• Because of an ugly conflation of factors that conspired to keep me from blogging this week, I missed a bunch of cool things, like the article about PerthNorg in last Tuesday’s West Australian, complete with a lovely photo of Bronwen
• How did I not discover Galacticast sooner? It makes little sense if you’re not a sci-fi nerd, but if you are, it’s a whole new level of awesome.
• In Federal politics, this week saw the re-emergence of boat people! and dangerous immigrants! and topics like that. First there was Johnny’s off-the-cuff mention that he thinks HIV-positive people shouldn’t be allowed to immigrate. I agree that this’d be horribly discriminatory … but I find myself not that concerned, since it’s basically no change from current practice. I mean, my cousin recently spent $150 on X-rays to prove he doesn’t have tuberculosis, and that was for a bloomin’ tourist visa.
• As for the more recent announcement, about swapping asylum seekers with the US, I’m seeing lots of comments calling it “illogical”. But although this policy is no less discriminatory, I have to give credit to Johnny for its brilliance. Given that the man’s stated goal is to keep boat people off Australian shores by any means possible, a plan to ship them across the world immediately is genius. It’s also a cheap attempt to switch the punters’ attention away from Ruddster-love and back to issues on which the little man seems trustworthy, but it’s failed miserably thanks to other matters dominating the news.
• Perthlings! The public comment period for Northbridge Link has been extended to the end of the month, so if you haven’t already filled in the online comment form, you should!
• And a final word about Perth: when Jeff Kennett came over a few weeks ago I heard several people say we could use a bloke like him in power here. But I think they picked the wrong Victorian: what we really need is a rock-star Lord Mayor like John So. Seriously, could you ever picture people doing stuff like this for Peter Nattrass? Problem is, none of the current candidates for this year’s election look good enough.

An intriguing discovery in my inbox this afternoon: an e-mail from Bronwen Clune, the founder of a flash-looking Web 2.0-ish news service called PerthNorg. While our other new online news service pays lip service to citizen journalism, this site takes a full-on WikiNews-style approach to local news.

There’s Digg-style voting as well (albeit with vote links that aren’t prominent enough) — I’ll definitely be doing that even if I don’t get around to submitting anything. This mix has confused a few people, although I think the implementation has been done pretty well for the majority of Perthurians who’ll have never heard of either. Oh, and I do love seeing proper use of Web standards!

I’d actually found out about PerthNorg last week via this post on a Sydney Morning Herald blog (the things you learn reading eastern states newspapers …). But I’ve been busy with honours and work, and marked it in my mind as something to blog about later, particularly seeing as it was so light on content.

The site is still light on content, albeit much less so than it was; I’m reluctant to add it to my feed reader until that changes. Indeed, Jeff Jarvis’ excitement aside, I’ve not seen many other localised news plays that are built solely out of user-generated content, so I do wonder whether it will take hold.

That said, PerthNorg does have a lot of promise and is definitely worthy of my recommendation — if only because it’s currently the one good hope we have of a decent quality news service in Western Australia

(Meanwhile: also in my inbox today was an e-mail from Southern Coast Transit thanking me and promising a fix for a comment I made about bus drivers ‘logging off’ their trips before I could tag off my SmartRider … which I’d sent over a month ago!)

P.S. The lack of posting here hasn’t been an accident. Announcements are forthcoming, consider yourselves warned!