Archive | February, 2010

Don't prosecute the messenger

I subscribe to the Google Public Policy Blog and get updates every few days. Today, I got sent a story about a case in Italy where three Google executives have been prosecuted for a video of an autistic student being bullied at school. In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and [...]

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Complaining about Jon Faine

I sent this complaint into the ABC today after hearing some outrageous commentary from Jon Faine. If you were unfortunate enough to tune in as well, I encourage you to also make a complaint. You can do so here. I tuned into 774 to hear Jon Faine “interviewing” Dr Peter Singer. I understand that Jon [...]

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Unions and Twitter

The open, conversational nature of social networking offers the perfect elixir to turn this around. Check out my first Media140 blog post, discussing how union leaders can promote themselves, their unions and their activities socially using Twitter.

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The #Nocleanfeed campaign, DoS and political nous

The #Nocleanfeed (aka, #OpenInternet) movement won’t succeed in blocking the Australian Government’s filter because its leadership are captured by the dead-end Democrats and fringe libertarians with little political campaigning experience. This capture means that unfortunately the movement is receiving ill-informed political counsel from serial Democrat losers like elitist apparent drug-taker Kathryn Crosby (links to screenshots [...]

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Tea Party warning

For my Project 52 post this week, I thought I’d quickly comment on Karl Rove’s recent article in the Wall Street Journal. Karl Rove writes that the conservative, anti-Obama Tea Party movement needs to avoid being co-opted by the Republicans. They strength, he writes, is their decentralisation and their ability to “hold the feet of [...]

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Delegates key to union power

Back in 2003-04, David Peetz and Barbara Pocock (from Griffith University and the University of Adelaide) conducted a survey of 2500 union delegates to examine the power of workers in their workplace. You can download the paper here (pdf). The paper on the report is definitely worth reading and at 11 pages (many of which [...]

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Hybrid and electric cars

Hybrid and electric cars

Video maker Peter Sinclair has produced a fantastic 9 minute YouTube clip on hybrid cars and renewable energy. A feature of the video is the Chevy Volt, the new General Motors car that uses an electric battery that is re-charged from a socket, or from a petrol engine while driving. Genius. It also goes over [...]

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Don't get Internode

Having recently moved house, I decided to ditch Optus and go with the 50gb Internode ADSL2+ Naked Plan. Internode promised that it would take a month to install, but they would send the modem and it would be pre-configured, so I could just plug it in and start surfing. After waiting for a month for [...]

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social-media-and-young-adults

Young people don’t blog

For my Project 52 post, I thought I’d comment about a recent Pew report has come to my attention via DownloadSquad that says that young people are blogging less: Pew Internet released a report yesterday called Social Media and Young Adults that shows teen blogging down by 50% over the past four years, even as [...]

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Highrise unions?

Just found an interesting post by Eric Lee suggesting that union organisers use the CRM (customer relationship management) tool Highrise: Highrise is what one user calls a “Rolodex on steroids”. At its core is a contact manager. But it is also a task manager too, and an events calendar. It’s also completely free of charge, [...]

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What union members want from their union's communications

In my line of work, I hear a lot of opinion expressed as fact. A common one is that “union members don’t want our communications to look too corporate”, or “our members want a lot of detail, not a short summary”, or “our slogan should be ‘screw the boss’ or something like that”. You get [...]

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Alan Kohler shows he doesn't know about politics

Alan Kohler, of Business Spectator fame, wrote yesterday in Crikey: Against all expectations, Tony Abbott and Greg Hunt have actually come up with a clever climate change policy, and certainly one that will change the debate in Australia. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will now have to quickly do a deal with the Greens to get [...]

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