Photography I Created
- downplay the parent company ByteDance
- downplay the China association
- downplay AI
- TikTok is a global company
- The TikTok app doesn’t even operate in China
- TikTok is highly localised in its experience and operations, which means … insert country here … has a lot of independence in the day-to-day operations of the platform
I found the ‘Soon Horse’ at The Ekka today
Ekka 2022
The Withers kids hit Brisbane’s Royal Queensland Show for 2022.
All Luna wanted was a “Skye Puppy” from Paw Patrol.
I’ve been working on getting my Instagram account back to friends and family, after a decade of “better follow this account for brand and business reasons.” Turns out that unfollowing a thousand odd accounts over three days gets you locked out of Instagram for a week.
Where are the most notable people on the planet from? This really cool mashup of Wikidata and Openmaps shows you, on a globe. Looks like I’ve got to do something pretty notable to knock my local celebrity off her mantle.
How annoying are cold fries
It’s the crocodile you don’t see you have to worry about.
Crocodiles found on the Mowbray River, just south of Port Douglas in Queensland. Photographed with a DJI Mavic 3.
Brisbane on a Tuesday afternoon
It was a good month for me on Unsplash. Zero dollars made, but millions of feel-good bucks.
TikTok's talking points are totally cool, nothing to see here, move along now, everything's cool ya see
It almost seems like TikTok is the great globalist company we’ve all been waiting for, to save us from the boredom of our everyday lives, and to connect us - not with our friends - but with some kind of massive data store in China that I am totally sure is totally ok and nothing to stress about at all, ya know.
TikTok’s public relations talking points via Gizmodo:
insert everything is fine gif
Tugun Beach tonight
🌙
The radio is dead, long love the radio
Tim Burrowes in Unmade:
The meat of the event came in the panel, which included SCA CEO Grant Blackley. As is regularly the case, he was refreshingly less guarded than most of his peers. He actually told us some of what he was thinking about the company’s future direction.
It included acknowledgement that the day will come when the transmitters will be turned off, and all audio is delivered digitally. While an obvious observation, there was a time not so long ago when that would have been sacrilege coming from the person who is also chairman of Commercial Radio Australia.
Slightly to the surprise (I think) of his colleagues, Blackley also confided that he is thinking about making Listnr the main company brand. “One day you might no longer see us called SCA. You might see us called Listnr. I could see a world where if it is in fact at the centre of our universe and it is driving all of our growth and ambitions, and it houses all of our product, maybe there’s a natural extension there… who knows?”
He knows. Given that he told the audience he’d made the same point on stage at the Radiodays conference in Europe a few weeks back, I think the answer to that is that he’s already decided.
Although this is a very obvious path for the radio industry to take, because it’s where the eyes in the ears and the attention has moved.
The one remaining issue is that as a technology, AM/FM radio, DAB digital radio, and digital television broadcast, are actually quite beautiful technologies.
High definition delivery of audio and visual signals across an entire city and there’s no ISP charging per gigabyte. The only thing required to listen is a simple radio or TV receiver. As much as radio and TV as we know it today will die, it will never go away, I wonder what form it will take in the future?
I wonder what will fill the FM channels in 20 years time?
I’ll always love the radio, it was a beautiful medium in 2009 when this photo of me was taken. Today, the same radio stations are playing the same tune in a different world. That season needs to end, but what does the next look like?
Reels is less than half as successful as Stories was on the same theft timeline
Nathan Baschez in Every:
Is Reels even working?
Yes and no. Reels is now two years old and, according to my reading of the data, it’s only working about half as well as Stories was two years after it launched.
Back in 2018, when Stories was as old as Reels is now, Kevin Systrom was asked about the proportion of time spent in Stories. He declined to give a number but claimed it was “almost just as important” as the main feed. So I’m assuming it was probably somewhere in the 40–50% range.
Reels, on the other hand, only accounts for 20% of time spent—despite the fact that Instagram is pushing it a lot harder. The only thing they did to get us to use Stories was put that little row of circles at the top of our feeds. But now they’re actually sprinkling Reels directly inside our feeds so they’re impossible to ignore. If it was just a little row you could quickly scroll past, I bet that 20% figure would be much lower, perhaps below 10%.
May god save any of you who find this book in your family homes
A fancy hotel in Brisbane is trying to engage the Streisand effect by asking that these photos be removed from my Unsplash profile. It’s funny that brands are still trying to discourage user-generated content in 2022.
I might not be TikTok cool, but I’m Grammarly cool
Paul Ford in Wired mag might be onto something
Where the hell is she?
Coffee. Coffee is what’s at the end of the rainbow. There, I solved it all for you.
