I’m a volunteer for the Kaipatiki repair cafe on the North Shore. Today, we, collectively, fixed 75 items that might otherwise head to the landfill. Half the time the necessary fixes are trivial. It’s worth checking to see if there’s one near you.

If you see the word “enhance” or “enhancement” you know you’re either reading a press release or something that derives from a press release. Normal people just don’t speak that way.

It’s PR code for “we fixed something” or “we changed something” or, more hopefully, “our thing is now a tiny bit better than it was”.

Yet some “enhancements” are actually downgrades dressed up with that fancy word to make things sound more palatable.

I pulled my story about the goings on at InternetNZ from the main newsletter this morning and sent it out as a extra bulletin… It’s a longer read than the usual newsletter format, but an important one with plenty of context.

billbennett.co.nz/internetn…

I presume I’m not the only person to have had this scam email:

Hi there!

I am a professional hacker and have successfully managed to hack your operating system. Currently I have gained fu! ll access to your account.

Our ten year old robot vacuum has given up the ghost. I replaced the battery a year ago and it is still failing, so we need a new one.

We want to get a bottom end model. We don’t need fancy features. Any recommendations?

Took great pleasure seeing the Laser Kiwi flag so prominently on show before the All Whites game.

Not sure what New Caledonians would have made of it, but it could be a huge international hit and talking point if we rock it when we get to the World Cup.

Today I purchased a new pair of Dr Martens.

That would be 52 years after I got my first pair.

What is the point of a red Kiwifruit? It tastes fine, but not as full on as the gold ones.

A family member needs help with Excel and I’m immediately reminded why I have spent the last 25 years actively avoiding the software.

I have fully ActivityPubified my main work Ghost site Bill Bennett. It all seems to be working, but nothing appears to be happening. Perhaps it is all going on in the background. Or could it be that my readers, maybe even my audience in general, don’t do ActivityPub?

Five years ago New Zealand’s telecommunications sector was breaking all kinds of records as the nation went into lockdown.

Voice volumes surge as New Zealand enters lockdown

At last I found a question worth asking ChatGPT where I was not disappointed by the answer:

“What where the names of the Kung Fu ‘stances’ that were shouted out in the fight scenes in the 1990s Hong Kong film ‘Iron Monkey’?”

Linkrot has been a problem for years now, but this weekend is one of the worst yet, more than 40 outbound links from my site died in the last 24 hours and a similar number look like they are about to snuff it at any moment.

Barely a cloud in the sky all day, and now there’s a lunar eclipse going there’s nothing to see but clouds.

Between now and Easter I anticipate Hot Cross Buns will be my main source of carbohydrates. They may even be my main source of nutrition.

I had never heard the term ‘take a raincheck’ before coming to New Zealand in the 1980s. Wrongly assumed it had something to do with the weather.

It’s been a long time since I saw a stranger reading a newspaper story that I wrote. Five years at least. But it happened twice today.

Thank god for that. One of the pains in my work life is navigating umpteen different videoconferencing systems, most of which, like Chime, are flakey and unreliable.

techcrunch.com/2025/02/2…

“Poet Hera Lindsay Bird once described New Zealand as a “mean-spirited sale at Briscoes racist sexist 40% off deck furniture piss country”, and now Tourism NZ’s latest campaign appears to be inadvertently leaning into that image.”

It’s a pity the story is behind a paywall, the intro certainly make me want to read on.

businessdesk.co.nz/article/e…

Any lawyers out there who can tell me if I can sue Google for defamation if the algorithm decides I’m the target market for an advertisement?

I’m thinking here of the time a few years ago when I got bombarded with ads for a Nickleback concert. If any family members or friends had seen those ads on my laptop my reputation as a cool person would have been shot to pieces.

That has to be worth a six figure settlement… right?

Northcote point, Auckland. Wednesday evening.

An excellent post cum manifesto from Dave Winer who has done some deep thinking about the web in the past.

Here he encapsulates one perspective on the current state of play that many of us would subscribe to even if it isn’t orthodox thinking.

Activity.pub is fine and good, but as Winer says, it isn’t the only open protocol. Links are essential, but I’d argue the RSS feeds first developed by WIner are equally important.

Don’t waste time warming up when writing for online audiences. Get started straight away.

Readers are busy. They scan text looking for meaning and they want it fast. Other writing competes for their attention and it is only a click away.

Your first paragraph should summarise the entire story in less than 40 words. A 30-word intro is better. And make sure those words aren’t all in one sentence.

Don’t overload the first paragraph with too many facts. Save details for later.

Move straight to the action. Passive first sentences send readers fleeing for the exit.

Online, opening words are often a teaser to lure readers. If Google indexed your story, the first 150 characters become the descriptive text telling people what to expect when they click the link.

If you struggle to write short, snappy first paragraphs, imagine you are writing an old-style tweet. When Twitter still had its 140-character limit that was excellent training for writing introductions.

People who live outside the marketing and media bubble don’t always understand how advertising and publicity are not the same thing.

Advertising is a commercial deal between a business and the media.

If you are an advertiser, you buy a fixed amount of print space, billboards, radio or TV airtime, or web traffic. You take responsibility for providing the advertising material – we call it copy in the industry – at your cost.

If you’ve got the budget, you can hire creative specialists to prepare the copy for you. Paying for professional writers is worth the cost. Advertising professionals know how to get results.

As an advertiser you are in control. You decide when and where your adverts run. You have the last say over the message.

Advertising is expensive. Publicity is often cheaper. It is also riskier.

Publicity is when you grab people’s attention in other ways. If you hire a publicist, a public relations expert or a press officer, those people will attempt to place stories in the media on your behalf. They can’t usually guarantee anyone will sit up and take notice.

You have far less control with publicity. It works best when you have something newsworthy or interesting to say. If it isn’t interesting then the media will ignore it. And your story can be crowded out on days when there are other more interesting stories.

Editors and journalists’ first responsibility is to their readers. They don’t see selling your business as their job. It is their job to keep readers informed and interested.

Publicity is a scattergun. It can work. It might not. Use advertising to make certain your message reaches your target audience. It acts like a guided missile and costs about as much.

There is a twist on the gap between advertising and publicity. Less professional (or more desperate) media outlets will swallow your publicity and possibly publish it on your behalf if they think their might be a future commercial relationship. This explains why you might often see dull or uninteresting publicity campaigns show up in the media.

This is a post from 15 years ago on my main website. It was written in the golden age of online journalism when there was still plenty of money for freelances, but the point about writing tighter copy applies just as much today.

Print publishers paid freelance writers by the word. They needed to fill space around lucrative ads and draw readers in with informative or entertaining copy. There was a ready market for bulk, readable copy.

Freelance writers responded to market forces.

They learned to write long. Some padded their prose with waffle. Most didn’t feel pressure to write tight copy. A longer sentence bought a cup of coffee; a couple of extra paragraphs could fund a night in the pub.

Online publishing follows a different economic model. Web readers don’t hang around. As usability expert Jakob Nielsen says: “If you want many readers, focus on short and scannable content.”

Online publishers want snappy copy over and over to maximise page reads and advertising clicks.

Which means freelance writers have to unlearn bad habits and get back to writing tight copy. For us older journalists this means going back to our roots.

Those of us who learnt our trade in the 1970s grew up in a world where newspapers and magazines didn’t have acres of space to fill. And well-staffed newsrooms meant every available column inch was fought over.