Interestingly there were two strong themes that came up time and time again in the discussions. They were quite different but I saw them to be critically intertwined.

The first issue is the broad one of technology, and everything got lumped in together in this one from the social web, mobile payments, augmented reality, connectivity and mobile information tools. The one thing everyone agreed is that technology is changing the way people interact and make decisions when they travel. Interestingly one of the greatest fears/opportunities was the power of social networks, social communication and viral ideas. I say this is both a fear and an opportunity as clearly the affect can be either positive or negative.

The other top issue was on of our image as 100% pure, clean and green and preserving this and leveraging more off our natural beauty in a world where the environment is going to hell in a handbasket.

Why are these intertwined? Well once upon a time you used the glossiest of brochure with the most stunning of photos promising the best experiences in all your tourism marketing, and then hoped, when the traveller arrives, to deliver on the experience. Today there is a fear of social media within tourism, and I don’t expect this is limited to NZ tourism operators. What if we say we are 100% pure and the world discovers we are not quite 100%, perhaps only 85%, but worse, tweets, blogs and tells all their friends and followers.  What if someone has a bad time? What if the next viral thing is a video of a bad experience or image that breaks the illusion of our 100% clean and green image. This image is our marketing capital.

The reality is with more and more people using their social web connections as their primary source of information, this image could be damaged if we as a whole can not live up to what we are promising. Driven from the Auckland Airport into the city before? Been discussing high intensity beef farming lately? Shipped any coal to china lately? Okay you cant expect everything to be 100% squeaky clean and I don’t think that our 100% pure image is so misleading that an angry internet mob will develop and something viral will spread tarnishing our image and turning the world off of visiting our shores. Of course New Zealand is a beautiful and amazing place. Some of our less cellubrious “scenes” are so so. But today is there is a risk of painting a perfect image to sells plane tickets and beds, and have people picking on all the bad images around NZ that are in direct contrast and have this influence the way they talk about and describe New Zealand socially? Like I say if expectations are consistently not met, there will be negative comments and these will turn off others.  Nothing has changed here, it is the age old power of word of mouth, it is just that technology allows people to share this information more readily.

So forgetting the 100% pure image for now, this marketing campaign has worked well for us for so long but it may be up for an overhaul soon. The pervasiveness of technology in our lives today and the ability for people to enable others to vicariously share their experiences means that whatever our strategy is, we have to be somewhat genuine in how we promote anything online, whether it is NZ as a whole, a bed and breakfast, or a scenic walk. But don’t fear being caught out for not living up to expectations (I think it is in our national psyche to underrate ourselves) but even better than that focus on making sure the traveller gets the best experience they can possibly have and then enable them to use the social web to do all the good marketing for you. You can’t control what people say, but you sure can positively influence it.

So one asset we have got is our natural beauty. Another asset is our people. Nobody is more passionate about New Zealand than New Zealanders. What if we connected travellers to New Zealand with kiwis online? What if we got kiwis to describe places in blog posts. Share trip ideas “If you are coming to Auckland then you NEED to do …”.  Share their own views, photos or videos of their New Zealand.  This would create an opportunity for travellers to see NZ through our eyes before they come.

What if tourism operators participated in FourSquare, new checkins today get a complimentary coffee with breakfast, 10% off a bungee. What if we really engaged as a country with visitors online socially? No not just a FaceBook page, something smarter and engaging. Travel is all about seeing new things and meeting new people, and sharing the experience with others. We can make it easier for visitors to connect both with New Zealanders and their own friends back home.

We need to find ways to enable all the organizations tasked with promoting New Zealand as a whole, or particular districts, to engage with travelers online and encourage them to share their experiences while they are here and still on the buzz of jumping off a bridge with a bungee around their ankles. Let them tell the world NZ is 100% cool, 100% awesome, 100% the best country they have ever visited, in their own words. Enable people to have genuine positive conversations.  The technology is there so what’s the hold up?

The first barrier, as I talk about above, is the willingness of the tourism industry to engage, but I think we can overcome that.  There is a second major barrier.   We need to find ways to let tourists connect online while they travel without crippling data roaming costs or oppressive WIFI fees. Right now tourists don’t often tweet, and post up photos on the go while they are actually feeling the buzz because to do so would make them broke. Free or cheap ubiquitous WIFI is unheard of. We need to make it easier for travellers to remain connected while they are here.

Here are some ideas:

• Telecom/Vodafone partner with Tourism NZ to offer tourist SIMs with prepaid data and calls. Sure you can do this now but it is not at the front of a travellers mind to have to go out of their way to source a prepaid SIM for their phone. These should be on sale at the airport and at the reception of their accommodation packaged up in deals specially for tourists. It should be cheap and accessible.
• A partnership with a national WIFI network. What if Tomizone was packaged up to tourists and gave the traveller special online discounts for accommodation and activities only available through the Tomizone network?  There is benefit for all there.
• The i-SITEs. What is their future? Well one thing to make them more valid is to offer free WIFI for travellers. Perhaps even serve drinks and evolve into a travellers meeting place.
• At the very least accommodation providers need to offer their WIFI for free.

I think the fear of bad exposure through social media is not 100% justified. NZ really is a great destination (not that I am biased or anything) and for the most part I am sure everyone has an awesome time. The real fear, I believe, is that we are not able to capitalize off of the power of the social web. If we fear that people will say bad things to their friends then will will only discover that yes some people say bad things.  But what if we could facilitate travellers to share all their great comments and experiences?  One thing is for sure, a country our size and with our marketing budget, we need to maximize any opportunity the Internet and technology provides.  Pioneering an integrated approach of new technology and social media into our national tourism strategy may not be a bad start.

“Design can change not just your product, it can change your workflow, it can change your company. We just need inspiration, vision, and determination to operate at the highest level. To be good is not enough.” – Jacek Utko

It is no secret that newspapers are facing extinction in the print form. People are looking online for their source of news and current affairs and they don’t want to read yesterdays news any more. The monopoly on news is no longer tightly controlled by the media agencies. Each day they lose a little bit more control to independent blogs, websites, twitter and Facebook, although slowly, one by one the media agencies are buying these up in an attempt to maintain the control. No surprise there but they do this so they can continue to replicate a formula that has worked pretty well for them so far, which is.

1. Write some words about something topical which could be news, or opinion
2. Take a photo to make it more interesting (so it isn’t all just words)
3. Add lots of ads
4. Print it

Now, in an age where your teenage kids are producing videos, 3d animations, flash movies, and mashups in their bedrooms, why god why are the online “newspapers” not doing the same thing? Why must they cling so dearly to their archaic model for presenting the news? White paper, serif font, colour photo. Sure they have made the paper digital, but it is the same ole same ole when it comes to content. In fact, the print editions are more interesting and interactive, with their big awkward pages, and the occasional multi-page feature which has some nice colourful graphics.

For the online edition however, I would much rather look at something that is designed, and crafted, to stimulate and engage me. Just as Apple made a portable music thing-a-majiggy an object of desire through design, newspapers should try to do the same with their news. Seriously, lets take Jacek’s ideas another step further.

What if along side the “news”, newspapers made an actual attempt to add form to their current (and in many cases lacking) function. The first thing they could do is actually “design” their sites. Make them visually rich, easy to view, less cluttered and have some semblance of style. Things may not fit into tidy boxes and columns all the time, but they will just have to deal with that. But not only change the form of the news online into something more attractive in general, what if they, say, ran interactive features along side the day to day news, that gave you in-depth analysis on topical events. That’s the cool thing about the web, you don’t have to have just words and a photo. There are all sorts of cool things like Flash, JavaScript and Video. Plus each article is it’s own island, and is not connected to the rest of the news other than by a single link.

There is so much the format of the web allows you to do. For example, imagine if you can, a digital version of the traditional two-four page spread analysis piece. This digital version could be well designed visually to stand on its own as sort of a feature portal. It could be interactive, media rich and highly informative. Imagine still (are you still imagining?), as an actual example, a dedicated feature on the global financial crisis. This is a complicated story to report on because there are so many different levels of complexity to it, and it means different things to different people in how it effects them. Business readers will want to know different things to say, an at home dad, but both are desperate to understand the topic. Now you could give them a series of individual and non-connected articles on a daily basis that use text and a photo to communicate, or you could:

• Provide interactive graphs, and timelines demonstrating the scale of the crisis detailing critical events and the impacts on world markets over time. A nice interactive draggable graphic timeline would do this nicely. Here is a nice example at the NYT (its a nice start).
• Embedded YouTube style video of analysis. Here is a good one.
  
  The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
• Add other interactive elements that provide visual analysis on the crisis. Like graphs. Lots and lots of graphs and data depicting the scale of bailouts and blowouts. I like pictorials and graphics.
• Use maps as a visualisation tool, here is an okay example, but you could do much more exciting things
• Provide links off to key news articles elsewhere within the site about the same topic. Link them coherently, like “To read more on the effect on the New Zealand economy…” . Visually group the articles together under subject headings so you can see related articles at a glance.
• Provide feeds from Twitter, so you can see what other people are thinking about the topic
• Have some fun, include a flash game or two.
• Wrap the whole feature up in a great fully themed design that stimulates you visually, and entices you to explore, and be informed. Make the whole thing an experience.

Or you could do this:

What is wrong with the above (the idea, not Kermit)? Well for one, newspapers are geared up to write text articles. They employ journalists and photographers. They syndicate text and photos through existing channels, that are used to text and photos. To start producing video, Flash, and other media formats they, the news agencies, would have to evolve considerably. How would the editorial process work? What are the costs involved? Could they outsource the creation of such things to people who are good at doing media rich content? Possibly. There is a whole web full of content out there that the online newspapers could be using, but by including information from various sources, feeds and other websites they are potentially losing control of your viewer-ship. They fear that you may wander off to the sources directly (the Internet lends itself well for this you know) and that means you may look at and click less ads in their website. Or worse, you might discover another site that is more informative and interesting than the newspapers.

For a newspaper to change from the crap format they have right now, and their sole reliance on advertising to something better and more engaging online, it will cost them. But, is this a new opportunity for them? Would you actually pay to be better informed and to get your news presented well?

What if they offered a free “news and ads” version of the site (this is pretty much what you get now). Then, what if for a month by month subscription you can get access to media rich, and more comprehensive detailed analysis on the news and current affairs. I want to be informed and to learn. I want the information in forms other than text and photos, and I understand that this costs money to produce. I am immune to online advertising anyway so they need a better model to earn revenue. I want to be entertained, and enjoy the news. If they priced it right I would pay.

Lets say they charged $4 a month (or a dollar a week), and perhaps 5% take up this new news+ option. If your online readership is 600,000 unique browsers a week/month/year, lets say that adds up to $100,000 a month in news+ subscriptions. That is $1.2M extra for an online news site like nzherald.co.nz, and for that money you can generate a lot of nice content. For you at home, for the price of a cup of coffee a week you can get your news looking better, more coherent and interactive. I would pay it.

Will it happen. I think it has to. News content on the Internet could be really interactive, engaging, and informative, but at the end of the day it might be hard work and they might need to adapt to new ideas. It will take some balls to change. Anyway, I made my New Years resolution to not read online newspapers. It might take a few more people to do the same before they change their ways.

Here is why. Are you paying attention now? Oh good.

Towards the end of ’08 I listened to a lot of people feeling a bit down and out about things. The world economy was making everyone think about how bad things were going to get for them, and no one seemed to have any positive ideas. I didn’t have any really ground shaking positive ideas either, but I saw the road ahead as a bit of a challenge, and even started throwing one or two ideas around. I was also looking at myself and seeing someone who needed to change what they were doing in order to move forward. I literally just wanted to get off my arse and do something. So I decided quietly, after a few glasses of wine on New Years Eve, that I would do just that. I would remove my arse from the desk chair it usually inhabits and put it on a bike. Why? Because. Because it is doing something.

I don’t seriously think riding a bike the length of the country is a really good way to turn things around for the country but it would at least change me. And who knows what might happen.

Since then I have been called mad, been labelled “mid-life crisisee”, and been flagged for failure by a few. Then John Key announced his idea for the NZ long cycleway, and the knockers quietened down a little. Now I am three weeks away from my first day of full on pedalling and making my own cycleway.

So why am I doing it. For inspiration, for me and others. For fun and to get away from my computer. To meet interesting people and to change things for me. I will probably have a bit of time to think about things too, and we have a few great ideas we are tinkering away at in the Voom Studio office so I will get a lot of quality time to think about them. We are developing a great SaaS product that we will be launching by years end and we are currently taking a whole day a week out of client work to build something new and exciting because it is an investment in the future and now is the best time to do just that.

You see, we can either give up and go hide under a rock, or we can get off our arses and do something new.

So that is why. And chances are I might be passing through a town or city near you during April and May. If you are keen for a catch up and chew the fat a little, I might have some free time on my hands, so drop me a line via email, visit http://nzuphill.8degrees.co.nz or Twitter @rowsell. And hey, if you have a bike I would enjoy some company for a kilometre or ten.

First of all I went to https://transact.landtransport.govt.nz/

I selected the option to relicense my vehicle.

I complete the 3 step process of entering details and paying, and then after the “processing your payment, please wait” bit on the credit card payment screen (payment screens hosted by Westpac and Dialect). BAM I got this.

Note in the top right hand corner:

There is no merchant name. Comforting.

Also the broken nature of this page in general, with the text all over the place and strange red “x”s. This is a payment page for a friken government department! Hosted by Westpac! This gives me the heebeegeebees to be quite honest. So I tried it again, and got the same obscure error, and so I rang the call centre, to:

1. tell them they have a problem
2. check to make sure I haven’t paid twice for my car reg
3. pay for my car reg.

I get hold of Jane in the call centre but she cant help me because I can not answer the 10th identity question. I have established who I am, the car rego, date of birth, and trying to establish my address, but I am not giving the correct address, so she cant help. I have got the house number correct, I have the street correct, RD1 okay, post code is correct, but they don’t have Kerikeri as my town. So Jane wont help me. “Do you get your mail?” she asks.

So I have to play Guess-the-address to figure out what town or city they have on record. After a few minutes, I guess Northland. Horray, Jane can help me now as I am obviously not an identity criminal trying to pay for someone else’s car reg.

Phew, so I proceed to tell Jane about the problem they are having with their payment page. She checks to see if the payment has gone through, and luckily it hasn’t. But the broken payment screen seems to be my problem, not their problem, so I get to talk to a supervisor, and give him the run down on what is broken on their site. At this point I have resigned to the fact that I am going to have to go to the post office to sort my registration, so I am only still on the phone trying to help them out, as a tax payer I would like Land Transport to efficiently collect the taxes. I even have screen shots of the error pages, but no one wants them. “Do you have cookies enabled?” Yes I have cookies enabled. “You didn’t take too long entering in the details?” No!

“Can I email you the screen shots of the error page?” I ask

“Hmmmmm, no. Are you using Internet Explorer?”

“No I am on a Mac and using Firefox”

“Ahh. Sorry you can’t pay online with Firefox, we only support Internet Explorer 6 and above” WTF!

So here is what is wrong with that:

1. Internet Explorer 6 is 8 years old. It is good supporting legacy browsers (cause that is what IE6 is), but only supporting IE or better?
2. Internet Explorer accounts for 67.40% of the user share of browsers today, that means everything else is 32.60%. That is a third of all users that are not supported.
3. Internet Explorer is trending down in the browser stats. In the third quarter of 2008 IE was 72.22%, so it has dropped a total market share of 4.8% in six months, and like I said, this is a clear trend so it will keep dropping.
4. If you are only going to support only one browser TELL THE USER AT THE START of the process. Why let the user go through steps 1 through 3 at all. You can easily detect the browser in use, and alert the user that they need to downgrade their browser in order to pay online.

So if this is true, then Land Transport and Westpac are failing at an epic level. I hope it is not true, and I hope Dialect are just having a bad payment processing day and just need to sort out their error messages. But there seems to still be a lot of online services that only support IE, and Wespac themselves seem to be a big fan of it. I can’t use their corporate online without IE. I think it is time some of these online services take a look at how they are not transacting online.

Oh well off to the post office.

UPDATE:

@benkepes tells me via twitter he earlier this week paid for his reg using Firefox. So why does the call centre tell people only IE is supported? Perhaps it is the standard “you are using a browser and computer we dont understand” escape hatch?

UPDATE #2:

Well on return from a very nice stroll to the post office, I find an email from info@nzta.govt.nz

<snip>

I also note you called our Contact Centre today regarding the online problems you were experiencing and were advised that Firefox is not currently supported by the Transaction Centre or POLi payment. I can confirm this information is correct.

Regards

Contact Response Team

So the policy is to not support Firefox. However I am getting mixed info from people some saying that they can pay online with non-IE browsers, and some can not (perhaps a Mac flavour vs PC flavour thing), however it is obviously policy not to support Firefox at least, but it may not prevent some things being “technically” achieved, if you are lucky.

I have also been reminded by a few people of the horrible online toll payment system (also LTNZ) where to pay by internet banking(?), you need IE and an ActiveX control (note: this is just internet banking, not credit card processing. You can pay by credit card fine if you can find your way through the user interface). I always thought internet banking was something you did with your bank via your banks website? Why do you need to download software that only runs on a PC (note: you can get the ActiveX control to run in another browser using various 3rd party tools, but this may not work and is unsupported)?

Then I found this at http://www.landtransport.govt.nz/transaction-centre/index.html

It is designed to perform best with Microsoft Internet Explorer (up to version 6.0 ) or Netscape (up to version 6.2 ). Other types of browser are not currently supported.

Now when it comes to taking money from customers, I would have thought the first rule would be to have as few barriers in the way that would prevent them from giving it to you. So eliminating one third of the total browser market is not a wise idea. Sure, the majority of that third are windows users, and can fire up IE should they need to. But they choose not to use IE. Plus, they only support up to IE 6. Not 7, not 8. I am beginning to suspect that the policy is outdated, and it possibly suits them that way.

I could be missing something here but there are no technical limitations preventing any other mainstream browser from processing financial transactions online. So why make the concious decision not to support every mainstream browser?

UPDATE #3

Well I have been trying to pay the road toll, on my prepay account, for a recent trip to Auckland via LTNZ’s toll site to no avail. The service has been taken offline due to technical problems. This morning I learn that the service has been taken down due to a glitch where prepay customers were being charged up to 20 times per trip. Hundreds of thousands of dollars was debited that should not have been. No no no no no! This is no way to earn the trust of the public, who are probably not overly entusiastic about a toll road to start with. Not to mention all the other things wrong with the toll road payment systems, and the website itself. LTNZ seem to be dropping the ball both with policy and execution of their online systems in general.

If you don’t know what I am talking about, Twitter is an emerging social networking phenomenon that lets anyone “tweet” in 140 characters or less their thoughts, opinions or just what they are doing, right at that moment. Anyone can follow your tweets, and you can follow others. By tuning into different people, you get a stream of thoughts and comments steadily flowing through to you, and you can participate in “the stream” by replying to people, or just adding your own thoughts undirected to anyone in particular.

If you have ever used a chat room, Twitter is kind-a like a “build-your-own” chat-room, where you choose the members you listen to, but they can’t necessarily hear you or each other. Sound confusing? Sound inane? Well it is a simple idea, which has strange addictive qualities that people all around the world are discovering.

Different people have different reasons for using Twitter. In it’s simplest form it is a tool for participating in conversations with your friends and associates. Some people manage only a small group of people they follow and the conversations are personal and relevant. For others it is a tool to build professional and personal networks. They follow industry conversations. For others it is a path to Internet stardom, and having large interested audiences they can entertain. For some it is a way to tap into the broad social consciousness, to get a feel for what people are thinking and talking about around the world.

Twitter can be many things to different people, but the common thread is that Twitter is a way to have a conversation with others.

Like always when a new idea starts to get traction, and a community builds around it, people inevitably starting to think how to make money through it, how to sell your wares through Twitter, how to “cash in”. If you say this to the early adopter users of Twitter, the initial reaction is “Gawd, keep those bastards out”, the bastards being of course the evil marketers and big bad corporates. Of course no one wants to be spammed through Twitter, along with everywhere else. But more and more companies are discovering that Twitter is a way to have conversations with their customers. Not selling to their customers, but talking with them. After all you can’t stop people from talking about you or your products bad or good, but you can choose to be part of that conversation. Besides, every person, as a user of Twitter, chooses who they want to listen to, so as soon as they get the sales pitch from a company they follow, they have the choice to turn off that conversation. For companies, the best way to engage with existing or new customers is to have genuine conversations that they want to participate in. It sounds pretty simple.

So having said that, is there any threat that Twitter will one day be yet another vehicle to be owned by the marketers? I think right now Twitter is in a bit of an “Age of Innocence”, it is becoming incredibly popular, and it is an interface to conversations you would not normally be a participant of. I can tweet with Telecom New Zealand (@telecomnz) and Vodafone (@vodafonenz), and if I am having a problem with a product or service they are most helpful, due credit to both. They respond with genuine interest but still in a casual Twitter way. To be honest this beats calling their call centres hands down. But then 20 years ago, if you emailed both someone within would have responded the same, with personal interest and enthusiasm because they probably only got one email from a customer each day, and it made a pleasant change. Will it be different when they have to respond to 5 tweets a second? Is the “We have received your tweet and will respond within 1 working day” message inevitable one day?

Today you can follow your favourite celebs, and tweet with them. You can quite often even get personal replies from them too. Is it the fan mail of the new century? Stephen Fry @stephenfry has a whopping 52,000 follows, and he is in the top ten twitterers worldwide (by follower numbers) so you may not get a personal response from him, but he does write his own tweets. But when Twitter reaches critical mass will it be harder to participate in conversations with these people, and will they be less genuine?

It will be fascinating to watch what happenes over the next 24 months, and to watch as different market segments adopt Twitter. Will it be the beginning of the end when after a TV news article, they invite you to “talk back” on their twitter address? Will print advertising invite people to follow products on Twitter? Will it be good or bad? At the end of the day, I feel it will be the Twitter users who will decide.

Today I get my news headlines through twitter, I follow interesting celebs, I get information about new product releases (not sales pitches) from companies I am interested in, I get blog feeds and finally, the random thoughts of many many different people (but mostly technology geeks). All my choice. My Twitter motivation is to connect with like minded people, and have genuine interesting conversations with them. As soon as the conversations stop being genuine and interesting I may turn them off. But right now, Twitter is the wild west/new frontier phase. No rules, no barriers, and find your own way.

So what are your Twitter motivations? If you don’t currently tweet, what would (or wouldn’t) you use Twitter for?

Spent money (predicted $36M), did no innovation targeted for the consumer and built a site does what it did two years ago.

Where did they go wrong?

PEOPLE ARE NOT THAT LAZY: Ferrit fell for the misconception that people will shop online in their undies because they can and it is less work than going to the shops. People are not that lazy. People love shopping. The trend is to research online and then buy in store. The exceptions are books, DVDs and music and similar. But if you are shopping for a chrome toaster, people like to look at their reflection in it first. So to change this behaviour you need to give some incentive.

NO MOTIVATION OR INCENTIVE: There was no reason to actually buy from Ferrit. It is as simple as that! You could get everything in store, or even from the retailers website direct.

PRICING: If you are shopping online you would expect to get a discount, not pay the same as you would in store. Especially when you have to add shipping.

NO COMMUNITY: After the toaster review fiasco, any chance of community fell apart. At best Ferrit just became a directory of retailers and a catalogue of their products.

ANNOYING ADS: Those TV ads were a shocker. They were funny at first, but then got really annoying really quickly.

BAD COMMERCIAL MODEL: Looking at the retailer agreements Ferrit had with it’s retailers, they expected some pretty sizable commissions from the sales, and this varied depending on the type of product being sold. On top of the Ferrit commission, the retailer needs to make a commission too, so where is the room to give the consumer a good deal. There is NONE. Ferrit became just an extra clip of the ticket.

THEY FORGOT ABOUT THE CUSTOMER: I kinda get the feeling Ferrit thought the retailer was the customer, and forgot about the people who will actually part with their cash.

What amazes me most is that they ignored all the advice and criticism that came from the industry. Everyone, but Ferrit it seems, knew their model was a failure. And they didn’t adapt.

Will anything fill the gap, well is there a gap? I think Trade Me have it pretty much covered. Otherwise, if you are a retailer wanting to sell online, then there are plenty of plug and pay shopping tools that you can plug into your own site. Then you can keep the Ferrit commission, or you may actually want to give the consumer a deal, and an incentive to buy from you online.

I have a little superstition that the evens are bountiful and the odds are hard work. Now that’s not to be pessimistic and expect doom and gloom (gawd there are enough doom merchants around at the moment). No, I actually like the odd numbered years. They are nose down kind of years, and I always seem to get a lot done. Now of course this is all silly superstition.

So what did I plan in 08?

Read more, think more, be more
This is pretty hard to measure, but I have made a concerted effort to spend more quality time reading quality, having more quality thinking time and not feeling rushed. All in all I think I am more effective. So success.

Do more to enhance my way of living without relying on buying crap
We rented no DVD’s in 08. I gave myself a “discretionary spend” budget each week and stuck to it. I did buy a new TV, but my old one was had it, and I bought an iPhone. Neither of these things can be considered “crap”. Oh and I got a boat so I can get away from things that make you want to buy crap. So I think this is a success.

Grow a really impressive moustache
SUCCESS! I thoroughly enjoyed Movember 08 and having everyone ask me if I grew my mo in sub-30 days. Yeah right. I was asked if now I will shave it off. No, I think I will hold onto it for a while. It has become kinda attached.

Avoid marketing
This one was easy. I watched only the TVNZ Freeview channels with no ads, downloaded TV series I like (with no ads), and stopped reading newspapers. Once you pull away from the mainstream media that pretty much cuts it down to mailbox circulars and online ads. Neither of these actually register with me anyway.

Be a better person
Success. I was a notorious work-a-holic and often let my work get in the way of other nuisances like, healthy relationships and lifestyle. I am now a reformed work-a-holic. I still work hard but in measured doses. I left my full time operational role with Vianet, and started part time consultancy which has quickly become a regular thing. I spend more time with my family and love them even more. I have more time for friends, and the community. And most importantly I have more time for me.

Move more
I have lost 8kg in 08. I find it much easier to get off my arse now. It is great!

Love more
I spend more quality time with my family. My youngest daughter spent the first 2 years of her life with a never there dad. And when I was I was always thinking about work. I have discovered two beautiful girls living in my house and they become more delightful everyday.

Eat less
As part of my weight loss, I watch what I eat. I count everything. It is amazing how oblivious I was to the amount of crap going into my body. When you carefully measure the inputs you can get very predictable outputs, and this is the secret to success for most things. If you don’t measure the inputs, how can you possibly expect the right outputs. As Rowan once advised, measure everything!

Hate less
Lastly, as a result of all the above I find I am much happier, and thus don’t hate as much. There is still much that “grinds my gears” but I don’t hate it as much. I find that if I don’t like something, rather than hating it, I provide constructive criticism, and see if I can help them or it out so I don’t hate it some much.

Well what is ahead for 09? I think the above worked so I’m gonna stick with it. But there is one new thing to add. There is a project I have been toying around with as an idea for some time now. Occasionally I tinker away at it. But this year I am going to get it going. I will make a plan (using PlanHQ) of what I want to achieve and then give it quality time. This is a year of hard work you know.

Also I refuse to participate in the recession. I think it is all psycological anyway. Anyone who tries to get me to subscribe to the impending doom will get a quick dose of optimisim and sunshine.

I think the idea being so people could not google them and be prejudiced prior to the trial perhaps?. What? The media are reporting only what is plainly public domain, like the fact they are accused of the murder of John Hapeta. Anything else someone is likely to find about the two men is already there. Will this stop people blogging about the trial? No. Will it stop people talking about it? No. Will it stop people thinking about it? No.

Now correct me if I am wrong, but are we entitled to free speech still? I can respect name suppression in general, and understand its importance, but is this a little half-arsed? By last count, I have found atleast 10 posts online already naming the men, plus stuff.co.nz is already openly naming them online (UPDATE: this only lasted a couple of hours, and they have now removed the names from the article). Once you have one you might as well have 100,000. It is near impossible to police and to stop. The Internet has a memory and does not forget. In fact the more you try and conceal something online, the more prolific it becomes, why? Just because people don’t like to be told not to do something, or think something.

So why did Judge David Harvey pick this case? I am not sure. It is no more high profile than any other case at the moment or in recent history. It is not Internet related. Perhaps it is because these fellows have fairly uncommon names and would be easily googled? Well the only posts online I found about either were the above posts and articles naming them in connection with the murder. Is it to test the waters a little? The media were all taken aback by this one. Perhaps Judge David Harvey, trying to establish a precedent, was slipping this one through?

Seriously, I can’t for a moment think that Judge David Harvey is a fool, in fact I suspect he is quite smart and he is very aware of what will come out of this, people will post online the details, the media will challenge him, and there will be a good deal of discussion over the idea of suppression on the Internet of case details and accused identities.

Perhaps there are one or more points being made here. Here is one.

Does new media creates challenges for a legal system that is built on some basic premises, one being you will be judged by a jury with a relatively unbiased point of view. Once upon a time you picked from the “peers” of the accused a jury, stuck them in a room and they deliberated, went home, perhaps caught the six-o-clock news, and read some stuff about the case in the paper, went back to court and deliberated some more. Today a juror can google anything. They can find the accused on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, LinkedIn. They can read blogs about the accused, and the case itself. They can do this from their computer, or their mobile phone, from home, the court, on the way to the court. There are no rules about what you and I can write about online, and if you do think someone is guilty and have a strong opinion you have every right to say so, don’t you? It’s your opinion. It may be unqualified, but it is your opinion and your right. But could this influence the opinion of that juror? Is that okay? Is that part of being someone’s “peer” in today’s society? “Geesh, everyone blogging about the case thinks he is guilty, so he must be”. Can the Internet find someone guilty?

I don’t think this will stick and lawyers from the Herald and Fairfax will get involved, but it sure is getting the media thinking and talking about it, which I am guessing was Judge David Harvey’s goal. It may have been a bit extreme, but I am guessing he has one or two important points to make and they will come out when “the media” challenges it.

My pick is the 3G model is due any day now. I wait in wonder.