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I first met John Belgrave at the start of my second career, the one as a public servant. John was at the time the Secretary of Commerce, CE of the then Ministry of Commerce. John was helpful and tolerant of this wild-eyed former private-sector IT developer as I came into government and blundered about, scoring wins and own goals it seemed in equal measure. He was measured, funny, and above all wise.

More recently I have run into John repeatedly in his role as Chief Ombudsman. “Good on you”, he kept telling me, as I was advocating the regulation of Telecom. “Stand up for the right thing.”

And that’s what John always did. He stood up for the right thing. He fearlessly forced the government to release embarrassing figures in the last week of an election campaign. He has been a check on government departments and a voice for the little person, the disenfranchised. He was there for the family of Liam Ashley who were so badly let down by the justice system.

John was a public servant in the true sense of the term. He well deserved the honour he received in New Year’s honours this year. New Zealand will miss him.

I will miss him.

I’ve been fiddling with Linux for a decade now. And, frankly, back then it was a total bear to get it working – you had to really, really, want to. Once you could get Linux to fire up, it was rock solid of course as it has always been, but the process of installing it was challenging even for geeks. Then you had to figure out how to get it to use your screen as anything more than a line by line device – Linux could and can do this beautifully and flexibly, but you had to know so much about your hardware and edit the configurations just so before it would go.

How things have changed! First Mandrake through the early noughties, and now Ubuntu are making wonderfully good and easy to install CDs of Linux. (Just a note to the side – Linux is just the kernel or core of an operating system, and you need a lot of other software to make it work. A lot of that software comes from the GNU project, so it’s more proper to refer to GNU/Linux. And that’s how the different flavours, or distributions of GNU/Linux differ – it’s all a matter of which additional programs are supplied with the kernel, and how it is packaged up for installation.)

Ubuntu was founded by Mark Shuttleworth, a South African man who made a lot of money in the dot com boom and has obviously decided to put something back. And with its latest release, Ubuntu has surpassed the ease of use of Windows in many respects – especially those annoying registrations and activiations, because Ubuntu is totally free.

The latest release of Ubuntu, which goes by the names 7.10 or Gutsy Gibbon, is very good indeed. It installs easily, and provides access to an ocean of free software, some of which is of the highest quality, through the menus. You can try Ubuntu without installing it on your computer, or you can install it side by side with Windows, or you can put Ubuntu on first, then virtual machine software from Virtualbox and re-install your Windows in a VM so it lives in a window under Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is a 700 megabyte download or a $15 CD purchase delivered from LinuxCDMall or Copyleft. Give it a go!

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…
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This week on Radio New Zealand National I talked about copyright and the Creative Commons. I started the item by playing “Imbube” – the first track on Renaissance, a CD by the Soweto String Quartet, which sounds oddly familiar until you realise its striking similarities to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”.

From there the discussion went on through the good and the bad of copyright, and how the Creative Commons represents a way to prevent copyright being used to lock up our culture.

I end with a link to a great video by Laurence Lessig on how copyright is being used to strangle culture. Enjoy!

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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.

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about the man who is generally regarded as the father of the modern computer – someone who didn’t get recognition in his lifetime and died in ignominy. He’s now seen as one of the heroes of the twentieth century. Read on…
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Earlier this week Consumer released its annual ISP survey. The big news on this, sadly, wasn’t the good, or even the excellent, but the ugly.

For the third year running, Xtra has come bottom. And not just bottom, but 42% – a massive slump from their abysmal 55% last year. On just about every dimension of customer satisfaction Consumer measure, Xtra gets a black mark.

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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about podcasts – what they are, why they are useful, and how to use them. You can use them to listen to radio programmes you have missed, or to ones that aren’t broadcast in New Zealand, or to programmes that were made for podcast and have never been on the radio. And you don’t even need an iPod – just a computer and broadband.

Read on for my notes, with links at the end.
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According to polling company Zogby a quarter of Americans think the Internet could replace their partner. Err, come again?

The same survey found, though, that if it were possible to implant an Internet feed directly into the brain only 11% of Americans would choose to do so. That’s…reassuring.

Any NZ polling companies up for a bit of pro bono research on this?

That’s right…amid the hoopla about about launching the New Zealand channel on YouTube, spare some time to look at the home-grown equivalent.

Kiwitube runs from Kerikeri, and shows local video of New Zealanders doing all manner of things. Go and take a look!