Digital Talanoa : Lists for 2008

I dug back into the archive this week to see what I wrote for the final 2006 Digital Talanoa a year ago. It turns out that I had identified and publicly declared a list of resolutions for the 2007 new year. What was on that list isn’t important so I won’t repeat that mistake this year.

A good end-of-year list for the Digital Talanoa is the top five technology-related business tools now available to us in Fiji. The results are partially based upon twelve months of user-testing, customer interviews and ICT-related import records from FIRCA. This data is then cross-referenced with all search engine queries from the .com.fj domain using terms that fall within the official information technology industry. That resulting data is then collated and parsed into one single spreadsheet from which I’m able to completely disregard and make up my own list of items I personally think are worthy. That’s how the top five business tools in Fiji list is made. So lets get to it, in reverse order of importance.

8 Years of Daily Photos

Here's a clip of a man who took photographs of himself EVERYDAY for 8 years and then stitched them together into a single video file. Fantastic results and an amazing thing to watch. I think I'd lose interest in photographing myself like this after a week.

Living My Life Faster - 8 years of JK's Daily Photo Project from c71123 on Vimeo.

Bulafiji.com explained

A letter written by a Kevin Langer appeared in the Fiji Times today questioning what the Fiji Visitor's Bureau is doing with their money. The letter raised some legitimate points that are probably best explained elsewhere by other people but it did reference the bulafiji.com website in a negative way so I felt it would be appropriate to respond given my own history with the site.

His words:

The FVB website is an abomination.

It lacks a single exciting quality and can only be described as highly unattractive. A very well known industry secret is that the FVB website's Google Page Rank dropped last year.

This leads to thousands of less site visits per week from web searches.

For almost four years, the FVB was a client, both at Connect and then at Oceanic when I started the company. When I first began working with the bureau, bulafiji.com was a huge challenge. There was no easy way for them to manage their content and there was very little content anyway. The technical infrastructure resulted in repeated site outages/unavailability and the support they were getting from their web provider abroad was expensive and slow. Throughout this time, however, usage and traffic to the site did increase as more and more people turned to the web, in particular, to research holiday destinations.

Here's what has happened since then...

Digital Talanoa : Welcome to the Oligopoly

The mood around Fiji’s telecommunications industry right now is a bit like a mango stuck in the windpipe of an elephant. It doesn’t really make much sense and the sounds of gasping fill the air around us.

I’m pretty close to this industry because I’ve worked in it and with it for much of my career, both in Fiji and elsewhere. To be a fly on the wall behind the doors of some of these communications company boardrooms now would be a real treat. Outside of rumour, for which there is plenty, there still haven’t been any announcements regarding the monopoly’s end and how it’s all breaking down. What we’re experiencing now, however, certainly feels like a drastic change. In the course of just a few weeks, we’ve seen Telecom, Connect, Unwired and newcomer Voicenet IP all begin offering affordable international telephony.

Google Zeitgeist 2007

I love Google Zeitgeist each year and 2007 is no exception.
Fascinating data.

Check it out.

Cyclone Daman

I've started a twitter feed and will send updates as I hear/experience/live them. You can follow it at:

http://twitter.com/cyclonedamon

You have to admire the sheer beauty of this type of storm. 5 years ago, Cyclone Ami ripped through Fiji on the day I arrived to the country. That storm wreaked a great deal of havoc.

At this point, Tropical Cyclone Damon is scary and threatening and it has Fiji on edge right now. Here's hoping that it's just a lot of rain and no damage or loss of life results.

Click for the full size of the photo below. It's worth a look. Taken early 7 Dec (Fiji time) by US military satellites.

Fiji's meteorological service website doesn't seem able to stand up under the pressure right now. Best way to follow the storm's progress appears to be via the news websites.

http://www.fijitimes.com
http://www.fijivillage.com
http://www.fijilive.com

I'll keep updates as long as I can stay connected and will also put up photography from the next 24 hours in Suva. Of course, all we do is get rain in Suva so the pictures might not look all that different from the usual ones.

UPDATE: Pretty severe confusion over how to spell the name of this storm. Is it Cyclone Daman, Cyclone Damon or Cyclone Damen.

UPDATE 2 on 9 Dec: The storm effectively gave Fiji a pass this time around, but not before wiping out some smaller villages in the north. Foolish to write that "it could have been" much worse even though that was the truth. The twitter account was simply not destined for a long life.

Activity of the Week : Trap the Cat

Small, time-killing activity of the week is below.
When I first started playing with it, I thought there was no way to win. That did change though. Now that cat is under my control.

Try it yourself.

Mailife - Overwhelmed

10.8 trillion SPAM email messages will have been sent worldwide by the end of 2007 according to new market research. That’s a lot of viagra dealing going on.

Perhaps more depressing is the fact that the same research also shows that person-to-person emails in 2007 number 10.5 trillion. In other words, 2007 will mark the first time the number of SPAM emails will be higher than legitimate emails. An entire economy revolves around SPAM as well. Some businesses involved in sending SPAM are making good money as are businesses responsible with coming up with solutions to prevent SPAM. Strange world.

Digital Talanoa : Good Buzz

English author Douglas Adams wrote that “Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own rules.”

I’ve commented before on the almost unnatural speed of the coconut wireless as it exists in Fiji. There is no doubt that it’s helped along nowadays by email, SMS and mobile phones. It actually becomes newsworthy to us when information is NOT communicated in a timely manner. The country’s tsunami scare a few years back stirred up a lot of controversy over whether the authorities should have the ability to implement some kind of warning system using the mobile network when human lives are threatened. Many letters were written to the paper, various comments were solicited from officials and then the story appeared to just go away. Are we less vulnerable today then we were at that time or has our attention span shortened as tomorrow’s news enters our heads?