by cameron | Sep 1, 2006 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
I love all of the hype about Steorn. There’s nothing like a great viral campaign. For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet… here’s their claim:
We have developed a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy.
This means never having to recharge your phone, never having to refuel your car. A world with an infinite supply of clean energy for all.
Our technology has been independently validated by engineers and scientists – always off the record, always proven to work.
What is it? How does it work? No details yet. Here’s what the CEO of Steorn had to say recently:
Sean McCarthy, Steorn’s chief executive officer, said they had issued the challenge for 12 physicists to rigorously test the technology so it can be developed.
"What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy," McCarthy said.
"The energy isn’t being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It’s literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy," he told Ireland’s RTE radio.
McCarthy said Steorn had not set out to develop the technology, but "it actually fell out of another project we were working on".
One of the basic principles of physics is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form.
McCarthy said a big obstacle to overcome was the disbelief that what they had developed was even possible.
"For the first six months that we looked at it we literally didn’t believe it ourselves. Over the last three years it had been rigorously tested in our own laboratories, in independent laboratories and so on," he said.
According to Wikipedia "A page on Steorn’s website titled "Press Coverage" had a broken link to a news story claiming the discovery in the Guardian on April 1, 2006."
What’s the blogosphere saying about it?
Anyway you slice it, this is going to be fun. Kind of reminds me a little of when the Segway was hyped up or the whole Adams’ Platform fiasco we had in Melbourne over the last ten years.
by cameron | Aug 31, 2006 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
Rich Giles and I will be speaking at the Strategic Corporate Communications event in Melbourne on Sept 14. My session is aptly entitled ‘Coping with new media aggression’. So I guess that means "Coping With… Cameron".
Mark Jones has some good additional notes from the PANPA conference we were at earlier this week, including this one of his own:
“What we’re seeing now is the rise of conversation journalism.â€
I think he means it’s different from the "voice of God" journalism most of us are used to. But I could be wrong.
Apparently he and Hugh didn’t appreciate my "Tarantino" camera angles. Cmon guys, I didn’t hear Travolta or Sam Jackson complain. You just don’t know art.
Speaking of art… Gould Galleries in South Yarra (across the road from the Como Building) is having an exhibition of Linde Ivimey’s sculptures next week. I’m definitely going. I stumbled across a picture of her work in a catalogue about a year ago and it blew me away so much that I tore it out and stuck it on the wall in my study. I’m trying to get her to come on the show as a guest. Check out images from the exhibition and tell me what you think. I find her work is scary and disturbing in a similar way to Francis Bacon‘s paintings and David Lynch’s films. When I was last in Paris (August 2004) I caught my very first exhibition of Bacon’s work at Musee Maillol. It was breath-taking. I’ve been a fan of his work since I discovered it via Brett Whiteley. Did you see that Whiteley painting of the Frangipani and Hummingbird sold for $2.04 million? Amazing. Brett knew how to paint a flower.
by cameron | Aug 30, 2006 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
Rich Giles is coming to Melbourne in September and he and I will actually meet for the first time! Weird. We’ve been doing podcasts together for 18 months but we haven’t met F2F yet.
So anyway, we’re going to have a small get together and it’d be great to meet some of y’all. Details here. Well lack of details there I should say. I didn’t even know about it until Cris from plasq told me about it. I don’t like this whole "geek dinner" thing. Too many nerds turn up. NO NERDS ALLOWED to this little bash. I’m looking for tequila, table top dancing… and lots of P2P filesharing. ANYONE caught talking about interface design or database optimization will be stripped naked and fed to …. Ben Barren.
by cameron | Aug 30, 2006 | Video
When I was up at the PANPA (PAcific Area Newspaper Publisher’s Association) Conference at the Gold Coast on Monday I had a coffee with Mark Jones, IT Editor of The Australian Financial Review and Hugh Martin, Editor of News.com.au. We discussed the future of newspapers. There was some workmen making a bunch of noise next to us, which explains some of the audio interference.
by cameron | Aug 29, 2006 | Uncategorized
My mother just emailed me a link to this video about using "bump keys" to open locked doors. As interesting as the video itself is, the point is this: MY MOTHER sent me a link to something on Google Video! Surely that’s a sign of a tipping point? (I think the Book of Revelation also had something to say about what happens when your mother sends you a link to Google Video… I think it’s one of the signs).
This makes me think of an argument I’ve been having lately with a bunch of MSM people. It’s this idea of "watercooler chat" media. There’s this idea, which may be true in part, in the minds of the mainstream media that we (their audience) have some Maslowian need to all watch/read/listen to the same thing so we can talk about it the next day around the watercooler, like we are so pathetically desperate for some sense of social identity that we need to rely on Big Brother to feel whole.
I’ve been explaining that this isn’t what happens when I catch up with my friends for coffee. Our conversations go more like this:
"Hey have you seen that clip from The Daily Show where Sam Jackson was talking about why he made Snakes On A Plane?"
"No, I haven’t. Shoot me the link!"
"Yeah I will."
or
"Hey have you seen the Urban Ninja videos on YouTube? This crazy kid who can seriously run up a wall?"
"No, getthefeckouttahere. Shoot me the link!"
"Yeah totally."
or
"Hey have you heard that new podsafe track that James Brown put up on PMN?"
"No way dude! James muthafucking Brown??? SHOOT ME THE LINK!"
"Ow! I feel good!"
Now that even my 59 year old mum, born and bred and still living in Bundaberg (rural Queensland, about as far behind the modern world as you can get without going to Uganda… I think even Bono is petitioning the IMF for debt relief and cheap AIDS vaccines for Bundaberg), is flicking me the coolest Google Video links, I think we can safely say the era of "one-size-fits-all" media is coming to a close.
