Ti Point Tork

Nine to Noon: 4 Mar 2010

March 3, 2010 – 8:51 pm
I talked today about cryptography, China, and Facebook's billions. My apologies for how rushed it was on air, but we had less time than usual. I've written up below what I was going to say. Listen in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. Links The Code Book, Mozilla Debates Whether to Trust Chinese, and Facebook on Track for $1B Revenue This Year. Cryptography I've read this fabulous book on cryptography by Simon Singh, "The Code Book". It's easy to read and full of the little anecdotes and trivia nuggets that I love. The book opens with the story of Mary, Queen of Scots. It's a great story for illustrating the value and dangers of cryptography. Mary, as I'm sure you know, was sister to Queen Elizabeth and probably had the better claim to the throne. She misjudged the politics and showed up in England to get away from tetchy Scottish ...

Posted in Radio, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

NZ Doing Good in ACTA Negotiation

March 1, 2010 – 1:15 pm
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is an agreement between countries around IP rights and enforcement. The negotiations have been happening in secret, with every country saying "well, we'd love to reveal what we're talking about but those other countries just won't let us". Fortunately there have been leaks, and the latest is a fascinating glimpse at how these things are put together and where the parties stand. It seems bizarre at first, but the draft is laid out like a spreadsheet: one article per row and with three columns, one each for the US/Japan version, the EU version, and comments. Inside each sentence square brackets mark the attributed proposed alternatives for language. From this we can tell some very interesting things about the New Zealand position: NZ negotiators are keen on the wording "copyright and related rights and trademarks" rather than the US's catch-all "intellectual property". Richard ...

Posted in New Zealand, politics, Technology | 6 Comments »

Nine to Noon, 18 Feb 2010

February 22, 2010 – 12:45 pm
You can listen to my Nine to Noon emerging technology slot from 18 Feb 2010 in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats. The links for the show appear below, though we didn't get to the media scares story: Computer Engineer Barbie, Digital Books and Your Rights, and A history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook. The author of the latter writes the excellent Mind Hacks blog.

Posted in Radio | No Comments »

Community Management Workshop

February 21, 2010 – 10:36 am
I attended a workshop on community management at Webstock, and at the end asked the attendees to write down some words of wisdom for a new community manager, maybe something they wish they'd been told or something they learned at the workshop. Here's their collected advice: Networking is important—often there are other groups doing similar things that are happy to piggy-back on projects or contribute resource. Before you start, understand your resource requirement and allow for growth, especially if updating/collecting info for the community. It's easy to contact and update for 60 organisations, a lot harder for 3,000. Depth of relationship allows for more engagement and vulnerability. Keep raising the bar! "Personal" rewards from community involvement translates to professional reward and back again. Always have a back-up person—don't be your own single point of failure. It can be important to reward people for participating in your online community. Go where your community already is, ...

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

Media 7: Social Media

February 16, 2010 – 12:21 pm
I had a good time a few weeks ago with Russell Brown, Vaughn Davis, and Ms Behaviour talking about social media on the Media 7 show. You can watch it online.

Posted in New Zealand, Technology | No Comments »

Auckland City Data Sales

February 7, 2010 – 9:40 pm
I used LGOIMA, the local government equivalent of the Official Information Act, to request details on how much revenue Auckland City council and the Auckland-area collective geospatial body made from geodata sales. Today I got the PDF of their response. Neither Auckland City nor ALGGi have made much from the sales, and I suspect the opportunity cost of the paywalled data far exceeds all their revenue to date.

Posted in Gov 2.0, New Zealand | No Comments »

NZICT Near Future Digital Priorities Paper

December 8, 2009 – 11:49 am
NZICT is an industry lobby group, representing the NZ ICT industry (software, hardware, services, networks, education, and training). They've just released a "Near Future Digital Priorities" paper. Here are my first thoughts. First, I have to applaud the industry getting together to try and figure out how it can help the rest of NZ grow. The most exciting conversation at the short-lived Digital Development Council was when agriculture and manufacturing and other industries had an honest conversation with representatives of the ICT industry without being sidetracked into the failures or benefits of particular products or vendors. Second, I applaud the idea that ICT can contribute to the lift in national economic performance that the government wants. Lately I've been thinking that there are three critical parts to NZ's industries doing better: (1) make better use of ICT, (2) develop a global focus so our businesses don't plateau once ...

Posted in Business, New Zealand, politics, Technology | 1 Comment »

Predictions into Opportunities

November 16, 2009 – 1:31 pm
Just a heads-up: over on the O'Reilly Radar blog, I posted about the opportunities for businesses in the future based on Stephen O'Grady's predictions for 2010.

Posted in Business | No Comments »

Telecom Encouraging Uploads

November 1, 2009 – 2:31 pm
Citing growth in photo-sharing and social media sites, Telecom have announced they won't charge for upstream traffic. That is to say, upload photos and movies all you like until the end of January when such traffic counts again toward your monthly bill. I've long believed that symmetric bandwidth is critical if we don't want to be a nation of passive consumers, so I'm chuffed to see a big telco support this. Fingers crossed for my ISP, Orcon, to do the same!

Posted in New Zealand, Technology | No Comments »

Open Access Day at Victoria University

October 14, 2009 – 10:53 pm
If you're in Wellington on the week of October 19, check out Victoria University's Open Access events. There are a pile of events and talks planned on the campus for that week as part of International Open Access Week. Check it out on the Creative Commons New Zealand page for the week.

Posted in New Zealand | No Comments »