Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

The New York Public Library and Wired Magazine have collaborated to bring a set of evening lectures on how new technology is changing the economics of art with speakers Lawrence Lessig, Stephen Johnson, and the dude who did the Obama poster. I'd love to see something similar in New ...

Teaching Kids to Program

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

My OSCON talk on teaching kids to program is now available as an audio podcast on the ITC Conversations Network.

Radio NZ National: Transparency

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

I'm going to be appearing regularly on Nine to Noon on National Radio Radio New Zealand National. I'm every other week, alternating with Colin Jackson. After the show airs, I'll post my notes and a link to the audio. Here's last week's: I'm going to talk about a ...

NZ Broadband

Friday, January 30th, 2009

There hasn't been a lot of action from the new Government on broadband (or anything, really, yet) but this Economist article is food for thought about spending priorities: When it comes to promoting economic activity, it is easy to see why having broadband is better than not having it, but most ...

Submission on NZ IP law and a free trade agreement with USA

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

SUBMISSION ON THE TRANSPACIFIC STRATEGIC ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES To: Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade Introduction This Submission is from Nathan Torkington, an author, musician, and software professional whose address is [...]. Summary I strongly oppose any proposals to extend the term of copyright, entrench digital rights management, assign investigation ...

National Library joins Flickr Commons

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

Way to go, National Library of New Zealand! They're the latest addition to Flickr Commons!

Good one, National Library!

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

My friend Aaron Swartz writes about the increasingly-evil OCLC: Not satisfied with controlling the world's largest source of book information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It's now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally ...

NZ Broadband Pricing and Network Neutrality

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

In this Ziff-Davis Australia article, the leaders of Australia's three largest ISPs declare network neutrality to be an American problem and explain why. It's an interesting argument, but I think there are some key elements unstated in the article. In America, largely for historical reasons, residential customers have "all you ...

Memo to Future Nat on Slides

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Reading back through my notebook at my jottings from last week's frantic flurry of meetings, I found this hard-learned lesson: When preparing slides for others, they MUST read them when you're done and MUST give a trial presentation with the hardware in place and MUST be the presenter doing these things. Yes, ...

Software Freedom Day Notes: ACTA

Friday, September 19th, 2008

Mark Harris lead this session. Was at SSC, MORST, now Independent. When Wikileaks in May released ACTA doc, saw NZ mentioned, began digging. ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Proposed by Japan and USA, but not limited to them at all. About eight countries, mainly G8 and a few ...