Australian Government Proves Why Blogging Is Best Left To Everyone Else

The Australian Government has released an official consultation (white) paper on whether it should launch a “consultation blog.”

According to the paper, the Special Minister of State the Hon. Gary Nairn states that the purpose of the paper is to discuss the provision of the consultation blog and “sets out to balance the opportunities provided by the new online environment against the challenges and very real threats emerging to the identity and privacy of individuals.” The blog itself “is
envisaged as a website that lists consultations and allows people to post responses, comments and feedback against each consultation.”

Now whilst it’s great to see a sovereign nation officially consider a blogging strategy, I want what ever it is the soon-to-be former Government is smoking; the irony of launching a consultation paper on a consultation blog seems lost on them. Certainly deciding to run a blog based on a lengthy consultation process by itself seems to me to prove that they shouldn’t be blogging at all; after all, if the purpose of having a consultation blog is to gain feedback from the public, wouldn’t they just be better off launching the blog and taking feedback from the public via the blog rather than launching a consultation paper that probably cost six figures to come up with by a committee of high paid public servants who love nothing more than creating papers like this as a means to avoid real exposure to the will of the public? A little cynical perhaps, but reading a paper that describes blogs like 2002 called again can do that to you.

The PDF in all its glory can be found here.

Disclosure: I’m a former Australian Government staffer.

Raising the Cone of Silence

The editorial "'Get Smart' in Washington" (Aug. 3) does not discuss the fact that the administration's proposal to gut the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) isn't about listening to foreign-to-foreign calls; it's about undercutting ...
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More Lawsuit Fun For Facebook

Facebook is going to have to defend itself against at least one more lawsuit in the coming months. They’re not just dealing with the ConnectU lawsuit - another one was filed against them last month, in Pennsylvania.

The lawsuit hinges on U.S. Patent 6,519,629 (”System for creating a community for users with common interests to interact in”), which was issued in 2003 and is now owned by the plaintiffs, Cross Atlantic Capital Partners.

This is a flat out patent infringement accusation, and the plaintiff is requesting royalties from Facebook. The patent claims relate to social networks built around communities of users with “common interests.” Facebook, which bases networks around universities, business, etc., is naturally the largest target for the patent offensive.

I emailed Facebook earlier today for a comment. No word back from them yet.

Buying tips Refrigerators

the refrigerators in the market cost between Rs.4,990-1,35,000. You first need to decide on the capacity of the fridge.

To give you a rough idea a family of 2 members would require about 50-200 litres. Add 20 litres for every additional member. However, remember that the food habits as well as the shopping habits also affect this calculation. Non-vegetarians would require a higher capacity refrigerator. If you are the kind of person who would rather shop for the entire week at a time, you should go in for a refrigerator with a larger capacity.

Although the gross capacity is the basis on which most refrigerator models in India are sold, the net capacity would give the consumer a correct estimation of the actual usable capacity of the refrigerator. Gross capacity is the total capacity of the refrigerator and not an indicator of the actual capacity, and as a thumb rule, you could reduce 8% to 10% from the gross capacity to get an idea of the actual capacity of the refrigerator.

Frost-free refrigerators have given way to defrosting since they have an in-built thermostat, heater and timer that activates the defrost cycle every 2 hours. Frost-free refrigerators make the messy chore of defrosting a fading memory. These models are priced upwards of Rs.10,000.

There are also models that have an a utomatic defrosting option which defrost the fresh-food compartment automatically, but the freezer still has to be defrosted manually. Models such as this are priced at Rs. 6,500 onwards.