Here in New Zealand we like to think of ourselves as a small, nimble, technical country, however, when it comes to eCommerce we’re rubbish! Take a look at this newspaper comment about Air New Zealand simply refusing to support Mac users who want to book online. You heard me, if you use a Macintosh you can not do online bookings with Air New Zealand. This is supposedly an internationally recognised top-quality airline who are pretty much giving the finger to some of their customer base. What makes it worse is if you book over the phone with them you are charged an extra unwaivable $15!

Further examples abound in the terrible website design that supposedly modern companies employ. (more…)

This guy has a couple of handy tips to make Firefox go even faster. Suitable for broadband users only. It really seems to help!

Recently I’ve been enjoying podcasting, a technique whereby sound files are delivered to people via RSS. The sound files are collected by programs such as iPodder and then added to your iPod library (I assume it works for other MP3 players too.

This wonderful tool means I need no longer listen to the radio at all. With the BBC getting involved already I will soon be able to tailor any audio entertainment to my exact tastes. I can be going to work, at the gym or at home and by listening to a documentary on quantum physics, a news show on new technology, a Spanish lesson or any one of hundreds of Podcast feeds.

Right now Podcasting is pretty new but I expect it to become very popular quite quickly. It’s almost like a TiVo for radio or the internet and it’s a lot of fun so far.

But this leads us to the question, is it better to have a wide range sources or information or to be able to tailor exactly what one wants to hear. This challenge to our collective understanding of the world, indeed, this challenge to society itself, is something we will have to tackle this century and I’m not sure we can handle it just yet.

Flickr is a wonderful service that lets you upload, store and share pictures in a flash. If you haven’t noticed already I’ve been using it for a few weeks and I am completely in love with it. It can have my little ginger babies if it wants and I promise to never ditch it and fight over who owns the dog. Never! You are mine flickr, MINE!

Ok, well, yes, you should all go and check out flickr. It lets you use a tiny application to directly upload images to your image store and you can also send in images by email, mobile phone and via a web page. Once you have loaded the images you can title them, send them to groups (kind of like a shared image noticeboard) and you can quickly post them into blogs. You can also stream them to web sites easily as you can see further down in my blog.

The groups function is quite nice. I started one for my family and joined ones for Second Life, Auckland (where I live) and Wellinton (where I studied).