Baby Boomers
There are five million Baby Boomers in Australia so I suppose there must be a number listening right now. Therefore, I thought I should share a website created by an Adelaide man, David Stephens, who has probably been researching Baby Boomers for two decades on behalf of governments, agencies and universities. And I must say that what he has created does not fit into what I would have expected a boomers site to look at. I worked with David and his team in the planning stages of this project and it has completely shifted my understanding of that massive bubble in our population aged between mid-forties and mid-sixties or, to be precise, born between 1946 and 1964.
The emphasis of the site is not the stereotypical “think now about retirement homes and comfy chairs” but is instead focussed on what David knows are the real life aspirations and needs of boomers – primarily, wake up calls to start taking preventative health measures now so they can preserve their freedom, energy and independence; age-appropriate money advice; “been there, done that” travel advice and information; and a raft of lifestyle articles.
I’m not a boomer but I can see this site becoming a handy portal because there are links to all manner of things such as:
- a one-stop listing of bushwalking trail sites around Australia
- a nicely done weather page
- a men’s health series (hmmm)
- a series on healthy places to live (Sunshine Coast, Queensland, wilderness of NW Tasmania, the northern beaches of Sydney, and the Barossa Valley of South Australia are just a few of the candidates to be explored in this feature)
- top five polls (the first ones are top five movies, dieting tips, world events, and money saving tips with first results to be released in Sept 2009)
- one of the most useful articles on the site is the plain English guide to dealing with scams, particularly online scams because as I work with hundreds of small business owners in their 50s, I discover that many of them are unaware of the telltale signs of a web scam.
And, finally, there is a games section with some classic fish and chip shop games of yesteryear including frogger and space invaders. And if you check the site out now (August 2009), I am the top scorer for space invaders. So explore to your heart’s content at babyboomers.com.au.
Australian Dad
This is another new community site (probably for Gen Xers) created by Tim from Melbourne who is a dad-to-be with his first child due in October 2009. It is a fledgling forum in which Tim has crafted a number of parenting topics in the hope that other dads will share their wisdom and create a useful, online community.
Topics cover conception, pregnancy and birth, and stretch on to breastfeeding, sleeping, eating and allergies. The list has potential to be never ending, however it is currently just beginning.
So I am mentioning this as a rallying call for any dads out there who want an orderly environment for sharing fatherly wisdom, without having to set up all the infrastructure yourself.
While it is still in its early days, the first topic to be populated and draw some traffic is one about Ovulation Predictors. These little devices the size of lipstick tubes, can be used to test whether your partner is ovulating and therefore “ripe” for a conception attempt 9ripe is Tim’s word). From what I can read, it seems that a fern-like pattern appears in a woman’s saliva when she is ovulating, due to a spike in oestrogen. I have included a pic from Tim’s site to give you the idea.
So, the site is off to a revealing start and you can add to its’ future promise by visiting Australian Dad yourself.
Spezify
After starting the segment with the Baby Boomers site, I think it is appropriate to look at this new approach to internet search engines – spezify – because it presents the world in a very psychadelic way. It presents a visual report for any search time you type and includes suggestions for related searches. For example, even though it is a US-based tool, a search for “sean perry fiveaa” revealed many links to you, Sean, and to our online segment blog.
For a more visually pleasing search, simply type in “Adelaide” for a wall of poster snippets of text, rich photos of vineyards and people, and videos. However, look to the list of suggested terms that run along the top of the search window and you will see “adelaideaustralia”. This gives even more targeted results. Intriguingly, one snippet about us is that Adelaide is “a city of southern Australia north west of Melbourne”, and there are two eye-catching photos, one of a possibly drunk man at Adelaide Oval holding a penguin and one of a man possibly sober underneath a Dry Zone sign.
My final test search was for “cricket ashes” and there is a plethora of old and new cricket photos, short articles, glimpses of new cricket computer games, and, hilariously, a shot of a product called “Cricket Ash Vac Filter Bag for Fireplace”. I thought it was a joke but it appears to be the real deal. These vacuum bags for ashes are made by a company called Cricket. You can buy them on Amazon.
Explore the world visually at spezify.
Mappy Hours
Thanks to Google Maps and ever-improving online mapping technology, there has been a movement to capture the world’s Happy Hours online. Of the raft of sites offering this service, Brett Monten, our residient King of the Geeks, has recommended the service at nerl.net because it has the greatest showing of Adelaide-based pubs, according to his exhaustive research.
However, not all pub owners are on top of this yet, so the map of Adelaide with all its many pint glasses, is more like the glass half empty rather than half full. So to make best use of the map, don’t go hunting on the pub locations, just work your way down through the list of pubs on the right hand side of the screen because they have been rated by people and are in use.
As this idea takes off, it will be a very useful bookmark for travellers to keep in their net-surfing phones when landing in a new city.
The whole scheme reminds me of the free hotel lunches that Chris Anderson wrote about in his recent book, Free. In particular, he centres on the practice of pub owners during the great depression of offering free lunches. At the height of the depression, pubs fed more people than charities! It is also where the saying “no such thing as a free lunch” comes from because the expectation of publicans was that you would buy a drink or three while dining in. Guess we have pokies to do that subsidy of meals these days! But I digress, this is certainly a novel initiative and one of those handy sites to help you discover new places within the normal routine of daily life. You can drink to that at the mappy hour site.
Sean’s Snapshot
Well, why say something positively, when you can use the drama of stating it negatively. That must be the rationale behind this car from Sean’s Malaysia pics: The Never Lose Team.
