Cybersurf

Let’s start with a fascinating site for cyber detectives – or for the rest of us who are just plain nosy. Windeed dot co dot za describes itself as an indispensable tool of choice for law firms, estate agencies, credit bureaus, valuers, surveyors, conveyancers and other professionals involved in searching for information in the deeds Office, Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office, Consumer and Business Credit Records repository or the Surveyor-General. Wow – that’s quite a mouthful.

What it really does is find and sell information from all those offices I’ve just mentioned. My understanding is that all that information is available free of charge anyway – but Windeed saves you the enormous hassle of trying to find the stuff yourself. I have not personally tried a search, but family members and colleagues have been very impressed with windeed.co.za.

The charges depend on the type of information you want – many of the searches come in at under five rand each while some of the more specialized queries can cost well over fifty rand. This is a really cool site.

Newscientist - the esteemed British weekly magazine that also has a very good web site – Newscientist dot com, will soon be producing podcasts. The site says that it will be putting out nine podcasts per week with all the latest science and technology news. This means that you’ll be able to download the files to your iPod or any other MP 3 player and listen to science news at your convenience. Sounds great, but I hope they won’t be charging for this service – at the moment about half the material on the News scientist is for subscribers only.

Next, I have to tell you about a rock concert I went to on Saturday night – where the supporting band was absolutely spectacular. Freshly Ground is indeed fresh and talented, but for our purposes right now – the group also has a useful fan site at Freshly Ground.com

On the front page you can find out where the band is playing next – in other words a gig guide; click on the horizontal nav bar and you can meet the band, read the lyrics; hear clips of some of the songs

Fade up music – 5 secs and fade under voice

And even watch two of their music videos.

Great band great site

And if you missed their web site address, do not fear, I will post the Freshly ground web site and all the other addresses mentioned in today’s program on the Cybersurf blog which you will find at Cybersurf. Blogspot.com – one more time – Cybersurf.blogspot.com

That’s it from me - Thanks for listening and remember to keeeeep on surfin.

Relevant Sites:

• Windeed
• Freshly ground
• New Scientist

// posted by Steven Lang @ 5:27 am 1 comments

And we start off with some news from myadsl.co.za – this site has regularly taken potshots at both Telkom and Sentech – so it was with some surprise that I received a press release praising the Mywireless offering of Sentech as the best wireless broadband in the country.

The site’s owner, Rudolph Muller came to this conclusion after an in-depth study of Vodacom’s 3G, WBS’s iBurst; MTN’s 3G and Sentech’s Mywireless.

Full results of the study can be found at mybroadband.co.za –

Personally I cannot comment because I am still waiting for Cell C to come up with 3G – and guess who has a Cell C connection.

I currently use the GPRS connection to surf the Internet and have found it quite useful. It is not practical on most sites as the bandwidth is restricted – but some clever operators have special low bandwidth sites that work rather well on a cell phone screen. For example – check out the BBC’s news site.

I also use it regularly to check my Gmail address and the cost is very reasonable – last month I connected to the Internet ninety times on my cellphone and the cost was under twenty rand

Meanwhile, yesterday, Estonians had the opportunity to vote on the Internet for the local elections. Surprisingly – Estonia has the largest e-voting system in Europe – eighty percent of voters on the electoral roll had the chance to cast their ballots ahead of voting day.

Well, I don’t think we will have a similar system set up for our next local elections, but if you would like to check out how far we are in terms of readiness, you can go along to elections dot org dot za – that is the web site of the IEC - the Independent Electoral Commission.

One of the most useful features of this site is that you can check to see if you are registered to vote. It works very well, I typed in my ID number and within seconds – out popped a result – with my voting district number; my ward number and the address of the school where I can vote. Check it out – elections. Dot org dot za.

And if you are really interested in more detail on the upcoming elections – visit the demarcation board site at demarcation dot org dot za – it has everything you wanted to know about which areas fit into which ward and municipality. It is great – but it does not yet have a date for the next election – it refers to the 2005/2006 local elections.

Now if you are interested a really spectuacular culutral event – you might want to go to the Newtown Diwali festival in Johannesburg next week. It looks very interesting – but don’t take my word for it – check out the site at

www.newtowndiwalifestival.co.za/ - that is newtowndiwalifestival – one word yes – one word.

If you happened to have missed that address or any other mentioned in today’s program – pay attention and do not miss this next one – the Cybersurf blog carries all the web addresses mentioned in today’s program so go along to cybersurf.blogspot.com – one more time – cybersurf.blogspot.com

Thanks for listening and be sure to tune in again next Monday for more Cybersurf.

Relevant links:

• MyADSL
• Independent Electoral Commission
• Demarcation Board
• Information about Estonia - in English
• Newtown Diwali festival

// posted by Steven Lang @ 6:42 am 0 comments

Hello Good morning and how do you do – this is Cybersurf, your very own Internet update. I am Steven Lang.

Very often, we hear the people are not happy with government because of a lack of delivery. Sometimes, people are not happy with the Internet for the very same reason – a lack of delivery.

Let me explain what I mean with a personal example, on Friday we thought it would be great if we could order some take out food on the Internet and have it delivered to our home.

My wife easily found the Mr. Delivery web site and we were very favourably impressed – in fact it is one of the most functional sites I have seen.

It is lightening fast and intuitive. Instantly we found the nearest Mr. Delivery franchise and we could browse through the menus of all the restaurants in our area.

Mr. Delivery dot com is a fantastic site – we were a little perturbed when the site informed us that delivery would take an hour – a phone request normally takes 45 minutes.

We were hungry.

After about half an hour, Mr. Delivery phones to confirm the order and informs us that it will take about another hour and a half to complete our order. Why?

“Because we only got your order now”.

Needless to say – we cancelled the order. My wife got in her car and within thirty minutes we were enjoying our Pizza.

The point of this story is self evident – it doesn’t matter how good your site is if you don’t deliver the goods. We can’t eat virtual pizzas – not yet anyway.

The problem with delivery might also have something to do with the recent Kalahari dot net campaign – where they go to great lengths to convince TV viewers that they do deliver – really!

In recent years, I have received quite a few complaints from listeners who have been very unhappy with service delivery from Kalahari dot net – perhaps their new campaign is telling us that they have recognised the problem and done something about it.

Anyway the debate over whether it is better to buy books online from Kalahari dot net or amazon dot com is still raging.

The list price and range of books are better at amazon dot com but delivery does take a long time and invariably you have to pay customs duty on your purchases.

And with that we wrap today’s edition of Cybersurf – thanks for listening and remember to keeeeeep on surfing.

Useful links

• Mr. Delivery
• Kalahari.net
• amazon.com
  

// posted by Steven Lang @ 10:28 am 0 comments

This summit is set to take place in Tunis in November this year. Leaders from around the world will converge on the Tunisian capital to sign agreements aimed at improving worldwide access to infomration and communications technologies.

There has been considerable debate about whether the media should simply cover the event as it happens, or is the media a special part of the information society.

PANOS – a UK based non-governmental organisation that uses communications for development, has set up a special web site aimed at getting jounralists to be part of the debate and to help de-mystify such issues.

I spoke to Murali Shanmugavelan, of Panos London and asked him why should jounralists be involved in the WSISI process:

IN: For two reasons . . . .

OUT: . . . . they want to.”

DUR: 2’13”

Murali Shanmugavelan, of Panos London – if you would like to check out their site – go along to www.panos.org.uk – that is panos P.A.N.O.S dot org dot uk.

(T) Now for a radical change of tack with a quick note about a virtual catastrophe – thousands of characters are dying of the plague in the world’s ffmost popular online game – World of Warcraft. Its makers say more than four million people worldwide play this game – and now the characters are dropping like virtual flies.

And so we come to the end of this week’s edition of Cybersurf – thanks for listening and be sure to join me again next Monday for more on the best of the web.

// posted by Steven Lang @ 3:18 am 0 comments