I don’t know whether it’s the first time an Australian legal trial has been covered live via Twitter, but the Twitter coverage of the AFACT v iiNet hearing in the Federal Court is breathing new life into court reporting. So, why don’t we just stream everything live to the Internet, audio and video?

That’s the question I ask in my first opinion piece for ZDNet Australia, Twitter in court: Why not streaming video?, which was posted on Friday afternoon after I’d spent half the week watching ZDNet.com.au‘s Liam Tung and The Australian‘s Andrew Colley bring us their observations as the case unfolded.

As it happens, the ban on live broadcast coverage from courtrooms dates back to the 1930s. Although there have been experiments with TV coverage, it’s still rare. But apart from the obvious cases where you’d want to keep it banned, why shouldn’t we allow it? That’s what I explore over at ZDNet.com.au. Have a read and let me know what you think.

If you want to follow the hearing, which is expected to last until mid-November, monitor the Twitter hashtag #iitrial.

Epping seemed strangely bleak. This was far from being the only empty shop on Beecroft Road. Signs were dilapidated. In the alley behind the shops, magpies rummaged through restaurant garbage bins in search of food. The eucalypt smoke enshrouding the suburb — the result of back-burning operation before summer — didn’t help.

Two years ago posts referencing John Howard dominated this website’s tag cloud. It’s been a long time since he was Prime Minister, but he’s still prominent here and in the mainstream media through things like his Menzies Lecture — and that was a strange attempt to stamp his own rhetoric onto Australia’s political history.

I wonder how long it’ll be until we stop hearing about the miserable old toad?

[Photo: A Space for Howard ©2009 Trinn (’Pong) Suwannapha. All rights reserved.]

If the world was about to explode into a Total War lasting six years, would you know?

As I wrote back in 2007, TV documentaries about World War II cover the rise of Adolf Hitler in a few minutes. We forget that Hitler was head of the National Socialist Party from 1921, fully 12 years before he became Chancellor in 1933. It was another 6 years before the invasion of Poland.

What did it look like for people living it in real-time?

My guess is that for the vast majority of people the rise of Hitler had very little impact on day-to-day life — just as today the distant wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have virtually no discernible impact on my life in Sydney. Nor do the many minor changes to our laws which increase the powers of central government without any balancing increases in our own ability to hold that government accountable.

In the summer of 1932, a few politically-aware people sitting in sunny cafes might have discussed that odd Mr Hitler’s failed run for the presidency, but I doubt anyone would have seen it as heralding global war.

This is why I’m starting to find George Orwell’s diary intriguing.

Initially, as the Orwell Prize published the entries exactly 60 years after they were first written it was, to be honest, boring. Laughably so, in fact, as the meticulous journalist documented the day-to-day activities in his garden. On 30 November 1938, it was nothing more than: Two eggs.

But now, we’re only eleven days out from the German invasion of Poland. Thirteen days from Britain and France declaring war on Germany.

Orwell notes a Daily Telegraph report (pictured): “Germans are buying heavily in copper & rubber for immediate delivery, & price of rubber rising rapidly.”

Orwell’s journalistic eye could see the signs. Could ordinary citizens? Sure, gas masks were being distributed and air raid drills held, but did people believe them?

In 2007, did we believe John Howard’s “alert but not alarmed” scaremongering? Or didn’t we? And if not, but they did in 1939, what’s the difference?

I reckon Orwell’s diary will be an interesting read over the next 13 days.

The man in the photo, science historian and broadcaster James Burke, is a revolutionary. So pay attention. This is important.

I don’t mean “revolutionary” in the lame-arsed sense used by every pissant little company with a new kind of double-whacko widget that’ll “revolutionise” the double-whacko widget industry. Because it’s now available in three different colours.

No, I mean the real kind of revolutionary: someone who advocates a revolution — yes, as in a complete overthrow of the established political system.

I’ve just finished watching Burke’s ten-part TV series from 1985, The Day The Universe Changed. It’s available on DVD, but you can also do what I did and watch the whole thing on YouTube. At least until some copyright-addled arsehole decides that you can’t.

As Wikipedia says:

The series’ primary focus is on the effect of advances in science and technology on western philosophy. The title comes from the philosophical idea that the universe essentially only exists as you perceive it through what you know; therefore, if you change your perception of the universe with new knowledge, you have essentially changed the universe itself.

To illustrate this concept, James Burke tells the various stories of important scientific discoveries and technological advances and how they fundamentally altered how western civilization perceives the world.

Apart from anything else, TDTUC is an excellent history of western scientific thought. But, after taking you on this journey, Burke’s final episode is a revolutionary call to action.

Here’s the final minutes:

We still go on believing that today’s version of things is the only right one because… we can only handle one way of seeing things at a time. We’ve never had systems that would let us do more than that, so we’ve always had to have conformity, with a current view.

Disagree with the Church, and you were punished as a heretic. With the political system, as a revolutionary. With the scientific establishment, as a charlatan. With the educational system, as a failure.

If you didn’t fit the mould, you were rejected.

But, ironically, the latest product of that way of doing things is a new instrument, a new system that while it could make conformity more rigid, more totalitarian that ever before in history, it could also blow everything wide open. Because with it, we could operate on the basis that values and standards and ethics and facts and truth all depend on what your view of the world is — and that there may be as many views of that as there are people.

And with this [brandishing a computer microchip] capable of keeping a tally on those millions of opinions voiced electronically, we might be able to lift the limitations of conforming to any centralised representational form of government — originally invented because there was no way for everybody’s voice to be heard.

You might be able to give everybody unhindered, untested access to knowledge, because the computer would do the day-to-day work for which we once qualified the select few in an educational system originally designed for a world where only the few could be taught.

You might end the regimentation of people living and working in vast unmanageable cities, uniting them instead in an electronic community where the Himalayas and Manhattan were only a split second apart.

You might, with that and much more, break the mould that has held us back since the beginning, in a future world that we would describe as balanced anarchy and they will describe as an open society, tolerant of every view, and where there is no single, privileged way of doing things — above all, able to do away with the greatest tragedy of our era: the centuries-old waste of human talent that we couldn’t or wouldn’t use.

Utopia? Why?

If, as I’ve said all along, the universe is at any time what you say it is, then say!

Now a few people are poking around the edges of this revolution. But how many actually comprehend the full breadth and depth of what’s going on?

Here in Australia, Senator Kate Lundy‘s Public Sphere events have started scratching the surface. At the state level, Penny Clarke MLC is kicking off the NSW Sphere next month, at which I’ll probably be speaking.

And yet, as I say, these events are only scratching the surface.

Why?

Because they’re looking at how the tools of Web 2.0 and beyond can be used to support the existing national and state governments and their institutions and instrumentalities. Because they still imagine that central authorities make everything happen. Because they still imagine that the role of the citizenry is to participate in systems set up for them by that central authority, instead of just autonomously doing things for themselves.

The true revolution is that the existing national and state governments and their institutions and instrumentalities will become irrelevant.

As Clay Shirky has pointed out, a 3-million article Wikipedia was knocked off in only the number of man-hours Americans spend watching TV advertising in one weekend. One weekend!

As Open Australia has demonstrated, just a handful of people can create a better and more flexible system for reading parliamentary debates than parliament itself.

As Mark Pesce has pointed out, old-fashioned hierarchical organisations actually get in the way of new systems emerging. And you can watch him say that on video.

So…

Imagine what might be possible when the burden of clunky hierarchical dinosaur-organisations is removed. Imagine what might be done with 51 more weekends-full of community participation. Then, as James Burke says… then say it!

It’s been 20 years since the Tiananmen Square massacre. Of the many things I’ve seen commemorating it, one of the most powerful was John Birmingham’s simple blog post of that day’s diplomatic messages from the US Embassy in Beijing.

Cable, From: Department of State, Wash DC, To: US Embassy Beijing, and All Diplomatic and Consular Posts, TFCHO1: SITREP 1, 1700 EDT (June 3, 1989)

PLA MOVES ON TIANANMEN, CASULATIES HIGH. EMBASSY BEIJING REPORTS THAT TROOPS USING AUTOMATIC WEAPONS ADVANCED IN TANKS, APCS AND TRUCKS FROM SEVERAL DIRECTIONS ON TIANANMEN SQUARE JUNE 3. THERE WAS CONSIDERABLE RESISTENCE BY DEMONSTRATORS, AND THE NUMBER OF CASUALTIES APPEARS HIGH.

Please read them all and, as I did, take a moment to reflect.

According to Wikipedia, “There were early reports of Chinese Red Cross sources giving a figure of 2,600 deaths, but the Chinese Red Cross has denied ever doing so. The official Chinese government figure is 241 dead, including soldiers, and 7,000 wounded.”

NATO intelligence puts the death toll at 7,000. Some other estimates are even higher.

China has blocked access to most social media sites such as Twitter, search engines, and many others. Yes. Let’s just stifle conversation and pretend it didn’t happen. Cowards.

I’ll wager this photograph of artist Him Lo, taken in Hong Kong yesterday, won’t be seen across the Middle Kingdom either.

[Photo: Tank Man, taken on 5 June 1989 by photographer Jeff Widener, depicts an unknown man halting the PLA's advancing tanks near Tiananmen Square.]

It was my very great pleasure today to discover that James Burke‘s groundbreaking TV series Connections and The Day the Universe Changed are all on YouTube.

Connections is more than 30 years old now — it was first broadcast in 1978 — and yet the way it weaves its threads through the history of science is still relevant to a contemporary audience. One thing I did notice, though, is how bleak his worries are, obviously an element of the Cold War mentality of the time.

Burke’s witty writing is a key part of the enjoyment, as this snippet from episode 2 shows:

I suppose Shakeaspeare and the travel agents have done more than anybody else to give us our Technicolor view of Elizabethan England, starring the Queen herself as a kind of swashbuckler in pearls. The fact is, about all she had time for was bookkeeping. When she took the place over in 1558, it was National Disaster Week. The money was worthless. There was no money! There was plague. The cities were packed and stinking.

Elizabeth appealed to the decent English middle class, with their healthy desire for prestige, power, fun and games, and cash. Soon, anybody who wanted to be anybody was on the make. And none more than that famous bunch of privateering seadogs led by Drake, Raleigh and Hawkins, who sailed the Atlantic looking for new American trade opportunities for England, setting up colonies, knocking off Spanish galleons — and doing it all with a kind of gutsy disregard for convention that we describe today as “criminal”.

I’ve often wanted to make programs like Burke’s. He gives hope to someone who, like him, has “a good face for radio”. I know that re-watching these old favourites will be important in many ways.

It’s Ada Lovelace Day! 24th March has been selected by Suw Charman-Anderson as an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. This is my contribution.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, known in modern times simply as Ada Lovelace, was the daughter of Lord Byron of poetry fame. A mathematician, she’s widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer.

“Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised,” says Charman-Anderson. “We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines.”

For my contribution, I decided to interview Australian geek girl Pia Waugh, and this is the result — the first time I’ve actually edited video with my own hands. Well, with a computer. Enjoy. It runs for just under nine minutes.

If the embedded video player (above) doesn’t work, try over at Viddler.

This is is also my first attempt at building a workflow for recording video interviews. There may more in the future.

Much has been said of the supposed racial element in the election of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States. This map shows how deep the historical roots run.

The base area map shows in blue the counties which recorded a majority of votes for Obama. The overlay dot map shows US cotton production from 1860 — each dot represents 2000 bales. The similarity of the distribution is uncanny a century and half later.

It’s worth reading the comments on the original post at Strange Maps as people attempt to explain the finer details.

“Television, the drug of the nation / Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation,” rapped American poet and musician Michael Franti of the Disposable Heroes of Hipocrisy Hiphoprisy”, now of Spearhead. Could this literally be true?

I’ve just read the most amazing speech, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky, which you can also watch on Blip.tv. It begins:

A British historian [argued] that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing — there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders — a lot of things we like — didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

Shirky goes on to argue that when WWII ended, we suddenly had to cope with another social surplus: all that leisure time thanks to a 5-day working week and all those new-fangled gadgets which made household chores a breeze. So what did we do? We slothed in front of the TV. For a generation.

As we turn off our TVs and connect to each other, this cognitive surplus is creating things like Wikipedia. An estimated 100 million hours of work has gone into it. Yet this is but a drop in the ocean…

How much time do we spend watching TV?

Two hundred billion hours, in the US alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the US, we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads… People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is.”

Back in 1992, David Gelernter asked, in his book Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox… How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean, where the great public institutions of the information age were. Where were the equivalents of the great cathedrals? The grand Victorian railway stations and bridges?

Obviously Gelernter asked that before the web, and before Wikipedia and Google and YouTube and Facebook and… and… OK, some of those are commercial projects. But as Shirky points out, we could have 2000 new Wikipedia-sized projects every year.

The information revolution has only just begun…

I do recommend you check out the entire speech. Hat-tip to Daring Fireball via Garth Roxburgh-Kidd.

The other day I quoted an historian who said that the Prussian enlightenment [of the 18th century] was about conversation. “It was about a critical, respectful, open-ended dialogue between free and autonomous subjects,” he said. So I’ll be so bold as to suggest this new conversation will lead to the Australian Enlightenment.

Yesterday I read two pieces which reinforce this idea of a new conversation. The first was Maxine McKew’s First Speech to federal parliament as the Member for Bennelong.

Let me extract (some might say “butcher”) just one thread from a speech that deserves to be read in full, and add my own emphasis:

The seat of Bennelong… provides a near perfect snapshot of how the country is changing. Join the throng on the weekend in the Eastwood mall and you will find that Rowe Street is both a modern-day Babel and a dynamic part of cosmopolitan Sydney…

For some, these changes are unsettling. But there is a younger generation that is entirely at ease with who we are and what we are becoming. Exceptionally well educated, many have secured a second degree from an international university and are multilingual. Some will be in mixed-race marriages. What they all have in common is that they will see their professional lives as crossing borders. They will be citizens of the world, trained here initially but orbiting around the world and working and playing in those places that will enrich them.

They will still call Australia home, but when they are in Delhi, Hong Kong or London, what story will they be telling about home? How do we want the Australian story to look for the coming generation? …

What we need is a new imagining, a revived sense of what is possible. The negativity and the tedium of the culture wars will not get us there.

But look at our history with all its warts and all its failures and you will still find plenty to inspire wonder, hope and optimism. You will also find that, if there is a common animating principle in Australia, it is that we look forwards, not back…

What people want now, I think, is an intelligent national conversation.

The prevailing orthodoxy, to this point, has been that, because we are enjoying such bounty, we are indifferent, to the point of being somnolent, about the bigger societal questions. Well, I happen to think that 2007 demolished that idea. Most of the commentators missed the mood shift. But it is there. It is real. All sorts of people know that politics and policymaking matter. Our national spirit matters. The lesson for me from the past year is that there is a great reservoir of goodwill that lies untapped beneath the surface of our national life, and smart governments will find ways to liberate and direct it.

And behold! Chairman Rudd has proclaimed the Australia 2002 Summit. With hopes in many quarters that it won’t be 1000 of “the usual suspects”, maybe that new conversation can begin.

However the second piece, Mark Pesce’s article How to listen to 21 million voices, reminds us that we need a truly national conversation — all 21 million of us, not just The Chosen 1000 at the summit.

In 1962, T.S. Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [claimed that] the greatest revolutions in science happen when ‘outsiders’ enter an established field, seeing it with new eyes.

These outsiders make observations which the boffins have simply ignored or discounted, because they disagree with the orthodox consensus. Over time, outsider observations become the new orthodoxy, which is itself overturned when another outsider enters the field. Funeral by funeral, science inches forward.

The Prime Minister has created something of a paradoxical situation: he’s reaching beyond the comfortable bounds of the government bureaucracy with the 2020 Summit, searching for new ideas, yet, because of the nature of the boffin universe, the most revolutionary and far-sighted of these new ideas would be anathema to those same boffins.

The summit is far more likely to confirm conventional wisdom than challenge it.

Mark suggests we could use Wikipedia-like tools to create this national conversation.

The Prime Minister must make clear that the 2020 Summit is simply the tip of the iceberg — that the boffins are only the most visible example of the expertise available to solve the nation’s long-term problems and invite the rest of the nation to participate in a broad sharing of ideas and expertise.

Rudd should promise that the 2020 Summit itself will be captured in video and audio recordings, with photographs and documentation that will all be placed online, in real-time, as the summit is taking place.

He can ask Australians to create blogs which track the progress of the event, noting everything as it happens.

Australians should be invited to use instant messaging, bulletin boards and other systems so that their own questions, reflections and comments could be incorporated into the summit.

The other day I said I’d be setting up the Topic 9 blog to cover one area of the discussion — and that will finally be happening on Friday. But it shouldn’t be too hard to set up the rest — blogs, wikis, whatever tools are most appropriate.

We shouldn’t wait for The Guv’mint to do it, either. Anyone can get the process going. GetUp is a fine example of people who’ve managed to Make A Difference without being “official”.

I supposed I should start talking to people, eh?