I’m looking to compile a list of New Zealand sites built using WordPress.

To be listed a site needs to be:

• Active – for now that means at least one post since 1 June 2010.
• About New Zealand, written by someone living in New Zealand or about strictly New Zealand topics.
• Either hosted at WordPress.com or self-hosted using WordPress.org software.
• Not spam – anything that looks like spam will not be included. This includes site with spam-like advertising. My decision on this is final.

If you have a eligible site that’s not already listed please leave a comment below and I’ll add your details.

New Zealand’s WordPress sites:

Homepaddock A rural perspective with a blue tint Ele Ludemann

Dim Post It is difficult not to write satire Danyl McLauchlan

MacDoctor Politics and Medicine: A Lethal Combination  Dr. Jim McVeagh

The Inquiring Mind A personal take on matters Adam Smith

TVHE The Visible Hand in Economics Matt Nolan

G Blog A community of green voices Green Party members

The Evolving Newsroom observations on news and journalism Julie Starr

Journalista On word use and jargon John Spavin

Bargain Betty Money saving tips Diana Clement

Love Plant Life Devoted to useful plants and gardening Anna Butterfield

it.gen.nz Technology and society, Colin Jackson

KnowIT Science, tech and WordPress, Miraz Jordan

Mac Tips, Practical advice for Apple users, Miraz Jordan

Toothpix Mainly about food, Lyn Potter

Ask Rachel Advice column, Rachel Goodchild

Little Miss Pink Hair Fashion, books and design. Susie Goodchild

Panda Cloud Antivirus is hard to beat when it comes to free PC security.

Unlike other security tools, Panda does most of its work in the cloud – it is software-as-a-service. Panda sends data about dangerous looking files to its servers for closer inspection.

Because your computer doesn't do the hard work, Panda imposes almost no overhead.

When I benchmarked my PC there was no performance difference between the system running the software and having the software switched off. If there's a network overhead, I couldn't measure it.

Panda's other big advantage is the malware checking database is always up-to-date. There are no signature files to download.

One issue I have with Panda is the program is so trouble-free, it is easy to forget. You barely notice it. I previously described Microsoft's Security Essentials as "barely there" – Panda Cloud is even less noticeable.

Panda is better than other free anti-virus products at trapping malware. I previously ran it for a month without any issues and have run it for the past three or four days with no ill effects.

I'd say it is the most promising free anti-virus application on offer. At some point the developers will need to make some money. I'll be interesting to see how. For now, this is possibly the best free choice.

Of course, you may prefer not to leave your computer's protection in the hands of free software makers.

I can't tell you if AVG Free 9.0 offers decent PC security. That's because the application was so annoying and imposed such an overhead on my computer I deleted it before testing finished.

There are times when free is too high a price.

AVG Anti-Virus Free 9.0 is still only two weeks old. It arrived about the same time as Windows 7 and is compatible with Microsoft's new operation system.

I downloaded the file in late October to test on my computer running Windows 7 release candidate version. The program is available at AVG's free web site – but as I'll explain in a moment, I don't recommend it.

It is only a small download at 869Kb – it takes seconds with broadband. The first file is a downloader which fetches and installs the rest of the software.

The process is easy enough. Yet the second screen you see is only the start of what becomes an annoying and shrill sales pitch designed to control your choices and trick you in to paying money. It appears AVG has learnt from the scam artists the software promises to protect you from.

Flakiness abounds

Your first choice is to select either free basic protection or a 30-day trial of the company's comprehensive protection.

The implication is responsible people will choose the second option – which means in 30 days AVG will ask you for money. Don't worry – you'll get plenty more opportunities to pay AVG if you choose not to do so at this point.

I thought I was downloading the free software – that's what I clicked on at the AVG web site – so that's what I proceeded with.

During the download AVG asks you to remove existing anti-virus software. This makes sense, anti-virus applications can conflict with each other and anyway, as each program imposes an overhead, the performance drop can multiply.

Annoyingly AVG doesn't remove the other software. It  halts and opens the Windows uninstaller so you can manually remove it. Even more annoyingly, the AVG installer closes itself at this point – you need to hunt around in your download folder to find it and start all over again – by now many megabytes have been wiped off your download cap.

Click, click, bloody click

There's a lot of clicking throughout this process – some of it unnecessary. Then it asks if you wish to install the AVG Security Toolbar.

The software has also helpfully pre-selected the option to change your default search engine to Yahoo. This is spam – of a sort. In both cases I choose No.

It is tricky – if you click off the first box, the Yahoo box stays ticked but grayed out. This can only be designed to trick you into selecting the search engine choice.

At this point the installer had to close Firefox. Not wanting to be sent all the way back to the start like that horrible long snake at the end of a game of Snakes and Ladders, I clicked to close Firefox held my breath. Phew. The install resumes.

We are now 40 minutes into the process. Even at minimum wage rate this free anti-virus program has cost me the price of lunch and a clutch of grey hairs.

Finally

Suddenly the process is over. A box appears telling me the install has finished. But wait, what is this?

More stuff to click.

Do I agree to give anonymous information? Oh alright then. And now would I like to receive spam? (Sorry news and alerts). Please enter your email address. Are you kidding? No.

While AVG starts its first scan. I reload Firefox. In the meantime I notice the program has installed an icon on my Windows desktop. Did I ask for this? No I damn well did not. AVG asks tons of questions during the install – but doesn't allow me to choose whether the icon despoils my desktop. At this point I'm starting to get angry.

Not responding

Meanwhile Firefox is failing to load. What's going on here? There was a string of open tabs – none of them are visible. Windows tells me Firefox is "not responding".

Eventually – more than an hour after the first download, Firefox opens. And what's this? AVG has installed AVG Safe Search. Is this the toolbar I choose not to install? The name is different, so let's assume it isn't the same thing. I wasn't warned or asked about it, but hey, let's go with the flow for a moment.  So, Firefox opens at the home page – my tags are all lost.

AVG is now scanning my computer looking for viruses. I open up the scanner's display and see what looks like a banner ad for the paid for software at the bottom of the screen.  Fair enough, the software was free and these people have to eat. I can accept advertising as the price to pay for free anti-virus.

But it has to go

Before long my computer started crashing, randomly. And things started being very s l o w   l i ke  w a d i n g t h r o u g h m o l a s s e s. There could be only one explanation for this. I removed AVG, reinstalled Microsoft Security Essentials and performance returned to normal.

Of course, you mileage may vary. AVG may rock your boat. But for me it has proved so disastrous I couldn't even test its efficiency as an anti-virus tool. I give it zero stars out of five.

In June I asked Can Twitter be journalism? At the time I concluded Twitter could be journalism, but that's not how most journalists use it.

Over the past week, Liam Tung at ZDnet Australia has shown just how powerful the 140 character messaging service is in the hands of a skilled reporter.

Tung is providing daily coverage of the trial between Perth-based ISP iiNet and the Australian Federation against Copyright Theft (AFACT).

He is also providing frequently updated tweets from the court room.

You can follow Tung's tweets through Twitter from his home page (LiamT) or by tracking the #iitrial hashtag.

ZDNet also publishes the feed on a web page. This makes sense because it's hard to make money from a Twitter feed, but a popular web page traffic sells plenty of advertising.

Microsoft Security Essentials sips system resources so sparingly there's no noticeable effect on my computer's performance.

And yet the free application protects my system from malware and attacks.

Lightweight

Security Essentials is lightweight compared with Microsoft's earlier, paid-for, OneCare security.

It only uses 280k of system memory on my test machine. The download is 8.5Mb and the installed program occupies about 12Mb scattered between the Program Files and Program Data folders on my on my C: drive. Of course there could be other components stored elsewhere – getting the full picture about software installations isn't easy when you run Windows 7.

One week has passed since installing the software. There's been no noticable performance hit running Security Essentials. System benchmarks are the same with and without the program installed. This is in stark contrast to Norton Internet Security 2010 which slowed my machine by about 4 percent to begin with, then progressively worsened to the point where it became unusable after ten hours operation.

Microsoft's program took seconds to download, then another five minutes or so to go back and fetch the necessary anti-malware signatures. I'm running Windows 7 beta and am completely up-to-date which meant things went smoothly for me. The Security Essentials installer will insist you download and install all the Windows updates before the application installs.

Scanning goes on for ever

I immediately ran a full system scan and quickly regretted the decision. Scanning isn't fast. The software warns users scans may take some time, but my first scan was still running some six hours after first installing the software. I started another scan before writing this piece and one hour, 15 minutes later the software has only scanned 76,000 items. The indicator bar is only 5 percent of the way across the screen.

It is possible to scan attached drives with the software, but there aren't enough hours in the day to test this.

To date Security Essentials hasn't found anything untoward on this computer. To check the software's effectiveness, I scanned my machine with Panda Cloud Antivirus and Avast. Neither found anything. Nor did Norton Internet Security 2010 find anything before being removed.

Google-like interface

Microsoft clearly learnt a thing or two competing with Google in recent years. The user interface on Security Essentials is minimalist. It uses bright red to show problems and is green while everything is safe. There are hardly any controls – compare this to the user interface on Norton Internet Security 2010 which is like the flight deck of the Star Ship Enterprise. The good news is there are few things to tinker with and break. I didn't notice anything needing changes.

When a threat appears online, the real-time protection mode kicks-in and displays a message in a pop-up window. This appears in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. You can dismiss it with a click or get more information. A lot more information than you'll ever need.

Evil empire

You can't argue with Microsoft's price for Security Essentials. It is free. In fact it looks as if it was part of the operating system from the outset. And it may have been. But Microsoft doesn't include it as standard with Windows 7 because of anti-trust considerations. There are people who are wary of using security software from Microsoft – some argue security problems only exist because of flaws in the company's operating systems. Maybe. But the Macintosh is no longer immune.

Competitors

Norton's paid-for security products are far more advanced than Microsoft Security Essentials – but the name makes that clear. This software does about 90 percent of the job of protecting your computer from attack. If you run a home system, take security seriously, run a hardware firewall and keep all you applications and systems software up to date, Security Essentials should protect you from all but the most serious attacks.

Microsoft Security Essentials is not suitable for business users and not the best choice if your home set-up is, well, let's say anarchic. Paid for products may give you better piece of mind.

Microsoft scrubs up well against the free competitors, but without extensive testing I'd rate Avast ahead of Security Essentials, there's also a solid free program from AVG we run on some of our home machines. We experienced some problems with these at the Bennett household as the free versions are difficult to find among the paid-for alternatives at these two sites.

Another alternative is the excellent Panda Cloud Antivirus – one of the best kept secrets in the security business and neither nags nor hides behind a paid alternative. You can read more about Panda and Avast in Alternatives to Norton Internet Security.

Pluses:

• free
• downloads and installs in minutes
• works straight away
• simple, unobtrusive
• easy to understand
• no performance hit

Minuses:

• slow scanning
• relatively untried
• doesn't offer the best protection

Overall:

A basic security product from a big name at an unrivalled price. Get this if you have no budget and are not confident dealing with other free security applications.

Advertising sales revenue is the money publishers make from selling space in their titles.

Most publishers set aside printed pages or parts of printed pages for advertisers. The number of pages compared to the total number of pages in a publication  is known in the business as the advertising ratio. Paid for publications have a lower advertising ratio than free publications.

Advertisements fall into two categories:

• Display advertisements are larger and more colourful – they can have highly creative text and images.
• Classified advertisements are smaller and usually only text with a minimum of graphics.

Magazines typically sell display advertising by the page, although they offer double page spreads, half pages and other formats.

Newspapers sell pages, but they also sell column centimetres (or column inches). Classifieds sell as column centimetres, as lines of text or in some cases by the word.

The more you buy the cheaper it gets

The more advertising an advertiser buys, the cheaper the rate per column centimetre (or page if they are buying magazine ads). So a full-page is cheaper than two half pages and so on.

Publishers offer advertisers discounts if they commit to buying a series of advertising over a period such as a year or six months. So, booking a year’s worth of advertisements in a monthly magazine is cheaper than buying 12 single advertisements.

Some advertising positions attract a premium rate. On newspapers this would be the front page and maybe the front pages of the internal sections. Magazines typically charge extra for the back cover and possibly the inside front cover. Successful titles can also get away with charging a premium for early right hand pages or other attractive sites.

Agencies and commission

Advertising is often placed by specialist media buying companies who develop strategies for their clients and negotiate with publishers. These companies earn a commission. Typically this is between 10 to 20 percent of the booking’s value.

In return for commission, media buying agencies contract to pay their invoices by a set date after publication – typically a month or so after the advertisements appear.

Advertisers who buy their own space are known as direct clients. They can haggle over prices, but unless they are large-scale buyers of advertising, they have less clout than agencies who can buy in bulk. It is often harder to collect money from direct clients than from agencies.

Rate cards

Publishers issue rate cards which show the prices or rates for each type of advertisement. Historically they were cards, but now they are usually available online, try Googling the term to see some. Rate cards prices are often, but not always negotiable. They also describe available advertising formats. Depending on circumstances rates shown on rate cards are negotiable.

When an advertiser or a buying agency buys advertising they are usually buying reach that is a publication's ability to reach so many potential customers.

Advertorial

People in the business use the term advertorial when publishers offer advertising linked to editorial features, or in some cases when a publication's editorial integrity itself is up for sale.

Advertorial deals come in many flavours. Many publications are more or less entirely made up of advertorial material – if an advertiser pays for space they are given a degree of say over what appears in the publication’s editorial content.

More credible titles wall off areas of content for advertorial projects. These might be clearly marked with terms like “advertising supplement” or “special advertising feature”, but it isn’t transparent to the reader.

Some publishers run editorial-style material provided by advertisers and charge for it. Others allow advertisers to send copy for inclusion alongside paid advertisements.

Publishers may or may not allow advertisers to sign off on their advertorial content. Some publishers will have journalists write advertiser-friendly copy for these sections, others keep up a strict demarcation between editorial and advertising.

The advertising business model

As a rule, free publications are more likely to run advertorial and compromise editorial integrity for commercial consideration than paid-for titles. Paid titles are less likely to take this approach. Some paid titles have little in the way of advertising and charge a hefty premium for quality editorial content. This works best if they can manage a high circulation.

Have I missed anything here? Do you have any questions about how this works?

Other articles in this series:

Where the money comes from: - an introduction to traditional print publishing business models
Copy sales: – how traditional print publishers make money from selling copies

This is a look at the print publishing business model. It is oversimplified, but the big picture is more important than the details.

Revenue

Historically print publishers earn revenue from copy sales and advertising. Some publishers, mainly in the trade press, rely solely on advertising.

Others, such as book publishers, rely solely on copy sales. Most newspapers and magazines make money from a mix of the two.

The balance between advertising and copy sales revenue usually determines a title’s editorial strategy.

The revenue part of a publication’s business model is simple:

Revenue = copy sales + advertising sales

Publishers who rely mainly on copy sales for their income typically spend more on producing quality editorial to attract readers.

Advertising-focused publishers put less emphasis on editorial. In extreme cases, they do away with editorial all together producing publications which closely resemble catalogues.

In part 2, we'll look at print copy sales.

Gist cuts through the deluge of incoming email, tweets and other messages. It sorts, highlights and presents your most important material in a simple format.

After one day of using the application I can see it has potential. It may become a lynch-pin. But I'm not yet  convinced I'll use it over the long-term. Here's why:

Gist works with Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook inboxes, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Salesforce. The software is a free web-delivered or cloud application. There's a paid subscription version in the pipeline.

Like Xobni, Gist digs through your past emails and organises information, appointments and correspondence. Unlike Xobni it pulls together a range of information sources. That's smart, email is only one of a number of information channels most people deal with.

Gist displays data on a dashboard where you can quickly see what the software decides is your most important messages. You can also view the information by the contact name.

Gist analyses your contacts then ranks them based on the number of communications with each person. The idea is to help you automatically filter out noise and focus on the most significant material.

Gist simplifies

In practice, it works, but only up to a point.

Here's what it does well:

• Gist does a great job of pulling together incoming material from different sources. I'm testing it with Gmail, Twitter and LinkedIn. Between the three I may have hundreds of incoming messages each day — in fact these are mainly tweets. Putting them all in one place is helpful.
• My contacts have been automatically ordered in a league table, with the most important at the top. The list is good, but it's not perfect. The people I'm working with are all on the first page, but there are people on the page who I don't know well.
  And I'm not impressed to see Gist's TA McCann as my most important contact.
• I don't use Salesforce and I haven't yet tried Gist with Outlook so I feel a bit of a fraud for including this under the what Gist does well heading, but the software appears integrate smoothly with these applications – which will certainly make it a powerful option for those people using either product.

Here's what's not so great:

• While Gist is good at deciding who your most important contacts are, it can't decide which material from those contacts is the most important. In my industry there's a lot of chatter on Twitter and the occasional gem. Material from LinkedIn contacts is important but not vital, but most incoming emails are vital. I'd like to tell Gist to give incoming email more weight than tweets – perhaps I can do this and I just haven't found out how, it's only been on my machine for 24 hours.
• I still feel deluged. It's easier to get at some of the important material. I could use Gist instead of Tweetdeck. And it's a better way of checking out LinkedIn updates than the RSS feed I use. But Gist is probably not going to replace my email inbox soon.

Better than Xobni

The headline says Gist is better than Xobni. The last time I looked Xobni only worked with Outlook, although it can pull personal information from Facebook and LinkedIn. Gist adds Gmail and Twitter putting it way out in front.

Xobni integrates with Outlook, but the composite screen is cramped on my desktop display and hard to view on my laptop. Gist on the other hand is browser-based (although there are integrated versions) and is easier to read.

Lastly, I found Xobni was slow to use and I suspected it slowed down Outlook as well – although I couldn't quantify this.