This month in Online Insights I combine one part election with one part masterchef and two parts history, unveil a tool to help you maintain a secret journal, give you a political voice, and give you front row seats to as many local jazz concerts as you wish right from your computer.

History Chef

Hardtacks - staple and enemy of civil war soldiers

Recently, our Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition held a contrived, plastic debate on live, Sunday night television. It marked the beginning of another federal election period with all the smear, puffery, deceit and staging one sadly has come to expect. What drew most coverage before the event was the fact that this excruciatingly tedious program was scheduled at the same time as the grand finale of yet another stale reality show, MasterChef. It was feared the masses would rather watch formulaic reality programming with cooking-show flavour than formulaic political debate with, well, no flavour.

It irks me that both television and our political landscape have descended from nutritious staples to artificially-flavoured poison. But that is for another article. What I have stumbled across is a website that ties politics and the culinary arts together in a much more appetising way – History Chef.

This delightful, albeit American, site is worth a meandering visit. Suzy Evans, who got her Ph.D in History, has woven a whimsical collection of food-based anecdotes involving US presidents and historical figures and their dietary preferences. Probably doesn’t sound that interesting at first, but I urge you to take a look. What I loved about this site was the way its stories gave is easily digestible tid bits of daily life. As you read and picture the people and the food they were consuming you really do feel like you have been transported back in time and given a truly authentic taste of life in another era. Some of my favourites include: Read the rest of this entry »

As a member of Social [Media] Butterflies, I posted a reflection on a new mood I have noticed among small business owners towards the use of social networking and social media as part of their business/marketing strategy. Read the article, Dipping toes into the social pond, here.

This month in Online Insights, we discover when fresh is really fresh, have fun with the beginning of everything, unlock a free planning tool, and set you up for some family and holiday fun, geek style.

Pop Up Book

Voyage to the heart of matter - the big bang as pop up art

I think I have discovered the secret ingredient that will help modernise children’s  books and it comes from an unusual pop up book that has been produced in Switzerland.

The book is a pop up book that charts the Atlas Experiment, which is  described by the official website as “a particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider [and it will] search for new discoveries in the head-on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy. ATLAS will learn about the basic forces that have shaped our Universe since the beginning of time and that will determine its fate.”

You will recall the talk of the end of the world when they first started running their machine last year. Read the rest of this entry »

This fortnight in Online Insights, we look at privacy on classifieds sites, piracy, social media, and ironing!!

carsales.com.au’s privacy policy

Privacy and Facebook has been in the news a lot (possibly because news corp owns MySpace, or is that being too cynical?) but I am concerned about privacy in relation to popular classified sites such as carsales.com.au. Here is why.

Yesterday I got an email from City Holden, completely out of the blue. This spam got up my nose more than usual for a few reasons:

• Firstly, I am NOT in the market for a car.
• Secondly, it was sent with a high priority notifier, which means it demanded attention that quite simply was not warranted. This is the equivalent of the little boy calling wolf.
• Thirdly, it was sent with an attachment, which is poor form for any mass mailing, let alone UNSOLICITED mailings. Adding salt to the wound, the email contained a message saying City Holden would not be responsible if the attachment, which I never asked for, contained a virus or damaged my computer.

What wonderfully warm communication, I think not. But this gets better. Read the rest of this entry »

I have just had a blog post published at Social [Media] Butterflies on the story behind the baby naming poll being run at babydavisblog.wordpress.com.

Here is the link to Crowdsourcing our daughter’s name.