Loose Launch (Or How to Throw a Book Party in Bali)

By | November 22, 2011
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Loose Wire, the book, was launched last night at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali. It was great to have such a large turnout and gratifying to sell out all copies! More have been shipped in for today’s session of the festival, and can be found at the Java Books stall at Indus. What particularly delighted me was the varied crowd — everyone from geeks to grandmothers! Thanks to everyone for coming and making it a fun evening. I realised that launching a book was really the first time I got to meet readers face to face and hear some of their problems. Mostly, most but not exclusively, about technology.

For those who aren’t in Bali, copies of the book can be bought from Equinox, my publisher. For anyone who happens to be in Jakarta, there’ll be a special launch this coming Saturday, to which you’re all welcome. More launches in Asia and beyond in the months ahead.

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Crying Out for Clarity

By | November 22, 2011
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Interesting post and thread at Signal vs Noise on the overuse of buzzwords, particularly on job applications. One thing caught my eye, though: the assumption that shorter, briefer is better. One commenter wrote: “I’ve always noticed that the shortest emails come from those with the most power in the organization.” That’s probably because they’re using a BlackBerry. Shorter isn’t necessarily better, although it might be. Clarity is better. Not always the same thing. (Having just read through a dozen award applications I see a crying need for clarity.)

Anyway some horrible buzzwords that crop up in the comments or my head:

  • anything with 2.0 in it
  • ‘space’ meaning market
  • ‘interface’ as a verb
  • stakeholder
  • grow as a transitive verb
  • more buzzwords here.

The Thai Coup – Another Blogger Scoop?

By | November 22, 2011
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Daniel Cuthbert, a blogger/photographer at MetroBlogging, writes in the aftermath of the Thai coup about how bloggers again apparently beat the pros to the mark:

I myself noticed how few traditional news networks were a the scene at 11pm on the 19th, and it seemed that the news reports that were being delivered were being done by people in news studio’s and not ones physically there.

Blogging has changed the way the public now receives information. Gone are the days of waiting for the big guns (CNN/BBC/Reuters) arriving at the scene to give the report, now local residents take it upon themselves to write up what’s happening and post it on their blogs. In recent events it’s these personal accounts that lead to the news agencies referencing.

The London bombings on 7/7 saw the first initial reports coming from local bloggers who lived near to the blasts. In India, local bloggers were the first to react to the terrorist attack on the Mumbai train attacks and the public found these blogs more up to date with information than local TV channels.

Interesting stuff, and, if true, not a little scary for us old hacks. I was there for the last coup, which dates me considerably, but I do recall how we covered it: We heard about it from our local reporters who used to walk around with a radio in each earplug, even at weekends. We were out on the streets pretty quickly, armed with cellphones the size of wellington boots, but sometimes that isn’t the place to cover coups. Offices need manning, stories need writing, and those journalists who are on the street may not necessarily look like them. That said, I’ve read some glorious stuff about the Thai coup from bloggers, including from Daniel himself, and this extraordinary, and speculative, analysis from Scott Rosenberg at Monsters & Critics. Early on there was good stuff at Global Voices Online, too. And 19sep, Gonzo Journal, Bangkok Recorder, etc.

I don’t know what the long term implications of all this are. I think bloggers can outwit journalists easily, especially in the early hours of a big (partly) visible news story like this. But what happens when the story starts to run longer than a couple of days? Perhaps the answer lies with Reuters, which is investing in efforts like NewsAssignment.net, a sort of publicly sponsored investigative journalism project. Oddly enough, it was Reuters I was working for back then during the 1991 coup.

Loose Change – Radio, Ricky and Rabid Readers

By | September 26, 2006
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Some stuff I thought you might like:

Email Wins Over RSS?

By | November 22, 2011
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I’ve been obsessively watching email subscription to my blog via Feedblitz and while we’re talking modest numbers here, it’s great to see people signing up. (It’s on the left hand side of the blog below my smarmy mugshot.) Much more personal somehow, than an RSS subscription.

Which doubles the pain when someone unsubscribes. Was it something I said? Something I didn’t say? The way I said it? What’s the etiquette on this?

Email subscription to blogs is actually a pretty useful tool. It may look like a step back from RSS but actually it has its uses. I use it for those blogs that I definitely want to read, and can’t afford to ignore (knowing that some days I’ll only get around to checking my RSS reader once or twice.) Email I’ll always read. And most feeds look nice in Feedblitz.

But maybe Feedblitz has missed a trick. Given email is a two way street, wouldn’t it be good to make the Feedblitz subscription more interactive? Allow readers to comment on a post just by hitting ‘reply’, or at least to offer feedback to the writer (especially when they unsubscribe a day after subscribing.)