Month: October 2007

Posted on

And they still get a vote…

Global warming — no, I won’t cave into the Neo-Con’s re-branding of “climate change” — may be an important election issue. But, as with so many big issues, most voters wouldn’t have a clue.

Yesterday the Daily Telegraph asked people a multiple-choice question to see whether they knew what the Kyoto Protocol was. Nearly half got it right.

Respondents were asked to select a description of Kyoto from a set of multiple options: (a) A Korean car, (b) The treaty that ended WWII, (c) An agreement on carbon emissions and (d) A Japanese banquet dish.

Almost half of the people surveyed answered correctly… But close to half of those who answered correctly admitted guessing the response.

38% thought it was the treaty ending WWII.

I shouldn’t be surprised. Back when I was working for ABC Radio I did a vox pop the morning after a state cabinet re-shuffle, asking people to name any cabinet member, old or new. 80% didn’t know what a “cabinet” was, let alone any names.

Posted on

PodCamp Perth 2007: Social Media and the Federal Election

Here’s a video of my presentation from PodCamp Perth 2007.

Thanks to Stewart Greenhill for the video work. As Stephen says:

I’ve put them on Viddler because it supports long videos and has some nifty tagging and commenting features. Feel free to be social: if you see something fun or interesting just click on the green “+” button and add a comment. That way, if people don’t have time to watch the whole thing at least we can check out the highlights. If you see the word “PROGRESSIVE” in the bottom left, click on it to switch to STREAMING mode. You can skip to any point in the movie by clicking in the seek bar, or on a comment point.

Alas, the very end is missing thanks to a flat camera battery. Mind you, Stephen wasn’t the only one to “experience technical difficulties”.

[Update 15 January 2007: I believe I have a complete audio recording of the session. If there’s enough interest I’ll combine it with my slides and this video, and/or generate a transcript.]

Posted on

Global Warming: analysing the risk

Frame grab from Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See

Yesterday Crikey reminded me about this video. I’d seen it before, but it’s worth seeing it again — particularly during the election campaign — and showing it to as many people as possible.

The message is simple. Perhaps we can never be 100% sure that global warming is primarily caused by human activity. However the risk of this being the case and us doing nothing about it far outweighs the risk of changing our behaviour and then finding out it wasn’t necessary.

Posted on

2007: The (Second) Last TV Election

The next time someone says we’re experiencing Australia’s “first Internet election” or our “first YouTube election”, slap them. Slap them very hard.

Our politicians only see the Internet and the emerging social media as a different kind of TV. YouTube is a place to post commercials, MySpace and Facebook for media releases. Their use of social media is so clueless that geeks attending PodCamp in Perth this Saturday were laughing.

Far from this being the “first Internet election”, it’s more like the The Last Television Election. Maybe the second-last.

Continue reading “2007: The (Second) Last TV Election”