I have a very good friend who is converting one of her Mitsubishi Starion sports cars into an electric vehicle – an EV. Her car will be the world’s first Electric Starion.

Wisely, while the car is being worked on, she is doing word-of-mouth marketing in the area she lives in, one of the most affluent in all of Australia. Many high-ranking corporate executives and CEOs who run some of Australia’s biggest and most influential corporations live there, and you would hope that these people would be moderately well informed at least.

The World’s First Electric Starion

Not so, apparently, at least so far as the future of private transportation, oil and electric vehicles – EVs – is concerned. Whenever she tells such people she is converting her car to electric, the immediate comeback is something like, “Oh, so it’s a golf buggy, is it?” Or, “So it’ll be a hybrid, then!”

Of course, it is neither. It will be a high-powered classic Japanese-bodied sports car running the latest available EV technology, with its Kostov 11-inch electric motor being one that helped power one of the year 2000 Sydney Olympic Games’ all-electric buses. Her Electric Starion will have far more power than any sports car would have normally and perhaps need. It will be more than powerful enough to get her out of any jam that happens in her local area, which is populated by most of the very worst drivers in all of Australia!

EVs – Electric Cars – The Great Hope of Private Transportation

Electric cars are the great hope of private transportation, the solution to the oil crisis, yet the popular myth is that EV technology is years away from the present day, and that hydrogen cars are somehow better even though hydrogen autos are a long, long way from production - if they ever reach mass production or even custom manufacturing in small numbers.

The reality is that the world had successful electric cars – real 100% electric-only non-hybrid EVs – way back in the last century, in the mid-1990s, in California. Go watch a DVD of Who Killed the Electric Car? to learn about how they were killed off not so long after the major vehicle manufacturers introduced them into the California market. In that instance it was popular myths in concert with Big Lies that did them in, despite their success and the fact that those few people lucky enough to get their hands on them positively loved them.

Carmel Duryea Morris & Her EV Conversion

To read more about my friend’s Electric Starion EV conversion sports car project, go to electriccarsforeveryone.com. Her name is Carmel Duryea Morris, and she is a descendant of Charles and Frank Duryea, aka The Duryea Brothers – the men whose Duryea Motor Wagon Company manufactured the very first mass market ICE – internal combustion engine – automobiles in the United States.

Carmel is making a series of videos documenting progress on her Electric Starion EV conversion, and the first is now online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOgkWXJHKq4.

It is my nature to be constantly learning, and to be revising current knowledge, and the past few days have been no exception to that rule. Right now I am revising my knowledge of SEO – Search Engine Optimization – an intrinsic aspect of advertising and marketing via Web 2.0.

Prior to this I was putting in some learning-by-doing time with PHP and CSS 2.

That is one of the things I love about the Web – you have a lifetime of constant learning ahead of you.

It’s baaaaaaaaaaack! I have restored the images and PDFs to my Brand Advertising page. This time, no tables, and all you do to download a PDF is click on the bold blue text that names the file.

My apologies for the page being down for the last few hours.

I’ve just noticed that the thumbnail images and linked PDFs on my Brand Advertising portfolio page have mysteriously vanished. They were resident in a table, and I wonder whether this new version of otherwise excellent WordPress – 2.6 – has eaten them as a result.

Sorry it took a while for me to discover that. Australian “broadband” is so slow compared to the standards accepted overseas that it takes a long time to load pages and even longer to upload new data. The more subscribers to Australian “broadband,” the slower the service. The slower the service, the more Australian business is crippled, crushed. Thanks, Little Johnnie!

But that won’t stop me restoring my Brand Advertising portfolio page for you, beginning right now, no matter how long it takes.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of relevant online articles.

• Australia’s Broadband Plan Under Fire
• Butting Heads Over Broadband

As someone pointed out to me the other day, I was there during “The Revolution,” right there in the trenches in London, smack bang in the very middle of it all.

The Online Revolution, that is, the one where the Web as we know it, and especially Web 2.0, was born.

Right in the Middle of The Web Revolution

I was there when the Adidas Webzine was being created by three and a half people in an attic in Shaftesbury Avenue. We were competing against Nike’s well-funded team of 27!

I was there when e-commerce was created and took its first faltering steps, with the industrial-strength software we really needed to make it work big-time still being worked on in software development labs throughout the USA.

I was there, creative directing the stills photography side of the thing, when we worked out how to show off photographers’ and directors’ portfolios and showreels online via British Telecom’s Creative Services Network. I came up with tags – tagging images and videos for classification and searchability – for the CSN’s ThePortfolio channel way back then, pre-dating their use by Flickr and other core Web 2.0 websites.

The Web Revolution Continues

My hands-on involvement in Web 2.0 innovation didn’t end when I left London for Australia. I got involved in online advertising during the start of the Flash craze, when damned few people had figured out there was more to it than simple timeline animations. I had been introduced to Flash when it was still called FutureSplash, and knew this was a technology to keep a close eye on in the coming years.

SemperMac was an experimental webzine that explored new ways of publishing online. As its creative director I came up with a whole new form of Flash advertisement – the Website-in-a-Website.

Almost a quarter of a million designers and advertising people around the world subscribed to SemperMac magazine at its height, and a huge number of readers asked for more of these ads in each issue – an unprecedented request at any publication I had worked on. After SemperMac’s demise, the Website-in-a-Website advertising format wasn’t entirely forgotten – Google recently revived it with slightly different specifications.

This new portfolio PDF depicts it as a schematic diagram, as some of my archives of the time – foolishly stored on Zip disks back then – became irretrievably corrupted.

Why This One is Different

This PDF is styled rather differently to the others in my portfolio – my Mac is out of action for the time being so I had to cobble it together on a borrowed Windows PC, minus access to my customary typefaces and design software. I am as proficient with Windows machines as I am with Macs, but I am damned if I can design to the same high standard on PCs as I can with Macs. With PCs the limitations of the operating system and especially its poor handling of fonts gets in the way all the time.

To download the PDF, please go to my Brand Advertising portfolio page.

Black+White magazine was an Australian cultural icon for the 1990s and well into the 2000s, until its relatively recent demise.

A surprisingly large percentage of the population of Australia loyally bought every highly priced issue of the magazine, up until about number 50. It was even wellknown and subscribed-to at ruinous expense by advertising agencies and design firms the world over.

My latest e-book – How I Came Out of the Western Desert and Helped Kill Off the Cultural Cringe – tells the story of my involvement in the magazine’s conception and cofounding. This e-book started out as a set of notes in response to a request by a friend – Jennifer Treur of JAM Directions – to tell the story of how Black+White began. Then, as with many things in life, those notes just grew and grew until they became an e-book.

To download your free copy of this e-book, just go to the e-Books page of this website and click on the thumbnail image of How I Came Out of the Western Desert and Helped Kill Off the Cultural Cringe.

Reader’s Comments

Black+White’s concept was simple and dynamic – standing out on the newsagent’s shelf as collector’s items to the critical artistic eye, breathing inspiration into a dull aisle.

A blend of photography, design and interviews that bought attention to the world’s most famous fashion and art photographers including Helmut Newton, Robert Mapplethorpe and Patrick Demarchelier to name a few, and equally encouraging Australian photographers to share the world stage.

… Jennifer Treur, Writer, Director, Designer, JAM Directions, www.jamdirections.com.au

Karin’s work is inspirational. Take her Black+White magazine concept and its result – it was the Bible of the photographic art world, open to all sorts of interpretations; ethereal, confronting or simply beautiful.

… Carmel Duryea Morris, CEO, Big One Productions, www.carmelmorris.com

I have just placed a freely downloadable e-book into the e-Books page of this website. It’s named 9 Lessons from “Black+White” and it is a summary in brief of the most valuable lessons I learned from conceiving and cofounding Black+White magazine – for which I was also European Contributing Editor – in the previous decade.

Black+White was a groundbreaking magazine of Australian arts and culture that was the magazine every Australian just had to buy, throughout the 1990s until it closed down several years ago.

The magazine helped kill off the cultural cringe in the arts – my prime aim for it – and it changed the nature of magazine publishing in this country.

I have uploaded a number of new downloadable magazine article PDFs to the Magazine Articles page.

Most of them are articles on famous photographers, many of them in-person interviews.

Here is a list of my subjects:

• Albert Watson
• Anderson & Low
• Andrew Douglas
• Brian Griffin
• Bruce Weber
• Daniela Federici
• David Bailey
• David Burnett
• Duane Michals
• Geof Kern
• Guzman
• Jan Saudek
• Joyce Baronio
• Joyce Tenneson
• Mario Testino
• Olaf Martens

More to come later!

I have added a new version of my resume to my Resume page, and am now in the process of adding a number of new downloadable files to this site.

I have added a PDF portfolio page sample of a press advertising campaign I wrote for a client in Western Australia.

KubanEmpire, a small but high quality web design firm in East Perth, discovered that their potential clients had dismissed the Web as a toy for geeks and nerds. In fact, KubanEmpire found that the entire Perth business community had somehow gotten the idea that the Web was useless for advertising and marketing, and so their business had fallen off dramatically.

“The Web is Dead!” was heard all over town. So, we came up with this campaign to talk about how the Web works… and works successfully… as an essential business tool.

I wrote the copy for this press advertising campaign, and Mark Braddock of Block Branding did the art direction.