Free email for life… come on, let’s think about that…
The Antipodean points to an article in the Age in which:
“Federal Liberal MP Malcolm Turnbull has called for the Government to give every Australian their own email address for life.”
Sometimes being an Aussie can be a tad frustrating…
I mean, I think it was a year and a half ago that the NSW govt splashed out $84 million on providing every frickin school with email.
This really has to stop.
For the same amount of money the government could provide every single Australian with their own fully featured Content Management System / Blog.
We have the tools and the hardware costs would be the same (or a lot less).
Imagine it, every resident could have their own area, their own digital space and voice… they could be geospatially aggregated in community contexts… multiple voices, platforms and audiences.
Bloody hell, using the global categories function in WPMU you could even have communities of interest in a city, let alone a neighbourhood. Whack in the tagging that Bud is also incorporating alongside WPMU and your folksonomy is your community.
What a brilliant public service!
Please somebody, anybody, hire me to make this happen!
Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.
About:
September 12th, 2005 at 7:54 pm
A funny story to this:
in germany you have quite a lot free web mail providers (like gmx.de and web.de). The German Post which was a former governmental company started a email service in 2000. They claimed that with their long history of delivering letters and their trust people place in them, you can get a email address which is stale for or your lifetime. Well, this was in 2000. Since 2005-03-01 the service was shut down, the domain is operated by lycos till 2005-12-31.
Of cause all the freemailers continue to exist, some of them for 10 years and more. Lessons learned? never trust the german post and dont trust the government to handle your communications.
Bernd
September 12th, 2005 at 11:16 pm
Hi James:
Thanks for the link. Interesting that I come up in the same breath as a rant about the backwardness of email.
I have to say that I do think email is more fundamental than blogging. Email is an infrastructure that is there and works. Thank God for that as we twiddle with figuring out how blog and other collaborative communities should work. How would we talk to each other otherwise?
But, an official email address for life? Would I be held liable for responding to official inquiries by email? Yikes!
September 13th, 2005 at 10:00 am
Well OK, email isn’t a bad thing in itself I just guess that it’s like a restaurant… you wanna choose where you go.
Whereas this would be a bit more like an alottment???
December 2nd, 2005 at 9:46 am
But, the thing is, the average person couldn’t give a rats about having a blog.
Schools will actually use their e-mail - the average citizen wouldn’t use a blog.
December 2nd, 2005 at 5:27 pm
so you think the kids will use that email rather than their gmail, hotmail, yahoo etc. ?
Am not after the ‘average’ person or citizen & yeh there aren’t that many out there now right now who would be interested… but mark my words these things are the buds of the next email!
December 3rd, 2005 at 9:12 am
Well, they might not use it for bitching to their mates about things, or signing up for pr0n sites, no. But the school will probably incoporate that address into official school communication, or whatever, and also have other things in which it will make the kids use it.
And I mean, if you think that’s a lame reply, OK, you can use the same argument about a blog. The school gives the kids a blog. OK, great. But who’s to say the kids won’t be like, “This sucks, it has hardly any features and I can’t write what I want to write anyway because of school rules… I’m just going to use my WordPress blog at home instead…”?