www.nickhodge.com

I was born a Prot­est­ant. I will more than likely die one, too. Intense excav­a­tion into fam­ily his­tory has shown me that my genes are Prot­est­ant for at least 8 gen­er­a­tions on both sides. Bap­tised and con­firmed a Lutheran, I was taught a thing or two about the most suc­cess­ful (not the first) split from the Cath­olic Church by Mar­tin Luther.

Dur­ing pub­lic school man­dated “religious edu­ca­tion”, I was taught by the local Cath­olic Priest. He seemed nice enough; kindly tak­ing us through the New Test­a­ment book Romans. It took many years for me to real­ise that this was an attempt at turn­ing me from my heretic ways to the true canon. If I recall, he didn’t even use the Revised Stand­ard Ver­sion of the Bible. Yes, Peter and Paul: the fath­ers of the cath­olic church.

After trav­el­ling to Europe in 1997 and 2004, I saw enough Saints’ rel­ics: shrunken heads, fin­gers, toe­nails and shrouds to last me a life­time. Large cathed­rals raised in the name of the Vir­gin or some Saint across the cit­ies of Europe show the folly of man, attempt­ing to reach for ter­restrial god status. The ven­er­a­tion of Saints and other popery not only rubs me the wrong way: I am sure my ancest­ors turn in their col­lect­ive graves.

So as Mary MacK­il­lop has moved through the man-made pro­cess of can­on­isa­tion within the Cath­olic Church, my genes quiver.

We hear that the church wants old and young to travel to Rome to wit­ness the can­on­isa­tion cere­mony. That will fill the cof­fers of the Romans.

I also heard many dis­cus­sions on the “brand” of Mary MacK­il­lop being valu­able. Like a product. Even our ABC both on radio and TV seems to have caught the “Mary MacK­il­lop” fever. So much for edit­or­ial independence.

And that is exactly what this can­on­isa­tion is about. Money. Never get in the way of a large cor­por­a­tion and money.

Luck­ily the Cath­ol­ics re-admitted her to the church. Oth­er­wise they would have missed out on their cash.

This tra­di­tion and hun­ger for money is not new. Saint­hood and pil­grim­ages have cre­ated many a city in the world as sup­plic­ant masses crawl on their knees to assuage their mor­tal sins. Pay­ing money for Indul­gences, as done in the Middle Ages, and more recently with spe­cial vis­its to ran­dom vir­gin sightings.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not anti-personal faith.

But please sep­ar­ate Mam­mon from Mary. She was, and I high­light was, just a not­able Aus­tralian woman who did more for the down­trod­den than any group of Car­din­als, Abbotts or Bish­ops ever did. And I would argue, ever will.

The Hon. Peter Gar­rett, mem­ber of Mid­night Oil and mem­ber for Kingsford-Smith is presently under-the-gun over the man­age­ment of the Energy Effi­cient Homes Package.

It seems out of the old adage: speed, qual­ity, cheap: pick any two that the depart­ment chose just speed.

From ABC1’s Q & A last night, mem­bers of both sides of the house marked Peter Gar­rett as an hon­our­able and a decent man. His exper­i­ence lead­ing envir­on­mental lobby groups, and lead­ing a suc­cess­ful band shows he can man­age people. But Man­age­ment in a Min­is­terial sense is way more complex.

Evid­ently, his depart­ment com­mis­sioned a legal risk assess­ment of the pro­gram in Feb­ru­ary 2009. This doc­u­ment was not seen by Mr. Gar­rett until early this year.

My spec­u­la­tion is:

• Mr. Rudd & Mr. Swan design a large pro­gram to inject money into the eco­nomy in light of the Global Fin­an­cial Crisis. Get­ting this cash into the eco­nomy quickly is paramount.
• Based on a pro­gram cre­ated by the pre­vi­ous Gov­ern­ment, it was seen as an easy mech­an­ism to gain green cre­den­tials and inject fiscal stimulus.
• Someone in the Depart­ment engages an external party to detail any risks. In large pro­jects, there are always risks. Mit­ig­at­ing risk is a part of sound pro­ject man­age­ment. Not all prob­lems can be solved nor fore­seen: but those that are fore­seen must be managed.
• Remem­ber: tim­ing is everything. Speed, speed, speed. The Depart­ment can­not wait months to cre­ate a viable infra­struc­ture to man­age all the risks, and as polit­ical pres­sure is on to spread the money out: noth­ing gets in the way of speed.
• Con­ver­sa­tions between Min­is­ters is all pos­it­ive and about the velo­city of the program;
• the Depart­ment keeps their risk assess­ment inform­a­tion to lower levels, in an effort to pro­tect their Min­is­ter, the pro­gram and poten­tially their job.
• The Min­is­ter doesn’t want to hear or see bad news: even worse, pass this up the chain to the notori­ous micro man­ager Rudd.

The causes for this break­down poten­tially are:

• An envir­on­ment where neg­at­ives and risks are seen as bad PR. Bad mes­saging for the nightly news
• An envir­on­ment where speed is crit­ical. Now, now now rather than con­sidered policy execution
• An envir­on­ment where people fear rais­ing bad news

Just “firing” the Min­is­ter is not going to solve the prob­lem. Although Mr Rudd will prob­ably reach a point where he jet­tis­ons Mr Gar­rett. That will be sad.

Con­tinu­ing my theme of ‘syn­thing the Sydney Har­bour Bridge: on Tues­day I took a series of 24 pho­tos on my Palm Treo Pro cam­era of the bridge. Includ­ing a seagull:

Dear Aus­tralian Fed­eral Politicians

re: Aus­tralian ISP Inter­net Filters

As a par­ent, a tech­no­logy industry vet­eran and cit­izen who works via the Inter­net, I feel it is my duty to provide a prag­matic per­spect­ive on the Fed­eral Government’s pro­posed plans to adopt Man­dat­ory Fil­ter­ing of Aus­tralian Inter­net Ser­vice Pro­viders (ISPs) for the bene­fit of Child Safety.

Cur­rent state­ments from Sen­ator Con­roy high­light the need to pro­tect Aus­tralian Chil­dren from undesir­able corners and con­tent found the Inter­net. This is a worthy ideal, but Sen­ator Conroy’s pro­posed solu­tions go nowhere near far enough to truly keep our chil­dren safe. Any half-hearted attempt at fil­ter­ing exposes the Gov­ern­ment to legal liab­il­ity and voter dis­con­tent when their kids see any undesir­able mater­ial that will fall through the cracks of a pure technology-based solution.

The block­ing of inter­na­tion­ally recog­nised child p-rn sites; and addi­tion­ally adding warn­ing bells to people access­ing these sites is a must. Whilst the need for secur­ity, and the seques­ter­ing of these sites for crim­inal invest­ig­a­tions is under­stand­able — to counter claims of “cen­sor­ship by stealth”, these sites should be reviewed by an Ombuds­man on a reg­u­lar basis.

The cur­rent rhet­oric from the pro-filter lobby pur­posely asso­ci­ates chil­dren online with rep­re­hens­ible child p-rn. I ser­i­ously doubt that chil­dren are going to pur­posely or not stumble on child p-rn. Rather, undesir­able people will find chil­dren in the “clean” inter­net. This online safety aspect requires more than 1,000 or 1,000,000 sites on a fil­ter list: it requires strong poli­cing, par­ent­ing and school edu­ca­tion: just as road safety is taught. Con­nect­ing two dis­par­ate and highly emotive issues obfus­cates and politi­cizes the real need of parents.

How­ever, the call for “undesir­able” sites to be cen­sored does cause alarm. “Undesir­able” is an emotive, and very sub­ject­ive defin­i­tion for each par­ent and fam­ily: based on their own moral, reli­gious, cul­tural, eth­nic and many other highly per­sonal considerations. 

Today, Edu­ca­tion Depart­ments provide Children-safe Inter­net access. This is treated much the same way as Kids-safe play­grounds and excur­sions: The legal prin­ciple of In-loco Par­entis applies. To imple­ment a Kid-safe fil­ter of any less qual­ity for kids at home seems counter pro­duct­ive. Experts in the field of internet-based edu­ca­tion also note that these fil­ters are very dis­rupt­ing and sig­ni­fic­antly slow down access to the Inter­net: but it is a cost that is born out of necessity.

By hav­ing a laud­ible goal of imple­ment­ing an Opt-out, com­pletely filtered truly Kids-safe Inter­net, the uniten­ded impact to Aus­tralian busi­ness and the eco­nomy will great. There­fore, fil­ters should be Opt-in for ISPs and Consumers.

Both a “Kid-safe Inter­net” needs to be cre­ated as an Opt-in for Home access; backed by a strong edu­ca­tion cam­paign from the Gov­ern­ment to Par­ents, and a stand­ard speed Filter-free Inter­net for the Aus­tralian Economy. 

Also, a “Kid-safe Inter­net” is much more than just what can be seen or read: there must be a code of con­duct for advert­ising, safe social com­munit­ies and busi­ness when inter­act­ing with our Chil­dren. For instance, the new phe­nom­ena of Cyber-bullying.

Any imple­ment­a­tion of Opt-in Fil­ters, Author­it­ies and broad-based edu­ca­tion cam­paigns should also real­ise that there is no abso­lute in safety. Just like pools, bicycles and cars: acci­dents can and will hap­pen. The Inter­net itself is in con­stant change: there­fore, any man­age­ment sys­tem must be cre­ated with con­tinual improve­ment as a stra­tegic imperative.

My think­ing and research on this mat­ter has led me to the fol­low­ing struc­tured recommendations:

Toward A Kid-Safe Internet:

1. Chil­dren must have access to the Inter­net. It is a fun­da­mental part of our world eco­nomy; cent­ral to our future as humans in the 21^st Cen­tury. Ignor­ing the Inter­net will ser­i­ously dis­ad­vant­age future Aus­trali­ans from the world eco­nomy: sim­ilar to neg­lect teach­ing math­em­at­ics or lit­er­acy skills. Simply ban­ning the Inter­net would be a dra­conian move that only a lud­dite minor­ity would advoc­ate. (Recent study on Child­hood cas­ual access to the Inter­net)
2. The world is a large and poten­tially dan­ger­ous place for young humans. That is why today Gov­ern­ments across the world reg­u­late what/when chil­dren can see in movie theatres, read, smoke, drink, engage in sexual activ­ity and drive. There­fore a strong pre­ced­ent has been set for the Gov­ern­ment to equally pro­tect chil­dren when using the Internet.
3. The Inter­net is unlike other pre­vi­ously inven­ted medi­ums, modes and tech­no­logy of com­mu­nic­a­tion: highly dis­trib­uted, uncon­trol­lable, two-way, multi-faceted (for instances: video, text and sound in a myriad of formats). There­fore, a unique admin­is­trat­ive mech­an­ism for pro­tect­ing those who need pro­tec­tion is required. Simply “listing” web sites with movie rat­ings will not work as will miss other con­tent. A cent­ral fil­ter for all inter­net traffic into and out of Aus­tralia is tech­nic­ally not eco­nom­ic­ally nor tech­nic­ally feas­ible with cur­rent com­puter technology.
4. Equally, the Gov­ern­ment should not be in the busi­ness of cre­at­ing fil­ter­ing soft­ware for all inter­net con­nec­ted devices a child has access to. These devices num­ber in their hun­dreds of mil­lions, across thou­sands of ver­sions shapes and sizes: PCs, Macs, non-Windows OS PCs, the wide range of internet-able mobile phones, Game sta­tions and Music play­ers. The Net­Alert pro­gram of the pre­vi­ous Gov­ern­ment has shown to have a low install­a­tion rate, and also misses the Inter­net con­nec­ted mobile phones many chil­dren cur­rently posses.
5. Hav­ing Kid-Safe fil­ters at the ISP level seem to be a sound and logical solution.
6. If the Gov­ern­ment ini­ti­ates the pro­cess of pro­tect­ing our chil­dren whilst they are on the Inter­net, and makes a pub­lic prom­ise that “the inter­net is now safe for our Chil­dren”: simply rely­ing on exist­ing the exist­ing static list-based sys­tems provided by ACMA as pro­posed by Sen­ator Con­roy the Gov­ern­ment will ulti­mately fail.
7. Sen­ator Con­roy talks of a list of ~1,500 sites, and is test­ing fil­ters with a list­ing of 10,000 sites. If you assume 1% of the 1 bil­lion web pages are not suit­able for chil­dren; Sen­ator Conroy’s plans is a few orders of mag­nitude out to safely restrict inde­cent sites.
8. Basing fil­ters purely on HTTP/HTML pro­tocol (that is, just Web browser traffic) will res­ult in a fil­ter­ing fail as the Inter­net com­prises many pro­to­cols. Adding other pro­to­cols such as instant mes­saging (chat rooms), file down­loads, sound and video doubles the load on fil­ters for each new pro­tocol added.
9. Keep Chil­dren “safe” on the Inter­net must be more than just block­ing static pages, sites, pro­to­cols and streams. True Online Child safety must include Cyber-bullying, Social Com­munity codes of con­duct, Inap­pro­pri­ate Advert­ising (sim­ilar to Child TV advert­ising guidelines) and many other asso­ci­ated issues with a broad, two-way com­mu­nic­a­tions system.
10. Of greater con­cern is what our kids: either acci­dently, or on pur­pose; pub­lish to the inter­net. With rampant iden­tity theft, and the abil­ity for people to pub­lish video and images to the world: we need to ensure this is addressed by any kid-safe inter­net.
    

    My sug­ges­ted approach:

11. A new Author­ity is cre­ated; resourced to keep Aus­tralian Chil­dren Safe Online.
12. This Author­ity is com­mis­sioned to address all the above issues, using the know­ledge that already exists in the community
13. This Author­ity has the power to Cer­tify Kid-Safe Inter­net Fil­ters at both end Device and at ISP level. For the sake of this doc­u­ment, these are named Fil­ter Devices.
14. This Author­ity also has the import­ant respons­ib­il­ity to edu­cate and com­mu­nic­ate Inter­net Pub­lic Ser­vice Advice for Parents.
15. The Author­ity own a cent­ral policies and pro­ced­ures to con­trol the Fil­ter Device Cer­ti­fic­a­tion; and pro­cesses of con­tinual man­age­ment of the Fil­ters. The Author­ity has the power to Cer­tify and de-Certify Fil­ter Devices installed at any point in Aus­tralia. Sim­ilar stand­ards exist for toys that show child safety breaches. Par­ents rely on thse stand­ards, recalls and Author­ity vigil­ance to offer a greater level of pro­tec­tion to children.
16. The Author­ity would have exec­ut­ive over­sight over a dis­trib­uted Fil­ter Man­age­ment Body. This body would be crowd-sourced, and be the clearing-house of fil­ters, codes of con­duct, industry best prac­tices and con­nec­tions with local Edu­ca­tion depart­ments and law enforcement. 
17. A cent­ral registry of what a Fil­ter Device must clean, and other child-protection guidelines is man­aged by this man­age­ment body. This registry may con­tain pro­scribed (child p-rn) sites, but to a lar­ger extent all the child-inapproprate mater­ial on the inter­net. This list will be lar­ger than the pro­posed 10,000.
18. Addi­tion­ally, there must be Industry-based codes of con­duct for online for­ums; age veri­fic­a­tion; phish­ing and other internet-related com­munit­ies. This body would could use inter­net tech­no­logy for rapid response, vot­ing and shar­ing best-practise amongst all ISPs.
19. As much a leg­ally pos­sible, this body of fil­ter­ing know­ledge must be trans­par­ent to bona-fide inter­ested parties, and would reflect com­munity “norms” as the inform­a­tion comes from the community.
20. Every ISP who has a com­mer­cial wish to mar­ket and sell “Kid-Safe Inter­net” must com­ply with the Author­it­ies policies and pro­ced­ures (ie: Each ISP chooses to Opt-in).
21. And ISP may only sell a Kid-safe Inter­net con­nec­tion if cer­ti­fied by the Author­ity. This could also apply to Edu­ca­tion depart­ments and private school groups where their con­nec­tion to the inter­net should also be through a Cer­ti­fied Fil­ter Device.
22. The know­ledge of what is to be filtered/codes of con­duct must be col­lect­ively shared so smal­ler, regional based ISPs can provide an equity of pro­tec­tion for rural chil­dren. These smal­ler ISPs will not have equal resources avail­able to their own fil­ter managers.
23. Par­ents and oth­ers interest parties have an internet-speed mech­an­ism to report and escal­ate breaches to the Author­ity; all parties must have trans­par­ent access to these reports; and like Wiki­pe­dia: a his­tory of decisions made.
24. The Author­ity also has the import­ant respons­ib­il­ity to edu­cate Par­ents and Guard­i­ans about the Inter­net. Par­ents have per­sonal exper­i­ence of mor­als, road rules, social norms, cul­tural expect­a­tions passed to them from their par­ents. The inter­net, being extremely new, is alien to today’s par­ents , and is incor­rectly feared. Like in pre­vi­ous times where the Gov­ern­ment has provided inform­a­tion on AIDs, cur­rency changes (to decimal) : it also has a respons­ib­il­ity to edu­cate today’s Aus­tralian par­ents on the Inter­net. The Author­ity must embark on a cam­paign to edu­cate Par­ents as they are the last lines of defence. Par­ents must also be encour­aged to pur­chase a Kid-safe Inter­net con­nec­tion from their choice of ISP.
25. Par­ents who are internet-savvy could opt-out of the Kid-safe Inter­net sys­tem; thereby tak­ing the respons­ib­il­ity for the pro­tec­tion of their chil­dren, or a range of fil­ters based on a range of clas­si­fic­a­tions could be cre­ated. A teen­ager will not want to view the inter­net as if they are 6 years old.
    

    The Cost of Filters

26. Any reas­on­able Adult Aus­tralian does not want a child-like view of the Inter­net as described above,
27. If left Opt-out, the res­ult­ing ISP Fil­ter­ing speed-tax will reduce invest­ment in Aus­tralian busi­nesses, and due to the inter­na­tional nature of the inter­net drive employ­ment and invest­ment offshore.
28. As the deeper level of fil­ters and codes of con­duct as described above are enabled to rightly pro­tect Chil­dren; there will be a slow­ing down of inter­net response for these filtered users. And just as alco­hol, smoking, vot­ing and other rules are relaxed for adults:  the same must apply to inter­net access.
29. Gen­eral ISP con­nec­tions should there­fore be unfiltered, and Opt-in. Turn­ing the inter­net into a pure-children’s play­ground will only hamper Aus­tralian busi­nesses and gov­ern­ments as they con­duct oper­a­tions in the emer­ging global Digital age. Busi­nesses do not con­duct busi­ness in a playground.
30. The impact of Australia-wide man­dat­ory fil­ters would hurt Australia’s eco­nomic future across all sec­tors of industry. Email traffic, online bank­ing, busi­ness to busi­ness com­merce: will all slow due to man­dat­ory filters.
31. Other com­pet­ing eco­nom­ies do not have the same ISP Filtering-speed-tax, and can there­fore out-compete Aus­tralian businesses.
32. There­fore, the fil­ters must be Opt-in and kept sep­ar­ate from the grown-up, busi­ness inter­net; but to a deeper level as the Gov­ern­ment takes on par­tial respons­ib­il­ity of In loco par­entis
    

    Vigil­ance

33. Apart from child p-rn, there are many other insi­di­ous dark corners of the inter­net that impact all Aus­trali­ans. Nigerian scams, phish­ing attacks on bank accounts, gen­eral spam, cyber bul­ly­ing: all drain our eco­nomy. The Aus­tralian Fed­eral Police must be given more exper­i­enced and trained officers with strong Inter­net skills to pro­tect all our cit­izens by poli­cing those who embark on illegal activ­it­ies. The Gov­ern­ment must address these increas­ing risks, too. (ref­er­ence: Online fraud­sters ‘steal £3.3bn’)

The cur­rent con­fus­ing state­ments of policy by Sen­ator Con­roy strikes me as policy-on-the-run with a dearth of grass-roots (elect­or­ate) demand and little to no pub­licly artic­u­lated strategy. There­fore, fear-mongering and ad-hominem attacks from all sides of this argu­ment have arisen. At this stage, it is in Sen­ator Conroy’s hands to clearly artic­u­late the strategy out­side of pure tech­nical “tri­als” and emo­tional and glib “child p-rn” arguments.

The lack of clar­ity and trans­par­ency is of deep con­cern as it thrusts at the heart of people’s desire for the free­dom access to inform­a­tion as adults: uncensored and unfiltered.

Now that the Pandora’s box of a Kid-safe Inter­net is opened, it is in the Government’s hands to do the right thing for our kids without hurt­ing the eco­nomy and freedoms we all enjoy. For the sake of Australia’s col­lect­ive future.

Nick Hodge

Inter­est­ing Links

• Noclean­feed star­ted out with Mark New­ton.
• What chil­dren need is cen­sor­ship Art­icle from The Guard­ian by Aric Sig­man. P-rn is only one of the many things on the inter­net that we must pro­tect chil­dren from; and ulti­mately par­ents must take control.
• Inter­net Cen­sor­ship, Blogs, And The Gov­ern­ment View More inde­pth res­ults of the fil­ter­ing trials
• Why inter­net fil­ter­ing is bad for busi­ness post on Smart Com­pany by Paul Wall­bank. Apart from the poten­tial acci­dental inclu­sion on a fil­ter, the Internet-speed-tax on all Aus­tralian indi­vidu­als, busi­nesses and gov­ern­ment agen­cies would make Aus­tralia an Inter­net back water
• Fireside chats in the 21^st cen­tury by Barry Saun­ders on the ABC web site.  
  
• Elias Biz­annes on The Rudd Fil­ter: one of the ori­ginal, and well thought and more import­antly, well ref­er­enced out posts on the matter.
• With a pub­lic intel­lec­tual like this, who needs bar­bar­i­ans? by Jon Sey­mour, detail­ing the lack of logic from the man­dat­ory fil­ter­ing side of the argu­ment; espe­cially the “inter­net has p-rn, there­fore opt-out all encom­passing fil­ter­ing is required.
• Glenn Milne of news.com.au writes a cohent and con­cise art­icle on Inter­net Fil­ter­ing and Censorship
• Sen­ator Nick Minchin (Liberal-SA) on NBN and fil­ter­ing. I like the quo­ta­tion: “The oppos­i­tion sen­ator addi­tion­ally claimed that Conroy’s policy was caus­ing Aus­tralia embar­rass­ment inter­na­tion­ally, giv­ing it a repu­ta­tion as a repress­ive regime.” Ouch. The full state­ment from Sen­ator Minchin has also been published.
• Tom Edwards and Gareth Grif­fith wrote in a spe­cial research note pub­lished by the NSW Par­lia­ment­ary Lib­rary Ser­vice, repor­ted in ZDNet: “NSW calls Con­roy on Euro fil­ter fudge”
• Mark Newston’s second, follow-up let­ter to his local Labor mem­ber.
• Libertus on Stat­ist­ics Laun­der­ing: false and fant­astic fig­ures in regards to child p-rn online. Well researched, with many links. High­lights the cur­rent emo­tional, McCarthy-ist level of witch hunt­ing with knee-jerk reac­tions does not help. Par­ental vigil­ance is a must.
• Back­ground on The Aus­tralia Insti­tute, and his­tory of fil­ter­ing prior to the cur­rent Gov­ern­ment The ALP under Rudd is in fact far more mor­al­istic and author­it­arian than the Lib­er­als ever were.
• iiNet’s state­ment iiNet and Inter­net filtering
• Kath­ryn Small of IT News reports on Net fil­ters debated by experts at cyber­law forum held on 27^th November.
• Neu­ter­ing the net is about repres­sion, not pro­tec­tion In the Age, by Chris Berg of the Insti­tute of Pub­lic Affairs. “wowser­ism dressed up in con­cerned rhet­oric about the sanc­tity of child­hood is still wowserism.”
• Children’s Wel­fare Groups slam Conroy’s Fil­ter­ing Plans by Asher Moses, The Age
• Clive Hamilton, “Net porn: Whose rights mat­ter most?”. Some notes: argu­ment has moved from chil­dren to teen­agers, two very dif­fer­ent beasts as far as par­ent­ing is concern.
• Labor Plan to cen­sor inter­net in shreds by Asher Moses, Sen­ator Con­roy has said that, under his fil­ter­ing plan, Aus­tralia would sign up to the same IWF blacklist
• and in rela­tion to the Inter­net Watch Asso­ci­ation, the recent block­ing of Wiki­pe­dia edit­ing in the UK does not lend itself creditability.
• LeWeb’08 Attendees note that Aus­tralia is plan­ning to Fil­ter the Internet
• Aus­tralian Inform­a­tion Secur­ity Asso­ci­ation on Man­dat­ory Inter­net Fil­tering
• 37% rise in 2008 “money trans­fer scams” in Aus­tralia res­ult­ing in AU$33million in lost funds. (Choice magazine). Choice has more detail on how to avoid online scams. The fail­ure of the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment to make the broad popu­lace aware of this is more prob­lem­atic for kids than “p-rn”.
• Dept’s Response to post­ings to its “blog” about Inter­net Cen­sor­ship. I just love the double-speak/managerial speak of the title, and the requests to stop call­ing it cen­sor­ship, please!“ Min­is­ter Con­roy on: Pro­mot­ing a civil and con­fid­ent soci­ety online.
• The Sydney Morn­ing Her­ald repor­ted on a secret report: Fatal flaws in web­site cen­sor­ship plan, says report. Again, excel­lent report­ing from Asher Moses
• Duncan Riley, Australia’s premiere blog­ger with logical ana­lysis: Great Fire­wall of Aus­tralia. I agree with Duncan: we need to keep the Gov­ern­ment out of our bed­rooms. To quote Duncan’s last para­graph, to which I agree and fur­ther echo:
  

  Today I am ashamed to be Aus­tralian, ashamed that my Gov­ern­ment should seek to imple­ment dra­conian 19^th cen­tury style cen­sor­ship laws over the mar­vel of the mod­ern age: The Inter­net. Free Speech may not be totally dead in Aus­tralia yet, but it’s about to be placed on life sup­port. Con­roy can say all he wants that this isn’t about free speech, but speech cen­sored by Gov­ern­ment isn’t free, no mat­ter which way you want to spin it. 

• Response from the Sydney Morn­ing Her­ald front page: Con­roy and Prof Land­feldt respond to secret report art­icle, trial delayed. I find it con­tempt­able that Sen­ator Con­roy has access to this report in Feb­ru­ary 2008, yet con­tin­ued to waste our money on “a trial”. A trial that is delayed until mid Janu­ary 2009. The more that is revealed, the more this whole situ­ation looks like a pure polit­ical play to ensure Sen­ator Fielding’s votes in the Sen­ate. So, who is genu­inely look­ing after the kids?

Notes:

• need to find ref­er­ences to fact to back up some of the statements
• there are some leaps of logic that need to be addressed.
• I will modify as com­ments come in
• I have linked to vari­ous post­ings from all sides as the debate has raged. One day someone will find this useful

Join Gov­ern­ment, busi­ness lead­ers and polit­ical blog­gers for Australia’s inaug­ural Polit­ics & Tech­no­logy Forum, brought to you by Microsoft Australia.

Quick details: Date: 25^th June 2008, Time: morn­ing, Loc­a­tion: Hyatt, Canberra

For the first Forum, Microsoft is host­ing key­note speaker Matt Bai, author and polit­ical writer for New York Times magazine. Matt will address the rise of polit­ical move­ments in the inter­net age, with a focus on new forms of Inform­a­tion Tech­no­logy and how they fash­ion or rep­lic­ate the polit­ical debate and trends.

In the midst of the nev­erend­ing US Pres­id­en­tial Primary Sea­son, and just prior to the Party Con­ven­tions: Matt vis­its Aus­tralia and provides a vis­ion of the future of polit­ics in the age of Hyperconnection.

Seats are com­pli­ment­ary and strictly lim­ited. To reserve your place, RSVP by 11 June 2008 and quote event ticket code’BAI’.

Laurel, Australia’s expert on Social Net­works has appeared on Aus­tralian Morn­ing TV

Don’t for­get us little people when you become fam­ous, Laurel!

(This is Laurel before she became MSM fam­ous)

Before you get all con­cerned about the word ‘decim­a­tion’, read the ety­mo­logy.

OK, now we see we are get­ting 10 groups of 100 people thinking (thanks for cor­rect­ing my spelling, Uncle Mike) deeply about top­ics import­ant to the future of Aus­tralia in a radio-sound-byte year (why not 2022. Nah, 2020 just sounds better)

On the inter­net side of this week­end in Can­berra I’d like vote up six inde­pend­ent, smart thought lead­ers in the future of tech­no­logy space. Cameron Reilly, Stilgher­rian, Mark Pesce, Peter Black ‚Laurel Pap­worth, Duncan Riley

 

(ori­ginal image)

With Aus­tralian Politi­cians using “Fibre to the Node” and “Fibre to the Home” as elec­tion ploys, I think It’s Time to raise the issue to a new level:

Fibre to the Dunny.

We should not rest until every Dunny in Aus­tralia has Fibre. Face it, that’s where the best brows­ing occurs.

Also, with Australia’s rising colorectal can­cer, an increase in our fibre diet would also help future generations.

134 out of 139 people in Queens­land con­tac­ted by Aus­tralian Fed­eral Police have fallen for Nigerian Scams. Lot­tery scams.

They sent a little more than $18 mil­lion dol­lars to Nigeria. That is $135,000 per person.

Account­ant, Law­yers, Doc­tors. Not people you would expect to fall for “get-rich-quick” schemes. I hope their tax, law and med­ical expert­ise is sci­en­tific­ally informed!

Keys, email man­age­ment. Know who is send­ing you email.

(from Sky News, 2:15pm)

My com­ment: wis­dom from my Dad: if some­thing sounds too good to be true, ignore it.

At the Hill and Know­lton “Sur­viv­ing and thriv­ing in the next dec­ade — Tech­no­logy Pub­lish­ing” Break­fast Bytes this morn­ing, a group of emin­ent pan­el­ists in pic­ture above, from the left:

• James Tuck­er­man – Pub­lish­ing Editor, Ant­Hill. New rel­at­ively magazine about ideas, money and skills. Pre­vi­ously more print than online, but adding new online pro­jects later in 2007.
• Heather Craven — Dir­ector of Mar­ket­ing & Com­mu­nic­a­tions, Cir­cu­la­tions Audit Board,
  Aus­tralian Cir­cu­la­tion Bur­eau. Sub-committee research­ing digital.
• Brian Haverty – Edit­or­ial Dir­ector, CNET Net­works Aus­tralia : Read­ers first, video and text style publishing.
• Tony Sarno – Editor, APC. Adding new online APC pro­jects later in 2007.
• Peter Roberts – Man­aging Editor, BRW. Part of the Fair­fax group, around since 1857. Noted that http://www.afr.com/ relaunched this week, and closed con­tent model AFR Access continues.
• Andrew Kirk, Hill and Know­lton: Chair

The theme from the morning’s panel and Q&A is that “there will be a mix­ture of online and print” and that “online and print” read­ers are treated as dif­fer­ent read­ers by the big-names. My per­spect­ive as a cor­por­ate online/citizen journ­al­ist is slightly different.

Like the quint­es­sen­tial invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ists: Wood­ward and Bern­stein learnt: fol­low the money. In the above list­ing of pan­el­ists, notice where their stated invest­ment is going. It’s online.

From a tra­di­tional publisher’s per­spect­ive, the busi­ness is about employ­ing journ­al­ists to gather hid­den facts, con­nect, ana­lyse and write stor­ies. People buy the paper (atoms) to read the stor­ies and maybe their eye­balls will stray onto an advert­ise­ment. The mar­ket­ing groups of com­pan­ies buy these pos­i­tions on the paper in the hope that the right eye­balls are enthralled by the product and/or ser­vice — and buy the product. The core of a publisher’s job is man­aging the com­pel­ling con­tent such that a spe­cific audi­ence is cre­ated that advert­isers value.

The web is no dif­fer­ent, except that any­one can be a pub­lisher, and out­source the rev­enue side (advert­ising) to Microsoft or Google. Large pub­lish­ers, such as Fair­fax, are unhappy that their expens­ive infra­struc­ture is sub­ver­ted online: Peter Roberts men­tioned twice that Google made $200 mil­lion in Aus­tralia without invest­ing in the content-side.

Peter Roberts also com­men­ted on one of his com­pet­it­ors, Alan Kohler’s Eureka Report, hav­ing only an online mech­an­ism but suc­cess­ful busi­ness model. My per­spect­ive is that Alan’s busi­ness is suc­cess­ful as he is seen as a respec­ted and inde­pend­ent entity within Australia’s fin­an­cial com­munity. Alan Kohler is a trus­ted brand.

The Gad­get Guy, Peter Blasina’s ques­tion near the end sum­mar­ised the morn­ing for me: What does the future really look like? Each of the rep­res­en­ted panelist’s organ­isa­tions (maybe with the excep­tion of cnet) have their busi­ness strategies weighted toward print, and the brand-value that print brings.

Peter Blas­ina comes at this with cred­ib­il­ity as a true multi-channel brand and per­son­al­ity: print, online and TV — and sur­mised that the com­ing gen­er­a­tion will change the face of the print publisher’s world. And they know it.

The future for pub­lish­ers is where the eye­balls are. And eye­balls are not going to be in print, it is going to be online. Eye­balls stay longer where this is trus­ted value, and most import­antly where there is a com­munity. Read­ing a magazine is an almost high-latency feed­back medium; where two-way inter­ac­tion is slow if attemp­ted at all.

Demo­graph­ics of the eye­balls are chan­ging to more online: younger read­ers being digit­ally nat­ive and older gen­er­a­tions hav­ing more time to explore online; with more females than males desir­ing a com­munity and inter­ac­tion rather than pass­ive accept­ance; high band­width con­nec­tion to per­mit TV, Radio and Print being equal online mediums.

Whilst I have no research to back this up, I am going to state it here. A com­mon refrain from print pub­lish­ers is that “Radio did not replace news­pa­pers, and TV did not replace radio” as their back­wards look­ing per­spect­ive on why online will not replace these old media. My argu­ment is that the inter­net can replace the media styles: with web pages, pod­casts and vid­casts. As Rupert Mur­doch is quoted as say­ing: “Big media no longer con­trols the conversation” 

James Tuck­er­man knows his read­ers, and I think has a plan to cre­ate value in Anthill’s com­munity. He under­stands the emo­tional con­nec­tion that he has with his read­er­ship. James also stated there are “pop­u­la­tion lumps” at birth-years of 1949, 1974 and 1985. Accord­ing to the ABS, there is another pop­u­la­tion lump in the 2005–7 range too. My sug­ges­tion is to watch Ant­hill as a pub­lisher. They are start­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with their community.

A Ques­tion about Second­Life, the cur­rent “craze” in Aus­tralia poten­tially due to a visit in meat­space by a Linden Labs per­sona, res­ul­ted in Tony Sarno say­ing that “many PBL man­age­ment have vis­ited Second­Life”. I fear it is because of the gambling dens rather than the com­munity aspect. About 20% of the audi­ence of largely PR and tech­no­logy industry attendees had logged into Second­Life, of which most had logged in once.

So, in industry par­lance, what is the tip-on for online? It’s the com­munity. Com­munity is the new Brand.