Calling all remix and mash-up proponents – NZ digital content and data wants YOU!

This November New Zealand will see the biggest push ever to get people using NZ digital content and data, with the launch of Mix and Mash: The Great NZ Remix and Mashup Competition. www.mixandmash.org.nz

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Our thoughts are with Cantabrians amidst the chaos, devastation, and upheaval of this life-changing disaster, where the Internet (through Twitter) is replacing the radio. Christchurch art historian, curator and writer Cheryl Bernstein writes about her experience of the earthquake(s):

For a couple of days, our legs were rubbery, our knees wobbling. The floor rose to meet us. We weren’t sure at times if the shakes were real or imagined. After some of the real aftershocks, ones in which the house banged and rattled and mortar rained down the roof, my hands were trembling so much it was difficult to hold my mobile phone, which didn’t leave my hand or my pocket for five days straight. When we lost coverage for an hour or so on the first day when the emergency batteries ran down in the cellphone towers, I knew to expect it—and that it would be temporary—through what I’d read on Twitter. Twitter was an immediate source of necessary information, reassurance, companionship. Critically, my phone felt like a lifeline to the outside world, to places where the lawn wasn’t covered in bricks and entire shop-fronts hadn’t fallen into the street and the river hadn’t changed its course and cracks so big a man could stand waist deep in them hadn’t appeared in the roadway. A line to the old real life.

In late June the Creative Freedom Foundation spoke at Youth Parliament on the topic of “Inquiry into whether copyright infringement is hurting New Zealand music; how can artists use new media to get their music sold rather than stolen”. Two government spokespeople from the Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Culture and Heritage as well as CFF’s Bronwyn Holloway-Smith were questioned in person on the topic.

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Colin Jackson writes on his blog that “There’s a great New Zealand film called “Boy” – it’s a coming of age tale with a uniquely New Zealand flavour to it. It’s been in the cinemas here for three months, and it’s gone down very well. I’m probably not telling you anything you didn’t know, because the film has been well-promoted. I think I saw that it was now the highest-grossing New Zealand movie ever. Well done to Taika Waititi and every one else involved.

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