A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — which this week wasn’t very much at all because I lost a couple of days returning from San Francisco.

Articles

None this week.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 69, “Service goes social, but how?”. Based on material recorded at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event in San Francisco, this episode includes a chat with Fergus Griffin, vice president of product marketing for Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud product.

Media Appearances

• On Wednesday I did another brief spot with Paul Turton on ABC Radio Statewide NSW.

Corporate Largesse

• On Friday I had lunch aboard the South Steyne at Darling Harbour, courtesy of Watterson Marketing Communication.

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: Since I didn't take any photographs this week, here's one of the rather serious seagulls they have in San Francisco.]

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.]

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, once again done fortnightly because I forgot to do it last weekend. Suffer.

Articles

• Nile’s porn excuse doesn’t hold water, for Crikey. Sydney’s Daily Telegraph alleged that various NSW politicians had been using their parliamentary computers to access pornography, and that anti-sex-industry campaigner and Christian Democrats leader Reverend Fred Nile was the worst culprit. He denied it, but as the story stood on 2 September 2010 I didn’t believe him.
• NSW Parliament’s flawed porn hunt, for Crikey. By the following day, it was clear that the “audit” of parliamentary web browsing was deeply flawed.
• What the NBN will deliver to Windsor’s mob, for Crikey. Independent MP Tony Windsor said that the National Broadband Network was a major factor in him choosing to support Labor over the Liberal-National Coalition.
• ACMA and Nine demonstrate Australia’s institutionalised racism, for ABC Unleashed. Sam Newman’s continued low-brow bigotry on The AFL Footy Show gets “punished” with a slap on the wrist. Again. It took only six comments before someone accused me of political correctness gone mad and compared Australian with North Korea. And another commenter said that I “looked like a potato that had been boiled too far”. The standard of discussion at ABC Online isn’t all that flash.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 55, “BYO computers: cloud security risk?”.
• Patch Monday episode 56, “Parliament’s poor porn probe exposed”. If ZDNet allowed longer headlines and more robust language in their stories, I’d have entitled this podcast “Pollies’ piss poor Parly porn probe exposed”. Poetry.

Media Appearances

• On Thursday 8 September 2010 I did a brief spot on ABC Radio’s Statewide NSW to chat about Stephanie Rice’s Twitterfaggotgate. Alas there is no recording.

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 eventually appear on Flickr.

[Photo: Enmore Village on a Spring evening, taken from one of my favourite afternoon working spots at the Warren View Hotel, corner of Stanmore and Enmore Roads. Compare it with the photo in this post, My village really is home.]

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets.

Articles

• The internet taking a back seat during the campaign for Crikey. Looking back at the first week of the federal election campaign and how the politicians used this “new” internet thing, it really was boring.
• Let’s blame Facebook again, shall we? for ABC Unleashed. A woman was allegedly sexually assaulted by a man she met via a social networking service and later allowed to stay in her home overnight. Once more, social networking sites are portrayed as evil.
• A new cable brings the promise of more internet capacity for Crikey. Australasian consortium Pacific Fibre announced that they’re joining forces with Pacnet to build a 5.12 terabit per second undersea cable from Sydney to Los Angeles via Auckland. It’ll pretty much double Australia’s international data capacity when it goes live in 2013.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 50, “Security lessons from Adobe Reader” with guest Brad Arkin, who heads up security and privacy at Adobe. The next version of Adobe Reader for Windows to be released later this year will include a “sandbox”, making it much more resistant to certain kinds of attacks.

Media Appearances

• On Thursday afternoon I did a quick spot on ABC Radio Statewide NSW with Paul Turton, talking about, of all things, running out of IP addresses, DNSSEC and this mangled story about the seven secret people who can reboot the internet. Alas, this isn’t podcast anywhere.
• On Friday I recorded an interview with ABC Radio National’s Future Tense which will be broadcast next Thursday.

[Photo: Circular Quay viewed from the railway station, photographed on 27 July 2010. We really do take this view for granted.]

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets.

Articles

• ‘Open Government’ declared in Australia for Crikey. Buried in the news just before the Australian election was called last weekend, Lindsay Tanner, the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, issued the Declaration of Open Government which had been called for by the Government 2.0 Taskforce. Someone ought to tell the Attorney-General’s Department.
• Two other articles have been written but are still in the production pipeline, one for Crikey and one for ABC Unleashed. And I’ve been researching a 2000-word feature for ZDNet Australia. So I’ve been very busy, you just haven’t seen the output yet.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 49, “The software patent controversy explained” with guest Kimberlee Weatherall. She teaches intellectual property law at the University of Queensland.
• A Series of Tubes episode 112, in which I chat with Richard Chirgwin about the Declaration of Open Government, the Privacy Commissioner’s findings on the Google Street View Wi-Fi incident, and how the Pirate Party fell at the first hurdle. Also, Internode’s John Lindsay explains the class action they and iiNet are involved with concerning Testra’s wholesale ADSL2+ pricing, and Steve Chung, consultant at Ruckus Wireless, talks about Wi-Fi privacy.

Media Appearances

• On Monday afternoon I did a quick spot on ABC Radio Statewide NSW with Paul Turton, talking about Opera Australia’s plan to encourage Twitter users to tweet reviews of their performances. Alas, this isn’t podcast anywhere.

[Photo: "Paddy Maguire's Hotel", at the corner of George and Hay Streets, Haymarket, Sydney, taken from a bus window on 23 July 2010.]

I joined presenter Paul Turton on ABC Radio’s Statewide for our third chat about things Internettish on Tuesday afternoon.

This week, we talked about privacy. What are the real risks online? How easy is it for people to find out about you? What should you tell your kids, and how safe are they?

The program isn’t streamed on the Internet, but I did another cheap-arsed recording using my MacBook Pro’s built-in microphone. The audio is below — and the shit quality is my fault, not the ABC’s.

Statewide is broadcast on ABC Local Radio throughout NSW from 1600 to 1800 weekdays, except in Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong and wherever else they have their own local drive-time program. I’m joining Paul every Tuesday afternoon at 1615 through until 15 December.

[The radio interview is probably Copyright © 2009 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but since they don't archive them I reckon it's fair enough putting it here provided you just listen to it and I link back to Statewide and encourage you to listen.]

I joined presenter Paul Turton on ABC Radio’s Statewide for our second chat about things Internettish on Tuesday afternoon.

This week, we covered how easy it is to post video on the Internet, making it difficult for the police and other authorities to cover up “bad behaviour”, and the strengths and weaknesses of online dating and, um, scoring a quickie.

The program isn’t streamed on the Internet, but I did another cheap-arsed recording using my MacBook Pro’s built-in microphone. The audio is below — and the shit quality is my fault, not the ABC’s.

Statewide is broadcast on ABC Local Radio throughout NSW from 1600 to 1800 weekdays, except in Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong and wherever else they have their own local drive-time program. I’m joining Paul every Tuesday afternoon at 1615 through until 15 December.

[The radio interview is probably ©Copyright © 2009 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but since they don't archive them I reckon it's fair enough putting it here provided you just listen to it and I link back to Statewide and encourage you to listen.]

Yesterday I joined presenter Paul Turton on ABC Radio’s Statewide for the first of a few regular chats about social networking and social media and things Internettish.

Statewide is broadcast on ABC Local Radio throughout NSW from 1600 to 1800 weekdays, except in Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong and wherever else they have their own local drive-time program.

Yesterday we talked about the etiquette of “friending” on sites like Facebook and whether it’s OK to refuse a friend request, where you draw the line between your personal and professional life, how people spread the news of the September dust storms for themselves and Rickrolling, amongst other things.

The program isn’t streamed on the Internet, alas, but I did a cheap-arsed recording using my MacBook Pro’s built-in speaker microphone [doh!], and I’ve posted the audio below. I’ll see if I can get a proper audio split next week.

I’ll be joining Paul every Tuesday afternoon at 1615 through until 15 December.

[The radio interview is probably ©2009 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but since they don't archive them I reckon it's fair enough putting it here provided you just listen to it and I link back to Statewide and encourage you to listen.]