The flash flooding in Toowoomba yesterday was unprecedented for the city, and my thoughts are with those who have lost loved ones and those who are still missing. There have been 9 confirmed deaths so far and over 60 people still missing (ABC News).

I’ve included some images and video below:

Cars being washed away by East Creek, Near Chalk Drive

Compilation by ABC TV

Dent St Rescue

Compilation of Images and Video (made by 14yr old Kiera):

Goggs St:

4WD Gets Washed Down West Creek:

More Information

Bureau of Meteorology SE QLD Radar
Toowoomba & Darling Downs Flood Photos & Info (Facebook page)
ABC Flood Coverage

It’s difficult to manually keep track of who is saying what about your business and its products online, but Google Alerts goes a long way to help you automatically monitor your online buzz. It’s a free service that anyone can configure to receive email notifications whenever you or your business is mentioned in websites and blogs. You can also use it to keep track of how your competitors are faring in your niche, and what marketing strategies they are using.

A Google Alerts Example

Here’s an alert I set up for my business:

Putting double quotation marks in between the business name ensures that only results with the full business name will be returned. I also added “toowoomba” as there are other businesses overseas with similar names, and I don’t want the results to include them. You can also use the minus operator to exclude certain results, just like in Google search (for example: “- brisbane”). Visit Google’s help page for a more complete guide.

Using Google Alerts for your business is a really invaluable way to keep a pulse of your online presence. If you own a business and have not already set this up you are truly missing out!

INFLUENCERS is a short documentary that explores what it means to be an influencer and how trends and creativity become contagious today in music, fashion and entertainment.

The film attempts to understand the essence of influence, what makes a person influential without taking a statistical or metric approach.

American retailers Diapers.com show off their unique way of processing orders 24 hours a day.

This reminded me of the BigDog project by Boston Dynamics. Amazing and scary at the same time.

Does the internet, in it’s current form, need to be censored? Does the internet, in it’s current form, need compulsory censorship by the government?

Back in 2007, ‘Internet Filtering’ was an election promise from the Labour party during the Australian Federal Election. I’m not sure if, at that point, the extent of the policy was fully known. It certainly wasn’t a highly publicised policy. Nevertheless, the Rudd government is fulfilling it’s promise through Senator Conroy to protect Australia from websites which contain child pornography, drug use, crime, sex, cruelty, violence, and anything else deemed morally objectionable by the government.

I think the decision to censor anything, be it books, television, films, games, or the internet is something which should be decided based on the cultural values of the community. While Australia isn’t the most liberal of all countries, we do enjoy a high level of free speech and democracy which should be protected and defended wherever possible.

That’s why the decision by the government to push ahead with compulsory internet censorship despite widespread opposition from industry, the media, and internet users is very worrying to me.

Putting aside moral objections, the technical issues involved with censoring this type of content are too vast to properly police. The kind of illegal materials the government wish to censor are not shared on websites, they are shared in chat rooms, file sharing (P2P) programs, and newsgroups, because of the anonymity they provide. The government’s solution to provide ISPs a blacklist of websites which cannot be accessed will to absolutely nothing to stop the flow of illegal material to those who want it. This basic misunderstanding of the issue will leave tax-payers footing a huge bill, slower internet access (Australia already lags behind the rest of the world in this), and joining the ranks of China and the United Arab Emirates in compulsory internet censorship.

Today saw the leaking of the government’s blacklist, which has been widely covered in the media, and cemented how fickle and ridiculous this proposal really is. There is renewed hope that this will not get passed in the senate, but there is still a  chance it will get tacked on to existing legislation.

Here’s hoping thats not the case!

I ordered a few hundred business cards for Phillips Design this week. I settled on VistaPrint after reading a few positive reviews in online forums. While I have yet to see the actual cards, the company has already left a bitter taste in my mouth from their in-your-face upselling techniques.

During the order process VistaPrint attemps to upsell various stationary with the customer’s logo plastered on it around 2-3 times, in some cases making the user scroll down an entire page with “special” and “limited time” offers. After skipping through these, a final attempt to sell the same thing at an even lower price was made.  After ordering the cards, an email order confirmation is sent with another dozen special offers.

In my opinion this kind of marketing poisons the entire user experience just to make a few extra dollars. It certainly made me think twice about referring any of my clients.

Upselling is an excellent way of giving the customer extra value and increasing business profit — just be careful not to overdo.