A big congrats to my colleage Julian Bajkowski, who took out the Australian Business and Specialist Publishers (ABSP) Bell Award for "Best Writer" on Friday night. Julian’s been on the team writing across both the AFR and MIS Magazine for more than a year and is doing a cracker job.

ITJourno has the story here (subs only).

Here’s one for the geeks. CSIRO has developed a wearable shirt that lets you play air guitar. I’m not kidding. I even called the PR to check it wasn’t April Fools Day (in November).

Check out this video of live air guitar action. I’ve got no idea if anyone would ever pay for this thing.

Update: SMH picked up the press release and ran with the story here.

Google has extended its foray into selling print ads with a massive program to sell ads across 50 major newspapers. You’ve got to hand it to the company for thinking outside the square – very few online companies have thought about how to use technology to improve print media. It almost cuts against the grain.

But then again, this move shouldn’t be surprising. Google collected 25 per cent of all US online advertising money last year, according to Nielsen//Netratings analyst Megan Clarken who was speaking in Sydney last week. Why wouldn’t it want more? And why stop at just online ads? Check out this quote from Google’s print guy, quoted in the NYT:

Tom Phillips, who runs Google’s print operations, said the company was attracted by the $48 billion spent every year in the United States on newspaper advertising. Google, nonetheless, is trying to position itself as a friend of the newspapers.

“Print adds value the Internet doesn’t have,” he said. Mr. Phillips, the former publisher of Spy Magazine, was hired by Google earlier this year. “It is a different browse-able reading medium.”

If this news is bad for anyone, it’s print sales people & agencies who just got cut out of the loop.

And is it the saviour of print media? I don’t think so, because this deal doesn’t address the loss of audience attention.

"See it at the same time as the US!" proclaimed the promo on TV last night for the next season of the OC in Australia.

That’s good news for the fans who can’t be bothered to download the shows off the Net – a practice that is still widespread. It’s also more tangible recognition of the havoc social media is wreaking on the business models of commerical free-to-air TV broadcasters. There is no way they would close the gap between US broadcast time and Australian broadcast time if there wasn’t a commercial driver – the loss of audience attention to the internet.