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Monthly Archives: June 2002

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For most of my life Red Dog has been a legend. We were born in the same year, call the same town home, and I feel like we have traveled the same amount. He just happens to be much more famous than I, even if he was a humble dog. He’s a symbol of both where I come from and of the strength and love that I strive to be. He’s a legend.

So, it should be no surprise that the moment I saw his name blazon across a novella in a cafe bookstore today, that I bought it and read it within hours. It was only after I returned home that I realised that it is written by the author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières.

Red Dog was a mate for the whole of the North West of Western Australia during the late 1970s. Wandering through towns, hitching a ride with the locals, and sitting outside of shop fronts for the welcome cool breeze afforded by the air conditioning inside. I remember being a proud young kid (perhaps at the age of six or seven) when my parents told me he visited their store one day.

Red Dog is a novella filled with fifteen short snippets of his life. Each gleaned from de Bernières research while in Western Australia for two weeks. It tells a tale of a brave, loving but independent dog who captured the hearts of many. In the tales a real sense of personality explodes to life to give the reader a great impression of life in and around the Pilbara, an area bordered by a red harsh desert and the cool blue Indian Ocean, and how Red Dog fostered such love.

The novella does not seem to be for children, but is written in an innocent manner that would make it approachable by the like. It does not seem to be for children because although it is heartwarming, it is a sad tale. Red Dog spent half of his life searching for his owner, John, who died one night without Red Dog’s knowledge. On his travels up and down the coast of Western Australia he made many friends, who all accepted that he was a transient character, that would be gone one morning, to return days, months or maybe years later. Red Dog died in 79 after he was poisoned by unknown people for unknown reasons. This broke the hearts of many, including an eight year old boy born in Dampier.

Each of the fifteen stories could be read individually, and if chosen carefully could suit a bed time tale for children. They would love his light hearted adventures and his amusing, though smelly, habits. The work as a whole is not powerful for its artistic prowess, but because it’s based on a wonderful true story. de Bernières does take some liberty in allowing some fiction, and in his words, ?The stories I have told here are all based upon what really happened to him, but I have invented all of the characters, partly because I know very little about the real people in Red Dog’s life, and partly because I would not want to offend any of them by misrepresenting them. The only character who is ‘real’ is John.?.

It’s because Red Dog is a legend, that I had to take the time out, and although not a theme I’d normally cover in this Blog, mention the tail. For those people here to read about technology, please forgive my indulgence.

Over-all a simple, easy to read book about a marvelous Dog. Nothing in-depth or literary stupendous, but good for a quick read. The story means more to me than most because I’ve known of Red Dog since I was a pup.

I’ve upgraded to Movable Type 2.21 to allow me to use TrackBack.

TrackBack is a feature that allows Bloggers to see who is linking to particular posts. Why is that important? Well, it allows everyone to see links that are relevant to one another. So if anyone else using TrackBack links to this post, you’ll see it in the TrackBack link at the bottom. If the topic is important enough, there eventually will be many posts on many Blogs linking to each other. This allows ease of navigation, because it reduces the need for doing searches. All the links are there for browsers to see and follow.

Some (and I’m sure not all) potential repercussions for this in the future, if other Blog tools implement the feature, will be :

  1. A tighter knit community in the Blogosphere.
  2. Quicker propagation of news.
  3. Abilities to see the flow of information through mapping TrackBack posts.

This type of feature could truly revolutionise Journalism. Steve Outing in his article Board The Weblog Bandwagon Now, Please, recommends that the newspaper industry take Weblogs seriously and begin to use them. Now imagine, if they also add TrackBack to their news articles that they currently write on their news web sites. They would expand their community, and even gain some free jounalists who are willing to write Blog entries expanding on their article.

I’d like to see business take this a step further. It occurred to me the other day just how powerful the Internet could be to a business if it knew how to use it well. I believe that 99% of big business have no idea how they can seriously reach their customers via the Internet. Most are still stuck in the mid-nineties, publishing web sites like they are brochures or catalogues. Amazon has taken the next step with their review feature on items.

My suggestion is that corporations should employee an Internet Community Developer, for want of a better name. This person would be responsible for growing an online community of customers. That doesn’t mean sell products or services to the customers, but get in touch with them, learn from them. At the same time an expert in the field could increase the companies exposure, hopefully for the better, for free.

A fantastic way to start such an endeavor is create a company Blog. Turn on the Comments and LinkBack features, employ some of my techniques in my Attracting Traffic To You Weblog (Increasing Blog Hits) post, and start communicating. Done right, people searching on the Net for information on the company, or more importantly the product or service, or ways to complain, etc. would find the Blog.

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“In London today a gang war broke out over a territorial dispute. However, the territory was not physical space, but a wireless cloud of bandwidth. The dispute erupted when a Wi-fi user of a local free network connection accused another of dropping in on his wave. “Not only did this newbie drop in, he launched a p2p flood.”, said one of the local Wibos.

Several laptops were broken in the fight, and one Wibo was taken to hospital for the removal of a PCMCIA Card. Residents of the casual cafe strip expressed some distress at the increase chalk markings that have appeared, and the rise of threatening looking white bespeckled males.”

OK. Maybe not. But I think it’s worth while setting some ground rules for the use of the Wi-fi freenets that are popping up, especially with the increased profile via warchalking.

  1. Do not drop in. Don’t jump on a network and hog the bandwidth. Sure fire ways of annoying other Wibos is launching a file sharing client (like dc++), or starting an FTP session to download large files.
  2. No spamming. Don’t use a freenet to send unsolicited email.
  3. Acknowledge other Wibos. Lets make it a community rather than just a technology.
  4. Give respect to gain respect.

Concept borrowed from The Tribal Law Surfriders code of ethics by Robert Conneeley.

Any other suggestions, most welcome.

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