Category: Community & Social

  • Managing Behaviour & Technology – A Night with NEAL

    I’ve just arrived back from an evening session on “Managing Technology and Behaviour @ Home” run by Andrew Cowie, Heather Eccles and Alan Curtis from NEAL (Northern Education Access Loop). I surprised myself by enjoying the session, it wasn’t that I personally learned anything technical, it was all about the presentation of the material which was simply […]

  • This is water

    A bit of a deviation from my standard fare of techy news and opinion, but I’m bundling this under “Community & Social” – I think it fits well. This video gave me pause for thought… It’s a well produced, visually engaging excerpt from an address to graduates in 2005 by novelist David Foster Wallace. Sadly, […]

  • Path of Exile – Crowdsourcing Funds

    The very excellent MMO “Path of Exile” by Kiwi game developer Grinding Gear Games has managed to raise US$2.5 million (yes that’s million, little finger to the corner of your mouth Dr Evil styles…) through crowd-sourcing future development funds from the online gaming community. This is not the first success they’ve had with funding via […]

  • Social Scams and Why They Work

    Over the last week, as New Zealanders begin to change their jandals (flip-flops / thongs) for shoes, I’ve noted a significant increase in the number of “warnings” being posted in my social network feeds. This is not uncommon and it’s not unique only to my network of contacts as these articles point out. Now, for […]

  • Going Dark…

    You may have noticed that I took the main page of this site offline yesterday and replaced it with this one as part of the Anti-SOPA protest… this post is not related to that action. Following a conversation yesterday, the social networks, communities and “non-standard” contact channels that I am active in will now see […]

  • Getting Ubuntu to Boot *AFTER* installing Windows 7

    From Google, and the various Linux community forums, this is a fairly common problem so, in an effort to be more useful than those who simply post a link to the GRUB man page, or an article which spells out how dumb it is to install Windows AFTER Ubuntu – I thought I’d drop my […]

  • NetHui 2011 – Day 1: Digital Citizenship – 21st Century Parenting

    21st Century Parenting – Challenges and Solutions Lee Chisholm, Operations manager, NetSafe This was an obvious choice as a session for me to attend, and it opened with an attention grabbing quote… “Three times as many smart phones every minute are activated than there are babies being born” – Hans Vestberg, CEO of Ericsson This […]

  • NetHui 2011 – Day 1: Innovation & Emerging Issues – Privacy Issues

    Privacy Issues for business in the new digital age Marie Shroff (Privacy Commissioner) This session started with a fizz and a whimper, I think based more on the usual audience for the Privacy Commission than the subject matter itself. I did enjoy the comics though 🙂 Customers are starting to take an ACTUAL interest in […]

  • NetHui 2011 – Day 1: Globalisation, the Internet and the Law – The Internet as a Revolutionary Tool

    Session Lead by: Brian Calhoun, Independent Consultant and co-chair of NZRise Inc  “I see a gradual slide toward corporate and government control…by control I mean content” The session started with a discussion of TOR / BitCoin / BitTorrent – all created specifically to circumvent control systems that were already in existence. The question then posed […]

  • NetHui 2011 – Day 1: Digital Citizenship – Cyber-Bullying

    Digital Citizenship – Combating Cyber-bullying & Harassment Stream led by: John Fenaughty (NetSafe) Perhaps the most notable example of standing up against bullying of recent times is that of 16-year old Australian Casey Haynes story (YouTube “Fat Kid takes on Bully”) a video that went viral both online and via traditional prime time media. When asked, 33.2% of youth […]