by cameron | Feb 23, 2008 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
I went to the Rose Street Artist Market in Fitzroy for the first time today (well apart from attending the annual graffiti art exhibitions held there) and I thought it was totally brilliant. I’m so sick of going to so-called ‘markets’ in melbourne and seeing the same old shit everywhere. Everything in Rose St looks like a one-off original piece of art. It’s kind of like a real-life Etsy. I picked up some clothes and this little leather pouch. At the time I didn’t know what I’d do with it, I just liked it. When I got back to the car I decided it was the perfect size for my touch and headphones. I’d rather this than something off-the-shelf at my local Apple store.
Also got ready today for the big Reilly garage sale tomorrow. If you’re in Melbourne, and you envy my CD collection (1500 cds of the finest music EVAH), then come to 297 Ballarat St Yarraville around 10am.
by cameron | Feb 5, 2008 | Brisbane, Melbourne
In a move that’s bound to surprise many of you as much as it surprises me, we’re relocating the Reilly family to Brisbane in about four weeks. I know – I’ve had my fair share of fun talking smack about Queensland (and Queenslanders) over the last few years – well, in fact, the last 20 years – and it’s the last place I ever thought I’d move to. Paris? Yes. Manhattan? Yes. Florence? Easy. Brisbane? Not on your life. But there you go, the universe has a sense of humour?
Why are we moving? Well we’d been talking about it in late December because most of our family is up there (all except my sister Anita who is down here in Melbourne and who we are all going to miss heaps) and we thought it would be good for the kids to get to spend more time with their grandparents and cousins. And then, out of the blue, Belinda saw an advertisement for a job in Brisbane which was made for her. She applied for it just on a whim, and was offered it a couple of weeks later. And although both of us love Melbourne dearly, and I’m going to miss my little village lifestyle in Yarraville, it just seemed like it was meant to happen.
Obviously I’m lucky in that it won’t affect TPN at all. I can work from anywhere I have internet access. It won’t affect MODM either, as I’d already planned to launch it nationally this year and will be looking for sponsors for each of the state events. Part of the sponsorship will involve flying me to each event, so I plan to be in Melbourne at least once a month for a few days.
So… I’m looking to buy a house in Brisbane (anyone with real estate contacts please get in touch with me), and recommendations for good areas to live, schools, cafes, cocktail bars, etc. I’m going to get a safari suit, pith helmet, hammock, and that’ll be me for the next few years. I’m going to buy one of those massive freakin’ commercial fans, stick it in the back yard in front of the hammock positioned between two palm trees and beside the pool, set up a little bar with an ice maker for my mojitos, and run my global media company from there. Going to lose 20 kgs, work out, take up surfing, work on my tan.
I moved to Melbourne from Bundaberg in January 1988. My dear deceased father’s last words to me as the car left Bundy were “you’ll be back”. For once in his life, he was right.
by cameron | Feb 3, 2008 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
Two great events on in Melbourne this week.
MODM 9 is on Thursday night and
The Hive, a new event for entrepreneurs run by Ross Hill, is having their first event on Tuesday night! I’m looking forward to both. I’m working on a plan to take MODM national this year and I’m very excited about it. It’ll be great to travel around the country every month talking to digital media folks about how we use our skillz to change the world.
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James Masini will be talking about how he started Hippo, raised significant investment and plans to take over the casual job market… be there!
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The Hive is networking for entrepreneurs. We get together to share advice, talk and hang out. Membership is free and easy, and everyone’s invited. If you have an idea and want to launch a venture or already have a venture already then make sure you come along.
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by cameron | Feb 3, 2008 | Melbourne, Podcast
A few weeks ago I went on a tour of some of Melbourne’s top cocktail bars with my mate and TPN host “Cocktail” Kevin Clark. Kev, who tends bar at the Tiki Bar & Lounge in Richmond, hosts TPN’s Soused podcast (a podcast about cocktails) and is also co-host of TPN’s Geeks Of Hazzard. He told me that it is said that the face you make when you’re shaking a cocktail is the same face you make when you are making love. So we grabbed my video camera and asked some of Melbourne’s top cocktail mixologists to show us their cocktail faces. I had a great night, learned a lot about cocktails and tasted some fantastic drinks. This is the result. The video is 30 minutes long and about a 140mb download.
by cameron | Jan 28, 2008 | Melbourne, Podcast
On January 27, 2008, a small group of people gathered in South Melbourne for the inaugural meeting of Geeks Who Care, a group of geek activists who want to be more involved in their local communities.
Attendees are (L to R):
Colin Wilson, Matt Trentini, David Jackson, Father Bob Maguire, Cameron Reilly, Nay Parkinson, Tony Goodson, Miriam Parkinson
The two outcomes we agree to were:
1. to set up some face to face meetings with teenagers living in public housing communities in South Melbourne to run some of our ideas past them, to sanity check our thinking
2. to explore the idea of providing mesh networks and refurbished PC’s to kids in public housing around Melbourne.
There was an interesting discussion about whether or not GWC should be focused on providing technology-related solutions for people, to leverage our geek-fu, or just doing basic “good works” that aren’t specifically technology related. The general feelings seemed to be to try to do something geek-specific.
If you have any ideas on how to build out mesh networks for public housing communities, please throw your ideas around over on our Geeks Who Care forum.
Become part of the G’Day World conversation.
TPN now has a HQ in Second Life! 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.
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by cameron | Jan 27, 2008 | Australian media, Melbourne
Last year I did a blog post covering the general decline in circulation and readership for Australian newspapers.
The Press Council’s 2007 report shows a slightly healthier situation, with a handful of papers actually showing growth from 2001 – 2007. I’ve posted the main graph of Metro papers here (you might need to grab the actual image to read the details). To make it easy, I’ve coloured the papers with declining readership in yellow and the ones maintaining steady in grey.
However – when you read their report in depth, you notice that there has been some creative accounting with these figures in a desperate attempt to forestall the knowledge that their industry is closer to death than General Suharto (what? he died today? well…. let’s say Castro.)
The report sez:
A significant development has been the unprecedented initiative taken by newspaper proprietors, acting collectively, to establish a new organisation, The Newspaper Works, to reaffirm to advertisers in particular that newspapers offer them a better and more influential platform than other media and, complementarily, to improve total newspaper circulation and readership. The new organisation has also undertaken, in conjunction with polling organisations, to try to improve the techniques used to measure circulation and readership of print editions and to measure newspaper website traffic accurately.
(Italics mine).
So – they are factoring in their online readership. Fair enough. Here’s the secret though – as I’ve argued here before – the transition from paper to online is VERY BAD for the print news business. Why? Isn’t a reader a reader? It’s the economics, stupid. When you buy The Age, how much do you pay for the privilege? A dollar fifty? I’m not sure, i don’t buy it (unless I’m in it). When you read The Age online, how much do you pay? Nada. So – they are automatically making less money. What about advertising? Well – let’s say you’re an advertiser. If you want to advertise in a newspaper that people in Melbourne read, how many options do you have? A handful? If, however, you want to advertise on websites Melburnians read, how many options do you have? Bazillions. And that number is just getting bigger every year. So it’s simple supply and demand economics. You don’t make as much money from an online reader as you do from a print reader.
Okay, so revenues must be in decline. What happens next? Do they hire MORE journalists? No. As everybody knows, they hire less journalists. And so the quality of their content goes down. Does that make readership go up? I don’t think so. And so the cycle of rot sets in. Print news organisations have a very expensive operation on their hands. When revenues go down, when people get down-sized on a regular basis, morale drops and… hey I’ve seen it happen in a million IT companies. It’s what happens when you think you’re invulnerable to generational change driven by technology and you think your brand has some kind of magical power which will continue forever. Basically – you’re sucking on your own exhaust pipe.
We’ve had an opportunity to witness this last week with the announcement that ACP is closing down The Bulletin, a magazine I was fortunate to appear in a couple of times – when Josh Gliddon did the first MSM coverage of TPN back in Feb 2005 and again in October 2006. The Bulletin’s circulation had been down and it just didn’t make sense to keep it open, according to ACP management. And we all know how disinterested Packer 3.0 seems to be in the media business.
What did the ACP execs have to say?
The Bulletin is Australia’s longest running magazine and was launched in 1880.
In the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures, The Bulletin had 57,039 in sales (Sept 07), which is down from circulation highs of over 100,000 in the mid 1990s. This trend is consistent with that experienced by many leading weekly news and current affairs magazines globally and is somewhat symptomatic of the impact of the internet on this particular genre.
It’s the beginning of the end.
