted into regular visitors.

What's especially interesting to me is who these people are. I am an Apple user, but this is not an Apple-themed blog. In fact, I hardly ever mention Apple. But while Apple users make up less than 10% of traffic on the internet overall, on my site they make up over 40% of visitors. More interesting still, Safari is the most popular browser for people visiting my site, and these people spend longer browsing my site than anyone else!

What does it mean? The simplest conclusion to draw is that people who are interested in the things I write about are most likely to be Apple users. This is something for me to bear in mind in future.

Looking at this now, it seems like a silly goal. Raise profile and reputation with who? Just in general, would've been my reply. Sounds like attention-seeking to me. I guess that's exactly what it was. I think we can probably translate this goal as 'is anyone out there really interested in what I have to say? Really? REALLY?!' The answer, apparently, is yes.

By far the most popular post on my blog for 2008 was How to Defeat Internet Censorship, which I'm surprised to note was written only around six weeks ago. This was one of my soapbox posts, and not really what I would consider an example of my best work. But it got me noticed.

Since then I've written a follow-up piece on the internet censorship issue as well as two articles for other publications. All of these follow-ups have been better written (I believe), two of them in the objective style and one playful. This has driven more people back to my original post and had something of a circular effect.

What this means is that in six weeks I've become someone who's name is, if not talked about, then at least recognised, in certain circles - specifically, professional geeks with an interest or involvement in politics. Since I've been wanting more contact with politically-minded geeks for some time, this is a good outcome.

Every time I write something on the topic of internet censorship, my traffic surges, I get a burst of new followers on Twitter and a flurry of comments and emails. Nevertheless, I've resisted the urge to exploit that. It's far too easy to get swept away in a tide of popularity and find yourself somewhere you don't necessarily want to be.

I've become more thoughtful about with whom I want to raise my profile and reputation. To be honest I'm not sure. I would like to become known for my writing, but I don't have a specific audience or a specific field in mind just yet. I consider my blog as an experiment and a way to practice while I find better answers to these questions.

Well, the first six months anyway. Setting goals for the entire year seems a bit too far, so I'll go for the six months until the end of June and then see where I'm at. They're really more 'areas of focus' rather than goals in the true sense anyway.

Here's my three areas of focus from now until the end of June 2009:

• Improve my writing technique and skill
• Find opportunities to write for other publications
• Finish my book and get it published

I'll also be continuing my blogging experiment of course, but my focus is now on making better material rather than building a bigger blog.

Stay tuned - I'll be posting more updates as I go.

My friend and colleague Lonnie B. Hodge, who is based in Guangzhou, China, doesn’t just “think outside the square” - he left the square thinkers behind long ago. And he is always coming up with bright ideas and often I find in the morning that he has implemented them overnight. I try to keep up, but I don’t think he sleeps.

Lonnie’s latest idea - or rather, the latest one I know of - is the Social Media Consultants site.

This has been launched to provide a space for social media consultants and PR 2.0 specialists to be more easily found by potential clients and business collaborators, with specific attention to being findable by geographic location and specialization. We also see it as a virtual coffee shop for discussion - via blog posts and comments right now - of matters of common interest.

We’ve started out with a WordPress site, because that was relatively easy to get up and running without a whole lot of configuring and with minimum palaver.

We’ve issued general invitations via Twitter and plan to get the word out as widely as we can. We’re encouraging those responding positively to post about who they are and what they do and to use social media tools, including audio and video, in the process, and to list and link to their Twitter, LinkedIn and other links.

Basic requirements to be able to participate are as simple as we could make them:

1. You should have an active blog that you update regularly (we too are guilty of not nearly enough updates, but we’d like you to have a presence on the net)
2. You must have worked in or been active in Social Media or PR 2.0 for at least a year.

Have we worked out all the rules of engagement, moderation, etc? Absolutely not. We are truly making it up as we go along and we know that will bother some and please others.

One thing we do know is that we want it to be truly international. Which means that, among other things, language is going to become an issue at some point.

Along with all the other issues. In the meantime, we are having fun.

And there is no fee - and never will be - for consultants and specialists to list themselves on the site.

If you want to be part of that and meet those couple of criteria above, please contact me via the Contact page here or tweet me on Twitter - @deswalsh - or Lonnie @lonniehodge.

And note that if you are a startup or the provider of an established social media platform you are welcome also to contact us about listing some informative information (as distinct from a pitch).

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Working on a content repository for a client at the moment - have been evaluating JackRabbit and Alfresco as a backend repository for an existing site. Anyway - I was already familiar with Alfresco, but spent a bit of time with JackRabbit today to give a comparison. It's a nice simple implementation of the JCR (JSR-170), but suffers a little from lack of doco when it comes to using it in something other than it's standard configuration.

I needed to test it with Mysql on Tomcat 6 - didn't really have any doco on this - so I added a new page to the wiki. Hopefully this is of use to someone:

http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/JackRabbitOnTomcat6

If you are not into Java and are looking for a way to access JackRabbit, there is WebDAV and also Apache Sling - which provides a RESTful api to JackRabbit. It's in the incubator still - but looks quite nice and has some potential.

Two or three weeks ago I upgraded to Picasa 3 and am pleased with its improved, cleaner user interface. For the last couple of years I have used Picasa web albums to publish my photos for public viewing. It was only today while I was adding a web album for our 41st wedding anniversary  that I noticed the new movie making feature for the first time. Even though I had only a few photos I gave it a whirl and am impressed by the simplicity and ease with which a YouTube HD movie can be created and uploaded. Herewith the result:

With friends and colleagues becoming enamoured with Animoto recently it is interesting to compare the two services. I generated a meetup with some friends a week ago on Animoto. Uploading the slides to the Animoto site is more painful, although adding music from the built-in collection is easier. There is little to choose between them. Animoto certainly wins though with its creative animations of the slides:

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, the 2006 movie focusing on NASCAR racing in the United States, has a brilliant send up of popular spirituality in the Powerade sponsored “Grace” scene. Ricky Bobby and Carley, their two sons Walker and Texas Ranger, best friend Cal and Carley’s father Chip, exchange their preferences for the Jesus version of the day.

Replace the NASCAR trappings with the culture of any church with an eye for success, and you’ve got a cutting analysis of the egotistic prayers we can too easily find ourselves praying.

Click on the image below to play the video in YouTube (HD)

Thanks to Hamo at Backyard Missionary

In common I suspect with many iPhone owners I am continually surprised by the ingenious apps, many free, that appear in increasing numbers. Yesterday I downloaded the MotionX-GPS Lite app and gave it a whirl during our walk at Burleigh. At the start of the walk I just pressed Start and carried the iPhone in my usual bum bag. With the hot day and a somewhat later than usual start time we kept under the occasional shade of the Norfolk pines – the tide was high so no beach to walk on this time. On the way I used the same app to geotag a photo or two. It seemed to work flawlessly and at the end of the walk, with a short rest on Nobbys lookout, it produced the following:

I simply chose one of the geotagged photos to represent the track and changed its name. With a click of the Email button a couple of track files and the photo were sent to my chosen email address. The message contains a temporary link to show the track on Google Maps which expires on 5 Jan 2009 (ie 7 days).

From the Google Maps page the user is offered a link to Google Earth if it is installed. I became fully enamoured with Google Earth during the 2008 Sydney-Hobart yacht race. This year for the first time a link to a Google Earth .kml file was provided which updated every 10 minutes. [However I suspect this was hacked at one stage to make it appear the incorrect yacht was leading the race – see tweet – it was too good to be true.]

I uploaded the .kmz file provided by MotionX-GPS to my SkyDrive public area here. This will trigger Google Earth to zoom to the track of the walk. Clicking on the Play Tour button shows a pleasant flyover effect along the track. I made a somewhat blurry YouTube video using Camtasia 6 to show the effect:

I think this is a pretty impressive outcome from a free iPhone app.

You can tell a lot about someone from the books they read. Looking back over the books I've read in 2008 I'm surprised at the trajectory that emerges and how accurately it maps my focus and state of mind throughout the year. I'm also surprised by how much I have read - 13 books in total. And here was I thinking I hadn't done much reading this year.

Here they are, in order of when I read them - click on the cover pictures to find the books on Amazon.

The Appeal John Grisham

A return to the classic legal thriller for John Grisham, where he seems much more at home. I read this while in San Francisco.

Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror Richard A. Clarke

A fascinating inside account of US national security over the last 30 years, leading up to and including the Iraq war, from the first of the Bush Administration whistleblowers.

Ronan the Barbarian James Bibby

A fun, fictional fantasy tale with plenty of bad puns. It was good, but I couldn't escape the feeling that Bibby is living in the shadow of Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams and others.

The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family Dan Savage

I've been reading Dan's sex advice column - Savage Love - for years now. This is his book about gay marriage. It's entertaining, insightful and, surprisingly, far more compromising than his column.

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture John Battelle

An engaging look at the history and development of search technology, with particular focus on Google. Battelle is a master of this subject and makes a good case for why search is pivotal to the future of technology.

Animal Farm George Orwell

Heard lots about it, never read it until now. I had no idea it was so short - finished it in an afternoon! It has definite themes in common with Nineteen Eighty-Four, most notably how people's minds are exploited and manipulated by a controlling class.

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income Darren Rowse & Chris Garrett

Can't say I thought much of this. It was short, written in big type and was like reading a bunch of blog posts rather than a book. The different writing styles of the two authors were jarring and disjointed and they spent a lot of time repeating themselves. The information provided was good, but for the most part fairly obvious and lacking in depth.

Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide Charles Wyke-Smith

I'm a professional geek, but not a professional web designer or developer. I searched long and hard for a good introduction to CSS with the right mix of theory and practice. After reading this book I have a much greater understanding. Highly recommended.

The Economic Naturalist: Why Economics Explains Almost Everything Robert H. Frank

In an attempt to make economics more interesting, university lecturer Robert Frank likes to get his students to think of real-life questions such as 'why do the keypad buttons of drive-up cash machines have Braille dots?' and then use economic theory to find answers. It's a fun, practical approach, and it works. I learnt more about economics by reading this book than all the textbooks I've read combined.

Predictably Irrational: The hidden forces that shape our decisions Dan Ariely

One of the big flaws in economic theory is that it assumes people behave rationally when they make choices. They don't. Dan Ariely, a leading researcher in the relatively new field of behavioural economics, conducts a series of real-life experiments to try to discover if there are patterns that can predict people's irrational behaviour. This book is the result of those experiments, and it's amazing.

The God Delusion Richard Dawkins

Dawkins is what many people regard as a fundamentalist athiest. In his uncompromising book, he tackles the tenets of religion using science and logic, and makes the case that religion is not only nonsense but also a deeply harmful influence on society. It's entertaining and well-written, but I'm ambivalent about some of his conclusions. I'm a contented athiest, but Dawkins' militant attitude towards religions seems a step too far to me, even if his reasoning is perfectly valid.

Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth Steve Pavlina

I'm a long-time reader of Steve's website, which has hundreds of great articles on many different aspects of personal growth and development. Steve is an ex-programmer, so his approach is very structured and practical - either it works or it doesn't. So much self-development stuff is inconsistent waffle, but Steve digs deep to find consistent principles that underpin all personal growth and then applies them to different aspects of life. Challenging, uncompromising and brilliant.

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom Jonathan Haidt

Haidt is a social psychologist who researches morality for a living. After watching his captivating TED Talk on the difference in morals between liberals and conservatives, I was inspired to order his book, which explores the concept of happiness as a social science. In each chapter, Haidt tackles a different aspect of human emotion and experience and looks at how it has been treated by scientists, philosophers and religions throughout the ages. He then blends his own research and offers his opinion of where truth might lie. Some of his conclusions challenge society's traditional views on such matters, and I can't help but feels he's onto something. A great read.

We used an alternative rendering of Once in Royal David’s City this morning, one of my favourites from the Iona Community. The new version, written by John Bell and Graham Maule in 1987, deconstruct the sentimentalism and triumphalism embedded in the original nineteenth century lyrics by Mrs. Cecil Frances Alexander. The original was published in Cecil’s 1948 book, Hymns for Little Children.

Once in royal Davids city,
Stood a lowly cattle shed,
Where a mother laid her Baby,
In a manger for His bed:
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ, her little Child.

Once in Judah’s least known city
Stood a boarding house with back-door shed,
Where an almost single-parent mother
Tried to find her new born son a bed.
Mary’s mum and dad went wild
When they heard their daughter had a child.

Words © 1987, 1997 WGRG, Iona Community, Glasgow G2 3DH, Scotland.

As can be expected, some of the congregation were delighted with the fresh and realistic approach to the Christmas story, while others were offended at the departure from reverence and poetry they’d learned to associate with Sunday morning worship. I would not suggest using this approach with all our Christmas carols. But it does open our eyes to the nineteenth century perceptions that filter through into our 21st century expressions.

The song, by the way, is available in Heaven Shall Not Wait, a book, CD from Iona Community.

"I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself."
- Oscar Wilde

New Years Resolutions are coming up...

I’ve just finished the latest Terry Pratchett novel, Nation, continuing the well established Christmas tradition in the Macleod household. This is the first novel in some years to be set outside the Discworld setting.

The setting is the Great Pelagic Ocean, an alternative universe version of the Pacific Ocean in the 19th century. Ermintrude, a well heeled thirteen year old girl discovers she is the sole survivor of a ship wreck on a remote island, joined by Mau, a young man who is the only one from his village to live after the giant wave. Together they must come to terms with questions of philosophy, religion, ancestral voices, life and death. They’re joined by a rag tag collection of refugees from both the tsunami and murderous pirates and cannibals.

Nation is not the usual satirical romp we expect from Pratchett. Instead we’re presented with a coming-of-age novel presented with sensitivity and insight. The plot is filled with Pratchett’s fascination with astronomy, critique of imperialism, and clever irony.

Terry Pratchett gives us an introduction to what was going on his mind as he wrote Nation. Click on the image below to play the video in YouTube (HD)