The Rise of the Fifth Estate - a good yarn worth reading

This morning I read Greg Jerico's book 'The Rise of the Fifth Estate' which chronicles the rise of political blogging and social media reporting in Australia.

Some of you may remember Greg better as Grog of Grogs Gamut, a blogger and former public servant, known for his detailed analysis of political and sporting matters.

He was outed by The Australian back in 2010, a matter covered widely by both mainstream media and the blogosphere at the time.

I had already been reading Greg's keen insights into Australian politics for some time - and he was exposed after attending the Media 140 conference, which I also attended and spoke at.

Greg's situation was a key test for how the Australian Public Service and our politicians handled public sector bloggers. Despite some time lag, it was handled well, with Greg's right to blog on a personal basis supported within his Department, Prime Minister and Cabinet.

This based on the APS code of conduct, which allows public servants to participate in politics, provided it doesn't compromise their ability or perception of being non-partisan.

Many people rallied around to support Greg at the time, including myself. It can be very lonely being a public servant and a blogger - and public sector workplaces do not necessarily understand, yet, how to provide appropriate support during this type of event.

Greg subsequently left the public service, though he has continued to blog. Subsequently he's worked on television programs and written for ABC's The Drum, while working on his book.

This gets me to the point of this post, reviewing Greg's newly released 'The Rise of the Fifth Estate'.

His book is written in Greg's easy to read, yet well-evidenced style (with the odd chart), which makes it an easy and accessible read, yet with a good deal of depth and analysis.

In it he tells the story of the start of Australia's political blogosphere, analyses its players and looks at the interplay between journalists and politicians, particularly on Twitter.

His book also chronicles the 'war of bloggers' that mainstream journalism, particularly News Ltd, have waged on the "anonymous armchair amateurs" of the blogging world, including his own experience as well as those of others.

He also draws some commonsense conclusions, cutting through the hype and mystique that the journalistic profession have used to justify their own specialness and detailing the convoluted mental gymnastics and lack of self-reflection that some mainstream journalists have employed to explain why real journalism can't come from a blog.

The Rise of the Fifth Estate is really the first book in Australia to chronicle the opening stages in the rising media culture ways, as old media strains to remain relevant and profitable in the face of new modes of journalism.

Given the cuts at Fairfax and News Ltd lately, this comes at a good time to help explain a little more about why events are unfolding as they are.


I did, however, ultimately feel a little let down by Greg's 'Fifth Estate'.

He's told a good yarn, in the best journalistic vernacular, a good current history and analysis of the past and present of the rise of the blogging and Twitter as political and political journalism tools.

However I was hoping for a few more glimpses into the future, some of his insights as to how the Fourth and Fifth estates might find a workable balance that profits both, with a maximum of mutual understanding and a minimum of ongoing friction.

In conclusion, I heartily recommend 'The Rise of the Fifth Estate' as a good read and as a great record of the first few years of what is proving to be a period of turbulent change for journalism and political communication.

However, don't buy it expecting any kind of model of how to build a collaborative journalistic model, involving both professional journalists and citizens, new media and old media, into the future.

For this we'll have to wait for Greg's next book (that's a hint Greg!)


You can read the first chapter of 'The Rise of the Fifth Estate' for free at Grogs Gamut.

For other reviews see:

• Dragonista's blog, Grog’s Rise of the Fifth Estate
• Fancy Goods, Eloise Keating, BOOK REVIEW: The Rise of the Fifth Estate (Greg Jericho, Scribe)
• The Monthly Quadrant Review, FakePaulKeating: The Rise of the Fifth Estate by Greg (@grogsgamut) Jericho

There's also an interview with Greg on ABC Radio National, Social media and blogs: the fifth estate?

The Canberra book launch is on 30 August at Paperchain in Manuka. For other launches (currently underway), see Greg's publisher, Scribe.

CAVEAT: Note that I helped Greg with some curation of the list of political blogs and supported Greg with some contacts and ideas. As a result I am named a couple of times in the book.

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Selecting the right tool for the job of online citizen engagement

This report was brought to my attention by Sandy Heierbacher in the Online Engagement Group at LinkedIn, and I thought it well worth sharing more widely.

Also blogged about by Sandy at the US National Coalition for Deliberation and Democracy (NCDD), in the post The Promise and Problems of Online Deliberation, the report provides a look at how online tools can be used in citizen deliberation, with recommendations on which tools to use when.

The report is available from: http://kettering.org/publications/the-promise-and-problems-of-online-deliberation/

There's even a supporting infographic as below:

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Mapping social media channels to engagement levels (based on IAP2 spectrum)

I developed the Online Engagement Spectrum around three three years ago, based on the IAP2 Spectrum  of Public Participation (PDF) and some complementary work by Bang The Table (no longer at the original web address).

As Gadi Ben-Yedah over at his IBM's Business of Government blog has begun a series of posts considering how social media can be used by government to engage online based on the IAP2 Spectrum, I thought it was timely to repost my Spectrum for people to consider.

To view Gadi's first post, go to Social Media for Public Participation: Step 1 - Inform

Online Engagement Spectrum 1.2

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Many national laws are increasingly irrelevant - how will governments adapt?

Facebook decides whether photos of nursing mothers are allowed to be displayed in its site (including in Australia and other nations where such photos are legal).

Google leaves China to avoid complying with its national censorship laws.

Gaming and gambling websites base themselves in jurisdictions where they are legal while attracting most of their customers from nations where such services are regulated or illegal.

Shoppers flock to buy online from countries where prices are cheap and the range is good, incidentally avoiding paying GST or sales taxes on goods and, to compete, retailers, such as Harvey Norman, open online stores based in foreign jurisdictions to avoid charging GST.

People at home use proxies to bypass copyright restrictions on viewing certain content on services like Hulu and establish overseas postal addresses with mail forwarding services to avoid copyright restrictions that only allow certain physical products to be sold in some jurisdictions.

Online pharmacies sell cheap drugs from Canada or Mexico to the US and pornography distributors sell their wares to consenting adults anywhere in the world, regardless of local laws.

Optus in Australia is legally allowed to distribute free coverage of sports events, provided they are received by customers' televisions, delayed 90 seconds and rebroadcast to customer mobile phones - meaning that mobile sports rights have almost become worthless overnight.

Electronic games, books and movies banned in Australia are available for purchase online.

People in countries with restrictive media laws use online proxies and software freely distributed by the US government to learn what is happening in their own country and the world.

Movements even work together globally to circumvent government ordered internet shut-downs or strong censorship in nations, such as Egypt and Burma to allow protesters to organise and citizens to remain informed and inform the world.


Around the world many laws created by governments are under pressure from the growth of the internet.

Laws were originally designed by societies as formal codes to guide, manage or restrict the behaviour of people, conduct of organisations and disposition of assets attached to a particular geographic location.

These 'laws of the land' worked well in a world where the majority of people lived, worked and played in a geographically limited area, where movement between areas was tightly controlled and where assets were easy to recognise and tax but hard to transport.

This remains true in many respects. Minerals, animals and offices are found in geographic locations and can be difficult, if not impossible, to relocate. We largely live and work in geographically defined areas, allowing geographically based laws to be implemented and enforced.

However with the arrival of the internet and mobile technologies certain assets, cultural values and behaviours began to drift beyond the control of any geographic nation.

Any content that can be digitalised or product that can be transacted online may fall outside of national borders, or cross many nations between creation and consumption.

Content that was previously scarce and controlled by national interests, such as news, education and research, can now be made freely available online for anyone anywhere in the world. Products that were previously shipped enmasse by a relatively small number of agents (import/exporters) are now transported by millions of individuals in much smaller quantities, making taxation and border control checkpoints difficult to enforce.

Movies, music, books and electronic games are easy and cheap to replicate, transport and share, despite the wish of copyright owners to lock them in vaults and dole them out to keep prices artificially high, as deBeers has managed diamonds.

Governments and courts are struggling to understand and re-interpret old laws in light of new technologies. Some laws and precedents date back hundreds of year, before the creation of the internet, television, radio, planes, cars or trains - all of the technologies that shape modern life.

Some of these laws and precedents remain influential in legal decisions, square blocks twisted and jammed into round holes to band-aid the legal system in the face of modern technology.

How should government and society reconcile discrepancies between new technologies, modern life and law-makers, law enforcers and laws that have demonstrably not kept up with the pace of change?

Should policy makers ignore reality in favour of legislation shaped to favour aspirational ideals? Should police forces consider all citizens guilty of crime unless they can prove their innocence?

This struggle keep broadening, from copyright, to retail, to gambling and human rights.

To attempt to retain control, governments have filled their streets with cameras to watch for criminal activity, legislated for ISPs retain an online history of website visits for their customers (just in case law enforcement agencies might need it, regardless of privacy risks), maintained secret blacklists of content that their citizens are not entitled to see, or even know what is on the list and secretly develop legislation to protect corporate copyright owners at the expense of citizens.

All of these steps have occurred in liberal western democracies. Autocratic regimes have gone even further to harass and arrest online commentators and shut down parts of the internet.

Many nations appear to have become obsessed with watching their own citizens to catch the slightest infringements at the behest of the fearful, the political and the corporate interests.

I have not yet seen discussions over the relevancy and enforceability of national and state laws in the face of new technology occurring broadly in Australian society or public service in a measured and thoughtful way. There are hall corridors and conferences but little research and mixed knowledge.

The question of how to reconcile the geography of the physical world with the expanding frontiers of limitless and jurisdictionally challenged cyberspace should be integral to many policy conversations. Even seemingly unaffected industries and people are touched, subtly, but profoundly, by modern technologies as their impact continues to ripple outwards.

Just as we require the human rights of citizens and the needs of Australia's region to be considered in legislation, we need to begin considering the workability of geographical laws in the face of modern technology.

In some cases our police and courts will need to work closely with other jurisdictions, even those with diametrically opposed views, in order to detect crimes and detain criminals

In other cases we need to debate how far legislation needs to restrict our own citizens in order to protect corporate non-citizens.

We need to review all of our laws in the face of modern technology to decide which remain workable, cost-effective and practical and determine which require improvement, international agreements or are just plain unenforceable.

And we need to do this regularly as technology keeps moving.

For any geographic state to retain pre-eminent in meeting the needs and wants of its citizens, constraining behaviours that society does not wish propagated and protecting the body, person and interests of individuals, governments need to move to the front-foot regarding modern technology, to stop treating it as the 'other' or a special case.

Governments need to recognise and internalise that our civilisation is technological by its nature. Our culture, values and behaviour are continually shaped by what is possible with technology and what technology has unlocked. 

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Social media drives five times as much traffic to Australian government sites as online news media

A couple of years ago Hitwise, an internet measurement company that uses ISP logs to measure traffic to websites, reported that social media sites had become a larger source of traffic for Australian government websites than online news sites.

This was a seismic change in user behaviour. Suddenly people were more likely to reach a goverment site in Australia from Facebook, Twitter or another social media site than from news.com.au, smh.com.au, abc.net.au or another traditional news source.

Of course it may have also been a simple one month hiccup.

Therefore last week I asked Hitwise to provide a 'two years on' view at their blog to see if there was a trend.

And there was!

Social media referrals to government sites in Australia hadn't only remained above news and media sites, they'd skyrocketed.

Source: Hitwise Experian

As Tim Lovitt posted in Hitwise's blog, in a rather understated manner, Social Media important to Government, between December 2008 and December 2011 social media had doubled it's share while news and media had barely held it's own.

In fact, by December 2011 social media was sending 9.75% of the traffic to government sites while news and media sites were only sending 2.27% of the traffic.

So should agencies invest in producing more media releases or in developing their social media presence?

I know which I would choose.

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Allowing your customers to codesign your services

Crowdsourcing often seems to be a high stress area for organisations, who fear what might happen if they allowed their users to design their products and services.

However what is often forgotten is that it's not about handing over the design process, it is about sharing it as a codesign process - combining the brain power of a few internal or contracted specialist designers who don't necessarily use your products or services with the brain power of thousands of non-specialists who use or interact with your products and services, often on a regular basis.

A good example of this process was recently discussed in Inc., where Fiat crowd sourced the design of its 2009 concept car, the Fiat Mio.

The main part of this process was conducted in Spanish (as Fiat is Brazilian based), and while I watched it occur at the time, there was only a limited subset of the conversation in English.

However Fiat ended up involving people from 160 countries - taking on board over 10,000 suggestions.  The website about the making of the car provides more information on how Fiat went about integrating these suggestions.

The concept car won widespread critical acclaim. 


This isn't the only approach possible, and the article in Inc, Letting Your Customers Design Your Products, describes five different types of crowd sourcing:

• Crowdfunding: Sites such as Kickstarter that allow an individual or enterprise to receive funding.
• Distributed knowledge: The aggregation of data and information from a variety of sources.
• Cloud labor: Leveraging a virtual labor pool.
• Collective creativity: Tapping "creative" communities for user-generated art, media or content.
• Open innovation: The use of outside resources to generate new ideas and company processes.

 How many of these could your agency benefit from?

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Who controls what online?

In the run-up to the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, the organisers have developed an animated infographic showing the points of control within the digital economy.


It provides an interesting perspective on which major companies provide which services and collect various types of data.

Take a look over at the Web 2.0 Summit map (the movements view is very cool - click on the service icons above the menu). 

Thanks @dasharp for bringing it to my attention.

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"Last in first out" - is this a risk for social media expertise and channel use in government?

I've seen (and spoken with colleagues about) a number of austerity measures taken in government agencies around Australia over the last few months.

With various governments across the country looking to cut spending to balance budgets, or at least reduce debt levels, lower 2011-12 budgets require many agencies to look long and hard at what they can trim or where they can do more for less (without affecting services to the public).

I wonder whether digital channels and expertise has been firmly enough established in many agencies to survive any cuts. Will management focus on their established infrastructure, maintaining their legacy IT systems and 'tried and true' communications and service channels at the expense of newer and more cost-effective, but less mature digital, channels?

In other words will we see the "last in, first out" rule apply for social media channels and expertise in many agencies?

(this is slightly rhetorical as I'm already seeing this in action in a few places)

I hope agencies will use any budget tightening as an opportunity to look long and hard at their operational effectiveness and select the channels which deliver the most 'bang for the buck' and long-term sustainability and viability.

Of course even if this means cutting non-digital channels in preference to digital, there is still a loss of expertise and corporate knowledge - though potentially a more sustainable one into the future.

Do you see signs that budget pressures are impacting on your agency's online capability? (feel free to respond anonymously & keep the relevant public service code of conduct in mind)

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Are telephones a natural medium for internet natives?

I wanted to share this interesting post discussing the challenges faced by people used to online communications technologies when attempting to use old technologies like the telephone.

Technology’s Child: Why 21st-Century Teens Can’t Talk On the Phone discusses how phones conversations are "both too slow and too fast" and don't provide mechanisms for thinking about and carefully editing what is said.

Will telephone ettiquette become a victim of the internet revolution, replaced by new skills?

Time will tell.

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European Union requires websites to make users 'opt-in' to website cookies

The EU Government's 2009 Directive banning "unnecessary" cookies in websites (if the site doesn't ask users to accept the cookie first) has just begun coming into effect - causing havoc and distress amongst European webmasters.

Cookies are small text files that websites store on a user's computer in order to reduce the need for users to enter information again and again. They are used in ecommerce sites to 'remember' what is in your shopping trolley, in social media sites to remember that you're logged in, to personalise content or advertisements based on your preferences and by many sites to provide anonymous website reports.

It is estimated that around 92% of websites use cookies. In fact it is hard to imagine the modern web without them.

However in 2009 the European Union decided as part of a 2009 amendment to their Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive that even though all modern web browsers allow users to choose to accept or refuse cookies, cookies may pose a privacy threat to individuals.

While the Directive doesn't explain why they may pose a threat, it states that cookies can be a useful tool and,

their use should be allowed on condition that users are provided with clear and precise information in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC about the purposes of cookies or similar devices so as to ensure that users are made aware of information being placed on the terminal equipment they are using. Users should have the opportunity to refuse to have a cookie or similar device stored on their terminal equipment.

In other words, when cookies are used for a legitimate purpose (though 'legitimate' is not clearly defined in the Directive), they can be used by websites provided that users are provided with an up-front method to view what each cookie is for and 'opt-out' of each cookie.

This directive was to be interpreted into law by European states by May 2011. So far only three countries have complied, Denmark, Estonia and the United Kingdom. The UK has also given webmasters twelve months to introduce appropriate opt-out controls on their websites, recognising the impact of their law. Other countries in the EU will introduce their cookie laws soon.

So OK, European websites using cookies now must have an opt-out provision for UK, Denmark and Estonian users and soon for all Europeans in the EU.

So where is the sting in the tail?

Firstly, these laws may apply to all websites that are viewable in European countries, as existing European privacy laws already require. This would mean that Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites hosted in the UK, Asia or anywhere else in the world would need to change how they functioned due to European-only laws.

Under this interpretation (yet to be tested in court), all (hundred million plus) websites, whether ecommerce, news, information or government would have to comply.

That includes Australian government websites using cookies, including any using Google Analytics, 'share' tools, shopping carts or otherwise using cookies to store (even non-identifiable) information on users - even for a single session.

There is an alternative. Non-European websites could simply block Europeans from viewing their sites and therefore would not need to comply with the European law. That would present a very interesting geographic freedom-of-information ban, as well as damaging the businesses of many organisations and governments who want Europeans to access their websites.

The second concern is around how the opt-in approach to cookies must work.

There's no clear approach in the Directive and plenty of confusion on how the opt-in control should work. The suggested approaches in the UK are to use pop-ups (which most modern browsers automatically block) or to use an 'accordion' that appears at the top of all webpages, as is used by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) - the ugly block of text at the top of the website.

A more humorous implementation of a pop-up opt-in control is used on David Naylor's website - read the text.

The BBC has introduced an opt-in approach that accidentally managed to break the law while implementing it - by using a cookie to hide the message asking you to opt-in for cookies. Oops - they needed to have an opt-in for that too.

The third issue with this European directive is the impact on useful things websites do. It will become much harder to personalise content for users or report on websites. Indeed the impact of people opting out of cookies, therefore rendering all cookie-based reporting significantly more inaccurate, is already being tracked. The ICO's website has itself seen a 90% fall in recorded (tracked) traffic. This indicates that the ICO will no longer know what site users are doing and cannot as effectively optimise and improve their website. Magnify this across millions of websites.

For those who wish to learn more about European Cookie Laws, check out the short video below or read the The definitive guide to the Cookie law.

And, as always, I'd appreciate your thoughts - particularly on the questions below.

Has Europe become the Cookie Monster? Or is this a reasonable and appropriate step to improve user privacy?

Should Europe have the right to impose laws in their jurisdiction on the rest of the world? If not, should the rest of the world stop Europeans visiting our sites?

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Familiarity trumps understanding (dealing with Neophobiacs)

Arthur C. Clarke, a famous science fiction and futurist once said,

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

I believe we reached that point quite some time ago in our civilisation. While most people watch television, drive cars, use electrical appliances, fly in jet aircraft, use computers and surf the internet, few understand how any of these technologies actually work, or the science that sits behind them.

In some cases many in society actively deny or denounce the science behind their everyday tools while still partaking of its benefits. They simply don't recognise or understand the disconnect.

Over in the Gov 2.0 Australia Group, Stefan Willoughby recently stated, in reference to Eventbrite and other online tools,

I just don't understand why it is so hard to convince people that these tools are valuable and not nearly as risky as they think.

Many of us working in the online space have encountered similar attitudes over the last 10-15 years, often from otherwise highly intelligent people.

I can't legitimately call this behaviour 'risk-aversion'. Those refusing to consider the use of online tools or expressing concern over the 'risks' often have little or no understanding of whether there are any risks (and of what magnitude), or whether the risks of these tools are less than the risks of the tools they are using now.

It is simply a 'fear of things new to me', without any intellectual consideration of the relative risks and benefits. This is a known phobia, Neophobia - the irrational fear of anything new.

I've thought about this issue a great deal over the years and tried a number of tactics to educate people on the uses and actual risks of online tools.

After 16 years I've come to the conclusion that explaining how online tools work simply isn't the right way to overcome irrational fears in most cases.

People don't really want to understand how the tools of our civilisation function - they just want to feel confident that they work consistently and in known ways.

In other words, familiarity trumps understanding.

To begin experimenting with a technology many people simply want assurance that 'others like me' have used it previously in a similar manner safety and successfully. Their comfort with its use then grows the more they use the tool themselves and the less new it feels.

They don't really care about the science or machinery under the hood.

Therefore as internet professionals our task isn't to share knowledge on the mechanics of online tools. It is to build a sense of comfort and familiarity with the medium.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't use evidence, explain how online tools differ and can be used for different goals or effectively identify and mitigate the real risks. This remains very, very important in familiarising people with the online world.

However we should spend less time on the technical details, explaining the machinery of how information is transmitted over the internet, how servers secure data, or how dynamic and static web pages are written and published. These things 'just work'.

Instead we need to focus on helping people use the tools themselves, provide examples of use by others and demonstrate practically how risks are managed and mitigated. Support people in understanding and trusting that each time they push a particular button a consistent result will occur.

Once people are familiar with a particular online tool and no longer consider it new it becomes much easier to move on to an accurate benefit and risk assessment and move organisations forward. Even if they don't really understand how it all works.

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1,000th post at eGovAU - looking backwards and forwards

It is hard for me to believe that I've reached 1,000 posts on eGovAU - all talking about Government 2.0 and related topics.

That's well over half a million words I've written on the topic in around three years - around 5 decent-sized novels.

Now I'm here I'm indulging in the opportunity to look back and forward.

Think on the world a decade ago, in early 2001.

The twin towers still stood, Australia had just celebrated 100 years of Federation and John Howard was soon to be re-elected.

The Internet bubble had collapsed a year earlier, leaving people deeply suspicious of investing in dotcoms and creating a global tech depression. There was no Google, YouTube, Facebook, Myspace or Twitter.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 web browser (still used 10 years later by some government agencies) ruled the web with around 90% market share. The web was dominated by brochureware and surviving ecommerce start-ups like Amazon and eBay.

There was no such concepts as social media, Web 2.0 or Government 2.0 (only eGovernment) and the Australian government had only recently mandated accessibility standards for government websites. Some Departments didn't have websites yet.

There were about 458 million internet users globally (in March 2001) - compared to today's 477 million internet users in China alone, or over 500 million active Facebook users.

The world has changed a great deal since 2001, geographically, politically and socially. Every living individual in the world has changed - some more than others.

Governments have also changed - however much has remained the same.

The next ten years promises to only bring more change, at a faster pace, than the last ten.

The challenge for all of us is to consider these changes strategically, their opportunities and consequences, whilst still living through them. The future has always belonged to those who can anticipate, act, react and adapt - and the future of government will equally belong to those who embrace and drive positive change, not to those who let it happen to them, or despite them.

We live in a singular moment in human history, a moment ripe with potential for humanity and the planet.

We've thrown off the shackles of distance with cheap communications technologies and given more than 2 billion humans access to a global mind - a database filled with much of the world's knowledge and thoughts, a conduit to discover, create, share and collaborate to build empowered, engaged and effective societies and institutions.

How should we use this moment in time?

How will YOU use this moment?

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Dumbing down or lifting up - writing in plain English respects your readers

It makes me really upset when I visit a government website and find it written in dense technical or bureaucratic language.

I can appreciate the desire of public servants to be precise and accurate in their choice of words, but often the language chosen is incomprehensible to people without two degrees and ten years experience in government.

I've heard about - and witnessed - instances when experienced writers or communication professionals have translated complex text into plain English and been told 'you're dumbing it down'.

No they're not. They're lifting the language up.

Writing in plain English is about respecting your readers - writing for them, not for yourself or your boss.

When writing complex multi-syllabic diatribes, the writer is not demonstrating their intellectual superiority or eloquent grasp of sophisticated phraseology.

The writer is showing they don't have the writing skill and experience to lift their language out of government-speak to a level used by society, by their audience - a level used every day to share and explain some of the most complicated concepts and thoughts imaginable.

The writer is hiding behind their words, using them to conceal a lack of appreciation and respect for their audience and a lack of understanding of their topic. They are revealing their limits and fears - and they are not getting their message across.

One of the core capabilities for the Australian Public Service is to 'Communicate with Influence'.

'Influence' doesn't mean using big words, it means using effective words - words that can overcome the gaps in communication between writers and readers to convey meaning and understanding.

So when writing your websites and developing your documents, think about the invisible people in the room - your readers. Is your choice of words appropriate for their experience and education?

Will they be uplifted by your simple and clear language or left feeling 'dumbed down', lost and frustrated by your turgid turns of phrase?

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Why don't advertising budgets match audience behaviour?

For a very, very long time (more than ten years) I've been asking marketers and communicators in commercial and public sectors why they invest so heavily in producing and showing advertisements for channels which fewer and fewer people are watching and invest so little in the newer channels emerging.

In most advertising budgets there's still a massive amount for free-to-air television, moderate for radio and newspapers, a comparative small amount for online, cable or mobile advertising and virtually nothing for social media engagement.

Of course there's price differences - the cost of producing and screening a single television advertisement is far greater than that to produce and screen a web video for a month.

There's also a difference in how advertisements are developed. Television and radio are one-way mediums, with the focus on gaining attention and communicating a simple message in 1 minute or less - whereas cable advertising can be more interactive and online even more so (except for display advertising online, which doesn't have a good record of success in Australia).

The last few years of research on Australians have demonstrated that the internet is our number one medium, particularly for under 35s, however advertisers are still focusing their efforts on television - perhaps because that's what the older decision-makers watch.

This discrepancy has been brought home to me again by the Mumbrella piece, Natalie Tran: Bigger than free TV, on Natalie Tran, a 24 year old student on YouTube who, in the second week of March, received 876,106 views.

As Mumbrella pointed out,

If she’d been on free TV, she’d have been the 42nd biggest show of that week, based on OzTam’s data.

She had more viewers than Nine’s Customs (876,000), Sunday’s edition of ABC News (872,000), RPA (868,000), The Mentalist (863,000), RBT (856,000). And indeed Top Gear (818,000).

A couple more interesting figures comparing Top Gear's channel on YouTube with Natalie's Community Channel:

Top Gear’s YouTube channel uploads have delivered 193m views. Natalie Tran’s Community Channel channel 357m.

To Gear’s direct channel views – 15m; Community Channel, 47m.

Top Gear’s channel’s most viewed clip – 5.9m; Community Channel’s 34m. And no, I haven’t got the decimal point in the wrong place.

Surely it is time to begin shifting the budget a little further, and trialing out more interactive initiatives than Simply. More. Display. Advertising.

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Which Commonwealth agencies use which social media tools?

Based on information I've collected over the last year, and using the data collected via the Vic Government, I have prepared a Google Spreadsheet designed to identify who in the Commonwealth Government is using which social media channels in their activities.

It is fairly basic at this stage;

• it is only Commonwealth for now (sorry to the state and local government guys - I will be building the same system for you soon);
• it doesn't look at how many of each channel your agency runs;
• it doesn't link to the channels;
• it doesn't link to agency websites;
• it may miss some smaller offices and agencies (I sourced the data from Australia.gov.au, so it should be fairly accurate, but it is hard to be sure, given the frequent changes and that not everyone might inform AGIMO of them).
• there are no contact details for the teams managing the channels.

The sheet also looks at engagement via third-party channels and at whether or not staff are allowed to access social media channels from within.

I need your help filling it out and expanding it into a useful tool for helping agencies identify which of their colleagues are actively using these channels on an official basis.

All contributions are anonymous - please circulate it to your peers. The more data we have, the more useful it becomes.

To give a taste of the spreadsheet - the stats are below.

Click on the link below, choose edit and then 'External social media' to add your data.

You can go to the full spreadsheet at: https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0Ap1exl80wB8OdENTTHE1VkJmZURzaGRPUHV4ZW1teGc&output=html

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What Australian government data would you like to see online under an open reuse license?

The NSW government has introduced a new service where people can provide suggestions on what government information they would like to access via a web or mobile front-end.

Thus far the eight suggestions focus heavily on public transport information - knowing when and where buses, trains and ferries may be found.

You can add your own ideas here.

However I'd like to ask a broader question.

Out of all the data that Australian governments collect or may hold, what would you like to see available online in a machine-readable format under an open license supporting reuse?

And how would you use it?

If you're short on ideas, why not check out the results of the iOpendataday & the International Hackathon, where thousands of people in over 73 cities across 5 continents participated in creating applications using open government data.

In fact it took place pretty much everywhere except Australia - bringing me in mind of Chris Moore's quote...

Here's a list of some of the applications created.

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The danger of permanent internet exclusion to egovernment and Gov 2.0

The internet is increasingly defining the 21st century.

It has become the primary medium used to find and share information, the most commonly used news and entertainment medium and has unleashed an outpouring of creativity which commentators, such as Clay Shirky have described as "the greatest in human history".

Equally there have been pressures to constrain aspects of the internet. Around the world a number of nations are blocking access to certain pages, websites and services - sometimes based on concerns on the appropriateness of content, sometimes due to economic or political pressure.

There have even been attempts, spearheaded by significant copyright holders, to block internet access for significant periods of time - or even permanently - from households or individuals accused of repeated copyright violations.

This last topic is worth debate in a eGovernment and Gov 2.0 context.

As governments shift information, services and engagement activities online there is greater expectation - and hope - that citizens will use the internet to interact with agencies.

By shifting services online governments can cut offices and employ less phone staff.

In a country where all citizens have the right to access the internet this is not an issue. Anyone who can engage online is encouraged to do so and offline government services can be reconfigured to suit audiences who are unable or unwilling to use the internet. Everyone wins.

However what happens in a nation where internet access can be denied to otherwise capable citizens, either for long periods of time or permanently?

What is the commercial impact after television and telephony have migrated to a (for instance) national broadband network? How would this distort these peoples' access to government services? What additional costs (at taxpayer expense) would government be forced to incur to service these people effectively? Does it exclude them from democratic participation or from vital health and welfare information?

I can't see any nation deciding to permanently cut access to an individual or household's telephony services because they used it to make a few abusive calls. Neither can I see any state denying a household access to electricity or water because one resident was convicted several times for growing illicit drugs via a hydroponic system in their bedroom.

However there are real threats emerging around the world that some individuals or households may be permanently excluded from online participation based on accusations, or convictions, for a few minor offenses.


An example is France, which enacted a 'three strikes' law in 2009. Reportedly record companies are now sending 25,000 complaints per day via ISPs to French citizens they are accusing of flouting copyright laws.

Under the law French citizens receive two warnings and can then be disconnected from their ISP and placed on a 'no internet' blacklist - denying them access to the online world, potentially permanently.

While this approach was designed to discourage illegal activity, early indications are that this doesn't appear to have succeeded as piracy may have risen. It also, apparently, has annoyed US law enforcement agencies as it may encourage greater use of freely available, industrial strength, encryption technologies, thereby making it much harder to distinguish between major criminal organisations and file downloaders and hurting law enforcement activities.

This is similar to an often-repeated storyline in Superman comics, when Superman can identify criminals as they are the only ones using lead shielding on their homes to block his X-Ray vision. If everyone used lead shielding, Superman couldn't tell the bad guys from the good guys (there's a future storyline for DC).


Most importantly a 'three strikes and you're off' approach - or equivalent law - risks permanently excluding people from the most important 21st century medium, simply for being accused three times of copyright violation. Arguably, in today's world, that's a much more severe judgement than people receive for multiple murders, rapes or armed robbery.

I don't see the Australian government rushing to embrace a similar approach, however it still raises the question of whether we need to consider internet access as a right at the same level as access to electricity or telephones.

Other nations are considering this as well. Several European countries have already declared internet access a fundamental human right, including France, which places the country in an interesting position.

The European Union (of which France is a member) has rejected a 3-strike law and, as Boing Boing reported, progressive MEPs wrote a set of "Citizens Rights" amendments that established that internet access was a fundamental right that cannot be taken away without judicial review and actual findings of wrongdoing.

As the internet has now moved from a 'nice-to-have' service to a 'must-have' utility for many people, even actual findings of wrongdoing may no longer be sufficient reason to permanently exclude people. In fact this may be legally impossible to enforce anyway, due to public access and mobile services.

Given the potential negative impacts on democratic participation, the ongoing cost to government and the potential commercial and social impacts - should it be possible for a government to legislate, a court to dictate or for ISPs to refuse to connect some citizens to the internet permanently?

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The media140 #OzPolitics Tweetbook

I felt that it would be useful to compile the online discussions during media140 #OzPolitics into a single work, a permanent record that could be reread, referenced and reconsidered.

So over the long weekend, with assistance from PeopleBrowsr, the support of Julie Posetti and permission from FirstDogOnMoon and Mike Stuchbery to reuse some of their material, I compiled the following Tweetbook.

You are welcome to read, print, share and comment.

media140 #OzPolitics Tweetbook

By the way - as far as I know this is the first conference Tweetbook created in Australia. It is based on the very useful Open Government and Innovations Conference Tweetbook from their conference in Washington in July 2009.

I hope the media140 #OzPolitics Tweetbook will also serve as an inspirational model for future Australian conferences and events.

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How to avoid turning Gov 2.0 initiatives into 'creepy treehouses'

I thought I'd share a post brought to my attention by Geoff Mason via the Online Communicators Forum group in LinkedIn


Written by Jared Stein at Flexknowlogy, Defining "Creepy Treehouse" explores the pitfalls when an organisation creates an online social environment.

The article defines the term "Creepy Treehouse" in several ways, including as the following:

n. Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards

Such institutional environments are often seen as more artificial in their construction and usage, and typically compete with pre-existing systems, environments, or applications. creepy treehouses also have an aspect of closed-ness, where activity within is hidden from the outside world, and may not be easily transferred from the environment by the participants.

In other words,  an artificial community may not be real enough to attract and maintain a community - it may have too many or arbitrary rules, expect and reward unrealistic behaviours or simply be designed to advertise (shout) at people rather than foster community engagement.

How can these types of issues be avoided - particularly given the governance required by the public sector?

One solution is to partner with robust existing online communities. This approach allows a government agency to participate without having to take on responsibilities such as developing the systems and the community, attracting and empowering participants or moderating and guiding behaviours. Certainly an agency needs to be careful about which existing communities it partners with, however there are many long-standing well managed communities that could be viable options.

A second approach is to partner on the creation of a community, funding an external organisation to develop a community that the agency can participate in. This also outsources much of the governance and control issues, reducing the agency's overheads in these areas. It is important to be very careful about the selection of the organisation that will create and manage the community as while many will claim they can achieve this, there are in reality very few organisations with the skills, experience, networks and capabilities to do so.

If, however, the agency has no choice but to create the community, it is important to be as transparency about governance and as even-handed, consistent and as hands-off as possible in its operation. While an agency can seed a community with content it needs to ensure that there are tools and incentives that encourage the community to generate the bulk of the content and interactions themselves. President Obama's MyBarackObama website is an excellent example of this, as the site allowed participants to form communities, create, share and distribute information and largely run their virtual lives within the community without seeing virtual police on every corner.

Perhaps that is the best analogy for an agency-run community - it needs to run like a western democracy without the elections. People are free to go about their business as they please, within the laws of their community. There are no bureaucrats and officials scrutinising their every move.

Surely a government agency can justify managing an online community in the same way our government manages our nation - treating the members as citizens, not serfs.

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Redefining public goods - by Nicholas Gruen

If you followed the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington earlier this month, you may have seen Nicholas Gruen's presentation on redefining public goods.

If you haven't, it is well worth reviewing (see below) - as are many of the other presentations from the event.

These presentations are available online, together with slides, from the event's website.



His slides are embedded below.

Redefining Public_Private Partnerships Presentation

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