Written By: - Date published: 9:12 am, August 30th, 2011 - 23 comments
Rijab looks at how social media can be a useful tool for political parties but how it also needs to be used carefully, lest it come back to hurt you. Red Alert and Frogblog are very free, with MPs writing what they want and relatively loose moderation, whereas NationalMPs is insipid and tightly controlled – who has taken the smarter course?
Written By: - Date published: 4:46 pm, June 28th, 2011 - 4 comments
Just a reminder (because I’d forgotten) that the InternetNZ et al NetHui starts tomorrow in Auckland and runs until Friday. There are some interesting sessions that I’m going to have to fit around the coding that has to be done. So my question is (and one that should be highlighted on their otherwise excellent website) – is there WiFi available?
Written By: - Date published: 9:30 am, June 16th, 2011 - 30 comments
Ianupnorth does ‘the Whale’ and has a dig around the National Party websites. It turns out they are registered and run by Parliamentary staffers. In fact, National and ACT’s MPs’ sites are all publicly-funded, while other parties’ MPs’ are not. Is NACT breaking the rules? No doubt everyone’s least favourite cetacean will be on to it.
Written By: - Date published: 3:40 pm, June 5th, 2011 - Comments Off
A warm welcome to molesworthst – a new political blog recommended by Morgan over at his own must read blog, Maui Street.
Written By: - Date published: 10:21 am, May 2nd, 2011 - 37 comments
The Mana Party already have a great website that suggests someone who knows what they’re doing is looking after the communications. Well worth taking a quick look.
Written By: - Date published: 3:45 pm, March 23rd, 2011 - 18 comments
Rob Carr over at Political Dumpground has provided me with my third glimpse at why twitter can be useful. After you’ve seen your first hundred or so of “killer app like Lotus 123″turn up, flare for a while and then disappear, you learn to be skeptical of investing too much effort into them (especially if they have the word Microsoft associated with them).
Written By: - Date published: 3:36 pm, February 11th, 2011 - 33 comments
Archiving websites is a bloody good idea because the public debate and emerging history of NZ society is shifting more and more into these electronic media. So I asked NatLib about one of those political blogs that disappeared from the blogosphere – KiwiBlogBlog. It still exists…
Written By: - Date published: 2:27 am, February 3rd, 2011 - 12 comments
Periodically I run a scan to identify network parasites that are sucking up our bandwidth and processing resources in excess. Of course I leave the benign parasites that provide search facilities alone. But I stomp on the nasties.
Tonight the biggest parasite appears to have been a New Zealand government department – the Department of Internal Affairs.
Written By: - Date published: 10:54 am, December 18th, 2010 - 11 comments
Ok this is seriously weird, too cool, and as bad as the elevator music is. But at least it is not John Key mangling songs with syncophantic radio announcers declaring it to be music.
The band running on iPad’s and iPhone – North Point’s iBand
Written By: - Date published: 1:45 pm, December 12th, 2010 - 16 comments
A documentary that aired in Sweden last night. Fascinating. The origional can be viewed here. The following is from YouTube as it is more likely to handle the load.
Written By: - Date published: 4:00 pm, December 8th, 2010 - 22 comments
A fascinating side-effect of the attacks at various levels on Wikileaks in the last week has been a demonstration of exactly how tough it is to take out a site without widespread support from people on the net.
renesys.blog has a excellent post looking at what has been happening to keep Wikileaks alive on the net.
Written By: - Date published: 1:21 pm, December 8th, 2010 - 7 comments
ISOC – the internet society that is probably the closest thing that the internet has as a governing body said “Unless and until appropriate laws are brought to bear to take the wikileaks.org domain down legally, technical solutions should be sought to reestablish its proper presence, and appropriate actions taken to pursue and prosecute entities (if any) that acted maliciously to take it off the air.”
We can probably expect that domain to be back on the air shortly.
Written By: - Date published: 9:15 am, December 8th, 2010 - 49 comments
Now that the Swedish prosecutors have finally given the British police a document that they can work with, Assange turned himself in, and has gone before a British court on the extradition request from Sweden. The court has remanded him without bail. I have already commented on exactly what I think of the charges – …
Written By: - Date published: 9:11 am, December 3rd, 2010 - 12 comments
Sometimes I find it hard to believe how the leaders of this world fail to comprehend what appears so obvious to me. In the Information Age, how do they think secrecy is viable? What is happening with Wikileaks, or more appropriately, what is about to happen, appears to be playing out along the same lines as the rise and fall of Napster.
Written By: - Date published: 8:47 am, December 1st, 2010 - 8 comments
There has always been an inherent design conflict in giving widespread access to information. On one hand it allows better service for people and organisations. On the other hand it means that less material can be kept secret because giving more people access to information and more opportunity to whistleblow when people see a problem or an ethical conflict. That has always been the inherent conflict.
Written By: - Date published: 10:04 am, November 7th, 2010 - 8 comments
With all the crap this government’s spewing out at the moment, sometimes it pays to take a breath and look at something a bit lighter. Lynn posted a while ago about some of the oddities of the internet, noting how “milk bottle” was one of the most frequent search terms used by visitors to this …
Written By: - Date published: 7:08 pm, November 1st, 2010 - 8 comments
Are Joyce’s plans for a regulatory holiday on the proposed ultra-fast fibre broadband network a violation of international legal commitments? InternetNZ says yes. Joyce says no. Labour’s Clare Curren accuses the Nats of “disregard for NZ law, legal trade obligations and public scrutiny”.
Written By: - Date published: 4:08 pm, September 14th, 2010 - 42 comments
Cameron Slater, aka Whaleoil, found guilty today in the Auckland District Court on eight breaches of suppression orders and one of identifying a victim.
Written By: - Date published: 10:45 am, September 9th, 2010 - 13 comments
At last, the left has its own version of Investigate magazine. As you might expect it’s a bit saner and better substantiated than anything Ian Wishart’s written since his conversion, but there are obvious parallels. Hooray for the internet!
Written By: - Date published: 3:10 pm, July 7th, 2010 - Comments Off
Not long after The White House Correspondents’ Association met with Obama’s Press Secretary to complain about limitations on their access, The White House launched its own weekly video blog. Presidential administrations have always tried to harness new communications technologies to shape a favorable image, says Mordecai Lee, a professor of governmental affairs at the University …
Written By: - Date published: 12:14 pm, June 30th, 2010 - 4 comments
Ring any bells? Tom Tommorrow at Salon is a great satirical cartoonist, for more of his work have a look at This Modern World.
Written By: - Date published: 9:31 am, May 9th, 2010 - 9 comments
Prime Minister John Key has released a multimedia demonstration prepared by his Technical Advisory Panel to explain why, despite election ‘promises’, New Zealand will not be getting ultra-fast broadband any time soon under National. Yes folks, like John Key’s Magical Cycleway To Salvation, there are a myriad of previously unconsidered reasons why we just can’t …
Written By: - Date published: 12:11 am, May 9th, 2010 - 53 comments
One thing that the election in Britain brought home to me, was how much I’m grateful for having Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) representation here. I didn’t start that way. Over time, I’ve grown to appreciate the gradual progress and stability offered by MMP. However the people at the Campaign for MMP could do with a little help in the Internet age. They’re operating like it was 1993.
Written By: - Date published: 8:33 am, April 19th, 2010 - 24 comments
Here’s a catchy tune for all you pirates out there. Get your kids to sing along!
Written By: - Date published: 9:00 am, March 23rd, 2010 - 4 comments
I wonder who is paying for this ad pleading for people to join the pro-Wellywood Facebook group. The pro-Wellywood group has the bland artificial feel of a piece of astro-turfing, probably from Prendergast or the airport judging by the content. And it stands to reason that the ad is paid for by the creators. Is ratepayer money being used to try to get people to join a Facebook group?
Written By: - Date published: 12:23 pm, March 21st, 2010 - 6 comments
An amusing tale of how Rush Limbaugh screws up, and a pile of wingnuts immediately jump to the wrong conclusions.
American wingnuts at their most ridiculous. But we have the angry and irrational breed here as well.
Written By: - Date published: 9:38 am, March 12th, 2010 - 14 comments
Who would have thought that a Facebook group advocating to keep Radio NZ funded and commercial-free would overtake Prime Minister John Key’s fan group for number of members? Well, yesterday at 9.30, just over three weeks since it was founded, the Save Radio New Zealand group reached 18,973 members, passing Key’s 18,972. That gives a …
Written By: - Date published: 6:30 pm, February 11th, 2010 - 63 comments
Enough of all of this politics. Lets look at something that is more mysterious than the hole that John Key is digging for his political future. Why in the hell is “milk bottle” one of the most frequent search terms for this site? Looking at the search queries that have resulted in a click through …
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, January 31st, 2010 - 24 comments
John Key is now stands as being first in NZ for being ‘clueless’ on searches in Google. He is number seven in the world as being clueless. The google-bomb is still running! It will be interesting to push him to number one in the world.
Written By: - Date published: 7:42 pm, January 29th, 2010 - 8 comments
The public domain, as we understand it, is the wealth of information that is free from the barriers to access or reuse usually associated with copyright protection, either because it is free from any copyright protection or because the right holders have decided to remove these barriers. It is the raw material from which new …
Written By: - Date published: 10:47 pm, November 17th, 2009 - 17 comments
Gagged The Law Commission yesterday released a report on ‘Suppressing Names and Evidence’. It’s timely given that Vince Siemer was arrested just last week for stating on his website that the judge in the Oct 15 ‘terror case’ has ruled that [lprent: gagged - see my comments at bottom] used by police were unlawfully obtained. …
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