For a long time, we liked to kid ourselves that Tasmania is a ‘natural laboratory’ that’s home to a world-class research community. This is not and never was true. But it could be.

Sure, we have some top-notch researchers doing amazing stuff here. You don’t have to dig very deep to find them. Add to that our indisputable advantages in certain niche areas such as marine science, biotechnology, forestry, and health, and the potential is impressive indeed.

Our state is geographically and ecologically diverse, clean and green, effectively self contained, and it offers a lifestyle appealing to many people.

But we need to stop saying things like we’re an ideal base, and that we’re a hub of research activity, and, instead, prove it. This is eminently achievable in Tasmania, much more so than it would be in any other Australian region. The outcome would be unique and serve as an extremely solid marketing and promotional tool for our state.

Our state could become a small-world network.

I have it on good authority that explicitly quantifying what you’re writing about in the title of your story leads to a higher click-through rate. That’s a shame, because so often the “Six things you didn’t know about cataracts” or “Eight reasons not to believe a digital marketer” stories can leave you feeling a little ripped off. You get the impression that somewhat less work has gone into that particular list than went into, say, the three laws of thermodynamics. In an article I saw recently, “Seven ways to get a flight upgrade”, the number-one tip was:

Be a frequent flyer.

As if you can decide while you’re in the check-in queue to magically become one. You either are or you are not a frequent flyer with that airline, and speaking as someone with a bit of travel-hacking experience I can tell you that anyone who is not a frequent flyer need not trouble themselves with the remaining tips in that particular article. Smile all you like, dress to the nines, if you ain’t Platinum status you’ll sit where you’re bloody well told, you cheeky sod.

Anyway, thanks for indulging me. To the point of my essay, which I could argue segues nicely from the frequent-flying gripe because it was a plane trip to Japan that prompted the idea.

I can see them now, a bunch of smug content-marketing ‘experts’ patting themselves on the back for coming up with such a deviously cunning strategy.

People are afraid of missing out, you see. They won’t be able to NOT click on the green button, because the red one represents a clearly negative statement about oneself, and who wants that?

I wrote this after someone asked me about patenting their new thingy, knowing I'd done some work in this space.

Your Eureka moment, the one where a big lightbulb goes ‘ting’ above your head, can quickly lead to thoughts of how to protect your newfound IP. But what does it take to get over the line? What sees a patent granted to one invention but not to another? There are some concepts I’d like to introduce to you.

A rather vigorous session on ABC talkback radio this morning highlighted for me the perils of not telling the full story.

Apparently (I didn’t hear the whole thing) a caller made an observation, something to the effect that ‘greedy baby boomers’ benefited from free education and cheap housing, and are now making life tough for the following generations because they’ve locked up all the resources and refuse to share.