So, as you may know, Qantas (the formerly govt owned, but now privately owned Australian national airline) has not exactly been kicking goals PR wise. It began with the AGM, continued with the lockout and hasn't really gotten any better.
However today I am glad to say that the Qantas PR machine has scored a spectacular goal.
Unfortunately it was in their own net.
This morning they announced a competition on twitter:
Two weeks ago the 4th annual Local Government Web Network Conference was held and it was good.
Organised by Reem Abdelatey of the Local Government and Shires Associations, the conference is Australias only grass roots event with a focus on Local Government use of the internet.
Well once again it has been a little while since I last blogged here, so best I bring things up to speed a bit.
The Site
I've added a new page to the site:
Basically some of the excellent people I've been working with lately.
IKEN
Tomorrow morning I'm going to be heading in to Parliament House in Canberra to attend Microsofts Politics and Technology Forum.
A half day event, it's going to be keynoted by british poli-blogger and radio personality Iain Dale and then we'll get a panel discussion regarding politics and tech in Australia.
I'll be tweeting under the hashtag #poltech
I was pointed at this article by Craig Reardon, in which he claims that open source software and small business doesn't mix. After reading through it I first checked the calender to ensure I hadn't fell through a time vortex to 2002 and then thought I should respond, both as a small business operator and a provider of services to businesses large and small based on open source software.
First off let me make absolutely clear my interest in this:
Despite the fact that the congress still seems set to close down the raft of open gov sites setup under the Obama administration, there is a little good news.
The code behind itdashboard.gov has been released to the world through an account on the venerable (and surprisingly still going) Sourceforce.
Hot on the heals of the announced cuts to the US online transparency programme comes another example of "How not to do Gov2.0"
For those of you who may not be aware, the New Zealand city of Christchurch suffered a large earth quake (6.1 on the scale) back in late February, causing wide spread damage and taking the lives of 166 people. Very soon after the earthquake hit, the government went into action to manage the disaster, and number of volunteer groups stepped up to the plate to assist the people of Christchurch.
Once again someone is doing it wrong on the internet and I feel I need to point it out.
In this case, the someone is the United States congress, which as part of its budgetary battle with the whitehouse has decided to reduce funding for a range of Gov2.0/Open Government initiatives from $34million to $2million.
So as you may have noticed the blog here has been rather moribund. Mainly I blame things like regular work, using twitter and so on.
However that's going to change.
I have set myself an ambitious target of at least 1 blog post here a week. These posts will be about topics that relate to the activities of Collaborynth and the interests of my clients.
Last night I was lucky enough to sit down virtually with Jeff Waugh, Kate Carruthers and Stihlgerrian to discuss twitter and the effect that it's had on online communications.
It was a good talk and you can listen to the full episode here
One thing I did bring up was #localgovchat, not sure if it made the cut but I'll be doing another post about that shortly
