cre8d design

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.

I’ve moaned about this before but bear with me. I’m so frustrated that iTunes hasn’t yet come to New Zealand. I’m a big music listener and frankly, I’m tired of listening to the radio while I commute. There’s just far too many ads. I love discovering new music and lately I’ve found that more and more music I like isn’t getting any airplay. When I’m online lately, I’ve been using last.fm and Pandora to discover new songs and artists.

Oh, and I’m a little obsessed with the music from Grey’s Anatomy (importing the soundtrack from Amazon because it’s not available here isn’t enough). I’ve fallen in love with Imogen Heap’s music (again, Amazon imports).

I have a good friend who’s been lending me CDs of less-mainstream artists – Evermore (beautiful album), Phoenix United, Turin Brakes, The Album Leaf, Transatlanticism and Portishead – among others.

But I’d like more music to listen to while commuting. I’d love to download a tonne of songs… but because I’m in New Zealand, it’s not easy. Our copyright laws here are well overdue for an update. You see it’s still illegal to format-shift. I.e., it’s illegal here to copy songs from your CD to your computer, iPod or cellphone. It’s illegal to make a mix tape or CD. It’s illegal to make a back-up copy of your CDs. Of course, no-one I know keeps the law in this regard – and iPods are everywhere here. Technically, the only digital music New Zealanders should have is digital music they’ve bought online.

When law changes to allow one single backup copy of our CDs (like Americans already enjoy) were proposed a couple of years ago here, the head of Sony NZ, Michael Glading, said “At the end of the day, you’re sending a message that it’s okay to copy, and that is going to kill our business,” he said. Of course, nothing has happened yet and the law is falling well the pace of technology and far behind what consumers want.

Here’s another problem: iTunes hasn’t launched here yet – presumably due to legal sagas and record companies not wanting to hand over digital sale rights. Our NZ online store options currently stand at:

1. Amplifier – MP3 format but only a limited number of New Zealand artist tracks only. No DRM which is nice. ~$1.20US for a single.
2. Coke Tunes. Try going to their site on a Mac (“the Mac version of Windows Media Player does not support the Digital Rights Management technology used to protect the music”) or in Firefox (“CokeTunes does not currently work in the Mozilla Firefox browser due to technical limitations”) and you’re turned away at the door. They don’t have anywhere near the music selection iTunes does (not all labels are on board) and the files are in WMA and have DRM. ~$1.05US for a single.
3. Digirama – WMA and DRM again. ~$1.01US for a single.

In summary: there’s currently no legal way to buy non-New Zealand music online within New Zealand for iPods. (Yes, you can illegally play around with the formats if you have the right software and convert from WMA and get rid of the DRM.)

So when TechCrunch reviews AllTunes – a Russian site which will accept overseas credit cards (unlike other online MP3 stores), naturally I was interested. Besides at a mere 9c US a song, it’s attractive financially. But is it legal? People argue both sides over at TechCrunch’s post. It seems to be taking advantage of a legal loophole there and I wonder if anything makes it back to the artist.

People are finding other ways of trying to get around the system legally – such as purchasing US iTunes gift certificates via Ebay (!), getting a friend in the US to purchase the songs on their credit card and then reimbursing via Paypal (messy and you’re paying for too many currency conversions).

Oh, and don’t get me started on the fact that there’s nothing legal to play on video iPods. No Google videos here. No TV show downloads here. *Sob*.

Territorial rights for digital content make no sense at all to me.

Ok, well not quite yet but Zoomin is the next best thing and it’s my new favourite map site for New Zealand. While there’s currently no businesses listed, it’s so handy for quickly finding street addresses. I used to use NZ Maps – but that only covered Auckland.

So much has changed in the five years since NZ Maps was created.

Zoomin offers the following advantages:

• Intelligent search – while I type in a street name, possbile matches appear (each with its suburb) with quick links for me to click.
• Just enough information – rather than listing each street name on a map (like traditional paper-based maps), only main roads are shown until I zoom in closer. The address I’m looking for is conveniently marked – rather than having to try and spot the street, then guess where the number might be on it. This makes map viewing seem so simple. When I’m at the street level, I’m provided with a list of other street numbers below the map which I can quickly click on.
• Quick to respond – as I zoom in or out, scroll up or down the page usually doesn’t need to reload – thanks to some handy AJAX behind the scenes. As a result, I’m waiting around less.
• Informative URLs -
  http://www.zoomin.co.nz/auckland/auckland/princes+street/36/
  URLs follow the pattern: Region – City/Town – Street – Number
• Nice design – I firmly believe simple is beautiful.

Great to see a Kiwi company producing useful web products.

(Geek speak: contains AJAX and is almost valid XHTML)