Good riddance to Google Wave.

I never understood what the fuss was about.

Wave may have been clever programming, but it didn't do anything other applications already did better. In fact Google has better tools for most Wave tasks.

It did instant messaging although Google already had one and a half tools that do the same job very well.

Wave did communications. Why bother when Gmail is so much better?

Wave was a collaboration tool. Who needs that when collaborating on Google Docs is so easy?

There was a social media twist to Wave, but Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are all simpler to use and way more polished.

Wave had a bad user interface and was difficult to use.

More importantly, it was difficult to understand what was going on and what one was supposed to do.

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

Knowledge workers make a living by dealing purely with ideas and information.

The term has only been around for 50 years. Writer and management expert Peter Drucker first used knowledge worker in his 1959 book "Landmarks of Tomorrow".

Drucker modestly said he was only the second person to use knowledge worker. He said it came from Fritz Machlup a Princeton economist.

Either way, Drucker popularised knowledge worker spending years expanding on the original idea and its wider implications.

Today's knowledge worker

Knowledge worker is widely used today. While people generally understand the term's meaning, there is still misunderstanding about its exact definition — even among knowledge workers.

Some think knowledge worker only applies to people working in information technology or elsewhere in industry using tools created by IT workers.

IT workers are only a subset. Anyone who makes a living out of creating, handling or spreading knowledge is a knowledge worker.

This covers a wide range. Teachers, trainers, university professors and other academics are clearly included. Writers, journalists, authors, editors and public relations or communications people are all knowledge workers. Lawyers, scientists and management consultants can also all be described as knowledge workers.

Educated workers

One key difference between knowledge workers and other white-collar workers is the level of education and training. Some knowledge workers don't have a formal tertiary education or high-level training – but they are a minority.

As a rule, knowledge workers have at least a university undergraduate degree, but that's not always the case.

Older knowledge workers may have fewer formal qualifications. That's partly because higher education was less available when they started out — and, anyway, university isn't the only path to knowledge.

Another reason is practical experience counts for a lot. But the key here is knowledge workers
each have a personal knowledge store they apply in their work.

Knowledge workers are well paid compared to other groups of workers – some are extremely well paid. Some knowledge workers join unions, but they are not usually organised in that sense.

This can lead to forms of genteel exploitation: few knowledge workers get paid overtime yet most are expected to voluntarily work for considerably more than the basic 40 hours a week.

Knowledge skills are mobile

Knowledge workers are more mobile than industrial workers. They can take their expertise elsewhere at the drop of a hat. This happens all the time.

An employer who abuses knowledge workers' professionalism is likely to see their most important assets walk out of the door one evening and never return. This applies as much today as it did when there were more jobs around.

Few governments have come to terms with the implications of having a highly mobile, highly educated, knowledge workforce. Just as knowledge workers can quickly find a new employer if necessary, most can move freely between countries. Any nation that doesn't look after knowledge workers can expect – over the long-term – to lose them.

This applies in New Zealand, which operates a progressive income tax system that, at times, appears deliberately designed to alienate knowledge workers. To understand this, compared the marginal and absolute rates of income tax paid by most New Zealand knowledge workers, they are noticeably higher than in most competing nations.

When I wrote the first draft of this post (it originally appeared in a different format in 2001) the same could be said of Australia. Since then Australia has moved to correct its tax system and is attracting 40,000 New Zealanders each year, most of those emigrants could be classed as knowledge workers.

In the 1960s there was a lot of talk about a 'brain drain'. If anything the flow of knowledge workers migrating to more benign economies is accelerating.

Drucker distinguishes between various classes of knowledge worker.

High-knowledge workers include professional groups such as doctors and teachers deal mainly in the realm of the mind while the knowledge technologists work with their hands and brains in the IT industry, medicine and other areas. Although both categories of knowledge worker are growing, the bulk of growth comes from this second group.

Why pay for antivirus software?

Microsoft Security Essentials has protected my desktop computer from viruses, spyware and other malicious software for more than nine months. I’ve had no security problems in that time – and I’m a heavy-duty internet user spending hours online each day working in my freelance writing business.

It does the job so well, I barely notice the application. There have been a few occasions when I’ve seen warning messages, but dealing with them means a simply click or two and the problems go away.

Microsoft Security Essentials is free, but that’s not the only reason I think it beats paid-for security applications from companies like Symantec.

When I first looked at Microsoft Security Essentials in October 2009, I described it as "barely there" saying the software sips system resources so sparingly there was no noticeable effect on the computer’s performance. This contrasts with  Norton Internet Security which slowed my computer down from the moment I installed the application – then proceeded to get worse over time.

Better still, Security Essentials is unobtrusive. It never gets in my way. There’s no work full stop, no set-up, no tweaking and no worrying.

In my earlier report I said I wasn’t yet certain if Security Essentials was better than Avast. Since then, I’d say the results are in, and Microsoft Security Essentials has the edge.

We’ve run Avast over the same period on one of the family computers and the applications works just fine – although there is an annoying database update message. However, I’m planning to install Security Essentials on that machine too because independent tests show the Microsoft tool beats Avast on detection.

I’m still running Panda Cloud Antivirus on my laptops – it is at least as good as Microsoft Security Essentials – more about that later.

Want to publish directly from Google Docs to your WordPress site? Setting-up Google Docs is a chore, but once you've done the hard work once, it's easy. Here's how I did it.

Google Docs may not be the world's best word processor, but you won't find a better way of collaborating on documents. Sharing and collaboration works far better than with Microsoft Word.

Recently I used Google Docs to edit some shared documents which would eventually become WordPress posts.

After writing the first post, I cut and pasted the text into WordPress. It wasn't pretty. Eventually I used WordPress' paste as plain text function, but that loses formatting.

I decided to investigate posting directly from Google Docs to WordPress.

There are a number of guides explaining how to do this, but an online applications like Google Docs is a moving target – some of the steps explained in the guides have changed in recent updates.

Here's what I did:

1. Get WordPress ready to receive Google Docs. Go to the Dashboard, select Settings, then Writing.

2. Select the box where it says:
XML-RPC Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.

3. In Google Docs, open the document you'd like to post in WordPress.

4. Pull down the Share menu in the top right hand corner of the screen and select Publish as web page.

5. You should see two items, the second says This document has not been published to your blog.

6. If this is the first time you've tried posting to your WordPress site from Google Docs, there will be a message saying: You need to set your blog site settings before you can post documents to your blog.

7. Click on the link.

8. If you use a hosted WordPress.com blog, then click the first button (which is selected by default) and choose WordPress.com from the pull-down menu next to the word Provider. If you run a self-hosted WordPress site, you'll need to select the My own server / custom option then choose Metaweblog API and your site address. It's important to end the xmlrpc.php – which is normally in the home directory.

9. Add your user name and password.

The process isn't foolproof – I still ended up needing to edit some HTML code which came through from Google Docs – but if you've build your workflow around Google's tools, this is relatively straightforward.

In network with x nodes, adding a (x+1)^th node means there 2x additional potential connections between nodes.

For example, on a telephone network, a new subscriber can call all existing subscribers and they can call back.

So the number of possible connections increases with the size of the network.

If the network is commercial one with nodes representing customers and each connection has a fixed value then the value of adding one more customer increases as the size of the network increases.

For a network with x nodes, there are x(x-1) connections.

When networks get large – so large that (x-1) is more or less equal to x, the value of the network is x² .

This is why network products and the companies selling them have what mathematicians call exponential growth.

Think of it as the difference between stuffing bank notes under your mattress and or investing it in a compound-interest account.

Microsoft Security Essentials is arguably the best free computer security tool. I looked at the free antivirus application in October and found it ticked all the important boxes.

It works well, it imposes hardly any overhead and the price is right. Yet as Simon Sharwood says at SearchSecurity, the lack of interest in Security Essential has Microsoft scratching its head.

Moreover, Sharwood asked security specialist Symantec what effect the Microsoft package had on its sales. “None at all” was the reply.

It seems Microsoft has a great security package, but the company can't give it away.

Microsoft can’t give away better security :: SearchSecurity.com.au

Peter Drucker said no executive should make more than 20 times as much as a company worker.

He was speaking in 1982. He was spot on then and his point stands today.

I'd phrase things differently:

No executive is worth 20 times the pay of ordinary workers.

So why are companies willing to pay some executives many hundreds times the pay of ordinary workers?

It isn't because they deliver 'shareholder value', there's almost no link between company performance and executive pay.

John Mackey at the Harvard Business Review blog says:

If CEO compensation is primarily driven by competitive markets, then how come the ratio was only 24 to 1 back in 1965 and is about 300 to 1 today? Surely the market demand for good CEOs is no greater today than it was 45 years ago or 25 years ago. Are CEOs today really worth that much more than their comparable peers were worth just a few decades ago?