Australian Pirate Party launches

After winning 7.1 per cent of Swedish votes in this year's European Parliament elections, The Pirate Party has opened up a branch in Australia and plans to contest the next federal election.

The party, which will campaign on a platform of anti-internet censorship and the decriminalisation of non-commercial file sharing, has already signed up 550 members, enough for it to register as a party with the Australian Electoral Commission.

It plans to hold internal elections for leadership positions - president, general secretary, treasurer and their deputies - on October 7.

But party spokesman Brendan Molloy was quick to point out that free file sharing was only one aspect of the overall mission, which was to "bolster our nation's Democratic conventions".

"We've here to actively change the landscape of Australian politics forever, by advocating freer copyright and protection of our civil liberties, especially against [Communications Minister Stephen] Conroy's censorship regime, which is not welcome in Australia," he said.

"We also have a strong stance for the reform of the patent system to be much fairer, especially in regards to pharmaceuticals and software."

In the European Parliament elections in June, the Pirate Party won 7.1 per cent of Swedish votes, allowing its leader, Christian Engstroem, to take one of Sweden's 18 seats in the European Parliament.

The group gained significant traction in Sweden following this year's introduction of laws that criminalised file sharing and the sentencing of four Swedes to a year in jail for running illegal download site The Pirate Bay.

In the recent German elections, The Pirate Party won 2 per cent of the vote, short of the 5 per cent required to gain a seat in the German Parliament. Spiegel Online reported that the party won as much as 13 per cent of votes for first-time male voters.

Further, in the German city council elections held in August, the group gained seats in the Munster and Aachen councils.

The party has branches in 35 countries and they all co-operate via a collective called Pirate Party International.

The Australian branch is headed by a University of Western Sydney law student, Rodney Serkowski. He was not available for comment but told ITNews he would contest the next federal election provided he was permitted to register as a political party.

The party argues that file sharing should be legalised and, far from being detrimental to artists, was one of their best means of advertising their music.

It is worried by recent revelations that Conroy is considering legislation that would have persistent file sharers disconnected from the internet.

"Our policies are all geared towards copyright reform, patent reform, anti-censorship, non-commercial file sharing, policy in regards to having Digital Rights Management abolished and policy supporting the right to privacy of every Australian," Molloy said.

Despite its clear overseas success, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft does not appear to be alarmed by the presence of the Pirate Party in Australia.

"It will be interesting to see if a party advocating illegal activity is able to contest the election," a spokeswoman said.

"If they are able, perhaps they could do a preference deal with the Shoplifting Party."

Online activist group GetUp campaigns on similar issues to the Pirate Party and has obtained more than 115,000 signatures for its petition opposing Conroy's internet censorship policy.

GetUp chief executive officer Simon Sheikh said his organisation might decide to work with the Pirate Party on campaigns but could not support any individual party directly "because we're a non-partisan organisation".

"In saying that, we believe in intellectual property reform and we believe in protecting Australia's internet from Senator Conroy's censorship agenda," he said.

A spokesman for Conroy did not respond to calls requesting comment.

UK musician Dan Bull's musical open letter to Lily Allen

UK musician Dan Bull's musical open letter to Lily Allen, after she made comments earlier this week about how filesharing is detroying the music industry. Great stuff. Pass it on.

“I’ve also tried to outline some of the main moral arguments for filesharing in the lyrics. Hope you enjoy..”

Gmail introduces themes

.. here are a few choice examples, there are quite a few more to choose from (31 in total so far).

Ninja

Desk

Bus Stop

Terminal

Shiny

Team House

Cherry

Aah a pleasant surprise this morning.. Google has introduced themes into Gmail.
Looks like they're gradually rolling it out account by account (as they do).

Some very nice stuff here.
Very cool.

Thanks Mr Google :)

He's a weird burger

In under a year, Ben Huh has become an unlikely web hero whose obtuse sense of humour has spawned a legion of cult websites fed for free by an army of loyal geek followers.

As the owner of Seattle-based internet company Pet Holdings, Huh has the enviable job of scouring the web in search of the latest internet fad - known as a "meme" - to nurture into an online phenomenon.

His first outing, ICanHasCheezBurger, acquired by the company in September last year, provides users with little more than a place to upload bizarre photos of cats captioned with even weirder misspelled punch lines.

The fad, dubbed "LOLcats", put Huh and his company on the map and now attracts 1.4 million page views a day.

Before Huh's site, LOLcats existed merely as images distributed by geeks on forums.

Huh's secret, he said in a phone interview, was to pull web fads out of the geek backwaters of the internet and make them accessible to a far broader audience.

In less than a year since he acquired ICanHasCheezBurger.com, Huh, 30, has followed up with five more similarly strange websites and, having recently hired his 11th employee, is now working on two more.

All up, the sites, funded by advertising, attract 2.8 million page views a day and if that trend continues for the rest of the year, Huh's sites will have served up over a billion views.

"We just want you to be able to come to one of our sites and be entertained for five minutes or more, that's all we're looking to do," he said.

Huh's latest venture, TotallyLooksLike, draws inspiration from the "separated at birth" features found in magazines.

However, instead of matching famous people with other famous people, TotallyLooksLike compares celebrity faces to pretty much anything - such as Gary Busey and a horse or Donatella Versace and Janice the Muppet.

And like all of the sites in Huh's stable, TotallyLooksLike is entirely user-driven with all content submitted to the site for free, allowing Huh and his team to concentrate on building out the technology back-end.

"We're like game designers - we're trying to come up with a system where people can have fun being creative," he said.

"People have always thought John Kerry looks like Herman Munster, that [Public Enemy's] Flavor Flav looks like Stripe from Gremlins. People have thought that and they probably shared it with friends but there was no outlet for it. We're giving these people an outlet to be funny."

Huh is the first to admit that he presides over a stable of sites that are, frankly, quite weird.

Failblog, which Huh recently acquired, specialises in hosting user-submitted pictures and videos of people or companies "failing at life".

For instance, featured on the site today is a picture of a ham advertised as being "delicious for [Jewish holiday] Chanukah".

And just below it is a picture of a screwdriver kit with the warning label "not to be inserted into penis".

GraphJam, another of Huh's sites, is a repository of Microsoft Excel graphs and flowcharts about everyday life and pop culture.

Punditkitchen hosts political pictures with funny captions, while there's even a version of LOLcats for dogs, called IHasAHotDog.

"I'll admit to you describing LOLcats in words sounds totally lame ... it's pictures of cats with funny misspelled captions on them," said Huh.

"If you think about that, you're like, why is that funny, there's no reason why that should be funny, but if you look at the site and you really understand the creativity of the users that come by, it's fascinating.

"Users transcribe human emotions to these cats and human activities, and for some reason it makes the cats adorable. It also makes them kind of evil ... the range is just incredible."

Internet set for domain name big bang

The internet looks set for one of the biggest shake-ups in its brief history if the web's regulator votes this week, as expected, to allow new domain names such as .love or .paris.

The vote by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which began its annual general meeting in Paris on Monday, would open up millions of new variations for web addresses.

"Apart from the .com, .net or .org, the 1.3 billion web users will be able from early next year to acquire generic addresses by lodging common words such as .love, .hate or .city or proper names," ICANN president Paul Twomey told French newspaper Les Echos.

With the stock of available web addresses under the current IPv4 protocol set to run out by 2011, ICANN has been under pressure to find a solution for burgeoning demand.

Under the proposed new regime, domain names will also be able to be lodged in languages such as Arabic or Mandarin Chinese.

"We have tested 15 languages with non-Latin alphabets so that they can work with web browsers from Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple," said Twomey.

Websites are now largely limited to domains that end in .com or .country, but the ICANN proposal would enable firms to buy new generic domains ending in whatever they want.

The popular online trading site eBay is one of the many companies that wants to have its own domain name.

Broad product groups such as .bank or .car are also likely contenders.

Cities could benefit too from this liberalisation, with the German capital hoping for .berlin or New York for .nyc.

Some cities or regions have been bending the rules already to get the domain they want. The city of Los Angeles has for example signed a deal with the South-east Asian nation of Laos to use its .la domain.

In theory, an infinite number of new domain names could be created, which would prove a boon for ICANN because it would receive payment for each one, but in reality advanced technical skills and a fat wallet would be needed to set up a new name.

Tens of thousands of dollars would be required, noted Loic Damilaville, head of the AFNIC association of French domain names.

ICANN's 32nd international public meeting this week gathers more than 1,500 delegates from dozens of countries, backing a new address system, IPv6, which would add billions of new internet addresses.

A non-profit organisation based in southern California, ICANN oversees the assignment of domain names and internet protocol addresses that help computers communicate.

.. from smh.com.au

QR code for this blog, generated at http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

Thinking inside the square

THE prospect of flashing a mobile phone at a movie poster to get screening times and buy tickets might seem fancifully futuristic to most.

So, too, the idea of aiming a handset at a business card to spare the hassle of manually entering the details.

But the technology that allows this to happen is on its way to Australia.

Known as QR (Quick Response) Codes, the square bar codes on flyers, newspapers or T-shirts provide a direct link to a web page.

When mobile phones with internet capability are swiped over the top, the user is taken directly to a related web page.

The technology was pioneered in Japan. Advertisers started placing the codes on billboards, magazines and shopfronts in 2000.

Since then, it has been embraced by almost every retail industry and adopted by consumers to encode personal details on business cards, where they can be scanned and read by software provided in almost every one of Japan's 100 million handsets.

Some people, like 25-year-old Yuta Horai, even emblazon personal QR Codes on their clothes.

"It's just a quick and easy way to link to a mobile internet site about anything - restaurants, movie times - on your mobile anywhere," says the Tokyo artist, who sometimes wears a T-shirt with a code that links to a website promoting his friend's band.

Special phone software is needed to read the codes. In some cases this can be downloaded from the internet, but Telstra says it is planning to release a range of QR Code-compatible phones "in the very near future".

"It makes the internet more directly accessible - you scan a code to get access to the content that you want when you want it," the executive director for consumers and channels, Tim Copper, said. The Herald will be Telstra's media partner in the the new phones.

Even Facebook has taken an interest in QR Codes, in a sign this two-dimensional technology, designed in 1994 by Denso-Wave to track parts in Japanese car manufacturing, has finally pricked the global consciousness.

The social networking site produces T-shirts and bags with personalised codes that new friends can scan to add the code-owner as a Facebook "friend".

In Japan, mobile phone users only have to position the code inside a square viewfinder on their screen to be taken directly to a corresponding website.

The process allows them to easily obtain restaurant locations, book taxis, find nutritional information, listen to music, enter competitions and sign up for giveaways.

Lawrence Cosh-Ishii, director of digital media for the online publication Japan Wireless Watch, said: "The iconic QR Code symbol has served as a trackable call to action for businesses engaging with potential customers."

Japan's McDonald's puts the codes on hamburger wrappers. Supermarkets put them on meat and egg packaging to provide information about the farms that produced them.

According to a survey, 73 per cent of consumers have used QR Codes. Among teenagers the figure rises to 90 per cent.

from smh
QR code entry on wikipedia
check out semapedia while you're at it

"Information is like a life jerky: dried up and not terribly communicative. Through information you come back to the vast set of phenomena that is creating the data in the first place. Experience and the universe itself are intimately bound up with one another. The purpose of the Internet and all its surrounding phenomena is to create a context where experience is universal, and the informational reduction is no longer necessary."

~ John Perry Barlow

the rise of Urban Nomadism

Wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places—and each other

AT THE Nomad Café in Oakland, California, Tia Katrina Canlas, a law student at the nearby university in Berkeley, places her double Americano next to her mobile phone and iPod, opens her MacBook laptop computer and logs on to the café's wireless internet connection to study for her class on the legal treatment of sexual orientation. She is a regular here but doesn't usually bring cash, so her credit-card statement reads “Nomad, Nomad, Nomad, Nomad”. That says it all, she thinks. Permanently connected, she communicates by text, photo, video or voice throughout the day with her friends and family, and does her “work stuff” at the same time. She roams around town, but often alights at oases that cater to nomads.

Christopher Waters, the owner, opened the Nomad Café in 2003, just as Wi-Fi “hotspots” were mushrooming all around town. His idea was to provide a watering-hole for “techno-Bedouins” such as himself, he says. Since Bedouins, whether in Arabian deserts or American suburbs, are inherently tribal and social creatures, he understood from the outset that a good oasis has to do more than provide Wi-Fi; it must also become a new—or very old—kind of gathering place. He thought of calling his café the “Gypsy Spirit Mission”, which also captures the theme of mobility, but settled for the simpler Nomad.

As a word, vision and goal, modern urban nomadism has had the mixed blessing of a premature debut. In the 1960s and 70s Herbert Marshall McLuhan, the most influential media and communications theorist ever, pictured nomads zipping around at great speed, using facilities on the road and all but dispensing with their homes. In the 1980s Jacques Attali, a French economist who was advising president François Mitterrand at the time, used the term to predict an age when rich and uprooted elites would jet around the world in search of fun and opportunity, and poor but equally uprooted workers would migrate in search of a living. In the 1990s Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners jointly wrote the first book with “digital nomad” in the title, adding the bewildering possibilities of the latest gadgets to the vision.

But all of those early depictions and predictions of nomadism arguably missed the point. The mobile lifestyles currently taking shape around the world are nothing like those described in the old books. For this the authors cannot be blamed, since the underlying technologies of genuine and everyday nomadism did not exist even as recently as a decade ago. Mobile phones were already widespread, but they were used almost exclusively for voice calls and were fiendishly hard to connect to the internet and even to computers. Laptop computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs) needed fiddly cables to get online, and even then did so at a snail's pace. Reading and sending e-mail on a mobile phone—not to mention synchronising it across several gadgets and computers to create one “virtual” in-box—was unheard of. People took photos using film. There was no Wi-Fi. In short, there were gadgets, but precious little “connectivity”.

Astronauts and hermit crabs Without that missing piece, several misunderstandings took hold that now require correcting. One had to do with all those gadgets. The old mental picture of a nomad invariably had him—mostly him, at that time—lugging lots of them. Since these machines, large and small, were portable, people assumed that they also made their owners mobile. Not so. The proper metaphor for somebody who carries portable but unwieldy and cumbersome infrastructure is that of an astronaut rather than a nomad, says Paul Saffo, a trend-watcher in Silicon Valley. Astronauts must bring what they need, including oxygen, because they cannot rely on their environment to provide it. They are both defined and limited by their gear and supplies.



Around the turn of the century, as some astronauts, typically executive road warriors, got smarter about packing light, says Mr Saffo, they graduated to an intermediate stage, becoming hermit crabs. These are crustaceans that survive by dragging around a cast-off mollusc shell for protection and shelter. In the metaphorical sense, the shell might be a “carry-on” bag on wheels, stuffed full of cables, discs, dongles, batteries, plugs and paper documents (just in case of disc failure). These hermit crabs strike fear into the hearts of seated airline passengers whenever they board, because their shells invariably bang into innocent shins all the way to their seat. They carry less than astronauts—and are thus more mobile—but are still quite heavily laden with gear, mostly as a safeguard against disasters.

Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don't even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other “smart phone”. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online.

Another big misunderstanding of previous decades was to confuse nomadism with migration or travel. As the costs of (stationary) telecommunications plummeted, it became fascinating to contemplate “the death of distance” (the title of a book written by Frances Cairncross, then on the staff of The Economist). And since the early mobile phones were aimed largely at business executives, it was assumed that nomadism was about corporate travel in particular. And indeed many nomads are frequent flyers, for example, which is why airlines such as JetBlue, American Airlines and Continental Airlines are now introducing in-flight Wi-Fi. But although nomadism and travel can coincide, they need not.

Humans have always migrated and travelled, without necessarily living nomadic lives. The nomadism now emerging is different from, and involves much more than, merely making journeys. A modern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting chief executive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aeroplane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing,” says Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the Annenberg School for Communication, a part of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

This is why a new breed of observers is now joining the ever-present futurists and gadget geeks in studying the consequences of this technology. Sociologists in particular are trying to figure out how mobile communications are changing interactions between people. Nomadism, most believe, tends to bring people who are already close, such as family members, even closer. But it may do so at the expense of their attentiveness towards strangers encountered physically (rather than virtually) in daily life. That has implications for society at large.

Anthropologists and psychologists are investigating how mobile and virtual interaction spices up or challenges physical and offline chemistry, and whether it makes young people in particular more autonomous or more dependent. Architects, property developers and urban planners are changing their thinking about buildings and cities to accommodate the new habits of the nomads that dwell in them. Activists are trying to piggyback on the ubiquity of nomadic tools to improve the world, even as they worry about the same tools in the hands of the malicious. Linguists are chronicling how nomadic communication changes language itself, and thus thought.

Beyond technology This special report, in presupposing that a wireless world will soon be upon us, will explore these ramifications of mobile technology, rather than the technologies themselves or their business models. But it is worth making clear that technology underlies all of the changes in today's nomadic societies, so that its march will accelerate them. Wireless data connections, in particular, seem to be getting better all the time. Cellular networks will become faster and more reliable. Short-range Wi-Fi hotspots are popping up in ever more places. And a new generation of wireless technologies is already poised to take over. Regulators have grasped that the airwaves are now among society's most important assets. America, for instance, has just auctioned off a chunk of spectrum with new rules that require the owner to allow any kind of device and software to run on the resulting network.

Devices, too, are on a steep trajectory. Just as Sony's Walkman once planted the notion that music can be mobile, the BlackBerry by Research In Motion (RIM), a Canadian firm, has since 1999 made e-mail on the go seem normal. And just as the personal-computer era entered the mainstream only in the 1980s with Apple's commercialisation of the “graphical user interface”, the mobile era arguably began only last summer when the same firm launched the iPhone, with its radically new and user-friendly touch interface. As a result, Google, for instance, has received 50 times more web-search requests from iPhones this year than from any other mobile handset.

Cumulatively, all of these changes amount to a historic merger, at long last, of two technologies that have already proved revolutionary in their own right. The mobile phone has changed the world by becoming ubiquitous in rich and poor countries alike. The internet has mostly touched rich countries, and rich people in poor countries, but has already changed the way people shop, bank, listen to music, read news and socialise. Now the mobile phone is on course to replace the PC as the primary device for getting online. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 3.3 billion people, more than half the world's population, now subscribe to a mobile-phone service (see chart 1), so the internet at last looks set to change the whole world.

To people in early-adopter countries such as South Korea and Japan this will come as no surprise. (Five of the ten bestselling novels in Japan last year were written on mobile phones.) Nor will it come as a shock to people in their teens and twenties elsewhere who have never known life without text messages; or to itinerant salesmen and executives who have for years been glued to their BlackBerries day and night. By contrast, many older people will strain to recognise themselves in the behaviour patterns described in this report, and indeed may never adopt them. But the lesson of history is that what the geeks and early adopters do today, the rest of us will probably end up doing tomorrow or the day after. It is the pioneers that set the direction; the mainstream will follow in time.

The most wonderful thing about mobile technology today is that consumers can increasingly forget about how it works and simply take advantage of it. As Ms Canlas sips her Americano and dives into her e-mail in-box at the Nomad Café, she gives no thought to the specifications and standards that make her connection possible. It is the human connections that now take over. Since humans, as Sigmund Freud put it, must arbeiten und lieben, work and love, in order to find fulfilment, this report will start off by examining how they will work.

from the Economist

Google has lots to do with intelligence

When the nation's intelligence agencies wanted a computer network to better share information about everything from al Qaeda to North Korea, they turned to a big name in the technology industry to supply some of the equipment: Google Inc.

The Mountain View company sold the agencies servers for searching documents, marking a small victory for the company and its little-known effort to do business with the government.

"We are a very small group, and even a lot of people in the federal government don't know that we exist," said Mike Bradshaw, who leads Google's federal government sales team and its 18 employees.

The strategy is part of a broader plan at Google to expand beyond its consumer roots. Federal, state and local agencies, along with corporations and schools, are increasingly seen by the company as lucrative sources of extra revenue.

In addition to the intelligence agencies, Google's government customers include the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the state of Alabama and Washington, D.C.

Many of the contracts are for search appliances - servers for storing and searching internal documents. Agencies can use the devices to create their own mini-Googles on intranets made up entirely of government data.

Additionally, Google has had success licensing a souped-up version of its aerial mapping service, Google Earth. Agencies can use it to plot scientific data and chart the U.S. coastline, for example, giving ships another tool to navigate safely.

Spy agencies are using Google equipment as the backbone of Intellipedia, a network aimed at helping agents share intelligence. Rather than hoarding information, spies and analysts are being encouraged to post what they learn on a secure online forum where colleagues can read it and add comments.

"Each analyst, for lack of a better term, has a shoe box with their knowledge," said Sean Dennehy, chief of Intellipedia development for the CIA. "They maintained it in a shared drive or a Word document, but we're encouraging them to move those platforms so that everyone can benefit."

Like Wikipedia

The system is modeled after Wikipedia, the public online, group-edited encyclopedia. However, the cloak-and-dagger version is maintained by the director of national intelligence and is accessible only to the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and an alphabet soup of other intelligence agencies and offices.

Agents can log in, depending on their clearance, to Intellipedia's three tiers of service: top secret, secret and sensitive but unclassified. So far, 37,000 users have established accounts on the network, which contain 35,000 articles encompassing 200,000 pages, according to Dennehy.

Google supplies the computer servers that support the network, as well as the search software that allows users to sift through messages and data.

Dennehy declined to asses the quality of Google's products, but he applauded the contribution that Intellipedia can make to the government's work. Whether the network actually leads to better intelligence will largely depend on agents sharing some of their most important files and then their colleagues chiming in with incisive commentary - issues that are out of Google's hands.

Normally, Google ranks results on its consumer site by using the number of links to a Web page as a barometer of its importance. Doing so on Intellipedia isn't as effective because the service lies behind a firewall and is used by a limited number of people.

Instead, material gets more prominent placement if it is tagged, or appended by the network's users, with descriptive keywords.

Because of the complexities of doing business with the government, Google uses resellers to process orders on its behalf. Google takes care of the sales, marketing and management of the accounts.

Conspiracy theories

Google is one of many technology vendors vying for government contracts.

A single deal can be sizable, such as the one Google made with the National Security Agency, which paid more than $2 million for four search appliances plus a support agreement, according to a contract obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

However, the amount is insignificant when measured against Google's overall revenue of $16.6 billion last year, virtually all of which came from online advertising.

On occasion, Google is the target of conspiracy theories from bloggers who say it is working with spy agencies more closely than simply selling search equipment.

The buzz got so loud two years ago that Matt Cutts, who leads Google's fight against spam Web sites, responded by ridiculing the idea in his personal blog.

Google's Bradshaw emphasized that the company sells virtually the same products to companies as it does to government agencies. Google can make minor tweaks to comply with government rules about equipment security, for example, while major customization is handled by others.

"There were some wild accusations," Bradshaw said. "But everything we do with the government is the same as what we do with our corporate customers."

.. from San Francisco Chronicle

Wikileaks is a website which allows whistleblowers to release (whilst remaining anonymous) government and corporate documents, without possible retribution.

WikiLeaks site

WikiLeaks article on Wikipedia
WikiLeaks article on Guardian.co.uk

Spike

I don't know what happened last Thursday, but I appear to have been visited by 910 people in one day.

For some of you, this may not be such a big deal, but if you have a look at the normal daily number of visitors I get, you'll see why :) .

This weeks visitor map

..this last week my blog appears to have attracted a few more visitors from South America, Japan & Canada.

This weeks visitor map shows a bit more of a turn-out from central asia and also the west coast of the United States.

This blogs visitor map for the previous week shows the typical banding we've seen previously.

I'm at odds to explain why the east coast of the united states is responsible for so many more visits than the west coast. Any ideas?

.. the new way to make living

Taarik Furmie jokes that he's the Santa Claus of the internet.

As a seller of toys and games, Christmas is Mr Furmie's busiest time of year.

He's run off his feet checking stock, sending off orders, comparing the competitiveness of his prices and making sure his accounts are in order.

And he does it all without leaving the comfort of his home in Casula, in Sydney's western suburbs.

Mr Furmie is one of a growing number of Australians who are making a full-time living selling goods on internet site eBay.

In September this year, there were more than 17,500 Australians who used eBay as their primary or only source of income.

Another 94,000 eBay sellers had considered quitting their day jobs to sell full-time on the trading website.

Since it began in 1999, eBay has significantly changed the way Australians shop and opened self-employment opportunities for those who thought they'd always be bound to a nine-to-five desk job.

Mr Furmie worked in IT when his wife started selling old toys and games their children no longer used.

Soon, she was buying goods from second hand stores and garage sales and re-selling them for a profit on eBay.

When she had her third child, Mr Furmie took over the hobby and it flourished.

Four years ago, he left his job to focus full time on his toy business. He also moved from secondhand to new toys and games, sourced through local suppliers and manufacturers.

Now he competes with major department stores and has set up his own business name, Treasure Planet Toys.

"You will find that you are generally getting better prices on eBay, because I don't have the overheads that they (department stores) do," he told AAP.

"You find that a lot of people, especially today with the stress of modern day life, people are finding less time to get to the shop and when they do get there it's stressful.

"If you can sit in front of a computer and find the same item (and) it's going to be delivered to your door, you save yourself two hours and frustration."

Mr Furmie is coy about how much he makes, but says it's better than his previous job, although much of the money goes back into growing the business.

He is classed as an eBay PowerSeller - sellers who average a minimum of $2,000 in sales per month, over three consecutive months. Titanium PowerSellers - the top level - earn $300,000 a month.

Mr Furmie teaches people how to sell on eBay in an eight-hour course conducted at people's homes, but some institutes are now offering lessons on how to make the most of the trading site.

The Council of Adult Education (CAE) now has a one-day course, Buying and Selling Goods Through eBay, which teaches how to "make money and find that elusive item".

Victorians are some of Australia's biggest eBay users.

A national survey last month found residents of Springvale, in Melbourne's southeast, were the country's biggest online traders, buying and selling at an average of $274 per member.

Second place was taken by nearby Dandenong, which averaged $173 per member.

Dandenong resident Rebecca Wilkin is an eBay convert.

The 28-year-old buys and sells goods on the website, particularly clothes and baby goods.

She recently decked out her daughter's nursery with brand new furniture for $500, including cot, change table and rocking chair.

"I do research before I buy anything, either at the shop or online as to how much the retail price is," she said.

"Nine times out of 10 I find I can get a really good bargain on eBay."

Ms Wilkin believes Dandenong and Springvale topped the national trading figures because of their low socio-economic demographic.

"Dandenong is predominantly a low-income area and you do find you get more for your money, if you know what you're looking for," she said.

"You've really got to make your money go further and you can get a bit of spare cash by selling things you don't need any more."

Ms Wilkin also thinks the language barrier could be a factor, as many migrants live in Dandenong and Springvale.

Consumer trends expert Bernard Salt, of KPMG, said many of the top-ranking eBay suburbs across the nation had high levels of migrant populations.

Three quarters of Springvale's 18,000 residents speak a language other than English at home.

"Perhaps Australia's newest residents prefer to buy their goods on eBay rather than have to negotiate the language barriers of traditional shopping centres," he said.

Leigh, of Boronia in Melbourne's outer east, says he'll never visit a chain store again.

He buys clothes on eBay for half what he'd pay in a shop and they're delivered to his door.

He also sells items he has lying around his house that he no longer wants.

He has sold an old Australian Airlines watch for $35 and T-shirts from car shows for $70-$80.

As a car collector and restorer, he also finds eBay useful for sourcing and selling cars and car parts.

"I've got a set of wheels lying around that you could take to the wreckers, but I'll put them on eBay. People are looking for stuff like that all the time," he said.

"If I want something cheap I will see if it's on eBay first. It's definitely a good money saver."

Leigh bought an XP Falcon Coup for $5,500 in Western Australia and a F150 pick-up truck from Queensland for $11,000.

Potential eBay buyers are warned to do their homework before they buy.

That includes checking the feedback on the seller and always using the PayPal facility.

"The majority of people on eBay are there to do the right thing, but you can lose money if you just don't take precautions," Mr Furmie said.

found on smh

This weeks visitor map for this blog

Following hot on the heels of last weeks visitor map for this blog, here is, you guessed it, this weeks map.

Great to see that with absolutely zero effort on my behalf I have successfully tapped into the African and South American markets.

Now... what about Antartica. Any guesses for how long it will take before I get a visitor from there?

Gabe & Max's Internet Thing

Hilarious stuff.. all about the internets!

Map of this blogs visitors over the last week.
Interesting banding across the globe, I assume following the english understanding countries rather closely.
I clearly need to do more work for our visitors from

• Canada
• South America
• Africa
• Russian
• Greenland
• Antarctica

I'll keep posting this regularly i think. I wonder if I use google translate on a few entries I can address this horrendous imbalance :)

click for full-size