• Official recording now available on thinkers.sa website
• A story within a story (Oli’s view of twitter chatter during the evening)
• A FaceBook group has emerged
• So far there have been 50 flickr photos, 7 technorati hits, 10 blogsearch.google hits of contributions tagged with sastories .

South Australia’s most recent thinker in residence, Dr Genevieve Bell wants to collect ‘one million’ stories to find out what makes South Australia tick. In her inaugural public lecture, Dr Bell threw out a challenge to the audience that I would like to extend to you, dear reader – to find ways of getting people involved.

Members of the audience were handed a postage paid postcard bearing an invitation to ‘Tell us about your technology’ – How do you stay connected? The internet? A mobile phone? On the grapevine? Tell us your stories, so we can see what makes SA tick!

While the official campaign to collect stories kicks off next year, eager beavers can get involved by:

• mailing one of the official postcards to Department of Premier & Cabinet
• visit sastories.com and follow instructions there
• TAG stuff online with sastories – flickr pic with long comment = excellent, blog post = cool (best with picture), del.icio.us for anything else U can think of…

Oh, and while you are at it – would be cool to know roughly what part of South Oz you are from (there will be a list of ‘regions’ to choose from on the website, but if you ain’t shy why not geotag yr stuff).

I tried to publish a semi-official podcast of the lecture from the Griffin’s head hotel (nearest spot with wifi) but my olde laptoppe ran out of batteries while I was chatting with some of my twitter buddies over a beer – hey there’s as story and it happened in Adelaide.

Lots more to say about that – and I see Dave (LifeKludger) Wallace has been assembling a story of his view of the event from afar… and Oli, assembled this view of the event from within, via twitter!

Fang – Mike Seyfang

A great listen, I’m subscribed!

p.s. Richard – if you are reading this, I tried to leave a comment on the episode and reach out to you with regard to a request from Tanya to re-use parts of your show, but alas, comments were closed. Feel free to drop a comment here if you have any issues with re-use.

Tubes #67 — Filters and Fibres … a Double Helping of Tubes

October 30th, 2008

This week’s A Series of Tubes is brought to you by Nortel.

This week we’re back with a double-header episode. We delve into science again, to talk to Tanya Monro, winner of the 2008 Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year, to talk about how to put holes in optical fibres – and why you would want to.

http://itradio.com.au/?p=209

A possibly related episode of ‘a series of tubes’ for those interested in optical signal processing as a possible solution to the upcoming power crunch that will soon put the brakes on moore’s law growth of internet router infrastructure:

A Series of Tubes #57 — The Science of a Really Fast Network

July 17th, 2008

You or I won’t need an all-optical switch at the homestead any time soon, unless you’re hiding a terabit-per-second Internet connection under the sink. Still, it’s an interesting concept: fire a photon at a cloud of electrons, and get a really fast optical switch for backbone networks. Richard Chirgwin talks to Dr Ben Eggleston of CUDOS to find out why it’s not just sci-fi.

Note:

[From an old twitter tweet -> how did I miss the looming internet energy bottleneck?- http://tinyurl.com/3pjsce 3:47 PM Oct 13th from web]

Fang – Mike Seyfang

CoEP blog.

Well done KJ and the team at education.au!

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

Had I been at my microphone, I would have tried to steer the conversation toward clarifying and exploring just how network savvy business models can be. To me, this is the key for future success in the post Web2.0 era – figuring out how to make revenue streams that grow with the network as the value of digital content heads toward zero. The people who figure out how to do that AND sustainably grow a network are the ones I want to invest in.

So what is Grooveshark and what’s so clever about its business model?  Based on what I heard in the podcast, a little intuition and bugger all research it would appear to be a peer to peer (p2p) based music sharing network that collects and distributes money in the fairest  and most legal way it can. The basic idea is to promote commerce around sharing of DRM free .mp3 files of any music – yours, stuff you have purchased, stuff you have stolen, anything!  Sounds weird an even wrong, until you think about it from a couple of perspectives:

1. Music from the ‘old industry’ - you know, the stuff produced by musicians who are under contract to the middle men who are losing so much as digital music and the internet combine forces in the age of the read/write web.  Grooveshark provides an interesting collection service that reminds me of shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. Providing a service that collects funds from the very activity undermining the ‘old way’ (the destructive-creative force of the ‘new way’) and returning some funds to the vast array of middle men, labels and collection agencies is interesting. Providing they do a good job of this messy work it is a valuable service. It does get better the bigger the network gets BUT it loses out as the value of digital content heads toward zero.
2. Music from the ‘new industry’ – still forming and somewhat undefined, where any kid with talent and $1000 worth of equipment can record, produce and distribute their music. (the stuff my kids do). Here the big challenge is getting noticed. Providing zero barrier to entry platform for collecting funds for the sale of .mp3 files is a start. Finding a way to promote artists as they raise funds from live gigs, intimate services for fans and merchandise of things made from atoms will be key to the future. This model leverages growth of the network and is insulated from the inevitable decline of the value of digital content.

Well done Dave and Kent for finding Steve Spalding and getting him on the show! While I am sorry I missed it, I’m encouraged to see the EEL model working – our network is growing and our connections are becoming more intimate.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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