American Politicians using 2.0, Australian Politicians still using paper

Politics 2.0 on the ValueWiki Blog only highlights the Luddite qualities of Australian politicians and Australian Government. All the presidential candidates for the USA 2008 Election have their own MySpace pages, some candidates have blogs, social networks and the ability to create your own website about the candidates. The two candidates for Australian Prime Minister are John Howard and Kevin Rudd are a very different story. John Howard has a special website for his seat of Bennelong, which contains an online community survey for Bennelong, email form submission for feedback and an area to enter your snail mail address to receive detailed information on specific issues. Kevin Rudd’s own website URL only redirects back to the ALP website. An email address is not listed on John Howard’s member page for the House of Representatives, although an email address is listed on Kevin Rudd’s member page for the House of Representiatives.

The party websites aren’t much better, the Australian Labour Party website has an email newsletter signup as well as buttons to email the page, print the page, view text-only version and bookmark the page, although they do have a selection of Australian Labour Party RSS feeds, however these are all different formats for a single content feed, which is of Media Releases (how very old media).

However, there are some 2.0 political voices from Australia, they just don’t belong to the politicians. This MySpace page does not belong to Kevin Rudd, but is trying to show support for Kevin Rudd (Kevin Rudd For PM! has 1474 friends). Best name goes to JohnHowardAwesome (John Howard: PM of Australia has 490 friends). There is also a MySpace Group for Australian Politics. That doesn’t include any of the mock pages such as these ones on MySpace for The Ruddmeister (Kevin Rudd) and John Winston Howard (John Howard).

Is there really no more engagement than an RSS feed of Media Releases?

Scouta is on the lookout for audio and video you love

Scouta is now open to the public! Signup and invite your friends to find the best audio and video on the web, (not just the latest lame craze on YouTube). I never used to watch much video online (too much noise like PrankVote and not enough signal like The Machine Is Us) until I got Scouta. I got my mitts on a Scouta Beta invite a while ago and I’ve been a Scouta addict ever since. Scouta is a top Australian internet startup from Graeme Sutherland and Richard Giles (codename Web2Thing). If you want more than the About page, check out the Scouta Blog for the latest news. One of the coolest things about Scouta is the ability to form groups, with topics ranging from Apple to Web2 and beyond. Each group can have tags, as can individual media items. I’ve created a couple of groups, including Arcologies (a blend of architecture and ecology), Media FUD (This is the place to mark the media coverage which would be the shame of the industry, if they cared about ethics), A New Kind of Politics (seeking a better kind of politician), Perfect Presentations (mark your favourite presentations here), How To (for video/audio tutorials). Individual items can be linked to, just sign in to rate them. No complex rating system here, it’s either good or bad. This is one of my favourites – WeTube: The Future of YouTube.
Another cool item from Scouta is the output of your favourites in RSS! My favourites are here: and these items have been recommended to me, but I haven’t yet rated them:  
digg story

Textcasting – iPod hack or new name for RSS?

Textcasting is the latest member of the ‘casting family. Slate has announced they are now providing textcast audio files with embedded text.

I’m trying this tomorrow morning on my iPod Nano, not sure if it’ll display on such a little screen.

[Update: Slate's textcasting does not work on my iPod Nano]

via Librarian in Black and Library Clips
[transplanted from Typepad]

The Good Gnoos

For those who haven’t been checking out the Gnoos beta site, here it is.

I like the interface, nice and clean, not too much stuff on it (that’s a hint Technorati).
The only thing I don’t like, is the way it highlights the outline of the entire box full of posts, when you highlight the top link (eg. Aussie Blogs). While pretty, it makes the UI confusing, as some things become highlighted on mouseover that have no additional function, such as the white space between posts.
There is a very slight load lag of the red highlight, which is probably adding to the UI weirdness, is anyone else experiencing this? I’m using Firefox.

Ben, it’d be nice to see a link added to the Gnoos logo, linking back to the main site. I’ve made some other notes on the Flickr image.

But on to the content! – Is this the first Gnoos drama?
This post is awesome, this blog’s going straight to the feed reader.

I’m finding that running searches across multiple tabs in Firefox does seem to slow it down, but that may be the beta environment (at least I hope so, we need more speed than this).
So far, the search results have been excellent (when they loaded), although I would prefer some kind of 10 Random Aussie Blog posts, rather than Aussie Media (they’re so Web 1.0).
Maybe the Top Searches or Aussie Blogs links could reload when re-clicked?

Ben, is there a Gnoos ping URL?
[transplanted from Typepad]