Instead, I’ve just come back to it and will post it as dot points.

Australian household internet consumption has grown 57 times since 2000, the first year the Internet Survey was conducted.

Total subcribers (including business) average download over three months:

• 2000: 273mb
• 2008: 10.17 GB

Household subscribers average download over three months (in 2000, there was only dialup)

• 2000: 174mb
• 2008: 9.9 GB

Other points of interest from the data.

• Average internet data consumption per subscriber has increased 37 times since ABS first released results in September 2000
• Average Australian household internet consumption has grown 57 times in the same period.
• TOTAL internet data consumption across Australia has increased from just one terabyte of data in 2000, to 81 TB of data in 2009.
• 3.8 million connection in 2000 were almost all dialup, compared to 8 million connections in 2008, of which 1.3 million were dialup.
• In just two years Australian data consumption doubled. In Sep06 Australia’s total data download was 36tb (to 81 TB in Dec 09)
• Where the average (mostly dialup) connection in 2000 downloaded 273mb each, the total download across australia was 1.05 TB amongst 3.8 million connections.
• In 2008, Australia’s 1.3m dialup users downloaded almost exactly the same amount of overall data as the first survey reported, this time 1.07 TB.

Last week the Australian Bureau of Statistics released their Internet Activity Survey for the December quarter of 2008.

According to the ABS release, their highlight was that wireless broadband subscription across Australia has tripled in just one year, from 481,000 in December 07 to 1.46 million in December 08, which is great.

Looking into the numbers, that massive jump in wireless broadband takeup represents 979,000 new subscribers, more than the entire country’s overall growth of 891,000 internet subscribers in the 12 month period (7.1 to 7.99 million). If the numbers don’t seem to add up it’s because 576,000 subscribers finally ditched their dialup connections. But dialup’s decline actually slowed compared to the previous 12 month period, to December 2007, when 862,000 subscribers left their dialup provider. That drop took dialup connections from 2.75 to 1.88 million, compared to the current period to December 08, where dialup subscribers dropped to just 1.31 million.

What I found unbelievable was to be reminded, in the week that the government rejected all bids for the National Broadband Network (NBN) to go it alone on the internet superhighway to heaven, is that so many Australians are still on dialup. Of the almost 8 million (7.996m) internet subscribers in Australia as at 31 December, 2008, 1.3 million of those are still on a dialup connection. That’s 16% of the country. If dialup is still the price gouge I remember it being 13 years ago, that’s a large proportion of the Australian online community who are overpaying for a vastly inferior product.

Apart from the people don’t have a choice, for reasons like rural or remote areas, I’d be very interested to see some breakdown on who still subscribes to dialup and why. Is there anyone who chooses dialup? Despite having highspeed broadband as a matter of course, I know one person who had to convince his parents recently it wasn’t worth holding on to their dialup subscription “just in case” old contacts still had the email address that was tied to it.

Do you know anyone still on dialup, and do you think they have a good reason to be? Apart from absolute necessity, I don’t see how it could be justified, and part of the NBN rollout should be reducing that 16 per cent significantly.

In January I experimented with a little mobile journalism, or MoJo, on a small story. Using Qik on a Dopod mobile phone, I live streamed video from the scene of a unit fire on Brisbane’s south side.

This was by no means an experiment in mobile journalism that even basically covered how MoJo could be done, it was simply a spur of the moment decision to give it a go. These are my thoughts on the process.

One of the videos watching fire fighters go about their work after they had already put the fire out.

Interview with the fire officer in charge

This video was taken with a TV cameraman alongside me. The use of his light was crucial. I had earlier interviewed the officer in charge using my point and shoot camera, but the footage was very poor without a light on the subject.

Each time I started a new video stream an update was sent to Twitter. While I was live streaming to the internet several people used Qik’s inbuilt comment facility to send me comments asking where I was, who I was with, and what was going on.

Pro: There is the potential for community or viewer input during a live interview. The journalist could invite questions from the audience, choosing one or several to ask directly if appropriate.
Con: None really. The comments don’t create a notification sound or show in the video. The only issue is if a journalist thinks they might be distracted, but this is easily overcome by turning off comments.

The vision is streaming live to the internet.
Pro: No editing required before original content can be viewed. Gives audience the very real sense of “being there”, and participating in the event or interview.
Con: For mainstream media, there could be the paralysing fear of loss of control. What might someone say or do? Not just say in terms of “offensive” language, but saying something that could present a serious legal problem, like accusing someone of being responsible for a crime. The fear is not irrational, but TV do live crosses all the time.
Another loss of control is the ability to embed the video anywhere. That means competitors could simply put the embed code on their own site. This isn’t a problem if there is a way of appropriately branding the video because viewers will still know who created the content, no matter where they see it.

Apart from live streaming to the internet, I also took images and video on my Sony Cybershot DSC-W110. In some cases this was concurrent, simply holding the camera under the phone while one streamed and the other recorded.

The most compelling footage of the fire was shot on a mobile phone by a neighbour, not a member of the media. Connecting our phones via Bluetooth, he was able to give me the footage of flames shooting from the window. That phone footage was used on TV news the following day and can be seen embedded in the Courier Mail story here.

The videos above are in a live emergency services situation, but standard interviews are of course also possible. I’ve been experimenting with Qik, but UStream and other services are available as well.

Interview with Qik co-founder
Innovations in Journalism – live streaming video from mobiles developed by Qik
In the comments at that page: “Tip to Qiksters – buy a cellphone tripod.” I couldn’t agree more.

A post of mine from 2007, some of my earliest interest in mobile journalism came out of the Reuters MoJo lab.
the earley edition – Mobile Journalism Toolkit

Stephen Quinn is a journalism academic at Deakin University who specialises in Mobile Journalism. One place you can follow his thoughts is on the GlobalMojo blog.
He’s a good man to follow if you’re interested in mobile journalism, particularly in the Asia Pacific region.

UPDATE: I have removed the uTag script that automatically changed my URLs. And for brevity, the technical issues with uTag that I address in this post are:

1. If the ad banner is left open after visiting a site, the user continues surfing to other websites, and later closes the ad banner, the browser will automatically refresh to the page first visited by following the uTag link.
2. In the same vein, once the ad banner is closed, using the Back button will simply reload the banner frame, rather than going back to the linking site.
3. A uTag Death Loop exists, whereby a uTag link to another uTag enabled site will result in an increasing number of ad banners stacked on top of each other. Read below for how this happens.

Put simply, uTag is a monetisation strategy for linking. Several sites already provide link shortening services which have become popular chiefly amongst Twitter users, who need a short link because their posts have a 140 character limit. Examples are bit.ly, is.gd, tinyurl.com, to name just a few. The difference with uT.ag is that it aims to pay people for providing those outbound links.

The utag link will provide an ad banner on the target page and, at the end of a payment period, a share of revenue is deposited into a pre-nominated paypal account. The ad banner sits below the normal page content and can be closed if a user considers it too intrusive, but will the banner become more of an annoyance for people than the revenue is worth? Also, if users hate the banner so much they stop trusting or using your links, then you have a serious problem.

So it’s great in theory – a revolution of the link economy. Whereas people linking out to quality content were in the past building a reputation as a trusted resource, the idea is that now you can still do that, but at the same time actually be paid! But there are still some bugs to be worked out that may turn people off, and away from your content.

The uTag blog has listed a few external reviews of their service, while
Pantsland’s Brad Kellet has aggregated a few responses from his Twitter crowd after he asked for their thoughts on the banner ads.

I’ve implemented the code on my site and, as you’ll see, it rewires every outbound link to a uTag link (UPDATE: no longer). I see three main issues with the service. As Hugo Sharp, one of the uTag developers, responded to these bug questions on Twitter (@hugosharp), I present the exchange here.

The uTag death loop I referred to is a possible scenario in which a uTag link to another uTag enabled site will result in an increasing number of ad banners stacked up on each other.

Read the following Tweets in reverse order to see how this outcome, a double ad banner, happened.

So a brief experiment confirmed the existence of a uTag Death Loop, or as @hugosharp described it, a potential black hole.

As my last (top) update mentioned, the experiment was unsuccessful in that I couldn’t loop back to my site from Twitter, because Twitter outbound links open in a new tab or window. However if I linked to a uTag enabled site, which in turn linked back to my uTag enabled site, a loop of following those two links could theoretically result in a never ending stack of uTag ad banners.

If a high traffic site was using uTag links they might expect to lose a proportion of visitors who get sick of the intrusiveness, and apparent unpredictability, of the ads. As I mentioned at the beginning, some visitors may stop trusting your links, or using them at all, because of the banner they know they’ll get.

While you shouldn’t disregard the unhappiness of a proportion of visitors, some people may offset that with the possibility of revenue that the uTag link provides.

Mine is not a high traffic site, so with little to no return on the uTag banner ad revenue the uTag links may have to go.

Vodafone announced today they have signed a deal to sell the iPhone in ten of its global markets, including Australia, ‘later this year’.

Tuesday 6 May 2008

Vodafone to offer Apple’s iPhone in ten markets

Vodafone today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten of its markets around the globe. Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network.

You have plenty of other multi-purpose phones – smart phone, PDA phone, Pocket PC phone – all of which do lots of good things. Is the iPhone the best? How does it rate against the others?

The mobile world is advancing towards that mythical ‘all-in-one’ device that can not only effectively meet the demand for multimedia use of phone, video, audio, image and web, but also realistically meet the needs of those publishing content on the go.

It’s a mobile revolution. The Nokia N95 can’t be bad if it’s the mobile platform of choice for the Reuters Mojo team, so does the iPhone live up to the hype?

In Australia, very few news organisations use Twitter. As full disclosure, before I continue, I work at The Courier Mail, a News Limited paper.

Fairfax masthead sites

• Sydney Morning Herald – none, although there is a user account for an SMH columnist
  https://twitter.com/samanthabrett – last and only update May 2007
• The Age – http://twitter.com/theage – last update May 2007
• Brisbane Times – none

ABC News

• http://twitter.com/abcnewsbrisbane – regularly updated through day
• http://twitter.com/abcnews – regularly updated through day
• http://twitter.com/abcrn – ABC Radio National – deleted since December
• http://twitter.com/abctv – an example of a squatter. Two updates, one of which is “can’t believe this one wasn’t taken”.

News Limited masthead sites

• The Australian – https://twitter.com/theaustralian – never updated
• The Daily Telegraph – https://twitter.com/dailytelegraph – never updated
• The Herald Sun – http://twitter.com/heraldsun – never updated
• AdelaideNow – https://twitter.com/adelaidenow – never updated
• PerthNow – https://twitter.com/perthnow – never updated
• The Mercury – https://twitter.com/themercury – never updated
• NT News – none
• The Courier Mail – 20 Twitter accounts (as at January 31, 2008) updated whenever new content available on site

I am assuming the unused Twitter accounts above belong to these publications, but it’s entirely possible someone could simply be ‘squatting’ on the Twitter user names.
I set up Twitter accounts for all of The Courier Mail’s news sections in early October last year, making our newspaper one of the only two news outlets in Australia using Twitter (that I have found), and definitely one of the largest media contributors to Twitter by number of content categories, but not necessarily volume of content.

The Courier Mail’s current crop of 20 Twitter user accounts are providing free SMS/IM updates on topics ranging from sports, to business, to breaking news, all with tinyurl links to the original story content. I’m now trying to find time to play around with a Facebook page for The Courier Mail, although I rarely have any spare hours at home to spend doing that.

During the process of setting up these Twitter accounts, I did a search to see if other Australian news outlets were already using Twitter.

Of News Limited mastheads, apart from The Courier Mail, none of the other existing News Ltd Twitter users have posted.
Of Fairfax mastheads, only The Age has a single feed, last updated in May 2007.
The ABC has two feeds – one of which I follow to receive local news alerts on my mobile phone.

A search for “news” in Twitter yields a large number of results. Here are just a few (listed as their Twitter user name) that may be of interest – financialtimes, npr news, cbcnews, wired, ITN_NEWS, BBC, SkyNewsBusiness, indianews, SkyNews, and CNETNews.

In the UK, the BBC and Sky have a larger selection of Twitter updates that can be followed.

The 2007 federal election was approaching when I was working on the Courier Mail Twitter accounts so, having already written a story about politics and social networking, I had a look at what political parties had on Twitter.

At the time the results were:
Greens: http://twitter.com/Greens
Three updates in total, all on August 2, 2007, that are worth mentioning.

The Greens have established a twitter and are testing it.
04:11 PM August 02, 2007
Do you receive my Greens twitter?
04:26 PM August 02, 2007
Hrrrmmm, if I was 14 I’d know exactly what would happen
06:39 PM August 02, 2007

Liberal (both spoofs)
http://twitter.com/johnhoward
http://twitter.com/johnhowardfacts
Labor: none
Democrats: none
Nationals: none

In 2008, however, the Greens seem to have got their act together with a Twitter page feeding from the Greens Blog website.
https://twitter.com/greensblog

I also didn’t find this during the election last year , but https://twitter.com/kevinrudd is another spoof Twitter account.

The possibilities of Twitter as a quick and easy mass distribution method would be well utilised by politicians.

Qtrax requires a software download, much like the iTunes store, to browse, play and download the songs. The service is said to be supported by limited advertising around the Qtrax player window.

The Mac version of the Qtrax music player software isn’t due for release until March 18.

via: Download 25 million songs for free – legally | Australian IT

UPDATE: Apparently Qtrax didn’t have the support they thought they did, so in fact have delayed their launch.

Since then I’ve received my beta testing login details. With a great deal of excitement I went to Hulu.com to see what fantastic wonders would be presented to me.

None. If you’re in Australia, bad luck – it’s a case of look, but don’t touch.

For now, Hulu is a U.S. service only. That said, our intention is to make Hulu’s growing content lineup available worldwide. This requires clearing the rights for each show or film in each specific geography and will take time.

Being limited to North America because of distribution rights, international users are agonisingly teased by a long list of currently popular TV shows they can’t watch – Arrested Development, Family Guy, Scrubs, King of The Hill, My Name is Earl, The Office… the list goes on, and unless you have a beta login to Hulu (get on the waiting list) none of those links will get you anywhere.

With a login, choosing any episode from one of those shows takes you to the video player screen, right to the excited point of ‘Loading Video’ before slapping you in the face – rejection.

But I want to take advantage of the options alongside the video player – share, embed, watch it full screen! Hopefully it’s not too long before something is up and running for Australia.

In a desperate attempt to see the video player in action, I tried some older shows in the hope they were no longer affected by distribution rights. Thankfully, even Doogie Howser episodes (Breaking Up is Hard to Doogie) from 1989 were unavailable.

The potential of this application is huge. When I read the description of what it would do, I couldn’t wait to try it. Unfortunately the interface isn’t entirely user-friendly at the moment, but it’s in beta, so expect something great to come.

For what is obviously planned for this media player the ABC is again demonstrating why Australians go to them for original online audio and video content – because they try to make it easily accessible.

Often they succeed in the attempt, and that’s why their podcasts and vodcasts have enjoyed such popularity. ABC digital content has succeeded because it is available. If there’s not much to choose from, people move on. The ABC’s integration online of text, audio and video content is impressive, to say the least.

If you haven’t seen it, check out an example of their in-page video player on this story.

Incredibly simple, but effective.

The Reuters mojo (Mobile Journalism) team has been field-testing the exclusive use of a Nokia N95 mobile phone for filing picture, video, and text content.

Tests have been conducted all over the world, and while the phone’s video quality isn’t great, it’s certainly a lot closer to the perfect mobile journalist than anyone else has effectively come.

See their mojo site, but the toolkit consists of the N95 phone, a collapsable keyboard with phone bracket, mini tripod for video use of phone, directional microphone and a solar charging mobile power source for the phone.

The solar power source is probably not necessary for your average city journo, but as their description says, the solar charger came in handy in Senegal. Fair enough.

Despite the 5MP still camera on the N95, I don’t think its video quality is equal to what you could expect from a comparable still camera. I’ve seen some excellent video taken on a lower-end consumer point-and-shoot digital camera (a $300 Canon Powershot SD800 IS)

The News Ltd paper I work for (full disclosure) went so far as to declare in March 2007 that “YouTube’s dominance of online video content is about to end”.

Hulu.com is the outworking of that effort and is now in beta, and it’s looking pretty good.

Something very few news sites are doing today is incorporating social networking opportunities into their structure.  Even less are incorporating social networking into their video content – which remains for the most part clunky and unappealing.

Hopefully Hulu will change that for News Ltd/Corp.  This aspect of the current beta player is promising.

The “embed” function allows you to set in and out points, so you can embed just a selected chunk of a video clip on your blog.

I really hope this technology gets rolled out to all News Ltd/Corp sites, because it will exponentially enhance video content accessibility.

A review of Hulu at LostRemote.

Twitters (messages left on Twitter) are limited in length, much like a text message on a phone, but would be very handy for imparting brief, quick instructions to everyone in a work group immediately on their mobile phone.

via Phil Windley’s Technometria:

…using Twitter as a messaging endpoint in what Rohit Khare calls a “syndication oriented architecture,” or SynOA. Jon Udell and Rohit talked about this on IT Conversations a few weeks ago.

I’m using Twitter in a similar way in my class this semester. My students are writing servers that send updates to a Twitter account via the Twitter API. Anyone can then subscribe to those updates through RSS, via SMS, or simply by going to the Web page. Easy, simple, and pretty effective.

Tags: twitter, social networking, rss, sms

The Digg Effect: A Deconstruction | Linux Brain Dump

Pew Research Center: Online Videos Go Mainstream

To make the online video point, Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com has put together a video entry about the research findings.

From the Pew survey link:

• Online video now reaches a mainstream audience; 57% of online adults have used the internet to watch or download video
• Three in four young adult internet users watch or download video online
• News video is the most popular category for everyone except young adults.
• More than half of online video viewers share links to the video they find with others.
• Most online video viewers have watched online with other people.
• Professional videos are preferred to amateur productions online, but amateur content appeals to coveted segments of the young male audience.
• Few pay to access online video.

Low on speed, high on cost | Australian IT

“Markets with healthy levels of competition have led the introduction of innovative services and appealing pricing packages,” the report said.

I expect broadband prices in Australia will drop when Telstra is finally opened up to widespread competition, and so I impatiently wait.

An excellent site for Australians looking to compare broadband packages, as well as quality of service (they list over 6,000 plans and 250 providers), is broadband CHOICE.