Archive for February, 2008

A survey by Borders bookshop shows that if your Zodiac sign is Gemini, you are twice as likely to be a successful writer, reporting that “The 27 great writers born under the twins include Chaucer, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, Margaret Drabble and Jodi Picoult”.

I’m a Gemini and I’m pleased to say that I’ve been moderately successful as a writer but by no means anywhere near the Greats. For me, the trouble about being a Gemini is that I tend to be changeable, easily bored and unable to easily buckle down for the long, hard slog it takes to be truly great at something. I’m much more successful at being a dilettante than a literati.

What star sign are you? Has it helped with your writing? Or hindered it?

Photo: thanks to Lukman Kusuma from flickr.com (CCL)

Blogging about Facebook etiquette last week got me thinking about what I do on that social network and how much of a role it plays in my online social life - and to be frank, I don’t spend that much time there. You would think that I’d be a great fan, seeing as I’m such a social media aficionado. So why does it not ring my bells, as they say?

After mulling over this for awhile, a number of things struck me:

• For many people, especially those new to social media, Facebook feels like a safe, contained space for them to play in - the nice, white gated community of the internet. For me, I like the great open spaces of prairies beyond that offers a vast range of blogs, images, podcasts and video. 

• In particular, I really enjoy reading great blogs, which can be stimulating, intriguing, engaging, amusing - and I like joining the discussions by adding comments and sharing my thoughts around a thought-provoking topic. The interactions on Facebook are geared for chit-chat rather than longer, in-depth discussions.

• The activities most people engage in on Facebook seem to be fairly trivial - sending Hatching Eggs and the like. Which is fun and a way of saying to someone, “I’m thinking of you” that is different from sending them an email, where you feel obliged to say something more than those few words. I enjoy that from time to time but it’s becoming wearing when you are constantly inundated with variations such silliness - and especially when you have to download the application first in order to receive their greeting AND you know that the person sending you the interaction has just downloaded the application and hit “send to all your friends”. Having fun with your friends has never been so easy - or so automated.

• The Facebook mini-feed keeps you up to date about what your friends have been up to - but it mostly shows you what they’ve been doing on Facebook. It’s all about what Facebook applicaitons they’ve added, what Facebook groups they’ve joined, whose Facebook wall they’ve written on etc and not what they are really doing in their real lives. I prefer dipping in and out of my Twitter stream where my Twitter friends are sending out little messages about what they are doing and about blog posts or real world news stories they’ve been reading - and increasingly, videos of what they are up to. All this can be done from their mobile phones, including live video streaming via Qik.

• Facebook inundates you with ads in the sidebar and also with ad-items that pretend to be part of the min-feed. Its Beacon application which added users shopping activities to the mini-feed as if those users endorsed those products caused an outcry recently. So far, Twitter seems to be ad-free.

• Facebooks seems to be private but it is less private than you think. If you want to be sure about privacy, make sure you check that all your privacy settingsare enabled. This apparent privacy and the naivety of users inexperienced in web-safety has led to the recent hoo-ha over employers finding out about staff’s private indiscretions.  If in doubt, treat Facebook - and any other social network - as a public space.

• Inexperienced users have also left indiscrete messages on each other’s Walls, which can be seen by all the friends of the Wall-owner. It is also very easy to mistakenly send a message to “all ” your friends. When replying to a message sent to “all” from one friend, I don’t think there is an option to reply to that one friend - your reply goes to “all”. This is all potential for tension and drama between friends if someone sees a message they should not have etc….!

So, my final verdict is: Facebook is as good a place as any to start your social media exploration but it’s not as private as you think it is. As with any public space  - or semi-public space like your office, school, college or community space - take a moment to think abuot how what you say and do might be taken. And don’t leave private information lying around, in the same way you wouldn’t leave your wallet, driving licence, passport etc lying around the office or in a lecture room.

If you like to see what your friends are up to in terms of real world interactions rather than just their interactions with Facebook applications, check out Twitter - my Twitter feed  at www.twitter.com/fusionview may be a good place to start, and in particular you can see the mix of people I follow for the news items they share via Twitter and also the more personal daily activities that others I follow tweet about. br />
Photo: of gated community thanks to Dean Terry on flickr.com (CCL)

My top priority during my visit to Barcelona a couple of weeks back was to look at the buildings created by Gaudi. It is astonishing that his strange, swirly, hallucinatory architecture was built during the late 19th century and the early 20th century - they seem so modern, surreal and fresh today. Even in our present time, with London’s Gherkin, the humping turtles of the Sydney Opera House and the desert-inspired buildings of Zaha Hadid vying for eye-grabbing attention, Gaudi’s buildings from over a hundred years ago still pack a punch.

We tend to assume Gaudi set out to be radical and anti-establishment in his designs just because they were so unconventional alongside the traditional classic architecture of the 19th century. But in fact he was a staunch and conservative Catholic, appears to have taken his inspiration from nature. An article in The Age quotes:

“Nothing is art if it does not come from nature, as from nature come the most beautiful and extraordinary shapes,'’ he said. “Furthermore, nature is the masterpiece of the Creator.'’

This accounts for the curved lines of his designs and the a-symmetry that characterizes his work. His furniture looks like its been shaped out of vines. His rooftop chimneys look like rocks eroded by the timeless wind. The pillars of the Sagrada Familia Temple are palm trees. Tiles are shaped to give the sense of water.

Click on the photo below to view a slideshow of some photos from our Gaudi journey:

Like many geniuses, Gaudi was not always appreciated in his lifetime. Not many people understood his work and if not for the wealthy industrialist Eusebi Guell who became his patron, Gaudi might have sunk into obscurity. George Orwell famously “thought the Sagrada Familia was “the most hideous building in the world'’ and thought the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up during the Civil War when they had the chance.” Even Guell apparently did not like Gaudi’s designs - according to Wikipedia:

Reportedly on one occasion Gaudí said to Güell, “Sometimes I think we are the only people who like this architecture.” Güell replied, “I don’t like your architecture, I respect it.”

For me, it was the trip we did to Montserrat up in the craggy mountains that really brought home Gaudi’s creative inspirations. We saw the mountains from a distance as the train chugs across the plains outside Barcelona. Within an hour, we were in the foothills, taking the funicular train up to the ancient monastery built up against the rocky face of the steep mountain. Erosion had shaped the rocks into standing figures and we could imagine them as aliens or fat man or angry warriors. Walking high up on dusty paths above the man-made buildings, heading towards the ruins of ancient hermitages, we saw rock figures tower above us and craggy sentinels line the spur down the side of the mountain, passed the bare branches of gnarled trees blasted by wind. This was Gaudi in all his glory.

Every girl’s fantasy?

(You’ll need the sound enabled on your PC to enjoy this one)

The British Psychological Society’s blog points to a research study that has found that a company’s profits are linked to the facial appearance of the Chief Executive. Apparently, “Companies tend to be more profitable if they have a chief executive with a face rated by observers as being more competent, dominant and mature.”

It’s not about age or beauty, it seems, but these other qualities of competence, dominance and maturity that are evident in the face and are somehow linked to the company’s success.

I was reminded of the US presidential race in 1992 when short little Ross Perot was knocked out after the three way debate against tall, handsome Bill Clinton and square-jawed George Bush Sr. Next to them, he looked like one of those money-grubbing small creatures with big ears in Star Trek (the Ferrengi?). America just could not picture him as their leader, representing the most powerful nation on earth alongside the leaders of other countries. He might have had the competence, dominance and maturity to have headed a business empire with a personal net worth of $4.4 billion but that paled into insignificance when he stood beside two tall, good-looking guys who exuded even more competence, dominance and maturity.

But I also thought of Bill Gates, of Microsoft fame, another billionaire who was ranked the richest person in the whole world between 1995 and 2007. He started his empire young, looking nerdy and with a bad dress sense. His speaking voice has a nasal whine. He hasn’t changed much over the years. He looks more like an office clerk than the one time richest man on earth.

And there’s Mark Zuckerberg who created Facebook and who is said to be worth $1.5 billion and is only 25. He looks like a kid. He is a kid! Where’s the competence, dominance and maturity oozing from him?

Maybe with IT and social media, there’s an inverse correlation between these qualities and the company’s success?

Photo credits:

Perot et al, from record.wustl.edu
Bill Gates from niall kennedy on flickr.com (CCL)
Mark Zuckerberg from Laughing Squid on flickr.com (CCL)

Someone (let’s call her Rachel*) asked for my advice about Facebook friending etiquette the other day. We are both friends in the real world (an old Uni pal) and we are also friends of Facebook. Rachel, who is an internet newbie who stays mainly on Facebook, had received a “friend” request from a business colleague of her husband’s.

Rachel told me, “I don’t know what to do. I use Facebook for my close friends and family and this lady is nice but she’s - well - a business contact. If I accepted, she’d be the only non- “real friend”. And I use Facebook for, you know, personal stuff that only friends and family would be interested in. But I don’t want to be rude.”

This is a dilemma I’ve come across a number of times.

With people you don’t know at all who just came across your profile on Facebook and try to “friend” you because their aim is to reach, like, wow, 1,000 friends, man - you just ignore them. That’s easy.

With friends who are your real-life friends ie you know them in the real world and they actually are your friends in that sense of the word, that’s easy too - you accept them.

It’s these in-betweeny people who are your acquaintances or business colleagues or someone you met at a party and spoke to for five minutes - what do you do about them? For me, my Facebook profile and all my public online presences are part of who I am in public and relate to my profession as a writer and social media specialist so if the person fits with that public me, then I accept them. For private personal connections, I maintain private spaces eg for family photos and videos.

For Rachel and many others like her, her presence online is not part of a public, business-related presence and she’s just having some fun with friends and family. This is where privacy settings and more “un-friendly” conduct becomes necessary - and is quite legitimate. I suggested that she explain to her husband’s business colleague that she uses Facebook for family and close, personal friends only and if she’s worried about the colleague taking it the wrong way, to make sure she knows that Rachel can be friendly in other ways that work better for the nature of the business relationship.

As we live more and more of our lives online, privacy issues are going to become more and more relevant. At the moment, there are no rules of etiquette for social interactions online and generally, what we’ve been using in the real world works too online. But new etiquette is bound to evolve as new issues and circumstances arise. In a case like this, it’s a matter for Rachel to find a way to best negotiate who she friends and what personal information she shares online - but it’s also a matter for the business colleague to respect the privacy of the person who does not wish to “friend” her online (although Rachel may be comfortable meeting her from time to time in the appropriate business setting).

So, Rachel didn’t accept the friend request. What do you think? Would you have friended this colleague anyway?

*not her real name

Photo: thanks to jennybento from flickr.com (CCL)

While I loved many aspects of Barcelona during our week’s trip there the other week - the beautiful architecture, the great food, the shopping, the sunshine - the one thing that was a real struggle was the Spanish rhythm of life.

Lunch would start at the earliest at 1.30pm and many of the shops would close. We would be there at the door of the restaurant, starving and fainit at 12.30pm and then have to find something to occupy ourselves for an hour before being able to rush in when the owners sauntered over to let us in. The Spanish customers would turn up around 3pm, chic-ly dressed and with no sign of famine about them.

Dinner would only start at 9pm and most Spanish people would arrive at the restaurants after 10.30pm. We’d of course be there on the dot of nine, grouchy and tired from the need to eat, and the restaurateurs would still be laying out the table and doings some last minute floor-sweeping.

“I just want a light meal and then get to bed,” I’d say through half-closed eyes. But the menu would be so enticing that I’d end up eating three courses with delicious wine. By the time we got back to the hotel and ready for bed, it would be past 1am. My meal would sit there heavy and laden in my belly and I knew it would take another few hours to digest but I’d be too tired so I’d just fall asleep.

And in the morning, I would just feel terrible.

The worst was the during the two days of the EuroComm conference which started at 8.30am (”What??!” I thought when I first saw the programme). Which meant I had to be up at some ungodly hour with a belly full of lead, getting dressed, having breakfast and trying hard to be perky when I met my communicator colleagues. Groan.

Here in the UK, the cycle of my working day starts early - up at 6.30am to get into the office for 8am, lunch at 12-12.30pm, heading home before rush hour around 4pm, dinner at 7.30-8pm, bed by 11pm. At the weekends, I sleep in a bit but usually no later than 9am and I may go to bed around 1am but meal times are never far off the usual mark.

And London could only cope with two rush hours a day. Imagine if there was a long break in the middle of the day for lunch and people headed off home and then had to come back again around 4pm. Nightmare…

I just don’t know how Spanish business people manage. If you’re Spanish or live in Spain, please tell me!

And whether you live in the UK, Spain or anywhere else, if your rhythm of life is different, I’d love to hear about it, too. Please add a comment.

Photo: thanks to SeraphimC from flickr.com (CCL)

The National Geographic have a channel on YouTube and this is one of their intriguing videos.

I certainly wouldn’t have thought of that technique…

I wrote about the dangers of the omnipresent mobile phone camera last week in my post “Losing Control”. In the same week, a video posted on YouTube.com shows a cop in Baltimore losing it with a teenager, physically manhandling the kid without good cause and abusing him verbally in an intimidating and vicious manner. The kid’s offence? Calling the officer “dude” instead of “Officer” seemed to be the trigger.

Watch the video and be appalled.

Officer Salvatore Rivieri was suspended several days after the video hit YouTube, according to the Baltimore Sun.

In cases such as these, when bullies are caught red-handed and red-faced on camera - particularly those who are in positions of trust and authority - it can only be a good thing. However, as the Baltimore Sun report says, we do not know what took place before or after the recording so caution and proper investigation is always needed in these cases.