Wednesday November 23rd 2011 was a very interesting online news day. Not so much for the actual news story – but rather what followed. The Twittersphere was abuzz earlier in the day after a helicopter crashed at Auckland’s Viaduct Basin while installing a fake Christmas Tree. Video coverage of the installation work was at the time being webstreamed live by the tvnz.co.nz team. It’s an event you can never imagine free-to-air television affording live coverage [...]

The last few days at work have been busy with the launch of a month long fees amnesty. The concept is that you can return library books that have overdue fees associated with them and have the fees wiped in exchange for cans of food. Over 120 cans came in on a single day so it’s proving popular. Asides the webpage with all the info we’ve begun to create a few promotional videos to help [...]

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) [...]

Today I was fortunate enough to be able to watch Lawrence Lessig deliver his keynote at the start of day three at NetHui. It’s always a good measure of a speakers popularity to watch the live twitter stream from an event such as this and observe the frequency of tweets about the speaker and the comments they make. If this was the only measure of success I’d say Lessig won hands down pre and post [...]