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.
Sam Flemming in Advertising Age mentioned the scandal that Toyota has been embroiled in inside China, before a lot of the bad press it received in the occident over âunintended accelerationâ.
This involved a netizen, an owner of a Toyota Highlander Sport, filming that his SUV was unable to get up a 30-degree incline, something which âlesserâ models such as the Korean-built Renault Koleos, and even the subcompact Chery QQâone of the cheapest cars around in Chinaâcould manage. The following news item reveals more. Itâs in Mandarin and dates from December 22, 2009.
The news investigators show that even a Daewoo Lacetti (Buick Excelle in China) and a Chery van could manage the same slope, and confirm that the Highlander could not do it.
They are not alone. Jitendra Patel filmed this with his 2009 Highlander earlier last year:
As Sam says, this issue has brewed thanks to the Chinese internet which, while not as free as it is in most countries, still seems to create active consumersâ groups. People will rally as individuals if the cause is rightâand consumers seem to be rediscovering their power, online.
The disappearance of my Google Friend Connect gadget from the right-hand column was not part of my plans to de-Google my life: after all, it took me a while to amass the followers there (I think I had a mere 18, but some of them were friends).
From my Google Dashboard, I noticed there were Friend Connect entries for all sorts of things, including blogs I had deleted. And, oddly, there were two entries for this domain: one for the main site, and one for the blog.
Naturally, I deleted the entries for the dead blogs (which I never entered anyway), and since there were two for jackyan.com, I took out the one for the site and retained the one for the blog. Logical, but wrong.
Now that the gadget has disappeared from the right-hand column, the penny dropped: the one for the site was one I manually set up, and was the account used for the gadget formerly on the right. The one for the blog was one that Google âhelpfullyâ put in to Friend Connect.
This is precisely the point I and others have been driving home for weeks on this whole Google mess: if we have not asked for it, donât do it.
I never asked for any sites to appear in Google Friend Connect except the ones I added. Granted, it was still my action that killed the gadget at right, and lost me those followers, but Googleâs practice of trying to trick you into using its services (âLook, youâve already signed up to themâ) sure didnât help me.
So to my 18 followers, my apologies. Hindsight is a great thing. And it seems I have even fewer connections with Google nowâeven if it was unintentional. (Iâll be deleting the unrequested blog entry in Friend Connect, too, as it has no followers.)
As of today, I am back with the reliable Firefox 3¡0 on my desktop machine as well. Firefox 3.5 would generally crash daily, though I remember there was once a three-day period in January when it did not crash at all. (There were other days when it would crash two or three times, just to make up for it and keep its daily record.) In 2010, Firefox 3¡0, on my Asus laptop running Vista, might have crashed once, if ever. (I kept things on 3¡0 there, and was right to.)
I liken 3¡5 to the Nissan Sunny B210 or Datsun 120Y: a car which offered no improvement over its predecessor and, in some cases, was even worse.
I waited till 3¡5 had been out for some time before I even considered it, thinking that Firefox had ironed out the bugs. I think it must have been around November when I âupgradedâ. What a big mistake that was.
I noticed no speed difference and had to put up with the regular crashes. And, judging by feedback, I was not alone.
One helpful netizen suggested Flash could have been responsible and she may be right. However, rather than change to another type of browser, I decided the best course was to âdowngradeâ to 3¡0. which worked with Flash, Java, or whatever else could be thrown at it in the course of daily browsing.
Another asked if the crash occurred at the same time each day and, if so, could it be the Firefox automatic updates? After a weekâs study, since I got into the habit of Tweeting each time Firefox crashed at one period, I had to conclude that it was around the same time (evening NZDT), but not the same hour. It varied by around four hours.
Thankfully, Mozilla keeps a copy of it on its website, probably because it realizes that 3¡5 is buggy as heck. I only found the link by accident last month and vowed to put restore 3¡0 on this machine. Mozilla even continues to upgrade itâthis is 3¡0¡18, which is a few sub-versions newer than what had been on this machine last year.
I canât tell you how bored I am of seeing the Firefox quality control agent come up every day asking me if I could explain what I was doing at the time of the crash. Well, chaps, I was browsing. And, after today, I hope to only see that window very rarely.
Iâm not even going to try 3¡6 at least till August or September 2010. But I think thatâs just the next type of Nissan Sunny, right? It stays with rear-wheel drive but has more modern colours?
My Wired for March 2010 arrived today (things take a while to reach the antipodes), with the most interesting article being on the Google algorithm. And hold on, this isnât a Google-bashing blog entry. Steven Levyâs article was probably written before the furore over the Google Buzz privacy flap. And it points out how Google has learned from users for search, producing more relevant results than its competitors. With 65 per cent of the search market (and close to 100 per cent of my searches for many years), it has a bigger pool to learn from, too.
Recently I have noticed in ego-searches that Google is now smart enough to distinguish between searches for yours truly and those for Jack Yan & Associates (both in quotes), so that the former results in a mere 53,800 references, and the latter with 124,000 (quite a bit down from yesterday, when I first hatched the idea about blogging this topic). That is smart in itself: knowing when people are looking for me (or my blog) and when they seek the company. By comparison, Yahoo! lists 280,000 for the former and 42,500 for the latter, as the latter is (if you look at terms alone) a more specific search.
Once upon a timeâeven as late as 2009âa search for my name would result in both my personal and work sites.
Iâm pretty proud of my company and the people who work with me, and in election year, if someone were checking out my background, I sure would not mind them getting to JY&A as well. On the other hand, thanks to this distinction, my mayoral campaign site comes up in the top 10 in a search for my name. Either way, itâs relevant to a searcherâso all is well.
But is this really how people search? If I were searching for, say, Heidi Klum, I would probably want (I write this before I even attempt a search) her bio, a bit of news, pictures to ogle, and Heidi Klum GmbH, her company. This is exactly what Google delivers, with her Wikipedia entry in addition (as the first result). (Bing does this, too; Yahoo! puts Heidi Klum GmbH at number one.) Maybe someone could get back to me on their expectations for a name search although, as I said, Google is doing me a huge political favour by distinguishing me from my business. The ability to distinguish the two is, by all accounts, clever. Levy cites an example in his article about mike siwek lawyer mi which, when fed into Google at the time of his writing, gets a page about a Michigan lawyer called Mike Siwek. On Bing, âthe first result is a page about the NFL draft that includes safety Lawyer Milloy. Several pages into the results, thereâs no direct referral to Siwek.â (A Bing search today still does not have Mr Siwek appear early on; in fact, most now discuss Levyâs article; sadly for Mr Siwek, the same now applies on Google, with the first actual reference to his name being the 18th result. Cuil, incidentally, returns nothingâso much for supposedly having a Google-busting index size.)
But I have one that is puzzling to me. Ten years ago, Lucire published an article about the 10th anniversary of the Elle Macpherson Intimates range. One would think that the query “Elle Macpherson Intimates” “10th anniversary” would bring this up firstâin fact, I did have to search for the URL last year when writing a blog post. On Google, this is, in fact, the last entry. On Bing, it is the first. On Yahoo!, it is second.
Of course, Google may well have judged the Lucire article to be too old and that the overwhelming majority of searches is for current or recent information. And being 10 years old, I hardly imagine there to be too many links to it any more. However, I thought the fact that we can now, very easily, sort our searches by dateâespecially with the new layout of the resultsâ pageâit might just give us the most precise result. The lead page to the article is in frames (yes, itâs that old), which may have been penalized by Google. But many of the leading results that turn up that have these two terms do not have them with great proximity (in fact, numbers one and two do not even have the term Elle Macpherson Intimates any more). However, I donât think the page I hunted for should be last, especially as none of the preceding entries even have the words in their title.
I am not complaining about the Google situation since a 2009 Lucire article that links to the old Elle Macpherson one comes up in the top 10, so itâs still reasonably easy to get to via the top search engine. (Cuil lists the 2009 article from Lucire in its top 10, too.) Thereâs also a blog entry from me that links it, and that appears on the second page.
Itâs just that I hold a belief that many people who search using Google (or any search engine) do so for research. They want to know about Brand X and, sometimes, about its history. If I type a personâs name, there is a fairly good chance I want to know the latest. But when I qualify that name with something that puts it in the past (anniversary), then Iâd say I want something historical. That includes old pages.
While few rely on a fashion magazine for historical research (though, believe me, we get queries from scholars who want citations of things they saw in Lucire), Google results nos. 1 through 53 and the majority of Cuilâs results (which are very irrelevantâthe first two are of a domain that no longer exists and a blank page) donât hit the spot.
For the overwhelming majority of searchesâwell over 90 per centâGoogle serves me just fine, which is why you donât see me complain much about the quality of its results. Even here, itâs not so much a complaint, but professional curiosity. It would be sad for Bing or Yahoo! to be labelled as search engines for historical searches, but someone should fairly provide access to the older, yet still relevant, pages on the internet for everyday queries (so I donât mean the Internet Archive).
PS.: Thereâs one more search engine that should be considered. Gigablast, which I have used on and off over the years, does not list the 2000 article, either. Like Google, the 2009 one is listed, and only five results are returned.âJY
My friend Pete informs me of his Google Buzz experience, and itâs not positive, either.
He is no stranger to technology and is more expert than I am on these matters. He had turned off Buzz, and was surprised to find that it was still taking his information and publishing it to his followers.
His sister took a screen shot of what she saw on her screen, which is shown above. Notice at the top of the screen, it says that Pete is following herâeven though by this time he had turned Buzz off. In Peteâs words: âIâve now had to go into settings where there is a further option to disable it altogether and kill all your posts. Iâm hoping that stops it!â
I hope so, too!
If any of the old Voxers are still around reading this blog, I met up with Paikea (a nom-de-plume of one of my neighbours and friends on the old Vox blogging platform) on Sunday. It was a wonderful catch-up and it was as though we had been Real World 1¡0 friends for years. Sometimes, blogs really do help you get into the mind of others so you know if you would hit it off or not.
I look forward to meeting her husband in the near future, too, and we have exchanged phone numbers and emails. I wonder if Linda-Joy and her husband might be next, as they are nearby in Melbourne.
Finally for tonight, how about the above? These are the followers on one Twitter account (I have an inkling who it is, but itâs not my place to say so). If you want me to feel honoured and very flattered, then following HM Queen Rania al-Abdullah of Jordan, Shakira Ripoll, Sir Richard Branson and Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger immediately afterme will do it. I am also in good company with my dear friend Manas Fuloria over in Gurgaon.
Iâm getting fussier about whom I follow back these days on Twitter, and have noticed myself removing some people I followed.
Initially, my rule on Twitter was to follow back only people I knew in the real world. Eventually, I opened that up and even went back among the following to include people I met online. Then, I chose people to follow based on whether they were real or fake and have to admit that a few clever Tweeters suckered me in to following some bots (which I remove whenever they are in my Tweetstream).
Today, Iâm afraid that even being human doesnât necessarily have me following back. I now consider the subject and whether itâs among my interests. Or I consider the location. In other words, I might have entered into a fourth phase of my time on Twitter, where I donât expect contact with all and sundry, just those whose interests align, or live in places I am in or am likely to be in.
Being more geographically specific with social media is exactly what Stanley Moss predicted would be a major 2010 trend at his Medinge and, later, SorbonneâCELSA presentations. I never gave it much thought till I realized I had been doing that myself for several months.
So as we begin the New Year, there are some rules to those I do not follow.
1. If your Tweetstream has any quotations from famous people in itâeven oneâforget it. A year ago, I might have followed you if you had some engagement with people and there was the odd quotation from Mark Twain or some other luminary interspersed with your conversations. Today, if youâre still using automated quotation programs, then Iâm no longer interested. It seems either lazy or passĂŠ, sorry.
2. While Shelly Ryan, the spammer, has gone, anyone having as their first Tweet an invitation to their profile and hinting it could be adult will get a block from me.
3. If the whole Tweetstream looks like a Twitter edition of my spam filter trash folder, youâre outta here. The teeth-whitening Tweet remains a dead giveaway. Also: anyone who repeats promotional Tweets can forget about getting me to follow back. And yes, I do scroll down the entire first page.
4. Thereâs a grey area with any type of automated Tweet outnumbering manually written ones. I have followed some car magazine ones when they are automated, but I am not following back a Tweetstream about, say, Facebook, or a whole bunch of advice, no matter how well meaning it is. If I wanted to read self-help stuff, that is better coming from a book than in Tweet form.
5. A huge disparity between those followed and the number following back. If you have followed 1,200 people and you have about three follow-backs, then that screams, âSpammer,â to me. In borderline cases, I will see who you are following. If your list is filled with people who all seem to have the same name, then I will know you are a bot, and I will send a block request to Twitter. (Some of these bots will find humans to follow by using spidering techniquesâsometimes it is obvious, and they will get a block, too.)
6. Anyone who has more API-delivered Tweets than real ones will be far more likely to be ignored than they were in the past.
7. Anyone whose Tweetstreams are made of re-Tweets nearly exclusively.
8. Anyone who has plugged into a single site and is feeding their headlines out, using that method to make up their entire Twitter account. I have seen two that just take headlines from ReadWriteWeb and link to their articles. Duh, why donât I just follow ReadWriteWeb directly? (Similarly, those who have taken a Google News feed are unlikely to get my attention.)
9. Companies who I know have misbehaved, and this is usually personal. (I can think of one that has had a preemptive block from yours truly.)
10. People whom I know are dicks in real life. (Fortunately, none have come knocking on my Twitter account, probably because they think Iâm a dick.)
Some of my choices sound harsh, and I donât profess to following the above 100 per cent of the time. Very occasionally, I might see a friend who has started Tweeting, who has, in the few hours after setting up his account, filled it up with people he knew. Obviously, the followingâfollower disparity would not apply.
Nor do I claim that I am more right than anyone else. Given thereâs no right and wrong with how you follow back in Twitter, letâs just say, âIt just is,â rather than put a judgement on to it. It is each personâs decision on how they use the service and whom theyâd like to follow.
Can someone please explain to me how I have a Google Buzz account?
Yes, I know, all those people complaining about Google Buzz found that their Gmail contacts where, all of a sudden, added to the service.
And Google, this week, apologized for messing up.
Well, Google, please explain my scenario, because I donât have a bloody Gmail account.
Yet, youâve seen fit to provide me with a Buzz accountâsomething I do not wantâand, like so many others, added 19 followers to it.
Above: Buzz has been the centre of complaints for Gmail users these past few weeks. Google now extends that to non-Gmail users.
This was today. This was after your supposed apology for messing up peopleâs privacy.
I guess youâve figured that after messing up Gmail usersâ lives, youâre now going after non-Gmail users.
Incidentally, can someone also please explain to me why I have 18 requests for Google Reader followers when I have done everything possible to remove every last piece of information out of there? Just where did these 18 suddenly come from?
Above: Despite deleting everything out of my Google Reader account, today I have 18 people wanting to be the followers of an empty account. Nice one, Google.
Above: A new field was added to my Google Profile, checked by defaultâto ensure less privacy. Less than a day after it apologized for breaching peopleâs privacy. Hypocrisy much?
Are your people so stupid that you would introduce a new field dealing with privacy and turn it on by default? The week after your Google Buzz dĂŠbâcle? Who did you hire? People from Facebook?
Does your HR department hire bottom-of-the-class guys, or do you find morons and train them down?
Rather ironical, considering that this week, I have been de-Googling my life. Looks like Google doesnât like my removing myself from its services, so itâs forcibly put me on to new ones and created new options which it has checked by default, decreasing my privacy.
It wasnât enough that you had put me on to Reader and turned on Web History after I turned it off.
Consider my profile deleted, dickheads. You are not getting any more of my personal information from me.
Really, Google, WTF?
Above: I donât have Gmail. Look, Google, itâs in my ânew products to tryâ section.
PS.: Deleting my profile has made no difference to my Buzz account: it remains there, complete with followers.âJY
P.PS.:Scootley at the Gmail forums explains that anyone can get a Buzz account, even if they do not use Gmail. Hereâs what I donât get (correct me if I am wrong):
⢠Buzz is part of Gmail.
⢠If I have never signed up to Gmail and agreed to its terms and conditions, what governs my relationship with Google over Buzz?
I decided to find out.
Answer: none.
On visiting Google Buzzâs home page, and following the links at the bottom of that page to the terms and conditions and privacy policy, I encountered these two pages:
Above: Google has no terms and conditions for Buzz (URL accessed 2.27 p.m. GMT [and again at 10.26 p.m. GMT]).
Above: Google has no privacy policy for Buzz (URL accessed 2.27 p.m. GMT [and again at 10.26 p.m. GMT]).
Ironically, I re-created a new profile and unchecked the âDisplay the list of people Iâm following and people following meâ option, and now, Buzz has finally disappeared. (This did not work earlierâand Scootley confirms that that should have had no effect on Buzzâs presence in my Google Dashboard. Still, itâs gone, so Iâm happy.)âJY
P.P.PS.: One consequence of having no Google profile is that Google punishes you in the search results. In an ego-surf of my name with quotes, I dipped 10,000 results because of the missing profile. (I also dipped 10,000 after an earlier attempt a few days ago of having my profile turned off.) Like one page on Google really counts for 10,000 hitsâbut apparently, Google gets pissy at you for turning your profile off!
Well, Iâd rather have a drop of 10,000 references than have weird services appear in my Google profile!âJY
