The NZ Web's greatest hits (and misses)
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"how real journalists should right (sadly lacking here in NZ)."
oh the irony. s/right/write
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I'm with Andrew, Onebefore, SunnyO and Halfpie got me interested in blogs.
Woolies online for delivering grog.
PA for making me sound clever at parties.
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Hah! That SunnyO guy is a twisted barstard if you ask me.
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Bet he wears a hat.
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Grant: What about Frogblog, back in its hey-day during the election? I thought that was a worthy daily read.
OTOH, sometimes I wonder why everyone think they need a website. It's analogous to every company thinking they need a shopfront. Sure, it's handy to be able to access party policy on-demand, but I'm not sure if people go to a political party website looking to be engaged or converted.
Anyway - my first internet memory is from "Back in the Day", when Xtra was first launched. I was one of the innocent children they herded like sacrificial lamb for their big launch demo. Xtra's "Big Thing" was an ultra-user-friendly graphical interface that would allow users to access everything they ever wanted to find on the interweb (read: a jpg with mouse-over links to 4 different websites).
I still have the t-shirt.
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As an expat with fantasies of returning one day, can I put in a plug for open2view.com ? Best real estate perving this side of nyhabitat.com. And a useful way of keeping tabs on curious and disturbing trends in haute bourgeois home decoration...
Ditto on Newsroom.co.nz before all the good stuff disappeared behind the paywall. It was enormously useful in organizing activism from overseas, and then suddenly it wasn't.
Could do better: if only there were a decent place to buy NZ books and music online for shipment overseas. Ben's totally right that Whitcoulls punted on this one.
Y'know, this whole System is reminding me of the good old days of soc.culture.nz, with Brian Harmer and his WYSIWIG news...
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Y'know, this whole System is reminding me of the good old days of soc.culture.nz, with Brian Harmer and his WYSIWIG news.
Aarrrggh! Just had a must-not-turn-into-Usenet moment ...
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No danger of death-by-crossposting though, eh?
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Anyway - my first internet memory is from "Back in the Day", when Xtra was first launched. I was one of the innocent children they herded like sacrificial lamb for their big launch demo.
Heh. I remember going to their corporate launch, where I consumed a tankload of Telecom booze and later in the evening behaved in a manner merry yet so unwise that it must never be spoken of. Calculating whether I could land one on Alan Gibbs and leg it for the door was the least of it ...
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But did you?
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yeah... if a person had worked in a government department and seen how they get it together to put stuff on the web, you'd not think them so avant garde.
a popular quote by a person who had been in one of the conversations to get very simple things online may well have been, "the blimmin banks are doing it, why can't we?!"
which goes to show, the greatest advance in internet technology may well have been ATMs (with their marvellous simplicity), and online banking.
if you can remember brown paper pay-packets, you'll find it hard to disagree with me.
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But did you?
Although he looked like the most smug man in the world, no. But I could have ...
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Anyway, wrenching things back to the topic, I dimly recall a local site in the 90s that made the most utterly egregious use of horizontal scrolling. Can anyone remember what it was?
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If you slash the tyres of an Aquada, does it sink?
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hey hey we finally get to comment. Newsroom early on definitely had it over scoop. I seem to remember a sort of RSS aggregator that got my junkie juices flowing.
ihug was a pretty major one for me with the ability to get remote mail - it seems so simple now :) -
it's better than that. ihug was the first to give unlimited download time/volumes for dial-up.
freakin genius. everyone i knew subscribed within weeks.
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I have to go with David Slack and give mad props to Robyn for Secret Passage and Dean Gray for A Waste of Bandwidth. Whatever happened to him anyway?
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I wanted to praise Arts and Letters Daily -- despite the sometimes mad ravings of its progenitor, it does (or did, I haven't been there for a while) manage to show how to get a whale of a lot of info onto a page, without flashy tricks, and yet in a way which clearly appealed strongly to the target audience.
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Hey, off topic - this is great - although I fear I may have to go do some work soon, and I'm getting withdrawal symptoms, I may have to head for Kiwiblog, sign on as "Darth Bilious" & call someone a moron.
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Here is a one hit wonder on the NZ web:
http://www.familyfirst.org.nz/index.cfm/action_alert_
Naughty Hell's Pizza
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I was working at Xtra when the black wall was replaced with the sunny yellow and blue portal. It was probably one of the greatest moments in the history of NZ interweb culture. Serious.
I have Ihug stories - oh, I have Ihug stories - but I'm saving those for later.
And thanks, David and Joanna, for the props. Yo, etc.
As for Dean Gray, I like to think he's secretly blogging under a pseudonym, spewing out hilarious, inflammatory right-wing rants. If he isn't, he should be.
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Does anyone remember BOHICA?
It was made up of incensed smaller ISPs who felt that Telecom was giving unfair discounts to Xtra which, oh, it just happened to own.
So BOHICA was formed. It stood for Bold Opposition to Hostile Internet Corporate Activities. Its logo was a snarling dog, which was, like, a reaction to Telecom’s SPOT.
Of course, BOHICA more commonly stands for “bend over, here it comes again”, which may have been a little too accurate.
I found this Computerworld article from ’96 outlining BOHICA’s outrage (Oh, look who it’s written by!).
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Daily stops are PA & NZBC. And Scoop should get an honourable mention for its excellent array of RSS feeds.
Stuff is at the other end of the spectrum: particularly when you look at it's stablemates in Oz: SMH & the Age, it is just plain embarrassing by comparison. Oh, and anything with a Flash splash screen is enough to make me close the browser window.
Other pet peeve: govt sites that think that using .co.nz or .com somehow makes them 'cooler'...
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early good sites:
webworkshop! (yeah, rob and lance, guilty as charged)
CHC Press was the first nz paper i regularly visited. back in the mid-90s my hatred of the herald was visceral and their web presence was nada.
early tvnz site (before they f-ed it up c.1999)
aardvark
scoop and hard news around 9/11. on a friday if i turned my mac on at work and there was no new hard news for the week i would be swearing about that lazy rb for a couple of hours ;-)
more recently:
frogblog leading up to the 2005 election. sooo good, which is why i have now had it with the current incarnation of frogblog. lame. lazy. waste of time. treats its users with contempt. some nice people used to comment, most of them have left the room.norightturn is great. but i/s, will you ever move to a better platform? blogger sucks. and it's a pity there is only a handful of interesting regular commenters.
------------------------brickbats:
- stuff.co.nz? gees, has it improved? I've always found it appalling to navigate.
- radio nz until a couple of years ago. what a disaster. -
As an ex-New Zealand resident who wants to keep abreast of news and things in New Zealand, the places I visit daily are
Aardvark
Stuff
Public Address
RBNZ - that one because it's my industry
NBNZ - my bankand I used to visit the Herald regularly until it wanted my money. With an ad-blocker, Stuff is great, but if I switch it off or hve to use another machine, I practically go blind.
What bombed? I bought something from Flying Pig, but not enough, just like everyone else. Is the AA Galleria still around? That was pretty awful too. And there was a sort of news site called SODA, if I remember correctly, that was supposed to be updated daily, but it wasn't.
And I just know that as soon as I post this, I'll think of another site.
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