I had been waiting in anticipation for the show since I booked it a month ago. Silly pun and unintended there, as the booked show I'm referring to was an event "The future of the Book" held as part of the Melbourne writers festival this week. Straight off the bat I'll let you know that I'm mildly dyslexic and even though I have always had a massive respect for books I'm not the type to plunder my way through a glorious stack of books in a weekend. My mother used to take me by the hand around the library with a basket which she piled high with her weeks reading so it wasn't for lack of being shown the way that I didn't do the same. I am an Audio book person and Audible.com is my friend. Friend in the way it points out what other books I would probably like if I enjoyed the one I just listened to and friend in the way that it takes me to reviews by other people who share my interests. I know you're all probably laughing, yes at me and not with me, thinking you probably have no real friends. We'll get to that in another Blog post when we discuss what a friend really means to us but here's a little insight by Cameron Marlow about Online Social Media and friends in Facebook http://tinyurl.com/aapjq2

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I felt compelled to write this post in light of the recent Twitter crazed support of the most popular reality show in the history of Australian TV, MasterChef. Something fundamental was uncovered for me and it relates to a change which we are all going to have to face up to. Twitter is crossing boundaries and these are quite serious ones indeed which Media companies such as Channel 10 are going to have to face up to.

The MasterChef final went to air on the East coast of Australia at 7:30pm last night. It was only to be aired two hours later on the west coast of Australia when it would be 7:30pm there, due to the time zone difference. MasterChef, during the series, gained a massive following on Twitter. If you don't believe me do a search in Twitter on #masterchef and see for yourself. The series for many who use Twitter was made that much more special when shared with new and old friends alike on the Twitter Social Media platform. The advertisement breaks for once became useful as Tweets spun between the lounge rooms of viewers. This is entertainment and we will see this concept grow and grow.

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Is it relevant? 

There are plenty of studies around which demonstrate that Emotional intelligence has been linked to better staff morale, increased productivity, higher job satisfaction and organisational commitment.  However as we move more and more to the use of on-line mechanisms of communication what does that mean for our ability to communicate … as people?

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With regards to authenticity in the Tweetspace: Earlier this year on the 5^th of March there was an earth quake in the Melbourne region which shook everyone a little as it's not a common occurrence. Tweets started to steam out about the occurrence and our local vetted ABC radio/TV channel which has a Twitter account @774melbourne followed it furiously trying to get the "right" story and doing a good job of it. The size of the tremor was being reported as 5+ on many accounts and this was starting to become official. A month earlier there had been a quake a few thousand km away in the pacific and people who were Googling "earthquake Australia" were in their haste seeing the size of a quake as 5.7 . Chinese whispers took this into the Tweepspace and I heard people talking about it in town the following day giving this statistic. There had been an Earthquake on the 14^th of February near Fiji which measured 5.7 and from what I can gather the two occurrences were being linked. The actual size of the quake in Melbourne was 4.6

Following on from this another story: On the 18^th of march @Wolfcat from the The ABC (Australia) was asked to present how Twitter had been used during the devastating Australian Victoria bushfires to locate lost loved ones and deliver critical information to those under threat. @Wolfcat had established and oversaw the Twitter channel for this part of the ABC. He was not given long to present and asked the audience to please understand that he could not give it its due in the short time he had allocated to him. Instead he would present on the Earthquake which occurred on the 5^th of March and how the ABC had operated in order to feed the relevant information out to the Tweetspace. It was really interesting as he explained how he had developed a method of establishing the Epicentre of this seismic event based on his mapping of the regions the relevant Tweets were coming in from.

As is happening more and more during seminar sessions there was a Twitter Tag #v21 which the audience were including in their Tweet threads out to their followers to keep on topic. I was sitting in the audience and started to feel the room shake while @Wolfcat was explaining all this. I immediately blamed it on a strong black coffee I had had during the break and having missed lunch earlier. Low and behold the streams of Tweets from outside the room started to come back in on the #v21 that there had just been another Earthquake. More and more tweets came streaming in and the session room started to buzz with this massive coincidence. http://tinyurl.com/n7nsx5  .

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So often I think systems developers lose touch with the systems they put out there.

I'll focus this comment on Software as a Service for the moment. SaaS can be delivered as a single or multi tenant offering. The basic difference is that Single tenant is designed for each individual client/company and hosted in such a way that a change to their software will not affect the software of other client/companies hosted on the same servers. Multi tenant is a one software fits all approach and any change will need to be adopted by all clients/companies who subscribe to that software. The multi tenant approach is becoming ever more popular and is starting to fall under the banner of the "Cloud."

Once again I'm going to narrow my focus down to the Multi tenant offering. This model relies on a large client base who subscribe for a low cost ,subscription based pricing model. There may of course be deviations to this basic pricing model and you can read all about the topic  in William Blares L.L.C.TECHNOLOGY:SOFTWARE & SERVICES September 26,2007Industry Report.

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A lot has been said about the economy of Cairns, its reliance on and vulnerability to the tourism market.  Slowly, the mining boom in the rest of Australia is having an effect on employment in Cairns , but we still need to find other industries to employ the thousands of people who are moving up here from down south and the other parts of the world.

Already, there is a small but flourishing digital economy in Cairns, with graphic designers and web design companies servicing mainly the local market, but with the potential to go much further afield. If we want a (reasonably) eco-friendly industry to base up here in the tropics, then this is a great way to go, high value knowledge based business with a small effect on the immediate environment (lots of people, working out of their own homes, electronically connected not commuting).  

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Thank you to the wonderful people who attended the half day workshop we ran yesterday at the Mecure Harbourside on the Esplanade in Cairns. From the reviews it looked like you all enjoyed it and I already had Gabi calling me this morning using her Mobile phone through her VOIP provider using http://www.fring.com/

Please remember to register on our website if you would like to be notified of such events by Knowledge Solutions.

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OOooooooo what a feeling. You get up in the morning after having been up late the night before hard at work creating a Online group in Facebook or Linkedin or after inviting all your contacts to respond to your new Blog and you turn on your computer. Call me sad but it's the same feeling you would have had when you unwrapped the paper on your first bicycle with the anticipation of what it might be. You log in and there it is a shiny new comment and there's another and wow your online community is underway. I'm playing out a scenario here so go easy on me. I know this is not how it typically ends up being but let me just hypothetically or probably more pathetically speaking just wander in my mind for a while. OK it's the end of your first week and you have over a thousand hits and it's picking up. A month later you have had a couple more thousand views and your community is firing on all cylinders and you know full well you are onto something here. Well what do you do with it?

1) There is value in the relationships which are developing between you and certain members.

2) You still have the shiny bicycle feeling which is now motivating you to stay up all night as you watch comments go backwards and forwards.

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Having been born and brought up in South Africa before moving to the UK, USA and now Australia I realise what an impact Culture can have on relationships and the spatial proximity associated with these. In some societies two people speaking to each other may stand very close together which in another society would be considered invasion of ones space. More bluntly this would relate to invasion of privacy. With online communities we still need to take this particular aspect of relationships from the physical world into account. Try and imagine you are in a room with the members of the community. Online proximity is related to everything from the formality you use in addressing the others to the way you sign off. I for instance used to find it rude to sign off simply using the first letter of your name. Now I find that in certain methods of digital communication like a Wiki I have no problem with this as I know all participants really well and its grown on me.

 What works for some might not work for others and I would love to hear your take on this?

On Friday the 11th of July we held our first Workshop in Cairns :

Multimedia Communication / Networking and Collaborative technology

We covered a multitude of topics from Web 2.0 and the new Enterprise to how they Y Generation is perceived and how best to work with them.

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