After a long period of fervent denial, I’ve finally come back around to Twitter and I’m now generally sold on its application beyond base-line narcissism. Of course, there are limitations for how often you can broadcast a personal status update to nearest, dearest and stalkers, but it’s Twitter’s application in the Enterprise space that seems to be growing in promise. If we simply consider its root application as a quick and easy way to broadcast short messages via most digital platforms, then the never-ending application for prominent individuals, businesses and communities is writ large in blunt red crayon. I’m keen to hear particularly about any good NFP / community examples - anyone?

Here’s some of my current follow-ees:

• “Still digging Mars! The Snow White trench looks good to sample surface soil down to ice layer. Want to know if that ice was ever liquid.”
  The Mars Phoenix ‘talks to us’ via it’s oddly nerdsome persona @marsphoenix
• “Calling all social media experts - UKGov your ideas for new data mashups, and there’s GBP20,000 to support the best ideas”
  UK PM Gordon Brown keeps both his national electorate and the sceptical digerati up-to-date with ministerial happenings via @DowningStreet
• “I refuse to converse with idiots who wear Bluetooth headsets all day”.
  The man, the myth, the machine that is Sir Henry Rollins offers 160-ch bites of his usual flawless wisdom @HenryRollins
• “..and the last thing I’ll tweet tonight: “shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.”
  God bless ‘er and her potty mouth. @Zadi from my new favourite vodcast, Epic FU, tweets in pure pink.
• “wow some loser named Ted vandalized a Mahalo page for a couple of minutes-what a genius! http://tinyurl.com/46g2w6″
  Mahalo founder (and recent subject in this blog) Jason Calacanis blogs about his ‘human powered search egnine’, firing @replies to individual users for the benefit of everyone else. @JasonCalacanis
  
• “Thanking Hillary. Our party & our country are stronger because of the work she has done.”
  The next President on the United States keeps the faithful happy with near-daily posts from the campaign trail. @BarackObama
• “My neighbor got a new iPod. She has Tiger. Apple says she needs to buy Leopard just to use her new iPod. That’s unjustifiable greed.”
  Cable-TV geek-god Leo Laporte shrinks his lab to miniature at @leolaporte
• “The jig is up, it was fun while it lasted”
  After the Fake Steve Jobs comes the Fake Stephen Colbert - the perils of not registering twitter/yourname. Read the story at fakestephencolbert.tumblr.com [@stephentcolbert]

Another good use of Twitter is to mine all the data for posts around a certain keyword - particularly useful for analyzing reportage around breaking events. summize.com makes browsing very easy indeed, and offers in-browser notifications of new posts since your last refresh. By way of example: “california fire” gives us personal - and potentially critical - insights into today’s fires on the U.S. West Coast.

Despite having the Golden Ticket, I renaiged on the invitation to the 2008 Biennale Artists’ Party (long story), but thanks to Peter Murphy’s ‘panoramic VR’ photography, both you and I can feel like we were literally in the middle of the crowd. Peter’s flash-based panoramas give an extraordinary - and often disorientating - feeling of 360 space, a sensation that is even more profound in his surround-scapes for both the opening of the Sydney Apple Store and the ‘Temple Of Baal’ in the Jenolan Caves.

GOTO: Peter Murphy’s Panoramic VR Weblog

Alex Pye certainly had nothing good to say about Duran Duran on her FBi Radio breakfast show the other day, but over at Lost At E Minor, Zolton gives some long overdue props to a Duran classic, “The Chauffeur”. As much as I loved Duran’s pomp and ceremony and gushing pillars of fire, it was this minimal downtempo melody (tucked on the B-side of the ‘Rio’ album) that always won me over. Nothing to do with the nudity in the video of course, which Wikipedia authoritatively cites as “a homage to Charlotte Rampling’s topless “Dance of the Seven Veils” in The Night Porter”. Sure.

And somehow, Simon Le Bon’s vocals - strained and weak at the best of times - seem to fit this pervy little pean to voyeurism. Anyone who can make a line like this work should be applauded: “Swim seagull in the sky towards that hollow western isle, my envied lady holds you fast in her gaze”. Bless ‘em.

World’s first iPhone 3G on sale in New Zealand a day before the US. [Via Engadget]

Extra: Dan Boud’s photos from the opening of the Sydney Apple Store last week.

I hit Cockatoo Island last weekend to catch some of the works at this year’s Biennale - photos @ Flickr. Although I spent about two hours there, I still only managed to see half of the works, so a return visit is inevitable. Still, a free ferry across the harbour to a beautiful and remarkable location, with a modest little cafe in place - not terribly arduous. Keen to see the 80-y-o grannies belting out Sex Pistols covers at the MCA - maybe next weekend …

I’m now on a lock-down mission - knowing that my (briefly active) Divshare account has been hacked along with the rest of the user community, and my username and password string is out in the wild. It would seem that I (and possibly the vast majority of people) had assumed that companies with a generally robust brand integrity would be 110% secure in the new web world order. Foolish, I know. I’ve now invested in a cross-browser, hard bastard password generator and ‘release lock’ that should prevent such foolishness in future. A lesson bluntly learned.

“Thanks for being a part of DivShare. Late last night we were alerted of a security breach that allowed a malicious user to access our database, which included user e-mail addresses and other basic profile information… Please rest assured that no financial information whatsoever has been compromised. While we are not aware of what data has actually been accessed or copied, the database included user e-mail addresses and other data you may have saved to your profile, such as your first name. We are not aware of any files being accessed without permission, but we recommend that you change your account password and the passwords on any private folders as a security precaution.”

Report by Kristen Le Mesurier in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald on what is deemed to be the world’s “first carbon neutral clothes factory”:

“Solar panels and hydro power, energy-efficient task lighting, low-emissivity glass, turf roofs, and windows designed to get the most natural light for workers stitching lingerie are some of the other devices. Overall the factory uses 40 per cent less energy than an ordinary factory of the same size. And all of its energy comes from renewable sources: 90 per cent is hydro and 10 per cent is solar. The company’s claim? It is the world’s first carbon-neutral clothes factory…

“This move is an interesting one, if only because factories across Asia are pegged as low-cost producers that fire on all oil-based and child-labour cylinders. If a factory can reconsider the way it uses resources so fundamentally, and still consider the move cost effective, surely lots of other businesses can too. It’s a sign of things to come.”

blogs.smh.com.au/innovator

Even though CeBit has been and gone, I still feel the urge to download my discoveries from Day Two. I was lucky to see Robert Beerworth speak not once, but twice. I attend a great many conferences and seminars and I’m starting to develop a keen sense of whether a presentation is going to fly within the first few seconds (and conversely feel dejected when my gut tells that it’s going to fall flat). Beerworth commands the podium from the very first moment, and not with any particular grandeur; instead he’s calm, measured and brutally honest. If you feel like you’re drowning in jargon, stats and half-truths, Beerworth seems to be the man to clear the fog.

In his first presentation, he discussed “Web 2.0 and Search” explaining ways in which we, both as users and publishers, can best utilise search to deep-navigate the growing morass of widgets, profiles and modules in the web 2.0 world. I particularly enjoyed the way in which he described Google “rewarding” you for following their rules - for example, simply have a Sitemap file tucked away discretely on your server will earn you a couple of extra Google Brownie points and should see you bumped up the rankings.

During both this and his second session, “Blogging For Business”, Robert went to some lengths to describe ways in which content syndication can work to your advantage. For many years, publishers have been keen to keep users locked ‘on deck’, they want eyeballs on their own pages for the sake of revenue. However, intelligent syndication of the same content to 3rd party locations can obviously help to drive users to your site - RSS has enabled this for a long time, however it’s taken an eon for major content owners to catch up. Beerworth also discussed his strategy of seeding unique content into 3rd parties, exclusive to their platform rather than his - articles specifically generated to lure a target market from one space to another, all the while offering relevant, useful content to the end user. It’s certainly a long tail approach, but nonetheless it’s driving quality traffic to Beerworth’s business.

Here’s some bookmarks culled from Robert’s presentation:

ThisNext - “explore product recommendations”, much like delicious or digg, but designed exclusively for products, such as the gold-embossed iPod Shuffle that everyone needs to have. “Today’s Rave” is picnic baskets.

trackur - “online reputation monitoring” - “If your reputation is being discussed, Trackur will alert you”. Good for business, great for socialites.

Add This - “the #1 social bookmarking button”, the widget that drives a thousand digg and delicious clicks. Drop this at the end of your articles and posts to help readers promote the content to their own networks.

MyPickList - sell the third party products that you love dearly on your own site, and earn a commission. (Not for us Safari users it seems)

Crazy Egg - as a supplement to Google Analytics, Crazy Egg can provide tools such as ‘heat maps’ to show you exactly where users are clicking on your site.

Woopra - free, more advanced alternative to Analytics that intelligently mines your visitor traffic

You can find outlines of both of Robert Beerworth’s presentations at robertbeerworth.com.

I’m way too serious when I DJ… From Saturday’s Uber System LIberated! at the Abercrombie:

Still, it’s all smiles when I’ve got a JD in my hand (w. Mashy P & bP):

Get the full set at flickr.

This weekend’s controversy surrounding photographer Bill Henson (see many references at SMH, including this most recent: “Gallery Under Angry Seige“) reminded me that I’d seen it all before. In fact, not only had I seen it all before, I’d published it all before - as co-editor of Thee Data Base zine in our inaugural issue in 1992. My good friend and fellow editor, Alan, had written a piece titled ‘Artists in Exile’ which looked at two particular artists, Genesis P. Orridge and Ron Oliver - both of whom had been forced to flee the UK as a result of police investigations into their work. (You can read Alan’s article at Thee Data Base archive).

One of the sources for the text was John Tozer’s piece in Variant magazine, titled ‘Eye Of The Beholder’. Adrian Lynne’s ‘Lolita’ movie adaptation was the catalyst for Tozer’s piece, once again putting the pros and cons (though mainly the cons) of Nabakov’s dirty old Humbert through the media ringer.

Tozer cites a number of artists who have explored similar territory to Henson (Ron Oliver among them): “Depictions of the body, and particularly the bodies of children, present a dilemma for both artists and commentators, and often photographers who work with children, like Jock Sturges, Sally Mann, Graham Ovenden or Ron Oliver, are discussed almost entirely in terms of the works’ uncertain legal status and the fact that the images may be open to classification by some as pornographic, not due to their intrinsic visual content, but to a woefully, (and perhaps inevitably), inadequate set of categorical laws that may vary from country to country or from state to state. However, what defines the status of images, or what enables them to produce meanings, is not necessarily their formal denotative qualities, but the connotative meanings and messages that are constructed by the nature of the field through which they are realised or consumed.”

He continues: “There is a danger, with the increasing attempts of some pressure groups to promote the belief that any depiction of youthful nudity is inherently unhealthy or bad, that one may no longer be able to see a naked child for what he or she is but instead become accustomed to seeing a body sexualised in adult terms; consequently, the childish body, both clothed and unclothed, is in danger of being fetishised and turned into a routine container of adult sexual values.”

I’ve yet to see the full range of photographs that have been cited in this current episode, only one that was posted today in The Age. Out of context, it’s undoubtedly unsettling - what I don’t know is whether it would seem any more or less unsettling surrounded by the rest of the work. And I think that’s particularly key - whatever the issues surrounding the work, it was not designed to be viewed as a single image at 300 pixels on a broadsheet web site. It was designed to be ‘consumed’ in a gallery as part of a broader exhibition - condemn it then if you will, but at least see (excuse the pun) the broader picture. Of course, that particular option is no longer available to us, as 20 individual pieces have been confiscated by NSW Police.

I do find it telling that an exhibition of similar work was viewed by 65,000 Australians at the Art Gallery of New South Wales with not one complaint. And what do we make of the fact that Australia put Henson and very similar work on a national pedestal at the Venice Biennale in 1996? Instead it takes someone as charming and not-at-all self-serving as Miranda Devine to discuss Henson’s work in article titled: “Moral backlash over sexing up of our children” to provoke the initial outrage and put Roslyn Oxley’s gallery under the threat of arson.

Indeed, that last point highlights the two separate stories at work here - (1) whether Henson’s work should be deemed to be criminally ‘obscene’ and (2) how the commercial and tabloid media play out their role as our moral compass. (What do we make of the ABC’s censored edit of one of Henson’s work? Dare I say that this is arguably more disturbing and sexualised than the original?).

It’s at times like these that the blogosphere can come into its own - giving us a broad and often challenging aggregation of thoughts and opinions, unfiltered and unmediated by proprietorial agendas. Some of those ‘thoughts and opinions’ however are being forcibly removed by nervous hosts. Brain Stokes aka Wees @ MachineGunKeyboard had his blog account suspended for “displaying child pornography” after posting one of Henson’s images. [Read his longer response to the action at SlackBastard].

Niall @ Dogfight At Bankstown calls Henson out: “[He] is not an innocent victim here, he is used to controversy attending his shows. Which should immediately say something. And the gallery itself cannot feign surprise.”

Bluemilk notes: “The world was different when Henson began his career and not just in terms of the growing power of the Internet, but also on account of an increasing understanding of the rights of the child and the damage of inappropriate sexualisation.”

‘The Voice Of Today’s Apathetic Youth‘ (best blog name of the week) says: “Sure, there might be some pervert out there who gets aroused by the photograph. But there’s also a near-certainty that if the same 13 year old was depicted in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt there would also be perverts who would find that arousing. Are we supposed to ban everything that contains the slightest possibility of arousing someone whose sexual tastes are criminal if acted out in real life?”

And photographer Dan Boud also managed to find himself on the Gallery’s doorstep as the story unfolded - see his images at his Boudist blog.

The Australian Index aggregates more Henson-related blog posts at theaustralianindex.com - a place to return to as the debate undoubtedly rolls on over the coming days.

img: Sahlan Hayes, from SMH.