Senator Conroy, the Australian Comms Minister today tried to sneak through wildly unpopular (except for Christian conservatives and crazed right wingers) in the guise of child protection technologies, despite wide-spread industry condemnation from ISPs, technical experts and privacy advocates.

Let’s review why these things are bad :

1. Censorship is anathema to modern democratic principles of free speech and freedom of information
2. Governments, no matter how well intentioned initially, continually abuse these laws to silence critics and control information
3. Sites always get censored which shouldn’t be, restricted critical information to people
4. The filters in question never work against their purported targets, and so only end of restricting information and access to those who need to see it

To see the future of the internet here in Australia, please check these critical links.

Basically, the argument amounts to netbooks being a watered down laptop experience while smartphones are a totally different experience, so in consumers minds, its a matter of what people will want. Excellent.

It is interesting though as the fundamental size of keyboards and screens start facing the realities of what can generally be done on them (anyone see the BSG Caprica pilot ? Love the paper sheet that people can draw on as an interface with those VR glasses).

I know I’ve thought a Macbook Air would probably be ideal for me and totally lurv my unidocy macbook (now macbook pro I’m told), but

The other question I really think it calls into play is the quality and depth of interaction with individuals. From my experience, quality of interaction and what you can actually do on a mobile device still pales in comparison to having a full fledged laptop at your disposal. In fact, I think mobile devices in general lead to more shallow, if more convenient and ubiquitous, interaction. However, the mobility, immediacy and ubiquity pay off for that.

But… for organizations that are simply hoping to move into mobile internet as a way of offsetting poor internet engagement in general, it’s an even worse situation over the long run if this is your hail mary pass : You need to have your engagement basics and strategy (as well as, I’d argue, a lifecycle model) in place in order to understand, engage and communicate effectively with the people your organization or company is trying to influence.

1. Myth #1: A brand community is a marketing strategy
   Reality: A brand community is a business strategy
2. Myth #2: A brand community exists to serve the business
   Reality: A brand community exists to serve the community in it.
3. Myth #3: Build the brand and the community will follow
   Reality: Engineer the community and the brand will be strong
4. Myth #4: Brand communities should be love-fests for faithful brand advocates
   Reality: Smart companies embrace the conflicts that make communities thrive
5. Myth #5: Opinion leaders build strong communities
   Reality: Communities are strongest when everyone plays a role
6. Myth #6: Online social networks are the key to a community strategy
   Reality: Online networks are just one tool. not a community strategy
7. Myth #7: Successful brand communities are tightly managed and controlled.
   Reality: Of and by the people, communities defy managerial control.

I can’t tell you the number of organizations and companies I currently see blowing this at the moment. Particularly big problems seem to be #2, #3, £6, and #7 at least amongst groups I’m intimately associated with.

Anyhow, definitely worth the read if you’re in the online space as well as the highlights on community affiliation, roles and scripts.

Very useful if you need some factoids to back up some proposals or presentations to your PHBs.

(via .O’Reilly Radar)

The records are now available on the Parliamentary website. The cool thing would be them providing an API to access this data from the intertubes to lead the way to some interesting political mashups.

(via BoingBoing.)

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.

Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

It goes on to suggest that any sufficiently useful tool will be used by activists (and that that is an excellent gauge of how well your tool works for all you startup moguls out there). It’s also got some fantastic sorts of examples of people using tools in repressive regimes that I have to admit I wasn’t aware of (my favourite being Tunisia and airliners.net which is a site my father uses), so there are some great examples here if you want to see how activists are doing it for themselves when they don’t have a top 10 advertising (or now, “digital”) agency at their disposal.

Totally loved this idea :

Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites. And even those who could care less about presidential shenanigans are made aware that their government fears online speech so much that they’re willing to censor the millions of banal videos on DailyMotion to block a few political ones.

Blocking banal content on the internet is a self-defeating proposition. It teaches people how to become dissidents – they learn to find and use anonymous proxies, which happens to be a key first step in learning how to blog anonymously. Every time you force a government to block a web 2.0 site – cutting off people’s access to cute cats – you spend political capital. Our job as online advocates is to raise that cost of censorship as high as possible.

As an eerie and disturbing counterpoint, I’d also suggest reading David Bandurski’s… How Control 2.0 found its poster boy in Yunnan, on the case of “netizen” involvement in the investigation of the Yunnan prison death. It concludes :

In the government handling of the ‘eluding the cat’ case we can glimpse an eerie phenomenon emerging in China: the rise of virtual political participation as a proxy and foil for real political empowerment. Notice, political rights are not on offer to China’s citizens.

(via RConversation.)

I think Don’t Vote is one of the most seriously focused and well-designed get-out-the-vote microsites I’ve seen in ages.

Check out some of the posters to download and print and downloadable banners for embedding into webpages.

And I *_really_* especially like their little “Spread the Word” mouse rollover which definitely gives about every option I’ve ever seen for disseminating something on the web in a nice little compact rollover popup. Going to steal the idea for my own sites I think…

Love it. Not easy to tell who is responsible but the DNS record whois mentions Pollinate media in Oregon.

Now, if _someone_ came up with something like this for the *_Canadian_* elections… =<

via scaryideas.

Since then, and with the advantages the underlying Drupal, CiviCRM and Alfresco core technologies have given us (though we’ve had quite a few problems with alfresco since launching), we’ve been able to do quite a bit more than we were ever capable of doing before with the old platform and made some fundamental gains with the site.

But like everything, new technologies and capabilities mean a bit of learning and some of the things we tried didn’t work exactly as planned, and some initial assumptions about the way the site would be used and our audience didn’t turn out as we expected.

So, the web team and our excellent tech partners, CivicActions have been working hard on making improvements particularly in the areas of layout design, information architecture, usability, landing pages (one thing we found is that the main landing page is not necessarily the only landing page due to google’s near pervasive ability to have people jump to places in the site from search results) and improvements to impact both searchability, cross linking and ultimately SEO to make thing easier for our constituents and the people we are trying to reach to find. There are also a few technical improvements on the end to make things run faster and more reliably.

It’s a big piece of work and a lot of sweat and negotiated has gone into the improvements and carefully thought-out trade-offs.

A big, _big_ hand to the web team and our Civi partners for some great work done and getting it up and out the door.

Contrast the new :

with the original launch :

Would love to hear (constructive) comments back. We’ll be doing a big usability push and working on some persona-based design work in the coming months to carve out the future direction of the site and its focus.

Very nicely executed social networking site based on activism, sharing and discussion. Just wondering what they used to get the base done. Inososhi ? LovdByLess ? They even managed to incorporate the new visual Global Identity and reconcile it with AI UK’s current visual scheme.

Not to over-romaticize them but some of them were epic and such a critical part of hacker lore that they’ve entered the cultural lexicon.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

> what is a grue?
The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

Some absolute genius has brought these back with Parchment, a web-based Z-machine that is now online.

So, having seen a pointer to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I had to have a go again. I had forgotten how much fun it was.

Of course, playing HGTTG is scarily reminiscent of working for the large NGO I am currently working for _and_ living in England. It’s blurring the line of what’s entertainment a bit. =<

>read mail
There are many pieces of mail. Most are from some computer company called Infocom which wants you to buy their games. Hidden underneath is an official letter from the local council, dated some two years ago and inexplicably not delivered till now, explaining that a demolition order has been served on your home. The date of demolition is today’s date.

(via Bambinos)

Sean Travis is a geek. Pure and simple. And has decided to run for office. He has clearly identified a group he believes can help him take down the current Kansas State Legislature representative (described by others as “an anti-abortion, anti-evolution, pro-censorship, pro-surveillance, anti-gay incumbent.”), other geeks.

He’s calling on them, precisely 3000 of them, via an xkcd style comic style page to donate precisely $8.34 each and help him with name recognition advertising as he has identified this as the key to winning (xkcd is a very geeky, minimalist comic famous for using stick figures for its graphics, yet being very clever, funny and a pillar of high geek culture, you can see it here : http://xkcd.org ).

He’s currently polling within 3 percentage points of his opponent. And he’s got 2,894 donors as of this morning (which is a record for donations to a Kansas rep)

In terms of a clearly identified group, goal, and change he wishes to happen (as well as a focused communication that appeals to his target influence group), it’s a great example of strategic campaigning well executed (so far).

UPDATE [19 jul 2008] : Sean blew away the 3000 mark in just over 36 hours and is now coasting close to 5000… and has added onto his comic. Very impressive.

He works the web like few others do, regularly hangs out in fan forums and plugs into his reader and viewership like few others.

So, I’m not sure what to make of his latest, Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer. OK,a supervillain musical sounds somewhat plausible, and there is no question that the singing Buffy episode is probably amongst most of my female friends’ favourites, but I’m still not sure what to make of it.

However, I still watched it like a rabid fan boy, and even though I’m not a fan of musicals, I have to say I enjoyed the episodic immensely (and tuned in today to watch the finale).

Now I’m kinda wondering where it goes from here. Is he moving it into the stable at Dark Horse comics ? Is it an indirect pilot for a show ? Not sure if its intentions are modest or grand but you have to give a tip of the hat to the guy.

More than anything though, I think it does demonstrate that excellent writing, and some low budgets can pull off some extremely interesting stuff on the internets.

(another interesting thing was the use of Hulu as the video serving. Have to admit it was extremely high quality and smooth).

nb: It’s even better to watch this in hi def actually (anyone know how to do this for an embedded video automatically ?). So, think about going direct to the YouTube link and playing it (hit the “watch in high definition” under the “Links” under the video)

They might have some minor distracting internet entertainment value and mint a couple of “facebook millionaires” (which never fails to amaze me), but the fact is they’re the dust of history and say more about personal vanity than most things.

But… a Facebook Calendar Generator ? Now that’s useful. Basically this small application once installed in facebook provides cal feeds for your calendaring software if it’s iCal compatible (ie. iCal, Sunbird, Google Cal etc).

It gives you two tremendously useful calendar subscriptions :

1. Peoples’ Birthdays – I can’t tell you the number of people whose birthdays aren’t in my addressbook. And I do like pinging pepole on their birthdays. Cause, no matter what people say, everyone likes it when you remember
2. Events You’ve RSVPed – which is also useful as I generally rsvp and then forget about the damn things. Surprisingly useful actually.

A blessing and a curse I guess. Means it would be dead simple for me to come here on holiday even when things are a little too busy to really warrant it at work, but means I’m not quite ever away from work at the same time. Hmmm…

Strangely, upload speeds appear to be strangely choked throughout the country based on connection testing I’ve done all over the place from even dedicated bandwidth places. Inside Trukey they seem fine, but as soon as you get o level3 access, especially through TurkTelecomm through to the Netherlands, you definitely notice a drop in speed and quality of service. Ought to make getting all those 2MB photos up to flickr a little bit interesting.

That is one of the things I love most about this stuff; the fact that with a laptop and a connection to the internet, you can mock something up, deploy it across the globe and have a site up and running in no time flat (or a little longer if you’re me).

Anyhow, merhaba de turkiye everyone. The weather is absolutely brilliant here and (while I’ve managed to get a vicious sunburn somehow) I have to say it’s a nice break. Here for a few days for work and then going to be kicking around the Turkey’s Western Med coast and the South Aegean and terrorizing the poor, unsuspecting local populace. Details for the trip are here

The site is totally run on free and open source software and consists of a Drupal and CiviCRM backed main web presence that can feed off our shiny, new open source java-based Alfresco document management system. It sports completely redone Information Architecture and User Experience for ease of navigation and to help specific audiences find what they need and get stuff done and the site also incorporates Amnesty International’s new global visual identity to attempt to unify the organizational brand around the world in the 70+ countries we operate in.

Technically, the project has been one of the most ambitious the organization has ever undertaken and we’re hoping the architecture is the blueprint for a much stronger platform for human rights impact on the web for many of our sections. We’ve got big plans for it (insert maniacal evil supervillain laugh here)…

Honours and tips of the hat to all the organizations that helped us with this : CivicActions, Fortune Cookie, Eva A and finally ImportantProjects. The internet and tech crews at Amnesty have expended an absolute herculean effort on this project for months now and have been like tireless, unthanked superheroes driving this thing through to completion. I’m stoked as to the possibilities we now have before us. We have a really great foundation to build on which is a huge leap forward from the system we’ll now be slowly decommissioning.

I’m exhilarated but completely exhausted, and yet still can’t seem to sleep. We’re squashing the usual few deployment bugs and issues on any sort of deployment of this magnitude, but overall, a pretty damn smooth rollout except for the few occasional moments of total terror.

Props to all the Amnesty folk who got this up…

via TechCrunch

Since, I’m stuck at home with a touch of the flu on a gorgeous sunny Vancouver Saturday (and should really be doing work anyway), this seems like a pretty topical post…

Recently while working on (yet another) degree, I was taking anthropology courses interested in the intersection of technology and culture and in particular, the way cultures develop in online worlds of massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs).

A paper on the virtual economy of Norrath had pointed out that based on the fact there was a real exchange rate for selling goods inside the virtual EverQuest world in our flesh and blood one, that it could be argued there was an established exchange rate and that both a GDP could be determined and established for the citizens for EverQuest’s Norrath. The wider implications of this to me were much more interesting. Economics itself uses suites of mathematical tools and (sometimes patently untrue) assumptions to try and emulate the “rational” choices of individual actors and remove holes in nice, neat theories, but here was an established economy where actors were making individual choices based on personal preference, complete with money supply, taxation, inflation, prices and all the other ugliness of a real live economy. A suitably modelled economic experiment could easily be created and run to determine policy impacts and whether incentives or disincentives could work in stemming whatever societal ills and economist or policy maker was trying to enhance or remedy before as an adjunct (or even replacement once it became sophisticated enough) to modelling. Any intrepid EQ or WoW people out there willing to work on modelling an economic experiment in-game to try and determine a policy effect ? (Taxation would be an interesting one).

This week an even more interesting corollary of real world modelling came up in an inadvertent bug/feature released onto the unsuspecting citizens of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (I really have to start looking at spending a little time in these virtual worlds one of these times). A new area opened up allowed high level characters to fight the troll God of Blood, Hakkar the Soulflayer, a high level, powerful boss who possessed a spell called Corrupted Blood which hit high level characters with damage and then continued to effect them and nearby other players by causing damage once they were struck by it.

Unfortunately, the world designers had not foreseen that some players would leave the battle after being struck and carry it into the greater world, and coming into close contact with both real players and NPCs have created a highly lethal virtual plague that is spreading like, well… the plague amongst the huge population centres of the World of Warcraft universe (The screensnap prefacing the post is from someone’sFlickr stream of the carnage the plague has caused in IronForge one of the larger population centres in WoW). Apparently, it will kill almost instantly anyone under level 50 (I have no idea what that means, but it sounds like it takes time to level people up to that level). Even more interesting, roving bands of infected players have also started using it as a form of biological warfare attacking previously safe havens and taking them over. Attempts by game designers to quarantine both infected players and cities has proven to be fairly fruitless in something which, for all accounts (I don’t play), is reminiscent of the Black Plague sweeping Europe Ebola Zaire in Africa.

The real value I see here, besides delighting the otherwise jaded citizens of WoW with an emergent problem that they seem to be quite enjoying, is the ability something like this would provide to model disease vectors in something like a real world contagion or even pandemic.

I’m sure there are other uses for virtual worlds as an experimental social laboratory that simply haven’t been thought up or tested but it does provide a kind of interesting environment that is simply inaccessible to the tools mathematics seems to be having trouble using in tackling tough, real world problems in a comprehensive manner.