The family went for a drive in the hills today, and we hit York for lunch and a wander. It’s great to see the town still holding it’s yesteryear character, and seemingly quite prosperous at the same time. Lunch was vegetarian burger, beer and chips at one of the local pubs, followed by a walk down the main street.

It’s a wonderland of second hand shops, and I grabbed a bargain set of drink coasters with crazy sayings (and even crazier fonts!) for a whopping 50 cents at one of them. I had to explain to my kids that this weird black phone which you had to turn the dial with your finger was the standard telephone in most Australian homes until the 1970’s. Showing my age I vividly remember them too.

Looking through all of these groovy antiques made me think about glass blowing, as in the art of forming glass into objects while the glass is in a molten, semi-liquid state.

Glass blowing is one of those age long trades that was never affected by the arrival of the Internet, more likely it was affected by machinery in general. Once upon a time, the average Australian home would have had a shelf full of hand blown jars and bottles, however nowadays you would think it would only be seen in sculpture and art such as vases.

Well, looks like you’d be wrong. Glass blowing is certainly still kicking along - the University of Sydney has a Glass Studio in their Sydney College of the Arts, Australian National University does glass blowing and there’s companies like Monash Scientific which specialise in scientific glass blowing.

In the Glass Blowing entry at Wikipedia, it is reported that glass blowing is one of the fastest growing hobbies in North America. Amazing!

On the way back from York, we stopped past the York Olive Oil Company for some Olive Oil tasting and factory tour. Having tasted fresh Olive Oil, I think I’ll be ruined when trying the supermarket variety!

Image: York Co Op Supermarket, York, Western Australia.

Here’s my third post in a series of lists of short tips. After my last two related posts, being 39 hints when looking for web industry work and 18 ways to being a better employee, I thought it was only fair I turned my eyes towards employers or managers.

Here’s some ideas and tips for those of you who either manage or employ staff. Treat it as one employer’s advice to another.

1. Only ever hire someone who you think can do the job, and the job will last. It’s a promise to employ them, and shouldn’t be done lightly.
2. Ask only that of your employees what you would do yourself. For example, never ask your staff to empty a bin if you wouldn’t do that yourself.
3. Teach and encourage your staff to pursue excellence in everything they do.
4. Never ask your staff to work all night unless you are happy to do the same.
5. Encourage your staff to think for themselves - not just take commands.
6. Encourage them also to question your commands.
7. Reward great outcomes - it doesn’t even need to be financial - a big thanks once in a while doesn’t hurt.
8. Show true leadership and strength in your beliefs.
9. Realise that you are still learning yourself, and that you aren’t perfect.
10. Exercise regularly and eat healthy.
11. Stamp out office politics, and never get involved.
12. Don’t criticise people, instead analyse and discuss their behaviours with them.
13. Show you believe in your staff. Don’t just say it.
14. Make employees feel a true sense of ownership in your organisation.
15. Encourage your staff to compete with themselves, not each other.
16. Conduct regular performance reviews with real discussion, not just box ticking.
17. Don’t get drunker than your staff at parties.
18. Never berate an employee in front of another staff member or colleague.
19. Complaining about staff members to other staff members will make the listeners wonder what you say about them.
20. Take time off for holidays or long weekends. A tired, grumpy boss helps no-one.
21. Understand what roles your employees do.
22. Constantly look at ways of improving your own management technique.
23. As the great parenting adage goes, be firm but fair.

I’m always looking at feedback - have any thoughts on the above? Either positive or negative, I encourage you to comment!

Image: Mundaring Weir (built 1898), from picnic last weekend.

This is the second in a series of posts in which I highlight innovative or just plain cool Australian websites and web applications. You can read the first post here.

Jon Yau and his team have been busy the last few months building RSS aggregators. First was AustralianBlogs.com.au, followed up quickly by AustralianPodcasts.com.au and more recently News2.0. Although it seems that half the web is an RSS aggregator, they’ve taken the clever approach of targeting Australian content, therefore building a niche, which seems to be working for them.

I recently asked Jon five questions around what they were doing.

Hi Jon, can you tell us a bit about what News2.0 is?

News2.0 is a news aggregator updated every 30 minutes sourcing headlines from Australian blogs (listed on AustralianBlogs.com.au). News2.0 displays the blog post headline and a small teaser. Clicking on the link will take you straight to the original full blog post+comments. It’s another way of showcasing Australian blogs by highlighting ‘What is the Australian blogosphere talking about today?’. Blogs bypass the gatekeepers of traditional media (eg. newspapers, radio etc) but have failed to gather critical mass. By aggregating local blogs, we hope to bring together a collective ‘voice’.

News2.0 attempts to bridge the gap between the bloggers and mainstream internet users by doing away with fiddly RSS aggregators and the like. The late-adopting mainstream internet user can still source, search and browse local blogs from a simple, one-page newspaper-style website, without having to learn how to operate Bloglines or dealing with the mountain of unread posts. They get to read local content, written by local bloggers without the technological or human-gatekeeper obstacles.

So Jon, I hear you’re not a web developer at all - what made you decide to start these projects?

I like reading blogs and listening to podcasts because I liked having choice about what I consumed (read/listened) and when I could do it. I was also frustrated at having to wade through North American-centric websites so I could find local content. It pissed me off that I could not do keyword searches on Technorati with geographic filters. I don’t spell ‘recognise’ with a ‘z’!

RSS is one of the core pillars of BYO web (I just made that up - it sounds much less controversial than Web2.0). As a content sharing standard, it has gained critical mass and has the all important Date/time dimension.

I’m definitely not a web developer! The backend is a nightmare - no documentation, lots of hand coding - I rely on my SAMS book and very kind offers of help from people like Kay Smoljak. She picks me up on web standards (I didn’t know there were standards!) and CSS (catastrophic stylesheets). As a consequence, all the sites look the same (no, really - go look for yourself).

How are you measuring success with news2.0?

I randomly browse the comments section on AustralianBlogs (over a few weeks after they list with us) to see if the comments have been left by other Australian bloggers. I figure that if I can see Aussies commenting on blogs written by other Aussies, then we might have played some part in helping make that connection.

It seems all three properties are strangely devoid of advertising - it is a business, right?

It was never meant to be commercial in nature and this remains the case, however if James Packer knocked on my door with an open cheque book…(my wife would be very happy….though I think she prefers Lachlan Murdoch). It was a personal itch that needed to be scratched.

What can users expect to see in the next few months?

Kay, CW and Genevieve Tucker are helping me beta our new site, AustralianBookmarks. It’s a poor man’s (Australian) del.icio.us with locality tags. Kay tells me it’s also got some SEO positives for webmasters (but I was just keen to be able to find sites without having to use the ‘pages from Australia’ radio button in Google).

I will continue to build on the ‘local content for local audiences’ mantra as long as I’m getting my kicks (and I’m having a ball reading local content and meeting local bloggers/podcasters/webdevs/designers as it’s completely outside my square). I have two more ideas in my head that I haven’t been able to shake in the last month, so I will start on these now that www.AustralianBookmarks.com.au is ‘Live’ (Any offers of help gladly accepted).

Well thanks for your time and your enthusiasm Jon, and I look forward to seeing your current and new projects gain momentum. Bring on the BYO Web.

Image: Tag cloud from AustralianBlogs.com.au