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 is asking libraries to put an OCLC policy notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library.

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 can eat” plans. Buffet bandwidth is the order of the day, every day. As the number of people online continues to grow, and they do more bandwidth-intensive things (YouTube movies vs all-text web pages), telcos must buy new hardware. “How do they pay for it?” the article asks, and offers up three solutions: charge heavy consumers more (the Australian and New Zealand “metered Internet” solution); charge the people serving lots of data rather than we who consume it (which pisses Google off and starts a “network neutrality” war); or just suck up the costs themselves.

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, I made slides for someone, and then discovered that the remote control started the slideshow just fine but didn’t advance; that I’d put the sections in a different order; that the person I’d made slides for wasn’t comfortable with the forward and backward keys; … and on it went.

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 others like us and Morocco. Mainly about IP. Calling it “counterfeit” gets it under the radar.

Also very much about the Internet. While it did talk about physical products, morphed over last four years and now about more. Don’t really know what it is about: unnerving level of secrecy. Can’t find anything official about what it is, other than US trade representatives office official line “it’s about enforcement”, a universal framework of enforcement procedures around the world. All have signed non-disclosure agreements.

I’ll be in Wellington on Saturday, September 20th, for Software Freedom Day. It’s open source’s open day, a chance for the general public who might have been curious about open source to come along and learn more. There’ll be copies of Linux given out and a WellyLUG installfest to provide any help people need installing Linux on their own machines, a SuperHappyDevHouse hack day, and a Bar Camp (which I’m emceeing). It’s going to be a heap of fun, and a chance to make a positive difference to software in this country. If you’ll be in Wellington on Saturday, swing by for the 12pm kickoff and join the fun!

I’m speaking at Webstock 2009 and really looking forward to it. What an amazing lineup of talent they have! I’ve been privileged to meet many of these folks before, and I’m honoured and intimidated to be in their ranks. I can safely say that New Zealand has never had such an incredible collection of technology people in one place before. Off the top of my head, here are three brilliant people on their list:

Jenny Morel is raising a $100M NZ VC fund. That’s good news, in that NZ needs smart angels and VCs. I’ve had a number of NZ friends making the rounds of US venture capital firms and angels looking for investors, and the message has always been “not while you’re in NZ”. Of course, it’s rarely stated quite so bluntly (VCs never want to close the door!), but it’s always quite clear that it’s much harder to invest in something that’s on the other side of the world than something you can drop in on regularly.

I had a thought on Saturday that wouldn’t let go. Here’s the brief pitch: let me know what you think.

Paul Graham, the creator of Y! Combinator, recently wrote an essay in which he said “Maybe in the long term the right answer for dealing with Internet distractions will be software that watches and controls them”. The link on “software” was to Rescue Time, a web site that gathers your per-app time usage and compares it to others (a Y! Combinator company; Paul is shameless).

My fellow O’Reilly Radar blogger Brady forwarded a comment from a mailing list that said “Software can’t keep people focused/productive, it has to come either from within or through external forces (deadlines, time limits, etc.)”. I was moved to respond.

Last year, Kiwi Foo Camp acted as a fundraiser for my kids’ local primary school. Around 60 kids, 3.5 teachers, and at the time they had around six old Windows 2000 and Windows XP boxes in various stages of decay. They’d planned to buy new computers but were making the “Macs are too expensive” noises. I gave them the Foo money and said, “use this to buy Macs”. They were able to buy nine bright shiny new Macbooks.