My idea made the Google 10^100 shortlist!
A year ago, when Google asked for “Big Ideas” to improve the lives of as many people as possible, so they could spend 10 million dollars on good works to celebrate their 10th Birthday, I was seriously impressed. This was one serious philanthrohack! Competitions like this almost always create more value than just spending money on stuff, and now Google has shown that over 150,000 people will compete just to win some kudos, help a lot of people, and see their idea brought to life – without even a promise of cash or contracts to the people with the winning ideas. I had a couple ideas of

Digital NZ Search Plugin Follow-up
Following up on my previous post about the Christchurch Digital NZ hackfest, I did find the bug in my search plugin script, it was just one of those minor typos that takes ages to find because the error message you got when you tried to use it was completely uninformative. Sigh. However, since I spent most of my time on this during “

Digitizing New Zealand
Fellow Kiwifoo camper Jo Eaton was in town on the weekend, spreading the good word about their mission to digitize and put online all New Zealand content, and make it available via their new developer APIs, with a travelling “Hackfest”. Fortunately It wasn’t too far for me to walk to take part – it was upstairs at CII, where Interclue is located. Among the various hacks there was an iPhone app and a Drupal module, and I got most of the way through building a Search Plugin for Firefo