Telstra takes to the mattresses (or blogs)

Telstra has drecided to join the rest of the blogging world. In the usual Telstra style, the new blogs are professional looking and full of user-unfriendly bugs. A massive array of corporate blogs, all carefully edited to put the company's best foot forward.
Too bad the company's policies prevent most of the country from joining the free world.

Buggy
Most of my customers are small businesses. SME's (Small- to Medium-sized Enterprises to the rest of the world); "small business" to the ATO. Considering that these businesses employ 85% of the workforce and are 96.4% of the registered businesses in Australia, I was particularly dismayed to find the new 'Small Business' blogger was the former soppy 'Lifestyles' blogger.
She goes on and on about her fascination of the insects she calls 'nerds', but the nerds at Telstra have their revenge: neither the RSS feed nor the Comments on her blog work. (She may not want the Comments to work.)
You can almost hear the gnomes chuckling.

You have to read the news like a conversation.
When the person blogging about small business in Australia keeps citing studies done by large retailers in the US; and calling Internet entrepreneurs "nerds", it's not hard to conclude she wishes she lived somewhere else. (Hint: She certainly needs to work somewhere else...)
One thing is certain: She has little or no idea what it means to develop the Internet as a resource for a small business in Australia.

Her first article was for 'Breast Cancer Day' at the Telstra Dome. Laudable, but hardly 'News you can use'. (A leftover from her former project?) She is far out of touch with the needs of small business in Australia.

A few of the other blogs have undefined RSS feeds, too. And Telstra wonders why it's losing money? I did find a useable feed on the homepage.

Comments
There are 4 separate blogs complaining about the regulatory requirement to keep CDMA in place until the NextG network is running properly. The blogs are full of people complaining about holes in service. The chief technical blogger advises getting a magnetic antenna; and one comment says it will make a nice paperweight.
No one dares complain about the fees. (I guess they leave that to the Dodo ad.)
Telstra whinges on to make its case. All Telstra has to do is explain that they want to cripple their competitors and are willing to leave 1/2 the population without reliable broadband.
Strangely, most of the Comments on these blogs seem to be Telstra shareholders. The shareholders want to know why Telstra shouldn't be allowed to make the same obscene profits as steel companies.

CDMA divine
Optus, iiNet, and other carriers in the G9 consortium built their business by sharing Telstra's CDMA network. This was mandated by regulations in order to introduce competition into the market. Only 10 years ago, Telstra was a monopoly. The only game in town.
When Telstra dragged its feet (for 7 years overcharging consumers for piss-poor broadband) on the issue of fibre cabling and then wireless internet access, 9 of these companies formed a consortium, excluding Telstra, and filed a competing proposal to do the work.
Here would be a chance for Telstra to let them know why they shouldn't mess with the Mother Country (..or Mother Nature, or God, etc.)
CDMA will go sooner or later. Telstra probably intended to handle the changeover as they did ADSL: charge heavily for the NextG service as it was grudgingly enabled. This is one case where the politicians should be applauded.

When you read these blogs as a conversation along with the other blogs on these topics, the Telstra gang seems to want to dominate the discussion to put the party line forward. The internet marketing of these blogs seem to be towards Telstra shareholders and employees, too, which skews the tone of the response.
I suppose all's fair in love and war, or business, but as an interested observer, you do get tired of seeing people ground up in the conflict.
Until broadband improves to the point small business can see the efficacy of the Internet, SEO and SEM will only be valuable tools for the privileged few.

Notes:
CDMA -- (Code Division Multiple Access): A technology for digital transmission of radio signals between, for example, a mobile telephone and a radio base station. In CDMA, a frequency is divided into a number of codes. A spread spectrum approach to digital transmission. With CDMA, each conversation is digitized and then tagged with a code. Also known as IS-95A or cdmaOne

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