Archive for September, 2008

This is an amusing take on what Harry Potter and his gang might be like 30 years on.

Which makes me wonder about my own childhood fiction heroes and heroines:

What would Nancy Drew turn out like later in life? As a precocious sixteen year old, she was an ace sleuth - perhaps as an adult, she’d be that nosy neighbour always “investigating” what’s going on behind other people’s closed doors.

Or the Famous Five? Well, that’s easy. Julian would be a braces wearing investment banker in the City; Anne would be a suburban mum driving the kids in an SUV to and from school in between yoga classes and caring for incontinent, blind old Timmy; Dick would be hanging out in the gay bars in Soho while George would be a forest ranger with her own chainsaw and a lovely femme in tow…

The freshly re-launched website for the British Prime Minister at Number10.gov.uk is using the leading blog platform Wordpress to create a regularly updateable site that integrates a range of multi-media and social media tool. (My two blogs are both self-hosted Wordpress blogs)

The main page shows a Top Story and below it, the Latest News from No.10 in a scrolling reverse date order layout - like most blogs. It is updated pretty much every day, sometimes more than once. But for those hoping to learn what Gordon Brown had for breakfast will be disappointed. It’s not Gordy’s personal blog but rather a site where the latest official news from the Prime Minister’s office can be posted up quickly and easily. Each post or news update is tagged for easy searchability and there are buttons you can click on to share the posts that grab your attention on Facebook, Delicious or Digg. However, there’s no option to add your comment so there is no real blog-like interactivity.

The “blog” serves as a hub for the other PM’s other multi-media activities. There is a link in the sidebar to the latest photos on Downing Street Flickr page where you can see Mr Brown strutting his stuff at press conferences, meeting the public and shaking hands with other politicos. None of him in his shirt sleeves doing a spot of gardening.

You can also click through to the Downing Street YouTube channel which has videos of the PM on foreign visits, sending a Ramadan message and making speeches. So far, so “ho hum”. But there’s an interesting attempt at reaching out to the people via the “Ask the PM” initiative where Mr Brown will be “responding to the most popular questions submitted by the YouTube community.” Apparently, people have already left questions and the PM “will be back in September with his answers” - but I can’t seem to find the videos of those who asked the questions and I can’t easily work out which videos of Mr Brown currently on the site are answers to YouTubers’s questions. Can anyone give me some pointers on this?

I think my favourite of all the these social media initiatives is the Downing Street Twitter feed - it’s a bit less impersonal than the other to-be-expected press release/ photo shoot/ sound bite style multi-media offerings as you can get a little bit of the voice of the staffer who is behind the tweets, although most of the the updates are still fairly formal in tone.

Of course you would expect the official website of the British Prime Minister to maintain a certain distance and dignity - and to be filled with official content. What is significant I think is the use of a blogging platform such as Wordpress as the host for the site and the dissemination of the multi-media content across video-sharing and micro-blogging sites to reach an audience that might not otherwise sit down and read the papers or watch the news on TV. It is a great example of thinking outside the box and using the technology because it’s the right tool regardless of what that technology is called - see my discussion of how misconceptions about “blogging” can limit your communication toolbox in A Blog by an other Name

For more commentary on the Downing Street “blog” from various bloggers, see:

Neville Hobson (blogger, podcaster and business communicator) - New 10 Downing Street site runs Wordpress

Simon Dickson, principal consultant at web and online communications firm Puffbox (which also inputted into the site) - Sneak preview of new Number10 site

Photo: from number10.gov.uk

Shortly after I wrote the post about my name, I am Beautiful, I was contacted by a writer who is collecting Chinese names worldwide to include in a book explaining Chinese names and their meanings.

I’m including the most of the email below as I think it’s a really interesting project and I’m of course honoured to have been invited to participate:

An email from the professor

“My name is Dr. Y. S. Yow, I am an Australian author.

I am writing a book on notable Chinese people world wide. The book is published in English, and explains Chinese names and their meanings. For each word I choose up to 5 prominent names as examples. (up to 10 names are listed under surnames).

Examples of our listings are as follows:

薇 [wēi, ㄨㄟ] A type of fern. Other spellings include ‘Wai, Way,
Wie, Wui’.

NAMES: 薇讳 [wēi huì], 晓薇 [xiǎo wēi].

PERSONALITIES:

CHEN Xiaowei 陈晓薇 [陳曉薇], President of Chinese gaming company The9 Limited, a leading online game operator in China, former head of China.com, China ’s first Nasdaq-listed portal.

Violet Vera WANG 王薇薇, U.S. fashion designer, best known for her wedding dresses, former fashion editor for Vogue magazine; author of “Vera Wang on Weddings”.

YONG Wui Wui 杨薇讳 [楊薇諱], Malaysian politician, member of the State Assembly of Sarawak.

ZHÀO Wēi (Vicky Zhao) 赵薇 [趙薇], Chinese film actress and pop singer; listed amongst the top 10 best known personalities in China Forbes 2008); featured in “Red Cliff”, “The Longest Night in Shanghai”, etc.

Professor Xiaowei ZHUANG 庄晓薇 [庄曉薇], Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, U.S., develops and applies advanced optical imaging techniques to study the behavior of individual biological molecules and complexes in vitro and in live cells.

……… ^^^

We would like to add your name if you could provide us in both Chinese and English, we would only list your name upon verification of its accuracy.”

My name in Chinese

I didn’t have the facility to create Chinese characters on my PC so I emailed Dr Yow a description in English of the Chinese ideograms making up my name:

“Ooi - chinese character meaning “yellow”, same as Wong

Yang - “reflection”, the same ideogram used in the word for camera and taking photos

May - “beauty”. ”

Interestingly, Dr Yow did not have Yang in the list of ideograms on his website so I had to send him the written characters - see the photo. Embarassingly, I couldn’t actually remember how to write my name in Chinese. My mum had written it down for me years ago on a scrap bit of paper and I turned the house upside down to find it - to no avail. So in the end, I had to call my mum in Malaysia and ask her to write it again and fax it to me! What a failed Chinese person am I!

Dr Yow has now added my name to the book and also added the character for Yang to his growing list of Chinese name characters on his website.

For more on Dr Yow

He has also published other books: see his webpage
http://www.yitseng.net/chinese%20dimensions/. He also told me in his email, “For details of one of my books, the premier of Western Australia wrote the foreword, and the Minister for Multicultural Interest launched it at Parliament house last year. Another of my books entitled “Innovation in China – the Dawn of the Asian Century”, will be published soon.”

Qik.com offers a video live streaming service from your mobile phone to the web. They’ve been rolling out the software for various of the main brands of phone, starting with Nokia. They’ve finally got to HTC, which is the mobile phone that I have - much to my delight.

So I’ve been experimenting with the service over the weekend. It really is pretty neat.

You can watch my live videos, streamed from my mobile phone, via Qik.com in the player below. (If I’m on now, it will say “Live” on the screen - otherwise, you can watch my archived videos.)

I think I will be using Qik as a video blog with a more personal slant in contrast to the posts that usually appear on Fusion View. I want to retain the cross-cultural magazine feel of this main blog so it’s not necessarily interesting for many of my readers to see me having a go at cooking on a Sunday evening! But for those of you who might find that fun and a bit quirky, especially those of you who know personally and/ or who enjoy video blogs (like Kenny!) , you can keep up with my live video blogging on my Qik page, which is Qik.com/yangmayooi

If you head on over to my page on Qik.com, you can also add comments and chat with me while I am streaming live.

You can also sign up for your own free account while you’re there and install the software on your mobile phone to join the fun. They now support most brands of phone, including Nokia, iPhone and HTC.

To follow my live video updates via your blog aggregator, subscribe to my RSS feed or you can also subscribe in iTunes.

For more about Qik and other online video tools and how they are changing the way we engage online, take a look at my blog The Next Big Thing: Video Conversations from earlier this year.

This post is by Angie Macdonald, my business partner over at our social media consultancy, ZenGuide.co.uk. She specialises in web content writing, blog management and giving blogging training.

by Angie Macdonald

We’ve recently enjoyed working with Savile Row tailor, Carol Alayne, to create her new business blog Tailoring for Women.

There are very few female Savile Row tailors, so it was a real privilege to get an insight into Carol’s world and the unique service she offers.

I used to associate Savile Row with men in suits making suits for men, but things are changing, and Carol Alayne is part of that change. She has twenty years’ experience and a particular passion for tailoring for women. Her background in banking means that she fully understands the tailoring needs of professional women and what their jobs require of them.

Through our coaching sessions on how to use blogging as part of her marketing strategy, we got to know more about Carol. Particularly fascinating is the fact that she learned how to sew on her grandmother’s knee at the age of five and started her first tailoring business when she was fourteen. Her other passion is playing the fiddle, which means she also understands the tailoring needs of musicians very well.

Together with our web design associate, David Robertson, we worked with Carol to design a site that would function both as a website and a blog, with the blog being the focal point.

The Tailoring for Women blog and website is now live. On the blog, Carol shares her expertise and insight on the tailoring industry. She is also creating a knowledge base that will demystify the process of the bespoke tailoring tradition and educate present and potential clients. Do go over and check it out. You will be able to learn about the differences between bespoke and ready-made and where to find extraordinary fabrics, for example. I was fascinated to learn that in many mass-produced ready-made garments the seams are fused together with glue!

Carol also has many high profile clients, including the British Olympic Shooting Team, Dame Kiri te Kanawa and one of my heroines, performance artist Laurie Anderson. From time to time she features garments she is making for high profile clients so it’s a good way to see who’s wearing what.

I hope Carol will enjoy blogging as much as we enjoyed showing her the ins-and-outs of blog posting, linking and commenting. We wish her every success!

For as long as I can remember, books have been a part of my family. Family outings at the weekend would be to the bookshop. If we did well at school or were good at the dentist, our treat would be to choose a pile of books and comics to call our own. My Dad would come home from work and flop into bed with a good book. Here is a photo of me, aged six months, reading in bed just like my Dad!

So I was chuffed when my Dad emailed me his latest blog post for his series Memories of Malaya, all about the role of reading and books in his life.

He writes:

One of the principal pleasures in my life is reading without having any pressure to stop at a certain fixed time to go and do something else – like going to work or to the supermarket or to do household chores. Many of my friends ask me what I do when I visit London in the summer every year, besides visiting and keeping in touch with my grown-up children and their families. They think I am mad when I say that I am happy to read sitting by an open window with the cool summer breeze blowing in. I do not stay long enough to finish a novel or a full length biography, so my reading consists of essays, on social political and biographical subjects, and the main daily newspapers. I would like to watch an occasional play or to go to a concert but it would be difficult to get a ticket because my stay is short. And very often if I booked for a show some day ahead I may find myself too lazy, too tired or just not in the mood when the day of the show arrives and then it becomes a chore to make the expedition from the suburbs to the theatre. In my short stay I am however able to visit and browse in bookshops and buy some books. Our house is also quite well stocked with books left by the children who now no longer live with us. So there is no shortage of reading material, and, if I need other titles there is a public lending library within walking distance.

My three younger brothers and I come from a family surrounded by books. Though my late Father was a medical practitioner he had time to read what are considered the classics like Dickens Dumas Austen etc mostly published by Collins. He had the whole set of 7 volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and all the volumes of the History of England by Macauly. Although we were comfortably well-off my Father did not believe in furnishing the house with luxuries. But we always had good and nourishing food and money for the purchase of books.

When we were very young my Mother would buy comics which were shipped from England. They were Beano, Dandy, and Film Fun, etc. She would buy them from a small bookshop belonging to an Indian Muslim. Its name was MM Ally. It would hang out a little board with the Union Jack painted on it and the words, “Mail Arrived” to indicate that a new shipment of books, comics, newspapers etc from England had arrived and we would rush there to buy the comics.

I still remember some of the names of the comic characters like Korky the cat, Desperate Dan, Minnie the Minx, Lord Snotty, etc. The stories would follow the seasons of the year. In summer the story would be centred on the seaside and in the winter months it would be Christmas and Father Christmas. (Malaya has no seasons). When the characters had a Christmas feast there would be pies, legs of ham, strings of sausages. I became fascinated with pies and had wanted to try them which I did when I arrived in England but did not find them very exciting. When the characters spoke they were given bubbles with the words in them. Film Fun requires more literacy. Besides the bubbles, beneath each frame were full sentences describing the action in detail. At the beginning my Mother had to read this part to us. The characters that I remember, were Laurel and Hardy, Mother Riley and her daughter, Joe E Brown, Max Miller Bud and Costello and there was always a short story featuring Sexton Blake. I received most of my impression of English seaside towns with their piers, the snow, the small working class houses and dress from these comics.

mmlya

Recently, I’ve been experiencing my garden as a bit of a chore. I’ve been very busy running around and trying to meet deadlines and also trying to fit in seeing friends and going out to restaurants and art galleries - all the usual London and big-city activities that tend to fill up all our diaries. So when it comes to having to mow the lawn once a week or tend to the rampaging weeds and pruning the shrubbery that’s gone mad, I’ve been harrassed and resentful of the time it’s taking out of my diary.

But then after a few minutes of mucking around in the greenery and soil, I start to relax and my racing mind slows down. And then I realise that I actually enjoy gardening!

Here is a video about Gardening as Meditation that I came across just as I was thinking about stepping back from the computer and putting on my gardening togs for a session of digging and pruning. Talk about synchronicity! It’s part of a series of videos on blip.tv, giving gardening tips. I’m definitely going to be subscribing to this video blog - which will hopefully keep me inspired and remind me that gardening is not a chore but a joy…

To view the full series of videos, which includes tips on how to attract butterflies to your garden and other hands-on advice, go to Growing Wisdom on blip.tv.