This new position requires Southall live, swim, and play every day, then record his adventures for the world via blogs, photos, video updates and media interviews. Not bad for AUD $150,000 and six months worth of work.

The successful candidate, Tourism Queensland CEO Anthony Hayes said, would be "someone who can capture and hold world attention."

While Southall's application video (embedded below) shows that he certainly can grab attention, and the publicity stunt dreamed up by Tourism Queensland has certainly been successful in giving Australian tourism a global profile, one question remains: Can the social Web interest translate into future tourism dollars for Australia - and more specifically Queensland? According to Hayes, "that's the million dollar question."

According to Hitwise, 38% of the top 50 searches for 'twitter' in Australia include the name of a celebrity. Lindsay Lohan leads the charge, followed by Ashton Kutcher, Miley Cyrus, and Australia's own Hugh Jackman. While Kutcher's much publicized race to 1 million followers increased Twitter's share of daily visits in Australia by 10.6%, Oprah's first tweet only registered a 2.46% increase

Twitter is also seeing similar growth in other Asia Pacific markets. In New Zealand, the official home of RWW, Twitter's share of daily visits increased 305% in 2009, and it is now the 49th most visited web site there, and its growth rate in Singapore is comparable. Only Hong Kong is lagging far behind these other markets.

Twitter is Sticky

One interesting phenomenon about Twitter is that new users tend to stay on the service. In Australia, according to Hitwise, the single largest spike in visits came one day after the Queensland Election in March, and interestingly, Hitwise did not record a drop in numbers since then. This bodes well for Twitter, which, thanks to the hype around Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher, was able to pick up a lot of new users who typically wouldn't have been too interested in joining Twitter.

eBay argued that these changes will lessen the likelihood of "bad buyer experiences" by increasing trust and security between buyers and sellers. But competitors, including Google (allegedly), Paymate, eWay, Qpay, BPAY, American Express, and a handful of eBay seller organizations and Australian banks have lodged counter arguments with the ACCC.

About individual 650 eBay users also submit counters to the ACCC. According to the Comission, "The overwhelming majority of these submissions were opposed to the notified conduct and raised concerns regarding restriction of choice, increased fees and issues associated with PayPal's security, dispute resolution and customer service."

In the end, the ACCC decided that the proposed eBay TOS changes would have "the effect of substantially lessening competition in the market in which PayPal operates" and likely result in "reduced choice for consumers, higher transactions costs and reduced innovation in online payment systems." Therefore, the ACCC released a draft notice denying eBay's request. However, this isn't necessarily the end of the issue. Under ACCC rules, eBay has the right to request a public conference at which all interested parties may speak their case to the ACCC, after which the Commission may reconsider their ruling.

For now, though, PayPal will not be the only option for eBay users in Australia -- and for that, sellers are mostly very happy. eBay's seller forums are this morning filled with threads of almost unanimously happy sellers cheering on the initial ACCC ruling and musing over what effect it might have on governments in other countries where eBay operates.