3 Comments

  1. Laurel

    Nice to see that Rod took a dim view of the flaming of Paul Fletcher – though if my fading memory serves me right flaming was a newsgroup/chatroom kind of thing wasn’t it.

    Perhaps we need a new word for the behaviour of posting to a blog or similar an unjustified “spray” that is full of “unparliamentary language” – the insidious bit being that the sprayed against doesn’t always know it. I’ve noticed a couple that came after we made comments about Telstra paying for sponsored links for Googling “AAPT” and a line we used that was good for the press about whether we are expected to patrol the borders of cyberspace. The posts were suggesting I was being naive thinking you didn’t need to – when of course we clearly do.

    You might have seen on Rod’s own blog some tooing and froing between me and Rod at times. One of the issues being Rod’s own tendency to “unparliamentary” language – i.e. to label people as liars.

    It is very hard in these circumstances to get debate going – especially as we are all a bit uncompromising. We are also all used to the “theatre” of live speeches where the use of a touch of sarcasm helps get audience response (laughter wakes up those who fell asleep). The written word as we know is so one dimensional – while in a speech you can use inflection to imply “okay, get it, this is a joke” it is very hard to get that in writing.

    One of my posts actually put that at the end following on from some stuff on Crikey about how the Telstra CEO pronounces his name.

    As for Paul Fletcher – I can tell you I alerted him to the post – and his total reply was “Thanks – amusing reading…” I’m guessing from your profile that you might know Paul and can see his wry smile as he would say it.

  2. Unfortunately no, I don’t have the pleasure of knowing Mr. Fletcher. I left Optus in 2000 to head off to Asia.

    ’bout naughty Telstra picking up searches directed at AAPT – that is sooooo against Google’s guidelines. You just aren’t allowed to buy ads (sponsored links by any other name) on a competitor’s trademark. If you want to Telstra removed from Google’s search engine, just drop Google an e-mail. *winks* S’not allowed on Yahoo! anymore either.

  3. We knew how to fix it and did, we just wanted to name and shame. You would be seriously disappointed at Rod’s post to his “Editor’s Desk” blog – I took the liberty of posting a link to your comment.

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