Listen to my 2 July 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show. I spoke about emotional robots, Kiwi web awards, and a new US government transparency web site.
Below are my notes. I prepare a small essay on the subjects I’m talking about because it helps me get my thoughts straight. We often deviate from the topic of my notes (as we did today with the long sidetrack into artificial intelligence). I look at my notes as where the conversation starts, not where it stops.
Listen to my 18 June 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show. I spoke about online dating scams, Twitter’s role in the Iranian election protests, and would have spoken about Chris Knox but we ran out of time.
Here are my notes:
What: Websites that let people post their details and look for matches to date. Biggest is match.com. Because it’s the web, members are not necessarily in the same country.
Glen Barnes and I have softlaunched opengovt.org.nz, an effort to do some MySociety-style projects for New Zealand. Glen’s built a catalog for open government data, and there’s a mailing list on which we’re discussing the next project.
I’m excited, I’m going to be at the 2009 GOVIS conference on Government and IT. I’m closing the event out on Friday May 22, but also running two workshops before it opens: Work With The Web, Not Against It and Planning for 2012. The conference happens in Wellington, 20-22 May.
Ever seen a web site with absolutely hideous URLs? You know the ones I mean–they can’t be read by humans, they’re longer than one line in email, they have ? in them and so on. These URLs make it hard for people to bookmark, share, and cite your web site. Why would you do that? Work With The Web, Not Against It covers these kind of epic fails in web sites. Five-step registration, miserable mobile experiences, failures building communities, …. I got a million of ’em, and I’ll be sharing them at this workshop.
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 Zealand: Christchurch, Auckland, Wellington, all with a few tech-literate artists, academics, journalists, etc. telling it how it is.
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 few groups and websites working on keeping the government honest and useful.
I’ll talk about:
The show aired Feb 12, 2009, and is available as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files.
My OSCON talk on teaching kids to program is now available as an audio podcast on the ITC Conversations Network.
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 benefits are likely to come from wiring people up in the first place rather than making existing connections hum faster. In Japan and South Korea over 40% of households have fibre links capable of blazing speeds, but that does not seem to have resulted in more rapid economic growth, or the emergence of new applications unavailable to consumers with ordinary broadband.
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 or enforcement powers to rights holders beyond those already in law, or otherwise use copyright law against consumers and artists. I also strongly oppose any interference with parallel importing.
Way to go, National Library of New Zealand! They’re the latest addition to Flickr Commons!