Posts by Morgan Nichol
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Losing has become something of a trend for Renaissance - they lost Macromedia & Adobe, so it would fit that they also lose Apple.
If you've ever visited the Renaissance offices, you might have gone through the same double-take I did... "Wait, THIS is APPLE?!" It was like the offices of a paper merchant in Slough, certainly not what I expected from the most carefully cultivated marketing driven brand on earth.
If the eternally rumoured NZ Itunes store provided TV shows I want, in higher quality than I can get from torrents, and more conveniently (so maybe they can provide for fast downloads, but torrenspy is pretty damn convenient), I would absolutely pay to get them. But they won't. They won't be anything like up to date. So they'll be a complete waste of time for the majority of people that are already comfortable with downloading TV.
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Nice one, thanks for posting this.
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Russell, just my humble opinion, but if you're going to allow pseudonyms (and I don't think you should, but you're the boss) I think you should be very strict with those few that hide behind their keyboards - whether they think they have to or not.
Also, timeouts are a good way of cooling people off if you don't feel the need to go all the way and get the ban hammer out, so do keep that in mind if someone posts drunk or gets over excited or whatever.
Lastly, and only assuming that it's true, I'm completely astonished to see Redbaiter posting under his real name.
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So, sure, I was on the Hard News mailing list, and it was great, but it wasn't influential (to the web), and it wasn't a website. And while publicaddress.net is both influential and a website, it wasn't early.
I'm very sad that no one has mentioned my daily ihug logo awesomeness, but it was nice to at least get a mention of our attempts at providing news. I'd put my hand up as one of the first NZ sites using RSS, but I have no way of proving it (not even to myself).
You want influential and early, you want Ihug between 1995 - 1997ish. Flat rate when everyone else was screwing the punters for all they were worth, free all sorts of things, and even broadband for home and rural users. Oh, and thousands of dial-up numbers. What a delight that was. :D
IDG was a must visit every day for me, Aardvark too.
I stopped visiting both for very different reasons. IDG when they redesigned the site to have no news on the front page. (What are they THINKING?! Surely their readership must have plummeted!) Aardvark because, well, Bruce Simpson really doesn't do it for me.
Believe it or not MoreFM were the first radio station in NZ streaming online (we were streaming them through a Xing MPEG box) way back in 1995 or very early 1996. Very influential in the sector, and followed quite quickly by bFM - when we moved to RealAudio (we moved again to MP3 straming much later), and the RealAudio server we built to handle the radio stations had enough excess capacity that we could do other things with it - notably live streaming from events in a couple of places around the city (@Luna on Symonds St, and a concert at the PowerStation). Not very many people actually about it to listen. (Robyn did.)
I liked SmokeCDs for a very long time and recommended them strongly to my friends, and I wish I still could, but they ripped me off, so now they get a handful of shit flung at them everytime a friend mentions them. I don't know exactly how many sales I've driven away from them, but it must be many many times more than the $50 they stole, so I hope it was worth it to them - calling me a liar was great too. However, they were still an early and very good site. Of course, RealGroovy.co.nz have never stolen from me, so I'd recommend them above SmokeCDs, these days.
The Village site was pretty great, their little java applet that let you select precisely which seats you wanted was fabulous, but I'm not sure what year that came in. Pre-2000 though, I think? They did have some technical problems, but they make it to my list for trying (and succeeding most of the time) to do something bloody convenient and bloody clever.
Trade-Exchange.co.nz was good and very early, until of course they blew it by delaying their online listings just enough that none of the good deals were still to be had - leading in no small part (I'm sure) to their appropriate decimation by TradeMe.
Lots of newspapers did a good job of shifting their news online, when did Otago Daily Times first come online? They might have been first in NZ, yes? Of course, the Herald was more relevent to me up this end of the country.
You want another disaster of a site? How about the ihug gooey? Never heard of it? No, that's right.
We have a lot of very smart people doing very cool things, but most of the product just doesn't have more than a niche or local appeal - for instance, there are vast numbers of online retailers in New Zealand, and many of them are extremely successful, but the large majority of them just don't care about anything outside of their own area. I've built sites for small businesses from florists to pharmacists and many things in between, and while they will all deliver to you wherever you are, they don't market outside of their own geographic area so of course you won't think about them when you want... Zovirax... Or a bouquet of something intimidating delivered to your latest stalkee.