Philip Walker said a culture of sending emails “where the content was not likely to offend and was banter between colleagues” existed at his Safe Air workplace in Blenheim.

The Employment Relations Authority (ERA) found in Mr Walker’s favour, awarding him $1000 for “a loss of dignity and injury to his feelings’ and ordering Safe Air to reinstate him.

Mr Walker, a purchasing officer at the Air New Zealand subsidiary, was sacked in February after sending 425 non-work-related emails to colleagues and family members between March and September last year.

Safe Air said 26 of these were “emails of concern” containing explicit depictions of lewdness, nudity and/or sex acts.

The ERA found he was among a group that had contributed to a “widespread inappropriate use of emails” but it was likely Mr Walker did this because he was “not clear about the standards expected”.

[...] In her conclusion, ERA member Helen Doyle said she was not satisfied that Mr Walker clearly understood Safe Air’s email policies.

When he became aware in September that Safe Air was investigating email use, he stopped sending inappropriate emails.

“In the circumstances of this case where there was widespread inappropriate use of emails, a fair and reasonable employer would accept that Mr Walker was less likely to have comprehended the seriousness and inappropriateness of the nature of the emails,” Ms Doyle said.

[...] Netsafe executive director Martin Cocker said sackings over the misuse of email or the internet were common.

He said companies had to have effective internet and email technology policies that were explained clearly and understood by staff.

“One of the main defences we see is people saying, ‘I didn’t understand what it meant’ … It looks like this was the case here.”

If you don’t already have one, Netsafe has a template Staff Cybersafety Use Agreement that you can use, or check yours against.

Like all such agreements however, its not the document that matters, its the implementation and monitoring. While your staff may have signed the agreement, do they understand what it means in daily use? How do you check that and what are your processes for monitoring and enforcement?

Netsafe is an excellent organisation that has plenty of resources and training kits available.

What’s your experience in this area? Comments please.

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Astralian banks are the latest to feel the heat. Angry bank customers hit web instead of tellers

Angry bank customers have found a new place to deposit their anger.

They are hitting the worldwide web instead of their bank branch and are venting online about sloppy service and interest rate rises.

A new Nielsen Online study in Australia reveals social networking sites such as Twitter are booming with people publicly expressing their displeasure.

The study measured consumer-generated media, or “buzz”, around the big four banks and found online discussion spiked following specific incidents related to banks.

[...] Nielsen Online director of analytics Mark Higginson told AAP the statistics showed people who were getting no satisfaction from traditional methods were going online to seek sympathy, support and a little revenge on the banks.Because so many people were online, it was an easy way for them to ask each other about their banks’ performance.

“It’s not necessarily that people are going online specifically to talk about it, but it’s people who are already online. When the topic comes up, it’s like a match to tinder wood,” Mr Higginson said.

What the report doesn’t mention is that people are much more willing to take action based on their communities of interest (friendship “networks”) than they would be on simply seeing a story in the newspaper or on TV. The facts are not in dispute here, what is different with online protests is that people who are individually angry about something are able to discover others, sometimes many others.

This is how grassroots actions get started these days and these tools are available to all of us. How have you made use of them?

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Computer security firms are warning users to be vigilant about spam messages capitalizing [on] the sudden death of U.S. pop star Michael Jackson.

[...] Security firm Sophos on Friday reported that about eight hours after Jackson’s death, its experts witnessed the first wave of spam messages taking advantage of the breaking news in the subject line and body of the email.

In these messages, the spammers claimed that they have vital information about the death of Michael Jackson to share and asked for a reply.

Experts said the spammers can easily harvest recipients’ contact information via a free live email address if users reply to the spam message.

[...] In addition, security experts at Sophos discovered that cybercriminals were taking advantage of the passing of U.S. actress Farrah Fawcett, a 1970s TV icon who also died on Thursday, to spread fake anti-virus software.

Bad news offers opportunity to spread malicious software, noted Guilherme Venere, an expert at security firm McAfee.

“Every time a disaster happens or news about some celebrity reaches the media, malware writers try to take advantage of it. The most common attack vector is email,” he wrote in a posting on the company’s blog.

Venere said users should be wary of spam emails offering links to “news” or “pictures” of deceased celebrities, which most of the time will lead to Web sites touting pharmacy products and even result in the installment of malware on the computers.

My system scan yesterday turned up about 20 trojans and malware applications, all of them attached to emails and I’d bet your system shows something similar. Death may be, as some cynics noted about Elvis, “a good career move” but there’s a reason we practise good hygiene when handling the dead and that applies to our computers.

Have a safe day on the net.

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1. Have a valid business reason such as being a distributed organisation where key people need access to the accounts
2. Make sure the accountant and auditor are not actively opposed (I work with one organisation that had to change its accountant when they decided to go online)
3. Broadband for users is pretty well mandatory
4. Do you want or need the latest version at all times?
5. Support servies can have immediate access to your service to fix any problems
6. Better backup than any of us does on our own account.
7. Do the numbers, online services will eventually (within a couple of years, cost you more than buying a standalone software)

Have you shifted to online accounting services? How did you make that decision? What is your experience? Was it worthwhile? Comments please.

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We’ve previously covered a number of Facebook scams, most designed to steal your Facebook login details to spam your friends. Today another such scam popped up: the Mashable (Mashable) team currently has multiple mails from “Junfunrun [dot] com” and “Bulitre [dot] com” (don’t visit those domains).

We’re not yet sure whether this is a fresh attack designed to steal login details, or whether it’s spam being sent from previously compromised accounts.

Either way, the message is simple: if you get a link to one of these domains from a Facebook friend today, don’t click it. The scam is easy to spot because the automatically generated subject lines are in the format “Hi {RAND}”.

You should also check that your Facebook account is not sending these mails. Mashable has the instructions, here

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The Australian Government announced a Web 2.0 taskforce today to investigate new approaches in openness and transparency when it comes to the online world

The taskforce of 15 people, chaired by CEO of Lateral Economics Dr Nicholas Gruen, will investigate ways the government can open up their computer databases to allow citizens access to government information more easily.

Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Lindsay Tanner, said … Governments cannot control the online world.

“We…have to accept that when we open ourselves up to public discussion through blogs, chat rooms (and) online forums we won’t always like what we hear,” he said. “We have to accept that there are challenges involved in participating in those processes for government.”

“Who speaks on behalf of the government? What restraints, if any, are there on what they say? What resources are contributed to those processes? [These] are all questions that we want the taskforce to advise on.”

As well as providing advice, the taskforce will fund initiatives that attempt to show that the Government is serious about achieving its objectives.

Tanner added that the Government will attempt to establish a pro-disclosure culture around non-sensitive public sector information and maximise the extent to which government utilises the views, knowledge and resources of the general community.

It will be an even bigger success if they can define as non-sensitive information such as who won the contract for X and how much they are being paid. But I’d give good odds it wont go that far.

Someone else who looks hard at these issues is Gerry McGovern who is always worth reading when it comes to website stuff. His take on the Apple/ Microsoft distinction? Apple makes better products, but Microsoft does better partnership and openness.

Where are you on the spectrum, and how do you feel about the proposition that in an online world there is nobody in control? Comments open as usual.

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And when you are trying to create an online community, are you aiming for bulk numbers or supporting the crucial 1% of super users?

An experiment at Verizon Communications … suggests that company-sponsored online communities for customer service, if handled adeptly, hold considerable promise. via Unboxed – Verizon’s Experiment in Volunteer Customer Service

Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon, is a software engineer by training and an avid consumer electronics tinkerer whose home projects have included installing high-end audiovisual systems. In those projects, he has often visited Web sites where users offer one another tips and answer questions. Verizon, Mr. Studness determined, needed to find a smart way to try to tap into that potential resource for customer service.

In talking to people and surveying the research on voluntary online communities, Verizon concluded that super-users would be crucial to success.

[...] Natalie L. Petouhoff, an analyst at Forrester Research, said that online user groups conform to what she calls the 1-9-90 rule. About 1 percent of those in the community, she explained, are super-users who supply most of the best answers and commentary. An additional 9 percent are “responders” who mainly reply and rate Web posts, she said, and the other 90 percent are “readers” who primarily peruse and search the Web site for useful information.

“The 90 percent will come,” Ms. Petouhoff said, “if you have the 1 percent.”

Verizon explored the alternative of building the Web site and managing the forums itself, but it decided to call on outside expertise. … Verizon chose Lithium Technologies, and its chief executive and co-founder, Lyle Fong.

[...] The mentality of super-users in online customer-service communities is similar to that of devout gamers, according to Mr. Fong. Lithium’s customer service sites for companies, for example, offer elaborate rating systems for contributors, with ranks, badges and “kudos counts.”

“That alone is addictive,” Mr. Fong said. “They are revered by their peers.”

[...] Venture capitalist Peter Fenton says that many of the most popular consumer Web sites and services, from Wikipedia to Twitter, are animated by a relatively small percentage of avid users.

[...] At Verizon, Mr. Studness says he is pleased with the experiment so far. He calls the company-sponsored customer-service site “a very productive tool,” partly because it absorbs many thousands of questions that would otherwise be expensive calls to a Verizon call center.

But the online forums, he added, also provide customer ideas for improvements in hardware and software for the company’s fiber optic service, as well as a large, growing and searchable knowledge base online.

“One answer can help thousands,” he said.

Corporate communications is an area that has been locked down for a long time as organisations try hard to “control the message”, but in tougher economic times, and in an open information environment, that strategy is pretty well dead. There are people out there who have more client experience of your organisation than you do, if they are also well disposed to help, why would you not enlist them to support others who need your services and offer them social capital in return?

The online tools are easily available as forums, discussions groups, blogs, how many of them are working for you? How do they meet your client support objectives?

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When Guesses Go Horribly Wrong
Comparing our two case studies, the guessing camp from the text-size example had by far the worst performance. A person who based a design decision on these guesses would be wrong 3/4 of the time. In the bank example, they’d be wrong only 1/2 the time.

So, why the miserable discussion-group guesses? The answer lies in the following two statements:

* “In this day and age…”
* “It’s not 1995…”

Sadly, too many Web designers refuse to believe in the durability of usability findings. Thinking that “things that were difficult in the past must surely be easy now” has led many websites to their doom.

When we actually study real users, we see how slowly they learn about technology and how little their ability to use fancy websites has improved. And, most important, we see how little users care about learning fancy Web techniques. People just want to get in, get their stuff done, and get out. They don’t want to learn.

Guesses go wrong because many designers desperately want to believe in the potential of advanced design. They simply can’t fathom how little most people know about their pet technologies.

(Yes, in recent testing, we did find a few small advances in users’ skills, but it’s slow progress; you’d better believe that simplicity will continue to win the day for decades to come.)

For those of us who have been using, and in some cases making a living from, these tools for a decade or more, the hardest thing to realise is that the vast majority of the world is not like us.

Ask many organisations what their website is for and you will get something like, “so people can find out about our organisation and what we do”.

Wrong.

Sadly, most people don’t care one iota about your organisation and they almost certainly wont “want to find out more about it” until the day they need it. Then they don’t want to know about it either, they just want help to do something that is suddenly important to them. What’s more they are under stress, they are possibly angry or afraid and their ability to learn is severely restricted.

A significant part of the problem is that too many of us see our websites as some kind of media channel, like brochures, adverts etc. If we thought of them as tools to get stuff done and fiocused on what those tasks might be for the people we serve, website might be a lot sinpler for users.

How about your site? Is it a tool for doing something, or a way to “present your organisation to the world”? How’s it working out? Comments open.

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Given each year by Global Libraries, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Access to Learning Award recognizes the innovative efforts of public libraries or similar organizations outside the United States to connect people to information through free access to computers and the Internet.

The award is for non-American libraries only so you will be up against some of the most innovative people in the world who do astonishing things with almost nothing. How do you measure up?

Is it worth a million dollars to try?

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That’s where comes in with a new program called YouTube’s Video Volunteers.

The mission of YouTube’s Video Volunteers platform is to connect nonprofit organizations with skilled video makers who can help them broadcast their causes through video, reaching new audiences online and driving action around issues and projects that matter to them. The Video Volunteers page shows video-related volunteer opportunities that have been posted to allforgood.org (which includes listings from Idealist.org and VolunteerMatch). As a result, a YouTuber eager to help out might find a listing like this (”Afro Diaspora Music Video Website” in New York City) or this (”Promotional Video for the GO-Science Challenger Learning Center” in Greenville, NC).

While this is principally for Americans at the behest of Barack Obama, there is no reason the rest of us can’t get in on the act.

If you have an account at idealist.org (about the most international of the feeder organisations) from now on, when you post a volunteer opportunity make sure to use the words Video Volunteer in your posting. That way, it will show up in the AllforGood feed – and as a result, on the YouTube Video Volunteers page.

And if you try it out let me know how it goes.

Meanwhile, how do you create video material now? Or is it in the too hard basket? Comments open as usual.

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The events of the last 10 days in Iran are a perfect example of how this new media thing works and the issues that arise from mass journalism, especially those of credibility and merging of duplicate reports.

One of the best thinkers on the future of journalism and the media is Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine who offers this take on Adding value in the new news ecosystem

… the essential truth in Iran is that no one has a Tehran bureau (or if they do, it has been rendered useless by government diktat). So we have no choice but to replace that bureau with the people, with witnesses empowered to share what they see.

[...] The live blog is print’s equivalent of live TV; it is the way to cover a story such as this: process journalism over product journalism.

But clearly, in that coverage of and by the people, we are experiencing severe filter failure, to use Clay Shirky’s term. … There’s no way to tell who’s who, who’s there, who’s telling the truth, who’s not.

Note the repeated word: Who. The greatest value a news organization can add to this new news ecosystem is to identify, curate, vet, and train people. Ideally, that needs to happen before the big story breaks. But it can even be done outside the country, as I saw CNN do this morning, talking with a Columbia University student from Iran, who knew who was real and was there from her network of family and friends. Of course, even if you know the people you’re listening to, it’s impossible to know whether everything they say is true unless you can verify it yourself. But that’s the point: You can’t.

So you need to have the best head start you can have. The larger the network of people a news organization can organize, the better shape it will be in when news breaks, the better it can filter the reports that come – whether from people in that network or in the larger network of people those people know. The more people in the network, the more who can go to the scene of news or research closer to it – the more you can ask for help.

Global Voices is an example of this infrastructure: someone who knows someone who knows someone, each able to judge what the next in the chain is saying.

I’ve also been arguing that for journalists, saying what you don’t know is becoming as important as saying what you know. That is all the more critical as misinformation and rumor can spread at the speed of information online. So I imagine a news organization creating a kind of anti-wiki – a dynamic, collaborative Snopes: a list of what we don’t know so we can see what is unconfirmed and so these things can be confirmed – so journalists can add journalism.

This network is even more important given the regrettable propensity for the official and politically connected media and the governments they serve to be a primary source of misinformation. If Iranians had listened only to their government they would have had Ahmadinejad installed for a second term. Perhaps they learned from Americans, Brits and Aussies who listened to their governments on the subject of Iraq.

The issues of trust and credibility affects us all and as advocates for particular causes, many NFP’s are subject to distortion and misreporting by the traditional media channels. The time may come when your networks of affiliated organisations and your collective membership may be the most reliable channel for getting the facts into the mainstream.

What is your organisation doing to build and maintain those channels and asses their reliability? Have you tried? How did it work out? Stories please in the comments.

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I expected selling my computer on eBay to be easy.

Attempt 1: I listed it. Within hours, someone bought it — from a hacked account, as eBay notified me, cancelling the sale.

Attempt 2: I listed it again. Within hours, someone bought it, and asked me to send it to her via FedEx overnight. The buyer sent payment via PayPal immediately, and then — near as I could tell — immediately opened a dispute with PayPal so that the funds were put on hold. And then she sent me an e-mail saying “I paid you, now send me the computer.” But PayPal was faster than she expected, I think. At the same time, I received an e-mail from PayPal saying that I might have received a payment that the account holder did not authorize, and that I shouldn’t ship the item until the investigation is complete.

I’m willing to make Attempt 3, if just to see what kind of scam happens this time. But I still want to sell the computer, and I am pissed off at what is essentially a denial-of-service attack. The facts from this listing are accurate; does anyone want it? List price is over $3K. Send me e-mail.

I had a similar problem in selling a coffee maker on TradeMe recently, although that wasn’t an attempt at fraud so much as someone who spends his life trying to annoy other users by constantly bidding up prices then never collecting the item, even after making multiple appointments to do so.

Interestingly, his onsite reputation is in the toilet but apparently all I can do is add him to my blacklist so that if he tries to bid again he will fail. The problem is that there are so many people who have never been stung by this guy that he will always have new targets and there is no point banning him from the site because he will just set up a new account and everyone will have to start all over again, at least at the moment we can know who he is.

“Caveat vendor” needs adding to “caveat emptor” and always check the reputation of the buyer before opening discussions.

Have you had any difficult transaction on TradeMe or eBay or any other online trading service? The Comments counsellor is open for your grief.

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Whether you’re a blogger, journalist, or writer, you know that the days of pen and paper alone are long gone. These days, you have a huge arsenal of tools at your disposal, from word processors, to content management systems, organization, and more, many of them open source and even free. Read on, and you’ll learn about 100 open source tools that can make your life as a writer easier. From 100 Awesome Open Source Tools for Writers, Journalists, and Bloggers

I’ll be having a look at some more of these, but I can recommend from experience these on their list.

• OpenOffice Writer: OpenOffice Writer offers a fully featured, familiar, and easy to use word processor.
• PDF Creator: PDF Creator offers a simple way to create new PDF files.
• Filezilla FTP: Put your writing files on the web easily with FileZilla.
• WordPress: Bloggers can use open source WordPress to create a customizable blog.
• Freemind: With this mind mapping tool, you’ll be able to explore all of your great ideas.
• Audacity: Audacity is a simple sound recording tool.
• Mozilla Firefox: Use this open source browser for research and more.

If you have any experience with any of the 100, especially if you have a few minutes to write a review of it for us, please drop in to the comments. If you have any other suggestions, comments are open to those as well.