G'day,

This Movember I've decided to donate the normally barren real estate above my upper lip to raising awareness about men's health. My commitment is the growth of a moustache for the entire month of Movember, which I know will generate conversation, controversy and laughter (mostly on public transport). Fortunately, my nose casts a prominent shadow, which should at least partially veil my movelution during the vulnerable first week. 

I am doing this because close to 3,300 men die of prostate cancer in Australia each year and one in eight men will experience depression in their lifetime.

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Dare i say... intoxicating.

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"Ah, words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away."

- John Clare, "Remembrances", quoted in Christopher Hitchens' recently published memoir, Hitch-22. (Sad to discover that the raffish rogue now has cancer of the oesophagus).

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It's no secret that New York is a tourist magnet, and as in many of the world's other tourist honeypots, Noo Yawk locals are often guilty of growing impatient with visitors to their frantic metropolis. (I remember attracting a salvo of artful cursing from a cyclist on the Brooklyn Bridge when I drifted into the bike lane to take photos of downtown Manhattan – this was the moment I decided that it wasn't the day I would propose to my wife.)

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Check out this elegant and practical furniture design. The Corner Tree is a corner shelving unit designed to make effective use of space by emulating the aesthetic of a tree's growth. I wanted one the minute I saw it, but was disappointed to discover that the design, by Indian Abhinav Dapke, is just a concept and, as far as I can tell, has never been produced commercially.

Let's hope a canny design house jumps on this. It would surely be a big seller.

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I find myself drawn to art and design inspired by the relationship between geometry and everyday life. Here's a great example: a T-shirt design by Phil Jones over at Threadless in which a boat disturbs the tranquil sea of horizontal blue lines. Brilliant.

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Many people regard cats as, at best, enigmatic. My theory is that people who say they don't like cats are actually reacting against those traits in cats that they dislike in themselves, for the feline is an unabashedly self-interested animal while we humans often channel an extraordinary amount of energy into demonstrating that our narcissism is firmly bridled.

Here, Guardian illustrator Stephen Appleby reveals that cats are far less mysterious than commonly thought. Who knew it was a simple case of the tail wagging the cat?

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When I moved to Melbourne in March 2000, I lived irregular hours while studying postgrad history at Melbourne Uni and working nightshift at the local paper. It meant I missed plenty of big weekend parties, which was a real drag for a newly arrived 20-something. The upside was that I often had weekday afternoons off. I'd wander down the street, through the manicured St Kilda Botanical Gardens, to Acland Street, where I would sit at one of the many cafes and read, sipping coffee or a glass of wine without the weekend crowds.

On one of my first journeys through the St Kilda Botanical Gardens I was delighted to discover a small community of ageing men huddled around an oversized chess board, the knee-high pieces obviously arranged with an intricacy and importance that only they could fathom. Their accents were dense, mostly Russian and Eastern European, and they were there every day of the year, as far as I could tell. I once saw them playing in driving August rain – I'd gone there with the specific intention of establishing just how game they really were – and drew a curt nod from one of the senior gents after our eyes locked through streams of umbrella run-off.

A few of the younger regulars had a whiff of desperation about them, as though this was their few hours break from a grim life of petty crime and graft. I pictured them wandering away as the sun set, peering furtively in the windows of parked cars for potential bounty before arriving home and opening a can of something for dinner then kicking back to plot strategic revenge over the old masters who had wiped the floor with them earlier that day.

That was a decade ago, but the memory is still so fresh. Walking through the gardens a couple of weeks ago I was thrilled to discover that The Check Mates are still at it. Better still, I recognised several of the original crew – still plying their craft, outflanking the enemy, deflating brash newcomers, staying agile and hungry.

They barely looked up as I snapped a few photos. Perhaps they are used to being photographed by tourists, but I prefer to think they were so engrossed in their game, in the urgency of the present, that they were oblivious to the outside world and how it might regard them. The same as it ever was.

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View on RedBubble 

Great quote from the novel I'm reading at the moment:

Here is a fact: nothing in all civilization has been as productive as ludicrous ambition. Whatever its ills, nothing has created more. Cathedrals, sonatas, encyclopedias: love of God was not behind them, nor love of life. But the love of man to be worshipped by man.

–  Gerda Erzberger in The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman.

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Dusk falls upon St Kilda Beach.

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Heard this on ABC News Radio this morning and it made me me smile.

Westpac's entertaining London-based economist James Shugg likened Estonia's imminent entry into the European Union to "arriving at the party when everyone has passed out and the police have arrived."

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Groucho Marx once said, "I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."

The video below encapsulates the essence of television (and TV marketing) better than anything I've seen before. 

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The story of how the Gatling gun came into existence contains echoes of the wayward strategy that saw Cane Toads introduced into northern Australia.

Richard Jordan Gatling invented the Gatling gun after he noticed the majority of dead from the American Civil War died of illness, rather than gunshots. In 1877, he wrote: “It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine – a gun – which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease would be greatly diminished.” The Gatling gun was used most successfully to expand European colonial empires by ruthlessly mowing down native tribesmen armed with primitive weapons.

via 10 Useful Inventions That Went Bad

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{First published on Anthill Magazine.}

While getting ready for work this morning I was fortunate enough to catch this shard of radio gold: ABC News Radio’s Marius Benson interviewing Imperial Tobacco Australia spokesperson Cathy Keogh about the Rudd Government’s plan to mandate plain packaging on all cigarette packets sold in Australia.

Imperial_Tobacco_-_ABC_News_Radio_(29-04-2010).mp3 Listen on Posterous

Source: ABC News Radio 29/04/2010 (mp3)

The legal line on intellectual property is one thing, but what’s with that bit about shopkeppers having their back turned for longer periods while they hunt for the right packet?

So it turns out that not all flacks for big tobacco are as smooth and assured as Nick Naylor, the silky tobacco lobbyist played by Aaron Eckhart in the 2005 movie Thank You For Smoking.

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If you've ever ridden the emotional roller coaster of setting up an elaborate domino chain, imagine how exhausting it would be to spend 40 hours assembling a miniature metropolis by standing staple stacks of varying lengths on their ends. 

Kudos to UK artists Peter Root for the effort and for this great timelapse video.

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Le Tour du Monde en 80 Secondes is a modern-day take on Jules Vernes' Around the World in 80 Days. Completed in just three weeks, Directors Romain Pergeaux and Alex Profit laced together hundreds of sequential photographs on a journey through the streets of London, Cairo, Mumbay, Hong Kong, Tokyo, San Francisco, New York and London again. The end result is quite captivating.

Background information, including a 'making of' video, pictures and interview, can be found on the project's website: tourdumonde80.fr.

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{This article was first published at Anthill Magazine.}

How many social media channels do you actively participate in?

If you’re one of the millions who have caught the social media wave in the past few years, there is a decent chance that you or someone you know felt pressured to climb aboard for fear of being left behind or mocked by the cool kids as being out of touch.

It’s a reasonable concern, especially for business people who have enough on their plate without feeling compelled to microupdate and engage at all hours of the day and night with whomever is up for a chinwag on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Skype, blog comments, instant message, email and so on.

The truth is, depending on how efficiently you manage your time and how much of it others demand of you, the number of online platforms in which you can actively participate is quite limited. “Actively participate” does not mean merely broadcasting your blog’s RSS feed. It means taking the time to make connections, to discuss ideas, to help others – to share the love.

It is perhaps inevitable then that the rise of social media has been accompanied by a counter-trend towards users abandoning it. Last year, when Twitter was the hot breakout platform, research revealed that 60% of Twitter users quit within the first month. Of course, that group was dominated by tyre-kickers, but it serves to demonstrate that people will only commit time to activities they think will return them a net benefit over time.

In October last year, Miley Cyrus used one popular social media platform (YouTube) to announce her decision to quit another social media platform (Twitter) by posting a video of her rapping about the reasons, which included how Twitter had reduced her to talking about her pimples. A good enough reason, I think we all agree. In fact, with notable exceptions, entertainment celebrities have proved particularly fickle when it comes to Twitter (see this list of celebrity departures).

The new heresy

Then again, Seth Godin doesn’t tweet. The Twitter account for one of the world’s most influential marketing brains looks like this:

A maven marketer not on Twitter? Scandalous!

Here’s Godin explaining to LeWeb and Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur why he doesn’t use Twitter or Facebook.

Godin identifies the same time/focus equation as the reason why he doesn’t allow comments on his blog – a heretical decision in the eyes of many digital media commentators. But for Godin, it’s about being the best he can be at what he does best rather than trying to be everything to everyone, everywhere.

Sharing this sentiment, popular US cartoonist Hugh MacLeod recently tweeted his decision to deactivate comments on his blog, gapingvoid.com, and up stumps on Facebook. He believed these channels were distracting him from doing what he does best, which happens to put food on his table.

Blogging is holding me back…

It’s one thing to remove the ability for readers to leave comments on your blog. It’s quite another to do away with your blog entirely. New York-based software entrepreneur Joel Spolsky recently wrote his final article for Inc. in which he revealed his decision to close his popular blog, Joel on Software, which he built up as a way to market his company, Fog Creek Software.

“A decade ago, I started Joel on Software, a blog that put my company on the map. But as the business matures, I’ve come to realise that blogging is holding me back,” Spolsky wrote.

He went on to explain that the blog had already done everything it could for his business and, in order to take Fog Creek Software forward, he needed to dedicate the time and focus he had hitherto devoted to blogging to the evolution of his business and more personal connections.

Many of these prominent entrepreneurs who have chosen to opt out of elements of social media subscribe to Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans philosophy.

Kelly contends that in a Long Tail economy where everyone can create and attention is the real currency, a creator “needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living”. The idea is that you are better off focusing your energies on creating something remarkable that will appeal to a hard core of 1,000 true fans who will do almost anything for you and buy everything from you (think Apple fanboys).

Achieving this – achieving success – requires great discipline and focus. It also requires that you prioritise what is important at any given time and, crucially, know what is less important and therefore a distraction. Bill Cosby once said, “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

Delete, delete, delete

Chris Brogan, author of the bestselling book Trust Agents, makes adept use of social media, especially through Twitter and his blog. Yet, as he wrote in a post earlier this year, he’s thinking of deleting his LinkedIn account because he’s not getting any value from LinkedIn – because he doesn’t put enough time and effort into nurturing his network there.

He went on:

When I look at it, I’ve got too many points of contact:

• Google Voice / Phone
• Email (primary)
• Email (for New Marketing Labs)
• Email (a private account)
• Contact Form
• Blog comments
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Google Wave
• My Blog
• Tons of other social networks
• In person at events

Here’s the rough order of which ones are making my life better:

• Twitter – serendipity, friendship, some business
• Contact form – lots of business
• Google Wave – where I’m planning my future
• Blog comments – lots more interaction than email
• Email – once I sort it, some business, and relationship-building
• Facebook – a little bit. I like feeling personal there.

So what do I do? Connecting is part of my job. It’s how business happens. It’s how I stay connected and accessible. And yet, I think I’m too connected. That’s a lot of points of contact. Think about manning all those phones, so to speak. Think about managing all those interactions in all those various formats across all those various tools.

What are you sacrificing?

Social media is great, but your first responsibility is to be great at what you do. In the race to connect online – to attract more followers and friends than the next person, to share with the world everything you’re thinking and doing – you’re adding to the noise. And this might very well be adding value for your respective networks.

But in doing so, what are you sacrificing?

Social networks (virtual and physical) are powerful platforms for tapping the wisdom and greatness of others and sharing your own, but greatness requires focus, and focus means dedicating sufficient time to working on what you’re good at in order to be great.

You might have one million online “friends”, but do you have 1,000 true fans? If not, it’s worth considering what you might need to give up in order to get them.

Paul Ryan is Editor of Anthill Magazine. Follow him on Twitter (if that's your thing): @pauldryan

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At every Olympic Games there is at least one athlete who finishes so far behind everyone else that they end up attracting more cheers and camera time than the other competitors in the race. They try their guts out, but, alas, it's not good enough. Not even close.

The camera trains on the finish line as the other competitors cross, lingers there for several awkward seconds, then the director, who dearly wants to broadcast the winner's celebration, dutifully crosses to the athlete labouring around the final bend.

The crowd cheers. It's a stirring affirmation of the Olympic spirit, a celebration of participation over failure. There's a lump in your throat. Then your mate sitting on the couch beside you says, "What are you smiling at? You'd make this bloke look like Steve Austin!"

True enough. But how would the average man fair in a 40-yard foot race against professional NFL players? This remarkable multi-layered video reveals the startling reality.

Hat tip: Scott Handsaker

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