Computing Assistance Support & Education Inc – CASE Notes

There’s been an abundance of good references mentioned during the event and we want to take note of a few of them here.

Yesterday Susan Devine and Gail Tuft gave a talk on how they have used a wiki to maintain business knowledge. The session was packed and a lot of people were very interested in trying out a wiki themselves. Gail reccommended DocuWIKI for a simple, easy to use wiki platform.

Peter Deitz from Social Actions gave a thought provoking presentation on “Social Actions”. For his site you can see www.socialactions.com, for a list of social networking sites you can see this wikipedia entry.

Headshift, a social networking consultancy based in the UK (but looking to expand into Australia) has done some good work and their offical site can be found here: http://www.headshift.com.

More to follow…

The second day of Connecting Up 09 is now in full swing. We’ve just had a talk from Alan Noble, engineering director of Google Aus/NZ. He gave a brief overview of some of their lesser known apps, cloud computing and answered some good questions. Just how green can cloud computing be? Can we get our information back out of the cloud if we place it there? He also detailed how adwords works and where community organisations can go to apply for grants from Google.

The wireless connectivity issues that plagued the conference seem to have been resolved (at this stage) so Twitter is still filling up with tweets. Elliott Bledsoe who gave the talk on Creative Commons yesterday also has a great blog post that explains how hash tagging in Twitter works and would be a valuable read for anyone new to Twitter.

More to follow after today’s roundtable discussions have finished…

We’re coming up on lunch in the first day of Connecting Up 09 – there have been some highlights so far including a great talk by Mark Pesce where he explored ideas surrounding the gradual change of our social fabric. An incredibly comprehensive online version of his presentation (plus much much more) can be found at his blog here.

Elliott Bledsoe’s talk on creative commons and copyright was very informative and ultimately, very important. Learning more about creative commons can be done (quite easily!) through their newly revamped website at www.creativecommons.org.au. A very important tip is to make sure you generate creative commons licenses specific to your country, even though CC applies worldwide.

The official Twitter feed has been getting a healthy workout despite generally poor wireless broadband at the venue! You can follow the twitter conversation here.

More to follow…

We’re pleased to release the next episode in our occasional podcast series. This time I head out of the studio to visit ACT Senator Kate Lundy. We discuss using Web 2.0 applications such as Twitter, WordPress and Joomla, get her views on the proposed national broadband network and how she feels about funding to community organisations.

To listen to this podcast head over to the official CASE podcast page!

The first Public Sphere event has just finished It’s been an information packed, thought provoking few hours. Here’s a brief rundown of material that has resulted:

• Official Public Sphere event details on Senator Kate Lundy’s site.

• The Twitter feed from the morning.

• Craig Thomler’s liveblog from the event.

• Tom Worthington’s blog (Including links to the slides of the morning’s  presentations)

More posts to follow, just need to let the dust settle!

From the auDA announcements list:

“Misleading unsolicited emails from Asian domain name companies
30/Apr/2009
auDA is aware that at least two companies apparently based in China and Hong Kong have been sending unsolicited emails to people with .au domain names, attempting to mislead them into registering their name in a number of Asian domain spaces.
Examples include:
We are a domain name registration service company in Asia,
Last week we received a formal application submited by Yadu Investment Co Ltd which wanted to use the keyword “***” to register the Internet Brand and with suffix such as .cn /.com.cn /.net.cn/.hk/ .asia/ domain names.
After our initial examination, we found that these domain names to be applied for registration are same as your domain name and trademark. We aren’t sure whether you have any relation with this company. Because these domain names would produce possible dispute, now we have hold down this registration, but if we do not get your company’s an reply in the next 5 working days, we will approve this company’s application
In order to handle this issue better, Please contact us by Fax ,Telephone or Email as soon as possible.
and
We are a professional domain name registration center in asia, mainly dealing with the domain name registration and internet intellectual property rights protection.
We received a formal application from a company who is applying to register “***” as their domain name and Internet keyword on Apr 2th, 2009. Because this involves your company name or trade mark so we inform you in no time. we would like to confirm if this company is your partner, subsection or some one you authorized, if it is not, pls inform us if these domain names and internet keyword are important to you and it is necessary to protect them by registering them first or not, thanks for your cooperation, looking forward to your reply.
auDA does not have jurisdiction to handle complaints about these emails, as they do not involve the registration of .au domain names. We have been advised that authorities in Hong Kong are investigating at least one of the companies sending these emails.
In auDA’s view the claims made in these emails are most likely false and misleading, and we advise people to disregard them.”

If any CASE member recieves a simiar email they are encouraged to follow the above instructions. If members have any additional questions or concerns they can contact CASE’s web support through usual channels.

CASE’s patron Senator Kate Lundy has been online since 1996. While holding a variety of portfolios she’s use the Internet to her advantage, allowing constituents a closer connection to their representitive in a way that politicians worldwide have only just begun to embrace (the emerging Twitter fad, for example). Now she’s had her site updated and has amalgamated her online presence at http://www.katelundy.com.au. It’s worth checking out as it’s full of content and very useful links.

The Age is reporting that:

“Bottle Domains has been banned from its primary business of registering internet domain names.The Australian Domain Name Administrator (auDA) yesterday terminated the accreditation of Australian Style, trading as Bottle Domains, “due to a serious breach of its obligations under the registrar agreement”. In January this year the personal account details, including credit card numbers, of up to 60,000 Bottle Domain customers were posted for sale at an online forum by a computer hacker.“

To read more on this dramatic story follow the link:
Nicholas Bolton loses internet domain registration business

There is some excellent free software out there. If you or your organisation are using WordPress to power your website, here are three great free plugins that will add value to your site immediately!

Akismet for WordPress: Anti-spam. If you’re running WP you’re probably already running Akismet. It’s a fantastic anti spam plugin that fights against the scourge of comment spam. If you aren’t running Kismet you’ve probably got a lot of jibberish comments from Russia. If you’re not running it, you must set it up immediately! You’ll need an API key for this, but getting one is a simple process. Akismet = ftw.

NextGEN gallery: Photo Gallery. This is a fully featured but simple to use gallery plugin for WordPress. It uses the nice Lightbox transition effects to display your photos and there’s an option to turn those photos into a flash slideshow. It’s got good thumbnailing, tagging and watermarking options. I’ve tried a few gallery plugins and this is definately my most favourite to date!

Cystats: Cystats is a great web-stats plugin with a good layout and a comprehensive set of views. It lets you see who visists, when and where. I use Cystats for “blog-only” traffic data which for some people is going to be their focus. Free, well supported – a must have!

So there you have three essential plugins for a multimedia website. Check back later for additions to this list!

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting to day that Telstra and OPEL have failed to secure a contract to roll out a national fibre network in Australia. This is potentially good news. The same political logic that says private business is the best and most effective choice for a service provider also says that there’s no way any business can provide broadband to the bush without losses. It makes no business sense to roll fibre out to rural areas. In Australia at least, the Internet should be seen more like a utility alongside water and power. Given our vast geographic arrangement, only the government has the capacity to provide this for our entire population. But have they got the tech smarts to pull it off?

In a shock decision this morning, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, announced that none of five bidders including Optus and Melbourne group Acacia for a national network were up to scratch.Under the new plans, the funding for the network offering speeds of up to 100 megabits per second will be provided by a national broadband network corporation in which the Government will be the majority shareholder.

$15b national broadband network (NBN) on way