Argentina mourns ex-president Alfonsin

Argentina's first president to be democratically elected after the "Dirty War" military dictatorship, Raul Alfonsin, has died of illness aged 82.

One month of Twitter

I've been using Twitter regularly for about one month now and it's been a great tool for networking with new people.

It makes things a lot more immediate and really all about what people are talking about "right now". I've managed to catch a live webcast and radio interview which I would have missed otherwise and its excellent for the latest news.

Twitter is two years old this month and with the number of users growing rapidly there seem to be more New Zealanders joining each day, making it even more useful for communicating and networking.

So after one month I have been pretty impressed with Twitter and I can see why there has been so much mania about it. Time will tell if it's a stayer or just another passing fad.

You can follow me on Twitter @frasernz

Travel search with Wego.com

Whenever someone mentions to me they are travelling overseas I always suggest checking for cheap flights on the travel search website Wego.com. I was really impressed by its results and I got some really cheap flights to Argentina myself. And now that they have an affiliate programme I have even more reason to suggest them. So here is a shameless plug. :)

Go to our New Zealand Travel page on infonews.co.nz to start your airfares search, help support infonews and hopefully get some damn cheap air tickets too. Or follow this link to go straight to their site.

If you have your own website then you too can join their affiliate program.

Thanks and happy travelling.

Project Management Software

When I read Julian's blog post 15 Signs That You Urgently Need Project Management Software straight away I knew that I was a number 8. I keep a notepad on my desk and list all my work, gradually adding new tasks and striking out completed ones. When the page is no longer readable I rewrite the list on a new page.

So I decided to give ProWorkFlow a trial and my biggest regret was that I didn't try it out sooner. It was very straight forward to set it up with all the websites and projects that I manage and one of the biggest surprises was that now I work in a virtually paperless office. I still keep a pen and paper handy but so far they have been gathering dust.

The time tracking feature has been one of my favourites and with one click I can start or stop timing on any project.  With the need to record my time over a fairly large number of projects and clients each month this automated timesheet is ideal for me and makes it so much easier to track where my time is going and manage my work load.

I already rely a lot on Gmail to manage my work but ProWorkFlow seems to be the missing link that I never realised I needed. 

Screenshot of ProWorkFlow projects manager page:

The last 7 years in Hip Hop

Skillz have been rapping up the year in hip hop (including a bit of NBA and NFL of course) for the last seven years. The 2008 one gets a bit political with some great lines in the second half. 2007 is the only one they made an official video to go with it and is one of my favourites. Enjoy

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

newszealand.co.nz relaunched

newszealand.co.nz was originally setup to help myself and Peter monitor various news sources in the New Zealand media to help us with the running of infonews.co.nz.

Following positive feedback from a number of people we have relaunched the site with an increased number of sources and topics.

The website uses the Google Feeds API and is similar to Alltop.com and popurls.com which you may be familiar with.

We are continuing to add more sources and topics and hope it will be a useful resource for a range of people.

As always we appreciate all feedback so please let us know what you think.

Welcome YouTube New Zealand

The YouTube team was in Auckland yesterday to launch a local version of their site and it was great to meet some of their awesome team. Apart from the slight faux pas of having 3 out of their 4 youtuber guests actually being aussies it was a successful afternoon. We got an interview with YouTube's International Manager along with comments from TVNZ and also TV3 entertainment reporter David Farrier, see our coverage of the launch on infonews.co.nz.

Our interview with David Farrier featured briefly on his TV3 clip of the launch.

YouTube's political editor chats with TVNZ


The YouTube team in Auckland


Finally some New Zealand content at the launch (Young Sid - Undisputed):