Planet Gold Coast

Have you ever heard something described as 'meteoric'? For example - 'Susan's promotion to cabinet secretary is the latest step in her meteoric political career.'

What does it mean?

The first definition for 'meteoric' provided by the Oxford American Dictionary, unsurprisingly, is:

of or relating to meteors or meteorites.

It then goes on to define 'meteor' as:

a small body of matter from outer space that enters the earth's atmosphere, becoming incandescent as a result of friction and appearing as a streak of light.

That's all well and good and sounds very fancy, especially the bit about the streak of light. But we all know what happens to a meteor. Either it burns up entirely in the atmosphere or it becomes a 'meteorite', for which the definition is decidedly less exciting:

a meteor that survives its passage through the earth's atmosphere such that part of it strikes the ground. More than 90 percent of meteorites are of rock, while the remainder consist wholly or partly of iron and nickel.

The word 'meteoric' is used most often to describe someone's career. Taken at face value, that would appear to mean it hurtles very fast towards the earth and either burns up before it gets there or hits the ground with a big thud. Yet the writer usually intends its meaning to be quite the opposite.

Most dictionaries do take care to note the figurative meaning, where 'meteoric' by consensus appears to be synonymous with 'rapid'. Indeed, a thesaurus search for 'meteoric' will suggest several similar words such as 'lightning', 'swift' and 'speedy'.

But any of those words fail to specify a direction. The default direction of a meteor is earthwards. Can you have a rapid career? That would suggest it's over quickly. So would lightning, swift and speedy.

It simply makes no sense to say someone has a meteoric career unless you mean it burnt up, hit the ground at great speed or was over in a flash. But below are just a few examples of the phrase as it's used regularly by writers in various publications. Click on an image to see the example in its original context.

The last one is my personal favourite because it's from a career coaching company which proudly promises people a 'meteoric career path'.

On the other hand, you can say someone has had a meteoric rise. Indeed, that is what is usually said. But it's still a little strange. When was the last time you saw a meteor rise?

Perhaps the lesson in all this is that if you're a writer looking for a meteoric career rise, then maybe you should keep your writing down to earth.

The Watch Your Language series is a tongue-in-cheek look at the way we have with words.

Following the debate on ABC Radio National on internet filtering the other night, I did a write-up of what was discussed, which you can read over at Somebody Think Of The Children. The debate was interesting because we heard in-depth from some of the filter's supporters.

Click here to read my guest post at Somebody Think Of The Children...

Book cover via Amazon

I’ve been talking lately with a colleague about possibly setting up an online forum or community for a project we have in mind. So I had an immediately personal reason to be delighted to receive a few weeks ago a review copy of Patrick O’Keefe’s new book Managing Online Forums

Then, just over a week ago, I seized an opportunity while traveling to read it right through at one sitting.

That might not be how most people will use this book. My guess is that experienced community discussion board managers will skim the book to check out its scope, then focus on particular sections which address their immediate needs, and those just setting up a community will likely focus on the earlier chapters first and perhaps make use of the excellent templates provided for community discussion board owners.

A summary of this review is:

• the book incorporates a huge amount of information and speaks at every turn of the author’s practical experience, over many years, in setting up and managing online communities
• it should prove an invaluable resource for anyone who is considering setting up an online forum or already managing one or more
• there are templates included, for guidelines and contact, which can be used and adapted freely
• advice on community software is restricted to vBulletin and phpBB  but the principles and practices set out in the book can be applied more widely.

My frame of reference was as a participant in online forums for fifteen or more years, going back to the days when The WELL (which had started in the 1980s) was still pretty prominent and Compuserve Forums. I have also been and in some cases still am a member of various Listservs, Ryze groups, Ning groups, Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups, some of which have been run well to brilliantly, some of which have verged on or tipped over into anarchy. I am also founding moderator of the now 900 or so member forum, LinkedIn Bloggers.

My personal preference (bias if you will) is for groups to be well run and the discussion managed in a kind of “loose-tight” way that means you can spend your time online enjoyably and/or usefully and don’t have to put up with nonsense and spamming.

From reading Managing Online Forums, I get the sense that the author too has a low level of tollerance for nonsense or spamming.

Managing Online Forums has a very readable, conversational style, which I found congenial. It would perhaps have been easier for the author to write more of a “shopping list” of things to do and not do, but I for one would probably have found such an approach not only boring to read but less than convincing. With Managing Online Forums I felt I was in the presence of a master, who had not only “been there, done that” but had reflected long and deeply on what works and what doesn’t.

The sub-title promises that the book will provide Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards. I found that to be a somewhat over-ambitious claim - perhaps a bit of publisher hubris: the author himself makes it clear that some aspects won’t be covered, for example technical issues (p 2) -

For the most part, I try to steer clear of technical issues, such as your particular administration-control panel, code editing, and custom programming. That’s not what the book is for.”

Nor does the book have specific advice with regard to other popular platforms as Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups or MSN Groups  - as is acknowledged also on page 2. There are huge numbers of forums on these and other platforms and it is inevitable that people managing communities on them will be looking for guidance, the specifics of which they will not find here. To provide one small example, as co-moderator of a group on Yahoo! Groups and requiring a specific identification detail for new members, I and my fellow moderators have found interface for joining totally inadequate, with the result that we have to go to considerable effort to help people join. Information on this sort of dilemma is not to be found in Managing Online Forums.

Although, as mentioned above, the principles and practices in the book can be applied to these and other platforms.

Chris Brogan was not impressed with the organization of the book but while I might have used different chapter headings I found the organization fairly unexceptionable.

The chapters are:

• Laying the Groundwork
• Developing Your Community
• Developing Guidelines
• Promoting Your Community
• Managing Your Staff
• Banning Users and Dealing with Chaos
• Creating a Good Environment
• Keeping it Interesting
• Making Money

Then there are appendices:

• Online Resources
• Blank General Templates
• Glossary

Two chapters which I found particularly interesting, from a forum founder or moderator viewpoint, were those on guidelines (Chapter 3) and on “Banning Users and Dealing with Chaos” (Chapter 6). As an aside, from reading these chapters it does appear that Patrick O’Keefe as a forum manager has had more than his fair share of difficulty-creating people to deal with. In his own words (p 3),

Part of managing a community is dealing with spammers, idiots, and people who just can’t seem to follow your guidelines. Of course, it gets worse - there are people out there who will actually want to do harm to your community.

Complementing these chapters on guidelines and “dealing with chaos” is the set of general guideline and contact templates in Appendix B: Blank General Templates. I would love to have had these templates a few years ago when LinkedIn Bloggers was just getting going - and am looking now at what can be gleaned from them. Having guidelines in place and known to members makes it a much more straightforward task to deal with behavior that does not serve the community. I know it’s a bit of a cliched expression, but the fact is that this set of templates alone is worth the price of the book and more - much more.

Overall, it is evident that Patrick knows his stuff: he has been building online communities for years and it shows.  Anyone who wants to set up an online forum or already has one can learn from this book. Anyone who wants to know how to build a community online, can find plenty of guidance here. If you want to know how to deal effectively with troublemakers and wreckers, you may need some trial and error but there is a ton of practical advice here. If you want to know how to manage and lead staff (paid or volunteer), it’s in the book.

On a less positive but hopefully constructive note, it would have been beneficial to have some more rigorous copy-editing, to improve the flow of argument. I find it distressing to see a book as professionally produced in other respects, as this, let down by a lack of thoroughness in final copy editing. In one instance, I had to read a sentence two or three times before I understood the instruction being given. Elsewhere, there seemed to be a proliferation of unnecessary commas, which had the effect of breaking up the argument, or making the flow of thought more jerky than it needed to be. Hopefully the publishers will put some resources into some smoothing, when the time comes, as I am sure it will very soon, for a second printing or second edition.

My main takeaway from reading Managing Online Forums was not so much about the mechanics of setting up or managing a community, but more about personality traits and character-building. It was pretty clear to me that if you are going to be a successful forum manager/community builder for the long haul, you’ll need a blend of thick skin, sense of humor, respect for others, a sense of order and a determination to apply the rules firmly and fairly, without fear or favor. There is an excellent section on this, under the heading “What Skills and Characteristics Do You Need to Have?” at pages 14-16 in Chapter 1, Laying the Groundwork.

You can order your own copy of Managing Online Forums from Amazon at this link.

Photo credits

Managing Online Forums book photos - Des Walsh, Creative Commons

Photo of Patrick O’Keefe by Wendy Piersall via flickr - Creative Commons license

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Not everyone spends as many hours on the internet as I do, which means not everyone gets to see the vast swath of stuff it spews forth from day to day. From time to time, I post a selection of my favourite bits - in case you missed it...

25 Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians

This is one of the most hilarious things I have ever seen. It is so, so wrong. Thanks Jason!

Live Puppy Cam

Someone has a live webcam running of a bunch of puppies in a pet shop. You can log in whenever you want and see what they're up to - right now. SO CUTE!

A Beagle Escapes!

This dog's owners wondered how he kept escaping every day while they were out, so they decided to set up a camera and see for themselves. This is quite a determined beagle...

The Vet Who Did Not Vet

The election's over now, but this video is definitely still worth watching. The guy from Blue's Clues narrates a Dr Seuss style rhyme about John McCain and Sarah Palin. Very well done.

A Penguin Escapes

If you thought the beagle was clever, watch this penguin escape from a pod of hungry killer whales.

• 75% of adults use social networks – here’s how to tap into them - article summarises new Forrester report - interesting stats about high rate of usage of social networks by boomers and seniors (tags: Australia socialmedia marketing socialnetworks survey Forrester StevenNoble)

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Fellow tweeter Des Walsh alerted me to a post by Forrester’s Stephen Noble where their consumer technographics data is used as the basis of several reports. Stephen has extracted the Australian data and published it as another expensive Forrester report. However his post gives us a few of the surprising findings. The one which might be useful to me is:

Well, I was expecting use of social technologies to drop off with age. And it does drop off with age, but not uniformly. Some social activities — such as creating content or joining social networks — fall away dramatically. However, others are common in all age groups. In particular, 46% of online adults in the Older Boomers and Seniors cohort consume some form of social media, whether it’s watching other peoples’ videos, reading other peoples’ blogs, or looking at other people’s photos. For many marketers chasing this demographic, that’s an audience too large to ignore.

I am becoming involved in a wellness project looking at the effectiveness of social networks for distributing preventative healthcare information to older member so society. From the above finding it looks like social networks might work for getting the message out to the older boomers and seniors. Getting them to interact and then contribute looks like a harder task.

      

cruisin' to 2009

There has never been such a wealth of free and low cost tools for personal and research information management, but students still struggle to achieve an effective routine to get them through the research and writing process.

"All the students we interviewed struggle to achieve proficiency in both traditional and digital technologies. We did not interview a single student who had settled into a satisfactory routine in either. Graduate students change their work processes over the course of their projects and most complain that they have not found adequate ways to organize information and retrieve it later on. We found enormous variety in the way they approach these and other tasks, including communication with peers and advisors."

Ryan Randall, Jane Smith, Katie Clark, & Nancy Fried Foster. (2008). The next generation of academics : a report on a study conducted at the University of Rochester. University of Rochester. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1802/6053. Accessed 15 November 2008

This paper looks at what authoring tools could be integrated into institutional repositories to meet the needs of individual and collaborative writing and to make it easy to move completed documents into the repository. It also calls for librarians to take on a mentoring role with students as information management experts. Section B. Implications of findings for our software outlines the challenges that students face.

A good read for academic librarians and institutional repository managers.

I offer up the following quote by Paul Miller from his blog post to prompt discussion. Being in the twilight of my university career I probably sway to the view that the Web 2.0 disruption will profoundly change the operation of teaching universities. I suspect degree teaching will increasingly be focussed within institutions where the only research is directed to improving the teaching itself. What do you think?

… The student of Harvard or Oxford or ANU isn’t buying a degree. They’re buying an experience, and a head-start on the populating of their address book. There will continue to be a premium market offering for this, although it will need to evolve to meet a changing demand profile.

The lower end of the Higher Education market (and, indeed, a significant cohort of Further Education/ Community College-type institutions) have the most to gain from disruption, deploying their lower costs, economies of scale and community locations to good effect in wrapping a cost-effective support and assessment package around mediated delivery of the ‘best’ online content sourced from top-flight institutions via iTunes U, OpenLearn, the OpenCourseWare Consortium and others. If ‘all’ you want is a degree, why pay more?

Superficially, at least, these disruptors can probably project a ‘better’ education than those above them in the institutional food chain. The tutor at a local community college is probably happier to point their class at a video lecture from Cambridge or MIT than their peer at an institution with a more inflated opinion of its own importance. The young lecturer at a mid-range teaching institution has their own reputation to establish, and this takes precedence to pointing their students at the lectures of others. Their more established colleague down the corridor doesn’t agree with those ‘odd’ ideas from Cambridge anyway, and is competing for attention and recognition in ways that again run counter to simply pointing their students toward third party content. The motivations of the teacher, the needs of the learner, and the maximising of institutional return on (staff) investment are in direct opposition to one another.

      

Just a quick post to say that Barcamp Gold Coast #2 is all pretty much ready to go for 29th November at Griffith Uni! All the info you need is at

http://barcamp.org/BarCampGoldCoast

We are doing pretty much the same as last time, pizza is sponsored by MindWorx this time, hardware giveaway and also a book swap if anyone is interested in offloading some unwanted trees (idea copied from Sydney). Coffee guy will be there too and we have the wireless internet like last time.

Not much more to say apart from please register at http://barcamp.org/BarCampGoldCoast2 - oh and tell everyone you know.

See you there

Listen up folks, it looks like the fight is on. The Government is persisting with its plans to introduce compulsory internet censorship in Australia. It's bad policy. It's a waste of money, it won't work and there are better alternatives. Not to mention the threat to free speech. But let's be absolutely clear:

If you think we will defeat internet filtering just by being right or just because the facts are on our side - think again. This is politics. If we don't get properly organised with a clear and consistent message that reaches the people who need to hear it - we WILL lose.

Stop calling it the 'clean feed'!

To defeat internet filtering, you have to think politically. First off - stop referring to it as the 'clean feed'. That's what the Government calls it. You know why they call their idea the clean feed? Because it makes people think the internet is dirty. Everyone knows the internet is full of porn, right? A clean feed? Sounds like a good idea to me!

Yes, I know that's rubbish and so do you. But we're not the ones who need to be convinced that internet censorship is a bad idea. Call it what it is - censorship. There are still people who think censorship is a good idea, but there are lot of people who don't know much about the internet and might be worried about it, but who are against censorship. We just gave them a reason to listen to us.

It's not about freedom of speech!

You want to know how to lose this fight? Make it about freedom of speech.

I care about freedom of speech and net neutrality as much as you do, but we're not the ones who need to be convinced that internet censorship is a bad idea. To people who think censorship is a good idea, people like us are a bunch of mad raving lefties who think everyone should be exposed to child pornography and bestiality. That is how we will be painted if we let them, and IT WILL WORK. There are more of them than us.

This is not America. There is no constitutional right to free speech in Australia. The supporters will ask what's wrong with censorship? We censor movies, TV shows and video games and nobody complains - except those raving lefties of course but they would have us all playing Grand Theft Auto wouldn't they.

Don't make it about free speech. There are so many other things about internet censorship that make it easy to tear down. Free speech should be a closing argument, not the opening salvo.

Don't be smug

I can't say it any better than this guy does. Don't be smug and assume anyone who can't obviously see what a bad idea internet censorship is must be a rabid right-wing Christian fundamentalist, an idiot, or both. They may well be, or they may just be uninformed. Do you think calling people who are uninformed 'idiots' is going to endear them to your cause?

Many, many people think computers and technology are scary. They resent the digital world and how much it has encroached on their life. They resent that other people seem to know much more about it than they do, including their children. They want to protect their children. And because of that you're calling them an idiot? Fail.

Educate. Explain. Do it again and again no matter how boring it gets. Be patient, compassionate, and firm. You will appear knowledgeable and reassuring.

Burden of proof

The Government has said it's going to do this. At the moment, the burden of proof is on those who oppose it to make it clear WHY we oppose it. To those who support it or are undecided, at the moment we sound like smug, self-satisfied know-it-alls who like being superior in the world of the internet and are whinging at the thought of having someone take all our fun away. In the 'real world', it's obvious that a 'clean feed' is a good idea.

Doesn't it make you sick? It makes me angry. It makes me angrier when I see smart and caring people play right into their hands by getting hysterical about it all and making all the mistakes I've just mentioned.

We have the advantage of being right, and the facts are on our side. But that is only an advantage. It doesn't seal the deal. We have to get organised and put the burden of proof back on the Government and its supporters to explain why their plan is not an expensive and useless piece of populist junk.

How to win

I think there are four battle fronts we should be fighting on. Here they are in order.

1 - Why we don't need compulsory internet censorship

We need to talk to those who don't know much about the issue. We need to make it clear we care about a safe browsing experience, and that's why we think the Government's plan is a bad idea. It will do nothing to improve safety on the internet, there is a risk it could threaten safety and it will waste money that could be put to better use.

The Government can't make the internet completely safe, even if it wanted to. The best solution is to get street smart. Let's explain how to do that, what you need to know, what tools you can use and where you can go for more information.

By doing this, we are being mature, caring and helpful. Hard to paint that as hysterical. The Government will have to explain why its idea is better. Good luck with that.

We should use a campaign body to do this, set up a website, have a spokesperson and do interviews with media outlets, buy advertising and direct mail.

2 - Attack the Govt's proposal on technical grounds

The Government says it wants to make the internet safer. Will its plan actually succeed in doing this? Let's explain the many, many technical reasons why it won't in clear, concise talking points that invite people to argue the facts and which puts the burden of proof back on the Government to support its plan.

Mark Newton's 8-point list is a good place to start. Then, use these talking points to reiterate support Point 1 about how to enjoy a safe browsing experience.

3 - Attack the Govt's proposal on economic grounds

The Government has pledged to spend $125.8 million on the Cyber-Safety Plan. Not all of it will be spent on censoring the internet and some if it will likely be money well spent. But $40-odd million of public money to censor the internet is a lot of money for something that won't work. What would be a better use of that money?

Censoring the internet will cost ISPs money, especially dealing with confused/angry customers and chasing up false positives. That cost will be passed onto consumers and businesses. Censorship will slow the performance of the internet, which will hamper our progress in the global digital economy. The country will pay a big price for an idea that doesn't work to begin with.

Again, we need to avoid appearing hysterical and put the burden of proof back on the Government to explain why it wants to spend so much money on this even though it won't work and it has already been tried and dropped by the previous Government.

4 - It's un-Australian

Calling something un-Australian is a favourite weapon of the conservatives in the culture wars. Let's use it against the Government and supporters of censorship here.

Is Australia really a nanny state? Aren't we grown up enough to handle our day-to-day lives without the bureaucrats sticking their noses in and telling us how to care for our kids? Do we really want to throw our lot in with the likes of China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and North Korea? What does that say about us?

This is where the arguments for free speech come in. They are good, valid arguments which come across more powerfully after making the previous points. The Government must explain why it thinks foisting compulsory censorship onto everyone in the country is necessary.

It's the Senate, stupid!

Labor have the numbers to pass this bill in the House of Representatives. All they need are a handful of votes in the Senate to make it into law. Those votes could come from the Greens, Nick Xenophon the independent senator (who supports it!), Stephen Fielding of Family First (who loves it) or the Liberals/Nationals, who will be sniffing the wind with an eye to the next election.

Let's get real about this so it doesn't happen. We need to get organised. Educate the people who are sitting on the fence, attack the Government on technical and economic issues, force the burden of proof back onto them to defend their plan, protest to the Government and the Opposition and throw in the arguments about free speech as a final deal-breaker.

If we keep on going the way we are, we could lose. That scares the hell out of me. If anyone is serious about getting a campaign together, I will gladly get involved.

a warning for the foolish

Typealyzer analyses your blog to assess your personality type. It's been somewhile since I did the Myers Briggs test and I can't find the results.

But this doesn't strike me as too far off course.

"The analysis indicates that the author of
http://inn0vate.blogspot.com
is of the type:

ISTJ - The Duty Fulfillers"Introverted (some might be surprised by this, but I think it is my natural preference)
Sensing
Thinking
Judging


Typealizer offers a badge (I will attempt to add in this post - but requires that I modify the head section in the layout) which they say will update as I continue to write.


Via Bex Huff - blog about technology, lifehacks and ecm

Once again the post, Do we need Open Educational Resources (OER)?, by Leigh Blackall puts forward a point of view with which I immediately resonate:

Our educational services are locked up in Blackboard, and our teachers are too afraid to professionally network online. Online education is a dark web. Stepping up to the plate then is Open Education services like Wikieducator, but bringing another set of restrictive criteria that effectively keep people in a twilight zone - adherence to one form of copyright.

I would love to have the opportunity to make public the wikis and blogs I am using within my own institution’s Blackboard LMS. This day fortunately is coming ever nearer.

      

I have mentioned Michael Wesch’s classic video A vision of Students Today in a previous post. Michael has used the video as the centrepiece for a post in of all places the Encyclopaedia Britannica blog. Here he reflects on the message of the video and laments the just-getting-by attitude of most students today, and their wandering attentions in class via their wi-fi laptops and handheld devices.

Nevertheless he emerges in a somewhat optimistic frame of mind at the end of the post. He encourages lecturers to embrace the fact that lecture halls are enveloped in the vast Internet information cloud. Class activities, even lectures, can ask students to work in groups and use their Internet-capable devices to conduct relevant learning tasks akin to those they will be undertaking in the real world. Michael’s quote sets up a lofty ambition:

… stop denying the fact that we are enveloped in a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where the nature and dynamics of knowledge have shifted. We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud (including almost any answer to almost any multiple choice question you can imagine). We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies. We can use them in ways that empower and engage students in real world problems and activities, leveraging the enormous potentials of the digital media environment that now surrounds us. In the process, we allow students to develop much-needed skills in navigating and harnessing this new media environment, including the wisdom to know when to turn it off. When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.

To a degree I have been able to experiment with some of these concepts in my use of our new pod room during this 083 semester. I have encouraged students in an IT subject to bring their laptops and have set them some tasks, individually and in groups, that require Internet search to accomplish with the outcome being a series of wiki pages accessible to the whole class. In addition, for a couple of semesters, I now hold online final exams in labs where students have full access to the Internet and a virtual machine where they can download and run any software during the exam itself. This forces me to set quite different questions, none of which are of the type ‘What is meant by the term …’ and instantly answerable using Google. Even answers to coding questions can be found online but at least this fosters code reuse and the student must understand if the code actually supports the required answer. They can also test the syntax if not always the semantics of the code, so assessment is made more convenient. Being electronic text, the answers can also be fully tested by the assessor.

Thus I am already moving in the direction espoused by Michael Wesch. However, to fully embrace the teaching approach will require major restructuring of existing subjects and will require an incremental approach over an academic year or so – something I personally welcome.

[Via Dave Parry at AcademHack]

      

We have all seen the use of Twitter for the Obama (@BarackObama) campaign where he attracted over 125,000 followers. It is no surprise then to see our own politicians joining the blossoming microblogging community that is Twitter.

As reported by News.com.au in a technology article just yesterday our very own prime minister caught the Twitter bug and set up his shingle as @KevinRuddPM. Via another post by Craig Thomler I discovered other twittering politicians such as our valiant leader of the opposition, @TurnbullMalcolm, who appears to be well ahead of his principal opponent in the twittering stakes.

Of course I immediately followed @KevinRuddPM to be instantly rewarded by a following. Repeating the same with @TurnbullMalcolm has sadly yet to result in the courtesy following! Tut, tut. [Update: the following did finally appear 6 hours later.]

Craig raised the interesting question as to whether our federal government agencies by twittering as well. Maybe the Twitter snowball is starting to gather pace.

      

The Leader of the Federal Opposition in Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, has been on the social networking platform Twitter for about a month now, as far as I can see. That’s the real Malcolm Turnbull, who has to go by the Twitter handle of @TurnbullMalcolm on Twitter, because someone else had already taken the Twitter handle MalcolmTurnbull. Now the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has joined in, with the handle @KevinRuddPM on Twitter - yes there is a fake KevinRudd too.

I’m following both of the real ones and they have reciprocated.

At least I think they have reciprocated. It could well be that each of them has a staff member or three managing the process. Time, I believe, will tell.

My guess, from “twits” I’ve been reading and from my own perception, is that the real Malcolm Turnbull is dealing directly with his tweets and someone on the Prime Minister’s staff is dealing with his. I’m open to being corrected on either count.

But still, it’s kind of nice to dream that the Prime Minister of my country might just have taken a few seconds out of his busy day to connect with me directly.

G’day Des, as it were

But even if it is, as I suspect, a member of Malcolm Turnbull’s or the PM’s staff - or maybe even robots organised by those offices - messaging me via Twitter, I like the idea that people influential in the offices of both the chief minister in the land and the leader of the alternative government, maybe even the principal players themelves, believe this sort of social networking is sufficiently important for the business of government and the highest level of politics for the respective office-holders to be, in some fashion, participants.

Maybe not fully engaged players, but at least what you might call involved spectators of the passing parade.

I much prefer this to the alternative.

And who knows, perhaps I’m too sceptical. Maybe late tonight, wherever each of our protagonists is in this vast land (I think they are both in the country) they will be crouched over their laptops, eagerly checking on the latest tweets and firing off their own, personally crafted 140 character bon mots!

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, via the internets - via Twitter.

And I almost forgot. @BarackObama is following me on Twitter -  with only 132,006 others. And I don’t even have a vote there. But at least he got his own name.

Update: I had no sooner posted this than I noticed on Twitter a message that I had lost my new Twitter friend @KevinRuddPM. But not I alone - suddenly it appeared he was not following anyone.

I say “apparently”. There are a couple of people suggesting it’s a misunderstanding and a Twitter failure, not a deliberate “unfollow” by the PM.

I’m finding this whole story a fascinating case study on the challenges faced by politicians in the social networking space. They can’t, in my opinion, afford to stay aloof. But where is the manual for when they hop in and things don’t go perfectly? Whatever “perfectly” might mean.

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• Net censorship plan backlash - BizTech - Technology - theage.com.au Australian Communications Minister Conroy's endeavours to censor the Internet skewered in Melbourne Age newspaper article (tags: netcensorship censorship Conroy Australiangovernment)

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some political snoops

Along with no doubt many, many others, I am watching with fascination Shel Israel’s unfolding adventures in the Middle Kingdom.

For those who just came in, Shel, who has an incomparable overview of social media internationally and its impact on business and culture, is currently visiting China for the first time. He is part of the China 2.0 tour and also keynoting at the Chinese Blogger Conference 2008 (Cnbloggercon ‘08) this coming weekend, November 15-16.

Having visited Beijing myself for the first time in November last year, I’m taking particular interest, given that Shel is also doing the first impression exercise.

On what is obviously an activity-packed tour, he is doing his best to get some blog posts out and they make great reading.

As well as doing some regulation tourist activities such as climbing up to a section of the Great Wall, he is also gleaning information and insights into the China blogosphere and social media space and sharing those in his blog and on Twitter.

I must admit I was quite dazzled last year by some of the numbers being thrown around, such as the number of Chinese bloggers and the number of people using bulletin boards. Being in business as a social media strategist, I naturally found myself trying to translate those numbers in terms of what they might mean for, say, social media consulting or other marketing opportunities.

I then started to listen more attentively and ask some questions. Which meant that I started to understand that such estimates could vary quite dramatically and should in any case be looked at carefully in terms of what the numbers might mean, for example how the gross number of bloggers might translate into estimating numbers of business bloggers.

From the post I read today, it looks as if Shel is having some not dissimilar experiences:

I learned that the 100-million bloggers estimate I was planning to use at my CNBloggercon talk would have drawn laughter. The real number is closer to 25 million. Bulletin Board Messages remain much more popular, with nearly 70 million people enjoying anonymity as they exchange information and opinion. Most blogs are very social. They are rarely political and almost never business related.

That bore out what I had learned last year and in subsequent observation from afar. Clearly the idea of a “business blog” has some way to go before it is as pervasive of the Chinese blogosphere as it is in, say, the USA.

Of course, the numbers in China are still huge - and there is amazing scope for growth and for new and expanding market opportunities.

I’m looking forward to more of Shel’s posts on his journeys in the Middle Kingdom. Our Marco Polo of social media.

As well as subscribing to Shel’s Global Neighbourhoods, you can keep up with his tour and impressions on a more “as it happens” basis” via Twitter.

Photo credits: Kaiser Kuo & Shel Israel - shelisrael1 via flickr - CC; Marco Polo Traveling - Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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