www.nickhodge.com

Like Michael Rees, Kath­ryn Green­hill asked me to list “web 2.0″ things that Microsoft has avail­able to provide some bal­ance to a Mur­doch Uni­ver­sity event.

By web 2.0, Kath­ryn meant: “To me, Microsoft plays really well in the large cor­por­ate ap space and is very good at that … but if I want to show people about the con­ver­sa­tion, re-mix, open access, inter­op­er­able web, then MS is not the first port of call…”

I can only agree with Kathryn’s state­ment. Microsoft hides all its cool web 2.0 things under a bushel. In fact, the prob­lem prob­ably is that the cool­ness are hid­den under many bushels, all over its web foot­print. But hey, I am not from mar­ket­ing; I am a mere Pro­fes­sional Geek. That is also why these lis­ted are free. Some are even Free-as-in-Freedom, too.

I think it import­ant that people get to hear, see and try altern­at­ives before default­ing to “the known and safe.” And yes, I real­ise can work both ways.

Another per­spect­ive, and my own opin­ion, is that Microsoft should not seek to do everything on the web. For instance, cre­at­ing a “Microsoft Twit­ter Ulti­mate Edi­tion 2010″ is stu­pid. Nor should Microsoft seek to pur­chase every cool com­pany that pops on the web. Again, that is my opin­ion. And I am the low­est on the low of the totem pole; a.k.a Indi­vidual Con­trib­utor or Sac­rifical Unnamed Ensign (ref: Star Trek)

Here is an edited ver­sion of my email response; draf­ted quickly and by no means exhaust­ive. If you have other cool examples, just post a com­ment and I’ll update the list.

• http://Office.live.com for online mini-Sharepoint site for team col­lab­or­a­tion. Office.live.com is a good place to start where people will use desktop apps for a full exper­i­ence. Don’t for­get other online app tools like Edit­Grid and Zoho.
• Don’t for­get bing.com & asso­ci­ated sites (includ­ing Pho­to­synth, Vir­tual Earth) as viable altern­at­ives to google. Lib­rar­i­ans use all sources available
• www.worldwidetelescope.org
• Live Is more than spaces (spaces.live.com) – there are photo stor­age, file stor­age (sky­drive, as men­tioned by Michael Rees in his post), and live.com integ­ra­tion into twit­ter, face­book and other online social media services.
• There is a Cre­at­ive Com­mons plu­gin for Microsoft Office 2007 to per­mit cor­rect (cc) for remix stuff out of spread­sheets, word etc http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D1DDBDC8-627F-415A-9B0A-97362BC9B480&displaylang=en
• Other remix things: apps.live.com is a single source for our desktop apps, includ­ing Live­Writer (don’t for­get that Live Writer has a whole host of plu­gins: http://gallery.live.com/results.aspx?c=0&bt=9&pl=8&st=5 ) and video edit­ing stuff, too. There are Wiki­pe­dia, FIickr, Twit­ter and all sorts of plu­gins. Office 2007 SP2 has both OpenXML and ODF (for Open­Of­fice) support.
• Don’t for­get that the most-used online con­ver­sa­tion tool in Aus­tralia is Live Mes­sen­ger (MSN) which does video + audio con­fer­en­cing, too
• RSS into out­look… hmm, pos­sible but not some­thing I’d recom­mend. Too clunky
• Don’t for­get IE8; with accel­er­at­ors and webslices http://www.microsoft.com/ie8 these use open formats to work
• http://visitmix.com/Lab has some cool tools, includ­ing Oomph with is a Micro­formats toolkit (works in all browsers, uses jQuery) … I use it on my blog. Licensed under MsPL (open source,  OSI approved, BSD-like)
• Another good, slightly techy tool for Win­dows users is http://www.microsoft.com/web with the Web Plat­form installer. Per­mits install­a­tions of PHP, Word­Press etc on your Win­dows machine without being a rocket scientist

Today was the last day I will appear as a “social media expert” on behalf of Microsoft. The inter­net and social media is main­stream, and it’s time to move on. And do my real day job: evan­gel­ising Microsoft’s developer tools.

Back­ground

Over the week­end, Chan­nel 10’s Rove attemp­ted to fist twit­ter, bring­ing in at least 1000 new Aus­tralian twit­ter users. A pleth­ora of ABC celebreties are fol­low­ing Mark Pesce’s lead and are join­ing twit­ter. There are 5 mil­lion Aus­trali­ans on Face­book. Politi­cians have real­ised the shift of power towards, and reach of the inter­net. There is no going back.

Over the last 2 years, and more-so with the depar­ture of Frank Arrigo from Aus­tralia, invit­a­tions to speak at ‘social media’ con­fer­ences landed on me. Internal Microsoft teams came ask­ing about social media asked for my advice.

None of these are a formal, meas­ured part of my job. Sure, using the tech­no­logy and being a social media prac­ti­tioner will still import­ant: but being a Social media expert is not.

So, with a little regret, from today I hand over the reigns of social media expert­ise and pub­lic rep­res­ent­a­tion to oth­ers at Microsoft.

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.

@Duncan­Ri­ley, formerly of Tech­crunch, has left as a full­time writer and has star­ted another star­tup: Inquisitr.com

Described by Duncan as a “mix of tech, pop and fark type stor­ies”, it prom­ises a blog that cap­tures the lighter side of this strange web world.

I, for one, wel­come our new Duncan overlords.

As com­men­ted over on Stephen Collin’s Blog: Dumb decision by our new gov­ern­ment over ‘Net fil­ter­ing. Some people men­tion this is a mere policy dump on the last day of 2007. Of course, the Aus­tralian web 2.0 com­munity is not neces­sar­ily happy about all this talk of cen­sor­ship.

OK, can we then get our trusty gov­ern­ment and ACMA to stop the SPAM I get from Nigerian scam­mers liv­ing on the Gold Coast; offers to enlarge my crown jew­els and keep them shiny and big­ger than other jew­els; Phish­ing attempts for all those off­shore bank accounts on dodgy islands in the Pacific; get-rich-quick schemes co-promoted by mem­bers of bor­der reli­gious hill cults.

Since Opt-out is the new word for hid­den cen­sor­ship, that is: how would the non-savvy inter­net user know they are get­ting a dumbed-down inter­net feed, maybe it’s time to ask the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment to do more.

Here is my list:

1. Spam fil­ter at the bor­der. Why should Spam fil­ters need to be installed on email serv­ers at schools and at home? As Spam is inter­net traffic, just block nasty emails at the digital bor­der. Usu­ally spam con­tains naughty words like p3n15 enlarge­ment that our women-folk should not have to read about.

   All we need are vir­tual drug– and foliage– sniff­ing dogs, just like Cus­toms owns, and train them to sniff for spam.

2. Stop an Nigerian Scams (419 Schemes) from both inter­net via email and via fax, too. The first Nigerian scam I saw was a fax sent to a work col­league in Perth about 12 years ago.

   Stop­ping the out­flow of funds by non-savvy Aus­trali­ans, pre­sum­ably the same ‘gull­ible inter­net users’ the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment is attempt­ing to pro­tect, will help our balance-of-trade.

3. Phish­ing. Since the suc­cess of cap­it­al­ism over that nasty com­mun­ism and the fall of the Iron Cur­tain, malevol­ent Rus­si­ans have found a quick way to read­dress the last 60 years. Send­ing out emails that look like your bank’s login page. Hey presto! User­name and pass­word is logged, and some geek slave of an ex-KGB Col­onel is remov­ing your hard earned South Pacific pesos and turn­ing them into Euros.

   As this is just inter­net traffic, the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment must help us to extend the cold war and pro­tect us from new capitalists.

4. Iden­tity Theft. A few google searches, and some search­ing in Face­book, LinkedIn, Twit­ter — all legit­im­ate ser­vices, and a scam­mer could pre­tend to be any­one. Even me.

   Using my details, they could attempt to falsely claim social secur­ity bene­fits. Get the $60-odd per month I get and route it to their accounts on a former Aus­tralian immig­rant pro­cessing centre in the Pacific. As iden­tity theft can occur over the inter­net, the Gov­ern­ment should just fil­ter this out too, and pro­tect us all.

All of the above are illegal either dir­ectly in stat­ute or in com­mon law.

In none of the above cases can any Gov­ern­ment provide a safe envir­on­ment to all its cit­izens all the time. Just how far is our bene­vol­ent Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment will­ing to go to pro­tect it’s citizens?

I’d prefer the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment set up a divi­sion of Depart­ment of For­eign Affairs online ready to help out net­izens as they travel to this unique uni­verse, not just fear­fully block­ing. Use the tech­no­logy to edu­cate people.

Accord­ing to the ABC, semi-autonomous Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment agen­cies must clear their media releases with the Depart­ment of Prime Min­is­ter before releasing.

Stated Mark Pater­son on ABC AM this morn­ing, the sec­ret­ary of the Depart­ment of Innov­a­tion, Industry Sci­ence and Research:

“The essence of the mes­sage was that the Gov­ern­ment wanted to ensure a degree of con­sist­ency in mes­sage on key mes­sages and there­fore wanted to clear key mes­sages through the Prime Minister’s office.”

Shades of Yes, Min­is­ter in the above. What a giggle.

Just blog it, agen­cies. Bypass the Bur­eau­cracy, Sub­vert the Hier­archy Com­rades!

It is dif­fi­cult to believe any organ­isa­tion lives in the mid 20^th Century.

Yet, Stilgher­rian has found one. Maybe it’s his vet?

There will be a point where us Generation-X-ers start wor­ry­ing about the future rather than the size of our LCD/Plasma screens. We’ll look to our par­ents and apo­lo­gise for our self-centred-ness (whilst under­neath blam­ing the me-generation of the 1970s) In our con­cern and wor­ries, we’ll real­ise our kids are highly digit­ally social­ised and our seni­ors are con­vers­ing with them. We’ve missed the boat. We’re in the gen­er­a­tional chasm.

If you don’t get it, get Mike’s busi­ness to help. They’re not only nat­ive, they’re going feral.

Ahh, Christ­mas. Dontcha just love it? Brings out the Scrooge McDick­ens in all of us.

Think­ing ahead of the game.

Scoble is leav­ing PodTech. Doing some­thing else from mid-January 2008.

In his post he talked about live streaming/twittering and the con­ver­sa­tion that res­ults from imme­di­ate con­nectiv­ity to an audience.

From Scoble’s post:

Another thing that opened my eyes? The Google Open Social press con­fer­ence where I had the only video, thanks to Kyte.tv and my cell phone (they had asked for me to leave my pro­fes­sional cam­era in the car — funny that’s a story I’ve heard sev­eral times, includ­ing on the panel dis­cus­sion yes­ter­day where Jeff Pul­ver showed off video he shot on a small pocket cam­era of the recent Led Zep­plin con­cert. He told the audi­ence that Led Zep­plin wants to buy his pho­tos and videos because they were bet­ter than the pro­fes­sional ones).

Blogs, Video-Blogs, Pod­casts emu­late the old media. Push out. Wait for com­ments (aka let­ters to the editor). The imme­di­acy is miss­ing. There is too much latency between thought to feedback

Immers­ive Con­ver­sa­tions.

Live-streaming/Live-twittering/Live-full immersion-SecondLife/Live un-meetings of the ilk as dis­cussed on EEL recently is the next step. The tech­no­logy is here per­mit­ting low-cost, high-bandwidth imme­di­ate two-way sessions.

In con­ver­sa­tions with Cameron Reilly, this is exactly where his mind has been for some months.

The move is on.

Thanks to Duncan Riley for a great con­ver­sa­tion today — now On The Pod, on The Pod­cast Network.

Art­icles men­tion: Jeff Sandquist in the April 2007 Wired.

“The heat internal being 70x” is a lit­tler hyper­bolic — more like 70% of the heat is internal when blog­ger steps out­side our blog­ging guidelines. Some notes on our Policy has been dis­cussed here already.

“Microsoft Pop­fly is for mak­ing Web Bling” lulz. my favour­ite quote.

Microsoft Office Live Work­space signup.

I use Edit­grid for col­lo­brat­ive fin­an­cial man­age­ment in our house.

Microsoft in Aus­tralia links, because I could not recall on the fly.

Microsoft on HD DVD

No: Wel­come to Generation-C