On Thursday, 5.30 to 7.30 p.m. at Meow, Edward Street, come along and have a chat—we’re doing a “meet the candidate” session. It’s not as formal as the fun evening we had at Soi—it’s a chance to come and pick my brain, and let me pick yours as we head into the real election season.
   The do is to raise local awareness, talk issues, gather donations, build a vocal “street and Tweet” team and generally press the figurative flesh (this wording is from Daniel Spector, and expresses the intent well).
   Wellington needs real change in this mayoral election, and as I am now the only non-politician running, I intend to head in to the mayor’s office with a real sense of what Wellingtonians want.
   Beyond free wifi, I know we want greater transparency in the city, and that we want to feel part of a greater, global community. And, right now, I can’t see any of my opponents understanding what these ideas mean.
   Travelling overseas a few times a year does not make one an internationalist. This is something you live, evidenced by your experience and your record of wanting to do good for your city.
   Have a glance at the Facebook page if you like, and, of course, you can Tweet me at @jackyan.
   We will have a fresh new batch of brochures as well, thanks to the Colour Guy in Lower Hutt. On Thursday, let’s have more dialogue and catch up.

Photograph by Sarah Burton.

Writing about cars calms me. So call me a freak. And maybe I’ve just needed to chill more in this last month as we head into the last few months of the mayoral campaign.
   It surprises me that Autocade has reached 1,200 models: 100 in the past month. And since I knew we were about to hit 1,200, then subconsciously I did want something flash to mark that number:

Audi Sport Quattro. 1984 (prod. 224). 2-door coupé. F/A, 2133 cm³ (5 cyl. DOHC). Homologation special for Group B rallying, based on regular Audi Quattro but with 320 mm lopped from the wheelbase. Standard turbocharged engine producing 306 PS, though competition models tended to be up in the 450 PS-plus bracket. Carbon–Kevlar body, steeper windscreen rake (of Audi 80 (B2)) for greater visibility as demanded by rally drivers, wider tyres. ABS, four-piston caliper brakes. This all came at a price: 203,850DM when new.

I didn’t want a repeat of 1,100 when the Nissan Cherry was the landmark model. (There actually was a miscount, but I won’t go in to that.)
   And in the 1,100–1,200 cycle, I managed to find yet another likely error (about a Ford development code) in Wikipedia which I harped on about over at my Tumblog.
   As I said in the 1,100-car post, Autocade is not perfect and I find errors in my own work. However, I don’t intentionally put wrong information in, and the Wikipedia error with the Ford CE14 code is like saying, in car-nut terms, that Margaret Thatcher was a member of the Labour Party. This error has now propagated all over the internet so that, if Wikipedia editors were to check, they would find plenty of pages to support a mistake of which their site could have been the source.

Between a few of us here and my friend Pete in the UK, we’ve spent nearly two weeks trying to get OpenX to work. We’re finally getting ad-serving technology put in in-house, after years of relying on the US ad networks we primarily work with. It’s also walking the talk: since I have advocated that Wellington moves to open source if I am elected mayor, then it makes sense that our Linux servers are running ads off an open-source ad-management program.
   The first problem might have been caused by me personally: OpenX wouldn’t install. Pete re-uploaded the files, we chmoded the directories, and away we went.
   Autocade has been the first domain to host the ads that we are sending along, and it’s been so far, so good.
   However, today we decided to give the home page of the Lucire web edition a go, and encountered a problem.
   All was well for the first few hours, but then I noticed something strange: two different computers at this office were behaving differently with the geo-targeting.
   We had fed in banners from two of our US networks. Let’s call them network A and network B. They were set, for New Zealand, to display at these percentages (roughly):

Network A: 98 per cent
Network B: 2 per cent

On computer one running Windows XP, the above was working.
   On computer two running Windows Vista:

Network A: 0 per cent
Network B: 100 per cent

   I’ve a fair idea of how geo-targeting works and two computers on the same network going through the same router with the same (outward) IP address do not, in theory, behave differently.
   But, as Homer Simpson once retorted, ‘In theory, communism works.’
   I hope the boffins can explain this one, because usually I have gone against expert advice to get computer hardware working. (The network was hooked up many years ago by yours truly, doing the exact opposite of what the instructions said—after, I might add, the instructions failed. My personal laptop and its Bluetooth connection were hooked up by finding the most illogical method possible.)
   Surfing to the OpenX forums (Pete had been on the chat earlier, but no one was around), I tried to log in. Unfortunately, this proved impossible and errors followed:

No one was there at all, presumably due to the database error shown at the bottom of the page:

   So, if any OpenX experts are out there and can answer our geo-targeting question, please give us a shout in the comments.

Despite fiddling around with all these online ads, there’s one company I know I will never deal with. And it’s not as though the online ad industry has come to us with clean hands, either, so this sullies them further.
   After surfing on July 10, I found I could no longer get on to Facebook. Every time I typed www.facebook.com, I got the screen below (excerpted):

Which led me to here:

   Somewhere along the line, I must have got to a web page that hijacked my web browser. It didn’t alter the hosts’ file, and I was eventually able to correct this by deleting all cookies and clearing the browser cache, but it left me with one clear message: I will never deal with Mediaplex.
   Based on the above, this conduct is highly unethical and is nearly as bad as planting a trojan or a virus on to a user’s computer. And Googling the incident, I found that many others had encountered the same, sometimes when typing in other sites.
   I was saddened to find out that Mediaplex is part of Valueclick, a company I dealt with for years. We eventually ended our contract with Valueclick. I don’t recall the reason exactly, but I suspect it was down to the low advertising rates the company delivered. There were no concerns over its behaviour.
   When I was on the Mediaplex site, I noticed that Commission Junction was part of the same group. We have been asked to join CJ many times during the 1990s and 2000s but always read the terms and conditions. It had something similar to this clause (which is in its current agreement):

Dormant Accounts. If Publisher’s Account has not been credited with a valid, compensable Transaction that has not been Charged-back during any rolling, six consecutive calendar month period (“Dormant Account”), a dormant account fee at CJ’s then-current rate shall be applied to Publisher’s Account each calendar month that Publisher’s Account remains an open yet Dormant Account or until Your Account balance reaches a zero balance, at which time the Account shall become deactivated. Transactions will not be counted if the Transaction subsequently becomes a Charge-back.

In English: if you don’t make a sale over six months, they have the right to charge you. When you pay it all back, they kill off your account.
   There’s nothing illegal about that, but considering every other affiliate programme we have seen does not do that, then I bet a few people who were less careful about reading their agreements would have been taken by surprise. I found it questionable, and refused to deal with the company. (It seems, if you believe some of the links on Google, that we got off lucky.)
   This latest stunt tarnishes the entire group: Commission Junction, Mediaplex and Valueclick. Caveat proponor.

Dear Chevrolet: even your own nation’s president calls the brand ‘Chevy’:

You might want to rethink that memo.

Google Dashboard continues to show some strange entries, months after I cancelled all my blogs and Adsense accounts, and severed my ties with many other Google products.
   I’d advise others to take a look at theirs and make sure they aren’t on services that they never signed up for. This went well beyond Google Wave and the privacy débâcles of early 2010.
   Here’s a relatively new entry on my Google Dashboard (left). After confirming that my Adsense account was shut, it insists I still have an account to one of the most poorly conceived ad programmes I have ever encountered. In fact, it says I have two products with it, which is news to me. I never applied more than once and that was for this blog, back in March 2009.
   On January 14, 2010, Google wrote to me in an email: ‘Thank you for taking the time to write to us. As per your request, we have permanently closed your AdSense account.’
   According to this new entry on the Dashboard, you haven’t—and Adsense remains among my Google products in ‘My Account’. I thought something was fishy when I first noticed that it did not drop back to ‘Try something new’ in January.
   Giving Google the benefit of the doubt, I signed in to my non-existent Adsense account and received this message:

I’d love to know what that application is and under what address I used, but, as I said, I believe this is a complete work of fiction, like Google claiming to support free speech or the presumption of innocence. I know for a fact that that’s bogus.
   At left is the other one, which probably turned me more anti-Google than anything else. Blogger. I no longer have any blogs on the service, and logging in to my old Blogger Dashboard confirms this. Well, they aren’t too good at mathematics down in Mountain View, because 0 equals 4 there. Surely it doesn’t take months for the Blogger count on the Google Dashboard to catch up? They are owned by the same company, after all.
   Finally, in the ‘No s***, Sherlock’ file is this one at left. There had better be no contacts in Talk, considering I never signed up to this service (oh, it appears in ‘My Products’, too).
   Do pop in to your Google account if you have one, and just cast a cursory glance down the page. Head in to your Dashboard to see what data Google holds. Hopefully you won’t have as many weird entries as I do.

As news emerges that teenagers have spent less time on Facebook, and there are more profiles getting closed on the social network, Sony has released its newest trailer for The Social Network.

After 9-11, it’s time to tell the “other” story of the ’noughties. And if Facebook is the topic of a Hollywood film, then this could mean it has jumped the shark.
   What’s next? A new social network where privacy is respected? Or, something more radical?
   Modern kids in the first and second world might want that newfangled “real life” next, because to them, the internet is ubiquitous, not special. So why not balance what was once a novelty to us with what we once found to be normal? As we once said: try it now, do it more, things you’ve never done before. The mainstreaming of extreme sports, if you will, simplified to basic exercise and enjoying the outdoors. It almost seems new.
   Simplicity seems to be “in” in so many facets of life, whether it’s a netbook without bells and whistles, or the old-shape Audi A4 with SEAT Exeo badging. Somewhere along the line, practicality finally found its place ahead of wank. It can happen in some economic recessions.
   Real life: more valuable to the teenagers of the 2010s than we thought. It’s back in vogue.

PS.: Thanks to Stefan Engeseth for inspiring part of this post.—JY

As some of you know, I was at Cape Kidnappers last week, visiting the Napier area for the first time. (I tried getting there last October, but this was as far as I got.)
   It was for the Audi A8 launch, and we at the office had a good laugh at this lovely and kind message that the company sent after the event:

The venue found some clothes in one of the rooms so if you are missing a pair of trousers and a jacket, we have them here.

   Maybe it’s my warped sense of humour at this place, but the first thing I said to the team was, ‘I’m pretty sure I was wearing trousers when I got back on the plane, so it wasn’t me.’
   The conversation descended from there.

This week’s humour spot: ‘Since Blogger/Google is USA based, they support the principles of “free speech” and of “innocence until proven guilty”. Even genuine spammers are permitted to speak here, until they cross the line and become disruptive.’
   As someone who has had legitimate comments deleted from the Google forums, and experienced that the actual stance is ‘guilty until proven innocence (sic)’, then this was another good laugh via the internet.

In plain English, when a city is hundreds of millions of dollars in debt—depending on who you believe, the figure is between $200 million and $400 million—how do you get out of the hole?
   1. You can sell the family jewels, and there’s water left. We tried this in the 1980s, and now so many foreigners own New Zealand companies that the profits go offshore and we lose a source of tax revenue. Not good, doesn’t work.
   2. You can put up the rates for residents to the tune of 5·58 per cent and hope they cover some of this. (The figure was 5·5, then 5·75—so much for transparency.)
   3. You can keep praying that the Rugby World Cup will give a temporary boost and hope no one notices that the other years aren’t as prosperous.
   4. You can look at what the city has in terms of creativity and intellectual capital, and build on that, especially if the world values the innovative thinking of New Zealanders.
   Of the four, I prefer (4). This present mayor and council favour (2) and locked in that rise for us a wee while ago.
   I know in some circles my name has become associated with the free wifi for the central city promise, but it goes a bit deeper than that.
   Free wifi is like having roads in a city in the 21st century, and right now, what we have is like paying tolls on every single road we drive on.
   Compare this to Finland, who enshrined in law the right to broadband, which became effective yesterday (July 1). This means every citizen in Finland has a legal right to having broadband at a minimum speed of 1 Mbit/sec. With netbooks and cloud computing on the rise, this seems to be the logical thing to do. The old ways of having programs on your computer are disappearing.
   Get the infrastructure right—after all, Singapore and numerous US cities have done it, and Wellington has to play catch-up with Dunedin and Whanganui—and we can get other things right.
   The sectors that have the greatest potential in the 2010s, and in my mind are the biggest earners for New Zealand companies, are the tech and creative sectors. Both rely on the ’net and a more visionary direction for Wellington in a huge way.
   Clustering, mentoring and financing are the things we need to do, and they have to be driven from the top. Some are done through lobbying by a business-minded, pro-Kiwi mayor and council (rather than a pro-foreigner one). Others can be driven through council itself. But we need a shake-up in order to do this.
   They are all possible solutions, and some are happening now at an ad hoc level.
   I’d want to help those companies that are Kiwi-owned or will remain majority Kiwi-owned—this helps with job creation, with the city’s rates and with the country’s tax take. And if Wellington becomes a centre for this activity in the 2010s and demonstrates that we are an advanced economy, who knows what else we can inspire around the nation?
   It’s not an overnight solution. But I know we have businesses out there that can generate millions for the New Zealand economy. Thanks to our social consciousness, many are sustainable. We already have examples in businesses I’ve cited many times before: the Sidhes, Wetas, Silverstripes, Catalysts of this world are creating jobs for Wellington. We just need to expand on that and stimulate innovation.
   Equally important are the need for transparency and changing the culture within the Wellington City Council, topics for other posts.

My friend and colleague at the Medinge Group, Ava Hakim, passed on a few papers from her day job at IBM. The first is the latest edition of a biennial global CEO survey, while the second asks the next generation of leaders—Generation Y. The aim: to find out what these groups think about the challenges and goals for CEOs.
   Unsurprisingly, both studies (involving thousands of respondents) had commonalities, though Generation Y placed global awareness and sustainability more highly on their list.
   Creativity, however, is ranked as the most valuable leadership trait. What society doesn’t need, they tell us, is the same-again thinking if we are to make progress in the 2010s. The old top values of ‘operational excellence’ or ‘engineering big deals’ no longer come up top in this new decade.
   Or, as I heard from one gentleman yesterday, we can’t afford to have the sort of ‘experience’ certain people tout, for they do not have 25 years’ experience—they just have one year’s experience, over and over again, 25 times.
   You know I’m going to say it, so I might as well: this sounds like the sort of ‘experience’ some of my political opponents have had, day in, day out. Groundhog Day comes to mind.
   Indeed, the studies indicate that we have a far more complex world, and same-again thinking isn’t going to cut it.
   In the first study (emphasis in original):

Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs. Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organizations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.

The most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. They are adopting new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs make customer intimacy their number-one priority.

Later:

Facing a world becoming dramatically more complex, it is interesting that CEOs selected creativity as the most important leadership attribute. Creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks. They are open-minded and inventive in expanding their management and communication styles, particularly to engage with a new generation of employees, partners and customers.

And:

Creative leaders consider previously unheard-of ways to drastically change the enterprise for the better, setting the stage for innovation that helps them engage more effectively with today’s customers, partners and employees.

The study also highlights an increase in globalization, especially in developing markets, leading to greater complexity. It also says the most successful leaders are prepared to change the business models under which they operate.
   In fact, the world we now live in demands that our leaders are globally aware, and see the need to compete in a global market-place.
   The implications for this city are that Wellington can no longer afford to see itself as merely the capital of New Zealand or the geographic centre. It is one of many cities that must compete for attention and resources at a global level—which means creating world-class centres of excellence for our industries. Creating such clusters can even help them stay domestically owned.
   The study indicates that the style of leadership is going to be, necessarily, internationalist—which means we can’t afford to have leaders who are monocultural, and fake multiculturalism. This, like any aspect of a brand, must be embodied for real. It doesn’t mean giving up what ‘being a New Zealander’ is; it does, however, mean that we have to be able to communicate with other nations and cultures, seeking advantages for ourselves.
   Innovation is a driver both in terms of internal processes and as a core competence—so leaders had better be prepared to do this. And being closer and more transparent with customers—or in the case of a city, citizens—is something practised by the most successful leaders, says the study. It reminds me of the topics in the first book I contributed to, Beyond Branding—where integrity and transparency were at the core.
   When it comes to the Generation Y study, the results were similar. This table summarizes the two quite well, and notes how the two groups differ:

   I don’t want to be giving the impression that the second study is less important, but realize that some of you are sorely tempted to see me wrap up this post.
   I will say, quickly, that the lessons are clear: the next generation expects leaders to be globally minded and sustainable.
   Chinese respondents in the second study, in fact, valued global thinking ahead of creativity. This perhaps highlights where the People’s Republic, above the other Chinese territories, is heading: looking outwardly first and delivering what customers in export markets want.
   As creativity is naturally a trait among Wellington businesses, it’s nice to know that many are already prepared for the challenges of the 2010s. And some of our most successful names would not have got to where they are without global thinking, even if some have been acquired by overseas companies: 42 Below, Weta, and Silverstripe come to mind.
   However, I can’t see these traits being reflected in politics—and that’s something I hope we can change in the local body elections, for starters.

Some weeks ago, as we neared this milestone, I planned to write a small blog post on reaching 1,100 cars at the Autocade site. And to show that these milestones are not rigged, we wound up with a fairly ghastly motor at that 1,100 mark.

Nissan Cherry (E10/KPE10). 1970–4 (prod. unknown). 2- and 4-door sedan, 3-door coupé, 3-door wagon. F/F, 988, 1171 cm³ (4 cyl. OHV). Small, front-wheel-drive range from Nissan, slotting beneath Sunny. First Nissan-designed car with front drive. Short front doors on all variants. Sporting model X-1 featured twin carburettors and 80 bhp. Unusually styled coupé (KPE10) from 1971, wagon from 1972. Mid-cycle update 1973. Exported usually as Datsun 100A and 120A. Usual Japanese virtues of quality, hitting Europe and American markets when they faced crises, and establishing Datsun as a leading player.

Yes, the old Cherry. Remember the horrible coupé model that looked like a mix of a regular Nissan Cherry, a SHADO Mobile from UFO, and a potato? It even looked bigger than the sedan—not what you’d usually expect when you consider the etymology of the word coupé.
   Although Autocade hasn’t become a car reference site that slips off the tongue of most enthusiasts, 1,100-plus entries are nothing to be sneezed at. I have even noticed that Wikipedia sometimes references it—supporting my theory that if it exists online, Wikipedia will believe it. Never mind that something might be totally legitimate and be covered in the international print press: if it can’t be found by the editors on Google, it doesn’t exist. So much for meritocratic coverage—because even Google will refuse to list certain things. (On this note, the current Yahoo! Search is more comprehensive.)
   But even then Wikipedia will get the occasional thing wrong. I noticed that its reference to the Camina, produced by Saehan of Korea, comes from Autocade. Yet it’s cited in Wikipedia as the Saehan Camina. Sorry, chaps: the vehicle was the Camina, with no reference to the company, although its successor was the Saehan Gemini.
   I’m not saying Autocade is perfect—I found a few errors myself today—but I spot so many errors on Wikipedia that could be avoided if all netizens—and I include myself—were more responsible. Like email, blogs and YouTube comments, many things on the ’net go into a form of decline once the original purpose is lost. Of course Wikipedia editors need to rely on search engines, because there are probably too many people abusing the site, creating a culture of suspicion. The initial wave of contributors who came on board, hoping to beat the encyclopædias, has gone. Senior editors need to find a final arbiter that is impartial, and a search engine’s robot is freer from bias than a human being.
   Perhaps I am being protective and even slightly hypocritical when I say I prefer the slow growth of Autocade, and its limited number of sysops, to the rapid development of Wikipedia. Of course information should be free, but the limited scope of Autocade helps ensure just a little more accuracy. The main problems I have with Wikipedia reflect less how many of its editors work (though I have cited at least one exception), and more how many of us choose to interact online, especially with the cloak of anonymity.
   You can’t change that without changing the way people work online and take pride in what they do—and that’s just not going to happen when certain governments are quite content to divide us into the information-rich and the information-poor. But that is a point for another discussion.