Rupert, the great white hope of traditional media, finally let’s it slip that he really doesn’t have any idea about the internet in this story:

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: WHAT HAS SURPRISED YOU THE MOST ABOUT THE MYSPACE EXPERIENCE?

Rupert Murdoch: The speed at which it has grown. It has had no marketing. Not a penny has been spent marketing it before or after the purchase, and it just grows faster and faster every week. Now we’re taking it out to other countries.

News flash: you never needed to spend marketing money on MySpace. It’s called 2.0 for a reason…

(Lateness disclosure: this story’s been floating around for a couple of days, but I’ve only just surfaced after being laid out flat by the flu for two days…)

Telstra CTO Hugh Bradlow strikes me as a guy who understands future technologies and the impact on business.

He struck up a conversation on the interesting, if not controversial, subject of Net Neutrality. And as you’ll see, I joined that conversation with a comment seeking his opinion on telcos charging content providers for the use of the Internet. A fair question, and one that Hugh started to address in his second post here.

Net neutrality, and related issues like quality of service, are subjects of keen interest here at Filtered. And given that our day job is devoted to talking to people about such things, we duly requested an offline conversation with Mr Bradlow. As I said, reading his blog you get the idea he’s got a well-rounded view that would be of wider interest to people.

But that request was denied today. Once you step out of the blog and into tightly controlled PR universe, Telstra’s shutters come down once again. Telstra does not want to be in any way linked to the current discussions about media reform in Australia, I was told by a PR woman. She won’t even let Mr Bradlow out of the cage in the context of restricting our discussion to Net Neutrality.

The kicker to all of this is that the AFR and Telstra have for some months (years?) been engaged what the politically astute would call a robust public discussion. Their distaste for this situation is one that I’d suggest ultimately circles back to the telco’s desire to control the media universe. I know of at least one AFR reporter that Telstra is currently not talking to, and without a believable explanation I have been swept under the same rug.

And so Telstra is now learning again that the more you try and control the media, the more it bites. Telstra might think its new blog gives it publishing credentials and a platform from which to right the media wrongs, placate its long-suffering shareholders and give those same shareholders and staff a platform to attack the media.

But you can’t on the one hand create the illusion of openness, and then on the other selectively refuse to engage in discussions with the media where there is an obvious opportunity to continue that discussion. Telstra needs to understand that blogs represent a corporate culture built on the premise of conversations. Look at what Scoble did for Microsoft. If you don’t want to go down that path and change your corporate culture for the better, get rid of the blog and stop polluting the web with PR drivel. That way Telstra’s PR machine can carry on as it always has and not worry about changing its ways because of the illusion of openness created by Now We Are NOT Talking.

If there is a positive note I can leave you with, at least the blog from the non-talking company finally has RSS feeds. Next step, add trackback, if you dare.

Graeme Wood, CEO of the latest Australian tech IPO sensation Wotif.com, was good enough to sit down for a yarn with yours truly for an article I’m preparing for AFR Boss.

He’s a rare animal among the bosses of ASX-listed Australian CEOs in that he speaks his mind, and doesn’t recite from memory carefully prepared remarks penned by PR people. In fact, on the two occasions we’ve talked so far, there wasn’t a PR person in sight, but I digress.

The subject was leadership, and taking a risk in business. How do you know if you’re making the right decision or not?

"It’s about ruthless personal honesty," he says. "If you are kidding yourself, you are gonna try and kid other people. If you are not kidding yourself you are off to a good start."

Obvious, perhaps. But very insightful considering he’s the boss of an internet company that doesn’t care about Web 2.0, SOA, XML, AJAX, blogs, or podcasts, or whatever’s big on Techmeme right now. The Internet is a delivery channel for his online accomodation business. The means to an end. Business before technology, not the other way around. And before you get too excited about that being an invalid opinion - consider that he personally banked $42 million from Wotif’s IPO.

Ruthless personal honesty. Dang, that’s just a refreshing perspective.

News that Enron Boss Ken Lay wouldn’t be turning up for court sparked something of an update frenzy on Wikipedia, oddly enough. This Reuters yarn recounts the minute-by-minute updates to Lay’s entry as the news morphed from an apparent suicide death to heart attack brought on by the stress of the trial.

Makes you wonder what Wikipedia this thinking regarding the future of its Current Events section, and Wikinews, both of which I’ve bookmarked and subscribed to in Bloglines for daily reference.