Have you heard that Elsevier is buying Mendeley? No? Well, that’s probably because you don’t care. In the hustle of daily start-up takeover news that has been the staple of TechCrunch and Mashable for the last few years, this one is small bikkies. But TechCrunch did report on it, which spurred others to re-report. Then […]
Following completion of my honours year in 2012, I applied for and received admission to a PhD program at the University of Wollongong, and an Australian Postgraduate Award. I’m looking forward to beginning work on the project, but at this stage it is still in the very early developmental phase so I’m finding it hard […]
The promises of new technologies and new ways of using technology seem to matter little in their practical application. Where the much-vaunted Web 2.0 promised to deliver human interaction and collaboration that earlier uses of internet technology did not, we instead got Twitter bots, Facebook privacy hoaxes and cats – lots and lots of cats. […]
While buzzing around the University of Wollongong website yesterday, I came across this little news story talking about the role of television in constructing ideas about the nation. The story talked about a seminar at UOW today titled ‘Television, Popular Memory and the Nation’, which is very similar to the topic of my honours thesis. […]
I’ve wasted half my life, Marge. You know how many memories I have? Three! Standing in line for a movie, having a key made, and sitting here talking to you. Thirty-eight years and that’s all I have to show for it! – Homer Simpson, The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace At the end of a long-ish […]
The extraordinary developments at Fairfax have been well-covered throughout the Australian media and blogosphere. In particular, the Jonathan Green on The Drum, Andrew Jaspan in The Conversation and Eric Beecher in Crikey are very good articles, full of insight and context. But, if Fairfax falls, what will become of rural and regional papers? Or, perhaps […]
I published a version of this post a couple of days ago. This one is much more detailed and refined. I wrote it up for The Drum, but it wasn’t wanted. You get it here instead 🙂 The Simpsons fan world is abuzz with the news Matt Groening has revealed the real Springfield is near […]
In his seminal work Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson wrote of the ways nations are constructed – of the common symbols and artefacts that define peoples within national borders. Equally potent are the symbols used to define others within those borders, or to signify they are outsiders. It is the symbols used in The Simpsons to […]
Visual.ly has just released a bunch of tools that allow users to display stats from Twitter and Facebook in infographics. I used one of the tools to compare the Twitter accounts @Rotary and @Rotaract. Rotary monstered Rotaract on almost all the measurements. While on one hand the results were unsurprising, on the other hand they […]