Diarist is a Windows Phone app developed by fellow Geekzone user Kev Daly. It has some cool features including Share option in photos so we can upload and blog an image and it works with Metaweblog API.

Testing it on Windows Phone 8, you can ignore this post.

HP invited a group of bloggers (including myself) to attend the HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. The infrastructure provided was incredible: accommodation, transport, special blogger lounge on the exhibition floor, communications, gatherings, reserved seats to all keynotes (including power and ethernet connections), plus the opportunity to meet many HP and partners' executives at the lounge during "coffee talks" available to our group only.

The number of posts still coming out of the group is quite large. So I decided to put together a "link blog". The DiscoveringHP is a meta blog listing all posts I could find, coming from this group, plus a blogroll where you can find your way to their blogs' main pages.

I understand some are still working on other posts, and I will update the DiscoveringHP blog with more links as they become available. I will also try and keep it alive during the upcoming HP Discover 2011 event in Vienna (Austria) - the European version of HP Discover.

This Thursday, 16 June 2011, Te Papa is hosting a one-off screening of a selection of creative works made for mobile phones, using mobile phones, by Laurent Antonczak and Max Schleser.
 

Thursday 16 June 2011
Soundings Theatre, Level 2
Te Papa
6.30pm-8.30pm
Free entry
 
Laurent will be presenting music videos designed for small screens, including New Day Interactive, a kinetic music video that responds to user's mobile phone movements, and Hamster Squaredance, an interactive music video that uses embedded QR codes (Quick Response barcodes that can be read by mobile phones).
 
Max will be showing two mobile-mentaries (mobile documentaries) made using mobile phones; Max with a Keitai, a film shot entirely on two mobile phones in Japan in 2006, and Ekaterinburg, a short mobile-mentary about the Heartbeat Festival in the Russian city of Ekaterinburg.
 
Both Laurent and Max will be present at the screenings to discuss their work, and will also be running a digital media workshop focusing on mobile film production at Massey University during the weekend following the Te Papa event (17th - 19th June).

More details here.

If you have seen Das Boot (or not), here is a spoof created by students at the Media Design School in Auckland, called Das Tub.

I received an invite for their launch event, but you can watch it online now...

Now and then I remember to post an update on stats we collect here on Geekzone... To put this in context, remember Geekzone is a technology community, with a demographics that is more likely to update their browser and computers to the latest and greatest. Having said, it is obvious our numbers will be very different of those from a site with a more "traditional" audience.

All those numbers are based on a sampling of more than 600,000 visits to the site over the last month.

Operating System: Microsoft Windows continues to lead the pack, with 84.39% of the visits. Mac OS follows with 9.85% and Linux third with 3.63%. iPad shows up in fourth with 0.91%. There was one lonely visit from someone using IBM OS/2 (and similarly small numbers for Playstation 3, SunOS, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Unix, OpenBSD).

Visitors using Windows were split in Windows XP (47.24%), Windows 7 (34.16%) and Windows Vista (16.92%). We should mention those brave 19 people visiting Geekzone while using Windows ME, and those three using Windows 95.

Mac OS users mostly used Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard (70.2%), and Mac OS 10.5 Leopard (21.41%). Someone out there is either using Mac OS 10.7 or faking the agent string, with two visits.

Browsers: Yet again Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox are head to head. And Firefox is again just inching in front of Internet Explorer. Here are the numbers: Firefox with 36.50%, Internet Explorer with 35.56%, Chrome with 16.63%,  Safari with 7.72%, Opera with 2.26%. Thanks to that person who visited Geekzone from a Nook eReader, and the Lynx user.

There are still 10.15% of users on Internet Explorer 6, but the majority is using Internet Explorer 8 (68.57%) and Internet Explorer 7 (21.23%).

Firefox users are mostly on 3.6.6 with 48.15% of the visits, but from there you see a variety of versions. It seems even though Firefox is gaining traction, people still don't update their browser installs.

IPv6: IPv6 adoption is slow, but I believe content providers should move in that direction... Since connecting Geekzone servers to an IPv6-enabled network and introducing AAAA records we have seen 0.04% of the visits coming through that connection.

Forums: Our Geekzone forums exploded last week thanks to the imbroglio that was the iPhone 4 launch in New Zealand. We saw spikes of more than 100% traffic over previous periods (day/week) thanks to the confusion generated by Apple and Vodafone not coming to an agreement if there would be an iPhone 4 launch in the country - less than 24 hours before the previously announced release date.

As a consequence, this month our top five Geekzone forums were Apple iOS (11.90%), Telecom New Zealand (8.28%), Off Topic (7.50%), Home Theatre (6.26%), Android (5.54%).

In the next update I will be able to report a new metric we are now following: ad blockers. Since Geekzone is fully funded by advertising (with some special sponsored blogs such as Visual Studio 2008 and MyFreeview|HD Review), I wanted to find out how many of our tech savvy users visit Geekzone and block our ads. We just started measuring this, and so far the numbers are a surprise to me.

Coming soon to TVNZ 7, InternetNZ - and a dedicated page here on Geekzone. If you plan to tweet about this please use the tag #TVNZ7:

Broadcaster TVNZ 7 and online policy leader InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) are proud to announce the TVNZ 7 Internet Debate on Wednesday 11 August at 9.10pm, LIVE from Avalon Studios in Wellington and hosted by experienced journalist Damian Christie.

The TVNZ 7 Internet Debate will be broadcast on TVNZ 7, streamed online and will incorporate online chat and polling to debate one of the most contentious topics surrounding the Internet today – “Who is responsible for safety and privacy online?”

The Debate will investigate three contentious areas of the Internet age – the safety of children, government intervention such as Internet filtering, and the industry’s responsibility to keep our data private as use of social media grows.

The public can watch on TVNZ 7 (available on Freeview/TiVo channel 7 or SKY/Telstra channel 97, www.internetnz.net.nz/tvnz7debate, or www.geekzone.co.nz. Online conversation leading up to and on the night will be established on Twitter, Geekzone and Facebook.

An expert range of panelists has been assembled including NetSafe Executive Director Martin Cocker, InternetNZ CE Vikram Kumar, Family First National Director Bob McCroskie, Telecommunications Industry Group CEO Rob Spray, Watchdog International founder Peter Mancer and Taylor Shaw lawyer Kathryn Dalziel.

The show is part of TVNZ 7’s Spotlight on Science and Technology month and is produced by Wellington production company Top Shelf.

TVNZ 7 Channel Manager Philippa Mossman says “TVNZ 7 is all about discovering, discussing and debating and we’re pleased to be working with InternetNZ to bring this thought-provoking debate on a topic that affects each of us in a far-reaching way. It’s a logical fit with our focus on science and technology in August, but it’s as much a debate about contemporary society and culture as it is about technology.”

InternetNZ CEO Vikram Kumar says the online world has become an inextricable part of most New Zealanders daily lives.

“As more New Zealanders connect and the Internet continues to grow, issues of online safety and security, use and abuse of social media, government filtering and censorship are coming under the microscope.

“The TVNZ 7 Internet Debate focuses a lens on these issues, asking who is responsible for online safety and privacy in the context of parents & children, individuals vs. government and individuals vs. the internet industry.”

On the day of the TVNZ 7 Internet Debate a series of public workshops will be hosted by InternetNZ in Wellington and NetSafe in Auckland.
For more information see:

facebook.com/TVNZ7
internetnz.net.nz/tvnz7debate

John Cleese explains the difference between those two sports, in an excerpt from The Art of Football...

According to a Nielsen Market Intelligence ranking sent out today, there's a good reason to advertise on Geekone: our audience is not afraid of engaging online. A quick look at the table below and you'll see why (click for a larger version):



Remember this is for New Zealand domestic traffic only. Nielsen explains the methodology:

"The rankings do not show which websites have the actual highest traffic numbers (ie total number of unique browsers) of this demographic, but instead show which sites have the highest percentage of their traffic consisting of people who have purchased online from any website, for the month of April.

For example, techday.co.nz is the number one ranking because 55.4 percent of its unique browsers meet the demographic requirement, but their total number of matched unique browsers equals 6,025. geekzone.co.nz on the other hand, in third place, has 51.7 percent of its unique browsers that meet the demographic requirement but their total number of matched unique browsers equals 54,132."

For some public demographic information you can check our Geekzone information on Quantcast and select different countries from their list.

We have decided to relist Geekzone on Nielsen Market Intelligence, just to gather numbers for advertising agencies. Having said that, Nielsen reports "Unique Browsers" and for comparison I also show our Google Analytics reporting "Visits" for the same period. Here is what Nielsen says:



And here is what Google Analytics tells me:



Looking at the % of New Zealand traffic reported by Google Analytics, it seems total Unique Visitors according to Google Analytics is about 38,661 - about 50% more than Nielsen is reporting...

I am actually testing the metaweblog API implementation on Geekzone, and using Windows Live Writer to post this blog entry.

As usual Phil (RedJungle, @redjungle on Twitter) did a great job of integrating our custom database and a nice .Net wrapper to allow this magic to happen.

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