it.gen.nz

New Zealand spam, even, and I’m not talking about the pressed ham. A few years ago a man in Christchurch was outed by investigative journalist Juha Saarinen for sending vast quantities of the stuff – he boasted of 100 million messages per day – mainly with solicitations to buy things that were supposed to enlarge your penis. If you even had one. That person got extremely grumpy when he received many angry phone calls about his business, complaining that his children were taking calls from strangers angry about unsolicited and inappropriate messages. The irony was apparently lost on him. When challenged, he said that he was doing nothing illegal.

Anyway, after the publicity that person (I would normally use the word “gentleman”, but somehow it doesn’t fit) said that he would stop spamming. Fair enough. But this week the newly-formed anti-spam division of the Department of Internal Affairs has swooped on on an alleged spammer, again in Christchurch, after an expose by the BBC and some fine work by a Danish journalist. The product is again male bodily extension. And this time, all the computers at an address – 22, not bad for a home – have been seized with a view to prosecution under the Unsolicited Commercial Messages Act of 2007.

That’s right, the Spam Act has been used in anger. If this person was indeed spamming he deserves the full penalties of the act, there’s no argument about that. But let’s, for a moment, think about the cynics of this act back when it was a bill – it didn’t get unanimous support in Parliament, after all. Where would New Zealand now be if it hadn’t passed? Left explaining to the BBC’s audience that this vile activity, illegal just about everywhere else, was acceptable in New Zealand? That we think it’s alright for New Zealanders to write to the world’s boys and girls offering to supersize their genitals? 100 million times a day?

Well done every MP who voted for it.

Last week I spent a couple of days in Australia, and as part of it I was driven from Canberra to Sydney by the amazing Pia Waugh. In the car were not one, but two OLPCs.

The One Laptop Per Child is intended to be a cheap but functional laptop suitable for children in developing countries. It’s a very nice little machine, and I was really impressed.

(more…)

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about what I thought someone of a geeky persuasion might like for Christmas. Not that I have any first-hand knowledge, you know…

You can get the audio online, or read my notes below.

(And good luck for your Christmas presents )
(more…)

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about blogging – how to get started, and if you’d even want to!

Read on for some advice, and as always some links at the end.
(more…)

The new MyLocation feature on Google Maps for Mobile is spooky but cool.

Google Maps is a way of finding maps of just about anywhere, online on your computer. Check out maps.google.com if you haven’t seen it. It provides street maps, driving directions from A to B, and it can overlay satellite photos so you can see what the area looks like from above.

Google upped the ante on that service in the middle of this year when it introduced Google Maps for Mobile – the whole thing runs on most of the fancier kinds of mobile phone. So, if you’re lost or don’t know a street you are looking for, you can whip out your phone and get a street map of Wellington, say, and search for the street you want or the one you can see.

And you can switch between the map view and a satellite picture type view – a very detailed aerial photo just like in Google Earth. This is endless fun. You can armchair travel to all kinds of places, or just look down on familiar ones. (more…)

or so runs a 1993 cartoon from the New Yorker. Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about the practicalities of knowing who people are on the Internet, about the scary abuses of identity information that some governments have engaged in recently, and about a very clever New Zealand proposal to offer a way to prove your identity on the Internet without the Big Brother overtones. Read on…
(more…)

This phrase is the epigraph to EM Forster’s 1910 novel Howard’s End, and it encapsulates both the emptiness of English society he was writing about and the capability the Internet gives us today. Yesterday I spoke at a meeting of IABC Wellington, which is a place where people who communicate for a living come together. The subject was social media – that’s wikis, blogs and so forth, and should communicators look at communicating through them? The answer I gave, as you might guess, was a resounding “yes”.

The Internet is the ultimate communications tool – using the term “communications” in its widest sense – and anyone who communicates for a living needs to be following it as it evolves. And evolve it is: social media on the Internet will drive as much of change in the way we communicate with each other as the introduction of the Internet did, and as the printing press and broadcast media did in their day. It’s good to see many communications professional getting this.

Another speaker at the event was Todd Hattori, the global chair of the IABC. He is a master communicator – as you might imagine – and I am in awe at his skills. As well as the “whether” and “how to” of social media, Todd spoke about ethics in communications. And I think he is right to – there is a stereotype of misleading PR spin, which is sadly justified on a few occasions, and Todd and the IABC are seeking to make such behaviour unacceptable. Good on them.

This hardly the first time government people have dabbled their toes in blogging, but it’s well worth looking at.

Over at digitalfutureblog.org.nz, the government’s Digital Strategy team has put up a blog to discuss New Zealand’s digital strategy. The Digital Strategy is what drives the government’s overall approach to digital policy, and it led among other things to last year’s regulation of Telecom. Take a look at the blog and think about writing them a comment.

Anyway, the Digital Strategy is up for revision this year, and part of that is a meeting in Auckland next month to talk about how we need to be digital, and how we can be. The meeting will even have a feed into Second Life!

This ain’t your Grandma’s policy summit – unless she’s a seriously wired lady, that is.

Apparently 7% of Internet users visit Wikipedia every day. That’s a staggering statistic. So the reports of people editing their own entries or those of their enemies haven’t stopped many many people from using it as a source of information on just about everything.

Even so, the revelations have shaken some people’s confidence, and given the commercial encyclopedia sellers a stick to beat Wikipedia up with. The Wikipedians have come up with a way to improve the trustworthiness of the encyclopedia without losing the egalitarian ethos which makes it so popular. The idea revolves around a board or committee which flags specific articles as “high quality” – a sort of good Wiki seal of approval – and some software which predicts the quality of someone edits to an article on the basis of other edits by that person.

Wikipedia is such a fantastic idea. It’s great to see a wiki approach to solving its problems. Read all about it here.

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about the way the Internet promotes amateurism, and whether this is a bad thing or a good thing. Capsule summary: everybody is an amateur at first; every profession grew out of people innovating and trying things. The Internet makes this happen faster. My notes are below with some links at the bottom. (more…)