Trevor Cook

Must read articles - 11 June 2009

When it comes to hard ideas and serious thinking, the book is still king - the Internet does not provide the same intellectual structure and scope as a book when it comes to big ideas, this also reminds us that the big ideas benefit from collaboration and criticism (but not I suspect crowd sourcing), but it still comes down to one, or a few, people doing the hard work that goes into writing, and ditto the author suggests for reading. Consuming more media, and ever-more accessible material won't cut it. Scholarly books provide the hard reading we need and which can't be got from the media and blogs etc. 

How a trillion dollar deficit was created (or the GFC is only responsible for a little bit of it) - Bush was a hopeless president by many measures not the least of which is budgetary and economic. This NYT article demonstrates that the real problem was Bush and not the GFC. We are lucky in Australia that we started with a strong fiscal position before the GFC, but that's no excuse for us to plunge into excessive debt now. 

The paradox of subsidised public transport - British Rail is becoming more popular, in the sense that passenger journey are increasing. Good news. Yes except if you're managing a depleted treasury. Every extra passenger journey means another slug to the public purse, at a time when the British budget is heading towards insolvency territory. I suspect Sydney's public transport problems owe a lot to successive NSW governments actively encouraging private over public transport in order to avoid this problem. Short-term thinking - yes, very - and now we have a long-term problem.

Skidelsky on the battle between economic theories and theorists. The GFC has renewed old battles.

Must read articles - 10 June 2009

John Lanchester, It's finished - an informative, insightful and, at times, savagely funny look at British banking.

Andrew O'Hagan, A car of one's own - a nice look at what cars mean to us and the future of a deeply troubled industry.

Roger Scruton, A farewell to judgement - At one level a look at what's wrong with universities (lots), at another a deeply conservative disparaging of the modern world (damn those feminists!), but he does have a good point for all that.

Mark Colvin, Remembrance of things past: history without an airbrush - A look at the ongoing struggle to face the past with unflinching honesty.

"Most blogs have an audience of one"

Slashdot Technology Story | Most Blogs Now Abandoned.

The Narrative Fallacy writes "Douglas Quenqua reports in the NY Times that according to a 2008 survey only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days meaning that "95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled." Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it's probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views. "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one." Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. "I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month," says Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta who had no trouble attracting an audience to his site, Things My Dog Ate, leading to some small advertising deals. "I think I made about $20 from readers clicking on the ads.""

Why is the 'community' so unhappy?

From Laurel Papworth: "The only thing I want to note is that bloggers have the same challenge that newspapers have today: we have a vocal audience. A very grumpy, sneery, pedantic, audience that love to find fault with our blog posts, create World War Three over a misspelling, and basically flame our poor shaking typing fingers. Ow! Burnies! Publish and be damned? Blog and be damned/cussed thrice over! 

The online community is our editor. And the community has greater knowledge collaboratively than any newspaper or blogger. And the community is speaking back. We HAVE to be accurate, or else have our inaccuracies shared with the world in a public display of humiliation. The World Is Our Editor….

… just a shame the world turned into a grumpy, chain smoking ol geezer behind a desk, that loves to highlight your many imperfections as a writer to the whole sniggering office/world. Like some irate deskbound patriarch popping antacids."

Does the online 'community' (I use the quote marks because it would have to be more supportive to be a real community): 

• represent the population generally today i.e. we're all stressed out hyper-competitive freaks
• become stressed because there is something deeply weird about being online for hours each day
• simply attract stressed, grumpy people - normal people can't be bothered. 

NYT and social media

Paul Smalera - Living Through 1500 - Q&A with Times’ Social Media Editor: All about the conversation - True/Slant.

Combined with the Times’ dozens of other official and unofficial feeds, the Times is approaching two million social media followers, daily. 

That's an amazing statistic.

Do something or go home

Seth's Blog: "Why am I here?". Seth Godin has some good advice about the propensity we all have to confuse attendance with participation. Many people sit through meetings and conferences without thinking about what they are getting out of it, much less putting into it. Seth doesn't say it, but the real problem is that too few people take responsibility for making the meeting, seminar or conference a success. Agreeing to be there brings with it a commitment to make the thing work. That means doing some preparatory work (reading and thinking) and it means taking a risk and putting your ideas and viewpoints out there. The sad thing is that it takes very little effort to make these things work. If everyone turns up with a good idea to contribute and also adds to the ideas of others, then pretty soon you've got a powerful and productive event on your hands. It takes so little, but it happens so rarely.

New world of fame and mass bullying

Susan Boyle is the victim of a new, toxic kind of fame | India Knight - Times Online .

Let’s be honest: the deification and then vilification of Boyle were both carried out by the public - a public increasingly keen on mass bullying. The internet has changed everything and that includes the nature of fame. Unfortunately, those who wish to be famous haven’t quite picked up on this: they still believe that only a couple of mean gossip columnists and intrusive photographers can harm or upset them: tomorrow’s chip wrappers. Actually, no: not any more. Even our nastiest tabloids’ most vitriolic bile is a caress compared with the stuff that exists online. As for chip wrappers: on the internet, the insults, the abuse, the obscenities are there, a mouse-click away, for eternity.

Horrible, what does it say about us and our society that we can be so careless and callous?

True/Slant - another online journalism project

FT.com / Companies / Media - Website aims for new model of online journalism.

Mr Dvorkin left AOL, a division of Time Warner, in April 2008 to create a new model of web journalism that would allow professional journalists and experts to easily post articles, pictures, video and “curate” their community of readers. Contributors can highlight particularly relevant comments that will appear more prominently on their pages, with some comments sharing top billing on the homepage. Forbes and Fuse Capital, formerly Velocity Interactive Group, a venture capital fund led by Ross Levinsohn, a former News Corp executive, and Jonathan Miller, a former chief executive of AOL, backed the project with $3m in funding. “What we’re trying to do is combine traditional standards and values and standards of traditional media with dynamics of the web,” Mr Dvorkin said. “We’re creating the newsroom of the future...We give them a playbook.” Few of the 100 contributors, called “entrepreneurial journalists,” comprised of former employees of the BBC, CNN, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, Rolling Stone magazine and Newsweek, would consider it a day-job. True/Slant is positioned as one facet of their career in modern journalism. They are either paid a stipend for their contributions, share in a cut of advertising revenue or receive equity in the company.

They do seem to be proliferating!

Ruben Guthrie

Belvoir St Theatre: What's on Downstairs - B Sharp: Ruben Guthrie.

Ruben Guthrie is on fire. At only 29, he is Creative Director of a cutting edge advertising agency, lives with his Czech supermodel fiancé and drinks like he invented it. Ruben seems invincible, until one fated evening when he drinks so much vodka he thinks he can fly. Before Ruben knows it his fiancé has left him, his Mum is escorting him to AA meetings and his bottomless schooner of confidence has all but drained away. For the first time in his life… Ruben Guthrie is alone.

I thoroughly enjoyed this play. Perhaps the writing doesn't reach any great heights of perception or insight but it is very satisfying with some great lines and moments. It is unsparing in its treatment of the effects of substance abuse and interestingly on the way people construct versions of other people that they love and cling on to those constructions even when that damages the person they love, There is some great acting in this production too. And it spears the empty creative heart of advertising.

Social Justice and the Web

The Great Seduction.

The old digital divide is now a chasm. The 25% of people in the UK who have no access to the Internet are, indeed, profoundly unequal with the rest of us – the 75% who have the good fortune or wisdom to know our way around the Internet. As Web 2.0 morphs into the raging real-time stream of services like Twitter, those poor souls who don’t even know how to send emails are, like their mid 19th century handworker ancestors, doomed to analogue oblivion. Luddism is for losers. Aside from the super rich who can afford their own Internet butlers, technological ignorance is the symbol of failure, the red cross of shame, in our Darwinian digital “democracy”. But what should be done? The unfortunate truth is that innovation isn’t fair. Nor is the Internet, especially today’s real-time web. Rather than creating more equality, it has actually generated massive accumulations of power amongst a tiny new elite of attention-economy aristocrats like Silicon Valley new media baron Tim O’Reilly who has more than 500,000 loyal Twitter followers. For all the promises of democratization, real-time landed gentry like O’Reilly and increasingly monopolistic technology companies like Google and Amazon might actually be reinventing the radically unequal hierarchies of mid 19th century capitalism in the new digital age.

This is an important issue, we tend not to think that the digital age might actually solidify and entrench social inequalities. But there's no point being anti-technology, the challenge is to find ways to overcome the problem. I'm not sure how that might happen, but I suspect it's an issue we'll hear a lot more about it in the years ahead.

Books shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1969-2008

Reading matters: Books shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1969-2008. An interesting, if huge, list.

The purpose of Art

Art is an attempt to create a world in which we can live: if not for long or forever, still a world of the imagination over which we can reign, and by reign I mean to reflect purely on our situation through this created world of ours, this Medusa’s mirror, allowing us to see and to celebrate even the totally intolerable.

                                                                                           John McGahern

Nature versus nurture the debate rages on

It is something every parent gets obssessed about, this article deals with the thesis that parents, or rather parenting, has very little impact on child behaviour outside the home. I think parental influence is exaggerated, but it is difficult to believe that there is no impact.

Literary tourism

Interesting article in the Higher Education Chronicle - I'm a bit addicted to it myself, that and Art Galleries.

Corporate Engagement finds a new home at Crikey Blogs

I am pleased to announce that Corporate Engagement has been moved, in it's entirety, to the recently created Crikey Blogs platform. We're still waiting for a bright, shiny new banner but I've been familiarising myself with Wordpress and posting to the new site in recent days, so if you wondered why my posting frequency had dropped off, that's why.

Corporate Engagement has been going since February 2004 (itself replacing an original blog I started with in November 2003 on the Blogger platform).

Moving to Crikey is the next step in my blogging adventure and an exciting step it is too.

Crikey is the first media site in Australia to fully embrace bloggers as bloggers rather than as journalists doing a bit of blogging on the side or outsiders being brought into provide some additional content.

The Crikey blogs are real blogs managed as blogs by real bloggers. That's BIG I think. I hope other media sites, particularly the ABC and SBS, might eventually do the same. (update: I should also mention that Wotnews, formerly Plugger, is also very blogger friendly too).

Aggregating blogs in this way and promoting them off a media site (although not an MSM platform) will give us bloggers access to much larger audiences and it will introduce many new readers to the potential of blogging.

So here goes, I hope you will drop by to the new home of Corporate Engagement and give me your feedback.

And if you have any suggestions for posts, please drop me an email ...

Update: More discussion on Crikey Blogs: Public Opinion and John Quiggin