Filtered

That whole Twitter thing

So my colleague Joshua and I today dived into this Twitter thing that's been buzzing around the blogosphere for weeks. Here's my page, and Joshua's is here. He wrote a yarn on the subject which was slated to run in tomorrow's paper (Friday).

So what is it? Think instant messaging meets blog, meets SMS messaging, and stir with large amounts of random bizzare conversations. I went out to lunch with an SMS notification service turned on and kept getting an SMS for each message one of my friends wrote. Let's just say I turned that little service off quickly. I can't decide if it's all just a little bit silly. Whatdya reckon?

Update: Story got held. You get that.

Update2: It got a run on page 3 of the Weekend AFR in case you missed it. Joshua kicked off the piece thus: "A digital stream of consciousness called Twitter has become the online flavour of the month."

AIIA joins lobby-o-sphere

The Australian Information Industry Association's new boss Sheryle Moon has launched into the blogosphere. Notable because she's a CEO of a very vocal IT industry lobby group, and there are few CEOs blogging in Australia. Also notable because she did one of those comeeko photo cartoons, a sign that she can't take herself too seriously. It's not exactly a funny cartoon, but hey, she's blogging!

US department blocks the bloggers

United States department of the interior chief information officer Hord Tipton has just delivered his presentation at the AFR's Government Technology Summit here in Canberra, Australia.

Interesting, smart guy. My ears pricked up when he started talking about how the government has implemented web filtering across approximately 45 categories, including all the usual areas: porn, dating services etc. Then out comes this pearler.

"We blocked the bloggers. That is a first ammendment right as far as bloggers are concerned," he said. "They have taken over in the United States."

Bloggers were apparently wasting time and not doing their 'real jobs.' The audience here laughed at the fact that Hord had upset his department's bloggers. 

But seriously, blogging an elicit activity worthy of being banned like porn sites? Yikes.

If there are any blocked corporate/government bloggers out there, I like to hear how that's affected your attitude towards your employer.

Now you see it, now you don't

I just thought you should know that Tom Reynolds' Telstra blog On the case no longer appears on NowWeAreTalking. It was there this morning, and is not there now. If you look at this page, you'll see a little white box where he used to live.

Cam's got the background here. (And yes, it was Cam who broke the story online, thanks mate... ; )

Update: I've written a big yarn about the story behind why Tom was sacked from Telstra in today's (Friday 13th) AFR, page 67. I can't link to it online because AFR Access is subscriber only. Worth adding that in the process of reporting on the story, it seems to me that Telstra decided to take down the blog in anticipation of today's piece. Over to you as to whether that was a good or bad thing.

Ballsy or scary?

A blog called Inside Google says the search giant's decision to comply with a court ruling and completely exclude Belgian newspapers from its search results is "Ballsy":

Old, dying media, here’s your lesson for the day: Google doesn’t steal your content, it just points its millions of users at you. That is to your benefit. Don’t blow it next time.

I beg to differ. That's not ballsy, that's scary. Hello search engine and (by default) internet business monopoly. Microsoft's been down this road, and it's not a pretty one.

Now you see it, now you don't

Telstra's Rod Breum in this post said we'd never run a letter to the editor from Ericsson's local chief Bill Zikou complaining about AFR coverage. It ran it today's paper.

But curiously, if you look at the public list of stories on Rod's blog here, it seems the post has been removed. What's up with that Rod?

(Almost) a decent Aussie blog index

You might recall an amusing little stink Charles Wright & I created around the idea of a non-vendor A-list of Aussie bloggers. Well now it seems The Australian Index has risen up to do a proper job of listing who's who in the ozblogosphere (thanks Trevor for the tip).

I have one quibble - aside from the fact that I can't see my blog listed (sniff). There does not appear to be any search engine that lets me confirm I'm not listed, or put more broadly, allow the rest of the world to find out this fabulous blog is not listed (don't ya just love the humility...). Seriously tho, a good search engine would improve on the basic state-by-state lists.

Swiki stuff

Hey you. If you're reading this via my RSS feed, check the latest revelation of my inner geek on my site. I'm trying out one of TypePad's new widgets, a swiki cloud. It's very now, baby. Are these things really useful? I'd be interested to get your take. On the upside, it has given me a search bar on the blog for the first time. And it has this really cool feature where you can compare the results of the swiki search versus Yahoo!, Google, MSN etc.

I've also shuffled a few categories around on the site - a prelude to a site redesign that I've been pondering for some time. Any recommendations on a web designer in Australia?

Beginning of the end for Bloglines?

I've just started playing with Google's news aggregator/RSS reader called (surprise!) Google Reader, announced on the Google blog this weekend.

My first reaction was "ah crap, now I've got to import all my Bloglines feeds." Of course, that's a hassle that I'll look to avoid until I get a better sense of what this is all about. Some early thoughts:

* It's one of the first times I've seen an RSS aggregator that doesn't require you to copy/paste an RSS URL string, or at least have to deal with it in any automated fashion.

* To a complete rss/newsreader newbie, I'm not sure that it will be as intuitive as Google will hope. You are at first presented with a blank screen which can be a bit intimidating. On the upside, a quick search in the "search for new content" bar and you are away.

* I like the chronological list of stories that get populated into the left hand side. The ability to "star" stories of interest is good, except that when I tried this feature I got an "oops" error message. No doubt it will get fixed easily/quickly.

* The keyboard shortcuts are a nice touch, but not sure that I'd convert from using arrow keys.

What do you think? Worth migrating from Bloglines?

Blog fame spreads

Opened up the SMH this morning to see Darren Rowse staring at me from a prominent pic on page 3. The paper has mixed together recent news of big media dot-com deals and thrown in a bit of Web 2.0 for flavour. Darren and b5 media have not been acquired (yet?) but the concept of "blogpreneurs", as Jeremy Wright puts it, is still a subject of fascination. And in true blogger fashion, Darren's not missed a beat, posting a welcome note early this morning. Congrats mate.