After a long day in the office of my government employer, as I sit listening to Triple J streaming online, reading Anabel Crabb’s gargantuan speech on the Drum and contemplating the shoe throwing incident on Q&A that left The Australian again denigrating the use of twitter I find myself thanking my lucky stars that I live in such a fantastic and open country. In my humble opinion, the ABC is the greatest provider of old media services and its amazing, innovative and cutting edge use of new media sits it apart from all the other media providers in Australia. Possibly the only media organisation to surpass it is the BBC and I am sure if there were a contest it would be a close run thing. But what more could the ABC do to jump to the next level? What could (and should) a government funded media organisation do to really give the people what they want?

Annabel Crabb, herself a recipient of some of those taxpayer funded dollars, talks of free information in her speech for the AN Smith Memorial Lecture at the University of Melbourne. She seems to be less than impressed by the conundrum faced by journos the world over and offers some wonderfully concocted advice and some fascinating insights into her world. I believe her dream of “an end to the old media new media wars”  is being well fought by her employer the ABC and praise be to them.

Can I offer some advice too, Annabel? Your dream may come sooner if the ABC was to embrace the Government 2.0 Taskforce advice for government organisations to use Creative Commons licensing. Incidentally, (as I am sure you are aware) your speech was published verbatim on The Australian website moments after it was posted on The Drum (or perhaps simultaneously, it is hard to tell) I wonder what copyright arrangements were made for that process to occur. Was the content licensed through a prior arrangement or was there some laborious process to make it happen? I am not for a moment suggesting any wrong doings or dodgy dealings, merely musing on the IP of your speech and what processes made it available in two places so soon after the speech was completed. My point being that it would have all been so much easier if you added a CC BY licence to the end of your work. Just a thought….

The ABC’s Q&A program has lead the way with infusing old media with new media resulting in mixed and often polarised attitudes (as well as the occasional shoe throwing) just like the rest of the program. The Australian is no big fan that’s for sure but only because they are not brave enough to mix it with the new media types, (look at the lack of comment opportunity on the page deriding the Q&A Twitter stream). Certainly I (an avid Twitter user) have often wondered at the usefulness of those tweets aired on the program but according to Peter McEvoy the blend has only served to increase the ratings and the sheer volume of tweets containing the #QandA tag go a long way to support the argument. It has been argued that you couldn’t copyright a tweet but I wonder if there is copyright to be had in the aggregation of those Q&A tweets. If so, does Auntie own the copyright? Q&A are happy to use CC licensed images for their Mashups so why not provide some back?

Auntie is experimenting with Open Access ideas as evidenced in the ABC Open Beta and some dabbling on the BTN site but by and large it is the standard Copyright Notice that you come up with on most ABC web iterations. If the ABC starts to get on board the Creative Commons wave I think that Annabel Crabb will be closer to at least one of her dreams, the ABC will smash the BBC in that contest, and people will get what they really want but what Annabel thinks doesn’t exist: valuable free content.