www.nickhodge.com

Photo: Rod Yates, editor of Empire Magazine inter­view­ing Michael Azer­rad on his movie, Kurt Cobain About a Son.

Kurt Cobain looms out of the cinema screen like a mel­an­cholic Vik­ing, ready to pil­lage our minds. Like the images of other dead celebrit­ies, the image sets off thought pat­terns and we clas­sify: drug addict, father, musican.

Like all nar­rat­ives per­petu­ated by the one dimen­sional main stream media, he was also a son. A tal­en­ted per­son with real prob­lems, real skills and dreams.

A son of divorced par­ents, a com­mon aflic­tion of chil­dren of the late 20^th cen­tury, this and the times haunted Kurt. The lyr­ics and music of Nir­vana described the world of the US Pacific North­w­est: dark with low hanging fog and cloud. This descrip­tion also applies to his life, and the life of many of Generation-X. Cold war, AIDS, unemployment.

The movie, About a Son, is Kurt nar­rat­ing his life in his own words. As cap­tured by bio­grapher, Michael Azer­roth in 25 hours of taped inter­views dur­ing 1992–3. The imagery paints a Wash­ing­ton state that Kurt lived in. A child of his par­ents, age and area.

Using Kurt’s own words, and show­ing the real life Aber­deen, Olympia and Seattle one gets a sense of the angst of Nir­vana. Kurt also talks about his addic­tion via self med­ic­a­tion to opi­ates to escape pain; depres­sion and scoli­osis.

The movie is about an ordin­ary per­son; it human­ises a driven per­son. An com­plex artistic soul that expressed the nihil­ism of my generation.

Most import­antly, Kurt touches the ulti­mate poison that is the cult of celebrity that has only grown in the last 15 years. Espe­cially fight­ing the neg­at­ive narrative.

Any Nir­vana fan or mem­ber of gen­er­a­tion X should see this movie.

Thanks to Pop­cornTaxi for bring this movie to Australia.

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.

Uncle Dave, with his new found power of record­ing his own Pod­casts, invited me to yab­ber on about my week so far.

We sub­ver­ted the Uncle Mike hier­archy, and had a good show.  Thanks Uncle Dave.

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

There will be many Aus­tralian sharpie Baby Boomers very quiet today. The hero of loud, Aus­tralian Rock and Roll, Billy Thorpe, died at 60 of a heart attack over night.

I won­der if in this elec­tion year, the pol­lies will pull a State Funeral. I hope so, as the impact his music had on that gen­er­a­tion sur­passes many who get a State funeral.

If you are not a par­ent or teacher with chil­dren between the ages of 5–15, you might want to read some­thing else. I know how it gets when people talk about kids.

If you are a teacher or par­ent, wel­come to the new inter­net gen­er­a­tion gap.

An art­icle pub­lished in the New York magazine, Say Everything, details the online lives of Gen­er­a­tion Y. The art­icle takes a moralistic-angle to cre­ate a story; and asserts that the gen­er­a­tion gap is greater now than when Elvis, Cliff Richard and The Beatles rock-and/or-roll per­ver­ted the lives of Generation-X’s par­ents in the 1950s/1960s.

It’s more than mor­als. It is about how the world is at the pivot point of a dra­matic change.

This quo­ta­tion from Clay Shirky sum­mar­ised where we are at:

“Whenever young people are allowed to indulge in some­thing old people are not allowed to, it makes us bit­ter. What did we have? The mall and the park­ing lot of the 7-Eleven? It sucked to grow up when we did! And we’re mad about it now.”

The moral side is important,Look at your internet-connected kids: what are they doing, right now?

As a com­par­ison, I took a photo of Liam over the week­end that illus­trated this major gap:

1. Liam has both MacOS X Tiger and Microsoft Win­dows XP run­ning, and is using both flu­ently. Vista will not be installed until he’s backed-up his PC, and he’s sure his games work.
2. MSN Mes­sen­ger is his con­nec­tion to the out­side world: rarely will one of his friends call on the phone; but I am sure he com­mu­nic­ates more widely than I at the same age. His peers are world-wide, not local.
3. There is a Fire­fox ses­sion run­ning on the Mac with his favour­ite web sites (for­ums, not blogs) going. He says that he’s had a Fire­fox browser win­dow run­ning for 2 weeks, solid. 
4. On the Win­dows box, he is cre­at­ing an Adobe Premiere video clip (adding titling+encoding). Not only con­sum­ing con­tent; he is act­ively adding bits to the world. The video comes from cap­tur­ing an anim­a­tion cre­ated using Garry’s Mod for Half-Life 2.
5. He is listen­ing to ABC’s Triple-J not via radio, but via Internode’s stream.
6. Liam watches less broad­cast TV than Avril and I. Way less. Yet his know­ledge of what is cur­rent and news­worthy is no dif­fer­ent. There  is no man­u­fac­tured scarcity (either in time, or in phys­ical atoms)
7. Wiki­pe­dia answers everything.

Hyper-connected & digitally-creative.

Com­pare this to your world.

Mak­ing a ‘social net­work­ing’ plat­form that assumes you are con­nec­ted and are writ­ing, not just read­ing from the web: that’s next. THe next gen­er­a­tion is cre­at­ing these tools as the Baby boomers and Generation-X keeps look­ing at its col­lect­ive navel.

As you are prob­ably aware, the music of the 80s touches me in a spe­cial way. I am also a fan of “The Office”

To hear that Ricky Ger­vais (Mr The Office) was in a little known New-wave band, Seona Dan­cing, well, that just made my Saturday!

The music is a clas­sic. Evid­ently they charted 117 and 70 in 1982/1984 and were big in the Philippines.

With lyr­ics like:

You’re los­ing out, now /
You scowl and shout /
Irra­tional accus­a­tions as I turn my head /
Your threats and tri­als /
My craven smiles /
Revolts you in your tor­tur­ous insecurities

One won­ders why they didn’t become as big as U2 or INXS!

This week: Sydney / Lake Maquarie / Sydney / Auck­land / Sydney.

Fin­ished my third Dan Brown book, Decep­tion Point. What is the Dan Brown Code? Simple:

1. Slighly off-centre, strange yet handsome/beautiful primary char­ac­ter gets thrown into a “situation”.
2. The “situ­ation” has an echo in mod­ern cul­ture con­spir­acy the­or­ies or edge-case sci­ence fact
3. The ant­ag­on­ist is the per­son closest to the primary char­ac­ter, or primary character’s new love-interest
4. Cut chapters just short and leave the char­ac­ters hanging. Forces the reader to “read on” and not put the book down
5. Weave in some sci­ence fic­tion or myth as the cent­ral theme
6. Obvi­ously, the story ends with the primary char­ac­ter “win­ning” (happy end­ing) and scor­ing with their love-interest on the last page.

As a reader of Lud­lum, Clancy and other thrillers, Dan Brown is miss­ing some their “meat”. Maybe this is the nature of mod­ern, post cold-war thrillers where the Soviets/China are no longer the cent­ral enemy?