It all changed on Day Two of Media140 Sydney.

Instead of the Day 1 brief presentations from academics and journalists, the Day 2 technology-focused case studies and workshops induced a can-do focus on creation and production. There was far more here that independent operators could use.

Some of Jay Rosen’s Keynote Internet Ten Commandments could be taken up by independent and alternative journalists although his suggestions were more relevant for mainstream reporters.

However, in the Case Studies and Tips & Tools for Journos sessions, producers and techies got right down to showing how they use audio, video and multimedia to produce interactive media. For example, Riyaad Minty @riy of AlJazeera said he set up the @AJGaza twitter feed to microreport the Gaza War, using Skype and google chat to communicate during that time.

Claire Wardle @cward1e from the BBC College of Journalism  explained that things did not go to plan when the BBC set up their User Generated Content hub. Instead of sitting back and harvesting a flood of contributions, UGC hub staff found they obtained better content by going out and engaging with their audience.

After flying from South Africa, Jude Mathurine @newmediajude of the New Media Lab, Rhodes University, South Africa, only had time to scratch the surface of his presentation, Why the future of African journalism lies in mobile social networks. I would have liked to have heard more about the media shown on slide #28 on, such as gatorpeeps for microblogging and Zoopy for video sharing.

Barry Saunders from EngageMedia was dismissive of the Day 1 furore about how to “open up journalism” and “help the audience to participate”. “Hey,” he said, “We were doing this with social justice movements 30 years ago”. Barry defined journalism as “a good faith attempt to make sense of the world”, and social media can provide context and history to journalism, he said. Barry’s vision includes a variety of journalism:

• Trade journalism – press releases and commentary, blogging moving to curating
• On the grid reporting
• Social conversation – blogging, editorial
• Data journalism – making sense of publicly available data
• Documentary/contextual journalism
• Curatorial journalism.

Online News Editor Dave Earley recommended we use some tweeting aids: twitter client JournoTwit , search dashboard TweetGrid,  Qik for video sharing and Twitpic for sharing photos.

And that was just a few highlights of the morning.

As someone whose work includes freelance writing, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Media140 Sydney.

I was keen to discuss the implications of non-fiction writers and alternative/freelance journalists using social media. What ethical, practical, legal and professionalism issues are involved with using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, You Tube etc to find story ideas, sources/experts, editors and story outlets?

I was hoping to hear critiques of social media. What are the downsides of managing data through “collective intelligence applications”?

Are there minefields involved in freelancers using the same communities of connected users for background research and fact-checking as they use to market and promote themselves? How can a lone operator who is unfairly attacked on a widely-known blog respond effectively? And where does community media fit into all this?

I was also keen to discuss the political economy of social media. Public broadcasters such as the ABC and the BBC are crowd-sourcing unpaid contributions from the public to broaden their sources, but how does this affect freelancers’ ability to make a living? This is happening while newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald replace columns written by paid journalists with unpaid “contributor columns” such as Heckler and opinion sites such as On Line Opinion do not pay contributors.

Valerio Veo said in his presentation, “Savvy journalists who are on top of this trend can leapfrog many budding bloggers” but how many can translate this credibility into cash?

Few of these topics were discussed though, including the question of the effect of crowd sourcing on freelancers’ income. Instead, Day One presenters talked about why more journalists should be on twitter, but the mainstream news and political reporters they were discussing are a tiny minority of the field.

Journalists are more likely to be writing for the likes of the Earthmover and Civil Contractor than reporting Question Time, and they are increasingly likely to be freelancers who are already enthusiastic tweeters.

Freelancers write lifestyle, make-up, fashion, travel, careers and gardening articles and columns and blogs.

They create opinion, humour, self-help and astrology columns. They write or edit or photograph for industry publications, banks and insurance company newsletters and union journals. They review cars, toys, TVs, books, restaurants and computers wherever they can find someone to pay them. They write about Second Life and they make documentary films.

The alternative journalism field includes activists who might write journalism for free but prefer to be paid. How is a present-day George Orwell to make a living?

Margaret Simons’ “disinterested journalism of integrity” is produced by trained, experienced freelance journalists as well as mainstream news reporters. However, is it likely that freelancers will produce high quality journalism if they are not paid for it?

(Since the conference there has been discussion about this. See The future of the ABC and of journalism.)

Things became more interesting when social media producers took the stage for the “Do journos do it better?” session, However, Stilgherrian in “What do journos do better, exactly?” spoke of “capital-J journalists” in media factories and everyone else out in social media communities.

There was little acknowledgment that many freelance journalists are out there energetically self-publishing and participating in social media communities already, going by their presence on twitter, on blogs and commenting on forums. To me, the division between freelance journalism, social media and citizen journalism is already quite porous.

Dave Earley’s list of 501 Australian Journalists and News Media People on Twitter demonstrates the range involved in his “Australian media people on Twitter”.

Although being at Media140 Sydney was interesting and enjoyable, by the end of Day One I was not sure I’d made the right decision in coming along at all.

O’Neill in his article Reality check in aisle nine (SMH 301009) observes that Sydneysiders, as well as wanting their food to be fresh and nutritious, also have concerns about how and where it is produced. They want their food choices to reflect their desire for an inclusive society and global equity on an unthreatened planet.

But O’Neill cruelly observes that lattes tend to watch a television cooking show rather than actually cooking so their fresh food has a good chance of ending up dumped. He describes Sydneysiders’ food desires as “little more than fantasies”, pointing out that each week the average household spends nearly five times more on takeaway or eat-out food than it does on fresh vegetables.

To make matters worse, the dumped food was probably bought at Coles or Woolworths. By choosing to shop at supermarkets, lattes are helping to exclude small independent retailers and growers from making a living, he says.

Although he acknowledges there might be a time problem, O’Neill also says maybe lattes’ personal belief systems are thin. Really, he’s very harsh.

What is the point in living in Sydney if one can’t enjoy the glories that it offers? Lattes can’t possibly be at the openings and the talks and the films and the performances and also be at home chopping. Doesn’t this make sense? And how many friends would lattes have if their values were out of kilter?

It’s all perfectly reasonable, if you think about it.

It used to be that Sydney had a great public transport system while Brisbane’s was hopeless and a car was a necessity, but that’s changed quite a bit.

Although Sydney still has a good public transport system with an extensive rail network, these days it becomes very crowded at peak hour. Town Hall Station can be quite dangerous because it is way over capacity.

However, the beauty of living in Sydney is that you can get to about 40 excellent beaches by public transport in a reasonable time and many in one leg. From Wynyard to Palm Beach might take 1 1/2 hours, but you’ll get there in one bus trip. Marrickville to Bondi Beach is two trains and a bus, but you can do it in an hour.

On the other hand, Sydney’s ubiquitous buses grind through the traffic, notorious for running late or not at all, although there are exceptions such as the buses whizzing along the Harbour Bridge bus lanes.

Up north, as well as trains that run on time, Brisbane residents love their busway system which takes people from outlying suburbs to the CBD in minutes. But outside Brisbane it’s another story. Spearritt reports that only two per cent of travel on the Gold and Sunshine Coasts is by public transport.

Getting to the beaches north and south of Brisbane can be a long process. Apart from private bus lines, traveling to the Sunshine Coast by public transport means a train to Caboolture, then a slow bus to the coast. You can rip down to the Gold Coast on a fast train, but only as far as Robina. From there it’s a bus to the beaches.

Both cities have water-based public transport systems with Sydney’s ferries traversing the harbour reaches while Brisbane’s ferries and CityCats cover the Brisbane River.

So owning a car is no longer a necessity in Brisbane, although you won’t make it to the beach in a hurry without one.

In the inner-city Sydney latte belt you can’t buy any old stollen, you need to find the top stollen, the absolutely sublime stollen, the really, really special stollen.

A latte couldn’t possibly go down to Coles and buy 500g stollen for $6.99. Unless they took it home and unwrapped it and pretended to have made it themselves.

Now PPAL thinks having rich, sweet, spiced stollen at all is special given that it’s usually only sold around Christmas time. She has made her own stollen, but it takes a while and if she wanted stollen quickly, she’d happily buy it from Coles.

But she might need to keep quiet about it.

Why do Sydney people (on trains and buses) insist on occupying two seats – putting their bag on the seat next to them?

Now PPAL always thought dismissing Brisbane like this was a little harsh, because there’s always been interesting and attractive things there to show visitors from elsewhere.

When people came to visit you in Brisbane, you could take them on a drive to see the views from Mt Cootha and on to Clayfield, Hendra and Corinda to see the big, beautiful, old Queenslanders.

Or you could take visitors for a drive to see the roses at New Farm Park and a walk around the Botanic Gardens beside the river in town was always pleasant.

In 1996 it became even better, because you could take them for a ride up and down the Brisbane River in the CityCat. And from around 2006, you could visit the Cultural Centre in South Brisbane, as well as enjoying all the new restaurants, the live music in Fortitude Valley and the rest.

However, when PPAL read the article, she found it was about the glories of the hinterland towns on the Lamington Plateau, inland from the Gold Coast: Mount Nebo, Mount Glorious, Tamborine Mountain etc.

Great places to take people on a drive, and the article wasn’t putting Brisbane down at all.

There’s just so much to do in Sydney. Why live here if you don’t see and do everything you can? Really, it can be hard for Sydneysiders to eat at home. Yes, well-prepared lattes would think ahead and pack a lunch but packed lunches aren’t really Sydney.  Let alone packed dinners.

There’s also the time it takes to get around, particularly by public transport. So for the hungry latte skipping down Oxford Street at dinner time on her way to see a movie at the Academy Twin, she really has to think about her priorities.

She could skip the movie, and take two trains and a bus to arrive home an hour later and start chopping.

On the other hand, she’s right beside the Snakebean Asian Diner, a place she’s heard good things about for ages but never tried. Green papaya salad’s on the menu, it’s cheap and there’s tables free.

What’s a latte to do? She wants to cook her own meals with the fresh greens in her fridge, but surely she can’t be expected to miss the movie?

Sydney lattes face some terrible dilemmas.

So Sydneysiders with big recipe collections, backyard pizza ovens, and kitchens full of tagines and bamboo steamers may be too busy to cook the fresh food we’ve bought from our local farmers market.

There’s so many cheap cafes in Sydney that it’s easier to grab something from them then go home, face up to the empty wok and start chopping.

And a lot of us are racing around town so much that we’re not home often anyway. When dinner time comes and that great place we’ve read about in “Good Living” is close by, in we race.

However, much of the fresh food Sydneysiders throw away travels a long way to Sydney, from places where it may not be available to the people who live there.

My friends in North Queensland tell me that it can be a battle for them to find much food to buy at all from the supermarket, and that’s almost the only place they can shop.

A lot of the vegetables and fruit grown there are bought by Woolworths and Coles and sold down south. While Sydneysiders are complaining about how expensive bananas are, they may not be able to buy bananas at all.

But do we really need to bring fruit and vegetables in from north Queensland and other places?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to increase the amount of land available for market gardens outside Sydney, buy the food they produce and leave the North Queensland people some bananas to eat?

Particularly given that we throw so much of their food away.

But to plan when to arrive at the cafe, if you’re a Brisbane person meeting a Sydney person, there’s something else to consider.

In this case, don’t hurry. Brisbane people have a tendency to think that if they’re meeting someone at 5pm, they need to be there at 5pm.

A Sydney person, on the other hand, will happily turn up at 5.15pm or 5.30pm or so, strolling along to the meeting relaxed and at ease. They will feel perfectly ok and would be terribly taken aback if anyone suggested they’d arrived late. Late, them? Where did you get that idea?

If they arrive at 5.45pm or later, they might laughingly tell you all about the contretemps that delayed them. It will usually be a complicated story that stresses how complex and busy their life is, how much in demand they are and how difficult it is for them to fit in everything that’s asked of them, so you must realise they’ve really done well to turn up at all!

They will be gently amused to hear that the person they’re meeting had arrived at 5pm. Or even worse, 4.50pm, to make sure they weren’t late. Noone, but noone, actually arrives on time in Sydney.

Unless they’re a Brisbane person. So if you see someone standing outside a cafe in Glebe Point Road for 30 or 45 minutes looking at their watch and up the street, it’s just possible they’re a pawpaw waiting for a latte, and they are taking a while to learn the local ways.