by Jon Bridges

If you're anything like me, you'll be sitting on a Swedish ball in Balmoral listening to downloaded Finnish music while writing your TBI column. If not, read on anyway...

In New Zealand, we love to complain about how slow we are to get technology, but I think it's a good thing. It means we miss out on the dud stuff that everyone else tests and realises is poor before the deals to bring it here ever get signed. That's how we dodged 8-track tapes in the seventies, and who knows how many technological cul-de-sacs we're avoiding as we speak.

iTunes is a good example of where we're slow. We finally got our own iTunes store of course, but it doesn't have the television and movie content of its American cousin. Which is where the new TVNZ Ondemand website that everyone is talking about comes in. It's brilliant, and as a form of television delivery it puts us ahead, rather than behind, most countries in the world. And it's the near-future of TV, which won't be something that is broadcast at a certain time, but an archive that we have access to when we want it.

It's brand new at TVNZ but it's already worth checking out. The classic stuff is magic. My early favourite is this clip of The Chills visiting London, which is great in itself, but also a reminder of how far we have come in TV production, and how far we haven't come in music. It's not that there's anything wrong with today's music, just that the music The Chills were making in 1986 is just as good. Whereas the television we were making then is very, very different. The Radio with Pictures item is clunky and poorly paced, but it has a stripped-down simplicity which is easy to watch. And the concentration on the subject matter and the lack of concern with pacing is charming and relaxing.

While you've got your Chills-on, you can buy their latest EP at a site called txttunes where indie bands can sell their songs and kids without credit cards can pay for legal downloads by text message. It's a New Zealand site run by Steriogram guitarist Brad Carter and ex-Warner Music man Matt Coleman. The beta site went up quietly at the end of last year, just for New Zealanders, and there are already 500 bands signed up. Come NZ Music Month in May, a whole lot of new functionality will turn the site into a real community and bands will be able to use the site like many now use MySpace, with the added bonus of txttunes providing them a very real revenue stream. In a nice turnaround, it won't be til later this year that Americans can use it. Though I know there is a legal reason for this, I like to think it's just to get one back on the rest of the world.

It turns out that Google has become the Progressive Enterprises of the internet. For the first time today a band search came back to me with the top hit being a link to the Google music page, where a discography of the band leads on to Amazon, iTunes and other links. The official band site came second on the search return list. In Foodtown, using exactly the same trick, they give their own crummy Signature Range brand the best merchandising - eye level on the shelves, plenty of markdowns, etc, so that you are more likely to choose their no-name, foreign-manufactured, bulk-discounted, average-quality alternatives to our own favourite grocery brands. The basic reason I never buy Signature Range is that it isn't fair. How can Watties and Ernest Adams compete on an even ground when the company that runs the supermarkets also owns a competing brand of groceries? So how Google could think I'd prefer their Signature Range site over the Chills' actual homepage, I do not know. I just do not know.

And in a press release, Helen has asked for public submissions on which of our cultural treasures should be considered important enough to be protected by the Hague Convention (which is like the Geneva Convention for art and culture) in case of an armed conflict. Protected treasures will get an emblem like this - so, straight away, I want a t-shirt with that on it!

On the list already are the obvious historic places, museums and art galleries. Are there other things that need this special status? Things that invading commanders would have listed, so that as they are killing us and driving tanks through our motor camps, they can avoid chipping any of our taonga? Since the TVNZ archives are already listed, at least that little clip of The Chills will be saved, but I think to be on the safe side we should definitely list Martin Phillips. We just need to decide where to tattoo the emblem...