The guvment is considering a “consultation blog” to engage folks in the democratic process. It’s all about e-government, Web2.0 and other funky buzzwords:

Government agencies in Australia have traditionally involved citizens and community in the processes and decisions that affect them. With the advent of e-government and the increasing use of information and communication technologies to enhance government service delivery, opportunities arise for agencies to engage and involve citizens and communities through new channels.

[…]

The rise of new multimedia broadband technologies such as Web 2.0 bring a stream of digital innovations that are transforming the way people use the Internet and the way in which they communicate. Specifically, Web 2.0 provides amongst other things, real time interaction, democratized web spaces, user generated content and citizen journalism. People’s use of these new innovations is driving expectations for new approaches to the way government interact. Governments cannot ignore these changing social dynamics, especially in relation to citizen engagement.

Sounds like a great idea on the face of it. However, perhaps these Web1.0 bureaucrats should spend some time reading political blog comment threads to see how little they resemble reasoned, intelligent debate. Just as only fanatic, partisan people and organisations bother to write submissions for government inquiries, only fanatic, partisan people and organisations will bother to engage with the e-forum. Plus there’s the added Godwin’s factor and the Iain; Hall factor.

And finally, blogs that don’t have pictures of cats can’t be taken seriously.

Australian bloggers shouted out in glee this morning when they took the three steps from their bed to their computer and read the news that a blogger in the USA has successfully sued another blogger for libel, winning US$5 million dollars in damages.

Within minutes, Australian bandwidth consumption skyrocketed as thousands of bloggers furiously travelled the internet archiving copies of their mortal blogging enemies’ web pages containing accusations against them of being “idiots”, “retards”, “lefties” and “Nazis”. At the same time, each of these bloggers was furiously trawling their own blogs deleting any insult they may have thrown towards their mortal blogging enemies, all the while nervously preparing defences for imagined court proceedings. By 9am this morning the Australian blogosphere resembled a desert with almost all content deleted and replaced by 404 errors, while emails were flying back and forth between Hotmail addresses to faceless pseudonyms threatening in illiterate blogging prose to “bring teh full forse of the law upon you becos of the outrite lies and unthuths youve been propegating about my charecter on teh internet.”

Make no mistake, threats to sue for libel will now become standard ammunition in any blog comments war, alongside Godwin’s Law which holds that most comment wars will end in a comparison of at least one party to Nazis. This new phenomenon will be known as GrodsLaw: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a threat to sue for libel approaches one.