I’m thinking a lot these days about what I can do to give back something to my local community. My discussions with folks like Father Bob, Mike Seyfang and Mark Keogh have helped inspire my thinking. On today’s show, I share my thoughts on the subject and tell you a little about what I’m going to be contributing over the next year.
Today’s rant.
You know I just realised that this is only G’Day World #10. Ten!! Ten stinkin’ shows?? In a year?? Ten shows that didn’t involve interviews. Man… that’s just slack.
Today I’m talking about:
Doc Searls’ article “Saving The Net”.
Chris Anderson’s comments on the continuing decline in traditional media.
James Bamford’s article “The Man Who Sold The War”
The BBC’s report that the US army used “white phosphorus” as a weapon in Iraq.
About a year ago, there were already a couple of thousand podcasts out there. Some were quite good. A lot were about fart jokes or people talking about how cool they were. Hey! Nothing much has changed! G’DAY WORLD started off as two Aussie guys having a yarn. Then we stumbled onto the idea that we could actually interview people over Skype. It was a revolutionary concept in podcasting at the time.
I’m running another survey – this one is for you to tell us what your favourite episodes of the show have been in the last year. Pick one or pick ’em all. Up to you. But the winners will get integrated (somehow) into our birthday show.
Some very nice people (and I know my mother was one of them… thanks Mum) have nominated TPN for the “Best New Site” category in the NetGuide Web Awards. Have you voted yet?
The only problem is… the folks at NetGuide have our URL listed as “www.podcastnetwork.com”… no “THE”… and the other URL doesn’t have a site… so I’m hoping the nice people at NetGuide will fix it for us.
“HYPERLINKS SUBVERT HIERARCHIES”
My guest today was the guy who popularised that statement, although he doesn’t take credit for coming up with it.
For my 60th G’DAY WORLD interview, I had the great pleasure this morning of chatting with David Weinberger! I was also fortunate enough to attend his presentation at BlogOn2005 last month and it was fantastic. He’s a smart, articulate, funny, self-deprecating guy, who also happens to be a “Fellow” at Harvard (I asked him to explain what the hell that actually means… apparently it doesn’t pull the chicks) and, of course, one of the co-authors of the bible, The Cluetrain Manifesto.
For those of you who STILL haven’t heard of Cluetrain, here’s a quick description from Wikipedia:
The Cluetrain Manifesto is a set of 95 theses organised and put forward as a manifesto, or call to action, for all businesses operating within what is suggested to be a newly connected marketplace. The ideas put forward within the manifesto aim to examine the impact of the Internet on both markets (consumers) and organisations. In addition, as both consumers and organisations are able to utilise the Internet and Intranets to establish a previously unavailable level of communication both within and between these two groups, the manifesto suggests that the changes that will be required from organisations as they respond to the new marketplace environment.
Long time G’DAY WORLD listeners might recall that we had Doc Searls, another of the Cluetrain authors, on the show waaaaay back in January 2005, before most of you even knew what a podcast was I bet! If you haven’t listened to that interview, you should! It makes a nice companion piece to this one. David even felt required to mention Doc’s name every 20 minutes. 🙂
Some of the things we talked about:
> The Long Tail meme
> Clay Shirky
> Doc Searls
> Christopher Locke
> JD Lasica’s book “Darknet”
> John Battelle’s book “The Search”
> Information Replaces Relationships
> Sony’s DRM problems
> Thomas Vanderwal and the concept of “folksonomy”
Finally – make sure you check out David’s last book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and keep an eye out for his next one coming out in 2007, Everything Is Miscellaneous, by subscribing to JOHO THE BLOG.