Word-whore. I write 'em. I talk 'em. Information, politics, media, and the cybers. I drink. I use bad words. All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris! Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
Yesterday’s edition of Hack on Triple J is worth listening to not just because I’m on it, but because Senator Stephen Conroy finally makes an appearance. Some of this answers are… curious, to say the least. You run a trial and then define what you were looking for? I’ll post more later, including a transcript of the relevant pieces. Meanwhile you can listen to the podcast.
I’ll be on radio Triple J’s current affairs program Hack this evening. They’re covering the National Broadband Network announcement from 5.30pm AEST. I believe I’ll be live in the studio after they’ve done all the set-piece interviews up front. You can access a live stream from the Triple J website.
Yes, the story of the day is the astounding news that Australia’s new National Broadband Network will be 100Mbit/second Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) — and government-owned!
I’m part of Crikey‘s massive coverage, which kicks off with an editorial, Bernard Keane’s Huge, historic and nationalised: broadband goes ballistic and Fibre To The Node becomes Fibre To The Nerd.
My contributions are A massive and much-needed catch-up and Crikey Clarifier: National Broadband Network.
My friend and colleague Mark Pesce also has 100 million bits per second: you call that fast? And there’s plenty more — some of which is behind the paywall.
As Bernard Keane says, “It will take days — perhaps weeks or months — to work through all the possibilities of this, technically, commercially and politically.”
It’s also a massive face-saver for the minister, Senator Stephen Conroy. Instead of being sacked for screwing up the original tendering process, he’s being given command of the biggest infrastructure project in Australia’s history. Just why does he get this lifeline, I wonder?
This is a massive shift in Australia’s communications policy. Stay tuned.
This week’s A Series of Tubes podcast is up and running. Richard Chirgwin talks with Colin Goodwin from Ericsson Australia about 500Mb/sec DSL, and with me about Senator Conroy’s comments on the iiNet lawsuit, ACMA’s research into social networks behaviour, and the Vodafone-Hutchison merger. A Series of Tubes is part of the IT Radio family of podcasts.
Fourteen months ago, just after the Rudd government came to power, one name dominated this website’s tag cloud. Out of 944 posts, 91 were tagged “john howard”. Finally, that’s changed.
Howard is still there, of course, in third place with 102 posts out of 1540 being so tagged, including this one. But the new leader is “censorship” with 118 and “crikey” with 106. “tv” is in equal third place with 102 — but that’s because my Stilgherrian Live posts are always tagged that. “stephen conroy” is in fifth place with 91.
As the image shows, the main post categories are Internet and Politics. I’m not at all unhappy with that.
All excellent food for thought as I ponder how I’ll continue to shape my return to doing media work full time…
Of all the moments of frustration in last night’s SBS program Insight — and there were many — the most revealing was from host Jenny Brockie. After almost an hour debating Internet “filtering”, Brockie said, “I’m still unclear about whether it works or whether it doesn’t work, as a system.”
Thus begins my article in Crikey today — though it’s behind the paywall. If you’re not yet a subscriber (and why not?) you can get yourself a 21-day free trial. [Update: Things are only behind the Crikey paywall for 14 days, Click away!]
My key theme is that the reason no-one can agree on whether “the filter” will “work” is that no-one has defined exactly what it’s supposed to do — least of all the Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy.
“I have only ever identified [the material to be blocked as] Refused Classification in terms of child porn, bestiality, rape, incest sites, those sorts of things,” Conroy said last night. “For adults who want to be able to watch the other sort of material, we’re not proposing to do that. We’ve never proposed to do that.”
Except that, as the article details, the story has changed over time.
OK, this morning’s post about Senator Conroy being sacked was a little April Fools’ Day jokette. But with the continuing controversy over Internet censorship, the delayed National Broadband Network (though that finally gets an announcement of something or other this week), and yesterday’s gaffe about iiNet spying on its customers, could it soon be true?