The eDemocracy project Open Australia Foundation just launched electionleaflets.org.au – which lets people upload election leaflets they receive, or search to see election materials in their electorate (or any electorate). This is the latest project from OpenAustralia.org – a non-party political eDemocracy group.

The purpose of this project is to shed light on local campaign stunts, and hold our politicians up to to national and media scrutiny.

It got written up in the SMH/Age today. Dirty Tricks Police.

They’re also sharing their archive with the National Library – so this stuff wil be permanently archived – very cool.

Please consider uploading (or emailing, or posting) any leaflets you receive to the site. Thank you!

The explosion of interest in Old Spice this week is a great example of social media interaction done right. It’s also a great example of how to build on and extend a popular video. You may have seen the original “The man your man could smell like” ad (which I believe was shown on American TVs during Superbowl as well as online).

That original ad has been on YouTube since February and has clocked up over 13 million views on YouTube. But in the past two days the campaign has been reignited by a new video campaign in which the video team created &  shot personal responses to Twitter messages – in real time. Read Write Web has a good article on how they’ve pulled these ads together in real time. Very impressive & bold work. Kudos to whoever convinced the Old Spice folks to give so much leeway to the creative people putting together these videos!

They’ve done video responses to a number of Twitter celebrities including Alyssa Milano and Rose McGowan, not to mention Digg founder Kevin Rose and tech blog Gizmodo. In fact, the Old Spice official channel on YouTube now has 302 videos on it!

It’s worth noting that they didn’t just rely on the personalised video spots – they also released a new Old Spice guy video, called Questions, which follows a similar formula to the original video. That video was uploaded to YouTube on June 29 and is at 5 million views so far.

They’ve also taken a leaf from the Barack Obama online campaign, (which allowed people to create their own Barack Obama buttons) and released some video footage for fans to remix.  As the Next Web folks pointed out, Pandarr from news aggregator Reddit asked the Old Spice guy to provide some video footage which could be used to create individual voicemail messages – which he did. The result was the Old Spice guy voicemail message which fans can customise & download to use as their voicemail message.

So what we’ve seen is a brand harness the popularity of a viral video to generate another huge wave of interest and views for their content, by using Twitter feedback and filming personalised, on-demand content. Witty, real time interaction. Finally an online campaign impressive enough to knock the Barack Obama campaign guys off the top of the list for tech conference keynotes. I hope you are listening, Webstock folks.

If you’re a Lord of the Rings fan of a certain age, as I am, you probably became a fan of TheOneRing.net before the Fellowship of the Ring was even released. It began as a site for NZ LOTR fans to share information and photos from the many places around NZ where the filming of the trilogy was taking place. For me, and I’m sure for countless others around the globe, TheOneRing.net was a tantalising teaser while we were waiting for the first movie to come out. I don’t know if there was an official movie site – I didn’t need one – the fan site was amply supplying us with news and photos.

Interestingly, although there is an official The Hobbit: The official blog for the two Hobbit movies which are now in pre-production (or is it in production now, I’m not sure), TheOneRing.net is still trumping the official site for news. Case in point – it was fansite TheOneRing.net which broke the news that director Guillermo del Torro had resigned from the helm of the Hobbit movies. I’m sure when a Hollywood studio (and all the megabucks that entails) is involved, it’s very difficult to change how the PR machine works. But it seems like an opportunity missed that we didn’t hear that news straight from the horse’s mouth over at The Hobbit official blog.

Over the course of its life, the Hobbit blog has rarely been updated. They did host a live online conversation with Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Torro back in May 2008 (good lord, was it really that long ago?) but that’s been the only real highlight.

Shame to see that a blog which launched in December 2007 (to coincide with the announcement that the two Hobbit movies were definitely going ahead) had a large head of steam to start with (423 comments on the post announcing the movies), then 60 comments on the announcement of del Torro as Director of the films, then just two comments on the announcement of the live chat with Jackson and del Torro. That looks like a big waste of the original audience who had a real appetite for official news from the Hobbit movie production. Yes, it takes time (and I’m sure wrangling with clearances etc behind the scenes) but if properly fed with content and attention, The Hobbit blog could have been a really popular way for fans to get official news of the movie, and been a real PR boon for the project.

Fortunately, we have fans to keep us going – thank you, TheOneRing.net for all your efforts over the years.

I read a number of blogs out of professional and personal curiousity, and the Geek Feminism blog which launched last year was my standout new blog of the year. So I’d like to take the time to say why it’s awesome, and why I especially appreciate the work done by its founder, Kirrily Robert (Skud).

Why the Geek Feminism blog is awesome:

• It’s a very useful resource for people interested in supporting women working in the tech sector, or wanting to increase the representation of women in tech. The blog rounds up success stories, relevant conference talks and interesting links. It also shines a spotlight on poor behaviour and has an ‘Ask a Feminist’ series in which readers can submit their tricky questions and receive advice.
• It is a regular reminder that there are other people out there tirelessly working to put an end to problems women can face in the tech sector particularly. Knowing this makes me feel more hopeful and less alone!
• The writers are intelligent – I find every post to be worth reading.
• It tackles issues & discussion about feminist issues at a level which many professional women are at – but also provides links to “Feminism 101″ materials which I’ve found invaluable for helping to discuss issues or problems with people who aren’t necessarily interested in or educated about feminist issues. It also links to resources for men who might want to find out how they can support women in tech.
• It’s a group blog – which means a diversity of views both from the writers and in the discussion in comments. So I’d like to also mention my appreciation of the work that all the contributors make to the blog.

Kirrily Robert:

You might not realise it, but even today, people who speak about feminist issues cop a lot of very unpleasant abuse for doing so. Kirrily gave a very positive keynote talk at OSCON last year about ways which in which people and organisations have been working to increase the representation of women in tech, which generated a lot of discussion and led to her deciding to found the Geek Feminism blog.

When she’s not doing Geek Feminism stuff, this Australian-born resident of San Francisco works with tech startups (she’s currently working at Freebase) and builds communities (she recently started a Community Management wiki). She’s also generous with her time and ideas, and I’ve invariably found conversations with her to be mentally invigorating. Thank you Skud.

This post was created both to salute the creator of my favourite new blog, and to fulfil my pledge to take part inAda Lovelace Day – a day to blog about women in IT and science. I noticed that Mary also blogged about Skudtoday.

Webstock does a great job of picking wonderful speakers to close each day of the conference, and Rives‘ appearance at the end of Day 1 this year was no exception. Here’s a taster of his charming performance poetry – A tale of mixed emoticons:

There were several lines so gorgeous that I wrote them down and underlined them emphatically in my notebook, including “my wierd mind wanders and my brave heart breaks” – then later in his talk, Rives showed some photos from his blog of handmade kites which fans had made which included that very line. Lovely. 

I had the pleasure of attending my second Webstock conference in Wellington last week. Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology at Brooklyn Museum was the standout speaker – I came away really impressed by the museum’s use of social media to further its “community-oriented mission through projects including free public wireless access, podcasts, cell phone audio tours, projects for mobile devices and putting the Brooklyn Museum collection online”.

Some cool examples she mentioned included:

Foursquare

The museum’s done a number of things to get involved with patrons who are using the location-aware app/game, FourSquare.

• They’ve used the Foursquare API to create a Brooklyn Museum landing page which is worth checking out. It aggregates the comments and suggestions made by people who’ve checked in at the museum. For example: “Saturdays are tough because of the crowds. Naturally the earlier the better and I find it best to start at the top floor and work your way down. (Alex). They’ve also added staff picks of local eateries. The page displays a gallery of recent visitors to the museum by grabbing the user icons of people who have used Foursquare to ‘check in’ at the museum, which is a nice touch.
• They also offer a reward to the patron who achieves Mayor of the museum on the first Saturday of the month; and they’re working with Foursquare to create a special Brooklyn Museum badge which patrons can unlock.

#mummywrap on Twitter

• The Museum’s conservators live tweeted the CT scanning of several mummies from its collection. They posted pictures and answered questions live. “Layer 8 has lots of ties – seems to be a lattice, but hard to tell how to put back together #mummywrap” (the museum tweets from @Brooklyn Museum)

Crowdsourcing recommendations and tags and feedback

• Brooklyn Museum Posse – the museum has made its online collection interactive by allowing patrons to create tags & recommendations for items. Shelley gave a great example of the great effects this interactivity with the public can have – it was via a patron’s comment on its online collection that Museum staff discovered that the TV series True Blood included a statue inspired by a piece in their collection. Their initial blog post about it resulted in a conversation with the Production Designer, providing fodder for cool and timely social media discussion.
• BklynMuse –  A community-powered recommendation system/gallery guide.  Posse members who have created “sets” of favourite items  can access them as they tour the gallery. “Those same sets can be shared and featured for other visitors to see, so your voice…your notes…your selections…may be highlighted, in all their Posse glory, for all to see.”
• Video comment kiosks – The museum replaced their comment books with video kiosks, in which visitors can record their own comments to video. These are shared on the web (hit the link to see the collection of comments).

I came away with a lot of neat ideas for using social media to further the outreach of museums and galleries – which I know will be useful in my teaching as I get a lot of curatorship students enrolling in my digital publishing courses. I also really liked the look of 1stfans -  a “socially networked museum membership” which offers meetups, artist created content via Twitter.

Thank you, Shelley, for your thoughtful and information-packed talk.

I’d also like to say thanks to Google’s Open Source Program for sponsoring my Webstock registration. Especial thanks to Leslie and Cat for making it happen. 

Great to see Margaret Simons piercing the veil of silence on the word rates being offered to Australian freelance journalists. Check out the series of posts on the subject on her blog – The Content Makers.

I’ve started a new job as Community Manager for Nuffnang Australia.

Nuffnang is a blog advertising network which came to Australia over a year ago. Basically their business model is to sign up individual bloggers to become part of their network, and then serve ads across its blog network. The cool thing about Nuffnang from my point of view is that they focus on building an active blogging community as a reason for people to join Nuffnang – not just offering the financial incentive of making money from ads.

So that’s where I come in. I get to help build the blogging community & blogging expertise of Nuffnang’s Australian bloggers. You may have already heard of some of Nuffnang’s bloggers, like Erica Bartle of  Girl with a Satchel, and vintage fashion blogger Candice DeVille of Super Kawaii Mama. Over the coming year, I’m hoping to use my experience & expertise to help build a bigger & better blogging community across Australia.

You can find out a bit more about Nuffnang over at the company blog – they’ve posted a roundup of 2009 which has some facts & figures about their international network. There are over 118,000 bloggers in the network across Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines & Australia. I’ll be looking after the Australian Nuffnang community, which is around 1,200 bloggers and growing.

I’ll be organising blogger meetups and events throughout the year, and you’ll hopefully see me out and about at lots of events too. Tech & gadget bloggers are welcome to attend our first tech blogger meetup on 4 March – details are available on the Nuffnang blog.