I'm not sure if there is a condition "fear of clouds" but from what a lot of people tell me this sums up many older CEOs ideas on web apps

A characteristic of  "barcamps" is that people slap their agenda on the wall when the day starts. Barcamps are brainstorming sessions, this one called "Open Govt" open to the first 160 people registering online, was to brainstorm how to get the NZ government and council authorities to be more helpful to its citizens by presenting more information (the non-private stuff), more easily, online. http://wiki.open.org.nz/Main_Page and http://groups.opengovt.org.nz/ tracks the ongoing results of the barcamp

How it currently works: Government departments gather information (road maintenance schedules, health practioners specialities and their locations, or reported crime...), and at great expense, the data is looked at and tiny parts come out in press releases, ring-bound reports or hidden inside the submenu of a submenu on the official website. The raw data is rarely released, and when it is, it's in "locked" formats, like paper, or PDFs or even scanned pages that website makers can't re-display on websites to make data more understandable like the beautiful San Franciso crimespotting web-map below, made possible because the city of San Francisco makes its crime data openly available (after removing the private details):

Worse, there's no official website in New Zealand to see which data is being collected, so government departments waste huge expenses collecting the same data - they just don't know it, and guard their data jealously.

The new model: Government departments publish the raw data in easy to use formats, in a common place, for other government departments and ordinary people to find and build websites that display and re-use the information.Like the US government now does on Data.gov Their mantra: Discover. Participate. Engage.

Doing it this way encourges clever/phillanthropic people to make-their-own website from public data to help themselves and their neighbours, all for free: one US city council promoted just that by holding a contest which "cost [the city council] $50,000 and returned 47 iPhone, Facebook and web applications with an estimated value in excess of $2,300,000 to the city" .

The current approach by a NZ local authority or government agency is to employ a contractor to build a website or web application at huge expense, often with substandard results (the web form on one NZ council website, it is said, can be hacked to send spam). Many government websites have deplorable online engagement rates (fact), and struggle to display useful or relevant information (my opinion).

Of course with more eyes looking at the data than 5 public servants, some of the best websites using many sources of public data in easy, engaging ways: known as "mashups", are born online - call it crowdsourcing, call it the free market.

People know what's most useful to them, civil servants don't - mash-ups born for this reason are some of the most useful/well-used online utilities: like Fixmystreet.com

- (there's a Kiwi team working to bring it here). Of course that doesn't stop "official" mashups happening: like USASpending.gov and Recovery.gov - making it easy to track what the US government's recovery package money is being spent on and what people are getting for their money. There needs a to be a mention of our National Librarians and Archivists who lone voices in the open government wilderness  http://www.digitalnz.org/

So other countries' governments and city councils have cottoned on to the new reality of going online and set up websites dedicated to streamlining the release of data and coordinating collection of the data ( to avoid duplication) ; here ordinary people are forced to find and collect the data on volunteer time without the help of our well-funded public service at http://cat.open.org.nz/ - although it looks like the State Services Commission is getting round to looking into a similar thing. As many in the public service here continues to buck the global trend and release information in old, un-usable ways, the pace of data releasing and website "mashups" quickens exponentially in other countries, gaining advantage over slower global competitors.

In the movie Valkyrie, Tom Cruise's character's plan hinges on enacting a second tier of the army to replace the first - the by now self-destructive Nazi-run one - this is kind of what's happening in New Zealand: the public is creating a second public service, on websites like fixmystreet, or civil defence web apps like Sahana. It's a damning indictment that the mechnanisms of the public service itself has lost touch with reality and is continuing to do things in ways that have lost all relevance to most Kiwis.

Some pics from "Geeks, Games and Gadgets" in Wellington a couple of  days ago:

Weta's bearded tinkerers were there, with Ben Nolan winning a ray gun I'm not making this up.

Sidhe the NZ playstation/xbox/wii gamemakers also set up a demo of a game that looked like a tool for training Vulcan reflexes.

And the rest: a mix of booths ranging from a dating service for Wellington nerds to a credit card-sized skateboard-fixer-multitool from Empire Skate.

The presentations were headlined by Bill Reichert, who is business partners with web marketing guru-of-gurus Guy Kawasaki in venture captial firm Garage Technology Ventures . Below is a short video of his 10 rules, where he drops some hints to web business pitchers looking for seed money: 

Keynotes were followed by a vanload of giant "Chicago-style" pizza from Wholley Bagels - the kind that you roll up and feed into your mouth - and free beer, trademarks of Unlimited Potential

(download)

Click here to download:

Geeks_Games_and_Gadgets_09_pic.zip (355 KB)

Thewhatsit.org.nz is a minisite from Netsafe for employers who want to create an IT policy stating what their staff can and can't do on work computers, based on a series of 15 steps. Deciding what to include or exclude at each step will create a draconian lock-down on the work computers for example, or a looser policy that treats staff as more autonomous beings. The process creates a tailored, and actually comprehensive IT policy leaning towards a more lock-down state:

There's a significant amount of hoops to jump through for what it does, including multiple registration screens: the site needs all your details, and you'll have to complete the full 15 step process before seeing what an actual policy looks like - no pre-registration previews. Some of the policies have an accompanying video module for "educating" staff, but another quirk means that if logged in as an employer you can't see the videos your staff will be watching. 

What you can do however is track which videos your employees have actually watched, privacy concern note: your employees aren't told their video watching is being tracked anywhere on their own section of the website.

The videos feature a doppelganger for the Simpson's Comic Book Guy character, a recurring character NZ video producers love. His comic bits bracket the serious part in the middle of each video. The language here is out of step with a conversational tone - personal gadgets and cellphones are called "personal ICT devices" by a female voice (as paper cutouts move around the screen) - it just doesn't resonate very well I found.

Is this the answer to an employee sending 400 lewd emails from work? Nothing can stop that kind of...lewd-ness, save a total ban on web access, but a policy might protect a company from some liability or accusations of negligence...which is the point of Whatisit.  

NZ's bloggers and others posting opinions online are increasingly receiving "nasty-grams" (notices usually on legal letterheads asking or telling them to remove material that is defamatory or copyrighted). At last week's Wordcamp, Steven Price, a barrister specialising in "media law" the area under which blogging, facebook groups, comments etc fall, had some useful rules-of-thumb for responding to legal letters, and avoiding them in the first place (see video below).

Steven pointed out that there are very few media law specialists in New Zealand, so in many cases that legal letterhead is designed to scare you into taking something down, when in fact the lawyer signing may have only a thin grasp of the case. Given that though, it's better to take it down first, then ponder your next move.

Another option for leaking documents - if you believe them to be in the public good - is to post them on third party websites like Wikileaks, or use an anonymous blogging host such as the Pirate Bay-operated Baywords

Lesser-known,Trademe-owned Holidayhouses.co.nz got a facelift and an overhaul of its search in the last 48 hours. The site lists homes in NZ (and overseas, mostly Australia) that owners have put up to be rented for short stays, it competes with Bookabach.co.nz and to a lesser extent Holidayhomes.co.nz in this space.  Here's the Before shot and the After shot of the front page: 

The real strength on all 3 sites is the booking charts - showing which days which houses are occupied - a popular house might be booked out back-to-back by different people wanting to stay, and you definitely want to avoid accidental overlap; and the media (photos, videos) and details on each home, which are plenty. But out-of-towners would surely benefit from more intuitive maps, on all 3 sites. Holidayhouses.co.nz uses a Google maps mashup as does AA-run Bookabach.co.nz, but both sites' maps I found glitchy (Bookabach) or idiosyncratic (Holidayhouses - clicking on a pin on a map takes me to another map?) or maybe I'm the one who's being idiosyncratic.

AA's Bookabach charges $199/year to list a house, or $9.50 for every night the house is occupied  (a sort of pay-as-you-go plan). At around 3400 listings there's some serious money in this online cottage industry...sorry.

Holidayhomes costs $135/year to list on

Trademe's Holidayhouses hides pricing behind a login screen.

Only Bookabach displays ratings of the owners.

Related NZ services:

http://www.bookabach.co.nz

http://www.holidayhouses.co.nz

Much as we love Posterous, there is a website in the works for Web
Business Watch, something that will really do more justice
categorizing the NZ web businesses featured, trust us, we're working
on it

From what I've seen of NZ helpdesks, most companies fit their round-peg small company needs into square-hole enterprise software, that, or simply rely on the noncommittal line "try our online help forum". Beetil is here to move the helpdesk experience online, and bring a simple AJAX-ian interface to the process of recording and resolving problems for customers, perfect for its target: companies with 5-20 employees, regularly servicing clients. Beetil charges a pay-as-you-go US$25/user/month with no contract. For that, you get a clean yet powerful online application with a basic public-facing interface, right off the bat, for your customers to enter problems, meaning you can have a proper helpdesk set up and running a couple of minutes after signing up for Beetil online - pretty nice if you're a small web app team rolling out a new product and want to offer professional-looking support that goes beyond a help forum for example. Beetil brings collaborative online features to helpdesk-ing: joint, wiki-style solutions to problems, and automatic suggestions linking a new problem with a previously solved problem are characteristic. In the video below: numerous suggested links appear after entering a problem, as the system digs up matching past incidents (and solutions):

Adscape (Disclaimer: I know the web development team for this service, though not the owner). Adscape gathers ad rate and demographic information as in this example from a huge range of media, in a standardised way, in one place for easy comparison. It lets you discover the NZ advertising landscape = adscape. Adscape's filtering - by topic ("interest"); and by demographics (age, sex, location) - lets you drill down and focus your ad spend on a specific audience, revealing which media:magazines, newspapers, websites, target that demographic - it makes you feel in control and informed. It has downloadable ratecards from some publishers, and decent online specials on ad rates. The site has big NZ media: Fairfax and APN, along with the little guys (from websites to niche print magazines), all listing their ad rates and demographics. Amazing.

Here's Chris Sparshott's presentation I recorded from Unlimited Potential's social media night, warning: it's over 30 minutes  (Viddler's a great free service for long-form video by the way). Chris is clearly walking the talk, engaging on multiple channels, effectively, by using some of the more "professional" social media tools. Clearly in chosing a social media channel, it helps when its audience already fits with the type of product/service info you're talking about. Hence LinkedIn and Slideshare are good fits for IBM. Chris's use of Slideshare proves that slides, which can be often overlooked, are really another form of social media when made publically sharable. Chris says he has 30,000 accumulated views from Slideshare alone - thanks to the IBM moniker sure, but nonetheless a lesson not to overlook the power of the humble slideshow... and here they are: