It seems that his only credentials are his hair.

Valleywag was all over this guy:

Shingy's Book of Nonsense Prophecies

Shingy Just Spent 20 Minutes Yelling Insane Gibberish on a Stage

SXSW In One Photo: Shingy on a Wrecking Ball

http://valleywag.gawker.com/tag/shingy

I've never heard of him. Or Billy Blue design. Or anything to do with him and I'd expect I'd recognise his hair.

Either this is a meme I'm not familiar with or we're being trolled. Perhaps both.

Source: I'm Australian.

It's essentially a meme now. Either he conned AOL into giving him a sort of chief innovator job, or AOL was in on trying to market him as their very own Steve Jobs. He got onto a bunch of news programs a few years ago where they fawned about how much of an honor it was to have him on.

http://www.msnbc.com/the-cycle/watch/the-digital-prophet-pre...

i'm sold solely because he calls himself a 'digital prophet.'

also, he makes more money than me.

The article says that he was born in 1970 but has nothing on his career before 1999. Maybe an Australian can chime in on the quality of the Billy Blue College of Design, but stints at unknown "digital media" companies and then at AOL (long after the dot-com boom) doing marketing doesn't seem like a particularly successful career. I'm kind of surprised that he meets Wikipedia's notability guidelines.

I've enjoyed this Thought Leader episode from CBC Canada's "This is That" show: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thisisthat/thought-leader-gives-talk...

David Shing reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Barley . The main difference is that one is a character in a comedy.