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Unbundled! | Dec 20, 2006 09:17

Immediate release: all media

The word of the year for 2006 is "unbundled", according to the readers of the popular New Zealand blog website Public Address.

The keyword of telecommunications reform trumped all others in an online vote at Public Address' community site, Public Address System over the past few days.

A little way back in second place was the euphemistic phrase injected into the culture by the animated TV series Bro' Town: "peow peow".

A couple of international buzzwords - "truthiness" and "emo" - came next, with a peculiarly local coinage - "coddingtonswallop" - rounding out the top five.

Readers voted on a list of words that had been suggested and debated in the course of an online discussion in the Public Address System Café. The debate process threw up a number of neologisms, including the number seven word, "brouhaka" (that is, a brouhaha about the haka).

"The choice of 'unbundled' reflected the significance of this year's telecommunications reforms for internet users, whether they consider themselves geeks or not," says Public Address founder, Russell Brown, "although geekspeak was pretty big too, and the prominence of 'munter' might be ascribed to the development of everyone's favourite character in Outrageous Fortune.

"A number of the year's big news stories got a look in - 'cancerous', 'frankly', 'stadium', 'brethren' and anything-ending-in-gate all made the top 15. But I must say I was particularly pleased with the neologisms. Clever lot, our readers."

The top 15 words as voted by Public Address readers are:

1. unbundled
2. peow peow
3. truthiness
4. emo
5. coddingtonswallop
6. munter
7. brouhaka
8. schadenfreude
9. cancerous
10. -gate
11. pwned
12. w00t!
13. frankly
14 stadium
15 = aspirational
15 =brethren

Russell Brown and other Public Address bloggers can be found at publicaddress.net and publicaddress.net/system for comment, interviews and offers of free seasonal drinks.
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PS: Yes, there was a winner for a bottle of the Longmorn single malt from Whisky Galore . I'm just confirming a name.

PPS: Please do note our new Public Address System feature, Summer Holiday. Keep us in mind and drop us - and your fellow readers - a line as you forge through the Great New Zealand Holiday over the next few weeks.

Oh, and check out DanNews' video montage 2006: The Year in Review in our OurTube section. Is nice!

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A little patch of turf | Dec 19, 2006 11:02

Okay, so here's the guy's MySpace page. The guy, that is, who has been arrested on suspicion of murdering five prostitutes in Suffolk. It's the story of the MySpace era that grabbing a little patch of turf in cyberspace is now so trivially easy that even the most troubled of souls might be there, friending with people who have no idea who they are.

The likes of Rain, who hasn't deleted Tom Stephens as a friend and now has people thinking her new love is the accused himself. The 257 comments are quite a parade.

Laila Harre had Roger Kerr for breakfast, lunch and dinner on the minimum wage issue on Morning Report today.

Further discussion on No Right Turn.

Richard Prebble continues to toss up theories about the provenance of the Hollow Men emails. Please try and forget allegations about dirty party politics: the latest hot tip is "anonymous tipoffs that it has nothing to do with party politics but is the work of a rich individual, from the Bay of Plenty, who has an obsession with the Reserve Bank and has paid private investigators a bucket load of money to obtain the documents". Um, okay.

In the US, John McCain gears up for his presidential run by springing something called the Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act. And yes, it's as cynical and OTT as it sounds.

For no particular reason, a clip from BBC's Planet Earth series about the parasitic cordyceps fungi which infiltrates an insect host, feeds on it, and then bursts out of its body. Eeeww.

And, finally: last day to participate in the Public Address 2006 Word of the Year vote, sponsored by Whisky Galore. We'll draw a whisky winner and announce the result tomorrow.

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Munted in one way or another | Dec 18, 2006 10:04

Drunk girls in heels and dresses the size of handkerchiefs. Queues everywhere. Clearly, the idea of ducking down to the Viaduct for a drink had not been a particularly sound one, even at 1am. Town was festively busy and everyone, it seemed, was munted in one way or another.

Still, I'd rather have it this way than let Gordon bloody Moller fill up the waterfront with yet more residential apartments for rich white people.

My homies, Phil and Renee, and I were in the area for B-Street, the bFM party. B-Street, a musical extravaganza across four downtown venues in celebration of the bNet Awards, was a great idea, well marketed and nicely produced - and thus, a bit of a victim of its own success. More people turned up to party than could be accommodated in the four venues.

We made the mistake of leaving the main venue, the Northern Steamship Company, after Voom played (and I surrendered all inhibition and sang along to 'Beth'). The venue management got the hard word from the police - who were looking mighty antsy about the crowd outside - and basically shut the doors. We tried the stagedoor blag, along with the managers of RDU and Radio One, but there was no having it.

I tried to convince Phil that if he could create a dsturbance and attract the attention of the bouncer, the rest of us could take advantage of the melee and slip in the door. He wasn't too keen. I tried waving my business card and saying I was a member of the bFM board at the other door, which the bouncer there seemed to find amusing but unpersuasive. Posing as a member of the Mint Chicks didn't seem very credible.

So we missed the Mint Chicks, and we never got into the Schooner Tavern - another ram dancehall - all night.

But we did have fun: how could we not? We talked bollocks to friend and stranger alike. We saw SJD (crunching version of 'From A to B and Back to C'), the Nudie Suits, who are still charming, and the DHDFDs, who were riotous, and after finding succour - and a booth! - at Deschlers, we headed back over to catch State of Mind. The room was full of bug-eyed kids dancing a million miles an hour: typical drum and bass gig, in other words, and fun with it. And then it was very late and time to go home.

I also saw Rob O'Neill twice, but we passed as ships in the night. Had we been able to converse, he might have told me about this thing in his blog about new Australian Labour leader Kevin Rudd discussing "the difference between neoliberal God Hayek and Adam Smith, whom both social democrats and conservatives claim as inspiration." Crikey.

You may be interested to note that Stuart Page has uploaded that clip for the Skeptics' 'A.F.F.C.O.' and I've linked to it in our OurTube section.

Also there, Simon Dallow and that controversial kiss.

Harry Hutton is funny (as usual) about the 2006 Weblog Awards - or, as he prefers to think of it, the North American Champion Bore Awards. Really, a contest of excellence where the pathological trash heap that is Little Green Footballs can grab a third of the vote and nearly win has its problems …

And, finally, do please all pitch in and cast your vote for our 2006 Word of the Year. You might even win a nice bottle of single malt from our friends at Whisky Galore.

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