Author: Stilgherrian

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A Crikey-led traffic burst

Writing for Crikey this week triggered an interesting burst of activity.

  • Website traffic doubled for a couple of days.
  • I was blogged about by Tim Dunlop over in Murdochland.
  • People from my past emerged from the woodwork — including Keith Conlon, the man who first taught me broadcasting.

Weird coincidences upped the traffic too:

  • Interest in Australia’s new ambassador to Italy, Amanda Vanstone, led more than 400 people to read my posting about Boost juice bars.
  • 200 people looking for live TV coverage of the space shuttle landing found my post about the previous shuttle touchdown.

But I’m still getting plenty of folks looking for those goddam Steve Irwin jokes , or discovering how to spell Vodafone.

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Coonan fails broadband history (no surprise)

The more you dig, the more it’s obvious that communications minister Helen Coonan is completely out of her depth.

On the ABC’s The Insiders on 25 March, the Raccoonan said: “If you just look back a couple of years ago no-one had even heard about broadband.”

No, Senator, I think it’s only you who hadn’t heard of it. The rest of us had it connected to our homes and offices.

Even 12 years ago there was Paul Keating’s Broadband Services Expert Group. Their final report included recommendations like:

With the spread of broadband infrastructure, broadband links be provided to all schools, libraries, medical and community centres by the year 2001.

And:

Telecommunications carriers and broadband network operators be required to inform government annually of their strategies for upgrading their networks, including the expected level of digitisation of existing network services, and the expected extent of broadband network coverage. This requirement should be reviewed by the year 2000.

Hat tip to Prof Roger Clarke for bringing this one to my attention.

[P.S. If you haven’t already done so, please vote in my poll about Coonan. If you’re reading this in the RSS feed, you’ll have to go to my website for that.]

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That’s just straight-up racism, Mr Howard!

Prime Minister John Howard rides his white horse into Aboriginal Australia to save the kiddies. Yes, banning pornography will prevent child sexual abuse, apparently — despite a complete lack of evidence to support that idea. Despite the fact that whities committing sexual abuse against white kids won’t have pornography banned in their communities. And despite JWH being on the record as saying he’s opposed to censorship of any kind. Just how many ways can you be a complete hypocrite in the one news story?