Paul Henry is gone

And bloody good riddance.
It defies belief that this guy actually has supporters. At the Quantas media awards he won "The Peoples Choice".... Voted by readers of "New Idea"!! WTF, nobody in their right mind would consider New Idea readers as representative of the people. However, Henry and New Idea have one thing in common, they shoot for the lowest common denominator.

The other ones coming out of this smelling of less than roses is John Key, He should've pulled Henry up on the comment right there and then. Not to mention TVNZ's Rick Ellis, why wait for Henry to resign, he should've just sacked him on the spot, he was a recidivist in any case.

Commonwealth Games

Ok I confess, I'm a sports freak and I'm getting the full dose at the moment with the Commonwealth games being in full flight, I love it, despite them being a bit of an anachronism in these days of nonstop professional sport. Of course I wouldn't sacrifice a good Rugby game to watch it but it's great in any case. The big advantage that these games have is that they have Netball and I'm a huge fan of netball. So I'm watching the Indians play and they're supposed to be easy beats and in fact in the company of the Silver Ferns, the Ozzies, the English and Jamaicans, you'd have to admit they are. They just don't have the speed, power, team and through the court skills that the top teams have. However their shooting circle was excellent and much of the basics are there.

If the Indians were to put together a national league and imported a Margaret Matenga, or Lynn Parker or any other good coaching people and some top players to give them a kick start, they could do for Netball what the Champions League has done for cricket. All they have to do is embrace it like Malawi has and wow Netball would take off internationally.

Free Marketing

I can't remember the original person who made the quote: "We live in interesting times"

But with the fork of Mandriva to a new Linux distro project called Mageia and then the creation of the Document Foundation to become custodians of OpenOffice.org (or a fork called LibreOffice), the whole FOSS marketing Universe has suddenly become a really exciting place. So I'm going to make some commentary about Marketing in a Free Software world.

The Mageia project has been interesting and the chance to be in at the ground level of a distro creation is as exciting as all get out, at least to me but I dare say to a few others as well on the marketing and Communications team.

Some in the community find our ramblings on the lists a bit much sometimes so I'm going blog about the marketing side as I see it for the forseeable and perhaps Demystify some of the marketing voodoo.


Marketing is not voodoo, or even Magic, it is a science. I know that sometimes professional Devs in corporates often have a low opinion of marketing people if only because they insist on getting someone else's itch scratched so the devs can't work on there own! :)

Marketing guys in corporates are caught in a vise between Sales and Management/Share holders, Sales want the brand profile lifted so they can shift product, Managers are demanding continuing margins and shareholders demand the brand value be maintained and increased.

A small amount of internal marketing is needed for purposes of morale and maintaining a good company self image amongst staff and besides that's considered HR's job.

By contrast in an OSS organisation, there is a considerable amount of internal marketing as Thorsten Lil so rightly pointed out on the Mageia lists, much more so than the above, essentially for the same reasons but with an additional slant: a Marketing team in a new FOSS project also has to "sell" itself. No HR department to help things along, darn it! :)

In the Mageia project we have gathered a team of excellent people together and we have been working away on a few marketing essentials for the Founders. A Core Values statement was done first and we continue on various other elements as we head towards a definitive branding policy.
Vision, Mission and target markets should lead us to a branding policy, a Logo and a Visual Schema.

It is exciting to think that when Mageia really hits the market we will have a full marketing plan with which to bring it to the world, although doing all this out in the open can be a bit annoying, I'm hoping for security by obscurity, so there will at least be a small element of surprise. :)

Just for the sake of it

I made a New Years resolution in 2009 to become a blogger. This was about as effective as the ten NYRs that had something to do with giving up smoking, back in the days when I was a nicotine addict. In the end of course stopping smoking had nothing to with said NYRs, I seem to remember doing it in June a few years back.

In any case the point is I didn't do a lot of blogging, basically because I didn't see the point of filling Cyberspace with more nonsensical ramblings than their already were. It seemed pointless if it wasn't going to be useful.

Was some comment I made going to stop the Israelis bombing Palestinians, was it going to stop Palestinians continuing their silly games of futile rocket throwing. Of course not, so I couldn't really see the point. Hence the months between posts.

This is a huge cause of sadness to me that I couldn't seem to find anything worth ranting about or cool stuff to hold up and cheer about, which meant I was either getting far too cynical or I wasn't coming across anything interesting.

Shocking and saddening. Until now that is, Until now.