Cameron's Brain

ABC TV and Darebin City Council's podcast

Neal Woolrich from ABC TV came around this morning and we chatted about the economics of podcasting. Good fun. Should be on air next week, but I don't know when. I still think these TV folks get it all backwards. They spend half an hour setting up and then  only interview me for five minutes! I'd spend five minutes setting up and do the interview for 30 minutes. I was just getting my rant warmed up when he said "okay that's all the questions I have". And no, I didn't wear the glasses.

Just got an email from the communication officer at the Darebin City Council (Darebin is an electoral district of Melbourne) promoting a podcast they have just started. It's just someone reading the Darebin Council newsletter and isn't very engaging so I shot him a note congratulating them for having a go but suggesting they get the Mayor on to chat live with some of their constituents or something like that. Have a listen and tell me what you think.

Visited my eye doctor this morning to prep for the surgery I'm having next Friday. I still can't believe I'm going to let this guy stick a sharp object into my eye. Still, it'll be worth it. I can't wait for those bionics. Especially the X-Ray vision.

61% of people who have responded so far to today's poll on The Age's website believe that same-sex marriages should be recognised throughout Australia. My mate Scott Sherman will be pleased.

I'm off to the French Film Festival tonight to see Monica Belluci's new film "Combien tu m'aimes?". I see she's also just made a film about Napoleon! Oh my god. Napoleon and Monica Belluci in one film. How much pleasure can a man take?! And Daniel Auteuil is cast as Napoleon. I like Auteuil. He'll do a great job I'm sure. Tomorrow night I'm back at the Festival to see "L'Enfer" starring Emanuelle Beart. Apparently this is the film Krzysztof Kieslowski was working on when he croaked. I'm a huge fan of his work, so I can't miss this. Oh and did I mention Emanuelle Beart is in it???

Washington Post hosts online chat with Chomsky

In a rare move for mainstream media in the USA, the Washington Post recently held an online chat with Noam Chomsky. It's fairly brief and the nature of the medium means his answers are quite short, but the most interesting part of it for me was his description of the USA as an "outlaw state" because it "dismisses international law and norms and treaty obligations".

On Napoleon, Father Bob and your desk

Recorded episode#3 of my Napoleon podcast with the totally fabulous J. David Markham today and it perked me up a bunch. It's exciting enough to talk about Napoleon for an hour, but it is 10x more exciting to talk about it with someone like David. He recently was awarded the President’s Choice Award for Napoleonic literature by the President of the International Napoleonic Society for his book "Napoleon & Dr Verling on St Helena" and is not only one of the world's leading Napoleonic historians and authors but also a great bloke to chat with.

For the last 15 or 20 years that I've been studying Napoleon it's been a pretty solitary exercise. Until I was introduced to David by the wonderful Staton Rabin there wasn't anyone I could share my passion with and now I'm geeking out with one of the top experts on the planet every couple of weeks. He's even invited me to speak at the International Napoleonic Society's annual conference in Seattle later this year!

I recently picked up a copy of David's recent book "Napoleon For Dummies" and it's a great easy-to-read overview of the period. I'm going to start reading it to Hunter & Taylor at bedtime. Don't laugh - I brought them back a toy Napoleon from Paris a couple of years ago, little plastic figurines about three inches high, and they still carry them around everywhere.

Anyway, also recorded a new show with Father Bob Maguire this afternoon. Just editing that now. Sitting down with Bob is always a highlight of my week as well. He fires me up. And I know I'm not alone. We are starting to get a small group of people putting up their hands offering to help out with this social capitalist project we've been cooking up. I can feel the momentum starting to build. As he would say "there isn't a moment to lose!".

That's what I love most about my life since quitting the J.O.B. - the cool people I get to chat with and hang out with. Okay Okay - not having a Boss - that rocks too. Not having to fill out TPS reports for Lumberg.

Did I mention I've been invited to attend the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC next month? Napoleonic conferences in Seattle, Bobby De Niro's film festival in NYC... ya know, it's a hard life. You'd hate it. Stay tied to those desks kids. It's a jungle out here.

 

journalists hate me

yes yes yes, if one more person tells me that The Age had a massive story on Aussie podcasting today and neither I nor TPN got a single mention, I will lose it. Journalist David Adams never even contacted me or any of the other TPN hosts as far as I know. But I am pleased to see some of Australia's lesser-known podcasters getting some press, they deserve it. Especially the boys from "In Yarraville Tonight", they had a photo and everything. Weird thing is they live up the road from me and we've never met! So I sent them a congratulatory email today and suggested we have coffee soon.

The only saving grace is that I got a phone call from a finance reporter with ABC TV news and they are coming to Chez Reilly in the morning to chat about the podcasting business. He said he heard about TPN via a column Trevor Cook wrote a few months ago (thanks Trev!).

Marty's right - ajaxWrite is amazing

Sayeth Martin Wells (about ajax apps really starting to kick ass):

If you don't believe me, then take a look at ajaxWrite. No really, click on the link, go into the app. It's amazing. After a few seconds of loading you'll have a simple version of Word running right in the browser.

I hadn't bothered to check out ajaxWrite before now because I'm already using Writely and think that is terrific. But Marty got me off my ass and I was REALLY impressed with how fast ajaxWrite loads, no sign up, nothing to install... all of a sudden you have a word processor running in your browser that looks and feels just like Microsoft Word (okay okay without the 20 extra toolbars you know you never use anyway).

Marty goes on to say:

What happens when the online applications do things that the desktop counterparts can't, such as third-party services integration. Imagine if Microsoft wanted to update Word to let you search or upload photos in Flickr. They would need to write the code and then blast it down to millions of machines. A trivial update like that is never going to happen. But an online service like ajaxWrite could roll out such a feature overnight.

If you run a Microsoft partner business out there right now, you need to be thinking about this stuff. Don't let these ajax apps bite you on the ass. Make sure someone inside your team is goaled on keeping abreast of these new apps and do a regular internal brownbag to the rest of the team to keep them apprised. Especially if you are working in the intranet / "Sharepoint" space. Forget about uploading Word documents into shared workspaces and checking in, checking out, etc. With Writely and ajaxWrite, everyone just works on the same document which lives in the cloud.  What kind of solutions can you build for your corporate clients around this idea? They don't have to buy Sharepoint and pay the $100 CAL for everyone in the company (or whatever the CAL is these days). They access it through a browser. Security? Backup? Support? All opportunities for you to solve. Someone is going to solve these things. Trust me on that. If I wasn't TPN'ing, I'd be out there selling this stuff to every smart CIO in the country. They are all dying to reduce their exposure to Microsoft (whether or not they should be worried about such things is another matter). The upside for them in trialling these apps is huge (if for no other reason than the bargaining power it will give them come EA renewal time). If you're the guy/girl that keeps the CIO abreast of these opportunities, I reckon you've got a good chance of becoming a trusted adviser.

And if you really want to do something cool, start thinking about the implications of ajax apps for the SME space. A lot of the issues that plague an enterprise CIO aren't in the top ten for someone running an SME. They want fast, cheap, easy. Show them a world where the applications run in a browser. Nothing to buy. Nothing to install. Nothing to upgrade. Nothing to support. IT JUST WORKS. At Microsoft, BillG used to call that "Win-Tone". Where your software was as simple and reliable as picking up the telephone and knowing you are always going to get a dial tone. IT JUST WORKS. If you've got internet access and a browser, you've not only got all of your documents stored in the cloud, but you've also got your applications.

By the way, Microsoft's been doing this stuff for ages. Any of you who have accessed Exchange Server via a browser using Outlook Web Access know what I'm talking about. I remember when MSFT finally got that working internally, it was a major revelation.

Information Everywhere

On the first morning of the Teradata Universe 2006 conference, I facilitated a panel on the subject of ‘Information Everywhere’. Here is a transcription of the panel.

The Panel Members were:

• Professor Craig Mudge: Professor of Innovation at Macquarie University and Director of the Macquarie Institute for Innovation
• Graeme Wood: Co-founder of wotif.com
• Stephen Brobst: Chief Technology Officer, Teradata
• Gerd Schenkel: General Manager, Customer Strategy and Cross Marketing, nab

Pick the question which Cameron inserted at the last moment...

TPN in SEOmoz's Web 2.0 awards

TPN may have only received an "honorable mention" in SEOmoz's Web 2.0 awards, but we're the only PRODUCER of podcasts mentioned. The rest of the companies are podcast search or platform plays. Thanks Kat Orland & SEOmoz!

Skylook t-shirt

Skylook t-shirt 001
Originally uploaded by cameronreilly.

Caught up with Jeremy Hague from Skylook this morning for coffee and he presented me with this t-shirt! Classic, I love it.
Here's the back of the shirt.

Cory Doctorow in Melbourne

Rich put me onto this piece of news today. Cory Doctorow, the world's #1 blogger, is going to be in Melbourne on April 18th. He's giving a free talk at ACMI. I'm definitely going to be there. I shot him an email earlier to see if I could grab him for a latte at some stage but he said he's only here for 24 hours and his schedule is chokkers. Frak. If you intend on going, let me know and we can hook up for a coffee beforehand at Fed Sq.

I want my neuro-chips

MSNBC has this story [via Scoble]:

The line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot blurrier. European researchers have developed "neuro-chips" in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together.

To create the neuro-chip, researchers squeezed more than 16,000 electronic transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto a silicon chip just 1 millimeter square in size.

Five years ago researchers wouldn't have even been able to contemplate performing this kind of experiment. This stuff is moving faster than any of us, scientists included, can even being to conceive of. Ray Kurzweil sums it up nicely when he says that all of us are used to thinking in terms of linear progression and very few of us, if any, can truly begin to cognicize the long-term consequences of continual exponential progression in the fields of GNR (genetics, robotics and nanotechnology). If you haven't already, I highly recommend listening to the interview I did with Ray late last year. I'm quite proud of it.