• The (Australian) National Forum

    The National Forum is an initiative that engages with many of the nations most important issues and political processes online. They have a whole bunch of sites; check them out. The National Forum, publisher of this site, was incorporated as a not-for-profit company to be a vehicle to promote democratic uses of the Internet in…

  • Audio Books

    Over summer, whilst travelling in India, I listened on my IPod, to the whole 40 or so hours of Dostoevsky’s War and Peace (a wonderful book btw). Audio books are great for travelling, as you don’t have to carry the whole book, but apart from this, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of…

  • Australia’s Cross Media Ownership Laws Change

    In line with the some what predictable behaviour of Conservative, laissez-faire ideology, the Australian Conservative government is set to change the laws that protect diversity within the Australian media system. Australia has one of the world’s most concentrated media systems in terms of ownership and the ‘cross-media-ownership’ legislation was in place to protect the Australian…

  • The Long View of Identity

    An excellent artictle by Andy Oram on identity and social software (Web2.0) The vision driving this article is a fervent belief among a far-flung set of researchers, software vendors, and system administrators: when people bring parts of their identities online, they can use the internet more effectively. Commerce sites can recognize them, participants in forums…

  • The Semantic Web for Museums

    Description Project Context: Mr Tom Worthington presented a week long workshop on the use of technology for museums of the Pacific islands region in July 2005. One of the recommendations made following the workshop was to investigate building an on-line repository of materials from across the Pacific. In second semester 2005, Kwok Chung, a computer…

  • Game Activism

    Some ten thousand Chinese protestors staged a demonstration on the weekend after a motif resembling a Hinomaru or “rising sun” Japanese flag was seen on a wall at a government office. Such large protests last took place in China two years ago when government-sanction anti-Japanese demonstrations broke out around the country after Japan approved school…