I’ve spent some serious time in bed this last week and a bit and blogging has been the last thing on my mind as I’ve had little energy. However, a quick update on what I’ve been doing:

• Autopatcher: working with Andrew from the Autopatcher team on an alternate site to their main one. The application is actually quite cool and enables people to speed up their Windows updates, especially if they have multiple computers.
• BurnzPost: This lively new group blog which was “created as a dispatcher of passionate opinions for the greater good of humankind”.
• Throng updates: the site is getting us more and more press and television networks and production houses are getting on board which is exciting.
• Psychsplash updates: Gareth is full of new ideas for updating his blog and I’ve been helping him make those a reality.
• Trendy updates: the site keeps growing and growing and is soon to launch in another city. I’ve been updating things behind the scenes and adding new features.

I’m also working on a number of other projects which haven’t yet been made public but it’s always exciting to see how people are using blogging in new ways.

Adam Walker Cleaveland sent me a note about his new free Wordpress theme based on his own blog which you can grab here.

I’ve updated my free theme but it’s not quite ready for my next blog post. I lost my computer due to theft recently which was annoying, and just before I’d backed up my part 2 of the Wordpress screencast (grr!) so that is going to have to wait for a while as I’m off to Melbourne end of next week for a workshop and mini-shopping-holiday!

One of the most loyal early-adopters on our TV community website Throng is a 14 year old guy called “Tui” from Taranaki. Over the weekend, he discovered the “secret” URL for the new TVNZ digital delivery TV service called ondemand, set to launch later this month. While no media had been granted access to the site, Tui got in and wrote an incredible review of TVNZ’s ondemand and got the scoop on how it all works.

Needless to say, the lack of password or other such protection of the service was fixed this morning and the opportunity for anyone to check out the site was lost. Actually, he just messaged me before to say he’d found parts of it still weren’t protected.

He did a great job, so if you’re interested in finding out more about TVNZ’s ondemand, check out his review and possibly digg it.

I’m currently away at Baa Camp, the New Zealand Foo Camp and really enjoying the conversations, discussions and networking here. It’s great to be around other talented and inspiring Kiwis working in the online space, along with people like Lars Rasmussen (Google Maps) and Ben Goodger (Google/Firefox).

The event kicked off last night with a great discussion about the broadband problems (and, more importantly, possible solutions) led by Minister of Communications/Minister for Information Technology David Cunliffe (possibly a distant relative). I came away really impressed by the way he listened to the concerns and ideas the group had and how he has now put the issue of peering on his agenda.

Rod Drury is the only one I’ve discovered so far who is blogging about the event, but I’m sure there will be others here doing the same.

A great (and clever) introduction to what Web 2.0 is and how it’s changing our world.

It’s been an eventful week in New Zealand with the publishing of an anonymous blog on Blogger about CYFS, our government agency for children and family social services. The blog is highly critical of social workers, naming specific cases and people and has some rather personal comments about some of them. The media has focussed on this side of the story, while the heart-wrenching stories on it, under the hurt and angry tone, are somewhat disturbing. Of course, it’s merely one side of the story and I have no dealings or personal knowledge of CYFS.

The story became big, however, when the head of CYFS said he was doing everything in his power and getting lawyers to work 24/7 to take down the blog. Instead of the blog getting a handful of hits, like many other “watchdog” or “name and shame” sites, it skyrocketed to headline news with the country debating whether or not it should be taken down. Incidentally, a non-scientific TVNZ poll had approximately 80% of respondents not wanting it gone.

In today’s Sunday papers, media personality Kerre Woodham (radio and TV host, newspaper columnist) says she wants all sites which allow anonymous comments or content to be shut down! Rather ironic, given that radio and TV do allow anonymous callers or protect the identity of interviewees when the need arises.

In addition to Kerre Woodham calling for all anonymous blogs to be shut down, today’s Herald on Sunday’s editorial hits out at bloggers:

Operated the right way, blogsites offer and generate intelligent debate and insight. The likes of kiwiblog and publicaddress are worthwhile reads, maintained by a dedicated group of talented writers and thinks. But most bloggers - and we’re talking 95 per cent - are fly-by-night, gutless wonders who prefer to spit inarticulate venom under inarticulate pseudonyms. These bloggers, operating under their own misguided belief of self-freedom rarely research any offerings…

Making up statistics (”95%”) and creating wild claims about bloggers, just because there has been a controversial case in the media this week, is hardly fair. There are plenty of insightful, articulate, intelligent, informative and successful blogs apart from those two which are listed and seem to get almost all the blog press coverage here in New Zealand.

It’s sad that traditional media needs to bash the bloggers when there’s a rich world of blogging out there.