The interactive media landscape is diverse and constantly evolving, so it is easy for businesses and practitioners to be a little hazy on legalities.

AIMIA (Australian Interactive Media Industry Association) Victoria proudly presents a free event on about how to manage the legal risks relating to your digital media business practice.

The session will explore topics such as managing human resources, user generated content, privacy law changes, trade practices issues and the legal relationship with customers.

Speakers include:
* Charles Power (Employment Law Partner - Holding Redlich)
* Marilyn Awad (IT/IP/Media Senior Associate - Holding Redlich)
* Dan Pearce (Media/IT/IP Partner - Holding Redlich)
* Non-legal speaker to be announced

For more information and to RSVP go to http://www.aimia.com.au/i-cms?page=5263

Date: Wednesday the 26th November
Cost: Free

Location:
Sensis Theatrette
Level 3
QV Centre
Cnr Swanston and Lonsdale St
Melbourne City

We would like to advise that the Annual General Meeting of AUUG (the Organisation for Unix, Linux and Open Source professionals) for 2008 will be held in Canberra on Wednesday the 10th of December 2008 at the CSC Office in Braddon.

Further details and agenda are provided in the notice on the website at:

http://auug.org.au/news/notice-agm-2008.shtml

IPTV is expected to usher in a golden age for online digital entertainment as audiences worldwide rapidly take hold of their media viewing habits through devices such as TiVo. Listen to expert industry insights from at least three sides of the story of the emerging business models in content creation, monetisation and distribution. The switch from appointment television to the on-demand media consumer has begun!

When: Wednesday 26 November; 6-7.30pm
Where: Digital Harbour Theatrette, Melbourne Docklands
Who: James Grant Hay, Managing Director, InShot Jim Shomos, Writer/Producer, Lets Talk Pty Ltd
More Information: Click Here

SharePoint - Follow the yellow brick road to public websites Adam Cogan, SSW

and

Making those Search Sites Hum - Tim Wragg , Professional Advantage

This month we are lucky enough to have Adam Cogan share his experience and lessons learnt while he worked to get the SharePoint based site for Worley and Parsons (www.worleyparsons.com.au) up and running.
Adam will also take us through how to improve the visual appeal “Sexify” the look and feel of your SharePoint site, or as he calls it “de-SharePointing with style”.

Full details of what Adam will cover include;

* Why companies want SharePoint’s Web Content Management
* How to “Sexify” the look and feel (aka de-SarePointing with style)
* Reducing the use of tables via ASP.NET control adapters
* Cross-browser compatibility the easy way with JQuery
* How to use the Custom Navigation Control Adapters - the golden pearl
* Customizing SharePoint web parts
* How to deploy (and how you can avoid 3 all-nighters)
* Performance - targeting anonymous users
* The lessons learned

Making those Search Sites Hum.
Tim Wragg , Professional Advantage

Join Tim Wragg from Professional Advantage as he takes us through customising the search from the way it indexes content right through to making those snappy result pages. Tim will use 2 common customer scenarios by customising the people search and a structured document search with metadata.

When: 26nd November, 5.30pm
Where: Microsoft’s Innovation Centre, Level 5, 4 Freshwater place, Southbank, Melbourne

Thought Convergence is proud to announce that Aftermarket.com has been selected as the premier auction house for the upcoming T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Down Under conference, scheduled to take place November 18-20, 2008 in Queensland, Australia.

The Aftermarket.com auction will commence on November 20, 2008, beginning at 8:30 AM AEST UTC/GMT +10 hours (Nov 19, 2008, 2:30 PM PST). Those unable to join us Down Under may register at www.Aftermarket.com and participate in the auction online.

Red Hat is hosting half-day briefing sessions in most Australian capital cities from November 11th through December 9th 2008.
Get an authoritative look at open source and its future directions.

Choose from two tracks: infrastructure or middleware, or listen to both.

Take a close look at the tools to build enterprise open source solutions.

- Enterprise architecture management
- IT operations and standards
- System security and management
- Application development tools and platforms
- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

http://redhatimages.com.au/eDMs/New_index.html

PRESENTER: Dr. Rod Farmer

ABSTRACT:
The greatest challenge in developing valued mobile users experiences is the mobile industry itself. The lack of standardisation, proprietary innovations, and difficult partner relationships have led to massive fragmentation amongst the industry’s biggest players - handset manufacturers, network operators, software platform providers and chipset suppliers. Despite advances made in better understanding end-user behaviour and needs, designers of mobile user experiences must continually assault an almost insurmountable climb of commercial compromises and technological perils.

This presentation provides a cursory overview of several mobile design issues which limit about ability to ability to move beyond the lowest common denominator in our designs.

VENUE: University of Melbourne, IDEA LAB, level 4, 111 Barry Street, Carlton

DATE and TIME: Friday 14 Nov 2008, 3-4 pm

BIO:
Dr Rod Farmer is an Honorary Fellow at the Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne, and is an associate of the Interaction Design Group. He currently works within the Australian Telecommunications industry, specialising in mobile user experience and research-driven product innovation.

With the Flex 4 Alpha release around the corner, Bjorn Schultheiss will be explaining some of its new features including the new component architecture, enhanced states, advanced css selectors, FXG and the drawing API and also Pixel Bender integration. Details below.

Date: Monday 10th November
Time: 6.30 for a 7pm start
Venue: Loop Bar - 23 Meyers Place, Melbourne

For more information visit http://www.ozfx.org/?p=39.

On Monday, November 17, Chris Sampson (Parisfirst Partners) and Ian Stewart (Office of the Premier of Victoria) will be talking about the current Premier of Victoria’s website. Chris will discuss why Joomla! and YouTube were chosen and how other design and build issues were solved. And Ian will talk about improvements to the original site including implementing Flickr and the first live webcast as well as some insight into where Victorian Government is heading online.

Note this is a Monday night. Please RSVP for catering purposes.

DATE: Monday, November 17 TIME: 6.30pm for 7pm start
VENUE: Loop Bar, 23 Meyers Place, Melbourne VIC 3000
COST: FREE (finger food provided)

RSVP: http://webstandardsgroup.org/event/160

The discussion will be about backing up & restoring large files which may be locked on a linux system.

Date: 31st October
Time: 7pm
Meeting: Computer Bank, 483 Victoria Street, West Melbourne, Victoria 3003, Australia.

Please refer to the website for more information and previous workshops/tutorials.

URL: www.mlug.org.au

Ruxcon is Australia’s premier technical computer security conference, held annually at the University of Technology (UTS), Sydney. After a break in 2007, Ruxcon is back and bigger than ever.

Ruxcon brings together the best and the brightest security talent in the Australia-Pacific region through live presentations, activities, and demonstrations. The presentations will include:

1. Security Applications for Emulation - Silvio Cesare
2. Intelligent Web Fuzzing - Neil Archibald
3. Attacking the Vista Heap - Ben Hawkes
4. Targeted OLE2 Attacks, The New Black - Peter Taylor
5. Attacking Rich Internet Applications - Kuza55, Stefano Di Paola
6. Introduction to Reverse Engineering - Ashley Fox
7. Now you see it, now you don’t! - Obfuscation ‘08 style… - Nishad Herath
8. Heaps about Heaps - Brett Moore
9. Uninitialized Variables - Finding, Exploiting, Automating - Daniel Hodson
10. JavaScript is Harder than you Think - Paul Ducklin
11. Enterprise Security, Softer than the foam on my Frappuccino - LUMC Crew
12. Pimping: Forensic Style - Adam Daniel
13. SCADA Penetration Testing: Hacking Modbus Enabled Devices - Daniel Grzelak
14. Browser Memory Protection Bypasses in Vista - Mark Dowd
15. None More Black: The Dark Side of SEO - Roberto Suggi
16. Ghost Recon: Subverting Local Networks - Berne Campbell
17. Browser Rider: Your way to Fun Browsing - Nik Mijatovic, Ben Mosse
18. GPU Powered Malware - Daniel Reynaud
19. Google Hacking - Christian Heinrich
20. Netscreen of the Dead: Developing A Trojaned Firmware for Juniper Netscreen Appliances - Graeme Neilson

Where: University of Technology, Sydney.
When: On the weekend of the 29th of November to the 30th of November, Doors open at 8:30am and the first presentation commences at 9:30am.

http://www.ruxcon.org.au/

As 2008 rushes to a conclusion, it is time to examine the year that was. Did the bold predictions made at the end of last year come to fruition? What were the big trends that did happen? What happened that we didn’t expect?

The final Interactive Minds event for 2008 will examine trends both past and future. Our guest speakers will look at what was predicted, what happened and what the next big interactive trends look set to be.

Following our speakers an expert panel will discuss the predictions for 2009.

Our Panel:
Yean Cheong, Account Director, eServices
Dr Axel Brun, Senior Lecturer Media & Communication, QUT
Stephen Phillips, Wotnews
Tim Lovitt, Manager - Digital, Gold Coast Tourism Corporation

Bookings are essential, please book at www.interactiveminds.com.au.

Date: Thursday 27th November 2008
Time: 5:30pm – 8:00pm
Venue: GPO Hotel - Code Bar, 740 Ann Street, Fortitude Valley, QLD
Cost: $65 (includes beer/wine and nibblies)

Spectacular security failures continue to dominate the headlines despite huge increases in security budgets and ever-more draconian regulation. The 20/20 hindsight of audits and reviews is no longer adequate to guide security efforts. Best practices are not the answer, they’re just a substitute for real knowledge. For effective security management, it is utterly essential to have relevant and meaningful metrics.

This internationally-acclaimed workshop provides a powerful nine-step methodology to develop critical strategic, management, and operational metrics.

Canberra - 20 November 2008
Sydney - 25 November 2008

This course will provide:

- Compelling business case for information security management metrics.
- Comprehensive overview of current and evolving security metrics.
- Understanding the inadequacy of contemporary approaches to security metrics
- Nine-step approach for developing the key metrics essential to managing security
- Framework and process to measure & monitor essential aspects of info-security
- Case studies, support material and security taxonomies.

http://www.alctraining.com.au/register.php?b44

Presentation 1: Evaluating quality in online asynchronous interactions on online discussion forums between students and students’ facilitators.

Presentation 2: Engagement in HCI: An Investigation into the effect of individual factors on Engagement.

(Presentation one)

PRESENTER: Dip Nandi

TITLE: Evaluating quality in online asynchronous interactions on online discussion forums between students and students’ facilitators

VENUE: University of Melbourne, IDEA LAB, level 4, 111 Barry Street, Carlton

DATE and TIME: Friday 24th October 2008, 3-4 pm

ABSTRACT:
The advancement of technology and improvement of computer skills of students has made it possible for online learning to develop quickly. The increasing use of information technology in providing education means that the interaction between teachers and learners are now happening increasingly online. Because of its potential benefit online discussion forums are becoming a common feature even in university courses as it allows students and instructors to interact with each other regardless of time and space.

This presentation will discuss the set of criteria depending on which participation in discussion forums can be evaluated. In doing so it will discuss the findings from a case study carried out for this research and how it matches and differs from the analysis of literatures.

BIO:
Dip Nandi is doing a Masters in Information Systems in the University of Melbourne. He is doing this research as part of the course requirement of 615-690, Minor Research Project in IS and wants to undertake a PhD in the areas related to interactions in online learning in the future.

(Presentation two)

PRESENTER: Geoffrey Findlay

TITLE: Engagement in HCI: An Investigation into the effect of individual factors on Engagement

VENUE: University of Melbourne, IDEA LAB, level 4, 111 Barry Street, Carlton

DATE and TIME: Friday 24th October 2008, 3-4 pm

ABSTRACT:
In this seminar Geoffrey Findlay will present his honours project on Engagement in HCI using a physics learning activity. A physics learning activity was selected because of its amenability to creating a program where individual factors could be isolated, as well as providing a population who would be interested in the program, namely physics students. An experiment was conducted, with the program used specifically created for it by the researcher and corrected after a short pre-test.

The experiment involved 15 participants completing two series of tasks based on projectile motion: one with a written task description; the other series of tasks consisted of targets on the screen to hit. There were three experimental groups with the independent variable being the interface with varying levels of immediacy of feedback: continuous path, discrete path and no path. Analysis consisted of mix of quantitative and qualitative measures, namely on-screen video of participant’s interaction, a brief questionnaire, and semi-structured interview. The findings and their implications will be discussed.

BIO:
Geoffrey Findlay is an IS honours Student, whose background includes a Bachelor of Science (Physics major) / Bachelor of Information Systems. He is supervised by Dr. Jon Pearce and Dr. Wally Smith.

Hear from Joshua Haebets from nSynergy and Ed Richard, SharePoint Solutions Principle - Stargate Global Consulting - MVP SharePoint.

Joshua Haebets, nSynergy
SharePoint Search and Search server has made some great leaps ahead in functionality over the past 18 months. This session will show some of the new functionality along with some old favourites. Federation is one of the great new features, allowing you to use the familiar search interface to present search results from a variety of systems, not just Live.

Increasing business productivity by making good use of OpenXML, SharePoint Events and Word Content Controls.

Ed Richard, SharePoint Solutions Principle - Stargate Global Consulting - MVP SharePoint

This is Take 2 for Ed, as his session was cruelly cut short by the Demo Gods last month. Join Ed as he talks about setting up MS-Word templates and make SharePoint events generate or change Documents using the OpenXML SDK. Ed will show a range of options using real life projects demonstrating the power an capabilities of Word and SharePoint working as a team. He’ll also show some VSTO integration and explain how to make clever use of Document Building Blocks and Word Content Controls.

When: 22nd October, 5.30pm

Where: Microsoft’s Innovation Centre, Level 5, 4 Freshwater place

Details: Want to understand what is working in today’s online advertising environment? AIMIA Victoria presents a session on online and cross-platform advertising that is relevant to contemporary markets and issues. Come along to this free event on Wednesday the 29th of October to hear from three fantastic speakers and have the opportunity to throw some questions into the ring.

Speakers include:
Mark Armstrong: Head of Automotive, Local and Classified Advertising, Google
Andrea Cartwright: GM of Strategy, Sensis Digital
Alan Long: Asia Pacific Research Director, Hitwise

The event is free, so please join us to get up to speed with online advertising, have a glass of wine and mingle with those in the know.

Location:
Sensis Theatrette
Entrance via Jane Bell Lane from Russell Street
Level 3, QV Centre
Cnr Swanston and Lonsdale St
Melbourne City

For more information and to RSVP go to http://www.aimia.com.au/i-cms?page=5180

Abstract:
In recent years there has been a growing interest in Urban Screen applications. While there have been several deployments of these technologies in our urban environments, surprisingly little research effort has aimed to explore the detailed material practice of people’s engagement and interaction with these urban screen applications. In this paper, we present a study of collaborative game play on large urban displays situated in three city locations in the UK. The study highlights ways in which collaborative play is initiated and coordinated within the context of an urban environment. These experiences are related to physical characteristics of the architectural spaces, the people populating these spaces and the interactive properties of the game itself. The study moves on to discuss issues relating to audience and spectatorship, an inherent feature of interaction in urban environments. The issues of audience and spectatorship are discussed in their own right but also in terms of their relationship to the playing experience. Finally the study considers these interactive experiences in the contexts of being hosted by a professional compere and also with no host present. Through the study we highlight factors to consider in the design of collaborative urban screen applications. From peripheral and passive engagement to more interactive engagement, participation is an important consideration for the design of successful urban screen content.

Speaker:
Kenton O’Hara is the new research director (since March 2008) of the HxI Initiative of the CSIRO/DSTO/NICTA in Sydney. According to the website, the “term ‘HxI’ denotes humans interacting with each other, with information and with technology. It focuses on augmenting their cognitive abilities and social interaction. The ‘x’ describes the search for an ‘x factor’ – something that makes interacting with technology more effective.” Kenton has a PhD in the Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Cardiff. Prior to joining the HxI Initiative and CSIRO, he was at HP labs in the United Kingdom.

Speaker:
Kenton O’Hara

Date:
Friday 24 October 2008

Time:
11.15 am

Venue:
Alan Gilbert Theatre 2, Level 1 Corner Grattan & Barry Street

http://chisig.org

http://www.interactiveminds.com.au/UpcomingEvents.aspx

Details: Understanding what customers want is critical to any business. No matter which industry, which target market, understanding your customers’ needs and providing outstanding service can be the difference between success and failure.

Our experts have a wealth of knowledge to share about customer driven strategies from online customer experience, usability and customer service. Do you know what your customers want?

The event is on Friday 17th October 2008 in Brisbane, Qld.

Visit www.interactiveminds.com.au for more information.

Our next Domain will be Thursday 23rd October.

Eric Beecher, Chairman of Crikey will join Brad Howarth on the couch for a chat.

Crikey is an independent online media service. Every week day they send their 10,000+ subscribers an email crammed with the latest news, analysis, juicy gossip, reviews, rumours, links and prescient tips.
Crikey’s aim is very simple: to bring its readers the inside word on what’s really going on in politics, government, media, business, the arts, sport and other aspects of public life in Australia. Crikey irritates the powerful by revealing how they operate behind the scenes, and it tackles the stories insiders are talking about but other media can’t or won’t cover.

http://www.the-domain.org/

Along with Microsoft and Platinum sponsor EMC, Unique World is holding a conference on October 28th 2008 at Microsoft’s Sydney Office in North Ryde. With a high calibre speaker program, the conference aims to provide valuable learning for customers on information management business and technology best practices surrounding Microsoft SharePoint, Office Business Applications, Unified Communications and the Customer Care Framework.

* Keynote presentation from Greg Stone, Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Australia
* Access to Microsoft and Unique World Technology and Solution Specialist presentations covering a broad range of information management areas
* Case study presentations and panel discussions from Lend Lease, NRMA Motoring and Services, NIB, Microsoft, EMC, F5 and AvePoint.
* Exposure to thought leaders and insight from the SharePoint/Office System partner community

This promises to be an insightful and powerful business opportunity to not only listen and see what solutions are available and how customers are implementing them, but also the opportunity to network with industry peers and get to know other like-minded professionals.

You have been recommended as a person within your organisation that might enjoy and benefit from the conference. Unique World, Microsoft and Impact 2008 Platinum sponsor EMC would like to invite you to register and join us at the event (attendance is free for your organisation by invitation).

When: Tuesday 28th October 2008
Where: Microsoft, 1 Epping Rd, North Ryde, NSW

REGISTER NOW:

http://www.uniqueworld.net/Events/Pages/Impact2008-Informationtochangeyourbusiness.aspx

MORE INFORMATION & AGENDA:

For more information and agenda, view the online invitation via link below

http://impact.uniqueworld.net/Invite/Pages/Invite.aspx