When the rivers of gold stop flowing

"Rivers of gold" was the term to describe the profitable classified advertising businesses of the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age. There's been another river of gold in the Sensis monopoly of directory advertising. If anything, the Yellow Pages has been far more profitable for Sensis/Telstra than the classified have been for Fairfax.

The launch of Google Maps Australia is direct threat to both these rivers of gold. By linking into the News Limited classified system, it threatens Fairfax's advantages. For Sensis/Yellow Pages, their monopoly is threatened by a viable alternative directory.

Google certainly does the job better than Yellow pages. I searched "Computer Repairs" and "Neutral Bay", Our business came up first and there was only one paid ad above us, all the other listings were in the immediate area. The map was clear and concise.

The same search on Yellow Pages Online didn't take us directly to the listings. We first went to a category page. Multiple categories for the one business type is another Yellow pages tactic to get more money out of us.

Once we were in the correct category there were SEVENTEEN premium ads ahead of us. To add insult to injury, almost all the listings ahead of are the "may not be located in the area" type. Many of them are on the other side of Sydney, which makes specifying a suburb stupid and pointless.

On those results, it's difficult to see why a small IT shop would bother with anything more than the basic Yellow Pages listing. Given the price of a single Yellow Pages category listing, let alone four or five, is prohibitive and you'll always be outgunned by bigger advertisers it's barely worth it. Even more discouraging is the fact Yellow Pages own one of your competitors.

The biggest threat to Sensis though is that Google have tied up with News Limited's True Local service. Being able to combine online listings with local and metropolitan newspaper advertising is a pretty formidable selling proposition. If News and Google don't get greedy then Sensis has a serious problem.

It's ironic that the Australian Google Maps appears the same week Fred Hilmer released his tale of being the Fairfax CEO. The tie up between Google and News illustrates how badly Fred got it wrong with separating the Australian Cityseach from the Fairfax newspapers. Had Fred got it right, Google might have been partnering with a dominant Fairfax.

Fairfax and Sensis should be very worried about the Google Maps-News Limited partnership. This really has the potential to divert much of the "rivers of gold" away from the established players. It's going to be interesting to see how Fairfax and Sensis respond.

Who'd be a teacher?

I'm not wholly convinced about the use of computers in class rooms. I don't believe any computer is a substitute for a competent teacher. As a taxpayer and someone who supports these evil things for a living, I'm not even convinced it's a good investment of my tax dollars.

Now teachers might agree. First we had the Julie Amero case where a Connecticut school temporary is facing 40 years in jail for a spyware infected computer. Now we have the Alexander Ponosov case where a Russian school teacher is facing a spell in Siberia for buying computers with pirated software.

The injustices in both of these cases is breathtaking. In the Ponosov case, the spectacle of provincial school teacher being used an example so Russia can prove it's worthy of joining the WTO is a digrace. I'd like to know what happened to the people who sold him the computers.

Julie Amero's predicament is also disgraceful. The real villains in this are the local school board who allowed filters to expire and accepted pop-up ads on classrooms computers as being normal. It really seems the charges were only a butt-covering exercise by these incompetents.

Incompetent is the best description of the prosecution's "expert" witness, Detective Mark Lounsbury who claimed Amero musts have "physically clicked" on pornographic links. The frightening thing is Detective Lounsbury recieved training from the FBI in basic network intrusion and advanced network intrusion in Unix. He admit even admits he's not an expert and relies on Computer Cop software.

It surprises me that more schools and businesses haven't fallen foul of the law because of malware infested PCs. Given it's considered sexual harrassment to have a girly calendar on an office wall, hard core porn on a computer desktop must beyond the pale. Every office and school should have proper filtering and spyware protection and policies to deal with the unexpected.