It’s been a little crazy around these traps lately. And that’s a good thing. But before I push on to new content I want to stop and acknowledge a few people who have helped bring important issues forward or who have supported me in their postings. Here goes:

The Starlight Foundation’s Livewire Project

On the weekend, Rachel Browne from the Sydney Morning Herald wrote about the Starlight Foundation’s Livewire project under the headline of ‘Charity project under fire‘. This is the first mainstream article questioning the project.

Matt Granfield and I wrote about Livewire almost two months ago and it generated a great deal of interest. Since then I have written to Senator Conroy but received no response. Hopefully articles like Rachel’s will increase the pressure to provide some clarification. Just like Cameron Reilly, Rachel got comment from the creators of the project but there has still been no explanation of where the money has gone. The closest we have got is that it is “not just a website”, but nothing has been disclosed that was not covered in our original blog post with a breakdown of estimated costs.

Special mention goes to Ash Ringrose at Bannerblog for covering it here, Ben Shepherd at Talking Digital for his links here, Tim Burrowes at mUmbrella for posting it here and Matt Bowen at Why Not Y for his support here and here.

Let’s hope there are some substantial answers to come.

ABC Learning’s Childcare Chat

Matt Granfield and I both wrote about the Childcare Chat forum which we launched here and here. Despite the best efforts of the SMH to make this forum look like a failing and contrived project, we had optimistic support from Tim Burrowes at mUmbrella with this article as well as a very well written piece by Matt Crozier at Online Community Engagement. Thanks for your support guys. The forum is starting to take off with a mixture of good and bad testimonials, parents supporting each other and ABC very close to making some policy changes as a response to several issues raised.

Good Social Folk Y’all

And here are some random tidbits that have popped up in the blogosphere over the last month…

Daniel Oyston from The Oyster Report included Another Advertising Wanker as one of his favorite blogs. Even though we are now limited to communicating via link love due to his harsh words against the Canberra Raiders and XXXX beer, I must admit that he’s not a bad bloke.

There was a bit of a stir last week when James Duthie published a post on the Online Marketing Banter blog criticising Australia’s social media community for being, well… unsocial. It was bloody well said and he deservedly received support for his viewpoint. I’m just counting myself lucky to be on his good side.

I was included as a joker of a marketing blogger with a spooning problem in Zac Martin’s latest post on Pigs Don’t Fly. Well, not quite. But he has found a great way of differentiating some of Australia’s marketing bloggers.

The mobileYouth team are the leaders in worldwide trends for mobile consumption. I’ve been lucky enough to be linked to in their link roundups a number of times. Make sure you check out their preso’s, some of the stats will blow you away.

The previously mentioned Matt Granfield was nice enough to quote me in his latest Marketing Mag article titled ‘Everything you need to know about social media marketing‘. Well worth a read.

Also, I’ve settled on my new job title being ‘Social Media Strategist’. I know… boring. But it’s accurate and not overly wanky. Thanks to all who threw suggestions at me on my post to help name a social media guy. My favorites were ‘Social Innit” by Zoe Scaman and Social Media Wanker by a heap of others.

Couple this with a new office for DP Dialogue and the public launching of Dialogix and it has been very eventful month. Thanks to everyone who plays nice and contributes to what can be a very intelligent and collaborative community.

That’s the last of the links… except for this clip of Stevie Nicks warming up before a show. I could watch this a million times over.

Related posts:

1. A Letter To Senator Conroy
2. Livewire: A Semi-Response From Non-Conroy
3. Could You Charge Your Client $14.7m to Create a Social Network?