pure and applied

Poem published in Snorkel

I have a new poem 'The Carnies' in the #9 issue of online journal Snorkel. Check it out.

Credit Lyonnais

Credit Lyonnais, originally uploaded by pureandapplied.

While in Paris (in October last year on our honeymoon) we stayed in an apartment in the district known as Opera, which is the home to many of France's financial institutions.

Each night we would sit in the window of our apartment having a wine, watching the street, and observing the workers in the Credit Lyonnais headquarters adjacent have meetings, talk on the phone, file documents, fiddle on their computers.

This fairly plain photo, taken on Friday night, Oct 14 shows one of those workers clearing her desk after being made redundant at the beginning of the financial crisis.

Where The Wild Things Are Trailer

Hearing on twitter that Maurice Sendak's much-loved children's book Where the Wild Things Are is being produced as a movie creates excitement and anxiety in almost equal measures.

Excitement that a treasured story has been realised and extended, and anxiety that the production doesn't trample or dishonour the fondly-imagined world of the book. This trailer leaves me hopeful, at least.

YouTube - Where The Wild Things Are Trailer (HD).

Data visualisation videos

Great vid featuring brain-popping facts about population, spread of technology and the not-so-distant future when our artificially intelligent masters introduce themselves.

Via infosthetics.

Which reminded me of an even more compelling TED video @verdantflaneur showed me last night about open-sourcing country data and visualising population growth, wealth and health outcomes: "Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen".

Via TED.

Adam Aitken's book launch

Adam Aitken. Photo by Juno Gemes.

Adam Aitken’s new collection of poetry Eighth Habitation (published by Giramondo) will be launched by Marcelle Freiman at Gleebooks in Sydney at 4pm on Sunday 5th April. 

‘a lucid and finally lyrical voice… wholly original on the Australian scene’ - michael brennan

Via Pam Brown's blog the deletions.

Photo of Adam by Juno Gemes.

Bitter William

The first born's a nong and yet they give him
the hat and stick and jacket. Now golf's easier
than tennis, than anything I've tried, than all the ars

combined, and easier than memory - what colour
were your eyes, your hair - I speculate on your underwear.
You're vanishing, or the thought of you is less indelible,

the image of your form in the lab now a sunlit
shimmer - soon only a name, a half-remembered
gesture, my hand on your vulva between classes.

Still my brother's the better man - more domestic
than feral, suburban not dilettante - a glamourless,
blameless middle. Saturdays he carts the attack

all over the park; he shines as though all the shims
and wedges of the mighty were exerted at his whim;
how he wields the earth! And I'm laconic in the stands,

expectant as an aged passenger, static and seething,
where once I was unencumbered as a eucalypt. So we live
up here tethered at the whip-end of a steaming coil

of asphalt looped around the mountain - bachelor
captives on a hillside dairy where the buried forebears
set up a ceaseless chatter. Were I to go far from this place,

I'd miss the cows' gentle lowing, the town shopping strip
there below, the amateur theatrical society, Sunday mass,
the idiolect. In the manipulative sky, the implacable faces

of the angels decry my several murders, uncomposed, alone.

Written by the pseudonymous Flannery O'Malley, and first published in Cordite #23: Children of Malley,  April 2005.

The art of the sneaky shot

Monet's 'Waterlilies', originally uploaded by pureandapplied.

Taking candid shots of strangers in public involves a certain amount of surreptitious maneuvering, of seeming to be doing something other than what you're actually doing. Apparently admiring the cathedral's flying buttress while composing a shot of the family of five at your elbow and waiting for them to compose themselves is the sort of patient and yet contorted thing you find yourself doing.

The Nikon D80 I use isn't noted for being spy, which means I get busted, grimaced at plenty, and shouted at occasionally.

So I envy this fellow photographer her considered, in-the-background style and black Samsung (possibly this one) which is at the "silent running" end of compacts. Neither of us broke cover in spite of taking a minute or so for several shots each.

UPDATE: This shot was taken during a visit to the l'Orangerie.

More spy shots of strangers.

Fixie Figure 8 T

I love my fixie, I love
8s, I love Ts,
I love type.

More at Workerman.

Via @guchagucha

Awesome funk mashup by Kutiman

This tour-de-force mashup using 22 sources prompted an amusingly triumphal take from 43 Folders (in the now-familiar theme of "the future of music is ours"):

Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is “Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who ‘did this’ with our IP?” instead of, “Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,” it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page.

Great mashups demonstrate two timeless truths:

1. that deep talent will gleefully outwit, outflank and outrun the restrictive nature of copyright and IP law by funkin it up around the sprawling, fraying digital edges, and

2. that the infamous backward-looking C-levels (do they even exist in Australia?) are internets roadkill, and folks like Kutiman are creating the funeral music.

Via 43 folders.

Change2 - a propietary site or a community site?

A few weeks ago as part of some research into sustainability websites I encountered a new Australian sustainability community site called Change2.

I was initially excited and - to a certain extent - I still am that there is a social network for people interested in sustainability.

In Change2's own words: "The Change2 network is a free central resource on sustainability that brings together individuals, business, government and NGOs."

However Change2 is also a business that sells consultancy services to the sustainability community. See their identically branded business site. Indeed the call-to-action to become involved with their business is to join the social site. Until the last few days their business URL also pointed at the social site.

I was confused and so raised this with one of the founders Leon Young (see the thread). Whilst I acknowledge Leon’s response, the critical question remains for me: how successfully can Change2 function as a social site for its community stakeholders while it is so closely aligned to a single vendor in the industry?

The answer, I argue, is "not very successfully".

Commercial goals and social goals don't mix happily and there are two stakeholder groups in a gnarly spot:

• Clients (current and potential) of Change2
• Competitors of Change2 (and its partners)

Clients

Sustainability managers, particularly at large listed corporates, face the following questions:

• What are the conflict of interest issues for a member of the Change2 social site in considering a competitive tender from Change2 the business?
• Am I endorsing Change2 if I join? Am I breaching my organisation’s corporate governance policies if I join?
• I want to be involved in a community, but I don't want to join a vendor site!
• It's just not obvious what's on offer. While the brand of the business and the social site remain identical there will be confusion about what’s on offer and how Change2 is engaged as a business.
• The Corporate Environmental Managers Group (CEMG) is a independent membership group for environmental managers. This is a group that doesn’t allow vendors to be members. Yet CEMG itself has now joined Change2's site. Are CEMG endorsing Change2?

Competitors

Competing sustainability consultants would encounter some of the following complexities when considering activity in the site.

• Change2 is an uneven playing field.
  How can I compete with Change2 in their own site? They win every time when the role of selecting which posts, videos and forums are featured are determined by Change2 editors.
• My client just joined Change2’s site!
  What does that mean for our relationship?
• The client I'm pitching is a member of Change2.
  In a pitch against Change2 some competitors would perceive client members of the site to have a vendor bias, possibly a conflict of interest.
• Is this a way for Change2 to generate new business leads? I can't access that database - not fair!
• What is the relationship between Change2 and other parties in the site? Is the Eco Investor business independent of Change2?

Problems as a social site

Taken together the above issues will discourage some industry stakeholders from any involvement at all, and I’d suggest result in a degree of reticence amongst some others that do join. Therefore the site is not delivering its aims.

For those joining there are some further problems around the implementation of the social site.

• The brand position is weird.
  Imagine for a moment a company called Telstra created a social site called “Telstra” as a "free central resource on telecommunications that brings together individuals, business, government and NGOs." There would undoubtedly be legitimate questions about Telstra's motivation, the credibility of the site, and endorsement of Telstra that membership entails.
• Change2 writers lead the blogs
  The vendors have so far had a strong voice in the site. The diversity is growing, but the collective voice of the community, the crowd, is comparatively quiet.
• Social discussion - forums and site activity, as opposed to blogs - in Change2 is demoted on the homepage below the fold, below blog posts (mostly from Change2) and other items selected by Change2, or videos made by Change2. The implication being that your voice is less important than our voice.

Whilst it's possible there are good answers to some of these questions, the fact they can be asked at all reveals a troubling ambiguity about the position of site, one which will see its social aims off to an under-achieving start.

Compare Change2 to the eminently more democratic, independent and vendor neutral sydneycyclist.com or the cancer support site i2yaustralia.ning.com. Both are built on the same free platform (Ning) as Change2 and are full of vibrant exchanges between engaged members. Notice there are no bike shops or cancer charities running these sites (although these organisations may be members).

How can this be fixed?

If others agree with my case, then Change2 can be easily modified to address the problems.

Here's what I'd recommend:

1. This post gets a good discussion in the site.
2. The change2 social site is rebranded with a new name and brand to make the break with change2 the business.
3. The administration of the site is opened up to members of the community unaffiliated with Change2 the business.
4. Named blogs are removed. There is simply the open blog of the site (like that of sydneycyclist.com).
5. Forums become the main site channel, and administrator effort is devoted to encouraging discussion.

I remain excited about the site, and its potential, and I’m looking forward to responses from the community of Change2.

This article is was originally posted on the Change2 site.