A little over a month ago, I attended a conference on “ideas, techniques and technologies for building community dialogue” called New Connections. It was a great, shambolic and inspiring event. At the time, I blogged about Mark Pesce’s keynote address – his renaissance span of ideas is totally inspiring – but I always meant to cover a few of the other sessions.

Only a few days after the Australian federal election, and organised by Tom Dawkins and Cassie Charlton from Vibewire, politics was always going to be a crucial part of the “community dialogue” discussed. In the first hour, we heard from media communications academic/lobbyist Julie Eisenberg, founder of the Internet Advocacy Roundtable Alan Rosenblatt, Carol Darr from George Washington Uni, online strategist for the Kevin07 campaign Camilla Cooke, and Brett Solomon the director of Get Up! Australia. An impressive panel. Or it would have been if phone connections worked (the US speakers were on a glitchy line).

“Lack of understanding of the medium did the Liberals a disservice,” said Camilla Cooke. But while there was a general feeling among the Australian attendees and panelists that the election result repudiated the Howard Government, the reality, as pointed out by Brett Solomon, was that only a few per cent of the population shifted. It’s no Rudd-slide (in fact, final numbers look even closer – looks more like ambivalence on the part of the electorate). And with 250,000 active members, Solomon’s online organisation, Get Up!, had the potential to make a difference in swinging electorates, with, he said, “thousands added to crucial electoral rolls.”

US blogging culture is different to Australia. Per capita and real numbers are far far bigger there, and the move to mainstream acceptance here has been slow. There are similarities, however. As Carol Barr pointed out, “People engaged in these blogs tend to be very influential in their local communities. Tap into them, and there are clear benefits.” (Or was she just trying to get all the bloggers onside? – it worked with me).

“It’s still just 9am!” she announced, with respect to online take up in politics. She emphasised the importance of constituent relationship management, micro-targeting, but warned of privacy implications. And, what I found interesting, was IP-targeted advertising by postcode. Camilla Cooke said this was carried out in the 2007 Australian election. That is, ads served up on your favourite website that relate to you, because you’re in a marginal seat, because there’s a hot local issue, and so on. Seems later than 9am, but I guess politicians get up early.

Much of the greatness of this day was about the informal chats between sessions, the race across to Single Origin for great coffee, the not quite tangible flashes of inspiration at ideas. Later, Tom Dawkins announced he was abdicating the throne, moving to the US to work with comparable organisations (Vibewire’s been his baby from day one) – I suppose there’ll be a new leader, I wonder how the organisation will make the transition?

I joined a panel on print media – “why bother with print?” – with Rachel Hills (New Matilda) and Matt Khoury (City News). I’m not sure how interesting it was for the audience, but I basically discussed the Cyclic Defrost model. How it works. Why we do print. To cut a long story short, print’s great for reaching new readers, and Cyclic’s focus is exposing readers to artists they aren’t familiar with (web’s great on the other hand for building relationships with established readers and people who are looking for specific artists); print’s portable and very readable; and there’s a sense of finality to the printed word you often miss online. There was a lot more, but I could go on all day.

Speaking on that panel, I missed discussions of the legal issues around digital technology, health and technology, and engaging young people in rural areas, but after wolfing down one of the last sandwiches (our panel ate into the lunch break), it was time for the session I’d really hoped to catch, on web 2.0. The interactive web if you like – though a lot of the audience had trouble getting their heads around it, let alone get into any real discussion. Conversation swirled around corporate and government influence; the shift from “god-like” journos making pronouncements from on high to the user-generated content model, and the related shifts in quality; egocentric networks, preening parlours (myspace), and the modularising of the web. Heady stuff.

Vibewire has just relaunched with a social media/web 2.0 look too.

I found myself wondering what all this social media is doing/will do to our social abilities. Communities develop by adults reinforcing childhood growth, and children imitating adult behaviours. But where people communicate primarily online, do we run the risk of evolving into otaku?

It was the harbour city collected en masse last night to open the Sydney Festival. A huge public affair with much less of the usual VIP business.

When you talk about getting cities working better, this kind of event has to play a crucial role in getting people out of their usual head (and physical) spaces, thinking about the city differently, and meeting, listening, dancing and celebrating.

There must have been at least 50,000 people squashed into the city’s mesh of interconnecting streets, although the SMH says “tens of thousands” (the Telegraph has since reported 150,000). Three couples got hitched on Macquarie St, Brian Wilson and Paul Kelly played in the Domain, Fuzzy threw a nu-rave/Baltimore/beats party in Martin Place, Spankrock played around the corner; and even further around the corner, in Angel Place, the Uber Lingua crew had their own thing going on.

I’ll start with the biggest. Brian Wilson was as banal and Bernie-esque (as in Weekend At Bernie’s) as he was at Byron Bay’s Splendour in the Grass festival, 2006. As he sang from his LCD autocue, and told the crowd to put out their (“god damn”) cigarettes, I wondered if those amazing albums (Pet Sounds, Smile) happened by accident rather than talent. Probably not, but these tours are diluting his legacy.

The dancing, singing-along and beaming Boomers loved it.

Spankrock and the Fuzzy party with Kato et al sounded hot, but the respective spaces were crammed with kids in bright clothes, and I couldn’t be bothered fighting my way through. Instead, I went to Angel Place to check out the Uber Lingua crew.

Bemused middle agers, Shire blondies, music geeks, hip kids, Japanese and Indian Australians, loads of Brazilians, actually people from right around Sydney and the world were squashed into this Melbourne-esque laneway. I’ve loved the space since the mid-90s when I organised parties at the former Angel Place Brasserie (as Obvious), so these days even a classical piece at the Recital Hall has a nostalgic charge, let alone a no-holds-barred street party.

The light sprinkling of rain did nothing to dampen spirits.

Instead of performers on one central stage, different performers were based at each corner in the weaving laneway between Pitt and George streets. It was kinda sound system style, though they never battled, they simply took it in turns, with the focus of the music shifting from time to time.

Stu Buchanan (who the Guardian just voted best blogger for world music) selected music between performances that spread the gamut from indigenous and Asian hip-hop, to Gypsy beats, reggae and soca to techno, baile funk and a world’s worth of other music. It was an obvious thrill for everyone involved (on the performance and audience sides of the equation).

When you’re cooking a spaghetti bolognaise, there’s a point where all the ingredients coalesce into a flavour that’s more than the sum of the parts. You get the peaks of individual ingredients, but there’s something more too. It was like that tonight. Fabulously inclusive, welcoming and cooperative, an event that uses space in the city in a different and innovative way, that gets people interacting with the city spaces in a way that town planners would spend millions and still fail to do.

And that’s just the first night.

Start of a new year. Back to work. That’s my way of saying it’s been quiet here and I’ve got some good excuses. January in Sydney is crazy, people can’t get over the thrill of new year’s and summer, and the Sydney Festival doesn’t help.

Well here’s a stop-gap. First up, check Vaughan Healey’s funny q & a with Andy Weatherall.

Healey: I was talking to some friends about this interview, and one of them asked me to ask you when you are going to stop making goth records….

Weatherall: (laughs) ha ha yeah well they can get fucked… No but I guess there is a dark side to the music, it’s kind of infused with a dark humour. To me goth takes itself too seriously, whereas my music has a kind of sick humour; maybe like dark overtones but there will be a poppy melody over the top. If you mix the dark and the light it turns out even weirder. Perhaps they are gothic records, but gothic in a subtle way.

If someone asked me to sum up the vibe of my records I would say it was something like this old 1950s British movie called the Lady Killers… or like a friend of mine who a couple of years ago said the music sounds like an Edwardian bathroom. I thought that was a perfect description. It probably is gothic, but not in that kind of po-faced, long-leather coat, eyeliner.. not that kind of teenage goth, I supposed it’s grown-up goth.

It’s always a pleasure reading David Byrne’s blog, and Wired has him interviewing Thom Yorke here, which is pretty great too. It takes a while to get started, there’s a bit of backslapping. But it’s a frank discussion of sustainable touring, Radiohead’s pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth opening gambit on the new record, and talking in the abstract, just what an album is about now music’s downloaded one song at a time.

Byrne: I’ve been asking myself: Why put together these things — CDs, albums? The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it’s artistically viable. It’s not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it’s not obvious or even conscious on the artists’ part. Maybe it’s just because everybody’s thinking musically in the same way for those couple of months … Probably the reason it’s a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you’re getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you’re going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there’s a kind of bundle.

Yorke: Yeah, but the other thing is what that bundle can make. The songs can amplify each other if you put them in the right order.

Byrne: Do you know, more or less, where your income comes from? For me, it’s probably very little from actual music or record sales. I make a little bit on touring and probably the most from licensing stuff. Not for commercials — I license to films and television shows and that sort of thing.

Yorke: We always go into a tour saying, “This time, we’re not going to spend the money. This time we’re going to do it stripped down.” And then it’s, “Oh, but we do need this keyboard. And these lights.” But at the moment we make money principally from touring. Which is hard for me to reconcile because I don’t like all the energy consumption, the travel. It’s an ecological disaster, traveling, touring … We did one of those carbon footprint things recently where they assessed the last period of touring we did and tried to work out where the biggest problems were. And it was obviously everybody traveling to the shows.

Byrne: Oh, you mean the audience.

Yorke: Yeah. Especially in the US. Everybody drives. So how the hell are we going to address that? The idea is that we play in municipal places with some transport system alternative to cars. And minimize flying equipment, shipping everything. We can’t be shipped, though.

The Scientists – Frantic Romantic
X – Degenerate Boy
The Mark of Cain – The Unclaimed Prize
Helmet – I Know
Melissa Auf der Mar – Head Unbound
Prefuse 73 – Smoking Red (feat John Stanier)
Tomahawk – Ghost Dance
Battles -Tonto (Four Tet Remix)

Matt Cousins is a producer and engineer at London’s Golden Hum Studios. Daniel Lea (aka By The Fireside), his partner at the studio, has just released a second album called The Great Hartford Fire, and Matt played on the title track. Playing in bands since he was 12 (it was all about the shoegazer and L7 covers back then), Matt’s recorded as Rises, and produced/played with expat Canberran Martin Craft, Swedish singer/songwriter Alma No Fear, By The Fireside and is just about to head back to the UK for touring and recording with his regular gig Findlay Brown (who’s just signed with Peacefrog).

By The Fireside – The Great Hartford Fire
Rises – Saved My Skin
Alma No Fear – Lullaby For Puck
Findlay Brown – Losing The Will To Survive
By The Fireside – Battlefields

M.Craft – I Got Nobody Waiting For Me
Sidewinder – Come Inside
Jarvis Cocker – I Will Kill Again
The Gossip – Careless Whisper
Roisin Murphy – Standing In The Way Of Control
Moloko – Fun For Me
Seiji – Loose Lips (feat Lyric L)
Seiji – Todo Mundo (feat MC Dolores)
Bugz in the Attic – Waiting (Afronaught remix)

Matt Cousins from London’s Golden Hum studio heads into the FBI fortress tonight for Join The Dots (from 9pm). He’s all about Americana, alt. country and classic AM radio, and as a producer, engineer and musician has worked on records by M.Craft, Lightspeed Champion, By The Fireside and Whitey. Listen!