Greener Desktop

The Sydney Morning Herald just published an “article” today that can only be called a fully paid for advertorial, poorly disguised as an article.

The article itself starts off by bagging  established photo sharing sites. Actually Flickr and Zenfolio are the only two real photo sharing sites mentioned.  The author then introduces subject of the article and praises the slickness of a site which I can only really describe as a flash version of a photo sharing site from the 1990s. It reminds me of when I first tried Yahoo back in university. Which has of course moved on since then. The author then goes on to paint a dramatic story of unrivalled passion from the creator of the site. Apparently it took him four years to make it. Ouch!
Anyway enough of the aesthetics as the author and the creator of this new photo sharing site have a real gripe which is backed up by quite possibly the most ridiculous and completely unsubstantiated claim I have ever heard.
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Today the Australian government announced their intention to go ahead with building a national broadband infrastructure, themselves. Apparently none of the tenders were up to scratch. Including those from the big players like Optus. Telstra was dumped from the process a long time ago.

Theoretically this is a great move. I have long said that the government made a big mistake when they privatised Telstra. Effectively creating a private sector monopoly on telecommunications. The difference between a public and private sector monopoly is greed. Corporations by their very nature are greedy. When Telstra was privatised it should have been split up into retail and infrastructure. With infrastructure not only servicing Telstra retail but other players. Infrastructure would have remained a public service.

So what the government has just announced is effectively what should have been done 11 years ago. Hooray right? Now for the bad news.

The government has effectively cut out the middle man when it comes to implementing their Internet filter. Since they will control the wire they will also control the Internet. This is great for the government since cooperation from ISPs has been a problem all along. The ISPs have known all along that the filter stinks. It’s bad news for them and it’s bad news for their users. Telstra the largest ISP in the country refused to participate in any trials and during the initial round of trials a lot of the ISPs that did participate dropped out.

Part of the motivation for building this network seems to come from frustration over what the private sector can deliver but the conspiracy theory in me says that a lot of it has to do with pushing it’s paternalistic filtering agenda through. With one hand the government giveth and with the other it taketh away, our rights and liberties, anyway.

My blog usually only gets a couple of hundred visitors a week. Mainly from coworkers and friends and family. I’m not much of a self-promoter and for some reason (probably because of lots of websites on the same IP) the site doesn’t rank very well on SEO. As you can see from the chart the vast majority of my traffic comes from my close social network sites and inbound links from instant messaging software. Search engines make up a very small percentage. I also don’t, usually, update my blog that often. Maybe one post a week on a good one so you can hardly be expected to come back every day to check it out.

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A close friend today was discussing mobile internet with me. I forced him to when I started ranting today about the fact that Vodafone want to charge you $10 a month extra for 100mb of Internet access on your mobile whilst I can get a whole gigabyte for $19 a month if I use one of those USB sticks. Don’t use Vodafone, they’re just one example of why we’ll be stuck in the dark ages for a long long time. Anyway I digress.

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