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.
In plain English, when a city is hundreds of millions of dollars in debtâdepending on who you believe, the figure is between $200 million and $400 millionâhow do you get out of the hole?
1. You can sell the family jewels, and thereâs 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, doesnât 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 5·75âso 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 arenât 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 rightâafter all, Singapore and numerous US cities have done it, and Wellington has to play catch-up with Dunedin and Whanganuiâand 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 ânet 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.
Iâd want to help those companies that are Kiwi-owned or will remain majority Kiwi-ownedâthis helps with job creation, with the cityâs rates and with the countryâs 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?
Itâs 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 Iâve 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.
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.
I learned the sad news that Norman Macrae, CBE, ææ„ç« , passed away on June 11, just shy of his 87th birthday.
Norman was one of the great visionaries and forecasters of the 20th century, and served as deputy chief editor of The Economist till his retirement in 1988.
Among his forecasts was the fall of the Berlin Wall, the advent of the internet, the move toward teleworking, and the pressing concerns of sustainability and the global income gap.
His work included a series of âretrospectivesâ written from a future date, which continued Normanâs trade-mark analysis on current and emerging trends in the global economy. With his son, and my friend, Chris, Norman authored The 2024 Report, whose predictions of broadband internet and its implications, made in 1984, only began coming true over the last decade. At the time, critics said Macrae and son were too optimisticâalthough history has proved them right.
I sent my condolences to Chris earlier today. The world has lost one of its foremost business editors, a great socioeconomic expert, and visionary.
Without Chris I would not have joined the Medinge Group, and it was through him that I realized so many of the Economist forecasts that I had read over the years were the work of his father.
I understand The Economist will publish an obit this week.
Certain media are reporting the cityâs [debt] in the $200 millionâ$300 million mark but our outside-council research reveals this is a very conservative estimate. Itâs likely to be more.
Regardless of whether itâs $200 million or half an (American) billion (scary just saying it), any deficit thatâs nine digits long canât be good for a relatively small city.
One of my plans after I get into office will be to balance the budget, which is why I have been going on about growing jobs and businessesin such a big way. In a very shortcut way of explaining it: more new businesses, more ratepayers, fewer reasons to increase the rates. Which, I might add, this current administration has already locked in for us over the next few years, letting the next mayor get the blame.
I object to any cuts in library services, even if there is a strong denial that that is happening. In a knowledge economy, we cannot afford to create a class system of the knowledge-rich and the knowledge-poor.
On this note, recently I asked Don Christie of the New Zealand Open Source Society to examine an open-source strategy for Wellington City. For starters, we discussed how the library software is a proprietary system that costs this city a considerable amountâwhen there is a New Zealand-developed open-source program that many other cities have implemented.
While it would be nice to keep believing we can afford expensive software to run city services, I donât like debt, and I certainly donât like owing people any money.
And Iâm not prepared to sell off our water to technocrats or any profitable part of the family jewels to see the hundred-million figure reduced.
There are good examples of open source working for cities and creating significant savings. Zaragoza, Spain, has been moving to a complete open-source desktop. And itâs not the only one.
Furthermore, open source will mean jobs in Wellington. This will mean new jobs. I have already gone on about the tech clusters being a vital part of this cityâs economy. Open-source skills are in high demand, and if overseas trends are anything to go by, we can attract these skilled people to our city. Already Wellington is a centre of excellence in many IT-related fields. Iâm talking about extending this and making a real claim to open-source. Let the world know that Wellington is the home of not just the most advanced software and visual effectsâ companies, but logically extend that to open source as well.
Itâs projected that by 2020, 40 per cent of jobs in IT will be open-source-related, so if we donât do it, another New Zealand city will. Iâm not about to give up one of our most important advantages, one which has been emerging in the capital since the 1990s.
Such moves can be done with the city and Wellingtonâs private enterprises working togetherâbut this will need to come from the top, and be put in motion by a mayor whoâs passionate about job creation. Itâs one of the biggest challenges we face, and I seem to be a lone voice on focusing on this for our city.
There have been a few times in the history of this blog where I stepped away from writing regularly. At the end of 2006, I had a pretty good excuse: I was in France. This time, my reasons for stepping away for a few weeks do not include: (a) I was spending too much time with the Miss Universe New Zealand contestants; (b) laziness; (c) being trapped in 1983 and discovering that DCI Gene Hunt controls the Lost island.
I was, however, chatting to a few more of the parties that we needed to realize some of my election promises. And doing a few media interviews. And looking at more ways Wellington could get nearer balancing its budget, as our deficit has ballooned over the last decade.
On May 15, I joined my opponent, Councillor Celia Wade-Brown, on Access Radioâs Espace Français, in what was my first political interview in French. I expected a nice-natured chat till our hosts said they wanted a political debate. So the Councillor and I gave the audience one, coming from very different angles. I believe we are the only two Francophone candidates. And I donât think Access does a Cantonese programme.
You can listen to the interview here, though they only store the programmes for six weeks. You can also download from this link.
I kept Leauna Zheng waiting for weeks while I prepared my emailed responses to her interview for Skykiwi, the leading Chinese expatsâ site in New Zealand. Despite her wait, she wrote a marvellous article (in Chinese, here), and for those of you relying on Google Translate, please note that the term Chinese expatriate is not translated correctly. (I believe this is the first Chinese-language interview to include my name in Chinese ideographs.)
And, finally, my interview with Bharat Jamnadas on Asia Down Under aired last Sunday. Heâs very kindly put it on YouTube, though the aspect ratio is a tad off and I look thinner than usual. There are very nice comments from two members of the Wellington business community, Laurie Foon of Starfish and Brent Wong of Soi, to whom I am extremely grateful.
The conversation at the end about Wellington v. Auckland was a good laugh, but there were some serious bits.
And this Tuesday just gone, it was a pleasure to play a âdragonâ in a Dragonâs Den-style setting analysing some of New Zealandâs entrepreneurs for New Zealand Trade & Enterprise.
My thanks to Bharat, Leauna, Kenneth Leong, Laura Daly at Access Radio, Jean-Louis Durand and Arlette Bilounga, and Maria Gray and David Powell.
The good news today is that Wellington Airport is officially in two minds about what type of sign it will put up on the Miramar cutting, which means that the âWellywoodâ sign protest has had a victory of sorts.
Iâm thrilled at the news because it shows people powerâespecially people like Anthony Lander who set up the largest of the anti-sign Facebook groups, and the 15,000-plus who joined thereâcame through.
The issue was always, and still is, transparency: how the council was prepared to say, âThis is not our problem. Itâs on airport land,â without giving a toss about how the rest of us felt.
The speed with which resource consent was granted was also questionable.
But the people of Wellington showed that we still have what it takes to make politicians back down, even if it is to cement their own power base.
This year, weâre discovering our own power and that we can keep politicians honest.
Hopefully in the election this year Wellingtonians will decide that it should not be âpolitics as usualâ. The important thing is that we vote, so we donât have the usually pathetic 30-something per cent turnout. And letâs start talking about even bigger issues.
Of some interest this week is the media giving a tad more coverage to the Murdoch Pressâs desire to charge for access in the UK. Websites for The Times, The Sun and News of the World will charge from June, something which was raised today on Radio New Zealand National.
This is not new: I spoke out against it back in November during an address I gave at CPIT, because I could not see how it could be workable.
According to the discussion on Afternoons with Jim Mora, the Murdoch Press is banking on its UK newspaper competitors following suit.
No one doubts that a lot of the work being done by the press is valuable and deserves compensation. But this doesnât ring true to me as a workable model.
What it will initially do is drive people to non-Murdoch websites for UK news.
Assuming other qualities and national tabloids follow suit, then we can watch the UKâs influence on global dialogue disappear. No one will care what the British people think on any issue, if their media are inaccessible.
It wonât get that bad, because I believe The Daily Telegraph will always be around in a free format, since it was one of the internet pioneersâit celebrated its 15th anniversary online last year. Thanks to the website, its international influence has grown.
The Murdoch plan also provides a wonderful opportunity for regional newspapers to become the national digital media of record if they are willing to provide their information freely.
I am quite happy to pay for some news services. But it does not come from charging for the raw articles. It might come from a value-added service: who will be the first to lay out a PDFed newspaper that is automatically generated from international sources that I can read, whether on screen or on an Ipad? In 2010, there has to be something beyond the words and a low-res pic, because a lot of news has, predictably, become commodified. (An internal newsletter we had here in the early 1990s predicted as much; meanwhile, this is a good academic paper on the issues.)
Some American publishers are getting the idea, and I have heard from an Australian company that is planning to do something similarly innovative. Therefore, I think Murdochs may have misread this one (as it has on climate change, according to one group): it is not akin to the BSkyB set-top box or other media it has encountered in the past.
Speaking of Brits, I have had three people this week say I have an English accent. One of them is Irish. Feel free to take a look at this old clip on Sunrise. I canât hear it. I sound nothing like Leslie Grantham or Michael Parkinson.
I seem to be on a lot of social networks (Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Vkontakte), so I thought Iâd look in to Sonico. I can see why itâs not as big as the others.
For a start, there seems to be insufficient globalization of its features. Try entering a Chinese film in to the favourite movies, and itâs a no-go:
And while you select New Zealand as your country, itâs too bad if youâre from Wellington:
Maybe these jokers hate the Wellywood sign as much as we do?
This is a bit odd. I was asked to fill out a survey regarding Google Docs, which I promptly did. I didnât give it very high marks, and after clicking submit, the response was âYou have indicated that you do not use Google Docs.â
I beg your pardon?
I indicated that I had used Google Docs, because Google defines the service as follows: âConsider Google Docs products including Google Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Forms, and its homepage.â I have indeed opened Google documents and I have been to the home page. I have outputted documents from thereâI know that because I did that tonight.
However, it seems Google does not want to hear bad news from its survey respondents, so those of us who give it a low score are classed as people who have not used the service. Otherwise, the logic must go, why on earth would you rank it so poorly? Everyone here, from Eric Schmidt downwards, knows that Google Docs deserves a high rating! You are obviously inexperienced!
This prompted me to do a bit of surfing about the survey. I was interested, in my âI have it in for Googleâ (thanks, Nigel!) mode, that deleting a Google Docs file does not mean that associated images are also wiped. Those who use the service might wish to take heed.
In 2007, Ralf Scharnetzki created a private, unpublished Google Docs document, with an image. He deleted the document. However, three years on, you can still access the image here (at a docs.google.com link).
I realize that in 99 per cent of cases, the image will be secure. No one other than the authorâand not every author, eitherâwill know the location of an image. But on the internet, stranger things have happened. Obviously those with confidential data would not use Google Docs to assemble their workâbut we are only human: you never know when you might let your guard down.
Just be careful out there. âDeletedâ does not mean, well, deleted.
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).
