Stephen Blyth's Blog

View Community gardens in Aotearoa New Zealand in a larger map See the map above, well I’d like your help to add to it. As part of some research I’m doing for an article on community gardening I want to know what is happening around Aotearoa New Zealand. By the looks of things there is [...]

Telling stories using video is something that Nathalie Hofsteed and Lee Hales at Give a little are pretty excited about. They recently told me about plans to make it easy for organisations to share video updates via their donation pages. Give a little are on a mission to make it easy for fundraisers to account [...]

I’d like to bestow my inaugural Award for excellence in community directories today. This is a personal award and doesn’t attract a cash or even in-kind prize. Just my gratitude. As part of a website writing project I’ve been working on I’ve scoured the country for online community directories. The aim is to provide a [...]

We’ve stripped the beta out of the CommunityCentral URL and we’re up and running. What a buzz! It was almost a year to the day since I started. At times progress seemed painfully slow. Wrestling with software development isn’t always easy, and not exactly fun. It consumed a lot of time. But we’ve got there. [...]

On the CommunityCentral blog you’ll a find a sneak preview of the new homepage. After a demonstration at the NZ Federation of Voluntary Welfare Organisation’s AGM we’ve decided to let people see what the new web-based platform will look like. Over the last few weeks we’ve been doing a fairly intensive amount of usability testing. [...]

After a successful yMedia challenge in Auckland last year, Pamela and the team are expanding. The challenge matches web savvy students with community groups who develop a practical website or make use of online tools over a two week period. Both Wellington and Auckland community groups are invited to participate this year. Participating organisations last [...]

In preparation for the workshop I’m running next week I’m looking for examples of what wikis are used for. What I really want to find is examples of New Zealand community groups with a wiki, private or public. So far, I’m struggling to find anything run by a New Zealand community group. Within government there [...]

I’ve just been added to a website listing blogs about New Zealand and by New Zealanders. When I checked today (4 April 2008) there were 479 blogs on Kiwiology. I’m sure in time they’ll have loads of advertising, but at the moment the site is uncluttered. And even though the people behind Kiwiology are a [...]

Just as the International Arts Festival was finishing, I finally made it down to the Festival Club at Frank Kitts Park. It was a pretty early start, so the bar was closed. Instead the assembled punters got breakfast. The performance was speedy. Just three acts. The plot: launch a new version of the New Zealand [...]

I was going to start this post by making a note of how many blogs there out there in the ether, and finish with an updated figure. Guess what? There are no accurate figures for the number of blogs being published, and certainly no data on how up-to-date they are nor the quality of content. [...]