Paul Eggert wrote:

I'd like to hear more from Australian correspondents on this before thinking about specific changes, though.

+1 me for changing to AEST, AEDT and so on. I encourage you to read through a relatively recent discussion about this. I straw-polled our Unix users' group's mailing list: http://lists.humbug.org.au/archives/general/2008-April/thread.html#26929 . If you'll excuse the deviation to a discussion of whether various places should have daylight saving time, you'll see a preference for AEST: I count 6 for and 1 possibly against. Eric Ulevik wrote:

ABC NewsRadio have been referring to 'Eastern Standard Time' and 'Eastern Summer Time'.

"Australian" is presumed for an Australian radio broadcast; for computer use there is no regional context. At any rate, the discussion should focus on the *abbreviations* rather than the full names because only the abbreviations are specified by the timezone database. I'm not convinced that searching the web for "EST" is a valid survey, particularly as it is a common abbreviation for "estimate" or "established". There are also websites such as Flickr that use EST but there is evidence that this is simply a result of using the timezone database: a feedback loop. I wonder to what extent the timezone database is seen as an authority for what people use. -- Ted Percival http://tedp.id.au/tzdata-au/