Archive for May, 2009

Clean Energy, Let’s Make It Happen

Published on May 28, 2009 in clean tech, environment, politics, technology and video. View Comments

This is a video of a quick, updated presentation by Al Gore at TED2009. He presents some worrying new findings about climate change. I know all this doom and gloom can be quite alarming but I’m very much focusing on the positive these days, so do stick with the video until the end to see the positive.

Gore makes his stance clear on so called “clean coal” technology and presents some better, practical solutions to climate change. He’s advocating and campaigning for the rapid uptake of 100% renewable energy in America. This will create jobs and economic prosperity, as well as helping to solve the problems of climate change.

Clean tech is something I’ve become very interested in lately, and I’m researching it to find out as much as possible about it. The claims about so called clean coal made by the US coal industry can just as well be applied to Australia. However, it’s an exciting prospect to think we could transform the way we produce energy, moving from a dirty, polluting, industrial world to one which is sustainable and produces a high percentage of clean, renewable energy. I’m in, how about you? Let’s do this thing!

The Problem With Premature Tweeting

Published on May 28, 2009 in Twitter, politics and social media. View Comments

As it’s so easy to tweet a newsworthy message out almost as soon as you hear the news, that can sometimes result in jumping the gun somewhat. It seems that happened in Germany this week when MPs leaked news for the president’s re-election.

It seems the news was published on Twitter a good fifteen minutes before the official election result was announced. Fifteen minutes is a long time in Twitter time, news can spread very quickly on Twitter.

“Twittergate” is now going to be investigated by the parliament as it broke decades of tradition. It’s not clear whether they actually broke any laws by leaking the news. In any case, I wonder what they can do about it? The vice–president of the house has said they can’t ban tweeting in parliament. However, I’d say MPs may not be so quick to tweet election results after this particular incident, given all the the fallout.

Have You Checked Out Gmail Labs Yet?

Published on May 26, 2009 in Google, social media and technology. View Comments

I’ve come to like Gmail a lot, which I’ve been using for 9,000 emails or so now (that I’ve kept anyway). It seems to just keep getting better. I use it on both computer and mobile, and I also have my Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar synched with my iPhone contacts and calendar. Being able to do this saves quite a bit of time in itself, it’s very useful.

If you use Gmail, have you checked out Gmail Labs yet? Do you know about these extra features that are being added to Gmail all the time. They haven’t exactly been shouting about the new “experimental features”. You have to go into the Gmail Settings and then hit the Labs tab, and then enable each feature you like the look of.

Some of the many new features include: YouTube, flickr and Picasa previews in mail, mark as read button (which should have already been standard in my opinion), multiple inboxes, search autocomplete, insert images, superstars (additional stars), picture in chat, quote selected text, forgotten attachment detector, go to label, offine mail  and undo send. That’s right UNDO SEND, which stops messages from being sent for a few seconds after hitting the send button, for those accidental emails that you send and then regret moments later. Now you can’t tell me that isn’t useful.Ha.

undosend

Thoughts on Social Media at Future Summit

Published on May 21, 2009 in Twitter, blogging, clean tech, environment, politics, social media and technology. View Comments

You haven’t seen a blog post from me for about three weeks because I’ve been on what I felt was a well deserved holiday in New Zealand. Had a good time thanks :)

While I was on holiday Steve Hopkins dropped me a line to invite me, along with a few other well known Aussie social media types, to attend Future Summit 2009 in Melbourne. This is a summit that attempts to provide “a forum for Australia’s leaders to participate in discussing key issues and challenges for the future.” Given my interest in social media, technology, and my increasing interest in clean technology as part of solutions to climate change, it was an opportunity I didn’t want to pass up.

Darren Rowse (Problogger), Bronwen Clune (Norg Media), Duncan Riley (The Inquisitr)

Darren Rowse (Problogger), Bronwen Clune (Norg Media), Duncan Riley (The Inquisitr)

The Future Summit is connected to the World Economic Forum through the Australian Davos Connection. The WEF has recently invited social media makers to participate too. Inviting well known bloggers and twitterers to such forums is an attempt to help open the ideas discussed up to the outside world via the web. I think this is a worthy goal, as these sorts of events have been heavily criticised in the past for being exclusive exercises for top power brokers in society.

From my point of view, it was also a great chance to get together for a few days with some of the other people heavily involved in social media in this country. It’s a big country and many of us don’t actually get to meet in person very often, although we communicate online constantly. Even in this age of hyper-connectivity, nothing beats meeting in person.

Part of the social media team at Future Summit 2009

It’s debatable whether or not these summits result in much action from all the talk, but it’s certainly a compelling idea for people to get together to talk about where we are heading as a country, and as a world. My head has been buzzing with ideas sparked by many conversations over the past few days. In this way, I’d have to say the event was pretty constructive, if others are feeling that same buzz.

With the main theme being “Priorities for Australia in the Crisis and Beyond”, there was always going to be a lot of talk about the global financial crisis (GFC). I’d have to say that much of the talk was of the recent past and current situation, rather than about solutions and future directions. Many financial experts didn’t seem to want to speculate on the future very much, or offer many ideas about how to proceed from here. Take what you will from that.

As expected, there was also quite a lot of talk about climate change and its impact on people, the planet and the economy. There were of course still certain people who only talked of Australia’s great mineral resources opportunities ahead, without any mention of climate change. However, I did attend various sessions about the future greening of the Australian economy, which included talk of innovative clean technologies and how Australia could be a leader in this area if it wanted to be. I found some of the thinking in these sessions both exciting and frustrating. It seems that entrepreneurs want to move ahead but aren’t getting the support they could get, especially from government. Having said that, there did seem to be a great deal of interest in new clean technologies and how best to move them forward. This was encouraging.

All in all it was well worth attending. I hope that people who were not in attendance were able to pick up on at least some of the ideas discussed at the summit via Twitter, various blog posts and video that will be shared online from the event. Some great questions were posed from twitter to some of the sessions, in fact some that caught the participants off guard and had them scrambling for answers. This was great to see. I’d like to see the social media presence at such forums around the world continues to grow, how about you?