Now while I expect the All Blacks to win, I don’t think it will be as easy as some are predicting.

The only way I see the French having achance is if they come out with huge intensity and get over 14 points clear in the first 20 minutes.

Then doubt would come in and spoil the AB’s gameplan.

However, I expect a score of around 25 – 13

Come on NZ, win the tournament playing the best rugby – not just winning rugby, but winning rugby that is entertaining to watch!

Times are changing in TV land.

While we in NZ still have restrictive broadband limitations in speed and monthly data caps, the world moves ahead in the use of streaming video.

Offerings such as Hulu and Netflix, plus streaming options through other providers such as Amazon mean that video delivered over the internet is dominating internet traffic in those markets.

But even in New Zealand, on demand video is becoming more and more prevalent. MySky allows for easy recording and playback of shows from SkyTV’s plethora of channels and the free to air networks have the OnDemand services where you can catch up on shows you have missed only a day later.

But what this “on demand” method of consuming video (and audio) does, is it puts the control of the content back into the viewers hands.

Apart from live events such as sport, where the “watching it live” component is eminently important, most other forms of TV or movies can be consumed at the viewers leisure. No more checking the TV guide and planning your life around when a particular show is on, just watch it when you like.

Imagine a world where you can pick and choose all of the shows you want to watch with no reliance on date and time.

What impact could this have on the different parts of the ecosystem?

Producers of Content: Major producers might be more selective of what content they invest in and so the number of productions might reduce in size (possibly better funded). Independent producers of content such as the Twit Network may be encouraged to produce more content to fill the gaps left my changed in major network production.

Advertisers: Much improved analytics and viewer statistics will allow for much more targeted advertising. Ads for lower rating shows will reflect those lower ratings and advertisers can get a real idea as to the viewership of their ad portfolio.

Consumers: Fringe shows (from the current model) will become even more marginalised until they disappear. Niche shows will be created by nimble producers focussed on fanatical audiences. The only scheduled shows will be live events.

I like this future as it enables true choice for the consumer and a better experience.

Make that really angry.

The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill is a contentious bill with history of internet protest. Maybe the knowledge that more highly visible protest would precede any passing of this bill caused the government to rush the Bill through parliament under urgency.

While the Bill has been changed to be more balanced than in it’s early incarnations, it’s termination clause was still a reason to protest.

But what this really highlighted, was not so much the content of the Bill itself, but the politics surrounding it.

Admissions from National politicians, that discussions with other countries over free trade talks were a consideration, gave a feeling that there were underhanded reasons for what was happening last night.

So what is urgency? Here is a link to the NZ Parliament site that explains:

The House of Representatives sometimes goes into “urgency” to make progress on business additional to what would be possible under the normal rules for sitting hours and progress of business.

Now this session of Urgency was called to deal with legislation related to the Christchurch Earthquake. However, completely unrelated business can be added.

Given that Copyright issues have absolutely nothing to do with the earthquake, one can make the following assumptions:

• The Government had some other agenda (Maybe this was part of the free trade negotiations)
• Pressure was being applied by supporters of the Bill (In this case the likely supporters are Record and Movie companies)
• By passing under urgency, with no notice, anticipated protest could be held to a minimum

Regardless of your opinions on the pros and cons of the “Three Strikes” and final sanction of internet account holder suspension, the conduct of the MP’s who were in the debating chamber last night made for some interesting insights.

I was up watching Parliament TV streaming online here, so were many others, possibly giving Parliament TV it’s best ratings ever. Alongside my stream was my Twitter feed and especially the comments tagged with #blackout.

It was an amazing and compelling evening of watching most MP’s wallow in their abject understanding of the topic they were debating, while those interested spectators spouted vitriol towards them via Social Media.

Special mention must go to Gareth Hughes (@GarethMP), Jacinda Adren (@jacindaardern) and Clare Curran (@clarecurranmp) who seemed to at least have a working understanding of what was being discussed.

Brickbats go to Melissa Lee and Jonathan Young who seemed so unsure of the terminology and the concepts being discussed that they are now stars in their own parodies of themselves.

Quite how a piece of legislation can be debated by those who are completely unqualified and also when key players are away (The Minister of Commerce, Simon Power) is amazing, maybe there should be a quiz before entering the chamber to test the knowledge of those wanting to participate in the debate.

As of this morning, the Bill was passed, with both Labour and National voting for, with the Greens the majority of those opposed.

It won’t spell the end of the internet, but the political process has exposed to many as a farce.

It seems the Greens got a few more supporters last night. Will it make a difference come election day?

Most definitely I am not. It harkens back to the day when I was at University and spent the entire 3 years of my computer science degree and did not touch a PC at all.

Now, I have always thought that Universities are supposed to prepare you for your career after you leave, but to not even use a PC is a bit of a joke.

Anyway, we used Apple computers for the first two years doing programming and other things. My flatmate was an Apple devotee, I was not. I can see the design aesthetics, I can sometimes see the usability benefits. But I much preferred my PC.

Zoom forward nearly 20 years and we have now have two iterations of the iPad.

I am using one (v1) at the moment for a client project and so have had quite a play with it.

It’s nice, it’s easy to use (for some things) and it makes my kids go all gooey, but it still leaves me cold.

My smartphone and my laptop seem to be a better combination that the iPad. It just seems to me to be a device that does things OK, but it doesn’t seem to fit a need.

What is there that the iPad can do that other devices can’t? What is it that made it a “must have” device?

Seeing the recent launch hysteria of the iPad 2 makes me wonder if it is any better than the original.

Can anyone help me out with this one?

The panel consist of 10 media types and 18 sports people from a wide range of sports. Interestingly, none of them are from Football.

Possibly sentiment carried the day, Dick Taylor is due to resign as he didn’t “agree with the end result.”

As the President of the Canterbury Rugby Supporters Club, you could guess that football is not his favourite sport, but his beef seems mainly that he thinks you must win something to be eligible.

“Really, they (All Whites) didn’t win anything. Part of the criteria for the Halbergs is about people winning or high achieving.”

He mentions that bit at the end “or high achieving” as a bit of a throw away, but it does change the criteria significantly.

Is high achieving significantly surpassing everything people expect of you?

If so then the All Whites were a shoe in for the award.

People expect the All Blacks to win, The Kiwis and Silver Ferns are one of only 2 or 3 contenders for every trophy. This is a massive achievement in the world of football.

Giving the award to a “non winner” has precendent:

Here is a list of recent winners:

• 1990 Halberg Award Winner – Peter Blake
• 1991 Halberg Award Winner – Philippa Baker
• 1992 Halberg Award Winner – Annelise Coberger
• 1993 Halberg Award Winner – New Zealand Men’s Amateur Golf Team
• 1994 Halberg Award Winner – Philippa Baker & Brenda Lawson
• 1995 Halberg Award Winner – America’s Cup Team
• 1996 Halberg Award Winner – Danyon Loader – (1990s Decade Champion)
• 1997 Halberg Award Winner – Beatrice Faumuinã
• 1998 Halberg Award Winner – Rob Waddell
• 1999 Halberg Award Winner – Rob Waddell
• 2000 Halberg Award Winner – Rob Waddell
• 2001 Halberg Award Winners – Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell
• 2002 Halberg Award Winners – New Zealand Men’s Basketball Team
• 2003 Halberg Award Winners – SILVER FERNS (netball)
• 2004 Halberg Award Winner – SARAH ULMER (cycling)
• 2005 Halberg Award Winner – MICHAEL CAMPBELL (golf)
• 2006 HALBERG AWARD WINNER: MAHE DRYSDALE (ROWING).
• 2007 HALBERG AWARD WINNER: VALERIE VILI (ATHLETICS).
• 2008 HALBERG AWARD WINNER: VALERIE VILI (ATHLETICS).
• 2009 HALBERG AWARD WINNER: VALERIE VILI (ATHLETICS).

Full Details can be found here and here

The 2004 triumph of the Tall Blacks is a similar award of the Halbergs to a non winner, their amazing 4th in the world championships is arguably an ever bigger non winning achievement.

It was also a great result for Winston Reid’s equalising goal as the Sporting Moment award. I was awake, ready to pack the kids off to bed after a competent, but anticpated loss.

But THAT goal changed everything. The kids were buzzing. They didnt want to miss the other games and the whole World Cup took on another dimension from that point onwards.

Enjoy these…

God on you Boys, well done!

We provide her website services and it is a real priviledge to help her in this way.

Here is a great view of her doing a flying lap at Hampton Downs (around 240 kph down the straight and it still didn’t sound flat out!)

Well done Av! Check out her website here

Google counter in an official blog post to counter that specifially by saying that search quality is better than ever (though conceding a short term increase recently)

Penned by Matt Cutts, it tries to convince people that Google are always trying to improve their results, that they take web spam seriously and they are implementing new changes to combat the new threats.

Google are in a different space these days than when they were fighting spam a decade ago.

Now they are the overwhelming search leaders and are beginning the attract the kind of attention that Microsoft has had to deal with due to their size.

Any small incident or problem will be leapt upon and made larger than life.

Reports generated by people with close links to opposition search engines will appear forcing Google and it’s fans to dispute the findings.

With webspam, the easy fight has been fought and mostly won. Computer generated content is easily found and algorithms created to weed them out. Each iteration from the spammers is met by an algorithm change at the Search Engines and the fight goes on.

But now we are talking about “low quality” content, often written by people (rather than scraped off other sites) for small amounts of money, on topics far and wide to capture and convert as much traffic as possible.

But here in lies the problem:

Most online business owners are in the game of creating content and hoping it drives traffic and revenue. Same as this new form of Web Spam.

What Google are complaining about is that this content does not add to the search experience of the end user. In their eyes, the end user clicks on a link that takes them somewhere that will not solve their question or provide the appropriate information.

So, does that mean that Google are now the arbiters of what is “low” or “high” quality content? These are much murkier waters than before and we trust that Google do this job properly, not to the detriment of everyday content writers that have something valid to say but may not be the most polished of journalists.

Plenty more ammunition for the anti-Google to fire up with.

Do you think this is a fight too far? Can you algorithmically determine high from low quality?

I got to thinking about this after watching The Social Network, the movie about Facebook, it’s genesis and growth.

In the movie Mark Zuckerberg, the “co-founder” of Facebook has a lightbulb moment; that peoples relationship status is an incredibly important part of a persons profile.

There are a number of key features in Facebook that make it so connectible and therefore so important to many peoples lives.

Most, if not all, revolve around sharing information: pictures, comments, links to sites, hobbies, interests, the list goes on.

But possibly the most important is the concept of Like

Like in itself is a very average word, you will not find Love on Facebook, nor will you find the ability to rate on a scale.

One thing that has been regularly asked for, but just as regularly ignored is the request for a dislike button (or hate as some people have wanted it to be called)

The fact that you can only make something positive, yet only averagely positive is a concept and can raise some interesting questions:

1. If something has no likes, is it bad, or just invisible.
2. How many likes = cool?
3. Why is there no dislike or any negative option?

With the last one, Facebook probably don’t want to have to be moderating all of the dislikes, they have enough on their plate with hate pages and groups, objectionable picture uploads and more.

But while watching the movie, I started thinking about the word “like” and it’s links back to the sites creator.

Zuckerberg, as depicted in the movie, is a brilliant problem solver who has inspirational moments (seemingly when he is angry) to build social style websites.

Paradoxically, he seemed socially awkward and the first scene of the movie shows him being dumped by his girlfriend for his eccentricities.

Is it strange that someone who was obviously not moving within a social crowd was able to create and implement various things specifically around the social glue that we thrive on?

Is “like” an extension of this?

Until relatively recently, pages and groups on Facebook had Fans. These Fans were Facebook users that took an interest in a particular page or group and added themselves as a Fan in the same way Like was used for comments and status updates.

When Facebook changed all of the Fans to Likes I couldn’t understand the reasoning. The differentiation it brought seemed logical and fitted the nature of the Groups and Pages.

But I got the impression from the movie that Zuckerberg didn’t want Fans. He wanted people to Like what he did.

Maybe Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg, or at least his socially hip and well connected shadow.

Since the invention of the Internet, the same stuff happens, so what is the difference?

The main difference is that more things are visible to everyday people. Things that were obscure for geographic reasons are no longer and can be viewed in all of their glory (or not).

But specifically, things are magnified. News coverage is more saturated than ever. If Obama sneezes, we have Richard Hammond slowing it down to super slowmo speeds and then goes viral on Youtube.

In some cases this is beneficial. (not the sneeze) Take things like the plight of victims. Whereas previously propaganda and the control of media meant that the plight of victims was reduced and in some cases eradicated with them, now with worldwide media being so openly available, it seems impossible for news to stay hidden for long. Cellphone video of protests and treatment of the protesters quickly spread via social media and video sharing sites.

Even in countries where media is closely monitored and controlled, it seems impossible to shut it out completely.

Is this a good thing?

I believe so. While there are always areas where this is turned into a negative; ie: invasion of privacy, paparazzi, Amercian Idol, the ability for anyone to publish news and make it available to the world is a great leveler.

Atrocities are now viewed with more balance. A prime example being the treatment of prisoners of war, prior to the last decade or so, none of the current reporting of ill treatment would have had the same coverage around the world.

What do you think, is this a good thing? Or are we walking a dangerous path?

It was all going so well, good memory management, it was fast and had great addons. It was a no brainer to use Firefox as my default browser.

Version 3 was better than Version 2, this is how software evolution was supposed to be.

And the only reason I still had Internet Explorer on my machine was that I needed  it to test my websites.

Chrome was good and fast, but Firefox had all those great addons: FootieFox for my Football scores, WHOIS tools, ScribeFire for writing my blog posts and the best of the lot FireBug.

Alas, since 3.6.8 was released my Firefox utopia has been shattered.

It has gotten to the point that I have had to shift to Chrome. Had to, not wanted to.

The memory leaks were so bad, that after coming back from being away from my desk for half a day, Firefox was consuming over 1gb of memory, for only 4 tabs!

It got to the point where I was rebooting 3 times a day to maintain any speed.

Luckily, since I have moved to Chrome, my work experience is much better, the speed is back and I found that there was an extension for Chrome called Firebug Lite, I am Saved!

If Mozilla sort out the memory problems, I may go back. But the major problems need some serious tweaks.

Have you found your favourite Browser or other software made by non monoply (Microsoft, Adobe) etc has succumbed to bloat and decreasing performance?

Have they gotten lazy as market share has risen?