by cameron | Nov 25, 2008 | Brisbane, Podcast
Have you donated yet to the TPN Pledge Drive? Help support independent media!
Today’s interview features Wayne Denning, Managing Director of Brisbane-based media company, Carbon Media.
I caught up with Wayne to chat about the issues currently surrounding Aboriginal people in Australia and what I feel is a particularly insidious form of racism on the part of most white Australians. As a former manager at ATSIC and now the owner of a media company that produces a lot of indigenous programming, Wayne has insights into the reality of the current situation and he shared some of those with me over coffee at a local cafe near QUT.
by cameron | Nov 12, 2008 | Australian politics, censorship, Podcast
Have you donated yet to the TPN Pledge Drive? Help support independent media!
My guest today on G’Day World is once again Australian journalist and author Antony Loewenstein. Antony was on a couple of months ago to discuss his excellent book “The Blogging Revolution” and today he has come back on to discuss Kevin Rudd’s desire to censor the internet and we discuss a range of things we can all do to try and stop it from happening.
Links to further reading:
Antony’s blogs:
Other articles:
by cameron | Nov 11, 2008 | Podcast
Dear TPN listeners, viewers and friends,
You know that we spend a LOT of time producing our shows for you.
And as we aren’t making money out of advertising, we’d like to ask for your support to help us keep TPN running. We have real costs in IT support, hardware, bandwidth, etc., as well as our time and effort. For the last four years, we’ve covered these costs ourselves. Outside a small amount of advertising that we have run, the majority of TPN’s costs have been covered by myself and the TPN hosts have donated their time.
Now, we know that paying for online content is probably new to some of you. You are used to getting it for free.
However, we do ask you to think about the idea of the people funding their own media. We all know that if corporate advertising is the main source of funding for the media, it influences the kinds of media that is produced and the messages they carry. We don’t want that kind of media to be the only kind out there. We want an independent media, run by the people and for the people.
If you want to support our efforts to bring you intelligent and entertaining content, please consider one of our donation plans listed here at the TPN Pledge Drive page.
Your support is appreciated!
cheers,
Cameron
by cameron | Oct 29, 2008 | activism, Atheism, US politics
Today is my 2nd last day in Seattle. I’ve had an awesome time. I’ll have to tell you about it sometime. There’s a few podcasts I’ve shot while I’m here that I’ll get out asap. In the meantime, I wanted to share with you a couple of thoughts about fund raising.
Obviously the USA is crazy about their Presidential elections at the moment and most, if not all, of the people I’ve met in Seattle are rooting for Obama. When I ask them who is funding Obama they tell me the same thing – he’s raised his money over the Internet from ordinary Americans!! It’s amazing!! The triumph of the little people over the politics!!
When I ask them how they know this to be true, they give me a strange look at tell me OBAMA SAYS IT’S TRUE! Oh well, of course.
My next question is usually “so how much did you give him?” and they usually answer “ummm nothing”. So who are these people who are funding Obama?
According to Kenneth Timmerman, who writes for the ultra-right-wing site Newsmax, Obama doesn’t need to disclose the names of people who donate less than $200.
Timmerman writes:
Campaigns are not required to disclose contributors who donate less than $200 — and Obama’s campaign refuses to release their names, addresses, and donation amounts. Obama has collected a staggering $603.2 million. Most of the money — $543.3 million — has come from individual contributors, half of it from “small†donors Obama won’t disclose.
So who are these people? How do we know that they aren’t big corporations – or non-US governments – who are making millions of small donations via credit cards over the internet?
Timmerman claims there is some strangeness about Obama’s donations. since Oct 14, the following people have donated:
OJ Simpson
Daffy Duck
Bart Simpson
Family Guy
King Kong
and
jkbkj Hbkjb
Timmerman’s source claims he made donations using several of these names and a disposable credit card. If Obama’s team aren’t picking up and rejecting fake names to ensure that 1) the person is real and 2) the person hasn’t donated more than the maximum amount of $2,300, then the system is open to fraud and manipulation.
Yet most Americans I talk to believe the Hollywood answer, that Obama is getting his funding from millions of small donations from believers.
Don’t get me wrong – I hope they are right and I am wrong. I hope I’m just being cynical. But there are questions here which the Obama campaign should be forced to answer.
The other great fund raising story I’ve heard lately is The Atheist Bus Campaign which launched Tuesday October 21 2008 in the UK. They hoped to raise £5,500 to run 30 buses across London for four weeks with the slogan: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” They overshot their goal. They have currently raised over £111,000!
For some months now I’ve been planning to move TPN over to a donation-based system. We’ll be asking out audience to contribute some funds to help cover our running costs. Wouldn’t you rather have media that doesn’t rely on corporate sponsorship or government funding? I guess we’ll see over the next few months how much people value TPN’s content.
by cameron | Oct 13, 2008 | Podcast
Dr David Skellern is the CEO of NICTA, Australia’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Centre of Excellence. He’s also an engineer and entrepreneur, who sold a company he co-founded (Radiata) to Cisco in 2001.
I caught up with him for 10 minutes a couple of weeks ago for a chat about why ICT R&D in Australia’s top ICT companies is pathetically low and about why Aussie kids aren’t studying IT.
If you want an independent media, you can support TPN by throwing me some cash to cover the bills or, if you’re tight on the cash front, by blogging or Twittering about the show or joining the G’Day World Facebook group. There is a list of things you can do to support the show here.
The G’Day World theme music:
Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)
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