You know how some naysayers claim that the web is full of crap and that little on it is credible. I roll my eyes and decide that they’ve been looking in the wrong places. And then you stumble upon a piece of crap that reveals itself as crap with only the slightest investigation.
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It is not vanity to want to know when your name is mentioned somewhere on a web page. It is also not difficult to find out as it happens and be alerted in your email box.
Google’s search engine has many little tricks under the sparse front page that serves as its metaphorical bonnet. Find out simply when someone uses your name (or refers, perhaps, to someone identically named). If you are John Smith, expect many false alarms.
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It must be 23-years since New Zealand companies scrambled to register their name or product against a domain name. It’s time to scramble again because you can now drop the .org.nz, .co.nz and .net.nz and just have plain old .nz Hang on to the originals because they’re still perfectly usable but make sure your competitor doesn’t get the new version.
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A year ago I hit upon a mobile phone, calendar and contacts combination that was so close to perfect that it would have done me for some years. So I sold the phone and started again.
I really liked that Nokia 920 mobile with wireless charger. It felt more like Apple’s build quality than some of the plastic Android phones and it worked superbly.
I bought the Nokia so that I could sync my contacts, calendar and tasks easily between my PC and phone.
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Topstyle, the HTML, CSS and PHP text editor has been out now for some months in version 5 and it is the best editor of its type that I have used in nearly 20 years of developing web sites. I don’t say that lightly – I’m fussy as I sit on a keyboard 9 hours a day.
I was an early user of HotDog, an HTML editor that appeared around 1995. It was such an improvement on Notepad that I bought the next two versions without hesitation. Then I discovered Homesite around 1998 and stuck with it through its sale to Macromedia and then Adobe until the latter abandoned it.
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Trademe has turned into a bully and it’s only taken 13 years.
When Trademe started in the late nineties, it was an underdog. Ebay largely ignored New Zealand and so the chance was there for someone to step in. It has taken only a few years for a keen young company to turn into an Internet bully.
Trademe is flexing its muscles as its (hapless) competitors line up for a crack at its lead. Sam Morgan let his mask slip when labelled one competitor’s efforts a “joke”. Yes he retracted, probably on wiser counsel and added some mitigating weasel words, but his attitude is clear.
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It seems many people want to write about their experiences for the Dominion Post’s website, called Stuff. The New Zealand Herald also solicits contributions from readers. They each call it “user-generated content”. TVNZ and TV3 are keen too.
Stuff Nation (who on earth dreamed that one up), the user section on Stuff, solicits articles, videos and images from readers and judging by an early response, it’s popular enough. There is always a catch and Stuff nation’s catch seems similar to that of other New Zealand media organisations who solicit contributions from readers: who owns your video or images when you submit to their terms of reference and load it up?
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