dees win draft picks : ktub win rainbow record deals of luv : brief wondrous oscar wao soldout but on order.

ktub krew
Originally uploaded by redbarren

Suited up with @nrpaton at The Long Room today, and went in with very low expectations which were met to a high standard with Dees losing by 80 points. (while @frankarr saints won by over 100 and got a top 4 double chance, wow!) Seems I should have had to a chat to the Dees 1st year coach who seemed to have set his targeted delivery levels to a higher bar the poor bugger; "Our on-field performances certainly don't reflect the ground swell of support and financial support that we're getting.."

While walking to the game, with some distributed telephonic assistance from soaked on sunday bike rider, I was hoping to snag a copy of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which is my current OCD foci. Seems every bookstore in Melbourne from Boarders on Chapel, to Readings on Acland, all the ones on Bridge Road where I was... and quite a few others, all had the same party line; "Sold out. On Order. Should have some copies on in 1-2 weeks."

Damn Mr Wao do u have the secrets of the world contained in there ? So upon advice from souffled consuming counsel I've taken to reading the Amazon.com first couple pages extract; "They say it first came from Africa, carried in the scream of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuku americanus, or more colloquially, fuku - generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World."

So any novel that starts with 'Fuku americanus' + 'Curse and the Doom of the New World' had me at the textual equivalent of Hello. Also grokkn following the David Foster Wallace technique of excessive footnotes even tho it's been argued that's tired (half of page 2 appears to be a footnote, hehe.) This may not mean anything or it may mean Diaz is the DFW 2.0; "But the fuku ain't just ancient history, a ghost story from the past with no power to scare. In my parents' day the fuku was real as shit, something your everyday person could believe in." - So far no1's commented on whether they have read book, altho one did mention via facebook that their bookgroup was going to read it but didnt. Pity - could have stolen that copy.

So in other breaking news, u can see on Sunday night as I listen to Father Bob and Safran (get the podcast its great) that I have a monster linear arc to my narrative :

- Walked past these asics which seared into my head, why is charcoal such an addictive palette, whether it be for cars, sneakers, sweatshirts ? And then the aqua blue laces just jump out convincing u u r an individual, but still able to confirm to the grey of life. (aqua blue is the new orange;)















- I havent decided if its ok to have velcro sneakers btw, but subscribe to soleclassics.com anyway.











- I had a pair of reebok classics i wore to death, well till i walked thru some sludge at brighton baths during a dredging that put the most turgid smell on the royal-navy blue-orange "Classics" and they went to sneaker god. But i do like these just to karmaloop.com Reebok ventilator maeda sneaker, mainly coz they have font work goin on toe + a transition of distressed/acidy colours while still doin the charcoal with a dash of colour thing.



















- check thommos karaoke tub on (screengrab pictured of) picasa which went down in full effect on wish i could've gone friday +/or y not read the ktub islands in the stream duet singers : @candysnap et buddhist paramour who found a rainbow of luv in the now on tram 112.

- my starsign - arent these supposed to be positive ? im tryin to get buddys luck to ruboff + besides ive gotta_rainbow2, how u like them apples:P

- i'll prob add some more non-linear links during fatherbob/safran which still has 78 (make that 29) minutes to go. big fn week of work this one, really gonna put head in front of imac.

a dim sum, pancakes, flight of the conchords dees win draft pick california desert run sunday

California Desert Run 18.jpg
Originally uploaded by VOD Cars

I'm listening to the finale of Radio Version of Flight of the Conchords which has been playing last 6 weeks on TripleJ at 9am each Sunday, been awesome, will Neil Finn save the day ? I'm also luvn VodCars Californian Desert Run pictures, wouldnt mind a GT40 to boot off to the MCG today to see Dees win the draft pink. Seems Banksy has been doing an amazing roadtrip around America. Luckily he's out of New Orleans, and also hung the KKK thru Alablama. Dianne's reporting from Series 2 Weeds territory Mexico City. Unfortunately I won't have time for Chicktionary's Dim Sum, Mad Men OSX icons, or Heather Snodgrass' imagined Pancakes. Well I'm off, even "without Neil Finn ('the Elton John of the North Island!') in the band the future seems weak" - but at least Dees get a draft pick. OK I need to suit up.

Listening to the Flight of the Conchords : "Boom! Boom! She's so hot, she's like a curry..... I think we need a bit of mandalin..... drop the drums....see you want some Boom Boom. You like Boom. I like Boom."

the brief wondrous sold out #13 sneakerfreaker life + quest for the next great novel.

magnation sneakerfreaker soldout doh.jpg
Originally uploaded by redbarren

Had a brief Greville St interlude after some happilyntasty JamaicanEggs breakfast establishment where japs tried to steal my I paid $3 for it ok, the best Aussie newspaper - part of the 500 journos just lost their jobs parent - the WeekendAFR masthead, specifically the grownups with super' or workin for a hedge fund life and leisure section.

But unfortunately my newspaper wasn't the only thing in demand that was MIA; There were 2 specific items I wanted to pickup as part of my written word semantic enrichment. Both were unknown to me SOLD OUT, which naturally made me want them even more. So what do u do when 27 dresses for wordsmiths style, u want something but dont yet have it ? well, u google the heck out of it, and snaffle whatever u can for free online... then read every link etc to see what u r missing and plot a pathway to actualise on the maslow hierarchy for said object(s) !

The first item I wanted and the official reason for going to Greville St on a Saturday, was to pickup the lucky #13 edition Sneaker Freaker, where the nearly always excellent incl free wifi Greville Magnation pictured, was getting some more copies in but were out. Total kudos to the sneakerfreak krew who at any one time have thousands of pairs of sneakers in their Fitzroy (i think) HQ's, which being market leader, get sent to them by adoring multinational sneaker co's with their limited edition collab heavy lines, not dissimilar to film studios with their Miramax indie product.

Sneaker Freaker #13 I need to pickup : "There's a stack of juicy content to inhale including a full-length interview with Jeff Staple about the Pigeon New Balance, a feature on the new Nike ACG Blazer project, an exclusive on the relaunch of Troop and LA Gear, 38 pages of New Releases as well as a series of interviews with the new school of indie brands, something you wont want to miss."


















The more important quest, has been to get away from blogs as my takeaway food for the mind, and start cooking using real ingredients via a challenging high maintenance novel that seduces and teases me, makes no sense, dazzles me at the last minute, and generally makes me snuggle deep into a doonah with a penlight late at night reading just one more chapter, page.

The Greville St bookstore has been good to me, as I've always found the best way to find books other than from friends u know with similar reading tastes, or Amazon's people who bought this book u really like, bought that book u might : Is when u enter a bookstore to ask the attendant (usually a postgrad English literature student is my idealised archetype) and mention my 5 favourite authors in the genre I'm searching. 2 out of 3 directors of first impressions won't actually know the authors, or bluff u towards selling whatever it is they r selling at that moment, but not at The Greville Street Bookstore. At times they've recommended I not buy anything due to a lack of match, or a book that was close to arriving which was a better fit.

My current quest has been to find The Next Great Novel. A world changer, one that u either read 100 pages till 3am or are only about to get 3 pages done till u get a rohypnol like sleep because the words are too big. The David Foster Wallace film script in the footnotes in the #1 book of all time : Infinite Jest for example.












BB : "David Foster Wallace. Johnathon Franzen. Dave Eggers. Zadie Smith. Safran Foer. Do u have any new books by authors like these...??"

Bookish/Helpful Shop Assistant : "Well.....you could try this, this or that... but what u really need is 'The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao' and it's sold out."

(nb thats it a Pulitzer Price winner is kind of offputting but kind of gravity pulling to, like when Oprah made Franzen's totally brilliant The Corrections part of her book club, to which he quoted Groucho Marx, and she took it off her list, hehe. SMH's soundbite : "The grand theme of Oscar Wao is the fuku americanus, a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World". The fuku has fallen on all the characters in the novel, perhaps never to be broken." Also came in #1 in Time Mag's Top 10 Fiction books list of 2007, geez im a bit late... i also like the author diaz in nymag refers to himself as "“ghetto nerd” with Time saying book is written in a "mongrel argot of his devising, a mixture of straight-up English, Dominican Spanish and hieratic nerdspeak crowded with references to Tolkien, DC Comics, role-playing games and classic science fiction.".)

Which of course means now I really want it. Any1 that's read it pls leave a comment.... maybe I can find a bookstore before my trip to the final home and away game at the G tomorrow, where the Dees win the #1 priority pick prob Jack Watts the future David Neitz 2.0.

NYT : "But of course an awful lot of serious young-to-middle-aged novelists (Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon) hang around there as well, lingering over the narratives that fed their childhood imaginations in order to infuse their ambitious, difficult stories with some of the allegorical pixie dust and epic grandiloquence the genres offer. In “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Díaz, the author of a book of sexy, diamond-sharp stories called “Drown,” shows impressive high-low dexterity, flashing his geek credentials, his street wisdom and his literary learning with equal panache. A short epigraph from the Fantastic Four is balanced by a longer one from Derek Walcott; allusions to “Dune,” “The Matrix” and (especially) “The Lord of the Rings” rub up against references to Melville and García Márquez. Oscar’s nickname is a Spanglish pronunciation of Oscar Wilde, whom he is said to resemble when dressed up in his Doctor Who costume for Halloween. “What more sci-fi than Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles?” Oscar wonders. And the question of how to take account of his ancestral homeland — its folklore, its politics, the diaspora that brought so many of its inhabitants to North Jersey and Upper Manhattan — is one that explicitly preoccupies Oscar’s creator. The way Díaz tells it, the Dominican Republic, which occupies the Spanish- speaking half of the island where Columbus made landfall, is the kind of small country that suffers from a surfeit of history. From the start, it has been a breeding ground for outsize destinies and monstrous passions."

Salon : "Díaz switches seamlessly between urban slang and quasi-Victorian archness. Mock-heroic phrasings invoke Homer; obscenities glide by like grace notes; and popular culture -- "This is your chance. If blue pill, continue. If red pill, return to the Matrix" -- provides a lexicon that somehow seems able to tame, if not contain, the screaming banality of daily life and the madness of the past. "Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor," Díaz writes of Trujillo, and keeping a beautiful daughter from his raging lusts was "like keeping the ring from Sauron.""

Quarterly Conversation : "I can think of no other novel that contains so much brutality, torture, rape, murder, and suicide, yet nevertheless feels fun throughout." (for less highbrow reviews, and more crowdsourced reviews check out goodreads on the book)

Brutality aside, doh - author was at Sydney Writers Festival this year..... and no I didnt get to MWF yday :( Big L. OK now I have no choice but to read this book, I will need to pickup a copy tomorrow.. any1 that combines Homer + SciFi is a good start... and after reblogging so many links i have no choice but to read.... Also, I forgot to mention this amazing artists commune/warehouse off Sydney road that I visited last nite... had some vkewl arted up Apple computers... and Obey-ish popgraf-art - even a twitter fail whale :) For those in Melbourne it's a bigger, more stylish ChapelSt Bazaar...

changing mothers, adagencies and oil on a friday.

SterlingCooper 2.0
Originally uploaded by redbarren

So it's Friday, really have no idea where that week went, and 2day as Friday often is, is meeting day. In preparation I'm reading the Woody Allen fake diary in the NYT, so I can better understand the dynamics of negotiation : "Offered role to Scarlett Johansson. Said before she could accept, script must be approved by her agent, then by her mother, with whom she’s close. Following that it must be approved by her agent’s mother. In middle of negotiation she changed agents — then changed mothers. She’s gifted but can be a handful."

Really should have/be going to the Melbourne Writers Festival but unless I pop into a session today/tomorrow - I will have missed. My search for the new Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, SafranFoer, Franzen, Eggers - continues. Where am I going to find a fiction book to reinvigorate my dazzlement with the written word ? OK, up early coz I actually went to bed early (iprimus sux bad overnight it only downloaded 3.6% of madmen series 1, 4.4gig file) Anyway, I really smell, I better shower, (would like2) put on some tartan nikes or black pumas or white NBs, or get some gas + oil and drive 86kms. We are Sterling Cooper dot com is another bow in the Mad Men marketing bag of trix. L8r.

"its supposed to be so good so bad so private."

P1060533
Originally uploaded by neilandrewclark

Tony Pierce's Busblog is one of my fave manlit'ters out there. Will def take it over the 2.0 echochamber, well apart from the ones providing the secret to making a clear $23M before u r 40. Anyway Tony provides the other half of the recipe, that being what to do with/how to get the freedom. Or even more accurately, how to be free within the system irrespective of whether u r pre or post exit, employed or not.

Tony tells great LA stories and links to the best of the new ones. Anyway, click on him - I'm not making sense today/this week; Cant spell names... it's all a deep psychic ledger that I'm makin a mess of. "Sleep. U need Sleep." : 'U mean I do?'. Table tennis interior monologue on a blog isn't the smart thing to do if u wish to profess your sanity. Makes your 38% look 23% overestimated. Read. Tony. 4. Secrets.

TonyPierce.com : "its supposed to be so good so bad so private. that youre supposed to have a secret afterwards. you shouldnt be able to talk about it at work. you shouldnt be able to blog about it and you definatly shouldnt be able to explain every detail to your mom. you shouldnt roll over afterwards and say : k wanna play wii now?"

'Sup friendfeed? : bustn a post_rss simple update protocol gnip_n_tuck.

LP640
Originally uploaded by Kurt Blythman

Nice LP640 captured by Kurt Blythman, and FriendFeed sound as if with "SUP" they've developed a similar technology to gnip. I really hope these new protocols are made open source or a standard emerges so we can utilise some of this technology because RSS polling is a business killn bitch, let me tell u ! (Louis Gray also has a good list of 10 things friendfeed should be doin/fixn, like having user profiles:)

Summary below via The Deal : "FriendFeed's Simple Update Protocol.. will allow the service to process updates from social networks and blogging sites more quickly than what's possible using current Really Simple Syndication technology. SUP.. query Web sites to determine which feeds have been updated since the last poll and then download only those that have been modified. "FriendFeed downloads millions of RSS and Atom feeds every hour.. SUP makes it much more efficient and lets us check much more frequently, like every minute or every couple of seconds, instead of every half hour."

FriendFeed provide a more detailed tech summary (Kev can u explain to me, ta:) - "For example, if a site such as FriendFeed switched from polling feeds every 30 minutes to polling every 300 minutes (5 hours), and also monitored the appropriate SUP feed every 3 minutes, the total amount of feed polling would be reduced by about 90%, and new updates would typically appear 10 times as fast."

Bonus : Post RSS Technology not your thing, how about living in a garbage truck ? It's very chic and minimalist actually :D Although I'd rather live here.

studio 61 on facebook ?

lindsban
Originally uploaded by redbarren

Who knows what to believe before caffeine ? I'm lucky enough to find the keyboard, open blogger and insert the hyperlink to Caro's piece on every1's fave x-crackd out w/hookahs Westwing creator Aaron Sorkin : Who may be making a movie about the Zuckerborg + Facebkmania. I vote Bleeker too to play the Founder role !

CNet The Social : "If a recently created group on Facebook is to be believed, entertainment stalwart Aaron Sorkin--creator of The West Wing and A Few Good Men--is working on penning a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about the origins of Facebook. Someone claiming to be Sorkin's researcher created the group so that he can learn more about the site, and several hundred Facebook members have already joined."

$801 of reason for mad men + the new "weeds" grrl to keep tweetin.

xpensive shit
Originally uploaded by redbarren

I'm deep deep in Mad Men addiction that I'm not even trying to fight the "problem" or unseat a heavily rooted denial. The latest ep "The New Girl"* was amongst if not the best (see this funny Ken Cosgrove + Zip moment on youtube) of current 2nd series via HouseNextDoor :

"Once again, there’s plenty of ambiguity about Don’s menschiness. His betrayal of Betty as a pouty response to Rachel’s marriage is hardly an example of maturity, but his standing up for Peggy is admirable, and I was reasonably impressed by his resignation to facing the music when it looks like Jimmy is going to call him out over the incident with Bobbie. The most grown-up thing he does, however, is treating Peggy with respect when follows Bobbie’s advice, first asking him to repay her ASAP and then calling him “Don” instead of “Mr. Draper.”

Anyway back to the point of this post before I cook my Chicken Chesticles for dins : After following all the Mad Men on twitter (it is kewl to get an email saying don draper and peggy olsen r followin u back), my heart stopped a few beats when I read that the Sterling Cooper Ad Agency Owner of Mad Men had shut down the twitter back channel. Well lucky, there's been a 360.

SiliconAlleyInsider : "What happened? Deep Focus, the Web marketing group that works for AMC, tells us that they gently nudged their client into rescinding the DMCA takedown notice they'd sent to Twitter. See, in Web marketing parlance, the Twitterers assuming the names of Mad Men characters are actually "brand ambassadors" meant to be cultivated, not thwarted. "Better to embrace the community than negate their efforts," says a Deep Focus spokesman. We agree!"












* For those who have seen episode HouseNextDoor also have the economics inflation calculation of Don well "Mr.Draper's" $150 car crash fine : "Many people will take Don’s $150 fine for drunk driving to be another of Mad Men’s periodic cheap, “Ho ho ho, look how far we’ve come in 40-some-odd-years” jokes. The truth is more complicated: According to the Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator, that fine comes to $1,092.54 in 2008 dollars. New York DWI law is pretty complicated--it seems that those charged with drunk driving are actually charged with two separate different offenses, “Driving While Impaired by Alcohol” (a noncriminal “traffic infraction” with a minimum fine of $300 and a max of $500 for a first offense; these charges are handled by the DMV rather than the DA, apparently), and “Driving While Intoxicated”, (a criminal violation for which first-timers face a minimum fine of $500 and a max of $1000). Point being, if Don had a clean record, he could theoretically be hit for a fine that’s almost $400 more (in modern dollars) than what he would face in 2008. If the accident led the cop to upgrade the offense to an “aggravated DWI” (which is done at a police officer’s discretion, I think), they’d be more likely to throw the book at him. The good ol’ inflation calculator also reveals that the $110 or so that Peggy scrapes together to pay Don’s fine would be $801 in 2008 money--no small sum at all"








* Next Ep : #6 Trailer now up : "Don and Duck take a stab at making peace. Peggy tries to insinuate herself into the execs’ after-hours meetings. Duck deals with a family visit at the office." Or even better, watch with one click the newest episode of Weeds out today :)

its a ubiquity mashup humpday for the homies.

170808-112325
Originally uploaded by B-tizzle

Workn thru 82 pages of spec markups and just checkn on google reader : is there an air app for google reader yet btw any1 uses ?, would be vuseful - Speakn of mashups, Mozilla Labs are doin some interestin things with Ubiquity via Webware : "Ubiquity's capability to extract items from Web pages an insert them in whatever you're creating, like an e-mail message or a blog post. At the moment I believe the only site you can extract data from is Google Maps, but clearly Mozilla's direction is to build a platform that takes bits of data from Web resources and pastes it together on the user's behalf."

Extra Link : I'm grokkn the "For The Homies" Melbourne brand which has my desired item of season, the black leather hoodie, and tho it's well outside my budget and 9 times more than the equally hawt F-T version I keep missn stock for, its a schweet lookn item along with others in their line. OK I'm beach runnin (Hastings gym reopens tomorrow after renos) before I go back to specs. Nice HD Nikon video btw...

rinse + repeat : selling your social_network or iphone_app in 3 easy steps.

Peggy Guggenheim
Originally uploaded by лесли

So it's 19 minutes to midnight and I've hijacked a Macbook Air as the 24" imac has the Sean Penn directed Jack Nicholson and allstar cast : The Pledge. Jerry Black: You don't know what the fuck you are dealing with! The Wizard is real and I know it!

There seems to be a few M+A pledges about today, with Amazon making the obvious step of acquiring the i hear its excellent, oops i better signup, book social networking site - Shelfari. Price not disclosed but I'm always envious of entrepreneurial teams that bite off the right size piece of the pie to build, bake it, then sell off2 the amazon bakery, where it can join the use it everyday imdb.com.

Shelfari Blog : "We’ve got some big plans ahead. With more resources and Amazon’s expertise in building a platform where people come to share ideas, there are a lot of new opportunities in the future that will benefit each of you. In the meantime, you’ll continue to have access to the great community and tools that you’ve always known and used on the site."

Ironically IMDB 2.0 flixster.com, via techcrunch, has bought a nanoish iphone movies app. "Movie focused social network Flixster acquired a popular iPhone application called Movies.app last week, and has re-released the application this evening. As far as we know, this is the first acquisition of an iPhone app. The price isn’t being disclosed."

Lots of docs to do this week, and its 4 minutes to 12 so I better press publish so i dont turn into a pumpkin or whatever the mixed metaphor is. Some nice JB Classics at Sneaker Freaker.

who said classifieds cant have facebookesque news feeds.

Lambo Run
Originally uploaded by Ian Jones Photography

Damn I just had Carspotter's Murcielago on, but check the Ian Jones captured 560 Gallardo, that is sooo money. As in alot of $$$; Luv the redesigned model. Anyway back to work, and look how the not in Australia Trulia is bringing news feeds to real estate, how topical to my day, kinda.

Mashable : "Further validating the trend made popular by Facebook, Trulia has adopted the news feed format for additional localized personalization features on its homepages. Visit Trulia’s main home page and you’ll see tailored news feed updates based on your geographic location. Upon launch, this news feed will be localized on a city level, but as Trulia aggregates more information to be included in this news feed and continues to build out this feature, it will move into specific neighborhood and zip code localization levels as well."

Trulia have a quick summary on their blog (also interesting hearing about what they are doing in Q+A, Iphone versions and structured home improvement blogging - dejavu of ideas i pitched awhile back:) : "The Local News Feed gives you real-time real estate news that relates to the cities that you care about. For example, let’s say you are searching in the Bay Area. You check out Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda and Walnut Creek. Go back to the homepage and the Local News Feed give you updates on homes for sale, sales prices, conversations about those cities (on Trulia Voices) and open houses."

who should clients call in australia for social media campaigns ?

Murcie in the Night
Originally uploaded by CarSpotter

CarSpotter on Flickr seems to be the man for catching supercars in Europe, damn do they drive some high end cars in Monaco. Nothing is standard it's all Gemballa this, Techart that. Anyway, lots of new work in the widget pimp this sidebar space, which is interesting. Given widgets and social network apps went big 2006-7 O/S makes sense Australia is now starting to look at the media space opportunity associated with blogs and social networks.

Dare has a good post on tips for making sure widgets dont slow down your overall page loads (hehe which i know well given how slow my blog loads and buggy too coz of my badly coded, installed widgets:) - "In many cases, it isn't feasible to host all of the data and content related to widgets that are being shown on your site. In that case, you should ensure that the key scenarios on your Web site are insulated from the problems caused by slow or broken 3rd party widgets."

On a related point - One of the biggest opportunities businesswise I see downunder (which is evidenced by the real pain well at least confusion and unwanted phone calls... it is currently causing business) is that there is no media, agency, large enough player that a client can call to make a social media/widget/facebook campaign buy.

Clients cant call google, yahoo7, ninemsn, sensis, news, fairfax + correct me if I'm wrong but facebook still dont have an Aussie employee or representative ? (or if they do they arent making much noise) So if u want to put a widget on Aussie blogs or social network profile pages how do u do it...

If you go back to 1999ish, clients called Nic Jones at ninemsn, Tony Faure at Yahoo, Nigel Dews at Fairfax Digital, was Zed/Zeb his name:) ? @ News Digital - but in the blogs and social media category, you can call Rebekah Horne at MySpace Australia; Bebo did (and prob still do have a local rep pre-AOL acquisition); ninemsn have millions of uniques on LiveSpaces and you can get in touch with Mr Petre's team at the News backed Allure Media who have the Denton au_licenses to defamer, gizmodo - but that leaves an awfully big long tail of blog and social network traffic that clients want to reach, esp that early adopting, gadget reviewing, investment making influentials.

Perfect for a (localised) SocialMedia/Lookery/Federated Media/BlogAds type model :) There's still some definite maths that needs to be worked on here.. What is the total deduplicated reach that can be obtained from the longtail of the Aussie socnet+blogesphere : What is the breakdown of the audience Roy Morganwise; Does it skew babyboomer AB vs genY; Are the properties that are generating the traffic likely to want to be advertised on by leading brands; and are there the right types of widget, contextual, display, content integration opportunities that will drive enough clicks + yield ?

My gut feel, is that with multiple social networks reaching more than 3m Australians monthly, and prob 1/3rd to 1/2 of Aussie eyeballs visiting a blog monthly... there are some opportunities to run some reach products across such a network @ low cpm/cpc, then take a higher cpm, content integration approach in high value verticals such as technology, financial services, travel, auto, retail and women.

So the consumer reach equation seems there.. and clients now seem to be the ones calling their agencies in Australia wanting to be in the "social conversation" - albeit a moderated safe one with high brand fits. Sounds good to me. Now just needs an investor to fund the technology (license + customisation of self-service advertising infrastructure) and people (1 X site manager + 1 X bus dev/sales mgr) Then you could start taking those calls and be the go-between.

-Who's is the motorcycle?
-It's not a motorcycle, it's a chopper!
-Who's is the chopper?
-It's Zed's.
-Who is Zed?
-Zed is dead babe... Zed is dead!

it's a 707hp russian search engine monday with the vagabond set.

Cans Re-cycled
Originally uploaded by unusualimage

Went to bed and woke up early, had a headache 36 hours which im really hoping leaves as I've got a full specs/email type of day then meetings 2morrow, and good things happenin in b/w. Nice work by the Russians' Yandex 8m ppl a day search engine in beating Google via Times Online on who has 55% market share vs Google's 21% in Russia. Australia is definitely not one of the 4 countries in the world where google doesnt dominate :) Profile is on Founder Volozh :

“Ironically, my first business experience was thanks to the Communist party,” said Volozh. “When the law about kooperativ was passed, our boss at the institute came to us and said: you guys are mathematicians, you start a business. We began trading computers and I was made technical director. I was only 24. [We were paid in hardware instead of cash and] I earned two personal computers in one year, a huge sum in those days – enough to buy my first flat, a two-bedroom Moscow apartment.”"

Current Stalking
Snickering at the Vagabond Set : "mischeif & manic marbles of the mayhem-esque me’s"
Couldnt get to end coz head was hurtn : Ellen Page in An American Crime movie.
Kzo is second generation Aussie streetwear, Ill take this hoodie coz the zip isnt str8, if i dont have to pay $283.
If I was one of 3 people with this Lime Green/Matte Black modded "Novitec's 707 horsepower TuNero F430s" - I'd be pretty happy.
Fred Wilson thinks there may be some breakage in 12 months. Agreed - when those fundings run out. From A VC : "Then the existing investors are forced to look hard at each other and decide if they want to keep investing. And then, if the company is really not making good progress, the answer is usually no."

how friendrank will come to blogging's secret societies.

Kitta & Lu
Originally uploaded by lu_lu

if there's one thing that's more confounding than the other gender, it's how they organise themselves on the internet. or more particularly how they carve out individual spaces, identities, personal brands, and even businesses : while building coalitions, link love, @twitter replies, meetups, and ultimately real friendships and sometimes business alliances.

metafilter has pickedup on an example of this by observing the galadarling, nubby twiglet, star, marie, queen quilda and others femposse (not to mention the lu_lu pictured kitta poss and the various twitter underground brigade blogesses:P); Some common character traits are noted ("Young female, using a glamorous pen name, mix between personal life.. + how-tos, design, fashion, style, likely to be an artist/creative, blogger itself a brand, Similar layouts") and the nature of their coalition is described if more as a question, than definitive : "A few of these blogs cross-link to each other, but other than that I don't see anything that suggests they're part of a collective or tight group of friends. Rather, it seems to be a growing sub-trend of blogging, and I was wondering if anyone else had noticed this and/or done some research on these blogs."

Nubby Twiglet, one of the "Secret Society" of 'non-pareils' (as gala has dubbed her community) has replied to the post with cautious positivity (the first rule of secret societies is not to talk about them i guess:) But Nubby's also a bit dont believe the hype : "In a way, I’m glad that the original question was asked because it’s generated some fantastic commentary and I’m all for girls bonding with one another and creating positive content that they’re proud of. I’m inspired by others who choose to live their lives with no regrets, follow their dreams and stay positive while doing it. We’re not the first (or only) group of girls doing this and definitely not the last."

Girls blogging, linking to each other, collaborating, organising and communicating online isn't exactly OMG what r they doing. Can u believe it ? Human beings communicate. Girl:Girl. Is this Lesbos or the final chopping of the phallic 1.0 power regime ?

What I find interesting about this case study, is when you take gender out of it, and look at the structure and characteristics of those that are building personal brands, or even a step before that, living a part of their life online, which obvs comes with pros (who said being internet famous was all bad) and cons (u end up not being able to say anything because google index everything for the rest of your life, people who pay your bills read/view u, and the content is going to be on the internet forevvvveerrr, which is a long time)

By living one facet online, u also change the potential outcome in that u r suddenly meeting and organising via twitter, facebook controls what events u go to, and twitter turning off direct sms probably got more discussion and activism than the first change of government in Australia for a decade.

The whole meta conversation behind the scene of Web 2.0 businesses, where entrepreneurs maintain blogs updating on the status of their perpetual beta, and VC's open up their work by writing about the consumer experience they had with companies they may invest in as a way of attracting deal flow. All of the above is nothing new to us (the readers, consumer-creators) It's just another post to comment or like on friendfeed and possibly twitter about if we were mentioned in the article.

What is interesting to me, and what is totally uncracked in all this, is the identification, filtering and aggregation of these informal clusters of personal brands around fluid yet sortable topics. I haven't seen any adequate implementation of finding the tribe you are interested in - Google blog search and Technorati index 100m+ blogs and match keywords users search for; This doesnt help u find an informal associations of watch devotees for example (whether it be casio/seiko japanese to breitling, rolex, hublot, etc) - In reality there are prob 500-1000 high quality daily to weekly publishing blogs and forums dedicated to watches. Not to mention the once every 5 years blog post by the new watch owner whose photos may be consumed by the avid watch citizens in these dedicated blogs and forums. Same happens in auto.

The recent approach by SixApart via launch of blogs.com was to just ignore all the amazing topics and voices on Typepad and simply manually classify the A-List media and blogs to provide basically a google news experience with huffington/perez type additions. It doesn't let you find that passionate blogger about Guitar Hero, or for me : the non-aligned network of 40 sneaker blogs that the sneakerfreakers, hypebeast, caliroots of this world, as well as retailers like sneakerhead, size-online maintain. This is far more complex than the pagerank_lite algorithm which the blog search engines followed, and it's also not the traditional meta-people search that wink is working on; it's a cross between topic based group search (in which user is looking at particular topics), which identifies the high influence people in that field, shows their relationship networks, and then displays the popular cluster of lifestreams (blog posts, images, video - show me only items with "2 likes" etc) and the relational connections between the actors.

How often am I asked by press "Who are the top (insert topic, category, interest) bloggers ?" It's often supported by "I tried searching using x, y, and z - and while I found some, I've got a very incomplete picture." - While sometimes I may want (and find) a particular blog post based on a keyword search (and similarly people will use wikipedia + mahalo type sites for a similar solution) nothing out there yet (that ive seen anyway, any1 got tips ?) really lets u drill into finding the influencers, who r the prolific content creators and also likely the most followed.

I know FriendRank as opposed to PageRank has been talked about as the Nirvana and basis of Social Media Optimisation. Ability to relativitely rank your online buddies by their marketing value, broken down by geography and commercial segment is both scary and exciting in its non-wasteful hypercapitalism potential. We finally won't hear anymore about John Wanamaker's half my advertising is wasted. Neither will we hear Dave Winer's my blog is the advertising call to arms anymore because it will be true.

Not sure who will solve this problem in the discovery of informal social media power elite networks - Will it be the Mountain View horizontal search engines, who move from dressed up pagerank keyword matching or even this much postured Seattle owned semantic search dreamers. Possibly it will come more from the social networks and adservers themselves through behaviourial tracking software and analytics. Friendfeed (my account), Facebook and Lookery are all positioned well for this too. Then again, each vertical and niche is different and those that take a segmented approach may do better, meaning there could be as many winners as niches.

"THE powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family, and neighborhood... The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. Those who sit in the seats of the high and the mighty are selected and formed by the means of power, the sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity, which prevail in their society. They are not men selected and formed by a civil service that is linked with the world of knowledge and sensibility. They are not men shaped by nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues this nation now so unintelligently confronts. They are not men held in responsible check by a plurality of voluntary associations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision. Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility." (The Power Elite : they certainly got "men" as a word into one paragraph a crazy amount of times, 1956)

OK I know I started this post talking about the internet famous secret society of non-pareil hawt_chic design fashion personal brand building with a dash of community bloggesses. But as I said, it's a confounding area, but those that are able to answer these perennial questions, and track/present the new voices in realtime across niches and locations will have a very happy time indeed. And if we think current society is a bit Mean Girls, what happens when there are realtime publicly available FriendRanks of influence ? What Janis said in Lindsay's only hit is just the start : "That one there, that's Karen Smith. She is one of the dumbest girls you will ever meet."

Cady: Hey!
Regina: Why were you talking to Janis Ian?
Cady: I don't know, I mean, she's so weird, she just, you know, came up to me and started talking to me about crack.
Regina: "She's so pathetic. Let me tell you something about Janis Ian. We were best friends in middle school. I know, right? It's so embarrassing. I don't even... Whatever. So then in eighth grade, I started going out with my first boyfriend Kyle who was totally gorgeous but then he moved to Indiana, and Janis was like, weirdly jealous of him. Like, if I would blow her off to hang out with Kyle, she'd be like, "Why didn't you call me back?" And I'd be like, "Why are you so obsessed with me?" So then, for my birthday party, which was an all-girls pool party, I was like, "Janis, I can't invite you, because I think you're lesbian." I mean I couldn't have a lesbian at my party. There were gonna be girls there in their *bathing suits*. I mean, right? She was a LESBIAN. So then her mom called my mom and started yelling at her, it was so retarded. And then she dropped out of school because no one would talk to her, and she came back in the fall for high school, all of her hair was cut off and she was totally weird, and now I guess she's on crack."

is blogging just linking ?

D Viaje
Originally uploaded by redbarren

hehe, is blogging about the marc cuban destination or enjoying the jason calacanis journey ? while u ponder that, why not check out the excellent design blog desire to inspire, one half of the (midcenturyjo + kim) manicurists being australian, the other - apart from those cricket playin kiwis - part of the no other nation closer to us aussies vs north americas, that being, canadian. the antipodeans' focus is "rooms" yknow, u may have one in your house/apartment, unless your studio is waaay small, coz your busting your east "west" coast village dream of being an artist.

desire2inspire's aesthetic covers multiple decades all fused into the blender, but not limited to : this is a kewl looking (kitsch or modernist) chair; great photos with (hello b+m) kittykats in background; apartments that look "i just thru this together" yeah right; some of their own bathroom renovations; lots of (ooh design gets me) wood : basically, all the good cross discipline "industrial design" physical real objects u want your designer to grok beyond that virtual, meaningless, hugely derivative, never inspired ajax, javascript and post rounded corners web design :) go check em out*, desire to inspire, they say repetition makes u remember "stuff" better.; desire to inspire. dot. blogspot. did i tell u that joke about the canadian and the australian ? Um, I dont really know one, anyway... "An Australian and a Canadian trying to inspire the world, one room at a time."

* btw, if u already have your rooms perfected, and just want to look totally street (u dont want 2b perceived as aloof and distant from the ppl's) - u need to visit the best online streetwear store : karmaloop.com; read their blog or classic startup growth story (pretty kewl when kanye comes to shop at your offline store) ive bought there, and it takes about 5 days to deliver to australia, amazing, awesome, non influenced /paid i dream rave, rave (google for coupon code discounts too - wish i had the coup' when i first bought there)... latest guys stuff ere, newest4womyn not jailed for 3 years dabrat whose debut album i really liked, oh if only i had non entrepreneur, non startup money ? im a big crooks fan, but esp tickling my fancy at moment is the Japanese originated diversified into LA Rocksmith brand (not the really shiny porno stuff:). I'll have this hoodvest (been really dying for this item for awhile actually), tshirt (or this crooks one:) and bucktown hoody for starters. Gmoney fo'sure. Design does make the world go around.... well if it can be built properly hehe

the tears after the tears.

Used to be a pizza + pasta joint adjunctd to the 'wicks reluvd classic cinema.
now a polish vodka bar with alcohol cured salmon, caviar n beetrooted horseradish.
The clinching drink a $8.5 heated vodka apple tea.
The 1st one goes down so well with the polish nanna made spring onionised potato salad.
2nd is moving quick and table's gettn crowded when crunchy calamari + pieroggi arrive.
Its slow motion as the warm sticky pomegranate laced vodtea gets knockedup.
Compounded by one of those cafe tables that doesn't want to naturally sit flat.















Just half an inch of leverage and the mostly full heated drink is alicia keys fallin.
A broken fall by Se7en jeans.
Target locked in and verified; Fire. 100% mission completion.
Gasps and high pitched yelp.
Paper serviettes quickly absorbed.
Thighs wet and sticky.
What is the eating protocol mid-meal.
Sookie la-lah.
Should we stay or should we go.
If we stay will trouble double.
No chocolat crepes tonite.
Just warm sticky vodka thighs.
And very full carbd polish tums.
Limping down glenhuntly road to evade the sticky se7ens.
A faux dry reach huck in the maccas carpark2end the adventure to elsternwicks after the tears.

after the tears

Address : 9B Gordon St, Elsternwick

Phone : (03) 9523 0969

the mtub fire_eagle arm wrestle.

TUB arm wrestle
Originally uploaded by LucasBucket

So I'm blogging in air, sometimes u just gotta operate in the @praxxis cloud. Gotta a hatrix of meetings so there isn't exactly time to stumble over my words, and hitup some of that mumblecore junk that I substitute for a blog post. It seems the LucasBucket pictured MTUB hisnher playaz Messr TechCollective in dahaus @joshsharp and everyone's overseas headed vixen @bethanie were engaging in a bit of arm wrestling. But what was the prize for the arm wrestle ? A Blackberry Bold maybe ? Surely not special times with the reworked vamped up where's that Richmond terrace josh @livnenna.

I promised I wouldn't mumble and I obviously havent done that. Now @mspecht may have had to leave MTUB early because his better half @miriamp is supersizing the melbourne populace. Speaking of which I have a 945am appointment (so why am i lookn at tshirts that say : "you're feigning nostalgia for a decade you dont remember") and its 941am. So I will leave u with Macdaddy Manus talking future web platforms, there are millions in these shovels I tell u Richard, the #1 blogger to emanate from New Zealand. I'm interested in what the Mac has to say about Yahoo's Fire Eagle as I'm hoping that platform can enable alot of the hyperlocal apps that alot of us so desire. I'm gonna jump off to my meeting on the Stingray now.

RWW : "As we wrote about Fire Eagle when the beta was first announced, it offers API kits in five different programming languages, it's got user authorization protocols already available for web, desktop and mobile apps and it's using the open standards community built oAuth to facilitate faster, more secure mashups. This ain't no cry-baby do it my way or I'm taking my ball and going home framework like the Facebook platform. This is leveraging universal open standards."

mad men on twitter, bb in melbourne.

black hoodz
Originally uploaded by redbarren

Off to Melbourne for 48 hours for a meeting, or 2/3/4/5/6. There will be caffeine. Nicotine. A vigorous exchange of ideas. Discussions of technical architecture. Alot on product specs. Jump on the prototype horse. A segue into real life with heated up apple Vodka. Distressed denim may be swapped for 3 buttons, cufflinx + loafers. Should all be diagrammatically schematic. There may be some douche. Would like a bit of JapanLA Rocksmithwear. Maybe I'll see a GTR in the carpark. OK must shave, change, pack.. all that back end work u dont see... it takes work to be dishevelled.

Kewl Thing of the Week - Mad Men* (and Womyn) on Twitter
They r official characters on twitter, and not being douches, schweet;
Don Draper
Peggy Olson
Pete Campbell
Joan Holloway
Paul Kinsey
Bobbie Barrett
Bertram Cooper
Sal Romano

* Close to needing a 12 step program for Mad Men (watch some here if u havent, to get a taste) I am so into it (that and latest Weeds).... now I've added all above tweets Im gonna need to get some new followers so i keep my 3:1 followers:friends ratio. Or if u r in a more serious mode Don Dodge has the skinny on this years TechStars companies, alternatively listen to Rick Segal talk about the Blackberry $150M venture fund, want me a Bold already...

Lijit : $7.1m in new VC/4.5k blogs/60 new ones a day.

OfficialBiyatchCrew
Originally uploaded by redbarren

lijit are building out a nice post feedburner type investment for foundry, hitting some nice stats, and congrats on raising a good amount of dough to build out the blog ad network widget analytics vision. Gigaom has the joost : "Lijit, a two-year-old startup based in Boulder, Colo., recently raised $7.1 million, bringing the total venture capital it has raised so far to a shade above $10 million.. The company’s widget is used by more than 4,500 publishers, mostly blogs, with 60 new ones joining every day. So far, they are seeing about 330,000 searches a day, and the company plans to build an opt-in ad-network around these searches.. “To date we have spent a little under a $1M on crawling and indexing infrastructure but we expect another $1.5M with this new investment.”"

* BB's joke for the day : How many Australian VC's know what Lijit does or what widgets are. (OK, I'll work on my deadpan investor humour, i do have some meetings friday that may reinvigorate my respekt.....)

what fashion blog r u wearing 2day.

crazy lady
Originally uploaded by redbarren

as well as reminding me about mods, wendy james and tranvision vamp, the very smartly hehe named imnotantisocial (just short sighted) blogspot by karen lazarenko is one of those melbourne thrunthru morning what r u wearing at 615am to go to work, and what ebay etsy bourke stmall counter did u spend your last pay/max yer credit card on. todays post is jonathan ashton tights and royal trux faux grunge on the turntable. Esp liked the Lover Marianne Remix. originally found it via donttell.com.au. damn these grrls like shoppn on ebaynetsy :) its the new chapelnbrunswick streets. yknow what i mean. grrls. like. 2. shop. not that i dislike sneakers, hoodies, and expensive brown suede boots. got red rock west lined up as next dvd to watch after latest ep of weeds. yay, nancy.

Michael Williams: Adios, Red Rock.