Resuming transmission

Cheers and welcome back!

A perfect storm of issues has effectively kept me away from this blog for most of the last 18 months.
I moved to a region called Hervey Bay in Queensland, where the weather was brilliant and the oceanfront lifestyle even better. "Get a beach house." I took it to heart.

Unfortunately, the internet in said beach house was complete shite – 1.5Mbps down on a good day. My dreams of living next to the ocean and running a consulting business from my home office evaporated as I spent more hours on the phone trying to get a workable connection than actually on the web.

This is where I insert insults about Malcolm Turnbull's 'Fraudband' unravelling of the National Broadband Network, once a truly inspired national infrastructure project for the new(ish) millennium.

Get a beach house—preferably with decent internet!

What I've been reading lately

Just an archival catch-up of recent The Beach House Weekly—my Paper.li auto summaries—of an interesting few weeks in science, space and Australian politics.

From rockets to meteorites, Roxon to Rudd, novas to Nobels, planet hunters to metric hunters.

25 March 2013
18 March 2013
11 March 2013
4 March 2013
25 February 2013
18 February 2013
11 February 2013
4 February 2013
28 January 2013
21 January 2013
14 January 2013
7 January 2013
31 December 2012
24 December 2012
17 December 2012
10 December 2012

Intriguing to look back through actually. Something in there for everyone.

Cyberbully pot-kettle, Greens launches, telescopes, more. The week that was.

Alan Jones learns what it's like on the receiving end; the ACT Greens campaign powers towards 20 October; the first stage of the Square Kilometre Array is turned on; a Nobel laureate yanks the rug out from under Newspoll; iPad Mini confirmed; and much more.

The week that was - my readings and posts.

What I've been reading and writing - a bit of a catch-up

This is a catch-up of my reading and writing lists as auto-compiled into e-zines by Paper.li. As usual, it is mostly for my own reference down the track, but maybe someone is interested.

The recycling bin may no longer be full of discarded newspapers, but holy moley I'm chewing through some online reading...

Editions for the week ending:

1 October

24 September

17 September

10 September

3 September

27 August

20 August

13 August

6 August

30 July

23 July

16 July

9 July

Phew. That's it. Must keep on top of this a bit better...

How to use Twitter to further your event, work or career

Twitter is here to stay. I used to think it was ridiculous to try to encapsulate your thoughts in just 140 characters. But the reality is that it is much more than that - although there is an art form to writing with such brevity!

Twitter use drives a lot of traffic to my little personal blog and helps boost it to more than a thousand views a week. So there's no reason it won't do similar for more professional web content promoting a program, event or a business.

Auto-posting blog articles to Twitter helps too, but you have to be creative in the way you title your blog posts so they make for an enticing tweet. I will often also embed Twitter tricks like user names and hashtags in the title, post the article so it generates the referring tweet, then immediately edit the title to remove the Twitter artefacts to make it presentable for other audiences. Interestingly, hashtags are now becoming common in Google+ posts.

Another thing to consider:

The Beach House - readings and writings for the week 10-16 July

Here's the Paper.Li e-mag of my readings and writings for the week.

Look out - Greg Jericho has written a book about social media and politics. Can't wait!

As the old media of Fairfax and New Corp struggle vainly to resist the changes being wrought by the internet and social media, some people "get it".

One of those people is Greg Jericho - formerly anonymous author of the hugely popular blog Grog's Gamut.

Greg was unnecessarily and shamelessly outed a while back by former Canberra Times (old media) journalist James Massola, who is now with the Fin Review.

Although he ended up leaving his public service job, Jericho has gone on to a fairly successful role as an alternative voice on Australian federal politics - primarily via the ABC's cutting edge commentary platform The Drum.

If the online world is the doom of the entertainment industry, they'll only have themselves to blame

An interesting analysis on TechCrunch of the chant of impending doom from the entertainment industry about downloading.

The article makes the point that the industry rants and raves about how pirating is breaking them, and that the industry should instead be embracing the new streaming and distribution opportunities. And that they should

• focus on customers
• deliver engaging media experiences to all screens
• make it feel as familiar as channel surfing.

This is all true. But there are some key facets of the equation missing.