www.nickhodge.com

… to para­phrase the quo­ta­tion below. Thanks to danah boyd for the inspiration.

(click on image to see lar­ger version)

Thanks to Mark Pesce for the recom­mend­a­tion to the Essen­tials journ­al­ist, Nick Galvin.

Oh, and Fiona Mor­ris had a ver­sion of the photo taken with cats. The cat ver­sions were fun­nier. Behind the scenes: when the photo as taken, we were actu­ally look­ing at http://icanhascheezburger.com/ for the LOL inspiration.

Cameron Reilly’s recent Pod­cast “Ex-Gloria Jean’s Fran­chisees Speak Out” is invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ism in the raw.

Fur­ther evid­ence that non “Mainstream Media” can do deep invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ism. TPN goes into the same orbit as Crikey.com.au in my book.

The story has been going along for some months and shows Cameron’s desire to find out the story to a greater depth than newspapers.

It will be inter­est­ing to see if Gloria Jeans (or at least the par­ent organ­isa­tion of the fran­chise) replies to this, and asks to be inter­viewed by G’Day world. Or bet­ter yet, Cameron asks the organ­isa­tion for a response.

Well done, Cameron.

Blue Day means a clear day. I could see the sky. After leav­ing a dark and rainy Sydney, 4degC Mel­bourne was a rude surprise.

Up at 4:00am. A cat wandered out, stretched and looked at me quiz­zically seem­ingly ask­ing : “WTF?”

After check­ing the online world, my new res­id­ence, drive off to the air­port. Megan’s bat­tery is stuffed. Oh well, time to jump in the other MINI (Scar­lett) and off.

Vir­gin Blue to Mel­bourne left only 10 minutes late due to Mel­bourne being fogged in. The in-flight magazine “Voyeur” has a one-page art­icle on Social Net­work­ing. LOL. It’s main­stream now.

There are two reas­ons for being in Mel­bourne: PR Sum­mit run by Fro­comm. I am a pan­el­ist along with Mar­ilyn Chalkley, Man­ager, CSIRO Media Liaison and Andrew Par­sons, Dir­ector, Pro­duc­tion and Digital Com­mu­nic­a­tions, Depart­ment of Immig­ra­tion and Cit­izen­ship. My title merely said “Pro­fes­sional Geek”

(for those watch­ing my Twit­ter: here is the real Air gui­tar You­tube: Dr Richard Helmer’s Every wanna be rocker’s dream come true)

The ses­sion prior to the panel was by Abi­gail Thomas from the ABC. Abi­gail talked about ABC’s Second­Life island.

So, the panel was inter­est­ing. There is a big gap of exper­i­ence and under­stand­ing of the “online nat­ive” world. Just pod­cast­ing a Press Release will not cut it for Pod­casters and Blog­gers. Cre­at­ing a Second­Life island will cost, and attract 3 dogs and maybe a man (as much as I tech­nic­ally love Second­Life, we have yet to see the future)

My opin­ion on this in a forth­com­ing post.

Inter­est­ingly, the recent exper­i­ence of Cameron Reilly, Twit­ter­arti (includ­ing myself, I admit) and Tel­stra was men­tioned in almost passing. Dr Hugh Brad­low from Telstra’s response is an excel­lent step into the conversation.

Had a break-chat with Gab­ri­ella Stern, Senior Editor from Dow Jones News­wires Singa­pore. Chat was about Journ­al­ism in this new online world we find ourselves. Enron, Stock Option Repri­cing and all sorts of dis­cus­sion around blog­ging and journ­al­ists. After watch­ing the PBS doc­u­ment­ary, News­war, it was enlight­en­ing. One part of our dis­cus­sion related to the “main­stream media” and blog­gers work­ing together.

On the sub­ject of the fam­ous (The Bul­letin fam­ous) Cameron.

So, I have a few hours to kill. Twitter-friend Andrew Barnett was in the Mel­bourne CBD. After con­sult­ing a map of Mel­bourne streets, I nav­ig­ated my way to Star­bucks on the corner of Bourke and Queen street. Twitter’d to all that I was there, ready for anything.

Any­thing happened. Cameron Reilly popped in for a few moments. Later, Froosh and Andrew Barnett popped in for a chat on life, uni­verse, wed­dings, parties and anything.

Upon return­ing to the impromptu Twit­ter meetup, Cameron derided me for my choice of corporate-coffee and insisted we move to Nick’s on Little Bourke Street. Let me say, it’s my new Mel­bourne food joint of choice. We are joined by new Twitter-friend, Garth.

So, off we trot to Nick’s.

Cameron inter­views us all on Twit­ter: ques­tions related to how it has changed our blog­ging; gen­eral Twit­ter stor­ies and if cor­por­a­tions should “adopt” Twitter.

My opin­ion on this in a forth­com­ing post. Same post as above as the topic inter-connects.

Taxi, Jet­star, Sydney, Home. Cat looks at me com­pletely refreshed. I write this blog with the cat asleep. Oh for the cat’s life.

Mel­bourne was beau­ti­fally blue today. Cat missed that.

At the Hill and Know­lton “Sur­viv­ing and thriv­ing in the next dec­ade — Tech­no­logy Pub­lish­ing” Break­fast Bytes this morn­ing, a group of emin­ent pan­el­ists in pic­ture above, from the left:

• James Tuck­er­man – Pub­lish­ing Editor, Ant­Hill. New rel­at­ively magazine about ideas, money and skills. Pre­vi­ously more print than online, but adding new online pro­jects later in 2007.
• Heather Craven — Dir­ector of Mar­ket­ing & Com­mu­nic­a­tions, Cir­cu­la­tions Audit Board,
  Aus­tralian Cir­cu­la­tion Bur­eau. Sub-committee research­ing digital.
• Brian Haverty – Edit­or­ial Dir­ector, CNET Net­works Aus­tralia : Read­ers first, video and text style publishing.
• Tony Sarno – Editor, APC. Adding new online APC pro­jects later in 2007.
• Peter Roberts – Man­aging Editor, BRW. Part of the Fair­fax group, around since 1857. Noted that http://www.afr.com/ relaunched this week, and closed con­tent model AFR Access continues.
• Andrew Kirk, Hill and Know­lton: Chair

The theme from the morning’s panel and Q&A is that “there will be a mix­ture of online and print” and that “online and print” read­ers are treated as dif­fer­ent read­ers by the big-names. My per­spect­ive as a cor­por­ate online/citizen journ­al­ist is slightly different.

Like the quint­es­sen­tial invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ists: Wood­ward and Bern­stein learnt: fol­low the money. In the above list­ing of pan­el­ists, notice where their stated invest­ment is going. It’s online.

From a tra­di­tional publisher’s per­spect­ive, the busi­ness is about employ­ing journ­al­ists to gather hid­den facts, con­nect, ana­lyse and write stor­ies. People buy the paper (atoms) to read the stor­ies and maybe their eye­balls will stray onto an advert­ise­ment. The mar­ket­ing groups of com­pan­ies buy these pos­i­tions on the paper in the hope that the right eye­balls are enthralled by the product and/or ser­vice — and buy the product. The core of a publisher’s job is man­aging the com­pel­ling con­tent such that a spe­cific audi­ence is cre­ated that advert­isers value.

The web is no dif­fer­ent, except that any­one can be a pub­lisher, and out­source the rev­enue side (advert­ising) to Microsoft or Google. Large pub­lish­ers, such as Fair­fax, are unhappy that their expens­ive infra­struc­ture is sub­ver­ted online: Peter Roberts men­tioned twice that Google made $200 mil­lion in Aus­tralia without invest­ing in the content-side.

Peter Roberts also com­men­ted on one of his com­pet­it­ors, Alan Kohler’s Eureka Report, hav­ing only an online mech­an­ism but suc­cess­ful busi­ness model. My per­spect­ive is that Alan’s busi­ness is suc­cess­ful as he is seen as a respec­ted and inde­pend­ent entity within Australia’s fin­an­cial com­munity. Alan Kohler is a trus­ted brand.

The Gad­get Guy, Peter Blasina’s ques­tion near the end sum­mar­ised the morn­ing for me: What does the future really look like? Each of the rep­res­en­ted panelist’s organ­isa­tions (maybe with the excep­tion of cnet) have their busi­ness strategies weighted toward print, and the brand-value that print brings.

Peter Blas­ina comes at this with cred­ib­il­ity as a true multi-channel brand and per­son­al­ity: print, online and TV — and sur­mised that the com­ing gen­er­a­tion will change the face of the print publisher’s world. And they know it.

The future for pub­lish­ers is where the eye­balls are. And eye­balls are not going to be in print, it is going to be online. Eye­balls stay longer where this is trus­ted value, and most import­antly where there is a com­munity. Read­ing a magazine is an almost high-latency feed­back medium; where two-way inter­ac­tion is slow if attemp­ted at all.

Demo­graph­ics of the eye­balls are chan­ging to more online: younger read­ers being digit­ally nat­ive and older gen­er­a­tions hav­ing more time to explore online; with more females than males desir­ing a com­munity and inter­ac­tion rather than pass­ive accept­ance; high band­width con­nec­tion to per­mit TV, Radio and Print being equal online mediums.

Whilst I have no research to back this up, I am going to state it here. A com­mon refrain from print pub­lish­ers is that “Radio did not replace news­pa­pers, and TV did not replace radio” as their back­wards look­ing per­spect­ive on why online will not replace these old media. My argu­ment is that the inter­net can replace the media styles: with web pages, pod­casts and vid­casts. As Rupert Mur­doch is quoted as say­ing: “Big media no longer con­trols the conversation” 

James Tuck­er­man knows his read­ers, and I think has a plan to cre­ate value in Anthill’s com­munity. He under­stands the emo­tional con­nec­tion that he has with his read­er­ship. James also stated there are “pop­u­la­tion lumps” at birth-years of 1949, 1974 and 1985. Accord­ing to the ABS, there is another pop­u­la­tion lump in the 2005–7 range too. My sug­ges­tion is to watch Ant­hill as a pub­lisher. They are start­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with their community.

A Ques­tion about Second­Life, the cur­rent “craze” in Aus­tralia poten­tially due to a visit in meat­space by a Linden Labs per­sona, res­ul­ted in Tony Sarno say­ing that “many PBL man­age­ment have vis­ited Second­Life”. I fear it is because of the gambling dens rather than the com­munity aspect. About 20% of the audi­ence of largely PR and tech­no­logy industry attendees had logged into Second­Life, of which most had logged in once.

So, in industry par­lance, what is the tip-on for online? It’s the com­munity. Com­munity is the new Brand.

The doc­u­ment con­tain­ing links of inter­est­ing video stuff is also online..Had an inter­est­ing exper­i­ence in mid-November: I was inter­viewed on live TV. CNBC Asia has a pro­gram called “e”; Keith Liu anchors this pro­gram that is broad­cast from Singa­pore. Trial by fire … no room for mis­takes. I think I lost 5 years off the end of my life!