In a surprise visit to today’s NSW Sphere event, Premier Nathan Rees announced the apps4nsw program — offering prizes of $100,000 for innovative applications with make use of government data for public good.

I’ve got a piece on the Crikey website, NSW gets its geek on:

“This is all about making government data easy for everyone to use to solve everyday problems,” said Rees…

Entries may be websites or web based services, mobile applications or stand-alone PC based or kiosk-based applications.

“The prizes will be judged by an expert panel – which doesn’t include me – and there will also be a People’s Choice Award and the opportunity for the best entry to go to a prototyping phase”, said Rees.

“Anything we develop as a result of the competition will be licensed as open source and freely available to government and the public. These will be public apps for the common good.”

This is a fascinating initiative. Have a squizz at the Crikey piece. I’ll write more later.

Yes, Stephen Stephen Conroy was voted “Cnut of the Week” for the third time running by the audience of last night’s Stilgherrian Live — which you can watch online now. My people do not like his Internet censorship plans, it seems!

We had so many nominations, ranging from “NSW wheat farmers” (who, despite record crops in some areas, are still whingeing because the world economic recession means they can’t get the price they want for their grain) to “the people of Arkansas” (for their medieval attitude to gay couples adopting children).

Still, despite a strong final field including Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (for calling US President-Elect “tanned”), Vitamin D (you’ll have to watch) and NSW Premier Nathan Rees (for recent state budget cuts), Senator Conroy was the clear winner with 66% of the vote.

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• We can’t afford to keep Sydney running: Rees | smh.com.au: New South Wales’ new Premier reckons we can’t afford to run Australia’s largest city. That strikes me as odd. Where did all the money go? Is he looking in the right places?
• I saved Telstra, says Trujillo | Australian IT: Telstra’s boss does bit of auto-hagiography. Given that he’s talking up how much he achieved, does that mean there’s some disaster about to be revealed?
• What I want from an e-book reader… | Doc Holds Fourth: Steve “Doc” Baty’s requirements for a e-book reader. I particularly like “I can ‘loan’ my copy of a book to a friend by transferring it to their reader. If I do that, it’s no longer on my reader. This could also act as a way to give people Gifts.”