Posts relating to culture, multiculturalism and cultural impact.
I think this shows just how badly Wellington Airport CEO Steve Fitzgerald misses the point: Being niche and understated is cool positioning for a local audience, but to be relevant on the world tourism trail, we need to shout about why we are great. Actually, not always. And even if we did have to […]
Read More… from With ‘Wellywood’, Wellington Airport misses the point about how to brand a city
Wellywood sign: see blog posts from last year (like this). You’d think Wellington Airport would know that the majority of residents are against this awful idea. An intelligent person would think: floating an idea in 2011 that was nearly universally rejected in Wellington in 2010 isn’t smart. Yet that’s exactly what they’ve done. […]
Now I see 60 Minutes New Zealand is on the act: how there’s supposedly something “different” about ‘Asians’. (God, I hate that term—I am neither Japanese, Sri Lankan or Kazakh. Prior to Winston Peters being on the scene, I thought I was Chinese, or a Chinese New Zealander.) The report surmised that it’s all about […]
Alistair Kwun always finds great articles on personal identity. The latest is from Wesley Yang in New York, discussing the Asian-American experience, and why, despite having such good grades at school, are there so few Asian-American leaders in the US? (Incidentally, this is a strange term: what do Americans call non-oriental Asians?) I applaud […]
I’ve now had confirmation from the Network Advertising Initiative that Google has, indeed, been dodgy about its Ads Preferences Manager. Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. We were able to reproduce the issues you saw and have been working with Google for the last week to address them. I am happy […]
Read More… from Google Ads Preferences Manager issue confirmed by NAI
In 2011, the issues that I spoke about during my campaign remain as pressing as they always did. We still need better, wider and earlier consultation, whether we streamline current processes or create new ones for citizen engagement. We still need to build a city-wide wifi network, one which exists but needs a […]
Read More… from One year on, the same issues remain pressing
Not only does Google Ads Preferences Manager reset on a regular basis and bugger what your preferences are, Facebook has today reset (at least for myself and one other friend) email settings. ‘Set emails to spam.’ Why Facebook does this regularly, I have no idea—but this is relatively minor compared to their removal of […]
Read More… from Facebook resets email preferences, after it removes gay photo as ‘abusive’
It’s shows like The Apprentice that have kept me away from watching TV. I was surprised to learn, in conversation last week, that TV viewership is up, while print is down. Shows you can’t base too much of what the general public does on your own experience. I estimate my magazine and book […]
Read More… from It’s about content, especially when reality is more appealing than reality TV
I have to hand it to Honda. The next new model from the Japanese firm is faster than the NSX and its old Formula 1 cars. It goes at Mach 0·72. The simplified version of Honda’s history goes something like this. Once upon a time, Mr Honda wanted to make cars. He wasn’t […]
A while back, in Desktop, I wrote about subvertising. This video, found via Rock Rodgers’ Tumblr, destroys the ads altogether, by means of a mirrored contraption that turns the projected images from a Berlin U-bahn station into rather nice art. Of course it isn’t legal, but one has to hand it to these chaps […]