Media: It’s increasingly clear that you can’t trust what you read. Anyone paying attention has known this for years, but the fact that more people are becoming aware of it indicates things are in for a bit of a shakeup. Or more of a shakeup. 4 more arrests in the Murdoch empire today. And I expect more in the weeks to come. And the impact of the internet on media, both news and entertainment, and increasing hybrids inbetween, is a subject for more books and blog posts than you can possibly imagine. Check out Jeff Jarvis. Or Clay Shirky. Or my friend Richard’s awesome ReadWriteWeb. But one thing I’ve noticed recently is the absolutely hopeless [1] coverage, particularly from the business press, on the world of..

Modern Finance and Macroeconomics: I read economonitor.com fairly often. These people are serious, hard core macro wonks, and they have been saying for months that the entire global economy, excluding more or less nobody, is on the rocks, for a list of reasons that goes on as long as my arm, and so far nobody has convinced anybody that they can see a way out of it. My opinion is that the way out will come from….

Technology: Technologists are making more magic happen every day. Kinect hacks are bringing reality modeling to the masses. 3D printing is bringing computer models to the real world. The internet gets faster every day. Smartphones that cost $1000 a couple years ago now go for less that $100. A smartphone has the sort of sensors on it that would have cost $10,000 or more not very long ago. I could keep on going on this subject for a very long time. But one under reported aspect, I think, is the impact technology is having on …

Politics: The US Congress has about a 9% approval rating. The Arab Spring continues apace. #Occupy are hunkering down for the northern winter but absolutely have not gone away. Incumbents worldwide are under the gun for having apparently failed to do anything at all useful for years, perhaps decades. What people define as “useful” of course, differs. But the key two things, I think, are that

(a) technology is transforming media, and those changes are transforming politics, and politicians who never got around to thinking about these changes are completely out of their depth.

(b) the technologists are making everything vastly more efficient, and that means that there is no way we are ever getting back to having enough jobs for everyone to do their 40 hours a week. It’s bizarre how little everyone talks about that. Perhaps it’s because the people in a position to know are having too much fun playing Angry Birds or marveling at the new advances in such areas as:

Physics. My friend Cathy Neil tells me we’re entering a golden age of Cosmology. This is apparently unrelated to the fact that Einstein may or may not have been wrong, and despite many many pre-prints on the arXiv since the initial OPERA experiment, no one has really ruled out the existence of FTL Neutrinos.

Anyway, I could go on about what 2012 may bring in the areas of Cognitive Science, Climate Science, Energy Efficiency, Sustainability, Eco-Housing, and so on and so forth, but in reality, I have work to do, and will be trying to stop thinking about all this as much as possible for a bit!

(Time to write this post: 30 minutes. Not bad. Maybe I should blog more often.)

[1] Ah, yeah, so my actual views on the business press would take at least another 30 minutes to explain clearly, and to some extent, I know, it’s about the audience. And so on. I may get around to explaining further. Apologies if anyone was offended, and it probably goes without saying that if you got as far as reading this blog post, you’re not one of the journalists I’m complaining about

Rightly or wrongly, I’ve felt that, although we’re more or less drowning in an ocean of inanity and disinformation, the best way for me to help with that issue is probably not by attempting to dilute the ocean with what I hope might pass for wit or even wisdom in some circles, and hopefully appear as less than complete inanity in others.

Of course, one person’s inanity is another person’s deeply personal and touching remarks, and the debate over what qualifies as “disinformation” will probably go on forever, although arguably it’s something worth debating, and I may have a few words to say on that subject at some stage in the future.

Now, apart from having so many other things I need to do, the reason I’ve been so quiet here is that I felt if I was going to say anything new, it ought to be something important, which is why I’m a little ashamed that my only post since the Feb 22 quake that (quite literally) upended our existence, which was already in a somewhat unstable state it has to be said, was about Unthink, a start-up hoping to capitalise on the perennial outrage over the privacy problems that plague most consumer focused websites, and of late, Facebook and Google in particular, as the largest incumbent aggregators of our collective inanity and disinformation.

Now, it’s entirely possible their startup adventure began with noble intent, and I hope it ends that way, but I do not see much chance that it’s actually going to work out for them. Facebook is the world’s best example of a “network-effect” start-up. People log into social networks because their friends are there, and all the privacy and control in the world isn’t going to interest anyone unless there is a sufficiently large audience of friends and family there to treat our inanities as deeply personal and touching remarks.

Meanwhile, on the monetization front, the merchants of disinformation are really not interested in advertising to people who care so much about privacy and control that they’re willing to switch to a site that at least initially, will have almost nobody on it. The idea that being a “brand ambassador” (as opposed to another pair of eyeballs for the advertisers) will somehow be sufficiently appealing to people that they’ll switch over and bring their friends also seems a little hopeful if you ask me.

And of course, the people who really do care about such things have other alternatives they already find more appealing – such as Diaspora nodes, which add such interesting adjectives as “distributed” and “open” to the promises of privacy and (one hopes) proper personalization.

I must admit, I found Unthink initially appealing, as did, apparently, Mr Fry. But I imagine that he, like myself, eventually decided that as in the parable of New Coke, a sip test is an insufficient indicator of an audience’s underlying desire for a bold and brash new flavour of an otherwise familiar product.

My best wishes to the Unkthink crew in their attempt to prove the doubters, such as myself, absolutely wrong, and eventually rise up to replace our current over-centralised consumer-grade conversation hub(s) with something newer and shinier at their own URL, but for me at least, the shine has worn off before I even get around to logging in, which I may or may not do at some time in the near future.

As, according to comments on Techcrunch today, they are finally into limited beta, and the rush to see what US$2.5m in start-up capital and some well deserved resentment towards the status quo can buy you in terms of traction has already crashed their servers, or at least, timed them out.

So instead of joining the Unthinking masses I’d best get back to my own little start-up, which managed to raise about a fiftieth of their pre-launch investment before we lost steam trying to build an IE6 version, and had to switch to bootstrapping in order to pay our bills (want a website? Or a browser add-on? We actually build pretty good ones..), in the hope that if we hang in there we’ll finally turn our often appreciated and occasionally acclaimed free (and eventually, freemium) products, with well over 3m downloads between them now (did I mention we have the 21st most popular Safari Addon according to extensions.apple.com?), into a sustainable business, which sometimes I feel ought to be inevitable, but for some reason I keep on inventing and innovating away on new ideas in private rather than doubling down and delivering on our existing products in public, and that really does have to change.

So I hope I’ll be back to blogging more often sometime soon, and with some worthwhile changes to announce. I think know we’ve got some serious potential, and despite the moderate irony you might have detected in my use of the words “hope” and “change”, I nevertheless still have hope that we, and for that matter the much maligned Obama Administration, can deliver you up some sustainable and successful innovation in the years to come, despite the obscure, and occasionally more obvious obstacles we all too often face, often of my own making, that are usually of not much interest to anyone, but real enough for us.

Er, ok, if you’ll bear with me, before I damn them with feint praise, I feel I should point out that the Obama Administration probably have more hidden accomplishments than you might have previously imagined, but with a congress that finds some way to block almost their every move, and in a media environment where the majority of viewer attention still goes to the “news” station that is somehow still saluting, and in some cases, even employing, the has-been salespeople for arguably the biggest foreign policy disaster of all time, you know, that one with projected costs of well over 3 trillion at this point, which, of course, turned out to be cheaper than their colossal failures on the domestic policy front (you know, the ones that have led to people occupying Wall St lately) – I think you all know what “news” channel I’m referring to here – is currently casting considerable doubts on the merits of the latest implementation of the Obama doctrine, you know, that multilateral mission that cost no American lives, didn’t require torturing anyone at all, created no new reasons for masses of Middle Eastern people to turn into potential terrorists (at least, that I’m aware of), has cost well under a thousandth of the price of another Iraq style operation, and arguably delivered more hope for the Libyan people than the Iraqis ever got from Team Bush, well, you’d have to say any hope team Obama might have had for an appropriate level of appreciation in next year’s elections must now be somewhere between modest, and minuscule. Which is unfortunate, in my opinion, anyway.

They’ll keep on trying I’m sure. And so will I. Double down. Deliver. I’ll do my best.

Just finally, let me point out that, by contrast, Karl always delivers, and generally in double quick time. If you need some great HTML5 work done fast, or a brilliant browser add-on that more than lives up to your expectations, well, his time is currently available and at a very fair price – at least until I finally figure out the 500 other things you need to make a successful start-up function properly – starting with focus, focus, focus.

Well, if you’ve made it this far you deserve more than a penny for you thoughts, and although I can’t promise to pay you back immediately, I’d be very eager to hear them.

Here’s the (much) longer version of my three tweets from yesterday.

I have been watching the UK election with some fascination since the results indicated a “hung” parliament. My knowledge of British Politics is scant – it simply hasn’t been all that interesting up till now for those of us with no British heritage (unlike the majority of my countrymen, my closest non-Kiwi relatives are Americans). But things have become very interesting indeed now that there is chance for massive political reform in the oldest democracy in the world.

I speak, of course, of the potential for the Britain to switch to Proportional Representation, which is, to quote Joe Biden, a big f’king deal.

The difference between “First Past the Post” and true Proportional Representation is like Dawn and Day. The Tories are right to fear PR – it’s a massive step towards ending generations of electoral injustice that have traditionally worked in their favour, and will do so even more if they get a chance to re-gerrymander the electoral map (Note, the British gerrymandering in recent elections has been far less egregious than it used to be long ago, it’s not a super-partisan process as they have in  the USA). To do so is actually one of their election promises, although their phrasing of that particular promise is something along the lines of “cut the cost of Westminster on the ordinary citizen by reducing the number of MPs”.

Even if it is done 100% fairly, redrawing the electoral boundaries won’t end the structural unfairness for long, and neither will it end members of the Duopoly suppressing 3rd party chances in the more obvious way: by warning the voters that a vote for a 3rd party is effectively a vote in favor of the other half of the Duopoly – thus compelling voters to vote tactically for the lesser evil, rather than strategically for the party they actually want to support.

The LibDem leadership surely knows this. They are not stupid. In fact, although I’d never even heard of him before, five minutes of listening to Lord Menzies on the BBC website this morning was enough to convince me that he is probably one of the smartest guys in the house.

Meanwhile, their deputy leader, Vince Cable, appears to be an economics wizard – he probably has folks like Stiglitz, Roubini, Summers, Geithner and Volcker on his speed-dial already, just waiting for his chance to get stuck in and help save our global macro-economic petard from the misdeeds of the last decade (or arguably, the last century).

And of course, Clegg himself appears to be pretty sharp. I am going to go out on a limb here, and extrapolate that the rest of the LibDem front bench are also highly competent.

So, as I said, these guys are not dumb. They know that a Lab-Lib coalition is going to be best for their party and best for Britain, and hence their A-team is likely in the midst of negotiating as good a coalition deal they can get from Labour and the rest of a required “rainbow” / “traffic light” alliance/coalition, while their B-team also negotiates in good faith, for a Lib-Con deal they believe Cameron can never follow through on – because his party would rather hang *him* than accept it.

Cameron himself would probably give the LibDems almost anything they want in exchange for the keys to Number 10, and presumably his front-bench would too. Their problem is that if they give the LibDems too much they risk of being given the boot by their own caucus in very short order – perhaps before they even get to the Queens Speech bit (this is one of those areas where a days worth of surfing the UK intarwebs, interspersed with updating my about page, and believe it or not, some actual work, is quite inadequate, I have no idea how fast the Tories could stage a backbench revolt).

Anyway, and this is a guess, the Achilles heel that will keep Cameron from number 10 is this: the common or garden unreconstructed Tory backbencher has ideological blinders so big he can barely see his chauffeur if he sits on the wrong side of the Jag.

Furthermore, his core constituency is likely similarly impaired (minus the Jag…) – or they wouldn’t have elected him.

I could be wrong on both counts. Maybe Cameron can overcome his own party and come up with an acceptable deal. But I wouldn’t bet on it, because any deal is going to have to get past not just Clegg but *his* backbenchers, due to the triple lock clause.

This is the sort of situation you end up with in an FPP electoral system where the electoral lines are redrawn only rarely – or worse are redrawn by the legislatures, as in the US Congress (and State congress) redistricting, in which incumbents always seek to feather their nest with a few more acres that match their demographic niche, while trading away the acres that have switched sides to neighboring incumbents of the opposing party, who are usually only too happy to receive them.

In a properly designed PR system, this sort of thing just doesn’t happen – the parties can gerrymander all they want and it won’t change who gets into power the next time around, so they don’t even bother trying, and the electoral needles gravitate back towards the center, eventually resulting in honest, centrist MPs who really care for their electorate – partly because their electorate really has a shot at turfing them out the next time around.

Perpetuating FPP, along with slow or biased redistricting, and backroom deals done with the usual suspects, is how a two-party duopoly maintains its power – for decades or even centuries. Chances to overthrow such a Duopoly and introduce Proportional Representation (AKA: Actual Democracy) come along less than once in a generation – and this is Britain’s big opportunity.

The LibDems have waited 90 years for this moment, and I refuse to believe that Clegg’s team are going to risk waiting another decade or three before it comes along again – regardless of what Cameron offers them in “other” inducements. They also know that to accept a Tory offer will require overcoming the “triple lock” voting formula that gives their backbench, and members, even more power than the Tory equivalents.

They will negotiate in good faith regardless, it puts more pressure on the A-team and their counterparts to come to a deal quickly, and regardless, it’s keeping an election promise from Clegg, and it’s important to start building up trust with the electorate. But eventually they will almost certainly follow the logical path from here into….

…a Rainbow “alliance” comprising: (1) a Lab-Lib coalition, (2) “anyone but Brown” in Number 10, and (3) as many minor parties as possible providing confidence and supply (for which they will rightly demand concessions, but coalition partners in theory get to pick and choose between a few competing offers, and given the urgency of the moment, sane voters from minor parties are likely to understand that a bird in the hand as big as Proportional Representation is worth a dozen in the bush, and thus they should not risk overplaying their hands.

Ideally, the coalition should bring as many of them as possible into the “big tent” in order to ensure continuity in the event of by-elections and greater legitimacy in the eyes of the voters (and as they say, better that they’re in the tent, pissing out of it…)

That’s how it gets done in New Zealand, and so far, it’s actually worked out pretty well – even with the oddest of parliamentary bedfellows. Of course, there are extremists on all sides who will swear blind that it’s been a complete betrayal – which is how you know that they’ve done the right thing.

I had a couple ideas of my own that I thought might fit the bill, and I managed to get one of them out of my head in sufficient detail to submit*. Amazingly, my idea seems to have ended up in the 16 Idea Themes that over 3000 Googlers distilled from over 150,000 submissions!

My submission was one of the two bundled into this theme (other themes had as many as 6 relevant submissions)

As you might imagine, I’m pretty stoked. Of course, “Enable people to submit bug reports about problems in the real world” is just the first line of a longer submission – not too long – Google wisely required everyone to refine their submission to answering 6 short questions and supplying an optional short video. Good thing, given they got 150,000+ ideas to read through!

Three things you might be wondering at this point:

Surely this isn’t a new idea?

It’s certainly not a new idea in 2009. There a lot of similar projects underway right now. One of my friends was telling me about his at the Digital NZ hackfest just the other day. A recent silicon valley demo contest even featured a SaaS version of the idea, Citysourced, targeted at American Cities, and it was noted as one of the few potentially world-changing products among the 50 launches. It probably wasn’t a new idea when I submitted it for this 10^100 contest a year ago, although I hadn’t heard of anyone else doing it back then, and I also doubt it was a new idea when I submitted it for an informal blog post based competition 6 months before that (ironically, I was trying to win a ticket to Google I/O, and missed out!). Way back when I first thought of it, circa 2005, it may have been vaguely original, but there was little point in implementing such a project back then because cellphones with GPS didn’t actually exist at that stage, so it ended up on the backburner with the other 5-10 “big ideas” I usually have fighting to get out of my pile-o-notes and into some sort of coherent project plan.

Should I vote for Seth’s idea?

Well, the idea behind the competition is to help as many people as possible. So pick the idea theme you think will do that. However, here’s why it might be worth picking my one: Cellphones with cameras** will likely be more or less ubiquitous in 5-15 years, we all share an environment that has it’s occasional problems, and people who want to know about those problems (and pretty soon, autonomous systems will want to know too), and the usual ways in which information about these problems is transmitted, routed, stored, organised and displayed is really inefficient and fragmented compared to what could be enabled with todays technology, so a good implementation of this idea would eventually help everyone on the planet. So the real question is, could a project sponsored by Google in the next year or so create a significantly better outcome than would be achieved by leaving it to other players in this space***? And how does the importance of getting this done right, sooner rather than later, stack up against the other 15 big ideas? I may post a follow up considering one or both of these questions, but this post is getting long enough already.

Why isn’t Seth’s (or anyone else’s) name mentioned in this list?

I was initially a bit disappointed about that, but I think they quite rightly want people to focus on the ideas rather than the people who submitted them. I was also initially disappointed that they didn’t link the submission titles to copies of the complete submissions, but I guess the point is to get as many people as possible to read all 16 ideas and then vote, and linking to a bunch of extra information would not have helped! On the other hand, after the voting process is over and the “final five” are found, I hope Google will provide more information about the individual submissions and submitters.

In conclusion, go vote!

PS: I made my final submission in a bit of a hurry, typing it direct into Google’s webform, and wouldn’t you know it, when I went to recover the text I’d entered using Lazarus I discovered I didn’t have it installed in the browser I was using! Hopefully Google will send me a copy of my submission even if it doesn’t make it into the final 5 – I’d like to blog it for posterity.

PPS: If you actually managed to read this far, why not sign up for my RSS feed?

* I’m working on a blog post that explains the other idea, which I still think is well worth doing.
** GPS helps, but isn’t essential, phones can do a reasonable job of nailing down location using signal triangulation.
*** Of course, some of them would probably be invited to answer Google’s RFP, and an ideal solution would probably allow for open and distributed interop between both new and existing players in this space.

She’s everybody’s sister… she’s symbolic of our failure… she’s the one in fifteen million who can help us to be free.

“Watching TV”, from Roger Water’s amazing album “Amused to Death“, contains surely one of the more poignant statements of the value of mass media in evolving peaceful democracy that you’re ever going to hear. Given the events of the day, I suggest giving it a listen. (And if you haven’t already, you might want to buy the album, and listen to it on a good sound system, it really is awesome. )

Roger’s Yellow Rose was a student of philosophy. So was Neda Agha-Soltan. So was I.

And I grieve for my sisters.

Many of you will know her as the founding editor of the uber-famous (well, in tech circles) Lifehacker, a phenomenally successful blog covering tips, tricks, software and sites that offer a multitude of ways to improve your workflow and lifestyle. Sadly, the sheer number of suggestions forced me to stop reading Lifehacker a while ago – chasing up all those potential speed improvements wasn’t helping me get anything done in the short term! I’m looking forward to achieving a somewhat more measured pace of life improvement from reading Gina’s new blog; Smarterware.

The fact that so many of these posts were of good value, and the fact that Gina was churning out a dozen or more every day, day after day after day, is certainly a Heroic feat in my opinion. I don’t think I’ve managed a dozen blog posts inside a single month, let alone in a single day.

While researching Gina’s life (a remarkably easy task, given how much she has written or had written about her in the last decade), I discovered an article that mentioned the genesis of Lifehacker – it turns out she was already working for Nick Denton as a coder when he bought the domain name, and her enthusiasm for the what could be done with it made him offer her the editor job on the spot. Many will realize this was probably one of the best HR decisions Nick made in his life, and it has to be said he’s made some good ones in his time.

“The one blogger I wished we had landed at Weblogs, Inc. was Gina Trapani from LifeHacker. I tried every two months for a year I think… no offer was good enough. Very, very frustrating.” – Jason Calacanis

To go from being a full time professional coder (with a pretty impressive resume) to being a full time professional writer is no small feat. Both involve using a keyboard and your brain – after that the similarities start to die off pretty fast. So that’s another reason Gina is a Tech Heroine.

I was actually aware of Gina well before she started Lifehacker, in that she was one of the few girl geeks who was seriously blogging, and there was a time (pre-2004) when just running your own blog qualified you as being moderately cool. I looked in the WayBackMachine and discovered she’s been blogging since late 2001 – which makes her a serious early adopter. Here’s her first post.

Another reason she’s among my Tech Heroines is that she’s the author of quite a few Firefox Addons, and I would say she’s contributed just as much to the success of Firefox through constantly blogging about Firefox and Firefox add-ons on Lifehacker, and providing early examples of add-ons for people to learn from, as almost anyone who actually works for the Mozilla Foundation. They should give her a medal or something. One of the earliest “Top X Firefox Add-ons” lists features her app “About this site”.

For reasons that may not be immediately apparent, the success of Mozilla ranks up there with the success of Google, Wikipedia, and the W3C as reasons why the web is so damned useful today, as opposed to mired in a morass of crappy over-commercialized portal sites and walled gardens, so Gina’s contributions to the success of Firefox are no small thing in the world of Tech Heroism.

Gina has said that her book is one of the things she’s most proud of, so I really must get around to buying it sometime soon. [2] Her book is called “Lifehacker – 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Life”.

If you can’t wait to get the book, or don’t feel like perusing thousands of lifehacker articles for your dose of wisdom from Gina, the interviews she gave to Tim Ferris and The New York Times should at least whet your appetite.

It’s not for nothing that in 2007 she was ranked 7th by Forbes in a list of 25 Web Celebrities, one above Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook.

Herein endith my tribute to Gina Trapani. To read about more Tech Heroines on Ada Lovelace Day, check out this huge list of posts, which is also available referenced by subject, and the locations of the bloggers writing about them!

[1] “Today” being a somewhat amophorus concept for me. Lets just stay I started this post on the 24th, NZ time, and will finish on the 24th, American time.

[2] My book reading has slowed to a crawl now the internet feeds me pretty much everything I need, but I make exceptions. It doesn’t help that book prices in New Zealand are at least twice what they are in the USA, if we’re lucky. This is another reason the internet is a great leveller – eliminating the edge once enjoyed by readers in large markets with better enconomies of scale. Imagine what it would be like if everything on the internet was priced differentially by where you lived, or you weren’t allowed to watch clips from an upcoming movie because it wasn’t available in your country….ok, bad example. Eventually the creative industries will realise how batshit crazy they are to do this to their international fans.

Still, after re-electing Bush, America has a lot to make up for. I cried that day back in 2004, and I suspect so did half the politically aware people on the planet (and we all cried again 4 years later, but for a different reason).

Realistically speaking, a huge leap has been made, but solid incremental improvements towards a return to international norms and good faith multilateral agreements, as well as strong leadership in progressive, non-military areas, followed by a public affirmation in the form of a re-election in 2012, are going to be required before the real skeptics, of whom I know plenty, will accept that America has truly redeemed herself and may deservedly claim some sort of leadership in the “free world” again.

Personally, I’m sold. The tenor being set by the first few days, along with the quality of the people going into key positions (more on some of them later perhaps) is going to make a significant difference to America’s standing in the next 4 years (heck, in the next 4 months), and I even believe they can sort out the economic crisis without the huge inflationary crash being predicted by some (probably some more on that later as well).

NB: This post grew from a comment I made on Jimmy Wales’ blog (which is currently in moderation but that may have changed by the time you read this).

In contrast, New Zealand goes to the polls tomorrow in what has to be described as a bit of an anti-climatic mood. Few seem to see a lot of difference between our two major parties – largely because John Key decided to adopt most of Labour’s policies, on the grounds that (a) they seem to be working and (b) the public seems to like them. The NZ public appear to have simply gotten bored of Labour, and frankly, I think they’re a bit daft because “boring and predictable” is about a thousand times better than what we saw from all the other NZ governments in my lifetime. But after 9 years everyone has managed to find at least one or two things they don’t like about Labour people or policies (Recent copyright legislation is a biggie for me and anyone else who cares about freedom and the internet), and since minor quibbles become more important when the other side isn’t promising to do anything much different, well, I can see how Labour is unlikely to get through this time. I’ll still vote for them, because they earned it, and I think in years to come we’ll probably look back at the 4th 5th Labour Government as one of the best we ever had.

However, one other notable point of difference lacking between our two possibilities for Prime Minister is their religion – or rather, their lack of one. In the last leader debate “Both said they did not believe in God or in an afterlife” – I quote from a report of the debate I read, because I missed the debate myself. Recently I’ve been regretting the lack of a TV at the office! So perhaps what they actually said was a bit more nuanced.

But if not, my assertion that this too is an historic election. I haven’t had time to research it, but it seems to me that Helen Clark vs Jenny Shipley was probably the first time two woman had fought for leadership of a western democracy, and this might be the first time that the fight is between a pair of atheists.

The reason this is possible is that the role of religion in NZ culture has been depleted to the point where no one really seems to have thought about the significance of such an election. Our separation between church and state is very much a “done deal”, and any talk of bringing the two back together is electoral poison. The fact that the last leader of a significant Christian party in this country is currently doing time for sexual abuse of multiple girls under the age of 12 probably may have something to do with that.

In America, on the other hand, it is almost impossible to win office, even at the state or local level, where they elect almost everyone from the local judge to the local tax collector, if you openly declare that you do not believe in God. It is a tragic, broken state of affairs and explains much of the pain that the country has gone through in the last few decades – through deliberate manipulation of their “flock” and of their favored politicians, the leaders of the religious right have prevented anyone from getting into power who was (a) smart enough to have decided there probably isn’t a God, and (b) honest enough not to have hidden their decision. And when you can’t elect a huge number of smart, honest people into even lowly positions of power, and it’s impossible for them to get into those particular positions of power through merit alone, well, what would you expect to happen?

I ended being MC by default, which is a pretty unfamiliar sort of role for me, but Ben was busy liveblogging and Stephen was running the laptop finding interesting content to go along with the talks, so I ended up being the one doing the talking between talks. The job was to watch the clock and figure out when and how to call time on each speaker, and since we had a lot of interesting people there and lots of good questions being asked, it was tricky. Didn’t completely fluff it. Everyone seemed to have a good time anyway.

A few notes on some of the presentations:

Ben didn’t quite manage the Steve Jobs effect since we couldn’t make the air-pointer driver work with Powerpoint 2007, but it was an excellent presentation on SaaS nonetheless, probably the best of the day from my perspective. And he thought he wouldn’t be geeky enough!

The lads from SLI definitely had the best schwag. Actually I think they had the only schwag. They also brought their projector which came in handy. It’s good to know there are some well financed web companies in Christchurch – hopefully Interclue will join them in that regard sometime soon. They’re hiring, by the way.

Marek showed off his new OpenID provider. OpenID was very much on the menu at BarCampWellington as well. There was some good debate about the pros and cons at both. I think it’s definitely an important standard, but it may take a while to catch on with the users. I hear that they have taken it off the menu for Firefox 3 which is a shame.

We chatting about hardware gadgets in an open session, with Phil telling us about Arduino and Eric Woods mentioning his recent investigations into the world of smartphones, and his conclusion that the best value to be had right now was importing a new Treo 650 from the states, for about NZ$300. I have a Treo 650 and I can confidently say it’s excellent value at that price, but the two things that really irritate me are the lack of 3G data – GPRS ping times are awful – and the camera being a poxy 640×480 that doesn’t work well indoors. The photo I’ve used here is an example of that. The sound recording for video is also pretty poor. Also if you want to use it as an alarm clock you’ll need to install an app, and most of the cost money. Google Maps works moderately well on it tho, and doesn’t cost money.

Near the end we remembered we hadn’t done the 3 word intro’s! A week later, the same thing happened at BarCampWellington! You’d think if anyone would have remembered to point it out at the time it would have been me, but my memory is reasonably atrocious at times. At Barcamp Christchurch we mixed 3 word intro’s with short talks by the people not wanting a half hour slot. Eg
Isaac from Wowza gave us a bit of a chat about user-centric data modelling that he expanded on here.

As a Finale, Roger Bays gave us a demonstration of his phenomenal augmented reality artwork, Semaphore. He was able to demonstrate using a monitor rather than using a headset like he did when he one the People’s Choice award at a recent exhibtion featuring 50+ artists (I think). I’m really looking forward to the day when they get this sort of thing working with descrete, affordable, non-bulky, wifi enabled dataglasses.

All in all, although I think in retrospect we should have given ourselves a few more weeks to prepare, and done it over a weekend, it was a really good day for the Chch tech scene and I hope it inspires more gatherings of it’s like as soon as we can organise them. Don’t forget to sign up to the TVIC mailing list to find out more about geek gatherings in Christchurch.