it’s hard 2motivate yerself in australia. let’s face it we r theoretically spending $43Billion Dollars on a National Broadband Network. I still believe in undefeated hehe

Now it may mean that Telstra gets broken up : Wholesale/Retail. +/or That Kerry Stokes buys Foxtel when Telstra is forced to sell it.

And as ripped off broadband consumers it may well just be another devil to pay too much4 worldwideweb access. but that is this continent; lovely to live in, lifestyle wise, not so good if entrepreneurial with a tech bias.

im not interested in excuses tho, i left my excuses at the door along time ago.

well, deferred my right to take a stand 4 a bit. but if they could just level the playing field a bit.

make internet cheap.

and fast.

our half and decreasing government owned telco charges $1500 a gig if u go over an internet provision plan that on average is 6-20 times smaller than a typical plan at the same price in the western east and west coast world.

ok, real blog posts l8r, just wanted to say hullo. who said twitter, friendfeed and facebook wouldnt kill blogging. and that facebook wouldnt kill friendfeed post $47.5M xoogler brainstrust acquisition.

i should be watching #thementalist + #fringe - both with helmed or with lead Aussie characters, but there is baseball on in America and for Fox Network, that takes precedence over fiction narrative.

Peter Chernin was President and Chief Operating Officer of News Corporation, and Chairman and CEO of the Fox Group until recently. While Rupert couldn’t offer him an executive employment package with enough gold to fit on the Gulstream G550, Chernin Entertainment now has a cosy producing deal with News Corporation that includes “several blind production commitments at the Fox network”.

But after running News Corporation, greenlightling TV sitcoms is only so interesting. Hence Chernin’s first film acquisition is being reported in Variety as “the story of Moses in ‘300′ Style. The tale will start with his near death as an infant to his adoption into the Egyptian royal family, his defiance of the Pharoah and deliverance of the Hebrews from enslavement.”

What the Australian film industry might need though, if it wants to follow Chernin’s Big Biblical Picture, is a slightly different parable : The Good Samaritan. In order to not appear too Braveheart or Gladiator, The Good Samaritan would need to cast a younger lead; Hopefully Sam Worthington in between being a half man/machine Terminator and Avatar for Hollywood, could fit in the feature shoot.

But this is where the post gets a bit more serious, as film snark aside, The Good Samaritan story has legs. That is if you aren’t being roundhouse kicked or king hit from behind when you go to defend an innocent mate or unknown person in trouble.

Front page of the Herald Sun today “Good Samaritans bashed for their Courage : Heroes Fight for Life”. From ninemsn, the story summary : “Ryan Hayes was knocked unconscious after reportedly intervening in a conflict at Bendigo’s Newmarket Hotel, about 140km northwest of Melbourne. The 23-year-old full forward, who once booted 26 goals in a single game and 110 goals in the 2007 season for hometown Elmore in the Heathcote Football League, allegedly stepped in when he found a customer being verbally assaulted by another man. After asking the aggressor to join him outside and making his way toward the door, Hayes was then allegedly struck from behind by a third man.”

And on the Herald Sun website today, the story has prime real estate, with citizen support (and blog comments) growing. There are some pretty animated commenters over there !

“It’s all nice and full of warm feelings for the Govt to honour good samaritans, but what about doing something to deter others from committing violent acts.”

“Todays youth is conditioned to violence.They grow up playing X Boxes and other computer trash whereby to win the game you must kill something or at least blow it up.”

“The Samaritan Day is a fantastic idea to honor the kind hearted people who has got involved and helped a victim. However it is a damming sad reflection on this government and justice system that a day like this is required.”

The frustration is getting worse with each attack, only last week 44 year old plasterer Darren Wheeler “was bashed with a piece of wood after trying to stop two men from stealing his neighbour’s car in Melbourne’s southeast. Darren suffered a brain haemorrhage and facial fractures and remains on life support at the Monash Medical Centre. The brazen daylight attack took place about 6pm in Endeavour Hills after the plasterer stepped in to foil a robbery after returning home from work.”

With the Good Samaritan stories of Ryan Hayes and Darren Wheeler in mind, the Victorian Government has now announced The Good Samaritan Day -  Premier John Brumby soundbites : “This Good Samaritan Day would honour people who have made a stand to create a better and safer community,“ he told the Herald Sun. “We all have a role in taking a stand and creating a community where people respect themselves, respect others and respect our community.” His quote to The Age sums it up : “It has been such a strong feature of our society. If you see someone in trouble you help them, and it’s always been the case.”

While many will use anonymous blog comments to push an anti-government position that a Good Samaritan Day isn’t enough, it is a start. For me, I think if there was more CCTV in place where violence happens (major trading and going out precincts, hot spots where violence erupts, transport hubs ie train stations, even fast food joints) - less people would engage in the risk if they knew the guaranteed result was jail and public humiliation of themselves and family.

But CCTV involves substantial government investment, that means it will take more rather than less time. In the interim, remember to use 1.0 technology like your telephone and CALL 000 as the Herald Sun says anytime there is something happening that needs to be dealt with. And if you are an active Tweeter, Facebooker or any other Social media : Use It! Whether it be writing a blog post like this, retweeting, starting a facebook group. All these tools can be used to promote a cause such as The Good Samaritan. And Not Just the Movie Version.

Man of Chivalry Award brought to you by Chivas*

“Nominating is easy. In the space below tell us the name of your nominee and in 100 words, or less, why you think he should win the Man of Chivalry Award brought to you by Chivas. You don’t have to know the nominee, you just have to want them to win. Come on! Get to work in finding the men who are really making a difference to our country.”

RYAN HAYES KICKED 26 GOALS IN ONE FOOTY MATCH

* DISCLOSURE OF COMMERCIAL COLLABORATION: Ben Barren (me;) does work in the alcohol industry, and partake in the consumption of product outside of work hours. It should be noted this post is written on his own volition + does not reflect the opinion of any clients or agencies, but it would be good if you could click on the above award and nominate someone like Good Samaritans Ryan Hayes and Darren Wheeler on why they think should win the inaugural 2009 Man of Chivalry Award brought to you by Chivas. As the name suggests, the Man of Chivalry Award sponsored by Chivas Regal aims to find the most chivalrous and gentlemanly men across the nation. They’re looking for men, who this year, have displayed outstanding gentlemanly traits, courageous acts and most honorable pursuits for their corporation, their community or their country. GQ and Chivas Regal will pour through all the nominations to come up with one winner. His achievement and story will be celebrated alongside all the other winners in the special 2009 Men of the Year issue. He’ll also be presented with his very own GQ Man of the Year Award at this year’s gala event. Better still, you and a friend will get to come along to the party of the year and join in their celebration. Go On! Be a Good Samaritan! Click Here !

So unfortunately I’ve been low on the long form blogging for the last 12 days as work requirements (and watching Rye win Elimination + Semi-Finals plus Dees win #1 + #2 #8 #34 #50 #66 #82 draft picks) take precedence vs wordpress multi-media mulling over the issue-tech-sneaker-tvshow of the day. But I thought I’d sneak in a status report.. and also do a little bit of spot marketing to see if any1 needs a no fuss / high quality social space system set’er’up’er’er + tracker.

What I’m doing which is different to 15 years at DDB, ninemsn, Sensis, Virtual Communities, Feedcorp is rather than writing documents that don’t get implemented, I’m alot happier rolling up the sleeves. In this case pushing Google Reader - and it’s Feedly + Postrank plugin, as far as they will go when it comes to Social Media Intelligence, Syndication + Marketing;It’s pretty kewl when companies outsource their feature request and bug fixing to GetSatisfaction.com - which funnels a stream of customer issues direct to the company who solve in near to realtime.

My example with Feedly here. Which ended up with me making custom requests of them. And this is where it’s impressive to see how companies - with no direct financial incentive, remuneration or contractual threat - to respond within minutes + solve within a couple hours with a patch. Feedly are rocking it.

3 primary use cases and types of work I’m doing, client projects I’m interested in;

1. Intelligence : Companies wanting to monitor when their brands are mentioned online socially; Across traditional media brands in the market they operate in, local microblog entries on twitter + friendfeed, longer form blog reviews of their company and its product, and also when their creative product is uploaded or remixed on YouTube, Flickr etc. Tools like PostRank (and Filtrbox) with scoring out of 10 for all entries are awesome.

Just finished current stage (2.0 rev) with an awesome MJK Holler’Influence team, around monitoring for a large brand’s corporate comms division.

It was the classic inchwide mile deep project where a narrow scope ultimately made the end result - while not easy, excellent. Would love to do more projects for public companies corporate comms departments, whether it be banks, insurance, FMCG or alcohol.

2. Syndication: Publishers looking to syndicate social and traditional online content via topics, locations, categories, file types via a realtime index from the same social media sources : YouTube, Flickr, Google Blog Search with all posts mentioning Australia OR Sydney OR Melbourne OR Perth etc, Google News filtered by originating country eg Australia

Am doing work in the travel/tourism space and filtering the blogosphere and social space by location - down to key locations, regions, states, countries and filtered by social media type is what I’m now wanting to do more of.

Would love more travel, user generated reviews in travel space, as well as other location based verticals such as property, news and classifieds.

3. Conversational Marketing : Identifying relevant online decision makers for clients and approaching, communicating, achieving results with the community etc. The recent trend seems to be with Daddy Bloggers. (ala Sony’s social campaign with’em via NYTimes blog :

“In general, dads have always gotten the short shrift when it comes to parenting, but in recent times, it’s been different,” said Jeffrey Sass, who is a single parent of a daughter and two sons, ages 17 to 21, and blogs at Dad-O-Matic. Advertisers have focused on mommy bloggers “because everyone believes the mother makes many of the buying decisions in the home, but in product categories like consumer electronics, it makes sense to go after dads,” he said.”)

Well not for me, but industry wise. I am doing alot in the model/fashion/lifestyle space and it would be kewl to work with some of the fashion and retail brands, as well as startup designers.

I’m especially interested with Google Reader now being the dominant RSS platform, and Google expanding it’s Wave Program, while GDocs keeps getting more users (even if they put Jotspot wiki into hibernation), and Gmail is a leading email platform - how Google will Glue it all together. Esp’ when it comes to the enterprise social space.

Google Developer Blog : “Over the last couple of months, we’ve been very busy developing the product, opening the protocol and learning from the thousands of developers who are using and contributing to Google Wave. While the product, platform and protocols are still being developed, we’re extending access to some of the highly collaborative people and communities we hope to benefit in the future - businesses and schools. In turn, we look forward to learning from these Google Apps users, so we can continue to tweak and develop the product as we gain insight from their experiences”

Bottom line is I’m pretty sure the social space enterprise wise is damn interesting when u combine what Google does with its small Reader team with GDocs + Wave, then combine it with mature startups like Feedly + Postrank. Now I need to go find a new client and work on (over) delivering on my active ones.

My Almost Melbourne Black Sunday Dream Uniform

I’ve been spending some of the last few days identifying online newspapers that may be of interest to a client’s clients So I had to laugh at the Tolles@Topix blog post on the conflict of newspapers (highlighted by the Social Media Revolution is Going Nowhere piece in UK’s Daily Telegraph) that simultaneously bag twitter, while having an excess (estimated at 20%) of social media pointers, hehe;

“But the best riposte to this piece is none other than the actual page where the article appears. Between the the “How to use Twitter” block, and the GIANT CHUNK OF REAL ESTATE for the social network every newspaper likes, Digg, it is quite clear that the Telegraph’s business practices reflect that social media is a big part of the the equation for them. There are no less than FOUR separate blocks of pixels, er , references to Twitter on the page here. Subtlety is not a concern for the Telegraph and its use of Twitter.”

I’ve also been looking into the tweens, fashion, and women’s magazine space that have strong online assets, and so was interested in this corresponding VentureBeat piece (created from a behind firewall WSJ feature) that the number of ads in the glossy style mags has gone down 21% in the last year; VentureBeat blurb : “Lifestyle magazines InStyle, Vogue and Elle are expected to see revenue declines this year of 21 percent, 26 percent and 20 percent, respectively, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. September issues of these magazines are almost a third slimmer than last year’s batch, reports the WSJ in a good overview of the sector. You know print really is dying when lifestyle magazines start losing their ads. Fashion brands were slow to move online, because women were slower to get online than men. That’s all changing, and it’s all the more marked because things are going so well online for the lifestyle sector: It is one of the few places showing growth in online advertising (healthcare is another proud example). The main beneficiaries: Places where these women are going more: Twitter, Google’s YouTube video site, and fashion and lifestyle sites such as DailyCandy.com and Glam Media, notes the WSJ. (Indeed, we’re hearing from industry sources that Glam’s revenue in the second quarter was 45 percent higher than the same quarter last year, and that the company is projected to maintain that growth rate through the rest of the year. This comes even as people assumed online display advertising would die during the recession.) The iPhone is also mentioned as a protagonist: With the phone itself considered a fashion accessory, it may become easier — if not hipper — to browse fashion on an iPhone than by flipping through a print magazine.”

On the other hand, it’s good to see if u can breathe some life in a dying sector, u can get rewards other than death…. MagNation - who have the best magazine setup - online and in person - are kicking goal$ via The Australian : “That’s good news for niche magazine mecca MagNation, where the typical customer prefers cult skate and design annual Wooden Toy to mass weekly Woman’s Day and fashion glossy Collezioni outsells Vogue on a per-issue basis, despite the fact it costs up to $150. MagNation co-founders Sahil Merchant and Ravi Pathare are banking on the resilience of specialist titles, with plans to open a second Australian outlet, in Sydney’s Newtown, in October. Like the existing MagNations in Melbourne and Auckland, the Sydney store will carry about 4000 titles over the course of a year, as well as designer stationery and T-shirts. “I’m not worried about the economic climate at all and I’m definitely not worried about … magazine circulations dropping,” says Merchant, who with Pathare (his uncle) shares the title of MagNation’s managing director and “chief magazineologist”"

Maybe it’s why Gap has ditched TV in advertising it’s new “Premium” $69.50 “1969″ jeans - (id noticed some supposed independent reviews of the jeans + the campaign on tumblr this morning - so the strategy seems to be working…)

“Clothing maker Gap is rolling out a new line of jeans, Gap 1969. One thing that will be missing with this new denim line? TV advertising. Instead, the retailer will rely on Facebook to reach customers. Ads on various Web sites (including glam.com and popsugar.com) will drive traffic to Gap’s Facebook page. The “Born to Fit” campaign to promote the 1969 line, created by interactive marketing agency AKQA, also will include traditional elements such as cinema, print, and outdoor ads, too, but Facebook is the main event.”

There was an article the other day by an aptly first named Google economist - Hal Varian (yup they employ those, probably some Nobel prize winner in demand and supply) whose basic argument that the so-called arms race in search or the “Scale” battle was a furphy - as little algorithms can win out. CNet : “So in all of this stuff, the scale arguments are pretty bogus in our view because it’s not the quantity or quality of the ingredients that make a difference, it’s the recipes. We think we’re where we are today because we’ve got better recipes and we have better recipes because we spent 10 years working on search improving the performance of the algorithm.”

I’m definitely not getting into the Size debate - but if u want to get to a $47.5m size Friendfeed-ish flip - then there is alot to be said for having a unique, beautiful, clean, working, scalable product. It’s even better if end users like it and it’s not easy to copy the different parts. Extra bonus if u r the leader in your space and no one really does what u do. And most importantly esp in consumer space - u need a big X-Factor.

So much more understandable, but still suitably abstract if you dont use it - is Polyvore.com - Whose original elevator pitch I remember from Xoogler Jess Less - whose blog I discovered via Friendfeed in the kewl Mountain View beta testing community days. From Jess’ Why Polyvore post (March 08) before joining : “My friend Thai showed me Polyvore back in October. “Check out this site my friend Pasha is building,” he said. I instantly fell in love. It was like a combination of online Photoshop and Flickr, but for art instead of photos. I was fascinated by all the cool things people were creating using Polvore — fashion, interior design, artistic self-expression, caricatures, logos, postcards, etc. I started making my own sets and was surprised by how quickly they got comments and “Likes” from the user community. I ended up winning Polyvore’s Halloween contest. ”

Jess described Polyvore as Photoshop meets Flickr, on the web. That’s how I remembered it. And like alot of the gr8 web services since 2004 - investing a couple hours at the start of a service is well worth the later return. Examples of products I use which I’m glad I learnt.

• How to configure and utilise an RSS reader, add feeds etc (Google Reader)
• Searching for finding, seeding + leeching, unraring .avi’s (TorrentVault)
• Tagging web pages for later reference (Delicious)
• Sending 140 character status messages (Twitter)
• Blogging - where little things like adding hyperlinks and uploading pics had to be learnt at the start (Blogger then Wordpress)
• Bookmarking pages with images (Friendfeed)
• Clipping clothes n kicks I want + inserting later in blog posts (Polyvore)

Polyvore is one of the product innovations from a team of young but heavily experienced in sophisticated web apps (founders from Google Maps + Yahoo Pipes) - that focused on a very specific totally new type of clipping community. When they setup there were many “tagging” and “bookmarking” services wanting to be the next Delicious.

But Polyvore was more about Fashion, and deep product sharing within community and then allowing a personal expression of taste via a scrapbook “photoshop” like blank canvas where u drag and drop the products u want to create an embeddable portfolio of today’s must have items.

So I’m glad to hear Polyvore are up to 4m unique users and have raised another $5.6m to further their growth. It’s such a textbook internet company, it pains me that downunder we can’t learn from the people, capabilities they develop, and execution path - We have exceptions, the too often quoted Atlassian and Remember the Milk, some say Red Bubble… but overall they are the exception that prove the rule. I doubt there are more than a few technical people working in the online industry in Australia that could understand, emulate, and innovate in a similar technical vein to what Polyvore are doing. But I hold out hope that such a superteam does or could exist.

And en masse really is what needed. While Polyvore may grow in numbers staffwise now.. it hasn’t been bigger than alot of small to medium sized online businesses in Australia (or online business units within larger companies) Why in Australia we don’t have more 10 employee venture funded stockoption incented product/technically vertically focused companies is the never ending question that only gets worse. Yes, we have multibillion dollar Seeks, and a $800M+ listing of auto equivalent Carsales - we have little coming up behind them.

Techcrunch Blurb on raising : “The service, which just crossed 4 million unique visitors and 150 million pageviews a month, allows web shoppers to pull their favorite items any online store and mix and match to create personalized outfits online. Users can then share their creations with friends, and, most importantly, anyone can then buy the items shown. This social side of shopping has users engaged. The average visitor spends 10 minutes on the site each time they log on, we’re told. The new $5.6 million Series B round is led by Matrix Partners, alongside previous investors Benchmark Capital and Harrison Metal Capital. Previously, the site had raised $2.5 million from Benchmark, Harrison Metal, Reid Hoffman, and Nirav Tolia. Polyvore launched in 2007, founded by a bunch of ex-Yahoo employees. Since then, it has expanded the team with some talent from the likes of Google and Intuit. The plan for this new money is to further expand the engineering and sales teams, and to promote growth.”

Yes there are editorially focused innovators like CarAdvice.com.au - but as for software meets community scalable vertical consumer leaders… I’ll have to get back to you… because they don’t exist yet… And I dont see the teams working on the edges either.. but I’d love to hear I’m wrong.

I’d like to hear more stories like Jess Lee downunder. But nup - here people work for a bank at lovely daily rates/ go to Google / bide their time at a newspaper ala Fairfax or News / leave the country for an overseas startup if ambitious/ stay local + become a freelance social media consultant + twitter about twitter - which is only one degree of separation from cubicle work often. The reality is none of the companies started downunder in the web2 boom have amounted to much cited examples aside. Which points to a very unhealthy market. Why would u go work at a startup…  From the same Jess Lee post about Polyvore - how many Australian online companies and the industry as a whole engenders this response (unfortunately few + as a whole it doesnt, any more and hasnt for a long time)

Jess Lee - Why Polyvore ? : “I got so excited about Polyvore that I sent a long email full of comments, suggestions, and complaints to Pasha, even though I had never met him before. After a few email exchanges, he asked me if I wanted to join Polyvore. I’ve always wanted to work at a startup and felt like Polyvore was a good fit — great team, great product, just the right size (3 people at the time), healthy growth, etc. It also happened to fall at the intersection of many of my personal interests (tech, art, shopping, fashion, user-generated content). Although I was pretty happy working on Google Maps, I felt like I wasn’t learning as much new stuff anymore, and I knew that a startup would have a really steep learning curve. Some of my friends thought I was crazy to leave Google, but I thought back to the advice my former boss Marissa had given me to always take the more challenging, more risky path (this was the advice that made me choose a job at Google over a job at Intuit), and decided to follow that advice once again. So I decided to take the leap…”

I still want 2C Inglourious Basterds.. but maybe read NY-Times on the (backers of flick the famous tantrum throwing) Weinstein brothers (who wasted their money on the MySpace for VIPs A-Small-World); “Swinging a blue cocktail in one hand, he held forth about the time that Harvey told him he’d like to invest in a restaurant. The goal, Harvey explained to Mr. Tarantino at the time, wasn’t to schmooze, or to get the best table. New York City had just banned cigarettes from restaurants and Harvey, then an avid smoker, didn’t approve. “He said, ‘I want to light up in my own restaurant and blow smoke in the fire marshal’s face,’ ” Mr. Tarantino recalled. Vintage Harvey chutzpah. The story killed, and when the laughing died down, Bob smiled, waited a beat and added another punch line. “A million dollars,” he sighed, “for a cigarette.”“

Mick Malthouse’s Premiership Clock is ticking + his now ex-assistant Brad Scott, formerly of Brisbane - altho he was a Melbourne boy, has been made Senior Coach of North Melbourne. Unfortunately I missed the Dees Win yday - atho I did listen to the SEN radio audiostream - I’ve had one of those cold thangs which us unavoidable if u enter out into the human world. The only viruses u catch arent just on windows machines!

I did catch the Red Hill V Hastings game tho (as Rye had a bye) I’ve gotta say I’m lookin fwd to the Mornington Peninsula Football League Nepean Division (finals’ere) where my team Rye (assisted by Richmond Trifecta of Jake King - who went for Didak on weekend, Greg Stafford + Chaffey) is playing in a good year for the Top 5 teams.. AFL Finals at the MCC (Long Room + Dining Room Bar where I can take up to 4 visitors for the first few finals anyway!)

And now that Geelong have come back to the field, and even Riewoldt et St Kilda choked against Bombers yday. It’s gonna be all on come September. Did I mention the kickass organic chook chips n gravy I had from Ormond road last nite ? Yumo… Could have used the D+G Hooded Scarf - even if D+G Copied the original…

So while I have no topic in particular to this blog post.. maybe u can get behind my request of Google Reader that I twittered @googlereader Was wondering if feeds by tag/folder4 shared items is on your product roadmap radar? awesome 2have spliced shared items feed - Let me explain my request further and you can see the Google Reader Get Satisfaction feedback forum - which is an interesting case study itself on modern product development, even in a farely secretive BigCo like the big GOOG cheese.

In my current Red Barren work - I’m trying to build on a single value chain (Social Media Optimization let’s call it), singularly (meaning I can deliver and support it myself / i am dependent only on me, myself, and I / no1 2 blame or reward but me), even if working on various client objectives (some want to monitor when they are mentioned on blogs/twitter - others want to syndicate a selection of youtube/flickr/blog posts to their website)

Rather than working on a range of projects with no continuity - I’m also trying to be able to work virtually (so I dont need to actually be there or somewhere to do the work - so dont need to waste hours/days on driving to multi-hour meetings which is ineffective for me and to the chargee) Finally, I’m trying to utilise and then build upon the most open / freemium tools available using some base level Atom, RSS, OPML and other feed based formats. The main tool I’m using to coordinate the different projects is Google Reader.

G_Reader as those in the industry around it (8 and counting) is great at sucking in, validating and updating RSS feeds - which can be categorised into their various content types (eg images from Flickr, videos from YouTube, microblogs from Twitter and Friendfeed, media news from Google News, blogs from Google Blog Search) as well as other dimensions such as location (region, state, suburb etc) and category (eg sports, entertainment, travel, auto etc)

The bonus with Google Reader is you can import and export OPML. I personally track 4000 feeds - which I have to finally delete some as I maxed it about 6 months ago… And there are brilliant extensions to represent the content via Feedly.com. And awesome real time analytics down to entry level out of 10 from Postrank.com with their Google Reader extension. I totally agree with what Rex Hammock said re whether Friendfeed type solutions replaced Google Reader (NOT:P!) : “I’m now a fan of FriendFeed, but Google Reader is the place I live. It’s not only my browser start page — it’s pretty much my browser middle page and end page, also. Oddly, whenever I speak to groups of real people (individuals not obsessed with geekitude) I always ask how many of them use Google Reader (I’ve quit saying RSS Reader). None do. Only a small percentage of them even use iGoogle. Frankly, I don’t understand how someone can cope with all this stuff that bombards us everyday if they didn’t have the internet organized with a news reader. If you’re reading this and don’t use Google Reader, spend a little time setting it up and using it a little each day to make the web come to you — rather than you going to it. Within a week, you’ll be thanking me for saving you lots of time. Or “cussing” me because you’ve discovered some incredible new feeds to follow.”

So you can do some pretty fancy yet still basic boolean/advanced search parameters to get a good match for clients wanting to monitor their company, brands, competitors, topics of interest + whatever other alerts they r interested in. After spending years drilling the blogosphere down to a country rather than Global AKA North American level, you can limit the content to mentioning or originating from Australia or England or Germany or Asia etc.

But what u cant do is combat bad quality. Bad writing. Blog posts or even worse tweets that just arent relevant to your client. And that’s why preventative algorithmic matching to create a subset of content ready for human moderation works so well. But u need the editorial manicuring if that is a word or who cares if it isn’t. But what Google Reader doesn’t do and what I tweeted for them to do - to save me the hours and days I’ve already spent (probably wasted too) is when U select the various items of relevance to your client(s) - What Google Reader calls “Shared Items” - which outputs as a feed (and so can thus be manipulated/syndicated/turned into a daily pdf report via Tabbloid.com)

The Shared Items feed from Google Reader loses all the category and tags that u set up in Google Reader and comes out as just one dumb aggregate feed by recency. If these shared items could just retain their tags/topics/folders it would be so much more powerful. I could deliver to my clients out of the box:

• A Daily Report of the 10 most Important Twitter Messages for mentions of a Public Company
• Selection of YouTube Videos broken down by their Roy Morgan Psychographic Consumer Segmentation
• Best Suburb Level Geocoded Flickr Pics for Real Estate Website
• Five Customer Testimonials for a new Online Banking Feature
• Bad Consumer Experiences blogged about of a competitors customer support
• etc

But bloody Google Reader only gives me one feed to aggregate all of the above... and supposedly it loses the tag.topic.category schema/structure built into the feed. Aggh so pretty please Google Reader team u rock, but can u pls fix, ta.

So in other news, it appears newspapers and related content entiries such as AP were validated in their wish to ban the parasites like Google and bloggers. Paid Content : “The vast majority of the value gets captured by aggregators linking and scraping rather than by the news organizations that get linked and scraped. We did a study of traffic on several sites that aggregate purely a menu of news stories. In all cases, there was at least twice as much traffic on the home page as there were clicks going to the stories that were on it. In other words, a very large share of the people who were visiting the site were merely browsing to read headlines rather than using the aggregation page to decide what they wanted to read in detail. Obviously, this has major ramifications for content creators’ ability to grow ad revenue, as the main benefit of added traffic is the potential for higher CPMs. (Disclosure: I have consulted for the AP and other content creators, though not on this particular issue.)”

But then the pro-validation of the anti-parasites argument was deconstructed to the positive. Jeff Jarvis : “If links are not valuable, then fine, get rid of them: refuse all aggregators’ and search engines’ robots, complain so much about links that no one bothers to link to you (a la the AP). Or put all your stuff behind a pay wall where the links won’t pay off. Where are you then? Without discovery. Without audience. Without a means to monetize audience. Links may not be worth as much as you wish they were worth, but that’s an unstated and unmeasurable standard and quite meaningless. You’ll discover just how much they are worth if you don’t have them. That’s the only meaningful analysis.”

Meaning the newspapers and AP are wrong again.

All I know is I don’t have AMC or HBO Premium Cable TV Channels - and tonite I watch the Series 3 return of Mad Men, followed by current season (actually last nite in America… well a few hours ago only really) HBO’s biggest show they say since Sopranos - True Blood, the awesome new str8 basketball coaching hooker Hung and not so good anymore actually bloody awful Entourage.

And not only do no Aussie or Global players let me legally and fairly pay to watch what hundreds of millions of people have the right to at the same time... heck Australia has only just started playing Seasons 1 of The Wire, United States of Tara and Mad Men on TV.

The only Parasite getting paid is iPrimus $139 for 200 gigage of programming a month (The ADSL 2+ Extra Big Kahuna Plan the only good large usage internet plan on the Mornington Peninsula)- who then use the Telstra network (but i much prefer paying 70c a gig versus the $2.50 they charge + $150 per gig when u go over 60 gig!) - to deliver me the latest HBO + AMC. Well plus $17 a month for a superfast / supersafe / supersecure up to the second TV deliverer….and with a sub $200 WDTV 2.0 settop box connected to yer LCD big screenTV - u can throw away that Foxtel IQ box and get the world’s leading TV and movies from the last 24 hours not Foxtel which apart from LIVE sports shows 2 years ago Movies and TV.

Anyway, I’m going to try and exercise so I can give my body a bit of a cleanse and see if I can get rid off this wacko cold thing… and I actually new new hightech / retrointerpretation runners with a twist like these Air Maxim Cross Trainer in OG colours… maybe with the new U-Boat Classico Chrono for a stopwatch…

End of Post Polyvore Charcoal + Zebra Fun

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If there’s one type of TV that’s a guilty pleasure it’s the Robin Hood “Long Con” - That’s when a posse of criminals’ criminal steal (back) from guilty remorseless bloodsucking scum. Obviously u had the Soderbergh Oceans 11-12-13 franchise - But I’m particularly partial to TNT’s #Leverage + BBC’s #Hustle. But this post aint about “The Long Con” TV - it’s about a parallel analogy that Xooglers can be very good at The Long Con when applied to building product and community then taking the financial benefit.

I’m talking 12 largely Xoogle Friendfeeders taking $50m in stock and cash from a pre-IPO Facebook, after already being minted millionaires for inventing + Doing No Evil at Google. You can check my friendfeed for my acquisition google reader shares and delicious links. Or see what my friends on Friendfeed are saying about the M+A. Or go even broader for the whole of Scoble’s broken heart friendfeed on the deal. This was only ever going to end in tears, but what is annoying is who is going to fill my product gaps as Twitter begat Friendfeed… but Friendfeed has not yet begat anything I can use as a substitute.. Even if Marshall hopes for a Perfect Storm.

I’m heading off to Melbourne via the gym so I can only leave bulletpoints on the product gaps I need to fill when Facebook gets assimilated beyond Web 2.0 recognition by the Facebook Lite Zuckerborg.

• Real Time Status Updates from Techy Types with low spam.. with no 140-160 character max and not limited to text - including Video, Images, etc - Luckily Friendfeed suck in feeds from all the major players and presented them in realtime.
• Personal Micropublishing tools where I could push webpages via a bookmarklet and include an image and longer than Delicious 1000 character maximum snippet and importantly - publish up to 3 images per page. With publishing to twitter a tickbox. Basically when I dont want to overload Twitter with sneakers and random good looking luxury items + I need to store images for later blog posts, which Delicious doesnt do, I used friendfeed.
• Private Room where u can + your special some1 can share snippets of the web in realtime.. so much easier than Twitter DM - cheaper than Text and with rich media.

That’s just a start.. but like I said this was a Long Con… and Long Cons are never that Long.. maybe 1-2 years max.. now the founders can add to that Google kaching with many millions more of benjamins cashola and some pre-IPO Facebook stock - which along with Linkedin and Twitter - may be only 1 of 3 of the major currencies.. actually worth something.. Not a bad hedge at all. Esp given Google may now get Twitter - so the Xoogling Friendfacebookers have exposure to both sides of the social networking puzzle.

But what is next.. yes open source / distributed social networking / android mobile anarchy apps / chromed apps etc - I just want to know what the new Friendster/Facebook/Twitter/Friendfeed is… maybe a start would be determining what product(s) I can use to fill the Friendfeed being turned off gap..

At Least Polyvore.com the Friendfeed of Fashion is Still Independent !

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Encyclopaedia Britannica, along with CEO of News Ltd John Hartigan, would likely not regard The Inquisitr Founder and Chief Blogger / Editor in Chief / Writer / Links Curator - Duncan Riley (whose personal blog is mission’d “blogging is not a spectator sport”) - a Journalist. Duncan (and probably every Australian with an active Facebook page) would probably fit into what Hartigan referred to when he said : “Then there are the bloggers. In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we’ve paid for. Something of such little intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance.”

Wikipedia on the other hand, does consider Duncan a person “worthy of notice” or specifically “significant, interesting, or unusual enough to deserve attention or to be recorded.”^[1] Now Wikipedia may not list Duncan as a “Journalist” (that is until someone updates Wikipedia as such - and then another party corrects/edits the update, and so on to infinity) - but Duncan, with a very small cadre of lean, sometimes mean, sometimes nice, but always fast, around the clock, and full of passion - is reporting, almost breaking, pushing the latest news - From Apple:Google:Twitter tech to 4chan:FTW:Fail:Youtube viral and even now some FanFooty founder fare.

Page 11* of Melbourne’s Sunday Age today devotes a full page of print to explore the “future of (high end) journalism” and whether a consumer pays model can be panacea for survival of (cue violins as David Simon creator of The Wire - whose cut short due to budget finale season 5 was about the decay of the media institution) is quoted “unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else.” - Funny thing I thought people like Duncan with Inquisitr were the new economic model that is being reborn on the web !

Dennis ‘Cutty’ Wise: The game done changed…
Slim Charles: Game’s the same, just got more fierce.

* Article isn’t online but the top level News Ltd charging for online content is’ere.

The feature article taps into the oft discussed debate that has been thrown around for years at Web 2.0 conferences - with very little difference to first year politics and philosophy undergraduate subjects I’ve sat thru - that define, discuss, debate :

Topic A. “Bloggers VS Journos” - Mumbrella covering Hartigan’s us + them Newspapers 1.0 approach : “My name is Pollyanna. “I’m here to tell you about the bright future facing journalists, particularly newspaper journalists...”

Topic B. Google vs Newspaper. This is where google is the virtual “cloud” media and software business. New York Times, News Ltd/Corp + Fairfax Newspaper businesses are referenced with their plush tens of millions of dollars overheaded physical newsrooms - with lots of bodies collecting, creating, disseminating “the news”. Mumbrella said it well in his (reply) letter to Mr Hartigan; “What Mumbrella does is just dowdy old B2B publishing, using newer tools. It just so happens that the B2B world we cover is the media and marketing industry. I suspect if I was doing exactly the same thing for the mining or medical industry (and as it happens, my sister title Thumbrella is already covering the travel & hospitality market), he wouldn’t even know I exist. Our readers are for the most part from within the industry, not the public.”

Topic C. Bloggers + Journos are one and the same Even though the Journo/Newspaper/MSM may be just another information source / feed / data provider - one of many providing a product with many substitutes; It’s best material - Either hyperlocal / opinion pieces / that with true creative power… that is unique / stickey etc - u get the drill. What u cant get from the other paper - that is the valuable stuff. And it’s not just editorial. A newspaper is it’s sale staff with relationships into advertising budgets bloggers can only dream about. This is where the monetisation story of social media hasn’t even begun.. and if newspapers could actually get a bit ahead of social media they would realise it’s a subset of their traditional media business… just with some crowdsourced elements, and distributed realtime content gathering and uses some new front end online tools for the end consumer. Yesterday’s news is a commodity but a breaking story or strong piece will get it’s own free marketing channel; Who under fair use summarises, collates, links, adds rich media, pushes to twitter, facebook, digg + gets “the news” to their “community” (formerly the “readers” or “audience”) - Who then in turn retweet / blog the item. The quid po quo is the media gets traffic and can ultimately do whatever they want with the cattle that is hearded to them - Charge / advertise / monetise / etc The Slumdog Millionaire effect…. one person saw it.. told another… then eventually it won more than a handful of academy awards.. Not because of marketing or production budget.. because of frenetic perfect 100 minutes of creative execution.. which created huge word of mouth where friends told the next to see it.. journalism online is no different..

So back to Duncan - he often via his personal blog (it’s not much of a globally consumer interesting news story - the future of Aussie newspapers.. unless like recently Rupert uses Australian markets first to test the paywall theory for his overseas properties) has mentioned how simple it is for newspapers - with one line of computer code : known as robots.txt protocol - to stop who it considers the largest parasite : Google to use it’s content (under fair use.. google doesn’t/cant republish the full article - unless it’s on a private page used by consumers such as Google Reader which the publisher has to publish in) But the newspapers havent yet banned google or bloggers from using it’s content.

Possibly as Duncan reports from a Harold Mitchell talk (Australia’s largest advertising media buyer) - News Ltd may go straight to suing Google; “Mitchell: the fight is on two fronts. One is to stop people like Google and organizations like Google from simply taking the information and making it available from inside their product. And the second thing is to get the product in such a way that subscribers are prepared to pay. It’s a fight that has to be won.”.

Either way, at the moment The Newspapers want it both way.

They want the traffic that comes from Google via it’s search engine and news properties. It is industry standard for Google to drive - at no cost (not incl google adsense advertising on right of search results page or any search engine optimisation costs) 30-50% of a website’s traffic. Given that the average cost per click averages 40c-$1+ depending on the consumer, and the newspaper groups each have millions of monthly online readers - Google is delivering millions of annual value in free marketing benefit to the print behemoths. So they have to decide in this equation the value of their content relative to the free marketing value a “parasite” brings.

Similarly, if you track the rise of Social Networks such as Facebook, and microblogging wireless friendly Twittering (click for Fred Wilson Twitter investor example)- a great amount of “parasitic” link sharing behaviour goes on; Many websites with audience in the social network sweetspot are receiving 10-20% of their traffic via Twitter and Facebook. In some cases traffic from these sources is overtaking Google as their main source of referrals. This trend will only continue over the coming years. And again, to date there is no cost to the newspapers for this free traffic. The techcrunch graph is 6 months old but u get the idea…

The irony is for a lifetime we have been subjected to millions of dollars of above the line advertising - for each of the major newspapers in Australia; The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun - who between them would likely have an annual 8 figure spend on Television Commercials, Print Ads and Outdoor advertising. But like political advertising who knows what effect it really has on consumer behaviour.

When I recommend to my 1600 twitter friends a link from a newspaper, a picture from my blackberry or possibly a pair of sneakers I like 50-125 people visit that link in under 60 minutes. You extrapolate that to millions of Australians on Facebook and Twitter - just in Australia. Then you combine that with an even bigger “parasite” in Google in terms of the free unique users it delivers to newspaper groups; It is insane that the newspapers consider Us - The 2006 Time Person of the Year - as the parasite.

The extra irony or perhaps the chess piece on the table is this potential sequence of Google litigation / increased newspaper paywalls / labelling of bloggers as parasites - is by the owner of the once leader of social networking - MySpace. In what is still considered one of the best value corporate internet takeovers in the noughties.

In a land of low innovation, slow moving disadvantage and cosy Kerry 2.0 + Rupert 1.0 oligopolies - what is disappointing but not unexpected is the transition straight from print rivers of gold to draconian solutions; Make the consumer pay; Sack staff; Sue competitors.

Wouldn’t it be easier to get on the front feet and follow examples that work in larger markets; Michael Wolff - the author of the best book about the Dot Com period - Burn Rate - recently wrote a Vanity Fair piece on Politico - the online business (with a print publication as a subset product) that has real numbers of staff; Real readers; Real revenue and profit and Huge amounts of Influence in Washington;

“Politico further alters the nature and effect of news by undermining the favorite view of old-line news organizations that news can be “platform agnostic”—a preferred phrase of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. This implies that content is content and it doesn’t matter how it’s delivered—hence, existing news organizations, with their existing content, can yet find a way to sell it. But Politico’s news is not like political news has ever been. Its Internet-focused version is some obsessive-compulsive mix of trade journal, Twitter feed, and, quite literally, real-time chat with seniormost newsmakers and leakers. It is constant, unrelenting, second by second. It exalts, and fetishizes, in breathless, even orgiastic news flashes, the most boring subject in the world: the granular workings of government bureaucracy. It is, arguably, in its hyperbolic attentions and exertions, in its fixations on interests that could not possibly interest anyone but the person doing it and the writer writing about it, something like a constant parody of itself.“

Michael Arrington Founder of Techcrunch.com (that Duncan Riley previously wrote for in between blog ventures) - a technology blog about startups originally and now a range of BigCo news  - that has Seven million monthly unique users - and alleged millions of turnover - wrote a piece about how the New York Times or a parasite willing to feed on it - could grab the Top 50 journalists from the paper, pay them $200k each and run the business on a far leaner overhead;

“So that got me thinking about the NYTimes. $3 billion in revenue. 16 million monthly unique visitors and 124 million page views (Comscore worldwide, May 2009). 9,000+ employees. 1,200 news staff, and just 400 or so writers, critics, correspondents and columnists. I’m still waiting to hear how many editors the paper has on top of those 400, but it’s probably a total full time news staff of no more than 450 people. I don’t really read the NYTImes beyond the technology section. But I’m guessing that the top performers in the news room, say the best 5%-10% of the writers and editors, produce 50% or more of the real value of the newspaper. The hungriest reporters. The best writers. The most competitive and aggressive editors. What if that group, the most valuable assets that the NYTimes controls, simply walked out of the building and started their own company? What would that look like? The New New York Times : The New New York Times, or NNYT, would have a writing staff of say 50 people. These are among the best journalists in the world, and let’s say they wanted to pay themselves $200,000/year, a top salary for a reporter of that stature. That’s just $10 million a year in payroll expenses. Call it $12 million with benefits. Plus, they all have stock options in the new company.”

D’Angelo Barksdale: Yeah, like my uncle. You see this? This the queen. She smart, she fast. She move any way she want, as far as she want. And she is the go-get-shit-done piece.
Wallace: Remind me of Stringer.
D’Angelo Barksdale: And this over here is the castle. Like the stash. It can move like this, and like this.
Wallace: Dog, stash don’t move, man.
D’Angelo Barksdale: C’mon, yo, think. How many time we move the stash house this week? Right? And every time we move the stash, we gotta move a little muscle with it, right? To protect it.
Preston ‘Bodie’ Broadus: True, true, you right. All right, what about them little baldheaded bitches right there?
D’Angelo Barksdale: These right here, these are the pawns. They like the soldiers. They move like this, one space forward only. Except when they fight, then it’s like this. And they like the front lines, they be out in the field.
Wallace: So how do you get to be the king?

Not to mention what happens when you look at the verticals that newspapers once oned; Yelp.com own restaurant and small business reviews in the US - not written by journos but by consumers that have been to these establishments and written (by and large) about their experience - but no newspaper group has successfully attacked this space downunder; TripAdvisor.com owns holiday reviews - Again Fairfax has bought into the travel intermediary accomodation booking space but not the review area - which would make sense for an editorial business; In finance, you have a range of new real time finance players such as StockTwits; No activity in Australia in the stockmarket newspaper area.. just the same old boring stock finance charts in the paper - really whats the point : It’s wasted trees. And as for gossip - Australians are increasingly likely to get it from PerezHilton.com, TMZ.com or Duncan’s Inquisitr.

Some of the good examples downunder underheralded is CarAdvice.com.au - setup and staffed by wait for it - a group of ex journalists - It’s now the largest independent automotive editorial website downunder and a leader in that segment. All with simple daily blogging with great pictures about new cars on the Australian market. Read the automotive section of Australian newspapers recently, including Saturday ? It’s pretty barren like my name. Similarly a Melbourne company Streetadvisor.com are allowing people to recommend streets, suburbs and locations - a potentially valuable resource if it can get critical mass for home buyers.

D’Angelo Barksdale: Now look, check it, it’s simple, it’s simple. See this? This the kingpin, a’ight? And he the man. You get the other dude’s king, you got the game. But he trying to get your king too, so you gotta protect it. Now, the king, he move one space any direction he damn choose, ’cause he’s the king. Like this, this, this, a’ight? But he ain’t got no hustle. But the rest of these motherfuckers on the team, they got his back. And they run so deep, he really ain’t gotta do shit.

Next time you see an Australian newspaper exec who is asking for dollars from the consumer, or even better as a government bailout (that will probably be next) ask them what they are doing about Cutting Their Own Lunch. What are their new ventures in the spaces they previously owned; Politics ? Entertainment ? Finance ? Real Estate ? Auto Movies ? and so on…

Ironically - and I seem to be using that word in this post alot, the newspapers online are having to become alot more like the parasites they detest; The home page for News Ltd News.com.au, or Fairfax’s TheAge.com.au or SMH.com.au - are increasingly having to be titillating or oddspot news to try and get some of the internet / digg.com / facebook / twitter traffic. Which is really not satisfying anyone too much. The newspaper groups are increasingly as they should adopting the reverse chronological, opinion, bloggy format for its ‘journalists’ to write about whatever grabs them that day.

But when it comes to the main game - which is giving the printing press over to the Community - so they can contribute their own viewpoint - dont expect much more than the abilty to sometimes contribute a blog comment - that will then be moderated by an editor some time soon and maybe put up online. Not exactly market changing.

As AVC says tho, better to get on with it than be stuck in the middle.. “They already have a subscription model in place at the WSJ. I don’t like the WSJ’s model as much as the FT’s model and I explained why in the post I linked to above. But News Corp has a model they could propogate across their other news sites. It’s not clear to me that newspapers like The Sun, The Times, and The Post will be able to make the WSJ’s model work. And that’s what interests me. What will News Corp do for those properties? And will it work?”

Marc Cuban, Yahoo 1.0 Harvester, gets the salesforce ideas on : “You could offer a “Newsjunkies Subscription”  that includes:

a.  Access to every Newscorp news website from around the world (excluding the wall street journal). From the NYPost to the UK’s Sunday Times, Sun and more.

b. Your choice of any 2 books from our Harpers Collins collection. That’s right. Pick any 2, from our Best Sellers list, or from the special list we have put together specifically for newsjunkies like you. Its your choice if you want them in hardback, paperback or e-book format.

c.  A subscription to our news magazine, The Weekly Standard. The choice is yours whether you would like it delivered to your emailbox, printed and mailed to you or both !

d. A $99 credit at a special edition of  The Fox Store that we put together exclusively for our News Junkie Subscribers. You can pick from newly released to DVD movies or from our classics. Its up to you !

Cuban continued : “.. So to summarize. In addition to Fox websites from around the world, a $ 79 dollar annual value, you get: 2 books from our Harper Collins collection, with a value of up to $79. a subscription to the Weekly Standard, worth up to $ 64 (in a deal with its new owner) a special $99 credit at The Fox Store where you can pick from an amazing selection of movies and tv shows. For a total value of  $ 321. Because our Fox News Junkie Subscribers are critically important to us, we are offering this special package for a limited time only.  This amazing package can be yours for the low low price of only…

$ 9.95 per month with a minimum commitment of 15 months ! Add a subscription to the Wall Street Journal  Online for $ 5 more per month, or get both the WSJ online and daily delivery to your home for an additional $9.95 per month...”

D’Angelo Barksdale: Yo, what was that?
Wallace: Hm?
D’Angelo Barksdale: Castle can’t move like that. Yo, castle move up and down and sideways like.
Preston ‘Bodie’ Broadus: Nah, we ain’t playing that.
Wallace: Yeah, look at the board. We playing checkers.
D’Angelo Barksdale: Checkers?
Wallace: Yeah, checkers.
D’Angelo Barksdale: Yo, why you playing checkers on a chess set?
Preston ‘Bodie’ Broadus: Yo, why you give a shit?

The elixir call of sleep, definitely need that 2nite… 2nd day in a row of the commute.. A few hundred kilometres later I’m glad it’s Friday... till it starts again the next day.. So after all the driving didn’t have enough petrol to get to gym or an open post 5pm servo - And I felt like a bit of non unleaded petrol oxygen, so a quick skip down the beach (would prefer the Air Maxim Patta above or standard issue), except my current Air Max Safaris have holes in both the toes and worn out sole.

So after spending the night listening to the audio transistor of Blues upstage faultering Cats, a bit of pre-bed #BurnNotice S3E9 (and Holly Hunter’s quirky rowdy cop meets angel interfacing #SavingGrace) hits the spot. Thx gawd Strickler has been dealt with.

Long Way Back

Aired: Aug/06/2009
Michael is forced to team up with Fiona’s brother in order to save her from a dangerous man from her past.

3 new Supra TK Society, my current kick in Charcoal Patent, are out - The Burgundy is prob my fave and the Midnight Blue/Black is Killer too.

Just when I thought there couldn’t be any more new kicks - 2 of my fave brands - Undefeated + Gourmet have a collab soon to be release via SneakerNews : “Gourmet gussied up some of their truly original models this spring by crafting them from epi leather. The coarse material famous from use in French luggage has become their new favourite thing, as evinced by this latest new silhouette. We don’t know the name of this new sneaker yet, but it’s likely to have a big launch because of the world-class collaborator in tow. The white upper has Undefeated’s unmistakable tally on the outer ankles, adding depth to the design that includes a black sole and tongue with red laces. We’ll keep you updated with more info, including a name and release date.”

From the Sperry Topsider site - the Band of Outsiders collab : They might need some help with the copy, its a gr8 product : “In collaboration with Scott Sternberg from Band of Outsiders, Sperry is offering this limited edition style that gives an edge to its Authentic Original with suede fabrics and laceless styling. Still providing wave-siped, non-marking outsoles your feet will be fashionable on the boardwalks of the islands and the big city streets.”

BAND OF OUTSIDERS - CHUKKA BOOT  : “Again, Band has teamed up with Sperry Top Sider, the company with black belt in boat shoes. Chukka boot meets boat shoe and the color is called cracked Champagne. I would call it grey but hey. All suede, rubber sole and lined with striped cotton. White stitches on the top and the red and yellow laces makes them perfect.” - Unfortunately the yellow laces cost $67 more.. amazing how different the photos look..

SupraTalk on the BlueBlack TK’s : “Terry Kennedy has been turning heads in the Blue Black TK Society colorway for quite a while and today we can bring you a closer look at this sneaker. The first thing you notice when you pick this TK Society up is how soft the leather is and the distinct shine the black and blue leather upper has. Again this TK Society comes with a black and white vulcanized sole and white wax laces. The Blue Black TK Society is easily our most favoured of the upcoming TK Society releases..”

SupraTalk Burgundy are prob my faves of new season TKs: “The Burgundy TK Society consists of an all Burgundy Leather Upper with a black and white vulcanised sole topping this sneaker off. The Burgundy TK Society also comes with white wax laces. No complaints about this sneaker, it adds another mature leather colorway to the Supra lineup.” (YouTube clip on the TK Society Burgundy)

Supra TK Society Black Suede Kicks on SupraTalk : “The Black Suede TK Society has been one of the more anticipated upcoming colorways from Supra, with a lot of Black Croc Skytop fans looking to upgrade. The upper consists entirely of smooth black suede, with the monochrome color scheme continuing into the vulcanized sole. Extra white wax laces are also included in the package.”

I could talk about the near perfect atlantic salmon fillets from the Amazing Italian Crack Supplier in Parkdale on Nepean Hwy. 7 minutes on a bbq (they were thick…) and washed down with a 567ml pint of Little Creatures Pale Ale from Fremantle.. well it was a nice post gym meal. Even if some kitties had a hard day of it… it will get better !

Got a truckload of deliverables tomorrow/well um today…. and better get to bed.. so u will have to make do with pictures.. pretty soon I will be getting rid of the pictures from blogging.. and it will just be a canvas of white… although I guess this blog is published on a black background, so I guess it might end up being like some of Rothko’s darker work.

The Michael Jackson Deal via LA Times : “Under terms of a 2002 will Jackson signed, his mother and three children receive a combined 80% of his assets, with the remainder going to several unnamed children’s charities. In the deal with Columbia — a division of entertainment giant Sony Corp., which distributes Jackson’s music as an adult solo performer — Jackson’s estate would receive 90% of any movie profit and the rest would go to AEG. A final cut of the film must be screened for representatives of his estate no later than Oct. 2, must be rated PG and cannot include material that “presents Michael Jackson in a negative light,” the contract says. There are plans for a movie soundtrack as well as a director’s cut DVD and two special editions of the film after its theatrical run. The documents also stipulate that Branca, Jackson’s longtime entertainment attorney, and McClain, a family friend, can produce at least one tribute concert to the singer as long as the broadcast does not interfere with the film’s release. ”

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Google brand is worth $100 Billion Dollars Please… Just let me clip that intangibles ticket… And Twitter’s capital city is London - Both Techcrunch say…

Gotta get me some of those Supra NS Strapped Wildlife  below now they are out… maaaaad… but then I want the Gourmet Diecis above… choice$ choice$… oh well not exactly my next purchase anyway in a land of milk and honey. Suffice to say Gourmet and Supra are on top of the sneaker crossover chukka game - esp given they are selling product in the $70-$140USD price range which the highest of luxury euro brands arent doing for $400-$1000 - even stellar brands like Common Projects or Lanvin.

The best kicks are (not wikipedia links*) Gourmet and Supra, fullstop. Check the materials and details. Basically every shoe on this post are one of the two brands… and just a limited selection of the current fall lines… As these are new brands.. they dont have to continually go back and again to retro-ise Air Max / Force 1 / Cross Trainer / Adidas Superstar / Puma Mids / NBs - etc as much as like em all.. These brands are doing fresh… and that’s somehow just how u gotta roll… Like a Zebra with laces that dont go straight… strategy is all zigzag after all.. u have to constantly replot how to get from A to B.. as long as u know where B is.. OMG i just regressed into a deep Six Sigma repressed abuse memory where management consultants planted a deep memory.. How fresh are these Gourmet’s below ? Maybe with this matching kinda jacket ?

Love that Rupe wants to get Google to pay for all that content they gnews… maybe GOOG will ask for a cost per click for each unique user returned back. From Paid Content : “The News Corp chairman and CEO told analysts and reporters during the Q4 earnings call: “We intend to charge for our news websites. The Wall Street Journal‘s WSJ.com is the world’s most successful paid news site and we will be using our profitable experience there and the resulting unique skills throughout News Corp (NYSE: NWS). to increase our revenues from all our content.” Murdoch cited the arrival of Jon Miller as chief digital officer and his work “leading a company-wide effort to establish a new economic model to profitably transition our print properties to digital.””

* is it just me who gets sick of wikipedia links being used as kinda smartass explanation…. there really should be a facebook group for that - if  i wanted an education… i would have bought a skool… says he who uses wikipedia links.. but i annoy myself anyway.. and wikipedia links in moderation… and in lieu of no other options for linkage… It’s really the gift voucher of linking… better than a google spam seo link… but still it aint no silver kicks present u r into..

Some of The Nicer Affordable Jackets out at the Moment

Oh I’m an uncle today for first time.. Congrats Jeremy - Zoe… and Toby the main man… I’m registering u for MCC fo’sure…

• Browse all

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	Gourmet Dieci Suede GO10515 142 AUD - pickyourshoes.com Buy
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