Stan Relihan had me back on his very popular Connections podcast today to discuss the results of our Digg contest as well as discuss his learnings from his first couple of months podcasting. We talk about LinkedIn, Twitter, and how to use podcasting to build your personal brand.
Well folks, here we are, 300 episodes and 3 years in, and I’m just getting warmed up! However, with a new year of G’Day World comes a new format, a new topic and a new question which demands The Cam’s attention – what are you doing on a daily basis to make the world a better place? As you’ll hear in today’s show, that is going to be my focus in the Year Four of G’Day World and TPN.
Also on today’s show, I’ve got a recording from MODM 7 where Simon Chen and I chatted with James Masini, 24-year-old Melbourne entrepreneur and founder of Hippo, an online job board to 15 – 24 year-olds. There’s a lot of background noise and we were standing too far away from the mics, but it’s audible and a great story. I hope you don’t mind the low quality. I was using the new Blue Snowball and Macbook for the first time and over-estimated it’s ability to pick us up amid the noise.
Speaking about my new Macbook Pro – it was sponsored by the awesome folks at Global1Training who are also sponsoring my interview from a few months ago with Dr John Demartini. If you didn’t hear that show, I highly recommend it, especially if you’re feeling like you could be getting a little more out of your life. Demartini has some great tips for asking yourself the right questions.
Thanks to everyone who has supported the show over the last three years – I’ve had the time of my life. Three years making this shit for a living. It should almost be illegal.
Become part of the G’Day World conversation.
TPN now has a HQ in Second Life! If you’ve never spent any time in SL, jump in, go to TPN HQ (by clicking this link) and add “Cameron Switchblade” to your friends (that’s me). I’d be happy to show you around and help you find your SL legs.
If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.
You can show your love by buying me stuff from my Amazon wish list.
Get the TPN version of Particls.
Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.
You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.
If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!
The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me†by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.
If you’ve ever lost someone close to you, you’ll know what I mean.
The same is true with new technologies. I’ve often said that there are five types of technology (I’m sure I’ve blogged this before but I can’t find it atm):
1. Those that are just stupid and a waste of time.
2. Those that are solutions looking for a problem.
3. Those that are occasionally useful but if they were taken away from you, you would hardly notice.
4. Those that are so useful that if they were taken away from you, you would sorely miss them.
5. Those that are so important to you that if they were taken away, you would fight in the streets to get them back.
I’m sure you can all think of technology you’ve seen over the last decade which fit into each category.
While I was in Perth, for some reason I had real trouble connecting to Twitter from either my laptop (accessing the net via my 3 USB modem) or my mobile phone (also accessing the net via 3). And I missed it. A lot.
Until I was away, I hadn’t realized how much a part of my daily connectedness Twitter had become. Sure – I like Twitter. I have it running in the background for hours every day but not all day – I often turn it off to avoid distraction. Yet when it was “taken away” from me for three or four days, I found myself getting cranky and going into serious withdrawal symptoms. I was checking it every few minutes to see if 3 had sorted out their network issues. I even resorted to sending and receiving a few twits via sms, something I never do anymore.
It’s a sweet relief to be back at home now on my regular connection and have Twitter working seamlessly (or as seamlessly as it normally does with their regular issues) in the background.
However, if anyone asked me why it has become so important, I really couldn’t answer it logically. It’s not like I learn much of significance, although I do pick up a lot of late-breaking news from there. And it’s not like I primarily use it to keep in touch with friends or market my business or anything else. I have more of an emotional connection to it – it’s that same feeling of connectedness that I miss when I’m offline (not by choice) when I travel to places like Bundaberg… that disconcerting feeling that I’m not plugged in, that there is a conversation going on… and I’m not part of it. That I’m on the outside. That I’m in a cone of silence. And I hate it.
I’ve come up with a name for it. It’s not entirely original but it surprisingly only has a few thousand google results, so it’s as good as original. 😉 Kind of reminds me of when I started podcasting. There is that famous Doc Searls post where he can only find a few thousand google results for the word “podcast”.
Anyway, the term I’m using is “meta-conversation”. That’s what I was trying to refer to in my post from Perth the other night. This conversation that is emerging from the combination of all of the new tools, swirling around, popping up waves from time to time, taking on an emergent life of it’s own. You are part of it. But it is greater than you, greater than me, greater than any single conversation or person or even tool, technology or start-up. It’s the sum of all of our conversations, the sum of the 24×7 connectedness, the pulse of the new society, the hum of a billion brains working together to dream new dreams, plot new adventures, the drum-drum-drumming of a new emergent intelligence being born right under our noses.
I welcome you, Lord Meta-Conversation, to our little world and I hope you enjoy your stay here.
Well as I sit in my hotel room after spending a couple of days with some of WA’s digerati (I say WA instead of Perth because Duncan Riley lives a few hours away) as well as some ring-ins from the Eastern states such as Nick Hodge, Stilgherrian and Paul Montgomery, as well as Adam and Jared (what happened to you guys? I hardly saw you yesterday and didn’t see you at any of the events today?), I’m trying to distill my thoughts.
The Perth digerati crowd certainly has a lot of energy. I was impressed by the amount of people who turned up to Podcamp, especially as most of them were from Perth. Bronwen Clune seems to be the Mother Goose of the Perth digerati crowd, running around keeping everyone in beer and skittles, with my old mate Richard Giles hanging back, giving both Bronwen and I a lot of shit, but acting as another lightening rod for the digerati here. Duncan lives out of town but his personal brand and the fact that he writes for the hottest geek site on the planet (although there has been a lot of talk over the last few days about whether or not TechCrunch still carries the cache it did 18 months ago) casts a big shadow over everyone here.
Getting back to Podcamp and geek meetups in general… the feedback on my unkeynote has been sparse, I still think I freaked most of them out. Mike seems to agree, although he seemed to like it. Stil called it “passionate” and thinks my use of a picture of Che Guevara gave him permission to use a picture of Goebbels.
I still get the feeling though that we geeks, we early adopters of the new new tools, the Twitterers, the Facebookeranians, the SecondLifers, the podcasters and bloggers, are still running around playing with these shiny new toys like 3 year-olds in a sandbox. When I look at people at gatherings like those over the last couple of days, I think about how wealthy and privileged we are. We all sit around with our shiny Macbooks and our iPhones and play with our communication toys which let us talk to enormous numbers of people all over the world, and yet we seem to lack direction. Whenever we get together at events like Podcamp or MODM, whilst there is a certain level of geek community bonding and a few impassioned conversations, that there is a general lack of BIG IDEAS. I’m including myself in this by the way. I come away from these events feeling slightly hollow, like a great opportunity has been missed. That there should be more going on than just getting together, having a few drinks, comparing toys, exchanging a few anecdotes, swapping business cards. Shouldn’t we be doing something more when we get together?
Nick summed up my rant from our recent podcast as “Geeks For Good” (I love how he describes debating with me as “like fighting a intellectual tornado”), and I think that sums it up pretty well – shouldn’t we be using our geek powers for good? Is it just me? Does anyone else out there feel like us geeks have a responsibility to use our understanding of computing and new communication technologies to make the world a better place? Or is it all just about making ourselves richer and buying newer toys?
Where is the sense of responsibility? The sense of purpose, of destiny, of time and place and manifesting these things to advance the chances of the human race to survive this century? I so much want to meet someone who has an awe-inspiring vision to share with me, something to expand my consciousness, threaten my perspectives, build me a new dream, entice me, invigorate me, dazzle me. Instead I find myself being the guy ranting and raving about changing the world and feeling like everyone is staring at me like I’m a lunatic. Maybe I am. Maybe it’s me, I’m just missing a few screws. Maybe it’s my messiah complex. I just feel like we’re all wasting time, wasting opportunity.
ANYWAY…
Someone during the Q&A after my session yesterday (I think it was Brett) asked me if podcasts were all just like radio. And yes, I do. I think most podcasts are just like radio. And that bothers me, has done for a long time. Shouldn’t we be doing something new, exciting, fresh? Something that hasn’t been done before? And the more I thought about that issue over the last couple of days, the more the ideas which Duncan’s post a month ago started in my mind have been taking more shape.
There is something new happening and it’s in the emergence arising from a loosely-coupled combination of the new tools – it’s podcasting + blogging + twitter + facebook + second life + real events like MODM or Podcamp. The new form of conversation lies in the intersection of these things, not in any one of them. It is messy and rambling and it is swirling around us, impossible to define or pigeon hole, but it is real and it’s growing stronger each year, a milieu that contains within it the beginnings of the true new communications platform, the true 21st century media. The conversation might start with a blog post then migrate over to a podcast then get expanded on in a Facebook group, debated in Twitter, then turn into a 4 hours group discussion in Second Life.
I don’t know what to call it yet (any ideas?), but I’m intrigued by it, excited by it and determined to harness it and use it for good.
All this talk of Geeks For Good reminds me of that episode of “The West Wing” when President Bartlett says to the new guy Will Bailey:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens can change the world. Do you know why?”
Will thinks for a moment, then answers ‘It’s the only thing that ever has.’
Cue theme music…
technorati tags: podcampperth07
The other night I caught up with Scouta founder and former TPN’r Richard Giles and Microsoft’s local professional nice guy blogger/podcaster Nick Hodge for a chat about the upcoming Australian federal election and was appalled to hear how they both intend voting. Geeks have a responsibility to lead. You’re a smart bunch. You are educated (formally or informally), connected and powerful. Don’t waste your vote.
This is a recording of the conversation. Warning: I used Garageband on the new Macbook to record it and I didn’t bother to equalize it, so it may sound a little rough.
This photo isn’t from the night, it’s one Nick took of me during my Podcamp talk yesterday, but it captures me in full revolutionary rant mode, which works as a visual for this show quite well.
Become part of the G’Day World conversation.
TPN now has a HQ in Second Life! If you’ve never spent any time in SL, jump in, go to TPN HQ (by clicking this link) and add “Cameron Switchblade” to your friends (that’s me). I’d be happy to show you around and help you find your SL legs.
If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.
You can show your love by buying me stuff from my Amazon wish list.
Add me to your Twitter account.
Get the TPN version of Particls.
Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.
You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.
If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!
The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me†by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.