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At last,
the contents of Aardvark's "million-dollar ideas" notebook
are revealed for all to see!
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When I saw a headline in this morning's NZ Herald which read
Smoking in the boys' room: what a blast and
which started out with the foreboding words
"A home-made bomb built by students at a Hamilton high school..."
you can guess what I was thinking.
As I read through the story I was just waiting for mention of the Internet
as a source for bomb plans -- after all, the mainstream media has previously
never missed an opportunity to link any story relating to bombs or pornography
to the Internet. In fact I can't ever recall reading a headline that
said "Boys Got Bomb Recipe From Encyclopedia At Local Library."
Well I must admit that I was impressed -- until I read the words
"Detective Sergeant Ross suspected that a website had given them the know-how
to build the device."
I must also admit that I didn't spot that the first time I read the article and
was about to give the Herald a big pat on the back for being so objective -- but
then a couple of early readers pointed out that I'd overlooked the "suspicions" of the police.
Now I have to ask: the police "suspect" that the plans came from the Net?
No proof, no facts, no substanting evidence -- just a hunch eh? Is that really
newsworthy?
Why don't they "suspect" that the plans came from an encyclopedia or that the
boys worked it out themselves from the information provided in a textbook?
After all, that's the way I (and many others) did it when I built bombs as a kid.
Maybe the media isn't as bad as it was -- but the Police still seem keen
to "suspect" the Net at every opportunity.
NZ, Australia's Poor Cousin?
Even though Microsoft might consider New Zealand worthy of its own identity
and the investment of $300m by way of a stake in NZ Telecom, it seems
that they don't have a lot of company.
Over recent months I've been linking on a semi-regular basis to stories
on the NZ.Internet.com
website.
These stories have been written by well known wordsmith Keith Newman and
have been great reading. In fact on some mornings they were the only
items of local relevance that I could find!
Unfortunately the parent of nz.internet.com --
Internet.com, have decided that
New Zealand isn't worth the effort. So as far as they are concerned we are
now a suburb of Australia.
Although no notice seems to have been posted to the site, the publishing of
Kiwi stories stopped abruptly a week or so ago -- leaving visitors (including
me) wondering what was going on. Those who subscribed to the site's e-mailouts
however were at least given the courtesy of a message which said in part:
"We will still maintain our commitment to the New Zealand market through
our Australian network - australia.internet.com. We will also continue to
profile both listed and private technology and new media companies through
our Australian 'Internet Daily' newsletter.".
They say that the NZ market doesn't warrant special attention in the way that
Australia's market does (gosh, I wish I'd known that it wasn't worth writing
solely for the local market! ;-)
However, I think there might be more going on (or going wrong) at Internet.com
than meets the eye.
The (once) excellent
NewsLinx site owned and
operated by Internet.com also seems to have gone down the gurgler during the
past week.
Compare the number of stories/links published at
this time last month with those published
today and you'll see
what I mean.
It would seem that the NewsLinx site is now only being updated by the tea-lady
when she ducks off to the toilet for a fag. The site's real value was the
fact that it was such
a comprehensive roundup of the industry's news -- today it's just another
small link-site and I suspect it's going to lose a lot of traffic very soon
unless things are fixed.
Hey, nobody ever said publishing on the Net would be easy I guess.
Free Tech/Net News
Looking for some free Tech/Net news for your website from 7amNews/ShockHorrorProbe?
The headlines and stories you see in the reddish box on this page are now available
for others to place on their own website -- free of charge. What's more,
for a limited introductory period, you can include the entire story within
your own pages so that people don't leave your site when they click on a headline.
Check out this page
for more information. Note -- this is in Beta test at this stage so please
report any problems.
Add Aardvark To Your Own Website!
Got a moment? Want a little extra fresh content for your own website or
page?
Just add a
couple of lines of JavaScript
to your pages and you can get
a free summary of Aardvark's daily commentary -- automatically updated
each and every week-day.
Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using
the RSS format. More details can be found
here.
Contact me if you decide to use either of these feeds and
have any problems.
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