What the media say about Google Plus

02.07.2011/01.14

You have to wonder how many of the Google Plus reviews are being inspired by the press releases. Here’s a typical one today, which I picked at random. Rob Pegoraro writes: ‘You don’t add friends to an all-encompassing list and then, maybe, slice it into subsets; instead, you group them in “Circles” and then […]

A much more famous blogger found her Blogspot deleted

26.06.2011/10.20

I didn’t know the politics of Prof Ann Althouse before tonight, but I see her blog, which is far more widely read than mine—with readership into the eight ﬁgures—also got pulled by Google-owned Blogger recently. Her experiences mirrored mine, except she had some of her readers join in the forum, which, admittedly, didn’t help things […]

Privacy Commissioner agrees with my 2009 thoughts: New Zealand Post breached your privacy

20.06.2011/00.52

A Fairfax Press headline today: ‘“Large-scale breach” of privacy rules by NZ Post’. The Privacy Commissioner has found New Zealand Post breached privacy rules in a promotion in July 2009, which I thought would have been a juicy story back then. The reporters write: The 2009 survey asked participants 57 multi-choice questions, ranging from […]

The land beyond Facebook

14.06.2011/09.53

Stowe Boyd wrote (and I re-Tumbled) the big drop in US and Canadian Facebook trafﬁc this week: Most prominently, the United States lost nearly 6 million users, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of it. This is the ﬁrst time the country has lost users in […]

I had perfect scores but no “tiger parents”

15.05.2011/09.38

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 […]

It’s about content, especially when reality is more appealing than reality TV

10.04.2011/01.55

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 […]

And now, Ben Heck makes an ‘Atari’ Xbox 360 ‘1977 edition’

21.03.2011/09.32

A while back, I came across Benjamin J. Heckendorn (a.k.a. Ben Heck) and his Commodore 64 laptop. This is a quite a fascinating machine, considering the actual “portable” 64 Executive was a heavy beast that could kill if hurled at you. While Ben took the 64’s odd colour, keyboard and 64C’s motherboard, his is structured […]

Some positive news a month on from the Christchurch ’quake

/05.19

Tomorrow, it will be one month since the Christchurch ’quake. It’s tempting to argue scale—the Japanese earthquake and tsunami versus our own—but at the end of the day, people are people, and our nations have both been hurting. We have become united, through disasters that emphasized that we live in an emerging global community. […]

Giving our young people a fair go

26.02.2011/10.34

Earlier this month, I gave a workshop talk to the Leadership and Development Conference for the New Zealand Chinese Association in Auckland. I’ve just uploaded the speech notes, and as I did so, I wanted to append a few more thoughts. The topic was identity—not just branding, but personal identity. My self-critique […]

Google’s new algorithm will likely weed out content mills

25.02.2011/12.05

I’m not enough of a bastard to only dis Google, because they have made a pretty good move today. Google’s new algorithm, it is claimed, will weed out content farms, one type of site that has annoyed us here regularly. These are sites that just pinch others’ content automatically. Because search engines pick […]