The audio is ©2012 dmgRadio Australia, but here it is ‘cos it hasn’t been posted on the radio station’s website. Besides, this is a reasonable plug.

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and so on and so forth.

Articles

• WikiLeaks slammed by Wikipedia co-founder, disrupted by hacker, for Crikey. A summary of the verbal and network-borne attacks on WikiLeaks — at least as they were when this article was written on 29 November. A lot has happened since.
• Cloud could be ‘privacy enhancing’: Pilgrim, for ZDNet.com.au. “Pilgrim” in this case is Timothy Pilgrim, Australia’s Privacy Commissioner.
• Note to The Australian: Twitter is not a newspaper, for Crikey. This article was triggered by several recent events, including the defamation allegation made by Oz editor Chris Mitchell against journalism academic Julie Posetti. One of the journalists mentioned by name, media writer Sally Jackson, believes the article is biased and calls it a “hatchet job”.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 67, “Cybercrime: the FBI’s worldview”. Edited highlights of a presentation to the eCrime Symposium by Will Blevins, the FBI’s assistant legal attaché to Australia for cybercrime issues.
• A Series of Tubes episode 120. Richard Chirgwin and I have a long chat about the National Broadband Network. Was the business case document worth the wait? Is there a black hole in the NBN financials? What’s the product roadmap? And what about this Points of Interconnect issue?

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

• The International Association of Privacy Professionals – Australian and New Zealand (iappANZ) fed me while I attended their conference.
• Viewsonic provided food and drink at The Arthouse Hotel for the launch of their ViewPad 7 Android tablet.

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: Low-grade reindeer is low-grade, taken earlier today at the Broadway Shopping Centre, Sydney.]

That’s the start of my guest post today for Electronic Frontiers Australia, entitled Without civil liberties, government is just a criminal racket.

It’s an essay that combines some thoughts about the constant battle for civil liberties with my reaction to the video posted by Wikileaks at Collateral Murder. It’s footage from 2007 showing a Reuters photojournalist and his driver and others being killed by US helicopter gunfire in Baghdad. It’s footage the US Department of Defence didn’t want you to see. It’s challenging to watch.

This is one of a series of guest posts for the EFA as part of their current fundraising campaign.

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.

Episode 46 of Stilgherrian Live, the Zeitgeist Edition, is now online for your viewing pleasure.

We had a strong field of nominations for “Cnut of the Week”, and it was tough selecting the shortlist. However we eventually saw Rupert Murdoch in 4th place (11%) for his insistence that we somehow pay for news online; Wynyard Baptist Church in 3rd place (22%) for their religious intolerance, and the Australian Football League came in 2nd (30%) for their legal attacks on a fan website which actually supports their sport.

The clear winner of “Cnut of the Week”, though, was Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (37%) for delaying the introduction of an emissions trading scheme (ETS).

As my friends over at newmatilda.com point out, Monday’s announcement amounts to Rudd breaking his first major election promise. But apart from that, it’s a clear failure to take action on the most important long term issue facing this country and, indeed, the world.

Not happy, Kevin.

Meanwhile, congratulations to deanlk, who won a t-shirt from our friends at King Cnut Ethical Clothing via his nomination for the journos and obit writers who got duped by a fake quote in Wikipedia.

Stilgherrian Live will return at 9.30pm next Thursday night Sydney time.

• Only Connect | the human network: The text of Mark's keynote at Microsoft's ReMIX 08.
• Mark Pesce – Only Connect | Viddler.com: This 23-minute keynote presentation from Microsoft's ReMIX 08 is a wonderful distillation of Mark's thoughts over recent months. If you want to get your head around the future, watch this.
• TimesMachine | New York Times: All issues of the New York Times from 18 September 1851 to 30 December 1922 available to browse as images and PDFs. Free to NYT delivery subscribers, but even the sample issues offered to everyone are a fascinating read.
• We Travel in Tribes | Rands In Repose: Excellent explanation of the appeal of Twitter.
• Royalty-free music | Aussie Bloggers: Links to some sources of royalty-free music, i.e. music for which you pay a one-off fee and can then continue to use in your production.
• Twittiquette and Acceptable Online Social Network Behaviour | DEDLOG: Dedlam offers 5 excellent tips for being a "good participant" on Twitter and other social media.
• All The Cool People Are Still Going… | hyperpeople: Adolf Hitler gets ready for the Burning Man party. Wrong. Funny.
• PR and the Management of a Real Crisis | DEDLOG: Shanghai-based Dedlam's commentary on how China handled the media during this month's earthquake.
• Power-Tweeting: 101 Everyday Uses for Twitter | Inside CRM: Examples of how the Twitter community uses this simple tool. When it works.

I decided that the “category cloud” on the left-hand side of the website was already showing that the biggest categories were politics, the Internet, human nature, media and business. I didn’t want the tag cloud to repeat that information. So I decided to remove all the tags which were also the names of categories.

Boy, that certainly changed the emphasis!

Even in the reduced screenshot (right), one name dominates. Yes, out of 944 posts, counting this one, 91 are tagged “john howard”.

My own boyfriend comes in a poor second with just 42.

Is that right?

I’ve tried to placate ’Pong. I’ve said that at least he doesn’t frustrate me to the point of inspiring lengthy rants about the destruction of social values and the end of the Enlightenment. I’ve never suggested that he be tried as a war criminal — though after that night-time canal boat ride in Bangkok I may reconsider that.

(Actually I haven’t told you about that canal boat properly yet. It’s another Unreliable Bangkok piece waiting to be written. I’ve been back in Sydney two months now, it’s not too late is it?)

However this does raise an interesting point about how tags work…

In a traditional information system, you’d plan your keywords in advance. You’d invent a taxonomy (that is, a formal classification system), and then you’d develop a controlled vocabulary (that is, a set of authorised keywords). For example you’d decide that it’s the “construction” industry, not “building”. Everyone would work off that controlled vocabulary.

Save confusion, y’see.

Everything filed into neat little pigeon-holes.

However in the Brave New World of the Social Internet, no-one bothers with all that. Everyone makes it up as they go along, throws it all into the ether, and with luck it’ll all sort itself out. Or Google will do it for us.

Instead of a taxonomy, you have a folksonomy.

This development mirrors many, many aspects of the post-Industrial Age. In the Industrial Age everything was centrally planned, like the Soviet Economy — one of history’s great success stories, no? Now, everyone just works at it as best they can, and problems are ironed out through group consensus — or just ignored because no-one’s interested.

And by golly gosh, it actually seems to work.

A 2005 study by Nature (which is behind their paywall, so we’ll link to C|Net’s report too) found that the centrally-planned, professionally-edited Encyclopaedia Britannica is only marginally more accurate in key areas than Wikipedia.

OK, Encyclopaedia Britannica disputed [PDF file] the study, and then Nature bit back. But the core point is that the Wikipedia approach generates a product which is just fine for everyday purposes, and it does so a lot faster, with a relatively small trade-off in accuracy.

So, to get back to my main point… assuming this actually has a point…

Mostly I write about politics. A very broad range of politics. Through my ad hoc assignment of tags to blog posts, I’ve shown that John Winston Howard dominated my political writing. I suspect that everyone else’s was much the same.

Yes, 2007 really was all about JWH, just not in the way he wanted. And now, Sir, can you please bugger off out of my website? Ta.

The Prime Minister’s office denies that one of their own edited the Wikipedia article about Peter Costello to remove the nickname “Captain Smirk”. But IP address 210.193.176.115 belongs to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet — at least it did until the reference was changed a few days after the accusation.

If you dig through all IP addresses starting with 210.193.176 you find that most of them for which data is available are front ends for a pile of government agencies — everything from innovation.gov.au and biotechnology.gov.au to coagbushfireenquiry.gov.au and search.investaustralia.gov.au. Sitting right on 210.193.176.19 is the PM’s very own website.

Assigning an IP address in the middle of this block to anyone but another government agency doesn’t make sense — from a network engineering or an administrative point of view. You reckon someone’s telling porkies?

Wikipedia has since nominated the Peter Costello article as their Australian Collaboration of the Fortnight. “Please help improve it to featured article standard,” they ask. Anyone at the PM’s office wanna lend a hand? Woof.

[A more detailed version of this article was originally published in Crikey a couple of days ago.]

But, you know, I just heard Archie Roach and Sara Storer singing his story on RockWiz. And bugger me, it turns out he’s one of the country’s most important human rights activists.

Bloody embarrassing not to know that, eh?

I mean, you’re probably more likely to remember, oh, that nigger woman on a bus, who was she again?