30 posts tagged “blog”

Some more oddities I have found on the web today, both relating to Google.
   Ever hear of people wanting you to give 110 per cent? Google’s Blogger service sure tries hard:

Blogger gives more than 100 per cent

Cialis ads on Google News

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Photo of Katie Taylor by Paul Whiteford, featured at Lucire

I know some people reckon beauty pageants are dead (or want them to be), but here are the most-searched keywords or phrases at the Lucire ‘Insider’ blog, beating Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new Chanel ad.
   Lyndon at Scoop tells me he’s seen the same pattern there, and the Miss New Zealand item has had to compete with political and swine-’flu news.
   As Kiwis make up a small portion of Lucire’s total audience, this is a huge but very pleasant surprise.

Today (so far)
miss universe new zealand 2009
miss universe new zealand
miss new zealand 2009
miss universe nz 2009
katie taylor miss universe
katie taylor miss nz
miss universe new zealand katie taylor
miss world 2000
jean-pierre jeunet chanel
aucklander katie taylor

Yesterday
miss universe new zealand 2009
miss universe new zealand
katie taylor nz
katie taylor miss new zealand
miss universe nz 2009
katie taylor miss nz
katie taylor miss universe
aucklander katie taylor, 22
miss new zealand 2009
katie taylor miss universe nz
katie taylor new zealand

I was totally stoked when Dan Gordon took a comment I made and turned it into a fictional election billboard on his blog. (Dan, please let me know if you prefer just the link and not the image.)

Maybe I should note ‘Authorized by Tom Dowie, 18 Walton Street, Christchurch’ even though it’s not an ad from the party, just to be on the safe side. (US readers: this is our equivalent of ‘I am … and I approve this message.’)

I know it’s fashionable to have a blog but what if you were a banking general manager with a printed newsletter to customers?

Westpac newsletter editorial

[Cross-posted] Normally I don’t do memes but since this has come from a real-life friend of mine, as opposed to someone I only know online, I am making an exception. So, Laura, here are my songs. (And you know me, I break all rules, which I will kind of do here!)

The rules
   1. Link to the person who tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
   2. Share five songs you are embarrassed to admit to others that you like and tell why.
   3. Tag seven random people at the end of your post.

The songs
   Here’s the thing: not a heck of a lot embarrasses me, especially not song preferences. So I will name some songs that you’d expect me to be embarrassed about but I am not.
   1. ‘Gin and Juice’, as performed by Richard Cheese. I know next to nothing about hip-hop though I eventually did hear the original done by Snoop Dogg. However, I heard the lounge version of this by Richard Cheese and his band first. It’s quite pleasant to listen to.
   2. ‘Jerusalem’. ‘Did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green?’ Grand stuff.
   3. ‘On the Inside’, the theme from the Australian soap Prisoner, or as it was called in the UK, Prisoner in Cell Block H. My mother was a midwife and after school I would wait for her at the hospital while she finished work. I’d go into the TV room where the mothers were smoking away and watching Prisoner. Being a child, in those days, you couldn’t go and switch the channel while adults were watching. So I tended to see the end credits and the haunting song, and I can probably still sing parts of it today.
   4. ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, performed either by Shirley Bassey in the original or David McAlmont in a cover version conducted by Nicholas Dodd. Boys aren’t meant to like this song, but I love it. And McAlmont’s androgynous version is actually very good. And come on, it’s composed by John Barry with lyrics by Don Black. That makes it cool.
   5. ‘Have You Never Been Mellow?’, performed by Olivia Newton-John. It might have been composed by John Farrar. O. N.-J. rocks. There, I said it.

As I once blogged, I tend not to tag people and leave it to them to take up these memes at their leisure. So, if you wish to share your embarrassing songs, please go ahead.

The below is from an entry I made at my main blog, based on some very basic maths after reposting a graph from the Historian’s blog.

Just last week I was listening to the radio—one of the foreign-owned stations that seem to populate the FM airwaves (probably Coast)—and the DJ gave one of the less intelligent commentaries about oil prices I had heard. He also referred to ‘gas prices,’ which of course is the incorrect term here where gas refers to gas, not petrol or gasoline.
   Petrol prices in New Zealand rise and fall based on American news—something that is not that relevant when it comes to how much we pay for oil. When there is a rise in the US dollar oil price, but the New Zealand dollar has strengthened over the same period, then that rise should not be felt at the pump as greatly.
   Let’s assume oil prices are at US$120 a barrel and there is no inflation between 2000 and 2008. (Of course, it was less than $120 in 2000 and more than $120 now.)
   In 2000, with the New Zealand dollar at an all-time low against the greenback, we would have had to fork out NZ$300 to get that barrel.
   In 2008, with the New Zealand dollar having gone back to around 1982 levels against the greenback, the equivalent is NZ$154.
   So for a New Zealand company buying oil, it actually costs less.
   However, I am ashamed to note that once you factor in the real prices, we are looking at these figures:

2000 price of crude, US$27·39 (real, not adjusted), equalling NZ$68·48
2008 price of crude, US$134, equalling NZ$171·79

Pump prices—and I know I am ignoring refining costs and a whole bunch of other stuff—are:

2000: NZ$0·97 per litre
2008: NZ$2·14 per litre

This actually means the rate of increase New Zealanders are experiencing is not as bad as the oil prices offshore based on New Zealand dollars, even if our prices are rising more quickly than Europe’s.
   While the Americans, relative to their dollar, are paying four times more, we are paying just under three times.
   Whatever the case, I think it’s worth informing the public—especially on whom we might be able to blame these price rises. And that demand and supply have nothing to do with these high prices, because demand is actually dropping—so we can stop blaming the Americans for their big SUVs and the Red Chinese for buying new cars.
   The targets are most likely the speculators, institutional investors, price fixers, the corporations and the cartels.
   And it seems to lend some weight to isolating a small country from these threats, globalizing where it makes sense—and in other areas, developing a better model in isolation to show the world how things might be done.

Ooh, I love it. The usual Red technique of scaring people from having free speech.
   Mr Andrew Moore has set up a website called Don’t Vote Labour. Whether you agree with Mr Moore or not, he has a right to express his political view. He is not endorsing any particular candidate: he just wants Labour out of power.
   The media are trying to make him feel bad for expressing his view, as far as I can tell. The stories are all over the news today: Mr Moore, they say, will be investigated by the Electoral Commission as his site could be a breach of the Electoral Finance Act 2007, which covers, inter alia, website communications. Judge for yourself and see if this is the gist of the articles, which are making out like something very terrible has taken place.
   Bollocks.
   Not only has Mr Moore not heard from the Electoral Commission, the Commission spokesman contacted by the NZPA suggests that no investigation has even taken place. Read his quotation carefully. Nothing has happened yet.
   There is more nothingness to the article than in an episode of Seinfeld.
   Some pro-government journalist probably stumbled on the website and decided to make life hard for Mr Moore and hoped to scare him into taking it down.
   The effect is that it has popularized it: the media have done all the marketing for him.
   We have to be very careful about reading these articles and whether something is in the past or future tense.
   I say that Mr Moore’s site does not even fit in to the requirements of an election advertisement under s. 5 of the Act.
   Any prosecution would have to be under s. 5 (1) (a):

(1) In this Act, election advertisement—
   (a) means any form of words or graphics, or both, that can reasonably be regarded as doing 1 or more of the following:
      (i) encouraging or persuading voters to vote, or not to vote, for 1 or more specified parties or for 1 or more candidates or for any combination of such parties and candidates:

but if that were the be all and end all, subs. (2) would not exist.
   I reckon that the site is excepted. If it’s considered a news media internet site (a wider and wider definition these days), then it fits under s. 5 (2) (d):

(2) The following are not election advertisements: …
   (d) any editorial material, other than advertising material, published on a news media Internet site that is written by, or selected by or with the authority of, the editor or person responsible for the Internet site solely for the purpose of informing, enlightening, or entertaining readers:

or how about paragraph (g)?

   (g) the publication by an individual, on a non-commercial basis, on the Internet of his or her personal political views (being the kind of publication commonly known as a blog).

It’s not a blog but one can easily make an argument on why Parliament put that part in parentheses.
   I’d happily swear that Mr Moore, with his site, is doing no more and no less than what a regular blogger might, and he should not be penalized just for being smarter with his web design skills. He’s simply organized his opinions better so we can see access them rather than trawl through dozens of posts to get them all.
   For years I worked on websites and put up what might amount to blog entries in 2008—but I did them in good ol’ HTML and made them look like regular web pages because I don’t always think the blog æsthetic looks nice.
   Mr Moore shouldn’t be penalized on his tastes, either.
   And, let’s face it, if you manually typed in dontvotelabour.org.nz as I did, you are pretty sure what political position the site has taken. Or if you clicked on the link here. Mr Moore is not shoving his website down our throats—which makes it just like a blog that we have to access ourselves. This is not from a push medium like TV or print.
   I think any judge analysing the rationale of why words under s. 5 (2) (g) are parenthesized would come to a conclusion that Parliament meant for a wider definition and that those words are merely a guide.
   And before you think I am launching into Labour, I would have written a similar post defending a webmaster who set up a Don’t Vote National or Don’t Vote Greens website.

What was the best blog post you wrote this year? What was the best post or blog you read?

Hard to say. Of mine, I thought the observations about the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial were pretty good and provoked a good and polite comment from the other side of the argument. I also started the year with what I thought was a succinct one on luxury at the Janus Thinking blog. Then there are all the private ones here on Vox that only a select few got to read.
   Of others’, there is no way of picking one that stood out. I probably spent more time than I could have predicted mid-year at the Journeyman Blog during the fall 2007 TV season. Who knew I would find a show to obsess about after Life on Mars finished?