My own piece of the Internet
 
Category: <span>Politics</span>

Category: Politics

Thoughts on same sex marriage

I was surprised that I got married.  It wasn’t that I was really against it,  I had a girlfriend I adored and had a lot of fun with.  It was more the permanency and establishment vibe that said,  “I am a joiner”. I was a little anti-establishment in my twenties. I had a choice to get married or stay blissfully de-facto. It is a disgrace that my gay and lesbian friends do not. Two days ago the happily unmarried Julia Gillard outed herself as a social conservative saying she had a “pro-union, pro-Labor upbringing in a quite conservative family, in …

The anatomy of a #spill on twitter

Last night I was watching the ABC news and checking our twitter when I was some mention of an #alpspill. I searched for #spill, tweeted something inane and waited for the ABC to report something. It came in the 7.30 report and it amounted to guesswork by Kerry O’Brien about Julia Gillard being in Kevin Rudd’s office. Apart from the Twitter gossip there really wasn’t any news. Crikey was silent, The ABC was relatively silent, The SMage was relatively silent. Some “star tweeters” like @bernardkeane simply said “I can’t comment”. What there was on twitter though was a lot of …

The importance of lying

Are you a liar? I am. I lie continually. I am like that Jim Carrey character who lies so much he is forced to spend a whole day telling the truth. Lying, whether it be stretching the truth or a bald faced porky pie is an important skill. Federal opposition leader Tony Abbott has established that he is a compulsive liar. According to Abbott things can be said in the heat of the moment that aren’t true. So if they aren’t true they are lies. And that’s OK because it happened in the heat of the moment. With professional and …

You and me, and the evolving web 2.0

Since Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle introduced the term Web 2.0 five years ago, there has been an explosion of web tools and Internet-connected gadgets that foster conversations, interactions and discoveries. In the past five years startups have built massive brands by harnessing communities and conversations. Brands like Twitter, Facebook, Stumble Upon, Ebay, Amazon and many others grew massive audiences by offering means for related and unrelated people to connect using Internet technologies. By crowdsourcing these brands provided platforms for collective interactions that create useful and cool tools like book reviews, movie databases, online encycopedias, map annotations, link resources . …

Looking forward and looking back

Each January the blogosphere is inundated with prediction lists. It is a chance for each blogger to prove how smart they are. Some lists are hugely intelligent and some are hugely indulgent. So in the spirit of indulgence I thought I would create my own list of predictions for 2009. But after some time pondering with a glass (or two) of wine I decided that a things that sucked about 2008 list would be the best way to look into the liquid crystal ball. Google dominance In 2008 Google consolidated its lead over other search engines. For a market to …

The big screen

Senator Conroy, our new Minister of Communications has proven that the Labor Party still do not understand the Internet. Mark Latham in his wonderfully vindictive apologia, The Latham Diaries, writes that in the dying days of the Keating government the then Minister of Communications was terrified of Telstra and virtually at their beck and call. Whilst Conroy has been pretty hairy-chested in his approach to the Telco, the Rudd government appear to be trying to out-nanny the Howard government by censoring Internet content. Not even Howard attempted to server-level Internet filters to protect our fragile morals. And this is the …

The rise of the left

When I was 18 years old and just starting at University I sought out, amongst other things, the socialist club and paid my $5 fee to join up. I had some knowledge of socialism and a vague idea about communism, Lenin and a love of the great design of post revolutonary Russia and the art of Mayakovsky. But at 18 what really interested me was the brand of socialism, not that I would have put it that way then. Socialism was entirely other to the demands and constraints of a society which appeared to expect a clear choice between Accountant, …