Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Leaving the bunker | Mar 14, 2008 10:40

The e-government unit at the State Services Commission has been determined over the past few years to get to grips with the internet and social media and respond appropriately. Given that this usually involves exposing process and/or leaving the bunker, it's not without risks --and is all the more laudable for that.

The latest development is an actual e.govt blog, which has distinguished itself with a strikingly useful piece of content: its own staff contribution guidelines, which is published under a Creative Commons licence. The idea is that other state agencies and NGOs can adopt and adapt it for themselves.

I suspect the guidelines will also be worth a look for private companies considering going social. I touched on the "what should my company do about blogging?" question in two presentations I gave last week. It's somewhere that businesspeople appreciate guidance that goes beyond "Rule One: Don't be a doofus".(Although I should note that that rule is, and will always be, the veritable lodestone of all corporate blogging guidelines.)

Meanwhile, Colin Espiner blogs John Key's promise to hold public service staff numbers. On one hand, I suspect Key is right, and that there are indeed instances of bloat, empty strategising and Wellington log-rolling to be found. On the other, National's use of the perjorative epithet "bureaucrat" for anyone who's not a nurse, teacher or cop is fatuous and offensive.

Key seemed to be trying to use the b-word in every sentence when he talked to Havoc yesterday. As Victoria University's Bill Ryan pointed out in an interesting interview on bFM later in the day, Key also referred to "navel-gazers" and "paper-shufflers". Like Ryan, I'm not averse to scrutiny, especially of favoured ministries. I'd just prefer it to be conducted in grown-up language.

No Right Turn, Stephen Judd and Deborah have joined the trans-Tasman blog swarm over the appalling racism shown by an Alice Springs hotel, which evicted a group of aboriginal women and children on the grounds that they were "not suitable" to stay there, on account of being aboriginal. Me too.

Cam Pitches of the Campaign for Better Transport, which won the support of regional councillors this week for a rail extension to Auckland Airport, popped in to discuss Whaleoil's abusive post about him. What followed was a classic episode of pants-pooing and toy-throwing from the host. If that's not your thing, you might prefer to just proceed to the campaign's website.

I'm mindful of both the usefulness and the huge cost of Sydney's airport rail link, but we're talking about a very different project here. Thanks to the CBG's advocacy, the Onehunga branch line is already being refurbished and reopens next year and it's a (relatively) short stretch from there to the airport. Most of the talk about it seems to have been in terms of passenger traffic, but I would think the case for freight is at least as compelling. And anything that would get other vehicles off the southwestern motorway between 4.30 and 7pm would certainly be welcomed by frequent flyers and visitors alike.

Brilliant comment on Harry Hutton's blog regarding Joseph Stiglitz's costing of the Iraq war at US$3,000,000,000,000:

It a cruel and callous thing to think of the cost this heinous war in terms of dollars.

I mean, if you think of it in pounds or euros it doesn't look nearly half as bad.

And, because it's Friday, a mash-up of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' that actually rivals the Nirvana-Destiny's Child classic 'Teen Booty': Party Ben's Daft Punk vs Nirvana, 'Smells Stronger'.

And my favourite cartoon of the year:

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Geekstravaganza | Mar 13, 2008 11:30

The unbundled broadband/voice plans announced this morning by Orcon under the Orcon@home+ brand, look pretty good -- assuming, of course, that you're connected to one of the five Auckland exchanges where Orcon has kit installed.

The service is ADSL2+, meaning, in theory, that it offers up to 24Mbit/s downstream and 1Mbit/s upstream. At this morning's launch Orcon CEO Scott Bartlett was frank about the fact that the service will only be a "marginal" improvement over the current Telecom offering in suburbs -- like Pt Chev -- that are on copper runs more than four or five km from their exchange. But Mac guy Mark Webster, who's a couple of kilometres from the Ponsonby exchange, has been getting full whack during the trials, so it appears that this is real.

Bartlett also said that these lines are "12 times" better provisioned than Telecom DSL -- which is pretty good for a service that's three times faster -- and that Orcon can ramp up its backhaul provision as required. Apart from prioritising http traffic, they're not doing any throttling. Non-geek translation: it should perform as advertised.

Anyway, the basic "Purple" plan gets you broadband with a 10GB monthly cap for $79.95, with sensible upgrade options for increasing the cap, up to 100GB for an extra $60 monthly. It's a naked DSL offering, so you can do without a voice line altogether if you wish.

The $100 "Gold" plan adds a phone with unlimited local and national calling, voicemail, call waiting and caller ID. You can add unlimited calling to any of 15 other countries at $10 per country, and you can keep your existing phone number. And the $120 "Platinum" plan starts with 25GB of data and unlimited calling to any one nominated country, with the same upgrade provisions as the Gold.

All plans come with a free modem/wireless access point, or you can rent Orcon's "home hub" router for $5 a month.

They're probably not deals for your mum, but for communications-happy households they're a welcome innovation. The unbundled exchanges are Glenfield, Browns Bay, Ellerslie, Mt Albert and Ponsonby. The Auckland CBD, Remuera, Takapuna and Albany follow, and the company's goal is to cover 300,000 Auckland households by year's end. Rollouts in Wellington and Christchurch start late this year.

Orcon's network will also be available at wholesale to other providers, including (heh) Telecom. I'm still a Wired Country guy until such time as Telecom installs those cabinet in the Chev (the regulation around unbundled access to cabinets is going to be very interesting), but I'm impressed by this. Vodafone: stop complaing and show us what ya got.

Further on the geek tip, the brand for the Freeview terrestrial HDTV service was also announced this morning. It's -- tad da! -- Freeview HD. Indications are that the major free-to-air networks will broadcast everything they can in HD, from launch. And launch is … sometime in April.

It looks like there will be terrestrial decoders in the shops before the "intergrated digital TV" sets (ie: TVs with a Freeview HD decoder built in). In Britain, the integrated TVs are dominating the Freeview market, but the newer spec in use here isn't available built-in yet. Happily, we'll be able to take advantage of the scale of several Asian markets, which have adopted the DTT spec drawn up by Freeview in New Zealand. Sharing the spec like that is a very clever move.

Meanwhile, since yesterday, I've been playing with a Freeview-compatible PVR -- the Topfield TF6000PVR ES, to be precise. It's a nice machine, per-programmed for Freeview, but the user interface isn't quite ready for your mum. I gather Freeview is working on a consumer-friendly UI for terrestrial PVRs by Topfield and others, to launch in September.

The Topfield has the odd quirk -- it seems to jump around on rewinding and fast-forwarding - but its core features certainly work. I've had less luck with the Ethernet LAN port on it. It seems to see my router, but doesn't pick up a DHCP address -- and without that, I can't download the USB driver and file transfer application I need to get files off the box, for production purposes. It also looks like I need a Windows PC (and not a Mac) to install the applications via USB. Any advice gratefully received.

The superfluous media geek upshot is that we can now digitally record four channels simultaneously. If we get the forthcoming Freeview terrestrial add-odd for the Playstation 3, we'll be able to capture six at once. You may regard this as tragic.

And, finally, there's been a big upheaval at Yahoo!Xtra: it has been decided that "due to a change in corporate direction" the company no longer needs a marketing department. Among other things, that means the departure of marketing director Susan Carlton. Susan has sometimes borne the brunt of criticism here, but she has always done so gracefully. And although she has never said so, I think in her position I would have been wondering what the hell I'd struck in the Yahoo joint venture with Xtra. Anyone with more goss on the great marketing chop and what it might mean is welcome to share.

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What I'd really like to know | Mar 12, 2008 09:39

I had a grump yesterday at Vernon Small for declaring that the Speaker's Tour would "overshadow" the announcement yesterday of a $700 million research fund for the food and pastoral sectors. An annual MPs' junket is bigger news than a step-change in support for innovation in industries that will, literally, feed our children? Really?

I was wrong, of course. The story led One News last night, and is all over the place this morning, with the Herald's editorial column, in keeping with it recent fondness for lurid language, declaring it "turns the stomach".

You could be forgiven for thinking the Speaker's Tour exists principally as an annual opportunity for set-piece media outrage, to flare briefly and then be forgotten until the next year's Speaker's Tour.

In 2001, the angle was that the perkbuster himself, Rodney Hide, was on the trip to South America; Speaker Jonathan Hunt refused to release the itinerary and the press dubbed it the "Tango Tour", because, um, the delegation watched a demonstration of the tango in Buenos Aires. In 2002, the scandal was 'MPs snub own airline for Qantas'. Last year, it was that so many MPs would be overseas during the April recess.

It's clear enough that some indignation is due over this year's trip, because four of the five MPs travelling to Eastern Europe are retiring at the election and the fifth, Peter Brown, might be lucky to be returned by the voters.

Claire Trevett's story for the Herald does distinguish itself by listing the people the delegation will be meeting: the Prime Minister and President of Poland, the Speakers of the Czech and Hungarian assemblies, our ambassadors, etc. In principle, this isn't a bad thing. Even in the networked world, there is no substitute for actually meeting people face-to-face -- but that benefit should surely be extended to MPs in a position to act on it. And seriously, is it wise to send Brian Connell anywhere?

Perhaps the most interesting part was observing the response of the various parties. Helen Clark had a carefully-honed response, Katherine Rich was relaxed and willing to discuss the matter, John Key disclaimed all responsibility -- and Marian Hobbs completely blew it and had to go to ground.

I'd wait for the gallery journalists to raise a hue and cry at the time it might count -- that is, when the next annual $100,000 budget (the same as in 2002, by the way) is approved -- but I fear I'd be waiting a long time.

Anyway, if, as most people seem to agree, the $700m NZ Fast Forward fund is such an important step for a crucial sector, where is the expertise? NZPA did a good job in the hours after the announcement yesterday, but If it's such a no-brainer, where are the morning-after stories that demonstrate the depth of knowledge amongst our major media organisations?

The most interesting element, to me, is the identification of "sustainable pastoral systems" as one of the four key areas of research. This not only puts some real money behind the theme of sustainability that has characterised under our science and research philosophy for the past few years, it addresses a screaming need to find ways to enjoy the current dairy bounty without exhausting all our clean water, and to try and curb our pastoral greenhouse gas problem. And the focus on value-added food products seems to support Fonterra's approach of tailoring food products to the needs of new markets.

But I have questions. What are the most promising areas of research? What products are pending? Which private-sector companies are most likely to pony up matching funds? Who will own the intellectual property in the killer products we want to create? Why has forestry been specifically left out? Aren't biomaterials very important too? Do we need another one of these funds? What about basic research? And why does the fund have such a terrible name?

I know we have quite a few scientists reading here, and a smaller number who post in our forums. I'd be very grateful if you could all venture some comment, so the readers and I could read perspectives we're not finding elsewhere today.

PS: If you want a demonstration of the merits of actual sector knowledge in commentary, you could do worse than Fran O'Sullivan's column on the Auckland Airport wrangle today. Her indignant response on Sunday to an Independent story ("For many years the financial paper used to make a practice of trying to undermine other business journalists' stories when it had been scooped") is quite bracing too.

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The Universal Intercept | Mar 11, 2008 10:39

Stephen Judd has spotted the mistake in the Dominion Post's headline: Crims' texts wiped. It is not "crims" texts being "wiped", it is everyone's, including the rather large majority of non-criminals, including those who read the Dominion Post.

And even that's not right: text messages are not being "wiped". Since March 2007, they have no longer been stored as a matter of course by Vodafone, thanks to the deployment of a new system that passes messages across the network without the need for storage or decryption. Telecom is expected to follow suit this year. With text message volumes now up over half a billion monthly, I assume it's much more efficient.

I was one of the people who were fairly relaxed when police gained a greater ability to intercept electronic communications. I could see no difference in principle between intercepting voice calls on phone networks and electronic messages on the same networks, and I accept that sometimes the police need to do that. I don't accept the need for them to force telcos to apply what amounts to a permanent intercept of an entire nation's messages.

If the police want an intercept, they can seek a warrant, and every telco and ISP in the country will readily comply. Short of that, there is no logical argument for storing billions of private messages a year yet regarding voice conversations as somehow too private to keep.

The Dom Post's sister paper, The Nelson Mail, seems to get it.

As you might expect, the Police Association's Greg O'Connor is demanding that the government legislate to force telcos to capture and hold all messages (permanently, I suspect, would be his preference). I don't regard Mr O'Connor as a great servant of liberty, and I wouldn't expect him to grasp the potential for abuse of such an archive. Once it's there, the ability to "fish" for information, or to widen the purposes of searches is only a law change away.

BTW: Kudos to Vodafone's Paul Brislen for having the skills and sense to post information in his official capacity, as he did on Stephen's blog. I wish comms people did that more often, rather than insisting on routing the information through a third party in the news media.

Meanwhile, an onstage interview at South By Southwest with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has turned into a "trainwreck" after audience members decided they wanted to hear a lot more about privacy and less about the nice stuff. Part of the interview is on YouTube. The interviewer, Business Week's Sarah Lacy is interviewed afterwards here. She seems, like, a bit of a dick.

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