In the US the universities led the Internet charge. The same in NZ, afaik. I recall at Massey in the late 80’s, a friend introducing me to the mysteriously cool “internet” and “email”. Sadly, on the surface at least, things have changed for the worse here.
One of the most basic tests to assess the cluefulness of a website is whether it needs the “www” to resolve. Sadly massey.ac.nz and canterbury.ac.nz do not resolve. These are our supposed internet pathfinders and the educators of our future IT talent.
The rest of the universities work – waikato.ac.nz, vuw.ac.nz, lincoln.ac.nz, auckland.ac.nz and otago.ac.nz.
More promisingly waikato.co.nz, vuw.co.nz, and aut.co.nz also work.
Otago.co.nz goes to a regional tourism site – a bit iffy but seemingly semi-legit.
But massey.co.nz is “bad host”, and stunningly lincoln.co.nz goes to a domainz ‘future site’ page and canterbury.co.nz and auckland.co.nz resolve to dodgy link spammers. No doubt there is a lot of history around these, but seriously – for Auckland and Canterbury regions and Universities not to have control of their own .co.nz domains is truly terrible. (forgive me if I don’t link to the link spammers)
It gets worse – http://www.otago.govt.nz, and the similar Canterbury and Auckland urls also do not resolve – so there is nothing there!
So three pleas….
1: Everyone – please lose the dependence on typing the redundant “www” by making your website resolve correctly
2: Regions and Universities – please take back control of your domains in all suffixes.
3: and Kiwi Advertisers – please drop the “dub dub dub”. It’s aggravating, demeaning and redundant.
Lance Wiggs 