Archive for the 'Blogs I Read' Category

Last week the IABC’s* EuroComm Conference 2008 took place in Barcelona, where I chaired the plenary panel discussion on social media. I was joined by co-panellists Giles Colborne of cxpartners, a web usability expert, and Marc Wright of simply-communicate.com, an internal communications specialist. We had a really good session, which was primarily the result of great comments and challenges from the 80 or so business communicators taking part in the session. I just want to focus here on one issue that emerged from the discussions, which I think reflects the main concern of businesses around social media: control.

When we asked the delegates what was preventing their businesses engaging in the social media, the main reason appeared to be an anxiety about losing control. If you have a blog or social network space, people can come and leave negative comments. If you allow your employees to use social media for internal communications, they could spread seeds of discontent internally. Social media tools also make it easier for staff to leak your internal discussions externally. If you offer spaces for user-generated content, you can lose control of the content and message.

But we also discussed how control is an illusion in the brave new world of social media. There could be people out there already expressing negative views about your business or brand on other social media spaces even if you don’t have a business presence on the blogosphere. Your staff are already able to sign up to Facebook or set up their own blogs at home, even if you block them at work. Leaks occur with email as easily as via any other internet or intranet tool. Someone could be filming you or any of your executives with their mobile phone camera even now, capturing your pratfall or offguard comment to be served up on YouTube for the world to see. Employers are doing internet searches of potential recruits as an add-on to the traditional ways of doing background checks - will they find that photo of you taken by a friend at your cousin’s wedding with someone’s knickers on your head?

For businesses who are worried about controlling the message about their product or services, the least you can do is monitor what the online is saying about you even if you decide never to engage in social media. And if you do engage with a blog or other social media tool, that can actually help enhance your reputation especially if you engage in an authentic way. The community you build around your blog will come to trust, respect and like you and loyalty can count for a great deal in times of crisis.

For individuals, the question is: will we always have to be “on” not just when we engage online but wherever we are because we never know when someone may capture us unawares on digital media? This is a much more challenging issue. It is impossible to be perfectly behaved all the time - that’s just a fact of being human. And perhaps we have to trust that people know that - and that in the long term, people seeing someone’s mistake displayed on YouTube will recognise that it’s just a very human momentary lapse, especially if there are other images of that person online that counter lapse. Perhaps in this early period of the mobile phone video, there’s a lot of press and publicity about this issue because it’s novel but that in the long term, there won’t be such a hoo-ha because there’ll be so many unremarkable human failings available to view online. Or perhaps we will all have to hire public relations consultants to help us with reputation management in the future, whether we are Britney Spears or just an ordinary non-celebrity…

We did not reach any solid conclusions during the discussion, only that this is one debate that is going to contine.

What are your thoughts?

Photo: of car wreck thanks to OpenSkyMedia from flickr.com (CCL)

*International Association of Business Commuicators

We all need our dreams. The world is full of aspiring writers dreaming to have their great literary works published. Some of us are lucky enough to achieve this dream. Others keep dreaming, keep trying, keep on going despite the odds. All those motivation gurus tell you that if you face setbacks, just pick yourself up and try again. Writers who run writing workshops encourage you to keep writing, keep improving your craft. We hear stories about writers like J. K. Rowling who was a single mum writing her manuscript at cafes and wham! now she’s a billionaire. We dream that we’ll be the next big thing in publishing, with our manuscripts fought over in by publishers who will be begging us to take their million dollar deals.

But sometimes, you just need to stop and look at the cold, hard facts.

Danuta Kean is a well-known journalist and commentator specialising in the publishing industry. Her blog on writing and publishing is a must-read for anyone interested in how that world works. A recent post gives us the cold, hard facts about writing and money. She says:

“Anyone who believes being an author is a pathway to riches is in for a rude awakening. Though the image of the starving writer scribbling away in their garret is dated, the average writer has seen their income drop from a measly £7,000 a year in 2000 (source: The Society of Authors) to £4,000, according to the latest research from the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS). Although news headlines may trumpet six figure advances for debut novelists and high profile politicians, the reality is that most authors’ advances are well below £10,000.”

Take home message of the day? By all means keep scribbling - but don’t give up that day job just yet!

Photo: thanks to sxc.hu (free)

For many of us over a certain age, the digital revolution has really changed our lives in a dramatic way - especially if you compare how things are now with what we were doing 30 years ago. I’ve written about such stark contrasts in my post about the difficulties and costs of phoning home to Malaysia from the UK in the 1970s and touched on how our working lives have changed because of the computer. So my interest was immediately sparked when I came across a post on music players on Say Lee’s blog A Pleasant Surprise(s), a personal blog from a Malaysian emigre to Florida, USA, talking about his daily life, family and musings on Chinese and Buddhist philosophy.

He wrote about his experiences of listening to music over the decades, starting with vinyl records played on a gramaphone and progressing via the Sony Walkman to today’s MP3 players. It reminded me of fiddling around with a cassette recorder and leads trying to tape vinyl records off my parents hi-fi so we could listen to taped music in the car. And of songs getting stuck on the turn-table if there was a scratch on the record. And the pain of having your favourite tape chewed by the tape machine and trying to unravel the mess of brown tangle from the mechanism - especially if you’d actually bought the cassette and had no other back up of it.

On the other hand, it was fun to sit around with friends passing the record sleeve around, reading the lyrics from the insert and gazing at the big photos of your favourite singer or band. And making mixer tapes of songs for your friends, writing out the titles by hand and decorating the tape box with stickers. Sure, MP3 players and iPods are much more efficient and easy and portable but doing things the old-fashioned way had a fun of its own, too.

Say Lee also writes about Chinese traditions like the Moon Cake Festival and finds opportunities to muse on Buddhist philosophy from everyday moments. I also like the warmth with which he writes about his family and it’s just delightful how he proudly displays his wife’s Chinese watercolours on his blog.

As I munched on my lunch the other day, I scrolled through my blog aggregator and found myself reading a couple of eery and spooky blog posts that just seemed to pop up randomly in an eery and spooky way.

The first was a post from my associate Silvia Cambie, writing about an afternoon by the lake a long time ago. It reads like a Stephen King or like one of those creepy movies like “What Lies Beneath”. Here’s an extract:

“I could feel its skeletal fingers between mine…Its glacial breath down my neck.

A surreal fog was rising between me and my friend, like thick incense smoke in a dark, forsaken temple.

I don’t remember how I left the house. “

Eeeeek!

The next post that popped up on my screen was from the blog of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, telling ghost stories set in the haunted libraries of the US. Here is the entry for a library in Arkansas:

“Benton, Saline County Library. The library’s home from 1967 to 2003 was a converted theater building that frequently featured phenomena that made librarians suspect a ghost was afoot: phantom footsteps, paperback carousels rotating by themselves, books falling from the shelves, a self-operating photocopier, and a slamming book-return door. Once, late at night, Director Julie Hart heard the distinctive sound of a manual typewriter—but the library had long ago discarded theirs.”

The hairs are standing up on the back of my neck!

I love a good ghost story bu I’m completely hopeless when it comes to hearing strange noises in the night - I’m no plucky heroine, going off to investigate and instead, preferring to cower in my bed after I’ve turned all the lights ablaze and turned up the radio full blast.

Picture: thanks to gaileymcguire on flickr.com

My cross-cultural view tends to focus eastwards and southwards to South East Asia and the Far East - inevitably, since my roots are in Malaysia and Chinese culture. But there is of course so much more world out there. So from time to time, I’m going to explore blogs from other countries and cultures here on Fusion View to widen my horizon and learn a bit more about the world beyond.

To start off this globetrotting journey, I came across the photoblog, A Unique View of the Arctic by Thomas Laupstad in Norway, who says on the About page, “I want to show you northern Norway from my point of view.”

He has some fantastic photos of Norwegian landscapes and captures that special northern light beautifully.

He writes that he took this photo in February. “At this time of the year the sun is only shining for a hour or two and in this photo the sun has disappeared below the horizon. The golden reflections are coming from sunshine higher up in the snow filled mountains. It was a very beautiful sight.”

I’ve never been to Norway and it seems unimaginable to me to go through months on end where there is only an hour or two of sunlight. I find it difficult enough here in the UK when it gets dark at 3.30pm in December. It must be so strange to wake up in the dark, spend the day in the dark and go to bed in the dark.

Thomas also has other amazing photos on his blog - one of a pine forest covered in snow, also taken in February. Of this one, he writes, “I think the scene looks like it is taken straight out of “The Chronicles of Narnia” with all the snow hanging on the Norway Spruce.”

If you’re a reader from Norway or a Scandinavian country - or with family or roots there, I’d love to hear from you - do add a comment or email me.

I discovered A Whiff of Lemongrass, a Malaysian food blog via my cousin Pey. Lyrical Lemongrass, the food blogger, is an accountant who seems to travel the length and breadth of Malaysia eating divine food, which she photographs first in exquisite detail! I am drooling already.

When Pey came to stay last weekend, we thought we’d try to emulate the food bloggers of Malaysia who all seem to carry huge cameras around with them to photograph food. But we ate the food before we managed to take a photo of it. We were happy and stuffed but would never make great food bloggers…

Some food posts on Fusion View and food blogs I like to whet your appetite on Friday:

Global Cakes

Lemon Meringue Pie

The Cooking Diva Blog

If you can recommend any great food blogs from Malaysia or anywhere around the world, please do add a link via the comments to this post.

I just came across the blog Global Culture which is a fascinating read and could keep me up for hours tonight if I don’t consciously pull myself away. It’s “a blog on migration, globalization and their impact on global culture”. It’s categories of posts include topics on Global Culture, Local Culture, Ethnosphere, Multiculturism, Folksonomy alongside Diversity, Migration and Diasporas. A must read for anyone who’s interested in cross-culture - as I am and I expect as most of you are!

The blog’s creator is someone called Juan who says of himself: “When I’m not blogging I create technologies that allow global citizens to tap the true power of the web to express their culture and in the process redefine the mechanisms by which travellers immerse themselves in local cultures, facilitating the spread of cosmopolitanism.” That’s a rather cool job, I have to say.

In the sidebar, Juan has posted this poll:

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Global Culture Poll

What is the most important tool of the Global Citizen?

* Money
* Dictionary
* Travel Guide
* Camera

I was going to vote but then I couldn’t make a choice out of those four items. I hesitated, I think, because the choice I wanted to vote for wasn’t in the list. It took me a few moments of pondering to reach towards the semi-formed thought in my mind. What was it that is - for me - the most important tool of the Global Citizen?

Curiosity.

Okay, technically, that’s not a tool. It’s a quality or a state of mind. But I suppose in my mind, nothing else matters if, as a Global Citizen, you don’t have that: curiosity.

You see how I could stay up all night exploring Global Culture? Just a fun little poll like that gets me thinking and mulling and questioning….

As I said, what a great site.

Photo: from Global Culture

I came across this blog about words and writing the other day, which is informative and great fun: A Writer’s Edge is by Georgina Hancock, based in San Diego. She has a thoughtful post on writers’ writing spaces, referring to a fad awhile back for writers to post photos of their desks on their litblogs. She says that her writing space is not just her desk but her whole house:

My real writing space, however is my whole house. The desk is in my bedroom now, but the other one still contains a large file cabinet and all my photo and spare electronic equipment. The library is in the kitchen, and I keep notebooks, a clipboard, writing instruments in the living room. Papers and newsprint turn up in every room, too. I’ve learned to function like a man, spread out and take up all the space!

It made me think of Dickens, who used to be able to write anywhere. In the evenings, his friends would be gathered round entertaining themselves with parlour games and dancing and chat. And he’d be there with them all, scribbling away at his novel!

I used to write at my desk in my study in the flat I had in Central London. It became a sort of sacred space - I would write my novels there and only there. I worked on a laptop with a black-and-white screen and only 16MB RAM (amazing, huh?). This was just before the internet invaded all our homes so I was not connected to the world wide web. It was my literary haven.

After I published my two novels, I treated myself to a fancy desktop PC with a colour screen and internet hook-up and speakers and everything. I explored the internet, I wrote business letters, I emailed, I uploaded photos… yep, you guessed it. I did everything but write another novel.

I’ve hung on to my trusty old laptop and use it when I want to focus on writing fiction. I threw out the rollerball mouse ages ago and navigate around the page with the arrow keys, Alt, Ctrl and F keys. I have to save everything on a floppy disk (remember them?). It makes me feel very old-fashioned and literary, almost as if I’m using an old Remington typewriter… Surely great works of literary fiction must follow?

In the house in the suburbs where I live now, my study is for admin like paying bills etc, emailing and surfing and running my communications and social media consultancy. When I work on my writing, I use the old laptop - or a more modern user-friendly one - downstairs on the sofa with a view of the leafy tree in my garden. Or I sit out on the patio in the summer, listening to the birds and enjoying the warmth.

Writing of course also goes on when I’m not actually tapping at the keys. I often get my best ideas just staring into space or lying in bed. Sometimes, it’s as I’m watching a film or reading a book. My mind takes an idea and wanders off and suddenly, there it is, the next step in the plot has worked itself out.

Where do you write?

From time to time I experiment with adding useful or interesting items to my two sidebars over there on the right. To make the most of your visit here to Fusion View, you may like to check some of them out.

What I’m Reading

I’ve added a new widget thing to my sidebar which shows what posts I’m reading that you might find interesting. Take a look at the far right sidebar, just under the Links section. Check back from time to time to see what new items may be useful or intriguing or entertaining.

Here is the linkroll for easy access:

Live Updates via Twitter

In the middle sidebar, you can see live updates via Twitter - it’s like having a mini-blog alongside this main one. The little messageboard displays the latest mini-post. You can see previous ones by clicking on the down arrow.

To find out more about this fun took, you can read the post I wrote about Twitter a few months ago.

Fusion View Podcasts

You can also catch up on my podcasts in the Podcasts section in the middle sidebar. They are all displayed in the podcast player there.

You can also view a list of my podcasts by clicking on the category marked Podcasts in the far right sidebar.

Concluding my email interview with poet Rob Mackenzie:

YM: You also spent 4 years in Italy. What were you doing there? Do you speak Italian?

Rob: In Turin, I worked for the Waldensian church, a tiny Protestant denomination which holds claim to being the oldest Reformed church in the world. Much of my work involved giving support, advice, and help to asylum seekers, refugees, and those who were in Italy illegally.The church ran a support project, which linked up to other projects and organisations ran by the local council, the government and the Catholic church. I do speak Italian, although Im not fluent, and Im probably getting worse after two years in Scotland. I translate Italian poetry now and again, partly to keep fresh whatever language skills I have left.

Was there a cultural difference/ culture shock when you were in Italy? I would imagine there to be less of a difference as Italy is in Europe but perhaps there is more of a difference?

I think there was less of a difference, but because I could understand the differences more easily, it sometimes felt as if there was more of a difference if that makes any sense at all. To be honest, I think most British people would be very surprised to find how very different living in Italy is from the UK, as we tend to go on holidays to Europe and not notice the differences other than the obvious ones i.e. food, sun, wine etc
The bureaucracy drove me crazy, the TV was awful, the emphasis on family felt exclusionary at times to outsiders like myself (although the Turin people have the reputation as the least friendly people in Italy), and Italians shared with Korea this idea of letting you hear what you wanted to hear, irrespective of what they actually planned to do.

On the other hand, Turin was a beautiful city, my daughter couldnt go ten yards along the street without being fussed over by complete strangers (and its true that children and young people are far happier and valued morein Italy than in the UK), and we did make some good friends there. Not to mention the food and wine!

How has having lived in three cultures influenced you? What have you taken away from each of them?

From Scotland Ive taken a misguided pride, a black humour, and a stubbornness that must be a national characteristic. From Korea, Ive learned what generosity and hospitality towards outsiders really involve. From Italy, I can identify strongly with the sense of being European more than just Scottish, and I also have this grim sense that when our politicians say they are going to tackle the problems affecting young people in this country (drink, violence, hanging about the streets bored etc.), they are starting from entirely the wrong perspective because the problems go deeper than they think, and no change will come unless they tackle the root problems. I think they could learn a lot from looking at Italy.

What was it like coming back to live in the UK? And specifically in Scotland?

At first it was good. Everyone spoke English, which was so much less effort than Italian! And we could get things in the shops that were hard to come by in Italy. But soon we began to realise that these things didnt matter so much. I liked my local grocers shop and the market stalls in Turin where all the staff knew me. I liked the way you could hardly find a ready-cooked microwave meal, and I really, really missed the dry winters and the warmth of the other seasons. Would I go back to Italy in the future, given an opportunity? Yes.

Do you feel that you are now “home” in Scotland?

No, although there have been advantages. Ive made contact with the UK and Edinburgh poetry scene that I felt far away from in Turin. HappenStance may not have been as interested in publishing my poetry chapbook if I had been based in Italy, as selling it requires doing readings etc. My wife is firmly part of the amateur theatre scene in Edinburgh, which is what she loves more than anything. My daughter is getting on well at her nursery school. So well be here for a while yet, but I dont think well stay in the UK for ever.

Will you share a poem on Fusion View as my other poet contributors have done?

Will this do?

TAXI

We take the Eurostar from Oulx and shift
two Filipinos from our pre-booked seats.
Outside the Porta Susa station, roadworks
attack the tarmac and the senses, force
the taxis fifty metres from their rank.
Kebab and couscous overrun the pavements.
A Lega Nord pamphlet pins robberies
on refugees. Our daughter shades her eyes
against the winter sun that casts white walls
in negative. Two black women arrive,
toggle their overcoats to sap the chill
from the wind’s whine, and then a cab draws in:
we gather cases, cot and pushchair,
a dropped teddy bear. Footsteps slide past us -
the women test the taxi doors. The driver
waves them away. ‘Priority for kids,’
he says. Only in Italy, I think.
‘And we were here before you anyway,’
I tell the women. They shrug their shoulder pads
and claim to head some queue. ‘So are you blind?’
I ask. They turn towards the newsagent
where billboard headlines hawk the evening scoop
that boats sank close by Sicily, fifty
clandestini dead, and thirty-five
half-starved. The driver shakes his head, observes,
‘They are not blind, but African,’ and bangs
our case into his boot. ‘Priority
for whites,’ he really means, and at our gate
the price is way too high, and still we pay.

from The Clown of Natural Sorrow (HappenStance Press, December 2005)

Copyright Rob Mackenzie

Photo: thanks to unep.org