In early January, I experimented with Facebook Ads.
The Ad on the left was targeted at All Australians and produced one click-through in 24 hours. The Ad on the right was targeted at Australians aged 18 to 40. It burnt through my daily advertising budget in about 40 minutes.
UPDATE:
Thanks to those who provided feedback on this, particularly Jeff Waugh and others via Twitter and Whirlpool. It would appear that requests from overseas to Australian-hosted websites will not be filtered. This means that the problem described below will not eventuate until Google sets up and starts issuing crawl requests from an Australian node. — MikeFitz
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A Deloitte analyst, Damien Tampling, has been reported by ARNnet as predicting the Government’s controversial ISP filter will have minimal long-term effect on Australian businesses.
I think there’s an important factor that Mr Tampling has missed altogether.
It has become clear over the past few months that Google is now placing a higher importance on “Page Load Speed” when calculating Page Rank – the all-important score that gets my business near the top of page 1 of Google search results.
My Australian website, hosted in Australia, will be crawled by the googlebot through an Australian ISP. Senator Conroy says it will load “a blink of an eye” slower, but this is an eternity to the googlebot. My page rank will then be lower than that of a competing US, UK or NZ company. I and other Australian companies will forever be at a commercial disadvantage because of the filter.
As I see it, ISP Filter -> Slower Page Loads -> Lower Google Page Rank -> Commercial disadvantage for Australian companies. What do others think?
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See also…
I have prepared this mind map to help guide the discussion in an upcoming meeting with a Labor MHR. As best I can, I have presented the basic arguments against Senator Conroy’s current Mandatory ISP Filter policy with a minimum of technical jargon.
The aim is to enlist this Member’s support for changing Labor’s Child Cyber-Safety policy away from the expensive and ineffective ISP filter and towards in-home filtering and education for parents about their role in ensuring their child’s safety.
The need to get this policy changed is now critically urgent as Senator Conroy has announced that legislation will be presented to Parliament in the next few months.
If you think it is helpful, please use the Mind Map to guide your own discussions with friends, relatives, workmates, etc. Download a copy as
Of course, many technical arguments have been omitted but if you spot any errors, serious omissions or room for improvement, please let me know.
Thanks to Kath (@sleepydumpling) for suggesting that I use the word “PROHIBITION” instead of “CENSORSHIP” when talking to a politician. Of course some politicians will think Censorship is perfectly reasonable in certain circumstances and the word doesn’t create a negative image for them at all. On the other hand, Prohibition reminds us all of the bootlegging and other unintended outcomes of banning alcohol in the 1920s.
For further information:
My basic argument against the government’s mandatory internet filter is
It won’t work; it’s a waste of our taxes; parents will let their guard down; children will be harmed.
However, there’s also this other niggling question…
Do I trust ALL future governments to NOT misuse the national internet filter infrastructure?
2009: The ACMA is blacklisting an ANTI-abortion website because its images are offensive to children.
2011 (as the filter goes live): We now have the national infrastructure to filter all RC material, including euthanasia and PRO-abortion websites.
2016 (after the revolution): The People’s Republic of Australia will now ‘harmonize’ all references to the Federation Square riot and massacre which, of course, DID NOT HAPPEN.
2021 (after the Jihad): The Islamic Caliphate of Australia will now filter all pro-Christian websites.
Who knows what the future holds? If a national internet filtering infrastructure is in place, will it be mis-used? It’s only a matter of time.
What sort of Australia do you want to leave for your children?
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Update
You can now purchase this cartoon on a t-shirt.
One of the most despicable things Senator Stephen Conroy has done was in the early days of the mandatory ISP filter policy. He asserted, on the floor of the Senate, that opposition to this bad policy “equates to support for paedophilia”.
Yeah, well two can play that game…
Now that his ISP filter clearly won’t protect children, what’s his real motivation for pushing on regardless?
Citizen: Senator Conroy, you know your ineffective ISP filter won’t protect children from internet nasties?
Sen. Conroy: You must be a pervert.
Citizen: You know parents will let their guard down, thinking “The government is doing my job for me.”
Sen. Conroy: You must be a pervert.
Citizen: You know children will be harmed as a result of your ISP filter?
Sen. Conroy: I KNEW you were a pervert.
Citizen: You know it will be a huge waste of our taxes and won’t get one paedophile one meter closer to a courtroom.
Sen. Conroy: Isn’t it GREAT? (Welcome to the pervert club, by the way.)
Of course I don’t really believe that Senator Conroy is a pervert. But I sure don’t like his “bully boy” tactics.
His real motivation for pushing on regardless is to establish the Western world’s most efficient censorship scheme. Don’t fall for Conroy’s Con.
The mandatory ISP filter will never be 100% effective. Our nation will never be able to afford the army of bureaucrats necessary to keep an ACMA “BlackList” up to date enough to protect children, while avoiding the unintended consequences of censorship experienced in other countries.
A better solution is parental supervision, aided if necessary by in-home filtering software targeted at the age-group of the children.
I call upon Prime Minister Rudd to cancel Senator Conroy’s white-elephant censorship scheme once and for all. Spend the money on the Australian Federal Police and parent education.
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Update
You can now purchase this cartoon on a t-shirt.
Putting Twitter’s little javascript “recent tweets” widget in my blog’s sidebar seemed like a good idea at the time.
But when Twitter goes down, and there’s a lot of that lately, my blog wastes a lot of time looking for it. I’m reconsidering.
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Update
It turns out that Twitter was under DDoS attack. 
That’s how effective Senator Conroy’s proposed Mandatory ISP Filter could be according to the ACMA[1][2].
You wouldn’t accept 87% of a pool fence. Don’t accept Senator Conroys censorship scheme disguised as a plan to “protect children”.
The mandatory ISP filter will never be 100% effective. Our nation will never be able to afford the army of bureaucrats necessary to keep an ACMA “BlackList” up to date enough to protect children, while avoiding the unintended consequences of censorship experienced in other countries.
The answer is parental supervision, aided if necessary by in-home filtering software targeted at the age-group of the children.
Meanwhile, Senator Conroy forges ahead with his filtering trials. Strangely he has chosen ISPs with only business customers, not ISPs with customers who are home users likely to be impacted by the filter. No valid conclusions can be drawn from such flawed trials.
Despite criticism from the Opposition, the Greens and independent Senator Nick Xenophon, Senator Conroy’s censorship scheme remains a threat to our children’s freedom, a threat to Australia’s digital economy and a threat to our environment because it remains government policy. I call upon Prime Minister Rudd to cancel Senator Conroy’s white-elephant censorship scheme once and for all. Spend the money on the Australian Federal Police and parent education.
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Update
You can now purchase this cartoon on a t-shirt.
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For more information, see my earlier posts:
See also:
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1. Australian Communications and Media Authority, Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filters - Report to the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, June 2008. Available at http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_311316 p44.
2. The effectiveness of the filter could be as high as 96 percent, but only at the cost of an unacceptably high “Over-Blocking Rate” of 1 in 12 legitimate websites. Everyone in the IT industry (except the vendors of filtering products) knows that Senator Conroy’s scheme is an ineffective and horrendously-expensive white elephant.
… is better than a band of loyal followers — if you want to get noticed on Twitter. It looks like someone has built an army of fake Twitter accounts which can re-tweet on command.
Bruce Wagner, a New York City talk-show host and Twitter user, took time out to leave an erudite comment on my previous blog post about TweeterGetter. Now it is not unexpected that he might have a band of loyal followers. It is also not unexpected that they might be prompted to re-tweet Bruce’s tweet at the same time or within the same minute as far as anyone can tell.
Here’s a sequence of eight of the re-tweets. There are plenty more.
A few minutes later, they all re-tweeted again and within the same minute. That wasn’t too surprising. However what was really surprising was the fact that they all re-tweeted in exactly the same sequence.
Here are three more examples of this perfectly-synchronised re-tweeting, all in exactly the same minute and exactly the same sequence.
This prompted me to inspect the profiles of Bruce’s loyal followers / army of re-tweet-bots. It appears to me that their sole role in life is to reproduce tweets from some news source and RT @brucewagner.
In the past three days, tens of thousands of Twitter users have visited tweetergetter.com and subscribed to its promise of 19,530 new followers in 30 days. They are signing up in droves. A Twitter search for “tweetergetter” shows them all rolling in.
Is it just me or do other people think that filling in this form hands over your Twitter username and password to a spammer - or worse?
Some folks should be changing their passwords about now.
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Update: 16-Feb-09
Gary McCaffrey assures me he is not collecting passwords, just usernames. As I see it, this is like collecting e-mail addresses for use in future spam campaigns.
Twitter is going to be a very ugly place when McCaffrey starts selling his list to the likes of Bruce Wagner (see An Army of ReTweet-Bots… ).
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Update: 17-Mar-09
I removed the active link to tweetergetter.com above because some folks have reported that tweetergetter.com now has an Exit Blocker. In other words, as you try to leave the site, a confusing dialog pops up and you are taken to another web page with more marketing rubbish.
What have I done now? Looking through the site stats I came across an inbound link from www.tsa.gov - the TSA or Transportation Security Administration! Did I accidentally blog about that time I was strip-searched at LAX? No? Ok, well forget I said anything about that then.
Like any sensible organisation, the TSA operates a (Blogger) blog and welcomes feedback from its clients / customers / victims / the travelling public.
A recent post reviewed the TSA’s comment policy and chose to link to one of my more popular posts, Simple HTML for Formatting Blogger Comments, as an example of how to include hyperlinks in comments.
When linking to another blog or webpage, make sure there is no offensive content on that page. Also, long URLs knock our format out of whack, so we have to reject comments containing long URLs. There are a couple of fixes for this. Go to tinyurl.com. It is a free service that will convert your long URLs into a much shorter URL. Also, you can go here to learn how to hyperlink.
Not much of a link, is it? Using the single word “here” as hyperlink anchor text guarantees the bare minimum of Google-Juice. Still, a small drip from a large tap is better than nothing.
I also note that the TSA probably didn’t have to look too hard to find me. As I write this, I’m in the #1 position on Google results for “Blogger comment formatting”.
Husband, Father,
Mike Fitzsimon
mike.fitzsimon
@MikeFitzAU
Software Architect
Convenor
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