• OK, so it turns out I’m a Social Media conference slag. Hot on the heels of the last one, I packed my little bag and headed to Sydney for iStragegy 2010. Travelling with work is still a novelty to me, I haven’t really got that whole, jaded “Oh GOD, not Sydney AGAIN!” thing down –…

  • Paneled

    Thoughts from Social Media Junction. I had my first experience at *talking* at a conference in my new role as Telecom’s Online Community Comms Manager – that’s community manager in less words. The theme was “Kiwi brands and social media – differing ways to achieve ROI”, along with folk from Hell, Tui, Bullet PR and…

  • Mad, man

    You, too, can Mad Men yourself

  • Queenslanders are nice, goddammit. Walking around Brisbane during the day with my son in his stroller, I couldn’t so much as approach a set of stairs without someone immediately stopping what they were doing and helping me out. People in cafes and shops were breezy and interested, in a way that only people with the…

  • Holly wood Animal: A memior by Joe Eszterhaus Basic Instinct writer Eszterhaus stars in his own life history, a life divided between his two children and wife he was steadily growing apart from, and Hollywood, where he ruled the roost by producing hot script after hot script. I preferred reading about his time in the…

  • This book has everything – heavy drinking, sex, violence, crime and gambling, all packed into one weekend in a couple of small towns in Taranaki. The characters and writing are colorful, to say the least, and there’s some surprisingly evocative passages about the atmospheric countryside, and portraits of minor characters’ lives. Ronald Hugh Morrieson, a…

  • My review of the Motorola Milestone, which appeared in Telecom’s co. magazine. I have a perfectly good mobile phone. It texts, it emails, it takes photos. I can even ring people. But when I was offered the use of Telecom’s whizzo new Motorola Milestone, running Google’s Android operating system that’s knocked sliced bread off its…

  • My great uncle Alan, when he left his architecture practise, wanted one thing – this quote from his boss’s wall. He got it. You can click it to make it bigger.

  • Chad Taylor – Heaven Again, Chad Taylor puts you right into a fictional Auckland that makes it seem much more dangerous and sexy than the one I live in. Apparently Taylor was doing a long walk along K Road and New North Road every evening when he was writing this, and it feels spot on,…