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:

Online Dating Scams

NZ Herald story

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.

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:

• “Rouge Archivist” Carl Malamud and his website http://public.resource.org. He was featured in Wired recently.
• MySociety and their projects, particularly They Work For You which has a NZ version, Fix My Street and What Do They Know. TWFY aims to make parliamentary record more useful. FMS lets you report potholes, graffiti, etc. WDTK lets people who make Freedom of Information Act requests share what they learn.
• The Economist article about these transparency projects which specifically singles out the local government portal of Missouri and the crowdsourcing project which hopes to get volunteers reading the proposal and build a database of where the money goes. Even a simple picture helps citizens (and journalists) make sense of what’s going on.

The show aired Feb 12, 2009, and is available as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files.