Following my outlining of Web 2.0 ideas for the ABC on Counterpoint, innovator and entrepreneur Ralph McKay got in touch with me to tell me of his own efforts to develop online opinion markets. These are interesting because they’re not principally prediction markets. They’re devices to elicit the opinions of large numbers of people using the net. Elections do this of course, but in a less flexible way than the online opinion markets that one can develop on the net - where people can change the questions being asked and so on. Read more »
Quoth Christopher Pyne in an interview on ABC Radio this morning:
There are a thousand ideas, there are 660 minutes of discussion on the summit program, which means for every idea there are 39.6 seconds put aside for discussing that particular idea.
So far this claim has been repeated by the ABC and others, without contention, for about 4 hours. It’s a great soundbite.
But 39.6 seconds of contemplation will show that Pyne’s maths is faulty. It runs thus: Read more »
So yesterday I lost my temper at a monumentally silly bit of policy making on-the-run by the new ALP government. After that tantrum I learnt that there was both more — and less — than met the eye.
To start with, let’s review what Julia Gillard said yesterday to start the whole shitstorm: Read more »
Per pestering by Dave Bath:
TOPIC 9: The future of Australian governance
“Google Government” should be a motto going forward. FOI should be altered to place the emphasis on departments to decide at the point of creation whether a document is sensitive; the default should be full disclosure. All possible government documents and data should be accessible and queryable by any member of the public. Read more »
I’m reading one of the better Web 2.0 books around instructively and amusingly called Here comes everybody which Peter Gallagher told me today came from Finnigan’s Wake. I thought I was terribly clever when I discovered this book on the net within a day or so of it having been published and had it shipped here by Amazon. And then I saw the paperback sitting smiling back at me at the ‘new bestsellers’ part of Readings Bookshop. So no brownie points for me. Read more »
Dave Bath at Balneus tends to perform a public service by nagging people to do their civic duty by contributing submissions to public inquiries and consultations. In that spirit I’ll mention a two that caught my eye: Read more »
I honestly thought that the Coalition had set the low point for IT policy in Australia. Between Richard Alston and Helen Coombs the whole scene was comprehensively botched; Mark Vaille’s being utterly sucked in by slick US negotiators in the FTA negotiations — and the Chapter 17 trainwreck we got from his ignorance — just set the seal on it. Read more »
On and off over the past few months I have received emails to say that our feeds don’t appear in aggregators like Google Reader or Bloglines. Or that they turn up late in big bunches. Or days in arrears.
Each time I would fire up my browser, navigate to the feed URL, confirm that the feed was feeding, and promptly blame Google or Bloglines; sometimes for variety I blamed Wordpress.
Then yesterday I got an email from James Andrewartha. He wrote: Read more »
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