www.nickhodge.com

QuT has a Bach­elor of Gam­ing and Enter­tain­ment. Cool­ness does not begin to explain this course. More than C++, it is also about the social aspects, his­tory, design — the whole works.

Dr Ross Brown and Penny Dren­nan are really cool: pas­sion­ate about their areas of expert­ise (and geeks from deep in their lives) — and pass on this to the next gen­er­a­tion of games designers.

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.

Neil Finn: “Hey, I am quite enjoy­ing the feel­ing of being unpop­u­lar. There is some­thing lib­er­at­ing in it.” Neil is in a battle of small phrases on the bat­tle­field of the print and TV media. Neil: use the power of the intar­webs to fight back at ‘em!

It seems my twit­ter­ing on the Euro­vi­sion song con­test has inspired Paul Foster to blog. Dude, I thought you were all over this European Union stuff!

New word: obscur­ant­ist. Used both by Paul Keat­ing in rela­tion to John Howard, and by Thomas Freidman in The World is Flat. The good news is that I’ve fin­ished the book. It seems that both sides of Aus­tralian polit­ics may be grokking the need to invest in education.

Les­sons learnt: Stock­holm Syn­drome and Lima Syn­drome. I real­ise the key vari­able here is time, and that the emo­tional hold works both ways.

Two key edit­or­ial com­ments in the last day put a reli­gious slant on the use of tech­no­logy: Howard Ander­son in Com­puter­world IT in “A cynic rips open source” and Michael Singer in “Why doesn’t Microsoft Have a Cult Reli­gion”. Microsoft, with thou­sands of blog­gers and far-reaching impact, does not really foster a cult-like fol­low­ing. In Aus­tralia, it is called the Tall Poppy Syn­drome.

The cul­ture of inform­a­tion exchange with Microsoft is extremely open. Anti-obscurantist. It is dif­fi­cult for cults to sur­vive where know­ledge is spread. Put­ting spin and machiavel­lian manip­u­la­tion just doesn’t work. I think Microsoft is miss­ing a cult fol­low­ing because it not obscure enough.

Maybe that is why the spin­meister Tony Blair and over-spun Scooch are the losers of the week. As quoted from Chris Saad over on the Particls blog: Rupert Mur­doch on Media 2.0 ‘Media com­pan­ies don’t con­trol the con­ver­sa­tion any­more’

For Mark “Chop­per” Read, going digital now doesn’t mean cut­ting off someone’s fin­gers when they for­get to pay a debt: Chop­per is now online.

Strangely, I won­der if his eco­m­merce will extend to cyber-enforcing.

In light of the recent shenanigans of AMEX, its time to list my num­bers in the “Do-not-Call List”

URL to register: http://www.donotcall.gov.au/

As per the Government’s web site:

Will it stop all tele­market­ing calls?

Regis­ter­ing your tele­phone num­ber on the Do Not Call Register will not stop all tele­market­ing calls to your num­ber. There are some exemp­tions which enable cer­tain pub­lic interest organ­isa­tions to make tele­market­ing calls. Exempt organ­isa­tions include char­it­ies, reli­gious organ­isa­tions and registered polit­ical parties. You can also still receive calls from mar­ket researchers.

Hmm. I’ll still get push-polling recor­ded calls from politi­cians, and people ask­ing for “mar­ket research”. All I want is no fricken’ calls from people I don’t know, fullstop.

Now, the site is broken and melt­ing down. Ooops, Cold­fu­sion just went hot. Dear web­mas­ters: always over­es­tim­ate the stresses on your sites. (Fixed at around midday.)

Twit­ter to/from SMS sus­pen­ded for Aus­tralia: http://twitter.com/blog/2007/04/twitter-down-under.html

I’m with Leslie: the mobile phone net­works in Aus­tralia suk0Rz. Big time. The devices are like bricks in pretty col­ours and think the world revolves around some backend that locks you in via your goolies.

There is all this talk about open source soft­ware, open source pro­to­cols, open source con­tent, open source file formats — yet we have no altern­at­ive and free­dom in the air­waves. Ham radio isn’t going to cut it.

TCP/IP is going to be every­where one day. It isn’t going to mat­ter what device you have. You’ll be online stream­ing up and down “stuff”

Oh well, thanks to Twitteresce, It’s not so bad. (ooh, 0.6. Time to upgrade)

Sub­titled: my year with Bell’s Palsy

366 days ago today, my body reminded me of who is in con­trol. I’ve told close friends. fam­ily and employ­ers of what occurred; but I think its time to “go large”.

Slurred Speech

On the 25^th April 2006 I woke up, and my face felt funny. Droopy, and numb. Hav­ing had a sinus infec­tion for the pre­vi­ous few days, I thought it was just a side effect. The 25^th of April is a hol­i­day in Aus­tralia (ANZAC day) so rest­ing was easy.

Tech­nic­ally, I was on sick leave from Adobe for a few days at the end of a 2 week hol­i­day. There was some­thing inside that said I really didn’t want to go back to work.

By the mid-afternoon, I was slur­ring my speech, and my left hand side of my face ached like noth­ing else, whilst also being numb. I couldn’t taste on the left side of my tongue, and there was a loud ringing in my left ear. Oh, and I was drool­ing from the left side of my mouth.

Avril saw me in the after­noon and was not happy. The first thought, espe­cially with slurred speech is “stroke”. For some reason, I was in a haze of pain and had not really thought through what was going on.

A quick “home stroke test” showed that whatever it was, I hadn’t popped a brain vein. Yet. We went off to our local Doctor’s clinic, see­ing the locum who was work­ing on the pub­lic hol­i­day. All I remem­ber of that visit was “thanks for com­ing, you’ve made my day as Bell’s Palsy isn’t all that common.”

A quick course of Cortisone tab­lets on the 25^th were admin­istered to “shock” the body into recov­ery. Cortisone causes the adren­aline gland to go into over­drive. A nasty side effect is that it doesn’t cure the pain, just makes you stay awake to feel it. From memory, I slept for 4–6 hours in total over a 4–5 day period. sid­e­note: JFK was repor­ted to have mul­tiple cortisone injec­tions per day, as he had Addison’s dis­ease. How he got through daily, I do not know. This drug’s side effects are not good!

Fur­ther invest­ig­a­tions with the Doc­tor on the 26^th with a CAT scan showed that (a) I do have a brain and (b) no blood vein damage/clots could be found. So, no stroke.

The dia­gnosis is by a pro­cess of elim­in­a­tion. The pain on the side of my face indic­ated Bell’s Palsy.

Pic­ture: taken 26^th April 2006 by Liam. This is me attempt­ing to smile nor­mally, you will notice that your right (my left) is not mov­ing up normally.

Bell’s Palsy

Bell’s Palsy is an infec­tion of the Sev­enth nerve of the face. This nerve runs from the top of your cra­nium into your ear and across your cheek bone end­ing in your eye­lids, nose, lips, tongue and chin.

Side effects from Bell’s Palsy are numer­ous: ringing in the ears, soreness/aching of the face, loss of sense of taste, loss of sense of feel­ing on the face, watery eye (can­not fully close the eye), inab­il­ity to con­trol the effected side of your mouth (you drool over yourself)

To oth­ers, the most vis­ible side effect is the droop­i­ness and “unbal­anced­ness” of the face: your face drops on one side as the muscles no longer get instruc­tions from that 7th nerve.

Now hav­ing suffered this, I look at faces much closer and can see the dif­fer­ence left-to-right of people’s face. Bell’s is more com­mon in older people. A fam­ous suf­ferer was George Clooney. Repeated ques­tion­ing of med­ical pro­fes­sion­als indic­ated I would not look like George after Bell’s. Bummer.

Bell’s Palsy and a bit of his­tory is at the link. Well worth reading

Bell’s Palsy is the effect of a weak­en­ing on the VII (7^th) Cra­nial Nerve. The most com­mon to least com­mon: viral infec­tion of the nerve, and in my case it was a simple infec­tion that “appeared” sooner with the pain at the top of my skull: which was thought to be a simple sinus infection.

It looks like there is going to be resid­ual pain for some time: which is manageable.

Get­ting Better.

The best cure for Bell’s is com­plete rest. No stress, no work. And that’s what I did. It took 3 weeks for the phys­ical vis­ible side effects to go away — that is, my face muscles moved nor­mally; my eye could shut and I could talk without slur­ring my speech.

How­ever, the long term effects of Bell’s are still with me today: aching left-hand cheek and ringing in the left-hand ear. Over the past 12 months, these side effects have lessened to a point where I can live and work with them com­fort­ably — and know the best way to man­age the reduced energy levels that accom­pany the pain. The muscles on the left hand side of my face are wired dif­fer­ently. It takes a dif­fer­ent “con­trol” to smile nor­mally, so I just smirk from the right side as it takes less effort. You can­not explain to people how its changed, it just has.

I returned to work in early June, hav­ing not been at work for April and May 2006. By mid-May, Avril and I had decided that to fully recover, decom­press and not have fur­ther valves go “bang” in my body — it would be best to make a mid-life course correction.

Tak­ing the Bell’s as an indic­ator of inner body health has prob­ably added mul­tiple years to the end of my life. Stress, a much used work, shows itself in funny ways. Essen­tially, I was a work-aholic in a job that I hated. Double bad.

The Work Thing

Not sleep­ing much dur­ing this epis­ode, I had plenty of time to think. Think­ing and time are a dan­ger­ous combination.

I was not happy with the job, pos­i­tion, stresses and many other things as Chan­nel Sales Man­ager at Adobe. Even more dan­ger­ous, I wasn’t hungry enough — or had the energy level to do what needed to be done. I was out of juice. The company’s local cul­ture was chan­ging; and it just didn’t suit me.

Return­ing to work part-time, I offered Adobe my pos­i­tion back, and asked for a Leave of Absence for at least 6 months, unpaid and with no bene­fits so I could fully men­tally and phys­ic­ally recover. Also, I would use this time to “re-educate” myself to go back to what I really loved: doing tech­nical stuff with end-user cus­tom­ers.

Due to vari­ous “shenanigans” with Adobe HR, the Mac­ro­media ‘mer­ger’ and other legal guid­ance it was recom­men­ded that I resign. It was easier for Adobe this way.

So I resigned.

That felt so good.

Recov­ery

I didn’t feel 100% until mid-September-ish. That is, I could do a full-day without get­ting too tired. Now, if I go too hard for too many days — I get the same aches in the face; but know how to man­age the pain and the asso­ci­ated tiredness.  Essen­tially, when I am not tired I work at 125+% to be 100% pro­duct­ive. Find­ing an appro­pri­ate, and less-stressed and prob­ably less fin­an­cially bene­fi­cial job was my goal.

By this time, Adobe had noth­ing on the plate for me full­time, so I star­ted look­ing else­where for stuff to do. A small gig for Adobe came, I took that and com­pleted that contract.

What you will read in my posts of that time: I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my work­ing life.

This “Enthu­si­ast Evan­gel­ist” job at Microsoft appeared. Know­ing Frank Arrigo through Mike Sey­fang, thanks to http://linkedin.com, I applied and the rest is now his­tory. It’s the first job that I saw that I really felt I wanted, and would be at >100% at.

So, that’s the story of the last 12 months. Some people heard that I was “ser­i­ously ill” and just exper­i­enced me not being at work all of a sud­den. Speak­ing to these people since, it was if I had fallen off the face of the earth.

Not quite, just my face had fallen, that’s all.

I hope this post helps someone else in the future. There is life after, and with Bell’s. It will just be all different.

Update 2^nd June 2007: strange cramp in the left-hand side of my neck/face today. Res­ul­ted in a slight dip­ping of the nerves around my mouth and sore­ness. The muscles seem out-of-place and aching along my cheek-bone.

Dear Amer­ican Express Marketing

I use your products daily. A Cor­por­ate Charge Card, a per­sonal Gold Card and your travel ser­vices are excel­lent. I pay my bills on time, and use the online ser­vices to reduce the load on your call centre staff. Where I have called your staff, they’ve been help­ful and solved my problem.

The online ser­vices help me cor­rectly cal­cu­late the forex charges, and the abil­ity to use my Amex points as Qantas Fre­quent Flyer is good too.

But for the love of god, please stop send­ing me junk mail attempt­ing to sell me another “fin­an­cial product”. And please stop call­ing me, on my unlis­ted phone num­ber, attempt­ing to cross sell me a product from this junk mail your latest tie-in. “I’d like to ensure you under­stand the inform­a­tion we’ve just sent you.”. Guess what. I chucked it out before read­ing it. Have been for 5 years.

And those people at shop­ping malls and air­ports who are push­ing your credit card (For the 20^th time, I do know the dif­fer­ence) on me is start­ing to tar­nish your name. In fact, because of this push­i­ness, I refuse: repeat refuse to ever own one. Some­times back­ing off might actu­ally sell more.

Yours

Nick

It has been an excel­lent week for the ABC. The Curtin “docu-drama” gave a por­trait of a man of his time: Prime Min­is­ter John Curtin dur­ing the 1941 through 1942.

Last night, Jeff McMul­lan did a stand­ard “journ­al­istic show” wrapped as debate on new tech­no­lo­gies, and the impact on com­munity on “Dif­fer­ence of Opin­ion: Grow­ing Up in the Digital Age”. Cap­tured inthe fresh­ness of the moment, this Pod­cast cap­tured by Chris Saad of Particls. Dis­cus­sion boards on the topic are inter­est­ing to read.

Another essence is that people’s online and digital life is real. It is a part of generation-y iden­tity. The base-level mor­als and eth­ics still apply; and prob­ably more so in a world that is flat and always on.

• Life in Chip­pend­ale, Steven Noble.
• Roy Porter: Social His­tory of London
• Eng­lish: defin­i­tion of vir­tual. Is vir­tual a pejor­at­ive? Maybe my lan­guage is a little too 1990’s

Nick, Mr. Excel UK, and I are in cross-licensing dis­cus­sion regard­ing our respect­ive names.

Next time I am in the UK, I reckon it’s time for a beer. My shout.

The top is a pic­ture of Nick P Hodge near the US White­house, and Nick J Hodge near the UK Big Ben in Lon­don. Nick P is from the UK, and I work for a US company.

(and thanks to Bruce Satch­well for prompt­ing me to con­nect!)