Articles

By Stefan Sojka

Don’t throw the real baby out with the virtual bathwater.

There is something about online business that tends to set us up for a huge amount of misaligned expectations.  With everything just one click away, the hidden complexities of Web functionality lead people to believe that it all happens auto-magically.  Some coder just copy-pasted in a few lines of recycled PHP and ‘whammo!’…instant global success story!  I have had people seriously enquire about replicating eBay and/or FaceBook for $5K and honestly believing that should do the trick.

It’s kind of understandable.  Most of the hard work is hidden in scripts and files and thanks to the limitless talent of a planet full of awesome GUI designers, everything looks so slick, clean and simple.  The Internet is the most complex entity in the known Universe, yet its astounding success is due to its belying simplicity.   If it didn’t look and feel easy to use, it would still to this day remain the bastion of computer scientists, hackers and brainiacs.

As a business owner, I still need to contend with the complexities.  If my business model is almost exclusively an online model, such as selling downloadable software, I am going to need a team of coders on hand to manage the high level of sophistication involved; security, functionality, payment, membership management.  Imagine; a Website as deceptively lightweight as Twitter requires 140 employees to keep it running – at a loss!

The big growth area now seems to be hybrid businesses, with one foot in the online space and one foot in the real world.  Think of pizza delivery.  You need a complex online system to manage and process customer orders and an efficient off-line operation to get the pizza to my door within 30 minutes.  Similarly, sites like Groupon rely enormously on the online component delivering deals and getting online exposure to billions of users, but without the real-world participating businesses delivering on those great offers, Groupon’s image could turn sour real fast.

Then there are your businesses that most of us are engaged in, that operate primarily in reality but use the Web to promote products/services and attract new business.  Even the simplest of “brochure-ware” sites need to be created to a high standard to reflect the quality of the business and to have some basic technical expertise applied, even if it is just for contact forms, updating content and measuring the site’s performance.

There is no avoiding the fact that I have to get the technical stuff right.  But what will really make or break the operation is everything else.  If I expect that the code will magically solve all my business problems and make me an overnight squillionaire, it will be at my peril.  Technology alone will not cut it.  Why does software keep on getting upgraded?  Because it will never be perfect.  It’s what we do with it and how we integrate it into our business that counts.

Here’s what I focus on; customer service, communication, quality control, administration systems and processes, accounts, building relationships with valued associates, ensuring (not assuming) that I am on the same page as my customers, diarizing everything, keeping time-sheets, keeping my desk tidy, my files organized, and my inbox manageable.  You know, all the stuff that prevents my life and business from descending into a chaotic nightmare and will only get worse the more things grow.

Every business now must have a layer of technology surrounding it and you have to get the right solutions and systems in place.  But as technology pervades our lives and the lives of our competitors, it’s the fundamentals of off-line business practice that will determine our ultimate success.

By Stefan Sojka

I might be giving away my age here, but my very first record (that’s the 33 R.P.M., 12-inch, black vinyl kind, with a hole punched in the middle, then inserted into a plastic sheath and a printed cardboard sleeve, that you listen to by scraping a diamond across it) was Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s “Monster Mash” – a devilishly funny (to a 10-year-old) combination of old horror movie themes and 50s rock and roll.  It was my first encounter with a ‘mash’.

It seems we are predisposed to enjoying serendipitous contradiction – from the early baroque musical concepts of counterpoint and fugue to the hip-hop sampling of collections of sounds into new musical forms – our brains love to be stimulated by the unexpected, anachronistic, counter-intuitive, oxymoronic, incongruous outpourings of those among us who see the world differently.  It’s an analogy to life itself – take two sets of genetic code, twist them together in a unique new combination and out pops the next generation.  What is the act of procreation, if not the ultimate mash-up?

I’ve spent the past week giggling uncontrollably over www.stsanders.com catalogue of ‘shreds’, where the masher finds musicians who take themselves way too seriously and over-dubs horrendously bad playing that fits perfectly to the original clips.  If I type “mash-ups” into YouTube search, the next couple of decades could disappear before I get through the results.

The mash-up has grown up.  It is the future of human creative expression, but it is also – when applied to science, politics, medicine, or any other discipline – the future of everything.  Biologists are mashing with physicists, cosmologists with chemists.  The universe is our chemistry set and when we mix the right elements, things explode.

Perhaps the big bang was a result of some 9th dimensional mash-up artist collective combining a few random theories to ‘see what would happen’.  “Oops!  Oh look, a universe! …Damn, we can’t touch it now – let’s just watch what happens for the next 13.7 billion years...”

The more you think about it, the more mashed-up this world is.  Dog breeds, drive-throughs, Velcro, sporks, camera-phones, Hapkido, English… we are the result of a few millennia of mashes and it can’t stop now.  So, what can we do?  Like any good mash-up artist, we have to see everything as potential mash material.  Thai food in pocket bread.  Hotel rooms on trains.  Pool cleaners with marriage counseling qualifications.  Retirement village pre-school daycare facilities.  What can you think of?  Perhaps there is a brilliant business idea one mash away from you and one of your clients.

If your ambitions are more humble, how about organising a karaoke party for your friends where everyone has to sing different lyrics to the backing track?  If nothing else, you’ll have a few laughs.  In a world that seems to be taking itself a little too seriously, this could be the perfect remedy.

For a broad history and catalogue of mash-ups, try the ultimate knowledge mash, Wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_ (video), en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_ (music), en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_ (web_application_hybrid).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-disciplinary

By Stefan Sojka

It’s not as difficult as you might think to become an Internet superstar.  The Web is engineered precisely to facilitate such phenomena as FaceBook, YouTube and the ‘Evolution of Dance’ dude.  In this simple how-to guide, I’ll show you how it’s done.  The key is to be everywhere and do everything.  In a networked world, the one with the most nodes wins!

Remember Neo, in the Matrix?  Remember how he/you felt when he/you realised he/you were the one?  “That’s right”, grinned Morpheus.  This is your ‘I know Kung Fu’ moment.  You are the Internet, and the Internet is you.  Your DNA is the meme.  You’re unique, just like everybody else.

Have Geek Will Travel
You will need your own personal nerd.  The Web, for all its point-and-click convenience, is a ridiculously complex environment.  He/she will configure your server cloud, sync your mobile devices with your laptop and ensure your Websites are cross-browser compatible, fluid, elastic and WC3 compliant.

Arsenal
Rule-of-thumb:  If it was reviewed on Wired, TechCrunch or EnGadget, buy it.  Essentials include an HD video camera, podcasting microphone, iPhone, digital pen, electric car, pocket laser projector, Adobe Everything and a DJ console, so you can guest DJ at all your own launches and seminars.

Go Viral
The best way to permeate cyberspace is by infecting it.  I don’t care whether you wipe out on a skateboard or David Hassel-scoff a hamburger, what’s important is that the video is a calculated strategic element in your self-replicating pandemic.

Blog
Blog long.  Blog often.  With 112 million blogs, you do have to work hard.  Strategy is everything.  Post comments on the top 100 blogs with witty retorts and demoralising put-downs, always linking back to your own Blog.  Fear not, once the momentum of all your other activities kicks in, your archived ramblings will re-surface like the creature from the black lagoon.

Social Butterfly
Two mantras:  1. “Add Me” 2. “Thanks for the Add”.  Set targets – say 5,000 per day, per site.  Here is your starting point:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_net­working_websites.  Nurture every friendship, acknowledge everyone’s feelings and compliment their every photo upload.  This is your fan-base.  You are a one of their's.  It’s a 200-million-way street.  Drive it.

Authority
You are now an Internet marketing genius.  It’s time to share your knowledge.  www.squidoo.com makes it easy to build a soapbox and begin proselytising.  When you have posted enough material, go to www.lulu.com and self-publish your how-to book.

Life Stream
Upload your entire life to the Internet – and tag everything.  Quantity, not quality.  If you upload enough old photos, school reports, love letters and phone disconnection notices, you will come up on page one in Google for everything.

We live in a paradoxical universe.  Ubiquity is singularity.  If you are everywhere, you will be in one place – at the top!  ‘X’ marks the spot and you have the X-factor.  ‘Me, Star Wars Kid’, you ‘FailWhale’.  See you at the end – and on the cover – of 'Time'.

By Stefan Sojka

We all know the Internet is an excellent place to promote our business, read the news, do our banking, trade shares, make travel arrangements, upload baby photos, catch up with old school friends, steal music, watch porn and laugh at kittens — but how often do we stop and wonder whether the Web might actually be useful for something a little more beneficial to everyone, not just ourselves?

I have to admit that after a lifetime of being marketed to, I am as self-absorbed and hedonistic as anyone else in this post-modern, super-capitalistic world we live in.  But something lurking in the deeper recesses of my conscience had me yearning for a higher purpose, seeking to contribute to the common good, not just my primal urges.  Perhaps an even deeper primal urge had begun to surface – an urge to share, to co-operate, to work towards the improvement of this poor planet’s well-being and the well-being of every living thing on it.

I can hear the cynics among you saying “How selfish is that?  Of course, if you help the world, you are really benefiting yourself in the end.”  Marketing people take note of this elegant paradox.  Working toward the common good is, well, good.  Enter the new networked world of ideas.

The Internet is the perfect place to spread ideas.  Whether it is an opinion, a way of seeing things or some highly complex scientific breakthrough, the idea explodes through the Web like it does in our own mind.  Right now we need ideas more than ever – so praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster that memes, movements and methodologies are permeating every corner of cyberspace.

www.globalideasbank.org – pre-dates the Internet, but since launching on-line in 1995 has collected over 4,000 ideas.  Anything from ‘seed embedded fertilizer paper’ to ‘training barbers in the early detection of melanomas’, GIB is our planet’s suggestion box, and you are invited to pitch in.  Social enterprise is on the rise – get in on the ground floor.

www.openarchitecturenetwork.org – taking file sharing to the next level, architects are now uploading and making building plans available to the third world.  With a focus on affordability, sustainability and helping local communities, this excellent resource provides direct access to the world’s best architects to the world's remotest villages.  Ideas are literally popping up everywhere in the form of houses, schools, hospitals and community centres.

www.worldchanging.com – the domain name says it all really.  From political ideas to alternative power generation, this site is devoted to making a real difference.  Their philosophy is that most of the ideas already exist, it is just a matter of getting them going.  Sign up, print out a few pages, and march down to your local council right now.

www.bigthink.com – ‘We are what you think’ – This is like YouTube with a brain.  No 'LonelyGirl15' around here.  Experts and opinion leaders expound their viewpoints on all manner of topics.

www.longnow.org – 10,000 years is a long time…or is it?  Some of the Internet’s big guns – Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and a bunch of others are building a 10,000-year clock, and re-configuring our human time-scale.  After all, we are all going to be someone’s ancestors, we may as well get used to it and start thinking about how we might be remembered.  Were we the ones who consumed ourselves into oblivion, or created ourselves into utopia?

www.ted.com – This famed festival of ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’ provides an endless stream of amazing ideas, breakthroughs, perspectives and inspiration.  There is a huge library of past presentations, from bio-mimicry to cosmology, computer origami to alternative energy, with a few comedy and musical presentations thrown in.  This is one of my favourite sites, and I am desperately squeezing my creative juices to come up with my own TED talk.  So far all I can come up with is a rather droll exploration of the delicate interplay between magazine deadlines, writing quality and editor wrath.

Any better ideas?

‘til next month…

By Stefan Sojka

The on-line diary, or ‘Weblog’ was once a quaint little means of posting musings and opinions onto the Internet.  Now look what has happened – the burgeoning ‘blogosphere’ is bloated with well over 100 million blogs, with some of them worth millions of dollars.  Blogging has become serious business.

It is nothing short of a media explosion, with some blogs trumping mainstream media as the go-to source for news, information, entertainment and opinion.  With an entry level of zero dollars, immediacy hitherto impossible and a potential global audience of billions, blog sites are perfect launch pads for anyone wanting to participate in the global conversation.

In reality, the Super Blogs are more like traditional media outlets – with teams of contributors, marketing departments, researchers and technical staff bringing it all together.  One needs an HR army to keep the content flowing at such a torrential rate to hold the oh-so-fickle and easily distracted Web surfer.  The world’s biggest current affairs blog, www.huffingtonpost.com even calls itself an ‘on-line newspaper’.

That doesn’t mean you can’t start from humble beginnings and go a long way on the power of one.  www.joelonsoftware.com is essentially a one-man-show, banging out an endless stream of articles to a large and dedicated following of tech-heads.  www.freelanceswitch.com began as a spin-off from local entrepreneur Collis Ta’eed’s personal blog, and has now spawned a veritable suite of blogs, tutorials and on-line marketplaces.  His e-book “How To Be A Rockstar Wordpress Designer” is an excellent primer, if you feel the urge to follow in his footsteps and blog your way to fame and fortune.

To get a complete overview of the super blog megascape, start with technorati.com.  It keeps a regular tab on the biggest and most popular blogs, as well as providing profiles, reports, reviews and instruction in the art of blogging.

Everything under the sun is being blogged.  It’s a surfer’s paradise.  Technology?  www.arstechnica.com, www.engadget.com, www.techcrunch.com.  Business?  sethgodin.typepad.com, www.bloggingstocks.com.  Humour?  www.icanhascheezburger.com

The best thing about any blog, large or small, is the two-way conversation it facilitates – readers get to post their own comments right there on the page.  Sure, it might seem a little futile, trying to be heard amongst such a cacophony of ‘buzz’, but somehow our opinions and ideas begin resonating and harmonising into a chorus.  The best ideas win out.  The dubious ones are decimated with wit and brute force.

If I can give any advice about blogs and super blogs this month, it is to get amongst them.  Participate.  Put a blog on your own Website – or find someone to help you.  Express whatever thoughts you might have until you get really good at it.  Find like-minded people and support them.  In the end the entire Internet is one Brobdingnagian blog.  In these rather volatile times, such a massive exchange of ideas could be our only hope.  Blog on!

By Stefan Sojka

We humans have relatively big brains, but in an age of information overload they are proving to be rather inadequate.  In fact, they’ve probably been inadequate since we left our jungle enclaves and moved to the city.  The infrastructures, their effects and the means of changing those effects has, since the birth of ‘democracy’ and the creation of the viaduct, been completely out of the general public’s realm of understanding.  We let politicians and their tycoon buddies kid us that if we put a tick on a piece of paper and stuff it into a box once every three or four years, they would take care of everything.  Our minds simply couldn’t grasp the enormity of national and global systems, so we gave up.

Now it’s time to wake up.  Our overlords are as incapable as anyone else to fathom the machinations of our reality – after all, they are only human too.  Enter data visualisation!

Finally (and not a moment too soon), we have a new way of seeing.  Amidst the explosion of information, little people with tiny minds, about the size of our own, have created the tools to understand it.  We can now see information – and we can ‘get’ it.  This new perspective is at first stunning, a little mind blowing, and ultimately empowering.  Once we can visualise what is going on, we can change it.  No longer is anything out of sight and out of mind.
www.visualcomplexity.com proves that perhaps we have actually evolved to grasp information in such a way – since it truly is beautiful.  These images connect the dots of our understanding.  I keep returning here to gaze upon these amazing images that help form my version of reality.
You can’t go past Google Earth and in particular Google Earth Outreach – earth.google.com/outreach/showcase.html – to get a grip on what is happening on this ‘pale blue dot’ we call home. It’s sobering – and impossible to ignore, once you’ve seen it.
Much has been done to map the Internet itself, the ultimate beast of complexity.  Go to images.google.com and search “internet map” – cool…
www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches is a large and well-chosen collection of awesome data visualisation samples and resources.  Just following the links on this page will open up your Pandora’s box of wonder.
www.wefeelfine.org focuses on human emotion on a global scale.  Empathy abounds.  Co-creator, Jonathan Harris – www.number27.org – has a seemingly limitless imagination for ways to portray information – single-handedly creating a new art form which mashes up computer science, anthropology, visual art and story-telling.

Now we can see what is going on with our ‘global eyes’, it’s time to engineer the next logical step – real-time data visualisation activism.  Watch it, click it, and watch it change.  A Web 3.0 upgrade, perhaps?  We’ll see…

Hack College
http://www.hackcollege.com/

An interesting initiative to orient students to the new world of open source computing, communication and learning… From their website:

'Lectures are boring and inefficient. Long hours spent studying hand-written notes is very 1994. Anyone graduating today needs to know not how to operate a computer, but when. The fault is both with the students and the teachers. HackCollege is changing education. HackCollege is educating the students of the world about effective, open source software, putting techno-political arguments in everyday language, and creating a cult of “Students 2.0.” If we can change the way 1 percent of college students and faculty in the world view education and technology, we’ve done our job.'

By Stefan Sojka

As business owners and consumers, we’ve all been on both sides of the complaints discourse – the complainer and the complained about.  While I shudder at the thought of receiving a complaint, I know it’s the most valuable thing my business can receive.  Bring it on.  When it comes to making complaints, I’m not exactly in the ‘grumpy old man’ category – yet – but I certainly don’t hesitate to provide feedback if I think it will lead to my service provider making real improvements.

Thanks to the Web, the whole customer feedback loop is now in hyperdrive.  Word of mouse.  Disgruntled customers don’t just tell their friends, they tell the whole world.  Get used to it.  Be proactive and ask your customers for complaints so you can address them before one of them has a chance to set up www.yourbusinesssucks.com .  The Net is no place to hide from your shortcomings.

What started about 10 years ago with a few enterprising netizens using Web pages to get even with companies who did them wrong, is now a global consumer activist movement.  Consumers are empowered, businesses are held to account.  www.thesqueakywheel.com has a proven strategy of listing complaints and automatically emailing the company every time someone views the complaints page.  Naturally they have a very high success rate!  www.ripoffreport.com is another great site, as is www.complaints.com.

www.notgoodenough.org is home-grown and has a 54,000-strong membership base, actively discussing, reviewing and advising business and consumers on customer service.  If you end up on the ‘gripes’ list, all is not lost – just be sure to do something about it.

Choice www.choice.com.au has evolved fabulously from its print roots to become a formidable force.  A founding member of Consumers International way back in 1960 – www.consumersinternational.org – Choice is involved at every level, sitting on an incredible selection of boards and committees, promoting best practice, standards compliance, service and quality.  Of course the Choice Website has plenty of scope for user interaction, including nominating yourself for election to the board.

Customer complaints and comments can show up anywhere online, it’s scary.  You never know who is saying what and how deep any feelings run until you take a good hard Google at yourself.  Deep in a discussion board about ISPs and broadband has sprung up a thread about the pros and cons of BarterCard – forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/731669.html with a couple of hundred posts and many thousands of views.  This kind of stuff is happening everywhere about every business.  All the corporate marketing in the world can’t erase these opinions – it pays to find them and heed them.

Another Aussie site www.complaintline.com.au has a cool motto – “To complain is human… to get results is divine.”  One could complain that the site needs a graphic design once-over, but the content is excellent – covering 125 categories, suggestions on how to resolve issues amicably and support for businesses to better manage their complaints.

On the government front we are very fortunate in this country – The ACCC www.accc.gov.au and the Ombudsman www.comb.gov.au provide well funded top-level support, while every states’ Fair Trading department inform and encourage good complaints management and outcomes for all parties.  Just Google your state for more.

It’s a bit of a serious column this month, but I’m in the middle of some major business improvements myself, and my customers’ feedback was the major impetus for change.  With the silly season well and truly upon us, we all want that glow of satisfaction that business is good, and everybody loves us.  Any complaints?  Write to me!

By Stefan Sojka

Isn’t it just like the Internet to spawn yet another trend without anyone ever expecting it?  Microblogging is suddenly exploding out of a few simple lines of code the way SMS sat dormant in our mobile phones until someone looking for the calculator accidentally pressed the wrong button and discovered it.  Microblogging is SMS 2.0.  Texting on steroids.  Musings gone global.

The current beacon of microblogging is Twitter www.twitter.com.  What started as a sideline dabble by San Francisco start-up ‘Obvious’, has grown so fast that its error message when overloaded – the ‘Fail Whale’ – www.failwhale.com – has become a cult hero.  Venture capitalists have been pouring tens of millions into Twitter, while the whale finds its fins and Obvious tries to work out the most obvious ways to convert ‘tweets’ into cash.

The simplicity and ubiquity of microblogging are its drawcards.  You sign up in minutes, start twittering in 140 characters or less, and you’re away.  Before too long you are recruiting a legion of followers, following legions more while the chit-chat starts to build to an almighty racket.  Now it’s being seen as the best way for breaking news to spread, churches to herd their flocks, corporations to leverage their demographics and friends to hook up.

Microblogging is at home on the desktop, laptop, hand-held and phone, which is what makes it so hot.  Trans-platform communications are barely viable yet:  text is king.  In Japan, where the whole population is glued to a tiny screen, Twitter is becoming a national sport.

A cursory glance at www.twitterholic.com will give you an idea of what is happening.  Follow a few links, and discover a community of hyper-connected trend-setters.

Meanwhile, spin-off sites, services and applications are blossoming – as are the Twitter wannabes and candobetters.  Twitterrific – www.iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific/ – and Twhirl – www.twhirl.org – enable easy reading and writing of your microblogs without visiting the site.  Summise, www.summize.com, a microblogging search tool, was recently bought by Twitter in an attempt to attach more value to their service.  www.snaptweet.com is a nifty tool to link your Flickr images to Twitter.

It’s so easy to imitate this stuff, code-wise, the clones are sprouting:  www.identi.ca, www.jaiku.com (snapped up by Google), www.dodgeball.com (snapped up by Google) and the quirky Plurk – www.plurk.com – no doubt soon to be snapped up by Google!  You might want to also check out www.pownce.com, www.tumblr.com and www.spoink.com.

Tweet this:  I can’t wait til they release more top level domains, so this parade of dumb Website names will finally end!

Twitter Glossary

You know you have a phenomenon on your hands when hundreds of words start getting invented.

TwitterBots:  Command-line instructions, issued via Twitter to perform all kinds of actions
Dweet:  A tweet sent while intoxicated
Fail Whale:  The loveable whale that appears when Twitter is overloaded
Fakers:  People who pretend to be celebrity Tweeters
Hashtags:  Using “#” to embed metadata into your posts
Twaggle:  A gaggle of Twitter followers
Tweet:  A blog posting to Twitter
Twitterrhea:  Sending way to many tweets
Twitticisms:  Witty tweets
Twoops:  An accidental private SMS sent to all your followers
Twebay:  To offer something for sale to your followers
Go to twitter.pbwiki.com for more…

By Stefan Sojka

One of my favourite science fiction novels is “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson.  (Go on, buy it with one-click on Amazon!) – a cyber-punk style romp through a not-too-distant future where the author projects we will end up if we carry on business as usual.  Not so much post-apocalyptic, more a toxic mix of organised crime, continent-wide ghettoisation and environmental devastation mixed with the coolest technology imaginable.

One main feature of his ‘Metaverse’ (the future name for the Internet – get used to it) is a real-time virtual 3D version of the entire planet.

It’s pretty mind-bending stuff – yet Stephenson’s fantasy is starting to come true.  Google ‘Earth’, Microsoft ‘Virtual Earth’ and a million spin-off sites and applications are collectively drawing us closer to this self-fulfilling prophecy.

This month I thought I’d check in to see just how far the project has come.  How detailed, in-depth and enlightening is this planet’s virtual reflection?  What does it mean to be able to visualise our planetary home with such new perspective?

First stop – Google Earth www.earth.google.com – if you haven’t already done so, download it now and prepare for awe.  If you have, say no more.  You know.

MS Virtual Earth ( www.microsoft.com/VirtualEarth ) is to Google Earth as Zune to iPod.  Awesome tech, but not as cool.  Google has taken the human high-ground, MS serenades the corporate beast.  Being a hominid like you, dear reader, I gravitate to Google Earth, where a swarm of other bipedal primates have amassed to build this great planet of the apes in our minds.

Millions of users are creating fly-through Contiki tours to prisons, illegally logged forests, war zones, historical sites, sporting venues, holiday destinations… all that is left is to put every Website in there, and you can kiss your Internet browser goodbye! maps.google.com combines GE content with the directory view, making it a bit easier to navigate.

Then there is the street-level stuff. maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview Privacy?  What privacy?  I really wish I hadn’t been scratching my backside the moment that Google camera car drove by!  www.mapjack.com is an independent ‘street view’ start-up, which inevitably, along with all the other ones, will be absorbed by Google or Microsoft.  Try also www.everyscape.com, www.locaview.com (no sub-titles, Japanese friend required) and www.immersivemedia.com

GeoNetwork – geonetwork-opensource.org – is the Open Source global mapping and spatially referenced data application.  It’s promising, but without Google’s billions, the model might not grow legs.

This is all just a glimpse of things to come, I’m sure.  It’s worth getting used to this new perspective on our existence.  A lot is being asked of our feeble minds – to ‘get’ this planet and everything on it, let alone what lies beyond (www.google.com/sky and www.worldwidetelescope.org).  Can our biology keep up with this technical evolution?  Can we cope?  Visual information overload.  Collective mental breakdown.  Or will we finally be humbled into a true sense of place, where the individual reconciles their microscopic insignificance with their stupendously inflated sense of self importance?  Whatever.  Anyone for golf?

By Stefan Sojka

Back in the 80s, there was not much to do at home but watch TV – and my worst fear was becoming a couch potato.  Fortunately the TV was so crap, it didn’t happen.  Fast forward 20 years and thanks to the darned Internet and my addiction to it, I’ve turned into a Chair Pear!  Oh how to end this endless cycle of motionlessness!?  The ever-widening girth of my being!  I know – I’ll check out a few Websites that might help me break this cyber spell… Oh the irony!

Once a place we went to for the sake of being there, the Web has evolved to become the place we go to find more and more excuses to unplug from the global super-cortex and rejoin humanity.

Servers all across the world are brimming with code, tailor-made to activate that dormant social ape-like being that rests beneath the Me2.0 cyber-persona I’ve spent the last 10 years perfecting.  The good news?  So has everyone else, so when we do Meet Up (www.meetup.com), surprise, surprise, there is a whole generation of cyber-apes, strangely un-socialised and desperate as I am for the allure and aroma of familiar organic entities.

And they have the same weird-ass special interests to boot.  Humanists, Skeptics, philosophers, hackers, pagans, ninjas and entrepreneurs are forming groups, arranging get-togethers and having a bloody good time.  I’ve just booked in for a ‘Skeptics in the Pub’ MeetUp.  If I’m back next month, you can be sure this ‘getting-a-life’ thing is actually quite safe.

If you are, like, hanging around with, like, nothing to do, www.skobee.com is, like, the most random way to, like, hook up.  It is only in the experimental phase, but the basic concept is ‘fuzzy scheduling’.  You tell the site where you is at, how hip you is and how down you can get with the hood, and faster than you can say “Generation Y” – you’ve got yourself a happenin’ schedule of happenin’ people to get jiggy with.  I hope they add a plug-in ‘dweeb scheduler’ module for un-hip dudes like me.

For the serious party and event organiser, www.eventbrite.com is the perfect service.  A modest, sliding-scale fee, enables them to take care of bookings, ticket payments and event registration, so I can take care of the balloons, name tags and strippers.

When it comes to synchronising lifestyles with our friends – one of the hardest things modern life could possibly challenge us to do – www.renkoo.com has the solution.  From the gregarious imagination of the folks that brought you such mega-million installed FaceBook apps as BoozeMail and HaikooZoo, here is the place to load up my availabilities and spam them out through every available medium to all my friend ‘Lites’ (15% more real friendliness, with only half the commitment).  Guaranteed optimisation of our chill time.

A couple of others worth scoping:  www.planyp.us – the “Wiki for your Social Life” weaves it all together, as does www.socializr.com.  OK, I’ve finished writing this, you’ve finished reading the entire magazine… we are both pumped – let’s get online and hook up somewhere for coffee!