Back to basics
What with Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Last.fm, Spotify and this blog, I've got quite a lot going on online. I hadn't recognised until today quite how stressful that was, mostly because of the links and interdependencies between all of those channels, constantly feeding each other. I'm not any less in love with being online than I was, I just realised that I needed to pull back and rationalise, if only to make it a little bit easier to manage.
So, I've uncoupled Facebook and Twitter. Partly this is because my use of Facebook is changing, becoming less about broadcasting news and more about keeping in touch. Consequently, having Twitter post every update to my Facebook wall was annoying to me, and annoying to my friends, especially though who object to @twitter #punctuation.
I've also slimmed down and simplified the theme I was using for this blog. Having let my blog languish for a while, I'd given it a lick of paint with the quite beautiful The Morning After magazine-style theme, which I loved, and still love. The only problem is that it is difficult to keep updated, partly because of the hassle of featured posts, special icons and multiple categories. All a bit difficult to manage, especially if you want to blog on the fly, which I often do. I realised that overcomplicating the delivery mechanism had actually stopped me doing any writing, because it was all to complex.
This new BlogTheme, also via the fantastic Woo Themes, is easy to use and well designed. I'll make a couple of tweaks when I get round to it - like the fact that the logo top right isn't a clickable link back to the homepage - but it will do more than adequately for now.
Thinking twice about the iPad
When the iPad was first announced, I was underwhelmed. I've been well aware of my adherence to the cult of Apple, and seriously thinking that the next time I buy a laptop, I'm reverting to a PC, so buying an iPad seemed like the least sensible thing I could do.
And then I started to see what magazine publishers were thinking of doing with it. I love magazines, and the thought that I could not only browse, but interact, flick and share, made me think again. Being able to get more out of my favourite magazines (like the wonderful Wired) seemed irresistible. There's something so intuitive about being able to manipulate data, images, sounds and text just through the interaction of your fingertips and a screen. Typing is a complex learnt behaviour, but simply touching is easy. Easy enough that a child can do it. Easy enough that you don't need to think.
And maybe that's the problem. I've got no particular problem with easy - and don't get me wrong, I love touch screen technology - but I do have a problem with not needing to think. There's something about the world of Apple that ties down creativity and thought at the same time that it proclaims that it enhances creativity and thought. You can be creative and thinking in the world of Apple, but really only within the bounds of the technology that you're given. But enough of my rambling. Cory Doctorow puts it much better than me:
If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn't for you.
via Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either) - Boing Boing.
Where’s the social in social networking?
For reasons which now seem somewhat mysterious to me, I decided to spend part of my holiday at Internet World today, and was enormously disappointed and uninspired. Despite being imminently responsible for a project that will completely rethink a complex and interesting website, and hence expecting to find something to spark my imagination, I found nothing useful. I think it's because the exhibition is answering the wrong questions.
Ten years ago, five even, perhaps even as recently as last year, technology was everything. What was really exciting in the world of the web was how the stuff worked. New innovations in social networking, connectivity, mobile access, content management... these things were really important. Like Mr Gutenberg and the early days of his terribly impressive movable type, everyone was excited about the mechanics. If all your energy and thought is going into how big your typefaces should be and how to arrange them in the frame, it doesn't much matter what you print. What's most exciting is that something's been printed.
Just in the past year, almost imperceptibly, things have started to change in the world of the web. It wasn't until I was halfway through a pint in the pub afterwards that it struck me. Going to Internet World was like stepping into a time machine and going back to 2007. I got side tracked into a demonstration of what was billed as a new exciting content management system, only to find that it was no more dynamic and sophisticated than what I could achieve with blogger. Which is to say, the technology in and of itself has stopped being impressive. I wonder whether it's possible to be wowed any more.
Wandering around Internet World, I was faced with an unanswered question, despite all the answers on offer, because nobody seemed interested in what technology, connection and sharing could achieve. Everything on offer seemed to be about bits of kit. Despite all the interest in social networking, the focus was the networking, not the social. Despite the thousands of people coming through the doors, humanity seemed strangely missing.
Connections and the power to choose
I have a meeting this morning to talk about internal communications at work and what we can do to improve it. Some of our problems are typical, some not so, but I'm not at all convinced that we'll reach anything like solutions. Essentially, I'm admitting that getting up early for an early meeting may be a waste of time.
Like so many places of work, we're efficient but not connected, and that worries people, especially our senior team. The goal of our internal communication is to increase understanding, engagement and action. The problem is that the connections needed to foster those things are messy and inefficient because unlike systems and processes, people are hard to re-engineer. Perhaps impossible. Getting people out of their boxes and silos is difficult because they are not only the easiest places for people to be, but also because they are the most efficient.
On a micro, individual scale, we understand the dynamics of groups and the connections in relationships. We move in personal, social and vocational circles of varying size and complexity, interlinking and interlocking patterns of people and places. And we know that connection is a good thing but it comes at the expense of efficiency. If I'm out with one friend, I'm not with another. If I'm chatting online, I'm not eating dinner with my boyfriend. If I'm spending time networking and building relationships, I'm not at my desk answering emails. There's a trade off. We make choices. And we do it so easily and naturally, we barely notice.
Which is why our senior team likes the idea of connection at work, but not the reality. Because the reality means relaxing the grip of efficiency, removing the structure the binds people's time and relocating some of the power and control. Giving people the space to connect also means giving them the power to choose. But work places are driven ultimately by compulsion rather than choice, and the people in those work places know that. And the senior team know that. And I know that.
And I'm still going to a meeting to try and change all that. Why? Because I don't have a choice.
If a tree falls in a forest, does Kevin Bacon hear it scream?
I like the Zen question about trees falling in forests and whether they make any noise if nobody's there to hear. It makes my brain hurt, in a stretched and puzzled way, which I figure can only be a good thing.
It also makes me think about this blog. I've been heartened recently by reading Clay Shirky's excellent book and discovering, to my surprise, the relative unconnectedness of much of Web 2.0. In the case of blogs, just like this, readership and connection is limited to a handful of people. What makes the pattern of connections interesting is those people's connections with others. I wonder whether I could get to Kevin Bacon's blog in six steps? In any case, I'm somewhere deep in the long tail of connectivity, far off the right hand end of the graph. It's not true that nobody hears the Zen tree fall over. The tumbleweed does.
In the end, does it matter what I contribute to the growing body of opinion on the web? I think it matters more that I contribute at all, make a few connections and play my part as a link. I've already beaten the norm by keeping my blog going for more than a few posts. Now all I need is some readers...
Just discovered Twitter. Micro-updates, like the status update on facebook, but straight from my mobile phone. So I can chart the minutiae for anyone who happens to care or be watching. This may be entirely pointless, especially if nobody else I know joins, but I do quite like it.
twitter.com/andyjaeger if you want to find me. It's a hyper-minimalist facebook.
Job news
It's been a week and a bit since my last blog entry, as I'm delighted to say I've actually been busy working! I started a temp job the week before last for the Nursing and Midwifery Council as an Online Journalist - odd job title, but basically I get to play with the website and intranet all day, which is quite good fun. And there's good news too - interviewing this week for a permanent position with the NMC, as Marketing and Publications Manager. I'm basically applying to be my own boss, if that makes any sense. But it should be good. After the manic nature of my last job, it's fantastic to work with people who appreciate what I do and apparently work at something less than a totally frantic pace. Yay!
So, keeping everything crossed for Friday...
Losing my blogging virginity
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