Well, I don’t know what I’ve done, but Twitter appears to have eaten all my followers, just when I thought that Everybody Loves Me.

I’ve gone from 473 followers to 146, back to 220 and now I’m on 207. It seems that my profile was set to private – I have no idea how, but I have now changed it back to public and have still lost over half my followers.

I’ve logged a bug with Twitter and hope they’ll get on to it. In the meantime I feel so unloved

This caught my eye on the weekend in The West Australian and if it’s true it is totally outrageous.

Under the headline “Fairfax hires Labor lobbyists” it read (the story does not appear to be online):

“Eastern States media group Fairfax has hired Labor strategists Hawker Britton to help in its negotiations with the State Government as part of its plans to set up a news website in Perth.

The West Australian also understands Hawker Britton has employed former premier Geoff Gallop’s chief-of-staff Sean Walsh, who ran Dr Gallop’s office for five years.

Hawker Britton’s Perth office is run by John Whitelaw, the former chief-of-staff to Police Minister John Kobelke. Former Labor MP Megan Anwyl was a director of the lobby group before leaving the position last week.

Mr Walsh could not be contacted yesterday, while Mr Whitelaw did not respond to requests for comment and Mr Anwyl refused to comment.

The West Australian revealed yesterday that the WA Government and its senior public servants were meeting senior Fairfax executives to discuss plans for their online service.

Paul Giles, acting manager of strategic communication in the Government Media Office, said in a letter to the public servants that the meeting was a chance to “discuss news format, editorial stance and media mix along with advertising opportunities, promotional activity and any other matters of interest.”

There have been rumours of Fairfax coming to Perth for some time, I blogged about it in March. So the move into the West Australian market is not so surprising, but what are they talking to the Government about? Since when do news corporations talk to the government about editorial stance?

There is no need for Fairfax to talk to the Government about launching an online news service for any legal reasons – online news remains out of the scope of media ownership laws.

The West Australian has a somewhat strained relationship with the current Labor Government – Health Minister Jim McGinty called for editor Paul Armstrong to be sacked over a health story that eventually made its way to the Press Council and which The West subsequently lost. So the doors are open for another news organisation to court favour with the Government – after all they are one of the biggest spenders of advertising dollars.

I don’t think replacing one media bias with another is a positive thing. And mainstream media wonders why we are so cynical? They make it too easy.

I gave a talk the other day on building online communities, in which I mentioned that gaming elements can be an important part in getting people to take part in a social network. Give most people a bit of a challenge and they rise to it.

Twitter’s newest Twitter poster is a great example of that It’s supposed to provide a visual representation of people’s degree of influence on Twitter. An hey, everyone wants to be a *little* influential.

Except of course if you have a private Twitter profile. Then you just want to be private!

Already I’ve seen a few tweets popping up about how to get on the Twitter poster. How many followers you have seems to be a consideration, but I think there is a bit more to it. Some people with 0 followers appear on the Australian page, so it could just be a pretty picture… Anyone else have theories?

Oh, and you can follow me here BTW.

Game on

Early this morning – at 2.30am Perth time to be precise – I had an interview with my Twitter friend Chris Brogan on PulverTV. It was just a short interview about Podcamp Perth and what we all got out of it. I must confess my mind was a little bit blurry, but it was great fun.

Chris Brogan and I ‘met’ each other on Twitter and we’ve exchanged twitters for some time as well as a few emails. When I added him as a Twitter friend it was long before I got involved in Podcamp and long before I knew he was one of the original two to start it (I just thought he was a cool guy with some great tweets). I love coincidences like that.

So this was sort of like a ‘virtual meeting’ for both of us. Earlier on Twitter I had asked someone to do a test Skype with me as I was having trouble with my USB headphones. Chris Penn - the other Chris behind Podcamp – answered and we had a great chat about the respective Podcamps as well. It really made the world feel small and familiar.

I’ll let you know when the video is up. Andrew Lipson, who does a great job as producer emailed me to say there was an error in archiving and they’d post it up later.

I’ve also started thinking about playing around with Live streaming myself. Have to give Grum and Rich a run for their money