How many times have we heard this statement over the last year?
It has been bantered around as many people see vast changes in their individual circumstance the world over.

The financial "credit crisis", the Arab Spring, a few deadly earthquakes and now a massive oil spill, rising global/western mortgagee sales, a generally tougher economy, high levels of unemployment - all of these hugely negative factors are impacting more and more on the everyday person.

But is a change really as good as a holiday, or just an unlikely distraction?
Does a holiday really make a change anyway, or just put off the reality of everyday life, set to crash into you harder when you return?

These are all tough questions, too tough really.
Too much of this kind of thinking tends to lead one to questioning one's station in life, one's direction or even one's very own purpose in the grand scheme of things. Who is this "one" anyway.

Seems that with that kind of thinking we may need a holiday sooner than planned.
Since that is not going to happen to any vast degree for us anytime soon, we have been working on a new format for the blog section of the website, as the world around us undergoes another round of profound changes.

The winds of change blow into the four corners.

All over the world this year there has been a contagious discontent that has seemingly spread like a virus throughout the world. Driven by so many various factors it has seeped it's way into many different facets of everyday life.

For many a welcome escape has been the joys of the internet. One of the litmus websites that the globe has to use as a weather stone is of course Facebook. Facebook has seen some remarkable growth since it's humble, and sometimes controversial, beginnings. It seems that in quite a disconnected world, we all crave the vicarious pleasure of communicating with our family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances from afar, even if we are just down the road. Facebook has now surpassed 800 million users, and that makes it a monstrous gathering of humans. It has been said that the combined power of social media (Facebook and Twitter in particular) have had quite a large part to play in the changes we have seen in the geopolitical world. Facebook has seen the internet take on quite a different persona, with it almost becoming a requirement for a modern "connected" person or business to be running a Facebook account. To not be present on Facebook (in the western world anyway) is becoming an odd thing for people to get their heads around. How many of us now have elderly grandparents on Facebook? Weird isn't it. It has become a counter-culture stance to not be a Facebookian. But new options have emerged this year that are well worth a look, and are serious contenders to absorb those that no longer wish to be apart of the Facebook monstrosity, such as the emergence of Google + as a serious contender.

The Big Picture undergoes change too.

As we have eluded to in some previous news posts we are undergoing some directional changes ourselves. One of these changes is a major upgrade of this version of our website to a whole new look, and some additional functionality, as we roll out some exciting new projects that we have been working on over the last couple of years.

The Blog gets some quite reasonable traffic, so it seemed only sensible to be utilising this traffic to garnish some additional revenue through the Google Adsense programme. Time will tell as to just how effective this is going to be, so we will continue to run our own internal advertising programme as well for the mean time. The Google Ads is a dry run for other clients and projects too - we have been getting requests for this functionality so lets test it out so we can report back with some degree of confidence. Do us a huge favour - click on some ads and make us some money! Takes minimal time on your behalf.

As a result of implementing the Google AdSense programme, and also testing some additional features soon to be unleashed, we thought we might as well change things up a bit in the Blog section and make more of an impact.
It has become a destination for some, so we thought we may as well embrace this and play into it.
Running a blog for our own entertainment is certainly not our core business, but content management and social marketing is something we are doing more and more for clients, and it has encouraged some clients to engage us to do this for them, so it has it's place and function. Feel free to email us and get a conversation started if you want to get our input on your social marketing.

The Times they are a changing as the connected ones beat the drums.

The last couple of weeks have seen the social uprising that gained media traction in the Arab Spring hitting the fair shores of New Zealand after the effort of protesters in the USA spurred on those aggrieved here.
The "Occupy" movement has all of the hallmarks of the 60's / 70's era "hippy" pretest movements but with all of the connectedness of the modern world. People are easily mobilised via our modern communication devices, and real time footage is shared with the wider world at the touch of a button. This has been the real shift between the decades.

Check out some of the footage from "Occupy Wall Street" - set of course to a momumental protest song by Bob Dylan that has been unofficially adopted by those on the ground living in the parks.

"The times they are a changing" - when Bob Dylan sung this in the immortal protest song he, and a whole generation, honestly thought that the times were a changing.
Maybe they did, and everyone was just too distracted to notice that the change was not the one that they were after, rather a far deeper, darker and dirtier one.
Decades on what will this dramatically more impatient generation make of all of this?
Has the reaction to the corporate infrastructure that runs our world due to their monopolistic stranglehold over our economic policy come too late in the day?