Sydney’s Daily Telegraphy newspaper is whipping up a storm today (178 reader comments) with a story about two controversial pieces of art. The first, a sculpture, depicts the Virgin Mary wearing a burka. The second, a hologram, presents a picture of Christ, which morphs into an image of Osama Bin Laden.

I’m no Brian Sewell but I would think that the artists are commenting on the fact that the Christian and Isalmic faiths share roots in the case of burka piece and reflecting on competing idols in the case of the hologram.

Kevin Rudd and John Howard don’t agree - they both condemned the art. The Daily Telegraph newspaper gives voice to the outrage. Morris Iemma, the State Premier for New South Wales, critiqued art that he hadn’t seen in a weird and confused statement.

The part of the whole story that stuck out for me was the comment made by Reverend Pattenden who when asked about the controversy said that he did not expect controversy to result from the exhibition “because the Christian community doesn’t look at art a great deal”.

This may be true but we’ll always be able to rely on the right leaning tabloid media to exploit an opportunity to stir up some anti-Muslim sentiment.

In London, legendary Aussie rugby player, Andrew Johns, got busted by British Transport Police with an ecstacy tablet. It was just the trigger that he needed to reveal his depressive drug hell in an exclusive in tomorrow’s Daily Telegraph.

A quick web search tells me that a typical Boeing 747-400 freight plane has a maximum fuel capacity in excess of 57,000 (US) gallons yet Australia Post won’t let me put 75ml of Givenchy perfume in the hold. Perfume is a class 3 hazard. This means that Mum has to wait until Xmas to receive this present.

In the latest For Immediate Release podcast Neville Hobson talks at length about the launch of A-space by the US Community Intelligence Service. A-space is an application modeled on Facebook. The FT covered the story and you can read more here. The idea is to ‘break down stove pipes’ between agencies, enable collaboration and make it possible to efficiently process information. A-space will launch in December, which means that while the CIS has worked out aspects of the application it is yet to deliver any benefit whatsoever. 

I agree with Hobson that other organisations might have something to learn here but I don’t agree with him when he says that the ‘benefits (of social networks within corporations) are apparent’ for everyone. This ‘me too’ attitude is likely to damage the prospects for social networking and Web 2.0 type applications. Organisations get burnt when they invest money and resources in technology just to follow suit or stay current.

Organisations that are considering an implementation of a social network or any other tool for employee collaboration need to think long and hard about how it can or will work for them. They need to think about usage guidelines; and privacy and access controls need to be considered. They need to be specific about the objective of the network and identify the anticipated benefits? They need to include strategies and tools for measuring the impact of the service and figure out how it will integrate with their existing knowledge spaces and Intranet. The list goes on.

Implementing technology for technology’s sake is not a good idea.    

Ever wondered why Americans are so lame at geography? Miss Teen USA 2007 is about to clarify…

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww]

I am in the market for a new mobile phone. I am currently using the Nokia 6280 (pictured). I’ve disliked it since day one, it looks like a toy, the battery life is poor, it randomly turns itself off, bits keep falling off of it, the 3G doesn’t work because it doesn’t have enough memory (or so it tells me) and the ring tones are rubbish.

So I went to my local Vodafone store and a couple of others. Vodafone have 8 phones to chose from!!! and of the 8 nothing stands out as being cool or different or exciting or new. Even the shop assistants are uninspired. In another store, we chatted through a much wider range. My thoughts are as follows:

Motorola - The Motorazr is looking a bit dated. OK, so its comes in a range of colours/finishes but it’s not seen as being a serious phone, the flip design appeals more to the ladies. It’s not the sort of phone you’d want sitting in front of you in a business meeting.

Nokia - Most of the new phones are in the slide design. There doesn’t seem to be much between them. Nokia offers a 5MB camera on the N95, that’s quite neat. I haven’t had a great experience with the slide phone. See my comments above.

LG - Relatively new to the market and getting better. Battery life is generally a problem and I don’t think I’m their target market. They are going for a youthful, fashion conscience audience. Nothing jumps out here either.

Sony Ericsson - I wouldn’t go near SE as I had bad experiences with the T300 (I think that was the name of it) a few years back. It was really slow and didn’t really work as a phone due to poor reception and sound quality. I looked at the W880i yesterday and this has really bad buttons.

Samsung - Have a new range of phones coming out soon with some nifty features, such as a business card reader. Focused on the flip market. Not for me.

There are others; Asus, htc, O2. Still, nothing stands out and new entrants need time to iron out glitches and get competitive.

The issue here is that the mobile phone market is maturing, the manufacturers need to minimise costs so they standardise or industrialise their designs and manufacturing process. Meaning that they opt for a single chasis or hardware platform and then add different features around this. The good news is that this creates opportunities for new entrants to the market with big ideas. The bad news is that until that happens, we can’t expect to get to excited about going and choosing/buying a new phone.

I’ll probably go back to my old old Nokia until something sexy arrives - such as the iPhone, which arrives in Australia in 2008 but then if the Australian iPhone is anything like Australian iTunes then only half of the features will be available anyway.

It has recently come to my attention that religious groups are interested in the power of social media. The 7th Day Adventists keep popping up. I guess this group and others like it are banking on the theory that the average online-Joe is ripe for a spiritual awakening.  Are there figures on the success rate for the door stepping tactic, I wonder…is man’s relationship with God the original - and most enduring - virtual friendship?

I just started listening to ‘Linked: How everything is connected to everything else and what it means’ in audiobook format. The book is by Albert Laszlo-Barabasi. I got this through Audible.com, which is a great service except for the fact that the free book offer from TWIT is only available to US listeners. Boo!  

Check out this site for the top 1,000 Web 2.o websites, according to Leah. I will take some time to visit these sites. This relates to Steve Rubel’s concept of the attention crash. Rubel recently blogged about the issue of consolidation, he says that Google, Microsoft and others have been successful in acquiring many of the established or well trafficed Web 2.0 sites but that the zero barriers to entry will ensure that the Web stays vibrant and organic. History tells us that consolidation is inevitable.

The topic of the week has been conversations. We presented two workshops on social media. Permission based dialogic marketing. The events went well (did I mention that already?). As the host of the event, it was my job to make everyone feel welcome but the conversation didn’t always come easy. Very long but successful week. Lots of new business too. Everything was digital. Later, in the pub with my colleagues I found out that Chairman of our parent company - a global marketing services organisaiton - is not one for small talk. One would argue that it’s not about how much you say but about what you say. But in a search optimized world it is partly about how much you say. Organisations have to keep communicating, bloggers have to keep blogging in order to maintain relevance, influence, authority. What will happen to quality and substance in the long run?

This dynamic isn’t new - public traded companies are focused on pumping out and creating ‘news’ as a means of communicating a positive (or active) message to Wall Street.

In social media, it’s best not to get involved if you don’t have anything to say but if you don’t have anything to say then that’s probably going to be a problem as well.

We held briefings in Melbourne and Sydney this week on the topic of social media. Our regional CEO and digital lead for Asia-Pacfic presented on best practice in social media. I was the host. Lots of interest from the audience of PR and marketing professionals. The main question being: I get it but what now?

We offer a methodology for corporates that want to tackle the issue of social media but didn’t have time to go into this today. 

Fact is, you approach this communication discipline in the same way that you treat offline communications. 1) find out what’s being said about your brand/sector 2) identify the influential properties and individuals 3) develop a strategy.  

Media audit followed by media list followed by plan.

A war of words has started between the fans of LinkedIn and so called Facebook evangelists about the pros and cons of each. Robert Scoble - who dropped LinkedIn a year ago - argues that LinkedIn has an expectation built into the system that users are going to do something for each other, such as send resumes. He ‘hates’ it for this reason. Scoble responds directly to this post by Donna Bogatin. Dennis Howlett gets involved here.

I’ve been a user of LinkedIn for a few years or more. I visit the site very irregularly and interestingly have only used it as a means of sourcing potential hires, via my professional network. Its not a visually appealing interface - you can’t post pictures for example. My account sits dormant for the most part, with the occassional new contact added via email. Scoble argues that professional networking is about social stuff - like pastimes, music. He says that knowing this stuff via Facebook helps his professional networking, I can see his point but I still feel that Facebook has some way to go before it can truly straddle the social and professional networks that people have. These aren’t necesarily converged and most people don’t want them to be.  I don’t think LinkedIn does a great job of networking - it functions best as a contact and jobs database.