Over the past year I’ve been having an ongoing argument with quite a few people who can’t understand why the Rudd-Gillard government has persisted with its internet filtering proposal since “everyone knows it’s a bad idea”.

I can’t argue with the ‘bad idea’ part, but the ‘everyone’ part is simply delusional. Yet many quite sensible people I speak to are genuinely bewildered that the filter is almost completely ignored by the mainstream media and barely registers on the radar of political debate.

(To be fair, the mainstream media’s reporting of internet censorship has been woeful and a prime example of what Jay Rosen calls “he said, she said journalism“, where a reporter simply records the opinions of opposing sides of an issue without subjecting their claims to any analysis. Most recently, on last night’s Q&A, Tony Jones only gave Small Business Minister Craig Emerson enough time to claim the government should filter all pornography that children shouldn’t see before shutting down the topic, preventing any debate.)

This is the kind of conversation I’m talking about:

renailemay: So let me get this straight. No #1 election issue on Twitter is the filter. And yet no questions from the floor during #ausvotes debate

vealmince: @renailemay Do you really not understand? Twitter is NOT the Australian public. It’s a tiny fraction of mostly like-minded people. #ausvotes

renailemay: @vealmince do you really not understand? Twitter is the Australian public. We live in Australia and we vote. Stop telling me I’m a minority

vealmince: @renailemay You and your 1000 mates. Either it’s not enough people, or you’re not organised enough to make a political difference.

Late last year, I argued that filter opponents were failing to cut through because they spent too much time agreeing with each other, debating nomenclature and deploying logic and sarcasm, rather than actual political lobbying, to sway the discussion in their favour.

But I think another factor at work is the inability of many in the twittersphere to see outside their small and mostly like-minded online social circle. This groupthink has led many online news outlets to publish polls finding that 95% or more of their readers were against an internet filter, unaware of or deliberately ignoring the massive selection bias inherent in asking that question to that audience.

The harsh reality is, even if everyone on Twitter thought and voted the same way, it would make no difference.

There are 13.9 million registered voters in Australia. There are 1.2 million Twitter accounts, of which no more than half could be active users who are eligible to vote. That makes 600,000 or about 4% of registered voters. It’s not a huge number, but 4% could gain a Senate seat, depending on how preferences fell, or swing the whole election.

Nice try. But of course, not all Twitter users would change their votes.

If Twitter is a representative sample of the Australian population (there are reasons to argue why it’s not), according to the latest polls, its users are split 50:50 on the two-party preferred vote. That means even if you could persuade every active Twitter user in Australia to vote for one party, it would only deliver a 2% swing.

But of course, you couldn’t get them all to vote the same way. Even though the filter is bad, some might argue that on the balance of all its policies, Labor is the less worse choice. Some of them might not care about the filter or, believe it or not, actually support it. (OMG, nowai!)

Still, a swing of less than 2% could be an election winner if Twitter users were disproportionately located in marginal seats such as western Sydney and the Brisbane suburbs. Whereas if a large number of Twitter users lived in safe seats, such as those in inner-city Melbourne and Sydney, even a 4% swing would make no difference.

Which do you think is more likely?

The impotent rage many Twits feel about the political-media establishment’s nonchalant treatment of the censorship issue is palpable. But it’s merely a symptom of the increasing influence of numbers men, marketing wonks and political strategists who use business intelligence technology to slice-and-dice, drill-down focus on winning a dozen or so marginal seats. If the issue that arouses your passion is not one that boils the blood of the residents of those seats, you’re irrelevant to the political process.

Viva democracy.

The trick with spam – and some malicious software – is convincing people to open an email, click on a link or something else they wouldn’t normally do. Social engineering, when done well, means getting inside people’s heads and understanding their desires, fears and vulnerabilities.

It’s not always done well.

For instance, lately I have been receiving emails, about one a day, along the following lines:

Hi
It`s Rosalyn again. Will you ever contact me?
I made those nude pictures especially for you.

Phew, state-of-the-art social engineering there! The next day it was Jessie, not Rosalyn, but the message was the same.

Since this approach clearly hasn’t worked with me, the spammers thought they’d try a different approach.

Hi
It`s Cleveland again. Will you ever contact me?

Genius!

This week I posted a survey on twtpoll, asking people the following question:

Which would you rather have in your home: Eddie McGuire or a steaming pile of poo?

The results were emphatic:

• Eddie McGuire: 2 votes (3%)
• Steaming pile of poo: 61 votes (97%)

While this was a terribly entertaining result, I did it to point out some of the problems with the many, many survey stories we see in the media. Read the rest of this entry →

In my current source of employment, I often have to apply my immense knowledge of grammar and style (not!) to reviewing other people’s work. Amazingly, most of the time they don’t hate me for doing this.

This gives me an opportunity (and audience) to rant about trends in modern English communication that piss me off. And lately, two words in particular have made my shit list:

1. Via

In recent years it has become popular in Australia to say, for instance, “I received the documents via email”. This is a habit we appear to have picked up from our American cousins, who never use a simple word when an ostentatious one can be utilised. (For instance, a person we call an anaesthetist, they call an anaesthesiologist, which is longer and fancier sounding, and also stupid; the doctor in question does not study the science of pain relief, he or she gives you pain killers).

Anyone who has visited Italy will realise that ‘via’ comes from the Latin word for ‘road’. In English, the OED defines it as:

1 travelling through (a place) en route to a destination. 2 by way of; through. 3 by means of.

If you substitute definitions 1 or 2 of ‘via’ into the sentence “I received the documents via email”, it makes no sense at all. And why would you say “I received the documents by means of email”, when you could just as easily say “I received the documents by email”? This way you save a whole letter and avoid sounding pretentious. I call that a win-win.

2. With

I have noticed it’s quite popular to construct sentences in the form of “With [some sort of trend happening], [some consequence of this trend can be observed].”

It is hard to put in words exactly what is wrong with structuring sentences this way, aside from a personal dislike. This construction is overused and often leads to overlong, overly complicated sentences. Also it is a weak way of showing causation; I always prefer to say “[Something is happening] as a result of/because of/due to [some trend]“. But that’s just me.

In the past five years there’s been a steady stream of social networking platforms du jour which then fell out of favour with geeky early adopters as as the great unwashed discovered them – from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter.

All the while, LinkedIn sat around gradually building momentum without any of the fanfare or media hype. Recruiters loved it, if only for its ability to fill quotas on candidate lists. But the developers also pulled in a few ideas from here and there – groups, events, marketing, status updates – OK, they nicked it all from Facebook and Twitter.

As a result, people looking to network for business – not to share pictures of kids and cats – have been coming back to LinkedIn and thinking, ‘Hey, this is pretty good!’ And LinkedIn gave them somewhere to put all their relevant career and skills information, which is a lot harder to do on Twitter.

Last week I hosted an online seminar with Karen Moloney from Get Me Learning Resources and Faye Hollands from Outshine Consulting. Karen took us through the nuts and bolts of promoting yourself and your business while Faye told us how she had used and benefited from it. And as usual, there were heaps of cracking questions from the audience.

If you’re dead keen to find out more, you can read Karen’s helpful handout notes or watch a recording of the webinar (though you will have to fill in your details to get it).

Marketers often say that men find shopping for clothes frustrating and alienating. It’s almost as though the entire process was designed for women, if you believe the stereotypes.

Some very clever online businesses have sprung up based on this premise, making it easier for men to find clothes they want without having to go through an embarrassing ordeal.

I’m not like that, generally. Over the years I’ve found a few good shops and clothing labels that usually have stuff I like that fits me, where they don’t have crappy dance music at eardrum-bursting volume and where the staff are helpful and unpretentious.

Most of the time.

Read the rest of this entry →

Pity the poor people of Albury-based transport company Border Express. On Friday they posted an innocent job ad looking for a developer with SQL Server and Visual Basic experience. But over the weekend, some wiseguy who had access to the company’s account details on Seek made a couple of sneaky changes. To the required skills, the miscreants added “”DD cup breasts, slim waist, tight twat” and a willingness to undergo “a pre-employment strip search to ensure they meet the requirements of the position”.

Sure, it’s one way to attract a lot of attention to an otherwise dull job ad, but everyone from female job hunters to company management was not impressed. The company and police are looking into it.

In Melbourne’s western suburbs a transport company employee was killed after a server fell on him while it was being unloaded from a truck. He reportedly saw the 200kg fridge-sized machine coming loose from a forklift and decided he would try to save it.

It wouldn’t be the first time someone put their body on the line to try and save an expensive piece of gear. With photographers, for instance, there’s a strong instinct to save the camera even while risking their own health, or body parts. But no matter how expensive the gadget, chances are a limb – or a life – are much harder to replace.

Just about everyone I know thinks the government’s plan to legislate mandatory internet filtering is a really bad idea.

This could lead me to believe the majority of Australians are as passionate about internet censorship as me and my friends. But then I remember that most of my friends are university educated, left-leaning types who work in journalism or the IT industry.

This same selection bias is at work in the online community, particularly on Twitter. The sort of people who use Twitter, who blog, who read the IT media are precisely the sort of people who would oppose internet censorship.

This has led many people to believe if they make enough noise about it online, the Government will drop the filter. Unfortunately, this greatly overestimates the importance and influence of Twitter and social media generally when it comes to real-world politics.

Even an infinite number of angry posts on Twitter, sarcastic blog posts and articles in the IT press would still have no effect on Government policy. Politicians only care about who can deliver them blocs of votes in important electorates.

Online fame is fleeting, but mine was the top article on ABC's The Drum for a little while

As I argue on ABC’s The Drum blog, so far the Christian lobby – which is for the filter – is doing this a lot better than the disparate anti-filter coalition.

This is not to say the anti-censorship campaign is doomed. However, it needs to focus less on preaching to the choir and more on real-life, professional political lobbying.

It’s a big ask, particularly because many of the anti-censorship groups have little experience in direct political action. But it must be done if we are to convince the Government of the immense folly and dire (supposedly) unintended consequences of its current plans.

In covering the ongoing AFACT v iiNet case in the Federal Court, local journalists such as The Australian’s Andrew Colley and ZDNet’s Liam Tung have caused some controversy by live tweeting from within the courtroom. While broadcast journalists in Australia are not allowed to report from inside courtrooms, the Federal Court has decided it’s up to individual judges if they want to allow live coverage on Twitter.

In the same spirit, yesterday I called Toshiba tech support for help on a very minor issue with my laptop. Ideally I would have preferred to email a question and then get annoyed when no one responded (59% of companies don’t respond to email queries, you know). But Toshiba doesn’t give you the option; just a phone number and a postal address. So I called, and it quickly became apparent I wasn’t going to get anywhere fast. Because I had nothing better to do while waiting on hold, I started Tweeting: Read the rest of this entry →

Another yarn I wrote for CRN, this time on Telstra’s consumer ISP BigPond redirecting mistyped domain name queries to a branded error page. In other words, you type google.coj in your browser and rather than receiving your browser’s standard error page, you get redirected to a BigPond page that gives you helpful suggestions – maybe google.com? – but also ads and pay-per-click links.

On one side of the argument are the techies, who dislike Telstra messing with the way the domain name system is supposed to operate, albeit only within BigPond’s network. Whether they dislike this for reasons of technical purity, or because Telstra will make money out of it, is highly debatable. I suppose there’s also a slippery slope argument to be made; if BigPond makes this change to how DNS works, what’s to stop it from redirecting, say, iinet.net.au to bigpond.com or an error page?

The other side of the argument is that Telstra provides helpful, contextual information that more easily gets people where they want to go. (Though if this were purely altruistic, you wouldn’t have any ads or paid links on the page, presumably.) As long as an ISP delivers this service transparently, honestly and with an opt-out (all true in this case), where’s the problem?

Online glory is fleeting, but I would like to point out that for a couple of hours this morning, mine was the top tech story on Google News for Australia.

Yay me!