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I REMEMBER CHATTING WITH staff from the Irish Revenue Commission in 1996, well before the concept of taxing online commerce was rolled into Ireland. Back then, I marveled at the resilience of Amazon--but the Amazon of 1996 is a mere peanut compared to the Amazon of 2019.

According to Franklin Foer, today "Amazon controls nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States. More product searches are conducted on Amazon than on Google ... (and its) advertising business is as valuable as the entirety of IBM. One estimate has Amazon Web Services controlling almost half of the cloud-computing industry—institutions as varied as General Electric, Unilever, and even the CIA rely on its servers. Forty-two percent of paper book sales and a third of the market for streaming video are controlled by the company; Twitch, its video platform popular among gamers, attracts 15 million users a day". [1]

To better appreciate where Amazon is heading, it's important to speculate what Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, actually wants.

Bezos is focused on Blue Origin, a profit-seeking company that "builds rockets, rovers, and the infrastructure that permits voyage beyond the Earth’s atmosphere—by selling about $1 billion of Amazon stock each year". [2]

Space--for the sake of the survival of the species--is a remarkable end game for Bezos and Amazon.

1. Franklin Foer -- "Jeff Bezos' Master Plan" in The Atlantic, November 2019.

2. The mission of Blue Origin.

[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business on the Clonmel Digital Campus for the Limerick Institute of Technology. Image from Graphicspedia.]

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While co-creating data and presenting it through PowerBI.

WE ARE SHARING a survey about the collaborative uses of cloud services with a framework provided by Office 365 and PowerBI. The data points come from survey work finished by creative students on the Clonmel Digital Campus and the PowerBI toolset has evolved through open documentation offered by Stephen Howell at Microsoft Ireland.

Stephen offers his PowerBI framework as part of crosstalk during a lecture hall session (1030 on 10.10.19) and again at noon today with a smaller group (1200-1230 room 114). Both are open to the public and free to attend.

[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business on the Clonmel Digital Campus for the Limerick Institite of Technology. PowerBI is a web app available to Office365 installations. Image is from MSpoweruser.com]

EVERY NOVEMBER, in the sleepy village of Cong, County Mayo, I try to join 80 other people to share my perspective on a major topic. In November 2019, the topic will be about "community" and I plan to update this blog post to share thoughts that extend from a blog post I've made about what community means to me.

Community means mailing lists to me. I saw this community spirit in the late 1990s when I first noticed how full stops between words communicated passive aggression. Years later in Cong, I sat across from Sean McGrath as we shared memories arising from a mailing list about the technical evolution of RSS feeds. Sean was one of the key members of an internet engineering community who helped articulate how information would be seamlessly shared across websites during the last century. Now that same elegant technical specification for Really Simple Syndication (RSS) distributes podcasts without any central control.

Community also means Communities of Practice. I stumbled upon a vibrant COP after connecting to Catherine Cronin. Today I seek out education conference through which I can hear the respected voice of Catherine Cronin during a keynote presentation.

Listen to "The Essence of the Open Education Community h/t @catherinecronin #cong19 E09" on Spreaker.

Community watering holes change as new technologies become mainstream. In 2019, I've fallen into the rabbit hold of Instagram stories. Some of those stories offer snippets of life from the ebullient Maryrose Lyons. My use of a digital dictaphone at a dinner table sparked a memorable session of discussion 17 years ago with me and my wife about the protocols of recording public conversations. I wonder how Maryrose would have expressed her alarm if Instagram stories had been available back then.

I'll update this blog post in the run-up to #Cong19, occasionally pointing to audio Congversations as they drop.

Listen to "Congversations" on Spreaker.

[You can subscribe to the audio version of Congversations through your favourite app or listen to Congversations on Spotify. Bernie Goldbach teaches his creative media students about effective community initiatives in practical session on the Clonmel Digital Campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology.]

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A morning refueling stop with #clonmeldigit.

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Standing 10m away from Hickey's bakery on a Monday morning.

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With BfG.

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In full flow during Inktober.

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With suspicious Shola.

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With Jagoda and Peter.

AFTER 12 MONTHS of using the Sennheiser Memory Mic to create hands-free classroom recordings, I'm very happy to report I have never lost an audio segment with the Memory Mic producing high quality audio or high definition video. I'm now helping other educators understand the simple and effective workflow involved to quickly produce and share recorded minutes from academic settings.

Listen to "Sennheiser Memory MIC And Spreaker E469" on Spreaker.

And a big thumbs-up to Christian Payne for introducing me to the sweet little piece of durable technology. The Sennheiser Memory Mic works with iOS and Android. It's much more resistant to water immersions and concrete bounce tests than the handsets I've used to record with it. Recommended.

I plan to archive a cover image into my Sennheiser Photo Album of every podcast I create with my trusty little recorder. I hope to make my photo collection more compelling than Sennheiser on Instagram. I think I have more photogenic talent in my collection (see the Flickr album below).

[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business on the Clonmel Digital Campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology, using recording equipment from Sennheiser, Beyerdynamic, Sony, Heil, t.bone, and Audiotechnica.]

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It's so easy to use and very durable.

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Bernie's current first world problem is part of a blog post.

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Sharing the story on Instagram.

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Blustery.

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Flying over 60 acres of grassland that are for sale in County Tipperary.

IT'S OFFICIAL! My Instagram feed is a feeder channel for talented young people. I see some of this as I scroll past dozens of images shared by creative students.

And I watch my 12 year old daughter delight in artwork that she wants to emulate.

I've scraped 10 samples from animators on the Clonmel Digital Campus. You can see their expansive body of work by following the Instagram handles in the YouTube clip about Instanimators that I made.

[Image of Lisa by Ciara Moloney. Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business on the Clonmel Digital Campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology.]

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The internet archivist.

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Photo from Wired.