A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and so on and so forth — and this week I’ve done a lot of writing.
Articles
- The information ‘vacuum’ over secretive ISP data retention scheme, for Crikey. The Attorney-General’s Department has been holding discussions with internet service providers and others about the potential for ISPs to retain customer data for use by law enforcement agencies. Secret discussions. Last week a Senate Inquiry initiated by Greens Senator Scott Ludlam dug out some details. The Twitterverse is using the hashtag #ozlog for this issue.
- Information Commissioner’s toe in the Government 2.0 waters, for Crikey. On 1 November the new Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) opened for business. The first Information Commissioner, Professor John McMillan, is showing political nous from day one. (As an aside, I’ve interviewed him for the next edition of the Patch Monday podcast, which will be posted on, erm, Monday.)
- Citizen journalism is dead, long live crowdsourcing, for Crikey. At Wednesday’s Future of Crowdsourcing Summit, some media folks talked about the changes in journalism that are being triggered by this buzzword.
- Timeline of misinformation: Twitter’s plane crash down to human error, for Crikey. On Thursday, media outlets including Reuters and Fox News were actually reporting that Qantas flight QF32 had crashed in Indonesia when, in fact, it ended up landing safely in Singapore.
Podcasts
- Patch Monday episode 63, “The govt’s data retention dreams revealed”. If you’d prefer to listen to the edited highlights of that Senate hearing rather than read about it, this is the go.
Media Appearances
- Parity Bit episode 1. A new IT-related video podcast produced and presented by Owen Kelly. I was chatting with him and the other panellists about #ozlog and other news stories. I didn’t swear once.
Geekery
Not a sausage.
Corporate Largesse
- I got free entry to the Future of Crowdsourcing Summit, of course, and they provided lunch.
- As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been invited to San Francisco by Salesforce.com.
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: Enmore village in the spring rain, taken from the Warren View Hotel. Compare this with the similar view from a few weeks ago.]
