foursquare.com - the enemy of Authentic

We've just got back in from a great afternoon gig by Nick Thorpe and the new wave/ country/ rock Prayerbabies at the Union Hotel in Brunswick. I am Melbourne hot, but still burning enough to unleash 'mental of Middle Park' on the world being created and enhanced by the socially transmitted disease foursquare.com. And their ilk (you know who you are).

As I surveyed the rocking, family-heavy crowd having a fine time in a small pub in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, a recent tweet from @venessapaech ("I'll say it, foursquare is just plain silly") popped back into my brain and I couldn't help but consider how suckingk it would be to impose a yelping foursquare dot com culture on this treasure.

It's time we made some 'no foursquare' stickers with the slash through their logo, before it's too late.
Foursquare (for those who have been asleep for the last 6 months) is a 'social network' that enables you to show off to your friends as to how cool you are, gather repeat visitor badges and perhaps even become the 'mayor' of the nearest coffee shop, with resulting retail discounts for you and all your friends. It reminds me of a digital strain of herpes in some ways.

I did not want your store loyalty card in exchange for my email address in 2001, and I don't want your gimmicky digital equivalent in 2010.

Naturally it's got all the vulture capitalist buzzwords du jour - cloud, lbs (not leg before stumps, location based services), social network, platform... (blogger feellinnnnggggg slleeeeeeeepppyyyyy...). And naturally it's worth more than the GDP of New Zealand.

It is about creating a world like Friends, the TV show, on your iPhone. And we know how real that was.

During the week I listened to an impassioned plea for the avoidance of temptation to join the current zombie economy, a great term describing the massive brainwashing people are getting this century into thinking that if you don't have a 50" flat screen Sony TV, XBOX, surround sound, $10,000 on your credit card, an iPhone 3GS, 2,000 Facebook friends, the new Commodore and a 6 figure mortgage, you are not actually living.

Fortunately the equal and opposite force of the zombie economy is a desperate rush for authenticity. As things get more fake, buying local produce, riding a bike (not a hipster fixie though) or going to live music becomes a life-enhancing thing. As it was for us this afternoon with the Prayerbabies.

I didn't need my dog food online in 2000, I don't need dozens of facebook friends, and I don't need to know where you all are this afternoon drinking your free Pabst Red Label that you got for checking in 10 times already this year. That ain't real.

Now I think about it, the whole lbsn idea (location based social network, I made that up by the way, can I have some vulture capital now please?) was quite possibly founded on the Australian Kath and Kim social principle of 'Loogamoi, loogamoi', and it comes to mind they missed a real chance to launch loogamoi.com, an LBS plotting your movements around Fountaingate shopping centre. Instead some upstarts with a product called Fastmall beat them to it.

Make no mistake, I'm not an utter misanthrope - I was absolutely thrilled to run into Travis, Jason and Mel, there with kids in tow, but the thrill was in the coincidence and the spontaneity.

As luck would have it, the only foursquare action at the Union was the dancing going on (average age 4, main dance move, the square). Long may that be so.

The Best Things in Life - Them Crooked Vultures perform in Melbourne

The photo is technically rubbish I know. Standing behind 1,000 people at Melbourne's Festival Hall, most of whom seemed to be 6 feet tall, glaring lights, greenish cast, and only an iPhone to hand ... Mark_LP would be horrified. But the memory is locked away in vivid 3-D Blueray.

Being thumped in the chest for 90 minutes by John Paul Jones' bass (who clearly got in on Robert Johnson's contract with you know who - he looks 30!); entranced by the speed of Dave Grohl's man-possessed percussion; and jaw-dropped at the antics and vocals of Josh Homme. Did I ever imagine you could climb on the bass drum and whack cymbals while playing lead guitar?

Invited along as part of my musical education by Rich Durnall, I thank my lucky stars for the chance to see what amounts to one of the all-time greatest rock bands. The live act exceeded the 2009 CD's quality several times over, no mean feat. I came away with swirling metaphors of having 3 of the greatest geniuses in any one field of endeavour not only in the same room, but working together to create something few will hope to match. None came.

Supporting the superstars was Alain Johannes, no mean guitarist and musician in his own right. Interesting to see the contrast between 'great' and 'super-nova brilliant' on the same stage though.

Half way through the night I was plotting to just come home, quietly pack the guitars away in a cupboard and retire quietly to less creative pastimes.

By the time we'd got back to the car, the chance to be just a 1% part of the emotional crash-cart that outstanding rock music can be convinced me to at least strum a few power chords in the morning. And as luck would have it, thanks to these little beauties, I could hear them.

Them Crooked Vultures live 10/10. Rich Durnall, teacher 10/10 . Hearos musician's ear protection 10/10.

Why I ride a motorcycle to work in Melbourne - a series.

Crazy old guy on cellphone at the top of his voice explaining to his Mum how he gets 100 minutes of talk time with the new phone he had to buy after the other one stopped working when he slept on the street in the rain at the weekend and he gets 150 texts per month for free as well and he's now just by City Road but going to St Kilda...

Wish his Mum would tell him to use his inside voice.

10 people tightly squeezed around me, all on iPhones and iPods trying to not hear crazy guy. MX newspaper with massive photo of Katy Perry's boobs falling out of her dress with headline "Has Katy got a bung eye?" based on a 2 line vox populi. 290,000 people in Melbourne read this crap every day?

Mouth "excuse me" with walking finger mime 15 times to headphone escapists just to squeeze past and get out at Albert Park. I'll take 40 degrees on the Gixxer in leather any day of the week thanks.

Melbourne Weather Phenomenon (2 in a series)

As a child I was fascinated by the stories of UFOs in Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods series of books. Well, there's my first sighting on the horizon of this photo, taken returning home from Thoughtworks' Quarterly Technology Briefing in Sydney.

Sadly, too many easy explanations I suppose. Gas balls escaping from a federal carbon trading policy perhaps...

Melbourne Weather Phenomenon (1 in a series)

Observed last week from our rooftop on a day of moist, Southerly winds driving up against the side of Melbourne's tallest tower block on a bright, sunny day.

I prefer to believe it is an outpouring of sonic energy and awesomeness from a searing 1997 Gibson SG being cranked up by the occupant of an upper-level apartment. He shall remain nameless in case the Department for the Environment get any complaints about contribution to global warming.

Pseud's Corner - Signspotting in Melbourne

If only we had some effing eggs we could make an effing omelette. Much amusement for 8 year old boys of all ages.

Where did all Melbourne's water go?

38%!! Bizarrely, I am so excited that Melbourne's water storage levels are back above the 1/3 of capacity mark for the first time in ages. But the situation deserves an economist's eye methinks...


If you think I can rant about the dodgy nature of Melbourne's toll roads and speeding taxes, don't even get me started on the water situation in Australia's fastest growing city (1800 new residents a week according to The Age last weekend).

Expect a Michael Moore documentary at some stage on the collusion between Victoria's state government and the desalination industry that has led us (via corporate wankerism and short term political cycles) through utter political brinksmanship to the edge of a crisis where the only solution has become vast water projects.

Any planner would have to be blind(folded) to not see the correlation between Melbourne's population growth and the decline in our water stored in the city's dams and reservoirs. Instead, playing to our bleeding heart environmental psyches, the blame has fallen on the uncontrollable 'global climate change problem'. "No incompetence to see here Mr Public, it's all the fault of that dreadful climate change bogeyman".

First step: prepare to be sobered up and go to this page on the Melbourne Water website to see for yourself how the trend has been in water storage since 1997. Great interactive graph - static version above. Ugly situation indeed.

Let's see what the Bureau of Meterology have to say about the long term rainfall trends for Melbourne. Always ups and downs basically, although the worst time in history has definitely been the last decade.

Plenty of websites will confirm we have had a drought since 1997 . Is that to blame? Well, certainly - less inflows means an inevitable decline in water levels.

But how have we been growing our storage facilities over the last 3 decades to cope with the completely predictable (compared to weather forecasting that is) influx of immigrants like me? Storage in lakes? Storage in urban reservoirs? Stormwater storage in the monumental new suburbs going up on Melbourne's outskirts? Water tanks? Conservation programs?

Checking out this page on Melbourne Water's site I think we see the culprit - the dreaded 'corporatisation' starts to occur in the 1990s:

1991: The Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works merged with a number of smaller urban water authorities to form Melbourne Water.

1994: Three years later, the Victorian Government announced that Melbourne Water was going to be divided into three retail water companies and a wholesale water company.

The only 'new' storage construction I can see on this timeline since bureaucratisation is the celebrated reconnection of the Tarago Reservoir in 2009, the closure of which was the first act of the new-born Melbourne Water organisation 15 years earlier.

The timeline is full of money invested in strategies and action plans, campaigns and buzzwords, retreats and think-tanks, call centres and quality assurance programs, millions was spent on computer billing systems, advertising and bugger all done to actually store more water.

I guess they all really missed having Wikipedia back in the 1990s. The planners and politicians just needed this graph on their wall to jolly along their water resource strategy thingo.

Turn it 90 degrees to the right and it bears an uncanny resemblance to our declining water levels in the dams.

Toast to Ando and Beck

2008 was the year Lonely Planet got back into the online game with the launch of a new website after struggling to do that for too long. With new shareholders BBCW on board, we met some wonderful people who gave up life in London to put their weight behind the project - which in the end won both the Australian iAward for the simultaneous transformation of organisational capability with delivery of the world's largest travel site; and the People's Choice Webby for Best Travel Site.

Here's our toast (from my colleague Chris Boden and I) to two of them, Andy and Rebecca Conroy. Apologies to Afferbeck Lauder and his brilliant book Let's Talk Strine - you cannot imagine how funny a South African and a Kiwi delivering this could be.

We're hair terday in this Gloria Soame
Ter sendoff Ando and Beck
We'll do it in proper strine style
Gettin' blotto on the deck.

In pommie-land 18 months ago
Old Smithy had a spout
Wheelaffta send a cuppla guns
To sort the mippies out.

Sex of content!
That's what she needs
Ta make a website bitter
Aorta jam the books online
And get it out the shitter.

The problem is I gunga din
To all the different bits
I need a single sign-on
It's just getting' on me tits.

Hare we gunna build all this?
Some bits moron once!
We'll get stark ender everything
In just a garbler munce.

"She'll be done by Cupdee" Ando says
But come spring in Melbin tairn,
There's no race-day for half the team
Beck just chucks her hembairg dairn.

The points are crook, she's up the spout
Said Beck "it's like a bloody maze"
But nothing we can't bodgy up
Inner narkup laddaze.

And launch we did, Navimber last
With not much egg jelly rooted
Scona beer bonza site
Zactly like we mooted.

We're gunna miss them bee in rand
As LP as Jimmy's 'roo
It's like a furry tile ya know
Zarf trawl that we've been through.

So laze and gem I ask you now
To rayzup all yer glasses
To Ando and Beck, who we've come to think
Aren't bad for pommie bastards.