• New Twitter Anti-Spam Bot Causes Chaos | ReadWriteWeb: The real reason Kevin Rudd’s Twitter account was misbehaving.
• Too many twitters drown out Rudd website | theage.com.au: The Age‘s article claiming the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Twitter account “crashed&” because of overload.
• Aussie Prime Minister Kevin Rudd Joins Twitter – The Reponse: No Clean Feed | Young PR: Australian PR expert chap Paull Young’s take on Kevin Rudd’s launch into the Twitterverse. He reckons it’s a waste of time because the audience is too small.
• Internet addiction disorder | Wikipedia: The Wikipedia article says that the definition and status of Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) is still somewhat controversial.
• China classes Web addiction as clinical disorder | The Inquirer: China appears to be the first nation to official classify Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) as a clinical condition.
• Reservoir Thunderbirds | YouTube: YouTube recommended that I watch this mashup of Thunderbirds and Reservoir Dogs. I agree.
• Was Simpson Desert closed because of aliens? | AdelaideNow…: The South Australian government refuses to rule out that their closure of the Simpson Desert Conservation Park was due to the presence of aliens.
• A senior fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence | International Herald Tribune: The news report that Sarah Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent was a hoax, set up by two guys developing a character for a new TV series.

OK, I’m not going to write a blog post every time the PM tweets something. But this gives you an idea of the scrutiny he’s under. He (or an as-yet-unnamed minion) types eight words and suddenly hundreds of people are a’flutter. Or a’twitter.

Mr Rudd’s first challenge will be to explain why he had over 400 followers last night, and had followed most of them back, but now half of them are gone. It’s probably just a Twitter glitch, but we all Need To Know. Now please. I’m sure the friendly folks at Twitter will respond quickly when they know it’s Australia’s Prime Minister (or an as-yet-unnamed minion) asking. That’s like even more important than Sarah Palin!

Have you ever seen Sarah Palin and Kevin Rudd in the same room? Spooky!

Since my welcome to the PM yesterday, I’ve been thinking about some suitably Prime Ministerial tweets.

Most of us don’t get that classified message each morning telling us where the Prime Minister will be, so it’d be harmless enough to feed us a little information as the day goes by. He could add a personal, reflective note without being a security risk.

“‘Only’ 200 pages to read over breakfast. Now I know why the coffee is free.”
“On way to CBR airport, flying to SYD. Constant travel is the tiring part of the job.”
“Glad to see NSW farmland looking better after the rains. Have farmers started to recover?”

As I said yesterday, Twitter is about just being yourself. Twitter could humanise the role of PM. Make visible the questions in the PM’s mind, like the ones about the farmers, and people will respond. They’ll also understand that Rudd is busy man and won’t respond personally to every reply, but he does need to show that he’s seen what they said.

He could also use Twitter to send (not-so-)subtly coded political messages.

“Meeting Gordon Brown, looking forward to resolving the pensions problem”
“Hoping Conroy’s finished writing his resignation letter”

The folks who write books about political tactics said that one of John Howard’s more successful tricks was using talkback radio to speak over the heads of “the media” and communicate directly with listeners. His mistake was thinking all those bitter, hate-filled time-wasters on the phones were actually representative of Australia now, rather than being an old-fashioned whingefest — the last remnants of a medium almost dead. A bit like Mr Howard himself.

Twitter and other social media tools could allow Rudd to take that tactic to the next level, talking directly over the heads of the talkback hosts, his media minders (read: limiters) and forum moderators to interact directly with The People. A bit like that story of the King going amongst the peasants in disguise, but without the disguise.

He could also use Twitter to listen over the moderators’ heads. If Rudd (or any politician) learned for themselves to use the searching and filtering and analysis tools, they could investigate what they wanted to see, rather than rely on the minions who, let’s face it, are only serving the PM because they want to climb that greasy pole themselves. Would you trust them to give you accurate information if it showed them, personally, in a bad light? I thought not.

There’s a whole essay in there about how politics and government is the last remnant of an age when information was hoarded rather than shared. Us hyperconnected folks know that sharing information is where the power truly lies. That’s the big difference between the industrial age and the post-industrial.

We’re in transition, though. Some organisations get it, some don’t. The open source software community is all about sharing and making the process public — warts and all — and as a result they can deliver a secure operating system like Linux for free when it takes Microsoft hundreds of millions of dollars to come close. The NSW state government couldn’t even roll out Wi-Fi hotspots in Sydney because they wanted to plan it from the top down with similarly top-down centrally-controlled businesses. Wrong tool for the job, people!

But, as I say, another essay for another time.

Both of Kevin Rudd’s tweets so far have been exactly eight words, and eight is a lucky number in Chinese culture. Will the next tweet also be eight words, making it the super-lucky “888″ message from Chairman Rudd?

Or, it’s a Full Moon in Spring tonight, the first in Rudd’s time as PM. Maybe this is when he reveals that he’s a super-powered were-robot, and the Twitter account will spew forth the hypnotic trigger-words to activate his army of Iced Vo-Vo-eating slaves. Man, that’d be so cool! Scary though.

Full Moon is at 5.18pm Sydney time.

Bonus Link: The mild-mannered Stephen Collins has unleashed his own super-powers to write Welcome Prime Minister. Now please engage.

• Annual Report 2007–08 | ACMA: The Australian Communications and Media Authority’s annual report for the financial year ended… four months ago. Trying to understand the emerging world by looking at documents like this is like trying to steer a fast car by reading traffic statistics from last week’s newspaper.
• ISP-level Filtering Discussion part 2 | Whirlpool Broadband Forums: A women — a Christian and a mother — explains why she is against Internet censorship.
• The perplexing Internet debate | On Line Opinion: Mark Newton, the network engineer who Senator Conroy’s office tried to bully into silence, has only become more vocal. Here he lists in clear bullet-point form the arguments the government has to counter.
• ISP-level content filtering won’t work | ZDNet Australia: Three of Australia’s largest ISPs take a stand against the government’s plans to censor the Internet.
• Clean feeds | ABC Unleashed: Mark Pesce’s piece about the Internet censorship debacle steps back and looks at how the last fortnight has been affected by what he calls “hyperpolitics”.
• Keep Your Filter Off Our Internet | AWIA: “As the professional body representing people working across a broad spectrum of the web industry, the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA) objects to the Government’s plans to trial ISP filtering, with a view to introducing it nationally.”
• Have Your Bunny Repeatedly: Crikey cartoonist First Dog on the Moon’s contribution to the campaign against Internet censorship in Australia.
• Twitter Goes Mainstream | WSJ.com: When a major mainstream newspaper says something is mainstream then it must be mainstream.
• Copyright Infringement as Stealing: Pfft! | Brendan Scott’s Weblog: One important part of any propaganda campaign is framing the discussion to benefit your side’s arguments. Major copyright-holders are keen to frame their bad guys as :”thieves” and “pirates”. This post is a well-reasoned piece explaining why “theft” is an inappropriate and disrespectful use of language.
• Eee PC 1000H HackBook | Flickr: Photo of Stephen Collins’ HackBook, an Asus Eee PC 1000H running OS X. Includes shopping list.
• Why follow @Stilgherrian on Twitter? | Matt’s Musings: One smart person’s musings on why he chooses to follow people on Twitter. I’ll write a response some time this week. It’s amusing to be called “the Rove [McManus] of the Streaming Web”.
• Sarah Palin Wardrobe Challenge: Kathryn Builds ENTIRE Wardrobe for the Candidate for Less Than $2500 | The Budget Fashionista: Just what it says. How to look just like the world’s most glamorous moose-killer without her $150k budget.
• Multicolr Search Lab | Idée Inc.: Punch in a selection of up to 10 colours, and this’ll search through more than 10 million Creative Commons-licensed images on Flickr and show you those which match. Very cool and, I suspect, very useful.
• 50 office-speak phrases you love to hate | BBC News: A nice collection of 50 examples of annoying business-speak. It’s from June, but it’s still valid.

• The twisted language of politics | Bloghound: A nice post on the hypocrisy shown in the differing descriptions of Republican US Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Democrat Presidential candidate Barack Obama.
• Send an e-mail message on behalf of someone else | Microsoft Office Online: The procedure for setting up delegated email access in Office 2007, e.g. a secretary having access to their boss’ email. I think it’s rather quaint that Microsoft still uses “e-mail” with a hyphen.
• Use Outlook Anywhere to connect to your Exchange server without VPN | Microsoft Office Online: This is the procedure for making individual Outlook 2007 users connect securely to a remote Exchange server over the Internet. “Outlook Anywhere” is what used to be called “RPC over HTTP”. I’m tagging this because I’ll be making this work for a client shortly.
• Configure Outlook Anywhere in Outlook 2007 | Microsoft TechNet: This is the procedure for making a group of Outlook 2007 users connect securely to a remote Exchange server over the Internet. “Outlook Anywhere” is what used to be called “RPC over HTTP”.
• 2006 Olympic Food Stealing Champion – My Dog! | First Dog on the Moon: One of First Dog’s more delightful (as opposed to deeply cynical) cartoons.
• Cursebird: What the f#@! is everyone swearing about?: A live feed of everyone who swears on Twitter, with a nice animated effect when a new curse pops up. Compelling viewing.

Yes, Stilgherrian Live has returned, and last night’s episode of Stilgherrian Live Delta, episode 25, is online for your (re)viewing pleasure.

I was grumpy because we started 40 minutes late. A technical fault at Ustream prevented people hearing the audio, so we just had to wait. I’m not good at waiting. I was rude. Sorry.

Still, when we finally got on air I introduced “Stilgherrian’s Street View” and pondered the ideal 8-person orgy. People chose the striking Fairfax journalists as Cnut of the Week, the clearest winners ever, beating Glenn Milne and the strange cheer squad at The Australia who want Peter Costello to lead the Liberal Party, and US Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

There was also Sheena Easton. Twice.

Have a squizz and let me know what you think!