LinkedIn has responded to criticism over their opting-in of everyone to their “social advertising” program with a self-serving blog post. I’m less than impressed.

I wrote two articles yesterday. For Crikey, Sorry too hard a word for LinkedIn over privacy faux pas, in which I describe LinkedIn’s response as bullshit. And for CSO Online, Five lessons from LinkedIn’s opt-out stupidity, which reminds people to keep an eye on social networking services for unannounced changes to the rules of engagement.

Paul Ducklin from security vendor Sophos gives them an easier time, praising them for a quick response. He’s nicer than I am.

In the cold, clear light of Saturday morning, what depresses me most about this whole episode is not that a supposedly-professional service would pull a trick like this and, when caught out, just smear PR bull over the top. It’s that they’ll probably get away with it, and imagine they handled it well.

Like Ducklin, many will doubtless see their quick response and the superficial changes to the appearance of the social adverts, and be pleased. Few will notice that they haven’t made any commitment to pro-actively notifying people of privacy changes nor any commitment to ceasing the unethical practice of automatically reducing people’s privacy settings and requiring them to opt out.

From LinkedIn’s point of view, the lesson is that they can opt people in, weather a PR storm for a few days, and survive. They’ll be encouraged to do it again.

Sigh.

I’m also unimpressed that my comment on their blog post didn’t pass moderation.

Here’s what I said:

I don’t seem to be able to find the word “sorry” anywhere here. An oversight?

What’s also missing here is a commitment to make any changes to people’s privacy settings contingent on them opting in rather than opting out. Not doing that makes a mockery of the “Putting Members First” in the headline.

Is a blog post really sufficient notice for such an important change to the terms of service? Since you seem capable of emailing members with your own promotional material, perhaps a direct, plain-language email explaining any changes to terms of service is more appropriate.

And by that, I don’t mean an email that says “it’s changed” and linking to a long legalistic document. Explain the changes in the email.

Navigating two levels down into your account settings is not “one click”, it’s three. Don’t fib.

[I later realised it's five clicks. Three to navigate there as described, one for the checkbox, one for "OK".]

“Members First”, you say. So act like you mean it, rather than just smearing some PR spin on top of what you’re doing to serve your own needs.

If you’re a LinkedIn user and want to opt out of all this, go to where your name is displayed on the top right of your LinkedIn screen and click on “Settings”. Click on “Account” at the bottom left of screen, then “Manage Social Advertising”.

[Disclosure: I receive a free LinkedIn Pro account as part of their media outreach program. I haven't deleted it... yet.]

“Social advertising”. It sounds so innocuous. But it isn’t. It means that simply by “liking” something on LinkedIn, or if you “take other actions”, they can use your name and photo in third-party advertising. Pricks.

I’ve written about this in Crikey today, LinkedIn pulls a Facebook-like swifty on ‘social advertising’. I called them “exploitative”. I compared them to the “consumer-grade arseholes at Facebook”. I stand by all of that, and more.

I asked how LinkedIn could be so stupid. But it’s more than that.

Just what sort of mindset do LinkedIn’s executives have if they reckon this is an acceptable way to do business with people?

To me it indicates that they have no idea how people might react to discovering their face in someone else’s advertising. Or, if they do realise that, a disturbingly callous disregard for others, putting their business profits before their basic responsibilities as human beings.

Is that antisocial personality disorder? That seems to be what we call being a psychopath these days.

If you’re a LinkedIn user and want to opt out of all this, go to where your name is displayed on the top right of your LinkedIn screen and click on “Settings”. Click on “Account” at the bottom left of screen, then “Manage Social Advertising”.

[Disclosure: I receive a free LinkedIn Pro account as part of their media outreach program.]

Skywriting has to be one of the lowest forms of advertising, no different from an attention-seeking teenager scrawling his tag over every flat surface within reach. So I guess it’s only appropriate that the low-brow arsehats of commercial radio reckon it’s a good look.

I’ve met commercial radio executives. They’re not the sort of people you’d want to have dinner with, let alone leave with your pets unattended. Like so many who’ve congealed into the uppermost scum layers of the broadcast media cesspool, they’re arrogant beyond belief, filled with their own sense of self-importance.

Writing in The Observer yesterday, John Naughton reckons this attitude is understandable, if no longer acceptable.

What always struck me about [TV's] senior executives — in both the commercial and public sector — was how smug and self-satisfied they seemed. In a way, this was understandable: they were masters of a particular universe, rulers of a medium that dominated the information ecosystem, dictated the political agenda, and determined the daily habits of a large chunk of the population. At that time, the most powerful apparatchiks in the BBC and ITV were the schedulers — the planners who designed ways of holding the attention of a mass audience. Their craft included tricks like not scheduling some things against stronger competitors; making sure that one had a follow-on that would keep audiences from switching channels over the 9pm watershed; winning the ratings war over the Christmas period and so on. Watching them at work, one realised that effectively they were playing chess –– and that the pawns in their arcane games were the viewers.

Embedded in the corporate DNA of push media like broadcast television is the assumption that viewers are, if not exactly idiots, then passive consumers. The deal is that they receive gratefully what we, the broadcasters, decide to create.

The same for radio. The same tricks to keep listeners from changing that dial before the next 15-minutes ratings measurement slot starts. The same arrogance.

And double same for Australian commercial radio, whose executives grew fat and lazy through the 1990s as they traded metropolitan broadcast licenses for tens of millions of dollars and their testosterone-filled 4WDs cruised the suburbs handing out largesse to the proles. The rumbling and whooshing and laser zaps and deep booming voices of their station promos underlined their self-image as intergalactic heroes.

Broadcast radio is threatened, of course, especially that which does little more than play music now that everyone has a gadget in their pocket that can play whatever music they want, when they want.

It’s becoming even more threatened now that those gadgets are connected to the grid, where they can figure out for themselves what new music we might want to listen to and download it automatically. Or hook into any audio stream on the planet, including those that we and our friends create for ourselves without the help of the music director’s computer-based music scheduling system. You know the one, the one that says it’s 8.50am so we must therefore listen to an up-tempo track from 1996 with a female vocalist, because in the last hour we’ve already had 75% male vocals and instrumentals.

How much are we paying that music director, anyway, when iTunes does the same job for free?

So in the face of this challenge, what is Mix 106.5 FM in Sydney doing to shape its future?

Smoke-pissing its frequency across the sky of one of the world’s most beautiful cities. Ruining that beauty, not just for those vast migrating commuting herds who might conceivably want to listen simultaneous to exactly the same sequence of songs by Diesel, Rihanna and Nickelback as everyone else in the city — yes, that’s what they’re playing right now, inspiring eh? — interspersed with forced cheerfulness, lowest-common-denominator inanities from a B-list comedian and, of course, advertising. Advertising that for the most part hasn’t thought of a more sophisticated strategy to grab our interest than shouting at us.

This sky spam, this moronic vandalism on a glorious summer’s morning just makes you look even more out of touch, Mix 106.5. Just fuck right off. And no, I’m not linking to you.

[Photo: More sky spam by sylmobile, taken just a few minutes ago.]

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and places — and what a productive week it has been!

Articles

• You know super-fast ain’t so super: Optus, and…
• ACCC says Optus pitch is misleading, for ZDNet.com.au, both covering the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s case in the Federal Court in Sydney against Singtel Optus for allegedly misleading or deceptive advertising. I particularly like Optus’ lawyer saying that broadband is not a bottle of shampoo, and the argument that even if an advertisement is technically misleading in and of itself this can still be “cured” with more information later in the sales process. The judge’s decision is expected early in the coming week.
• Turnbull v Conroy: how Coalition broadband plan stacks up, for Crikey, comparing the Coalition’s new broadband policy with the Labor government’s National Broadband Network.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 62, “Why can’t Labor sell the NBN’s benefits?”. I reckon that Labor has been crap at selling the concept of the NBN. After running through the week’s NBN-related political news, I cover some ideas for broadband applications that might help sell the thing.
• A Series of Tubes episode 118. Karl Horne from Ciena talks about that company’s views on traffic growth and network architecture, and I rabbit on about the spate of anti-NBN scare stories in The Australian, the new USO (Universal Service Obligation) inquiry, and the ACCC’s proposed inquiry into ADSL wholesale service prices.

Media Appearances

• On Monday I was interviewed by community radio’s current affairs program The Wire about the NBN. An audio file is available.
• On Wednesday I did a quick spot on ABC Radio Statewide NSW with Paul Turton, covering the ACCC v Singtel Optus hearing and also the death of Limewire’s file sharing service. It wasn’t recorded, sorry.
• On Friday I was interview by Melbourne’s SYN Radio about — you guessed it! — the NBN. I’ll see if I can get hold of an audio file.

Geekery

• We finished a batch of updates for the website at Nolans Road, including adding the new home page and some pages for Dee Nolan’s lush new book, A Food Lover’s Pilgrimage to Santiago De Compostela. Nothing earth-shattering, just some routine updates to an existing site.

Corporate Largesse

• HTC threw a more-than-adequate BBQ with plenty of drinks for the Australian launch of the HTC Desire HD smartphone. The venue was the Astral Bar and Restaurant at Star City Casino.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Sydney CBD at dusk, taken from the Astral Bar and Restaurant on level 17 of the Star City Casino in Pyrmont.]

• Nature Child | San Juan Islander: “According to family studies professor, Sandra Hofferth of the University of Maryland, there was a 50% decline between 1997 to 2003 in the proportion of children 9 to 12 who spent time in outdoor activities (hiking, walking, fishing, beach play and gardening).”
• FreeRangeKids: “At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail.”
• How far did you roam as a child? | Watershed: Educator John Larkin continues the thoughts about wrapping our kids in cotton wool.
• How children lost the right to roam in four generations | Mail Online: In 1919, an 8yo was allowed to walk six miles to go fishing. Today, an 8yo isn’t allowed past the end of the street without parental escort. This article from 2007 triggered many thoughts, and I’ve glad I found it again.
• Forget the young pretenders, Humans 1.0 can lead the way | The Observer: John Naughton riffs off the idea that teenagers don’t know everything and some parts of cyberspace (ugh!) are teenager-free. Although the article then says that “only” 11% of Twitter’s users are under 17 years old. And what proportion of the literate population is under 17yo? 11%? More? Less?
• Podcasting Equipment Guide (2009) | Hivelogic: A nice guide to the tools needed to podcast on a budget. Yes, there’s a reason I’m looking at this. Stay tuned, as they say.
• Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network | Parliament of Australia: Full transcripts of the Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network public hearings, which I’m tagging for my own reference later.
• What Information is “Personally Identifiable”? | Electronic Frontier Foundation: Gender, ZIP code and birth date are enough to uniquely identify about 87% of the US population. This has massive implications for publishing data sets, and for privacy policies that claim not to collect “personally identifiable” information.
• Nine News twittered by seagull | TV Tonight: It’s nothing to do with Twitter, but there is a seagull. A very big seagull.
• Apology for singing shop worker | BBC News: Shop assistant Sandra Burt, 56, from Clackmannanshire, was threatened with a fine for singing without a license by the Performing Right Society. However they’ve now apologised and sent flowers.
• Online Ads Not Working for You? Blame the Creative | Advertising Age: A study by Dynamic Logic says that obsession about optimisation and placement is less important.
• We can’t turn back the tide of internet piracy, says TV boss | Herald Scotland: “Internet piracy is merely demand where appropriate supply does not exist,” says the commissioning editor for education at the UK’s Channel 4.
• Court tweets sustained but paper still lurks | ZDNet Australia: Liam Tung, who tweeted from the AFACT v iiNet trial in the Federal Court of Australia in Sydney, reflects on the gaps in courtroom IT.
• Beats and Tweets: Journalistic Guidelines for the Facebook Era | NPR: Yet another exploration of ethics an journalism. One point in here I really do not like, though: “You must not advocate for political or other polarizing issues online. This extends to joining online groups or using social media in any form (including your Facebook page or a personal blog) to express personal views on a political or other controversial issue that you could not write for the air or post on NPR.org.” Sorry? Work for NPR and you lose your right to participate in democracy?
• Poles, Politeness and Politics in the age of Twitter | The New Adventures of Stephen Fry: Another fine if perhaps rambling essay from Mr Fry about the meaning of “influence” and accidentally gaining same. Worth a leisurely read.
• Why journalism's all a-Twitter | The Walkley Foundation: The editorial chief of Sydney’s forthcoming Media140 conference goes beyond the obvious “Is Twitter journalism?” and mechanical how-to issues and explores the ethical issues of journalists using Twitter.
• Twitter in the court: Federal judge gets it | CNET News: Another article about using Twitter in courtrooms, from the US an from March 2009.
• Call For Opinions | Blackbeard Blog: Tom Ewing’s collection of opinions on market research and social media, “quite unsupported by anything other than grumpiness and prejudice”. The first is that “insights” aren’t Zen koans. “If you can express something that briefly, it’s probably banal.”
• The internet doesn’t exist | Business Spectator: Ah, Alan Kohler! I do so love your commentaries! Here’s more of his sensible thoughts on the matter of paying for “content” on the Internet.
• How Safe is the HPV vaccine? | Information Is Beautiful: A brilliantly simple infographic showing the incredibly low risk of associated with the Human Papillomavirus compared with various everyday activities.
• Ultimate Goat Fansite: Do I need to explain? I thought not.

There’s so many of these links this time that I’ll publish them over the fold. I think I need to get over my fear of the link being published automatically without my checking them first, and my concern that my website won’t look nice if the first post is just a list of links.

Maybe I should just stick these Delicious-generated links in a sidebar? Or do you like having them in the main stream and RSS feed?

• INFOWAR vs. CORPORATIONS | Global Guerrillas: John Robb’s essay outlines a potential strategy for conducting infowar against corporations — most of which looks to me like it’d be illegal. I suppose that’s what war is about, eh? The comments stream is somewhat amusing.
• “Artists Should Be Compensated For Their Work” | QuestionCopyright.org: Nina Paley’s controversial-looking essay which posits that artists are not entitled to be paid for their art, only for their work. She’s using these and other terms in quite specific ways, so it’s worth reading carefully before passing judgement.
• Post-Medium Publishing | Paul Graham: In amongst the various current discussions of charging for news content online, Paul Graham makes an important point. “Consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more?”
• Americans on Tailored Advertising: DO NOT WANT | denialism blog: No, Americans do not want tailored advertising on the Internet, even less so when told how their activities are monitored to make it work.
• A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare | Central Intelligence Agency: This eminently readable CIA monograph puts the Stanislav Petrov incident into perspective, explaining how and why the Soviet leadership feared a US first strike.
• The Man Who Prevented WWIII | DivineCaroline: In 1983, Stanislav Petrov was in charge of Soviet monitoring systems watching the US for signs of a nuclear first strike. One night he chose not to react to an alert, suspecting it was a false alarm. He was right, and a potential global nuclear exchange was avoided.
• The Fiction Generator | Wondermark: The Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator 2000 makes writers’ chores a breeze!
• Against Transparency | The New Republic: This essay on the perils of some “open government” initiatives is a pleasantly nuanced read.
• Michael Wolff on Rupert Murdoch | vanityfair.com: Wolff wrote a biography of Murdoch, and presumably knows the man. My take on this fascinating article is that the old guy simply doesn't understand what’s happening online, perhaps because you can inoly understand the online world if you participate in it.
• The News Manual: A free resource for journalists, would-be journalists, educators and people interested in the media. It was developed from a three-volume book The News Manual, published with the help of UNESCO as a practical guide to people entering the profession and to support mid-career journalists wanting to improve their skills.
• Televising Court Proceedings | SSRN: A 1993 paper by Ian Ramsay, then of the University of Melbourne Law School, setting out the main arguments for and against televising the proceedings of courts, and suggests an experimental program to evaluate the arguments in practice.
• The Law of Defamation | Arts Law Centre of Australia: A good introductory overview of how Australia’s tough anti-defamation laws work.
• chiropractic – The Skeptic’s Dictionary: When I was pointed to this article critical of chiropractic, I noted that it used some fallacious arguments which Science itself would not permit. I’m tagging it as an example of the hypocrisy of some perhaps only a few?) bold defenders of Science because it may form the basis of a future post.
• 55 Twitter tips | SmartCompany: While many of these tips for business aren’t entirely new, it’s a reasonable-enough compilation.
• Captain Kirk has taken too much fucking LSD | DoseNation: A nice bit o’music editing by Fall On Your Sword.
• How to Publish a Magazine in a Day and a Half | Derek Powazek: Powazek published a photomag of images from Sydney’s dust storm, sourced from Flickr, without leaving his California base. This is a great step-by-step how-to.
• A history of the English marriage | Telegraph: It seems many of our current “norms” about marriage were invented by the Victorians.
• MoD “How to stop leaks” guide leaks | The Register: In a supreme act of irony, the UK’s Ministry of Defence document Defence Manual of Security has been leaked into Wikileaks. All 2300 pages.
• Twitter and the norm police | Woolly Days: Derek Barry sums up a recent discussion on Twitter, defamation and what constitutes “publication”. I’m tagging it because I want to respond at some point.
• Mash-up: A Short History of the Media Future | The Monthly: While perhaps not completely groundbreaking, this essay by John Birmingham is an excellent backgrounder on the issues facing traditional media companies.
• AUSTLANG: A new database of Australian indigenous languages, cross-linked to Google Maps.
• Uncle Bobby’s Wedding | myliblog: An American library was asked to remove or restrict access to a children’s book about gay relationships. The librarian wrote a detailed and well-reasoned response explaining why it stays.
• Guidelines for Secure Use of Social Media by Federal Departments and Agencies | Chief Information Officers Council: What it says. The first version of new rules for US federal agencies.
• Hyperconnectivity | Wikipedia: The term “hyperconnectivity” now has its own Wikipedia entry. Where’s mine?
• 99 Led Balloons: Social Media Blunders | digitalOZ: A nice list of classic social media traps for young players. A shame 90% of businesses entering the world of social media will end up making quite a few of them.
• The Moguls’ New Clothes | The Atlantic: There is much sense in this analysis of Big Media and how that Internet thing is changing everything.
• Eureka moments | The Economist: How the mobile phone became a key tool for third-world development.
• jQuery Carousel: This is the code that Jeff Waugh used for the rotating carousel of featured stories on the Crikey home page. He reckons he wouldn’t necessarily use it again. But this is my bookmark.

• Viral Wedding Video’s 10M Views Drive Chris Brown Buzz and Sales | Nielsen Wire: That “viral” (by which they just mean “popular”) video of a wedding party dancing into the church [was it a church?] reminded everyone of Chris Brown’s tedious autotune’d song again, with the result that it ended up in iTunes’ Top 10. Yet another example of how something being given away increases its sales.
• Who needs newspapers when you have Twitter? | Salon News: A massive troll by Wired editor Chris Anderson, seeking attention for his new book Free, which is not free. He starts by saying he doesn’t use the words “media” or “news” or “journalism”, but doesn’t offer any alternatives. Wanker.
• Techfest 2009 | NICTA: On 12 August 2009, NICTA showcases some of the new ICT research and development they’ree working on at this most-of-the-day event in Sydney. Let me know if you’d like to join me.
• Women In Film | YouTube: A morph-montage of some of the most famous female faces in film. Note how the eyes are so similar.
• Men In Film | YouTube: A morph-montage of some of film’s most famous male faces. It’s a challenge to spot all of them. Note how similar most of the noses are.
• Ashes 09: Hughes’ Twitter drop – Gen Y meets the Baggy Green | Crikey: Twitter, Criket Australia style: “We get the Twitter from Phillip and I feed them into our IT guy.” Somehow I don’t think they get this “personal” and “spontaneous” stuff.
• 栏目（目录): China’s PLA Daily offers free downloads of (military) music, plus some cheesy animated GIFs.
• Real Black Hats Hack Security Experts on Eve of Conference | Wired.com: Infosec “expert” Dan Kaminsky has been pwn3d, and his lame choice for passwords exposed.
• Tesla_Downunder: Some amazing photos of electrical effects from an Australian who’s been building large Tesla coils.
• AdViews: A digital archive of thousands of vintage TV commercials from the 1950s to 1980s, created or collected by ad agency Benton & Bowles or its successor, D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B).
• Profile: Gary McKinnon | guardian.co.uk: 43yo Gary McKinnon, diagnosed last August with Asperger’s syndrome, admits to hacking US military computers to fuel his UFO obsession.
• Template Twitter strategy for Government Departments | UK Cabinet Office: The UK has developed a standard 20-page template which departments can use for their own Twitter strategy. I can’t help think that it’ll kill spontaneity before it starts. “All other tweets will be cleared by staff at Information Officer grade and above in the digital media team, consulting relevant colleagues in comms and private offices as necessary.” Gawd.
• The Mind Of A US Army Sniper | newmatilda.com: A fine article on what it means for a soldier, particularly a sniper, to kill a person. And then do it again. Not an easy read, but an important read.
• Reconceptualising “time” and “space” in the era of electronic media and communications | Australian Policy Online: “This paper examines to what extent electronic media and communications have contributed to currently changing concepts of time and space and how crucial their role is in experiencing temporality, spatiality and mobility.”
• Cutthroat Capitalism: An Economic Analysis of the Somali Pirate Business Model | Wired: “Like any business, Somali piracy can be explained in purely economic terms. It flourishes by exploiting the incentives that drive international maritime trade. The other parties involved — shippers, insurers, private security contractors, and numerous national navies — stand to gain more (or at least lose less) by tolerating it than by putting up a serious fight. As for the pirates, their escalating demands are a method of price discovery, a way of gauging how much the market will bear.”
• Mark Thomas Info: I first encountered Mark Thomas by reading his book As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandala: underground adventures in the arms & torture trade. The stand-up comedian and activist for human rights is worth paying attention to.
• The Arms Trade | A Stubborn Mule’s Perspective: Sean Carmody turns his data analysis skills to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Arms Transfer Database, which I mentioned the other day. This initial foray generates some nice maps.
• The Coming Upstream Revolution. And We Need It | Gigaom: Just as I thought, increasingly two-way communication on the web leads to increased demand for fast uplinks as well as downlinks.
• Metadata for news | BuzzMachine: Jeff Jarvis’ write-up of Associated Press and the Media Standards Trust proposal for a new standard for metadata for news, plus his own thoughts.
• SIPRI Arms Transfers Database | Stockholm International Peace Research Institute: A searchable database of all international transfers in seven categories of major conventional weapons from 1950 to the most recent full calendar year.

• Online Ad Rates Picking Up | The Business Insider: Based on a review of data from 6000 web publishers, it appears that online advertising is up 35% since its low-point of December 2008. Rates climbed 15% between May and June.
• Love is Old-Fashioned, Sex Less So | A Stubborn Mule’s Perspective: Comparing the music in the Triple J Hottest 100 and The Guardian’s recent list of 1000 songs to hear before you die, the Mule comes up with the view that love is out of fashion. Also, chart pr0n.
• Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule | Paul Graham: This essay really speaks to me. If you’re a manager, then your schedule consists of those 1-hour blocks to beloved of scheduling software. But it you’re a maker, or someone creative, one hour is barely time to get started. A good discussion of how these two different working styles can be resolved.
• Too much networking? | msnbc.com: A network expert argues that less social networking would produce more radical innovation on the Internet. “An overabundance of connections over which information can travel too cheaply can reduce diversity, foster groupthink, and keep radical ideas from taking hold,” Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, director of the Information + Innovation Policy Research Center at the National University of Singapore, writes in this week’s issue of the journal Science.
• Electropulse weapon fear spreads to UK politicos | The Register: A campaign by US right wingers, designed to raise fears of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack they allege could cripple Western nations and lead to chaos, is targeting British politicians, with some success.
• God is not your bitch / This just in: It is hugely unlikely God cares much about your sex life | Mark Morford: A glorious rant about politicians and others exploit God to explain how they’re really, really going to change this time — amongst many other things.
• Best RSS feeds for information graphics | nicolasrapp.com: A collection of feeds which represents a nice mix of information graphics and data visualisations. (Is there a difference between those two terms?)
• Rebooting The News: A weekly podcast on news and technology with Jay Rosen and Dave Winer.
• The atmosphere in the control room gets tense … | Twitpic: This photograph is an overview of the control room as ABC TV’s Insiders is about to be broadcast last Sunday. Even with the combination of roles and reduction of control room staffing levels, broadcast TV is still a complicated beast!
• The Great American Bubble Machine | Rolling Stone: An astoundingly harsh critique of the US economy and, in particular, Goldman Sachs. The piece begins: The worlds most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.”
• Why cops should trust the wisdom of the crowds | New Scientist: The “unruly mob” concept is usually taken as read and used as the basis for crowd control measures and evacuation procedures across the world. Yet it is almost entirely a myth.

• Noteboek | Vimeo: Evelien Lohbeck’s short film creates a notebook computer out of a paper notebook.
• Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit (8-Bit Remix)” | DoseNation: Somehow, this hugely-successful rock song still sounds good played on cheesey 8-bit synthesisers.
• Towards a Taxonomy of blogs | Creative Economy Online: Meta-journalist Margaret Simons reckons that before we descend into the loggers versus journalists debate then we should define our terms. She proposes a classification of blog types.
• Rooftop STUB | Flickr: Will Hughes’ stills photography of Saturday’s party.
• What is wrong with Strawberry Amyl Nitrate? | Vimeo: Will Hughes took this video at Saturday’s rooftop party in Surry Hills. It contains rather too much of me, and certainly too much of my tongue.
• slow down london: Running from 24 April through to 4 May, this festival about “living life in real time” is striking a chord.
• Is Social Media Too Fast? | Convince & Convert: Jason Baer kicks off a discussion about the incredible pace of social media. “This of course requires me to jump from task to message to task to message like a Russian dancing bear on crack,” he says. Perhaps it’s time to choose to slow down? I’ll definitely have more to say about this anon.
• “One Of My Biggest Pet Peeves Is A Girl Who Is Not Probably Groomed On All Parts Of Her Body” – Arthur Kade | Jezebel: There is just so much wrong with this man’s worldview that I don’t know where to begin.
• a warning from the newspaper biz | overland literary journal: Can the book industry learn from what’s happening to newspapers? Amongst the great questions asked is: “Will an author’s share of revenue on e-books be a traditional fixed percentage, or a variable, we’re-not-going-to-tell-you-what-we-received-from-your-work-but-here’s-a-quarter-go-buy-yourself-something-nice percentage of advertising revenue that Google might deign to dole out (as it does with ad revenue to site/blog owners)?”

As long as I can remember, the bridge over the railway at Newtown Square, Sydney, has been covered in posters. Last week the posters were stripped, it was painted a dreary shit-brown — and then a phone number appeared. Last night this paste-up protest appeared too.

At first I’d been pleased that the bridge was getting a fresh coat of paint, despite the colour. But when the “Bill Posters Prosecuted” message appeared, along with the phone number to book advertising space, I was disappointed to say the least. Yet another community space was turned into a commercial one. No longer could anyone with a bucket of glue and a brush promote their event, now it was only those who could afford to pay commercial rates on busy King Street.

The vibrant arts community of the Newtown precinct is precisely one of the reasons we and many others choose to live here, even though we’re under a flight path and real estate prices have become outrageous. “Achtung! Die grosskapitalistischen Hühner kommen!” indeed. We do not need yet another billboard for mainstream advertisers.

Marrickville City Council, please call off your advertising broker and return this wall to the community where it belongs.

• Creatives grow better in the South West | YouTube: A brilliant 4-minute video explaining how to nurture creativity.
• Top 10 reasons to hate the iPhone 3G | APC: A suitably well-researched piece to help counter the Apple fanboy hype. A phone is a tool. Not all tools are for everyone.
• LEO Deutsch-Englisches Wörterbuch: A very fine-looking English-German dictionary site.

• NSLU2-Linux: Technical information for hacking the Linksys NSLU2 NAS device, along with the Synology DS101, the Iomega NAS100d, the D-Link DSMG600 and other ixp4xx-based devices with large attached storage.
• Hacking WD MyBook World Ed: Western Digital's My Book World Edition network storage device is actually a little Linux RAID server. This Wiki has technical information on how to hack them.
• Sarah Jessica Parker Looks Like A Horse: Well, she does. And here's the website. Proof that people have too much time on their hands.
• A twittering experiment | eicolab: An interesting use Twitter, with a comment added by yours truly.
• Friends, Enemies and My Army | Viddler.com: Another recent presentation by Mark Pesce, this one at the 2008 Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, on 25 May 2008. A nice trip through the power of Twitter, the "nuclear option", and the surprising influence of Josh Marshall's army.
• Phoenix Lander “Talks” to Twitterers | NYTimes.com: Includes an interview with the NASA employee who's been playing the part of the Mars Phoenix spacecraft on Twitter (@MarsPhoenix).
• Australian Strategic Policy Institute: "One for the feed reader", I've been told. I haven't explored this site yet.
• A discussion paper on the singular use of “they”: This link looks like it solves this question forever. If only people read it…
• Twitter Co-Opted by Users as Better SMS, Social Media Platform | URBEINGRECORDED: Yet another superb essay on the impact of Twitter.
• The Gruen Transfer | ABC TV: A new TV series looking at the art and science of persuasion as used by the advertising industry. Much good stuff here.
• Ern Malley | Wikipedia: Not exactly a new story, but I was recently reminded of this wonderful literary hoax from the 1940s.
• Scaling a Microblogging Service – Part I | Hueniverse: A comprehensive but fairly technical explanation of the problems Twitter faces.
• The Digital Media Revolution | YouTube: Mark Pesce, Technology Futurist speaks about the Digital Media Revolution at the SAGEM conference, April 2008, in Adelaide. Will the government heed his advice? In 5 parts, this links to part 1.
• Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address | YouTube: An inspirational 15 mins about the importance of following your dream, even if the end result isn't clear. "You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking back."

If there’s one thing I worry about more than ill-fitting underwear, it’s other women wearing ill-fitting underwear.

And I agree. Three afternoons a week, I lie in the street or take up a strategic position near a staircase or escalator so I can look up women’s skirts — and I’m appalled at the number of women whose underwear doesn’t form a smooth, form-fitting surface that matches their body contours. I should write to my local MP.

While agencies recommend their clients spend 10% of their revenues on marketing, the big four agencies — a combined global revenue of US$29.3 — spend only 0.01% of their own money.