I had a great time talking to a business group in Sydney today, my theme was that social media is suited in some corporate circumstances and not others. I made the point that there was nothing blue sky or revolutionary about social media and, indeed, it has some real drawbacks for corporates. I made four [...]

The good thing about Telstra and social media is that at least they are trying. This is important in a country where very few large organisations do. So full marks for effort. No doubt, Telstra’s re-entry into the fledgling field of corporate social media will be generally applauded within the small band of people who [...]

While many ‘thought leaders’ in Australia are playing catch-up on the media vs social media debate, in the US some of the better thinkers, at least, are pushing ahead: Five years ago there was media and social media and the two were distinct. You know what was what. It was like there elephants and zebras. [...]

Rudd’s ‘tough but humane’ bob each way rhetoric on asylum seekers was always a crock but hey worth a try and great if you can get away with it. Today’s newspoll shows that he hasn’t got away with it. Of course, Rudd could hope that this newspoll is an outlier and the damage is not [...]

The November issue of the SMH’s Sydney magazine features a profile of the ABC’s managing director Mark Scott which contains this curious line on page 36: “Their scant private time is devoted to family; once identified as a prominent evangelical Christian, Scott now says he doesn’t attend any particular Church” Scott may not ‘attend’ any [...]

Ouch: John Julius Norwich is an earnest and somewhat stiff-backed editor. So it’s not entirely surprising that he reveals in his introduction that he is “braced for objections” over his selections for “The Great Cities in History,” a collection of essays and images. He anticipates that readers will ask, for instance, why Timbuktu is included [...]

The much-heralded Copenhagen conference looks like it is about to be dealt a fatal blow, with the Obama administration in ‘lowering expectations’ mode.

Barbara Ehrenreich: It’s an old story: If you want to sell something, first find the terrible affliction that it cures. In the 1980s, as silicone implants were taking off, the doctors discovered “micromastia” — the “disease” of small-breastedness. More recently, as big pharma searches furiously for a female Viagra, an amazingly high 43% of women [...]

Immigration can improve the national gene pool: Geneticists have shown that there is literally such a thing as American DNA, not surprising when nearly all of us are descended from immigrants. We therefore carry an immigrant-specific genotype, a genetic marker expressing itself—in some environments, at least—as energetic risk-taking and competitive self-promotion. Even when famine, warfare, [...]