Stephen Quinn’s blog

It has been a while since I last posted. Lots of excuses. But only excuses, none worth talking about. Spent today at the annual conference of the communications policy and research forum at UTS in Sydney. Cheers.

Have been experimenting with a Nokia N95 8Gb smartphone for streaming live video to the web. Here is an example.

I have spent the past week at the Asian Publishing Convention in Singapore, where I gave 4 presentations. That is my excuse for the limited blog update. It’s frustrating how many hotels around the world try to make money selling Internet connections. My Singapore hotel charged $S15 ($US10.60) for 5 hours. The Net is like a utility such as sewerage or electricity. So charging for the Net is like paying to have a shower. Given I was in Asia, it’s relevant to point out that China is number one in both the number of mobile subscribers and mobile data users. In fact, 85% of mobile subscribers and 87% of mobile data subscribers are in non-US markets.

A comment by News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch, when announcing his company’s fourth quarter results, resonated with me. While noting that the newspaper sector was changing, he also said that “companies willing to invest in new forms of delivery, which have a commitment to quality, will prosper”. Right on Rupert!

Here are two cool map sites that will give you some fun. And we all need some fun in our lives.  Twittervision offers a map of the world map that jumps to where someone is tweeting, and shows the tweet. And the other does the same when someone updates Wikipedia.

As a journalism educator I believe people who teach journalism should also practise it. Would you respect a medical professor who had never practised medicine, or a legal educator who had never practised law? So here is my latest piece, published online and in print in The Age in Australia.

Gasoline in the US is about half the price that we pay for petrol (same thing) in Australia. The exchange rates are almost the same: $1 in Australia is about 96 American cents. The distance the crude is transported is about the same. So why is petrol so much cheaper in the US?

Numbers and journalists do not always mix. Here is an excellent site to help journalists convert numerical units (litres, kilograms, metres) into someting their audience can relate to. You simply type the number into a box and the site coverts those numbers into someting an audience can visualise. Did you know, for example, that 13,000 kilometres is equivalent to twice the Earth’s radius, or two Amazon rivers? This post also appears on my other blog, Globalmojo.

TIME.com has hired Craig Duff, an Emmy-winning video journalist, as director of multimedia. Duff announced the role on his blog. He will manage the site’s video offerings and train journalists.

The Editors Weblog reports that electronic paper, one of the newspaper industry’s most longed-for innovations, could be available to newspapers as early as next year. Ryosuke Kuwata, vice president of E Ink Corp’s Asia-Pacific region, said today in an interview that developers are getting close to unveiling the technology. According to Kuwata, newspaper companies have made “significant moves over the past year” towards investing in the electronic newspaper. The first commercial e-paper, he says, will be tested near the end of this year and launched some time in the second half of 2009.