My friend Dylan also contributed to the discussion and I left a largish comment on his post during lunch, which was consequently munged into an unreadable wall of text So I decided to post my reply here…

Firstly, in my defense, I left Stuff because of it’s content. Now the stories I want to read are aggregated with Google News. I still visit Stuffs site regularly to read the stories I want.

I would also argue that Jobs.org.nz (and by extention Google News, digg, techmeme and any other aggregator) are not stealing content. They’re using a headline and a small excerpt of the post (permitted under copyright “fair dealing”), and giving a perma-link to the content hosted on his blog. If they were using his entire post as content, referenced or not, I’d understand his anger and would agree that was “stealing content” because that would be copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Jobs.org.nz is obviously a questionable looking site, and I’m not saying that Lance is beyond his rights to ask his feed to be removed. I probably would as well – I wouldn’t want to be associated with that site as it has potential to damage your brand.

Dylan said:

Google News takes traffic away from publishers by “stealing” and republishing content within a news aggregation site where the original publisher has no opportunity to make revenue from ad sales.

I don’t understand how he came to this conclusion. Google uses a headline and sometimes a 20 character excerpt. If you want to read the story you have to link out to the publishers site (except for AP content which Google pays for syndication).

Dylan Said:

In conclusion I’d argue that Google News takes traffic and eye balls away from the publisher…thus reducing their revenues. If I were a publisher I’d be nervous.

I would agree that Google News takes eyeballs away from publishers front pages, but that’s simply because Google do a better job at providing a portal for content the user wants to see.

And of course publishers are nervous. So were the other industries when they realised that they had to change.

We’re entering a stage in our society where consumers want to pick and choose what they consume. The music industry is realising that some people don’t want to pay for an album for a few good songs (iTunes, other digital services). The television industry is realising some don’t want want to watch the endless river of shitty reality TV shows to get to the good stuff (TVNZ on demand, Hulu). The print industry must realise that some won’t want to wade through their quagmire of crap to get to the stories which are important to them.

The old reptile has this ability to slither out of the grasp of competing swamp creatures and end up basking on the best rock in the pool.
– Tim Selwyn

• The Living End
• The Dandy Warhols
• The Potbelleez
• Gyroscope
• Tiki
• Testament
• The Jordan Luck Band
• Autozamm
• Goodwill
• Concord Dawn
• Little Bushman
• Dimmer
• Die! Die! Die!
• Fur Patrol
• Goodnight Nurse
• State of Mind
• The Valves
• Pitch Black
• The Exiles

NICE! It’s due to kick off November 9th. Looks like some party! If the second announcement is anything like this one, I might have to be there!

Oh dear. In an effort to make everyone, but especially members of our Asian population, feel better about crime, I decided to do some research. So I googled. And sure enough, we score really low on the World murder rankings, just above the Scandinavians, Hong Kong and Japan (which has few murders but interesting ones).

Then I took a look at the total crimes per capita and found, to my horror that we are second from the top, just ahead of the Scandinavians.

Whoops! Above the USA? Above South Africa? Above Zimbabwe?!?

The clue, of course, is at the bottom of the page…

Note: Crime statistics are often better indicators of prevalence of law enforcement and willingness to report crime, than actual prevalence.

New Zealand has the second highest reported crime rate of countries surveyed. Obviously not something to be hugely proud of, but you can not even start to track and fight crime without having accurate reporting. Take a look at the comments section for an interesting view on the actual crime rate, not the hugely inflated “spree” being run by the mainstream media.

photo credit: yngrich

There’s a lot of buzz about Freeview at the moment. They’re almost through their DVB-T rollout. DVB-T means Digital Video Broadcast and differs from Sky and the current Freeview implementation in that it doesn’t require a satellite to recieve broadcasts, it uses the bog-standard UHF arial almost ubiquitously installed across New Zealand. Difference is, the broadcast is digital and will enable broadcasters to, finally, broadcast shows in full 1080p HD.

I know a few people that have gotten their grubby little mitts on Freeview set top boxes (Interested? Head down to Eastern Hi-Fi with a few hundred bucks and see what happens!) that realise this new standard and the feedback that I’ve heard from them is absolutely stellar.

All well and good, but for the love of God I don’t want another set-top box. What I want is a PlayTV. It’s a dual-tuner, well integrated little box for your Playstation 3 thats incredibly easy to use and integrates with the rest of my devices (UPnp NAS, PSP, HDTV). For those who are interested – here’s a little video showing off some of what it can do.

I don’t want Sky anymore. I don’t want their re-hashed movie channels, their proprietary access methods and all the buggy firmware to go with them, I don’t want to pay them for MySky for their half-baked PVR and I don’t want to pay them again to upgrade to HD.

If Sony gets their act together and releases this product here as soon as possible, they can quite easily position the PS3 as the gadget to have for all AV setups. They’ve also recently announced that they’ll be hosting a “Video On Demand” service – basically streaming High Definition movie downloads from the Playstation Store over your broadband connection. So between gaming, Bluray, HDTV PVR and video on demand it will become an impressive centerpiece for any living room.

photo credit: Hijeje

The Dominion Post says that a report by a Wellington Rugby Union asserts that less kids are playing rugby and therefore are lazy and apathetic. Well, if they’re not playing rugby it’s obvious that they’re sitting around in front of the TV and therefore don’t care about anything. Pull the other one.

Perhaps they’re a little sour that while Rugby numbers are down (31,000 to 29,845), Soccer numbers are UP (20,667 to just over 22,000)!

I can’t find the actual report anywhere, but The Dom Post actually have a reasonably balanced article on it – with quotes and questions to a lot of other sports figures and organisations (SPARC, Danyon Loader and some others) to balance out the junk from the report. An interesting piece but to jump from “Kids are playing less rugby” to “Generation Y should be ‘Y Bother’” is ridiculous and makes it sounds like it was written by a bunch of NZ First voters.

photo credit: aptmetaphor

Looks like some attention is being paid to public education today…

First up is that the NZEI has negotiated a 4% annual pay rise over the next 3 years for Primary School teachers. This is good. After all the complaints about school teachers being in short supply – having sub-standard renumeration for the hard work they put in isn’t going to help that. Considering inflation last year was around 3% this isn’t a bad bump for teachers. With most teachers earning above the average salary (I believe the pay scales between ~$35k-$70k depending on experience and responsibilities) hopefully this will allow people to continue to do what they love and still earn a decent living – since it benefits us all.

Of course theres a happy medium, you don’t want to have teachers in it just for the money. Hopefully, this other proposal, due to go before cabinet in the next few weeks, will raise the bar for public education workers here in NZ. This is in response to an ERO review saying that a “significant minority” of graduates fresh out of Teachers College were below the needed standard for becoming fully registered. Of course, that’s better than a significant majority but still cause for concern and it’s good to see that these things are being looked at and hopefully improved.

photo credit: Simon Oosterman

Last week, I sent an email to Brad Cranston, General Manager of Bunnings Warehouse New Zealand expressing my displeasure on the handling of negotiations with their workers union, NDU (NRT, The Standard). I have a few friends involved in this industrial action and spoke up not on their behalf, but by their side. It seems that from the people I know that contacted him, I am the only one that recieved a reply so far.

Thank you for your correspondence, as I am sure you will appreciate there are two sides to every story.

We have been negotiating with the National Distribution Union since May 2007,during this time we have lifted the average wage for all team members by 6.4%.This includes wages for union members despite being unable to reach agreement with the NDU. In addition Bunnings has also provided additional benefits which the NDU chooses to ignore such as 6% contribution to Kiwisaver, an offer to all team members of $1000 worth of shares in the company at the cost of one dollar, bonuses for all team members measured against store targets, dividends on shareholdings, to name a few.(around 80% of Bunnings NZ workers are shareholders)

Although the NDU publicly includes all Bunnings workers by insinuation in its press releases and pamphlets in fact they represent a little over 300 of our 2400 team members of which less tan 200 have joined in the industrial action taken.

We have a strong commitment to employing great people who want to work for us because it is a great place to work and in the main we believe we are achieving that goal despite the activities of the NDU.

I realise it is your choice where you shop but appreciate the opportunity to put the other side of the issue to you.

Ok, Fine. In my reply to him I acknowledged that the judging renumeration on wages only is flawed – but I wonder how many of those benifits are also offered to Australian workers, along with their wages. I like the 6% contribution to Kiwisaver – employers are only required to contribute 1% rising to 4% over the next 4 years. However, I bet you dollars to donuts that their counterparts in Australia get those benifits too (minus Kiwisaver – they have compulsory super).

Anyone that works/worked there feel like commenting?