2012 is shaping up to be an interesting and exciting year – and I don’t mean all that Mayan hype! I’m starting the month by moving from the Dunedin Public Libraries marketing team and joining the Dunedin City Council’s web team. The web team has in turn been incorporated in to a council wide communications and marketing team as part of some internal restructuring undertaken at the end of 2011. While I’ll still look after [...]

If you missed the news the Apple iPhone 4S Siri personal assistant was offline for a couple of days late last week (Friday / Saturday New Zealand time) due to hosted server problems ‘in the cloud’. It’s apparently highly network dependant and polls the Internet when you ask questions such as when your next xyz appointment is due etc. I found the reported outcry from United States residents that enjoyed access to the beta product [...]

Like many others I watched the last shuttle mission with a mixture of interest, disbelief, curiosity and sadness. “All good things must come to an end” goes the saying and over the last couple of weeks it became the NASA space shuttles turn to fall into that category. I’m fine with the idea of retiring an older technology and I’m even relatively at peace with the notion of private industry championing the space industries technological [...]

I’ve been reading Sally Pewhairangis’ posts over the last few weeks examining New Zealand public libraries use of social media. It’s been interesting to see which libraries are engaged in the use of these tools and to what extent. Hopefully for those libraries not currently active in this space it will be the wake up call required to start engaging with customers using these channels of communication. Like all things there’s a tipping point (Gladwell) [...]