A few people were beginning to suspect Nassar was the man behind the account and I’m guessing he outed himself before the press did it for him. The tweet in which he made the announcement looks like it has been deleted.

The sequence of events seem to be this: Nassar announced himself as the account creator (he has joked about being other people from time to time), it was reported on a number of blogs and the SMH that he was infact the person behind it, the Conroy Twitter account appeared to be deleted, Telstra announced that they had not asked Nassar to stop tweeting, they then announced they had in fact asked Nassar to do the right thing, Nassar reopened the account and tweeted:

But this is where the story gets interesting. It appears Telstra were in fact the one’s “faking it”. On its “Now We Are Talking blog“  Mike Hickinbotham wrote that he wanted to get the facts straight that:

• Lesile is not going to lose his job as a result of announcing he is the Fake Stephen Conroy
• Telstra did not shut down Leslie’s Twitter account. Fake Stephen Conroy (twitter.com)
• Telstra did not out Leslie as the Fake Stephen Conroy
• Telstra’s policy is that only selected spokepeople deal with the media

He then went on:

Analogies are developed to educate employees that social media ‘is like a conversation within a group of friends on the bus.  The conversation is meant strictly for the group, but it’s not a private conversation’.

The case of Leslie is different, he understands the whimsical nature of social media and in particular Twitter.  This isn’t a case of solving the problem by offering social media training.  Leslie made a conscious decision to engage in social media.

Telstra is learning the best way to engage in social media – notice our response has come in the form of a blog versus a media release.

We believe transparency promotes credibility.  This post is about getting the facts into the open.

I was pretty impressed with what I believed to be an honest response from Telstra and there is no denying social media throws a lot of challenges up for large corporations. I also knew Nassar to have had a few Twitter accounts in the past and I wondered if the fun was taken out for him now that people knew who he was. Had the Telstra blog not been broken, there would be a congratulatory comment from me applauding its openness. In fact, I did congratulate it on Twitter, and I noticed a few others doing the same.

But my alarm bells started ringing though when @M_Hickinbotham started tweeting something that didn’t quite fit with the NWAT post.

Turns out Telstra is not as transparent as it would lead us to believe and had Nassar not had the courage and gumption to speak up and risk losing his job, it would have got away with it. It appears Telstra had in fact asked Nassar to stop tweeting.

If Telstra had any sense they would have seen the opportunity for good publicity that Nassar offered them. The fact that Nassar is a Telstra employee tweeting on an OBVIOUSLY fake account for the Communications Minister only added to the humour.

I can only hope that it exercises “good judgment” here and looks to learn from the situation and redeem itself. I trust they don’t underestimate the backlash against them should Nassar lose his job.

Last week we had some students from TAFE drop in to the Silicon Beach House to chat about what we have set up here and working in the web industry as a career option.

The students are part of the Gaining Access to Employment and Training project, which is trialling a new learning methodology called Heutagogy to explore innovative ways that students can use new technologies in an educational setting.

Harriet Wakelam told me the the project came out of an argument over whether or not Gen Y kids were ‘digital natives’ a la Mark Prensky, and therefore able to instinctively use technology to learn vs, they use technology instinctively for entertainment/communication, but do not know how to use it for learning/do not want to use it for learning.

Heutagogy is the process of allowing learners to decide what they want to learn, how they want to learn it and when they want to learn it. It enables the students to become responsible for their own learning. The project aims to use Web 2.0 technologies to engage and motivate the students and then mentor and support them while they complete a project based outcome.

The students all shared a bit of their background with us, most of whom had become disengaged with a traditional classroom setting.

It’s great to see the support for these sorts of projects and the students I spoke to had really enjoyed the experience with most now realising what they wanted to go on and do. I had no idea anyone in education was prepared to take these sorts of risks – big kudos to the people involved in setting the project up.

It was a reminder to me about how much I love what I’m doing and I think we may have even convinced one of the students that this could be his area of interest. Actually, in fairness I think it was Myles who did that with his live coding session.

Better still I learnt something. It occurred to me by it’s very nature being a founder of a web 2.0 start-up means I am learning based on the principals of Heutagogy. It’s certainly self-determined learning.

Mostly I’ve spent the last few days rethinking a lot of things – and I’m not the only one. Cameron Reilly made some good points in his Podcamp post-mortem:

Whenever we get together at events like Podcamp or MODM, whilst there is a certain level of geek community bonding and a few impassioned conversations, that there is a general lack of BIG IDEAS. I’m including myself in this by the way. I come away from these events feeling slightly hollow, like a great opportunity has been missed.

It seems a few of us retreated into our geek pods to ask ourselves “can we make a difference?” Can we put our geek powers to good and extend them beyond the geek-to-geek community to make “the world a better place”.

Thing is, I think it’s easy to take what we know for granted and what we’ve learnt, while we look for the next BIG IDEA.

The best write up I’ve seen of Podcamp to date is on a basic WordPress blog, with no “about page”, from a guy (from his writing I think I can place him) for whom all these ideas were relatively new. I think his words speak for themselves so here they are, but overall to me it’s what made Podcamp wort it. BIG IDEAS or not:

Late, headed for the back. Regretted seating choice, which was directly behind a behind – a grotesquely big one – belonging to an obese geek whose pants had slipped way too far down as he leaned forward. Not much of a sight so soon after breakfast.

The speaker was Cameron Riley (see thepodcastnetwork.com), whose topic was “Is Podcasting Dead”? It was only recently born, as far as I knew.

Charismatic speaker with tendencies toward megalomania, his stated aim being to develop an alternative global media empire. Claims the world is run by “200 rich white men”. Sounds plausible. Claims mainstream media hates the web because they can’t control it, and are forfeiting power and influence to bloggers, podcasters, etc. YES! (I inwardly punch the air).

As an aside here – sorry, can’t resist – I am in love with the Net because it is a great leveller, and in being that, is ultimately subversive. There is a bloodless revolution underway that many are not yet even aware of.

What do I mean by “revolution”? Basically, a profound shift in power – and finally, into the hands of The People. Privilege, power and big bucks mean fuck all on the web. The mainstream media, for example, pours millions into establishing a web presence, but they can be outplayed by some blogger in a grungy apartment somewhere in Nowheresville who has no influential contacts, no journalism quals, no big buck backing. Cameron pointed out that some of the biggest political stories in the US in recent times have been broken by bloggers, leaving the mainstream media choking in their dust.

All this from someone who asks:

And how come I’d never heard of terms like “meme”, never heard of Sitemeter, never used Google Analytics in assessing my blog traffic? What the screaming fuck is Twitter? Photobucket?

Check out the full post here.

Thanks to Nick Hodge for the photo. You can see all the photos at PodcampPerth07 Flickr pool as well.

Lastly, a huge thanks to everyone for making Podcamp such a great experience. Looking forward to the next one.