When I go on about free wifi, itâs not just some vague election promise. Someone mentioned that I should have put the reason behind the message on my first billboard, but the reasons are too plentiful.
Itâs not just about giving businesses and tourists the access they expect in a modern society. Itâs also about signalling that Wellington is open for business, especially the type that can grow this economy with Kiwi entrepreneurship at its core. And itâs a great tool for transparency. Brad Gallen shared this link, and while these werenât the apps I had in mind originally, they show that in a creative world, people will come up with great ideas if you give them the infrastructure.
While the Open311 API has come from San Francisco, under Mayor Gavin NewsomâJenâs husbandâthereâs no reason we couldnât have come up with it here. But now that it has been developed, we should use it. There are five apps that Mashable has identifiedâand these are the sorts of things I can envisage popping up in Wellington if I am elected mayor.
Wellingtonians can elect someone who will give little more than lip service to transparency and technology, or someone who will use both to create and grow the city we deserve.
A contact of mine kindly sent me an invitation to a Chinese business networking site, called Ushi. All seemed well till I looked at the terms and conditions, which have, inter alia:
You agree to abide by any and all the related Chinese laws and regulations of the Contract Law of the People’s Republic of China, Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of China and its implementing regulations, Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on Preserving Computer Network Security (âSecurity Decision of the National People’s Congressâ), Law of the People’s Republic of China on Guarding State Secrets, the Telecommunication Statute of the People’s Republic of China (âthe Telecommunication Statuteâ), the Computer Information Security Protection System Regulations of PRC, INTERIM PROVISIONS GOVERNING THE MANAGEMENT OF THE COMPUTER INFORMATION NETWORKS IN THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA CONNECTING TO THE INTERNATIONAL NETWORK and measures for implementation, Administration of the Maintenance of Secrets in the International Networking of Computer Information Systems, Administration of Internet Information Services Procedures, MEASURES FOR SECURITY PROTECTION ADMINISTRATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL NETWORKING OF COMPUTER INFORMATION NETWORKS, Administration of Internet Electronic Messaging Services Provisions (âElectronic Messaging Provisionsâ). You also agree to be fully responsible for any behaviors and the any possible result due to the misuse of your account and password in this or that way. Any violation of Security Decision of the National People’s Congress may constitute a crime and you might be prosecuted for the crime. According to the Telecommunication Statute, telecommunication users assume liability for message contents and result transmitted via a communication network. In any case, should Ushi.cn have reasons to conclude that any of your behaviors, including but not limited to any of your words and other behaviors, have violated or may violate any of the above mentioned laws and regulations, the service offered by Ushi.cn will be immediately terminated at any time without prior notice.
Mainland China has an awful lot of laws relating to the internetânot very Confucian.
This scares me off, big time. Iâm cool with contract law and copyright law, and I have the basics there when it comes to the PRC. The rest: I really donât have time to look up the legislation and procedures.
It is so tempting to accept the invitation, given the way the business world is heading, but until the Peopleâs Republic can do something about cleaning up its legislative framework, itâs a no to Ushi.
Iâm sure that when browsing other Chinese sites, I have not been confronted with quite this much. Or maybe I just havenât browsed enough in the dot-cn space?
Iâve a bit more reason to moan about Google of late, after a few more dodgy happenings on the site.
But before I do, some good news: I found a very good search engine. And itâs not Bing.
Ironically, one of the alternatives to Google search that I liked was Yahoo!, but even that company now has switched to Bing. However, it still has some search tools that others can tap in to.
From what I know, Duck Duck Go (or, to use the siteâs own convention, DuckDuckGo) takes some of those data and supplements its own. Itâs surprisingly comprehensive and accurateâsomething I could not call Cuil, which once saw itself as a Google-killer.
I got a similar feeling in 1998 when I ïŹrst saw Google. âWow, this is much better than AltaVista!â Now with Google doing more evil, DuckDuckGo is a breath of fresh air. None of that âsupplemental indexâ BS, either. It also promises that it wonât store your private information. That, too, feels revolutionary in 2010.
I liked Google better, too, when it just delivered good services, and didnât bother with who I am or tried to pretend it was a social network.
Hereâs the real kicker: the founder of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg, emailed me after I sent in a compliment. I remember when either Jerry or David did that back in 1994 or thereabouts on Yahoo!. Youâll be lucky to get that now.
I donât know what that says to you, but I would have thought that that meant I would never get Buzz.
Wrong.
What part of ensuring that my name could not be found did Google not understand? What other US laws has it violated this time?
Itâs pretty rich for a company that did not have, the last time I looked, a privacy policy for Buzz.
So, I went and deleted my profile again. This time, it did kill Buzz, though I still have 777 connections in my Social Search. How does it know, if I am no longer supplying data for that?
I also really donât want to know the 285 friends-of-friendsâ searching habits and Tweets. (It still insists I have four blogs with themâthe actual number is zero. I wouldnât trust Google to be able to do arithmetic correctly.)
But hereâs one big down side to not having a Google profile. Google suggests you can be contacted through the company by not signing up to a profile with them! In your Google account, there is now this:
You are now a member of something that hasnât even been invented yet! This is probably how, after all, it got all those Buzz users earlier this year. Google has âpre-consentâ!
Clicking on âNew Serviceâ results in a 404. I donât know what game Google is playing, but something is rotten in Mountain View.
I can moan all I want, but I have acted and have drafted a letter asking Google to remove the unwanted services from my account. I would delete the whole account, but for a couple of services where colleagues have asked me to set things up (notably Analytics for the Medinge Group websiteâcontrary to Googleâs own claims, I cannot remove myself as an administrator).
So why whinge? Hopefully itâll have you checking your own Google accounts to make sure there arenât unwanted things there.
With the first billboard going up in town, Iâve been asked about whether my free wifi programme will cost ratepayers.
In a word, no. The wifi programme will be supported by selling the space on the home page.
Upkeep of such a service, and I am looking at several alternatives, is in the low five figures, though considering the benefits to Wellingtonâs GDP is measured in the millions, itâs a sound investment.
Where it could wind up costing Council is in the expansion of such a network. However, there are low-cost ways of doing that. The high figure is NZ$250,000 to roll it out to different areas, but lower figures have been proposed.
I would like to roll out free wifi to more than the central city, targeting neighbourhoods that could benefit from the educational uses of the internet. Newtown and Johnsonville seem to be communities that could benefit most greatly.
Iâd do this after the central city programme was successful and I think the figures will support my intentionally conservative estimates. There will be ratesâ gains to Wellington City thanks to productivity, improved businesses, and new businesses. If all indicators look good, then the rollout will continue to cost ratepayers the grand sum of zero dollars.
There are other ways, too, to make free wifi pay. Last week, two of my supporters sent me an article on Starbucksâ plans to capitalize on its free wifi service.
In Starbucksâ case, itâs launching a network that has premium content in news, entertainment, wellness, business and careers, and âMy Neighborhoodâ.
No money is changing hands: instead, the companies, such as Apple, are paying Starbucks for the opportunity to get new business.
And if Starbucks can do it, why canât Wellington City? The idea of opening up the home page to advertisers (incidentally, there is already interest, and we havenât even launched) is the same principle, albeit in a limited way. Expanding it during year one to include premium content from Kiwi creatives can only be a good thing for how we see our city.
My friend Edward Talbot, and his friend and business partner Rowan Wernham, launched their Snapr (sna.pr) service today. Itâs the ideal way to share geotagged photographs in the 2010s, and I expect these guys to do some great things as Snapr takes off.
Snapr was the only Kiwi (if not southern hemisphere) venture to show at SXSWâs Accelerator competition this year, and is a perfect example of how New Zealand talent can take on and change the world.
I foresee Snapr having a big take-up by netizens, especially as we move more into greater smartphone usage, mobile snaps, and augmented reality.
In their release, Ed and Rowan state: âSnapr is a big public channel for people to share whatâs happening in their life. We love the idea of a map with crowdsourced photos, you can look in anywhere, discover new people, and find neat things going on.
âMobile snaps are less about aesthetics, they are an immediate way to show what is going on where you are.â
The release goes on to describe the service. âPhotos on Snapr are viewed via a map based interface. Snaps from the same place and time are naturally brought together.
âAn iPhone application [a free download] allows users to upload photos, send tweets, and view the map on the go.â
The founders have their favourite images already grouped on the site, and you can begin to see how it works. Here are Rowanâs, and here are Edâs.
While founded in Auckland, this is the sort of business I see starting in Wellington under my mayoral policies: high-tech, creative, even game-changing. Itâs where the level playing field allows Kiwis to reach punch well above our weight.
Writing about cars calms me. So call me a freak. And maybe Iâve 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:
I didnât want a repeat of 1,100 when the Nissan Cherry was the landmark model. (There actually was a miscount, but I wonât go in to that.)
And in the 1,100â1,200 cycle, I managed to find yet another likely error (about a Ford development code) in Wikipediawhich 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 donât 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, weâve spent nearly two weeks trying to get OpenX to work. Weâre finally getting ad-serving technology put in in-house, after years of relying on the US ad networks we primarily work with. Itâs 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 wouldnât 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 itâs 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. Letâs 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
Iâve 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, âIn theory, communism works.â
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 saidâafter, 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, thereâs one company I know I will never deal with. And itâs 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 didnât alter the hostsâ 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 userâs 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 donât 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 (âDormant Accountâ), a dormant account fee at CJâs then-current rate shall be applied to Publisherâs Account each calendar month that Publisherâs 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 donât make a sale over six months, they have the right to charge you. When you pay it all back, they kill off your account.
Thereâs 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.
Iâd 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 thatâs 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 arenât too good at mathematics down in Mountain View, because 0 equals 4 there. Surely it doesnât 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 âNo s***, Sherlockâ 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 âMy Productsâ, 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 wonât 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, itâs time to tell the âotherâ story of the ânoughties. And if Facebook is the topic of a Hollywood ïŹlm, then this could mean it has jumped the shark.
Whatâs 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 âreal lifeâ 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 youâve 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 âinâ in so many facets of life, whether itâs 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. Itâs back in vogue.
PS.: Thanks to Stefan Engeseth for inspiring part of this post.âJY
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 itâs my warped sense of humour at this place, but the first thing I said to the team was, âIâm pretty sure I was wearing trousers when I got back on the plane, so it wasnât me.â
The conversation descended from there.
This weekâs humour spot: âSince Blogger/Google is USA based, they support the principles of âfree speechâ and of âinnocence until proven guiltyâ. Even genuine spammers are permitted to speak here, until they cross the line and become disruptive.â
As someone who has had legitimate comments deleted from the Google forums, and experienced that the actual stance is âguilty until proven innocence (sic)â, then this was another good laugh via the internet.
When I go on about free wifi, itâs not just some vague election promise. Someone mentioned that I should have put the reason behind the message on my first billboard, but the reasons are too plentiful.
Hereâs 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 
At left is the other one, which probably turned me more anti-Google than anything else. 
Finally, in the âNo s***, Sherlockâ 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 âMy Productsâ, too).
