Rob Antulov is one of the most visionary people in Australian media. He is the CEO and MD for Perceptric Media ( First product is One Minute World)

He has just started blogging at Perceptric. His first entry is here.

Welcome Rob!

I get intrigued by the stats on this blog.

And by the occasional comments to the blog, or verbal comments separately.

Yesterday I saw a comment on an article a few days back from a media and IP lawyer in Sydney who I haven't seen for some years. Good to see that he reads some of this stuff.

Today Richard McKinnon and I were talking. He got an email from a friend who had read one of his postings and assumed he was in Sydney.

Blogs compress time and space somehow. And have tremendous reach - far more than you might expect.

And the Long Tail is really quite self-evident.

Postings that are recent tend to have higher page views than those of some time ago - but every so often one of the older postings have a brief run of activity. Who knows why? Perhaps someone, somewhere searches on something and finds a story that is relevant, and tells a friend. I really don't know.

But what I do find very interesting is that the monthly page views of this blog tend to run at more than 40,000 views a month. And we are just over a year old. We get traffic from all over the world. Noticed a lot from Spain in the last month. Again no idea why...

Slow growth certainly.

Hopefully what is written will continue to prompt further discussion and bring topics that may be somewhat obscure into the public eye....

Enjoy!

Stephen Roach has some more things to say.... and I figure that this is a smart man, or else he would not be Morgan Stanley's Chief Economist... and whatever he puts into print he knows may come back to haunt him...

So my belief is that Roach is always very conservative in what he puts into the public domain. So read between the lines to imagine what is said behind closed doors at MS.

A bursting of the US housing bubble could give rise to alternative rebalancing scenarios in world financial markets.  If the US consumer retrenches gradually, the ensuing rebalancing would most likely have benign implications for asset prices -- that is, foreign investors will probably not lose confidence in dollar-denominated securities.  However, in the event of a sharp and abrupt pullback of the post-housing bubble American consumer, a more disruptive strain of global rebalancing could be unleashed -- as foreign investors draw into question both the return and the relative interest rate advantages of investing in US assets.  In that latter case, both the dollar and longer-term US real interest rates could come under serious pressure. 

My interpretation: Hang on, we are in for a wild ride. And it doesn't matter where you live, you had better be watching what the US consumer numbers say quarter by quarter. As and when the US consumer backs off, the global rebalancing begins. Its like a gyroscope. When the momentum of the core slows the gyro totters...

Fortunately in Australia we have had pretty conservative fiscal management from both the Libs and the Federal Reserve bank over the last 10 years. (unlike the previous regime where Keating gave us the recession we had to have). But - we are just as reliant on the US economy as the Chinese are. Australia is a totally resource centric economy (Thank Howard for that - there are virtually no incentives for entrepreneurs in this country. You get taxed to buggery for making a decent capital gain and you even get taxed on the option grants you receive before they are in the money if you are not careful!). So all of our exports are priced in greenbacks. If the US teeter-totters and the greenback takes a dive, the net effect to Australia is that companies that export coal, iron, wheat etc are all going to have to tighten their belts.

That will clearly spin into our own housing sector which is already fragile particularly in the suburbs.

Amazing stuff. Yesterday I read that Google has so much cash on hand that it is now being classed as a Mutual Fund, which brings with it more reporting, more compliance issues etc. They apparently have more than 14 10 Billion on hand.

Now today I read that they have done a deal with EBay to serve ads to all of EBays non-US sites. That won't solve their problem with too much cash!

So is it likely that Google will start buying some properties....?

You get quite a lot for 14 Billion!

What Google could do - as a company whose motto is Do No Evil - is to look at creating a Google charity. How much real good could be done if Google for instance contributed $1Billion to buying up Amazonian rainforest to protect them from being logged?

Or perhaps they could buy some planes for Medicine sand Frontieres - so that they can get aid to the needy that much faster....?

Emmalina, Tasmania's 18 year old YouTuber has had her 15 minutes of Warholian fame and says that's enough! 

Is this just another example of concern over personal information being too easily available, and persisting, in digital public fora? And increasingly so without permission, as today's Sydney Morning Herald article describes.

On the weekend I had a chat with a colleague who has taken down his personal website which had been in place for 6 or so years since his Uni days (a 'blog', from the pre-blog days).  This site carried commentary and opinion on many issues worthy of a Uni student, but now less relevant given his stage in life, and particularly his impending marriage (his views on certain matters pertaining to the opposite sex aren't really appropriate or valid any longer!). So, he has taken down some of what he put into the cyber-community - but, no doubt, it still exists somewhere, cached somewhere, potentially ready to be exposed at some point in the future. 

Another colleague once enquired about the longevity of an article hosted at a local newspaper website - unfortunately, a 'Google' search of a relative's name brought up as the first response a rather unsavory  article about an incident that generated some negative mass-media coverage, although the subsequent clearing of his name didn't.

So, to the extent we can, how we manage today the cyber-exposure of our thoughts, opinions, biases and prejudices, has impact into the future.

When  Emmalina is a few years older, she is likely to interviewing for that important job somewhere.  I wonder if a simple 'Google' or YouTube search will locate her (sometimes very frank) You Tube admissions, which she might then look back on and rather they had stayed as private conversations?

Seth Godin did an interesting piece about the future of radio.

I happen to believe that radio is one of the best media ever invented. But it is also largely its own worst enemy. Radio is theater of the mind. You can listen to it while you drive. It is interactive - like talkback.

Seth has a view that radio is in flux and could go in a number of ways. And I agree.

But radio is magical medium. Like books radio can tweak the imagination. And that is a great thing...

Stephen Roach in his latest essay paints a sobering picture of what is just around the corner for the US economy and, by extension, the global economy.

And this time it's personal.

The housing bubble is deflating fast in the US. In Australia we have been watching flat prices for several years now - and hoping that it doesn't get any worse.

The problem is, as Roach says, that we have an unbalanced global economy. For that read an economy that is far too reliant on the US consumer. Or, as I noted in an earlier piece, too reliant on distant events that are off our radar screens.

This is going to be a bubble that is going to be hard to pick though in my opinion. It comes with rising petrol prices, a massive tectonic shift in media - with advertising fast reaching the tipping point of dollars moving from traditional to online properties. Seems to me that the real hurt may continue to be masked by sectoral ebullience that will hide some of the pain, and give the politicians something to crow about regardless.

And then there is the middle east war. How long can the US economy tolerate the drain on funds that cycles round to a few fat corporations?

Its going to be Mr Toad's Wild Ride alright. And the real question that arises from this is will we hit the big D word?

My sense is that when you hear the US talk about recession, what they will really be talking about is an economy that is heading into deflation. And when that happens, watch out for the dollar, watch out for everything - the US will be in trouble.

Mr Nobody, David Tench tonight, blew the Aussie TV ratings wide open Monday night. Did it win its night and time slot first out? Nope. But it killed in its demographic,16- 39; was second in the bigger target demographic 25- 54; and is set to go big. Really big. It's fresh. Different. Interesting. The avatar says things a real person can't. Andrew Denton is smart. Animal Logic (the avatar's visual creator) clever. This show's a winner. Get set for a raft of imitators.

But their website? Old school. They had 620,000 hits after the show. Clearly, they weren't expecting this level of attention so soon. It's website basic. Just Google ads. No display. No interaction. Nothing that extends it all a level further.

Next question. What will they do with a potential money maker (the website) and brand extension device now.

Sony bought Grouper. This is a big move. It melds a hardware company that produces content with a new way of giving content to users.  Grouper is peer to peer; its consumer created; its distribution. This deal is the start of new ways of thinking for content companies. MySpace was different. Social networking and ad display. This is Hollywood finally 'getting it'; now it's only about how to get stuff to people where they want it.

Here are some interesting new companies I have come across over the last week or so....

Wablet - love this kind of launch - "exiting stealth mode indeed!".. Its an IM messaging application that lives on your site and enables you to really lock in a community.... nice idea

I am a big fan of Salesforce.com so interested to see this announcement about Google adwords.

All Peers appears to be ready to appear! And a very nice thank you from the founders to the testers that makes it all the more appealing to try....