A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Well, a fortnightly summary today, because I forgot to do a post like this last week. Sigh.

Actually, a lot of this relates to the federal election here in Australia, so you’d better digest it all now before you vote today. Hurry up!

Articles

• The broadband battle: what will they really deliver? for Crikey, explaining the two rather different broadband policies on offer in today’s election from Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition.
• Coalition broadband: a wireless tower in every street for Crikey, quoting some material from the Patch Monday podcast about how wireless broadband works and what it would require to deliver fibre-equivalent services via wireless.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 52, “Media laws dying for digital update” with guest Peter Black from the Queensland University of Technology.
• Patch Monday episode 53, “Understanding the broadband election” with guest Narelle Clark, a network engineering consultant who’s most recent gig was as research director of the CSIRO’s Networking Technologies Laboratory. She’s also vice-president of the Internet Society of Australia and on the board of trustees for the Internet Society globally.
• A Series of Tubes episode 115. Host Richard Chirgwin talks with Anup Changaroth of Ciena Networks about gigabit fibre networks, the product life cycle, and the value of Layer 2 carrier networks, and me about broadband policy.

Media Appearances

• Talking Twitter and the election on Syn Radio.
• Email is dead, what next?, the TechLines webcast in which I’m on-screen for about a minute as I ask a question near the end of the program.

[Photo: Tights are not pants, Enmore Road. Further proof, Ladies, that tights are indeed not pants. Not even if you're also wearing heels.]

If the embedded video doesn’t work, try over here.

Panellists were anthropologist Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow at Intel Labs; Alistair Rennie, general manager of Lotus Software and WebSphere Portal at IBM’s Software Group; futurist Mark Pesce; and Adele Beachley, who is RIM’s managing director for Australia and New Zealand i.e. from BlackBerry Land. It was hosted by the ABC’s James O’Loghlin.

I was in the audience, invited specifically so I could ask a question. Indeed, I get one in at the end. You’ll see me in the front row with a silver MacBook Pro in my lap.

I found the whole thing fascinating. O’Loghin worked well as a host too, I reckon. But I was wondering why for a webcast we needed the full six-camera broadcast production style. Freemantle Media did a good job, don’t get me wrong. But it’s an expensive way of doing things. Oh well, it wasn’t my money…

Anyway, have a squizz and let me know what you think.

I continue to get blown away by the quality of material coming from Middle Eastern media network Al Jazeera.

I’ve just watched the latest Listening Post podcast and have learned more about Yemen in a few minutes than from a lifetime of watching, reading and listening to Australian media.

And fascinatingly, this is how Listening Post presenter Richard Gizbert explained how you can take part in the program.

We are now closing in on four thousand viewers following us on Facebook and Twitter. They check in to find out what stories we’re working on and in case they want to weigh in as one of our Global Village Voices. If you’d like to do the same, just go to either of those sites and search us out. Or you can get in touch with us the old-fashioned way on email. We’re at listeningpost@aljazeera.net.

Yes, that’s right. Email is now “old-fashioned”. Love your work, guys.

• Tether me!: How to tether your iPhone (that is, use it as a broadband modem for your laptop) when when your carrier doesn’t officially support it. (I haven’t tried this. I don’t have an iPhone.)
• Hobby Horses | Blackbeard Blog: Tom Ewing observes that it might be better to stop trying to think about the “usefulness” of social media and instead consider it as a hobby. He draws some excellent parallels to hobbies and sport.
• Optimizing Rural E-service Engagement | Information Technology in Developing Countries: A paper comparing development-driven and entrepreneurial models of Internet services in rural third-world locations. On of the examples is India’s DakNet which I mentioned the other day.
• First Dog on the Moon | Crikey: The entire First Dog on the Moon back catalog is now online. 300+ images. Enjoy.
• Letter Opener | restoroot.com: A plug-in for OS X’s Mail.app to handle those pesky winmail.dat attachments that sometimes, even today, still infect some emails from people with Exchange servers (which have been poorly configured).

• Twinfluence: Twitter Influence Analyzer: Another stupid pseudo-science numerical analysis of people’s Twitter followers which supposedly measures “influence”. It completely fails to consider the quality of communication rather than quantity. Useful for impressing dumb old-school PR and marketing types, maybe, since they seem so obsessed with raw numbers.
• Resilient Nation | Demos: A project by UK think tank, Demos, Resilient Nation notes that the government’s power and authority is shifting across to the private and third sectors and down to regional and local government. Our ability to respond to disasters needs to be re-examined in this light. There are noises about starting an Australian version. Stand by.
• Exchange Connector POP3 Connector/Downloader for Exchange Server 2007/2003 | Quantum Software Solutions: A third-party (and Australia made!) replacement for Microsoft’s POP3 Connector for Exchange. Apparently more reliable, with better logging and more features — including the ability to download email every minute instead of only every 15 minutes.

These disclaimers have never been tested in a courtroom, and in some circumstances they could even reduce your legal protection. However, I reckon the key issue for a business is “branding”.

Do you really want your communication with clients, suppliers and associates to look like your relationship will be defined by lawyers? That you routinely send “confidential” email to the wrong people and have to ask for it to be deleted? That you or your staff won’t actually stand behind what you say in an email because it’s not “confirmed in writing”? That your reaction when things go wrong is to sue someone?

Please, empower your staff to speak with authority. Get your act together so you don’t make lame mistakes to begin with. And have the confidence and honesty to stand behind what you say, wherever and however you say it.

• Zero Latency Studio Setup | Hugo Schotman: More information on the studio setup, this time to remove the annoying delay in headphone monitoring.
• Advanced Podcast studio setup with Skype and Audio Hijack Pro | Hugo Schotman: Even though it dates from 2005, this article gave me the information I needed to sort out my broadcast setup.
• Cory Doctorow: How to stop your inbox exploding | guardian.co.uk: Five simple but effective email management tips.
• Why you should be using social tools in your organisation | acidlabs: Smart suggestions from Stephen Collins.
• The new rules for buying a Mac | Macworld: Sensible article about choosing which Mac to buy.