Archive for the 'MyWeek' Category

I went on long run a few weekends ago and decided to leave my iPod behind for a change. It was a lovely sunny day and the birds were tweeting as I stepped out the door and I thought, wouldn’t it be lovely to listen to sounds of spring instead of to the techno music that usually powers me along! I hesitated for a moment, worried that I might get bored or lose the energy to carry me through my 10k (6 mile) run. Would I be able to keep going for an hour without music?

A few years ago, a number of friends recommended meditation to me as a way to relax, de-stress and clear one’s head. I liked the idea of Zen - with its associations of beautiful Buddhist gardens, wise souls contemplating eternity and a peaceful loving kindness approach to life. I had pictures in my mind of raking a sea of gravel around islands of rock, contemplating apple blossoms against an azure sky and facing adversity with a wise twinkle in my eye.

The trouble was that I could not sit still for long enough. I tried different ways to meditate and each time, I’d give up after a few sessions. The easiest was downloading some meditation podcasts from iTunes where a guru with a calm and sensuously relaxing voice talked you through the different stages of meditation practice, punctuated occasionally by the “ting” of a lovely bell. It was fairly pleasant as I sat in my darkened study, trying to picture a candle flame being still. But I’d get restless and the single candle flame would light up into bright city lights. Or I would feel rested momentarily but when I got up again, it was as if the stillness had never been.

Then I joined a Buddhist meditation class meeting once a week after work. I’d rush there in a fluster and join the others, shoeless and perched on cushions while the teacher led us through the meditations with reassuring loving kindness and calm, dinging on a singing bowl from time to time. Again, it was pleasant enough and I was really impressed by the Zen-like nature of the teacher and the other experienced Buddhists. But after a few sessions, I found the more religious aspects of the practice like chanting and the codified concepts not to my taste and it was difficult to prioritise going to the class - it reminded me too much of bible study and hymn singing but with tunes I didn’t know…

I respect the values of mindfulness, being present, loving kindness, detachment, recognising transience and change and so on. But it’s the doctrinal side of any organised group that I always have difficulty bonding with. So while I’ve carried on reading and learning where I could about philosophy and spirituality in a Buddhist as well as other contexts, I haven’t pursued formal Buddhist meditation since those classes.

I started to think about these attempts at meditation that sunny day as I trundled along, heading to a big park in the next suburb to mine. Without music pounding in my ears, I had been listening to the sound of the breeze, the singing of the birds and the rustle of leaves in the trees. I was aware of cars passing by, the voices of kids, people talking as I whizzed by them. I felt the warm sun on my face and body and was consciously trying to maintain a good running form - tail tucked in, shoulders straight, head and back upright, feet landing mid-sole and not ahead of my chin, pushing back with the balls of my feet. I was aiming to breathe rhythmically from the bottom of my lungs, keeping one eye as always on my heart rate monitor to make sure I was not over- or under-exerting.

In many ways, it was like meditating, really. Taking care of posture is a big thing in meditation practice. As is rhythmic, deep breathing. And being aware of the sounds around you, being present in your whole body and whole mind. Up till that day, running with music had been calming and slightly hypnotic, rather like listening to chanting or drums, I suppose as you meditate - and I think that’s why I’ve really been enjoying running in the last year. But on this first long run without music, I was experiencing a different calm and different rhythmic hypnotic state - the rhythm came from my own breathe and the pace/ drumming of my own legs. I really loved it! And, yes, as it turns out, I did get through my 10k run - and completed it in 1 hour 8 minutes, which is a pretty good pace for me.

I realised then that there are different ways to meditate. I remembered reading about the Marathon Monks of Japan who run 40k a day for 100 days as part of their spiritual practice. And the martial arts of the East are also ways of meditating, with their emphasis on breathing, posture and stillness as well as being grounded in Buddhist philosophy. It seems obvious, really, that you can find meditation is movement as well as in stillness. But I suppose with meditation classes and teachings focused around on stillness and sitting and martial arts and running training focused on physical skillsets, it takes a little longer to make the connection.

So I am going to run to the sounds of the suburbs for the next little while and see how I get on. I may be along way from Nirvana but I rather like the thought of running my way there…

Photo: thanks to Allard One from flickr.com (CCL)

We went along to a private view of an art exhibition for the South London Women Artists (SLWA) at the Dulwich Library last week. It was a bit surprising at first when we arrived as we could not see any paintings or photographs - just a convivial party of people drinking wine and eating nibbles amongs the bookshelves. But, rather like a treasure hunt, after a bit of nosing around and asking around for clues, we found the artwork hung on the ends of bookcases and tucked in amongst some book racks. The artists were on hand, too, so it was interesting to chat with them and find out more about how and where they worked.

SLWA was formed about 18 months ago by Jenny Sweeney, to offer a meeting point for women artists in South London to help them promote their work and also as a space where they can come together with other artists. Many of the artists I spoke to that evening told me how much they enjoyed being part of the group, especially for the opportunities it gave to hook up with other artists. There are now 100 members and a waiting list.

The group is run on a volunteer basis with members chipping in their time and skills. One of the artists designed the flyer, another member worked on marketing the event and still others organised and curated this exhibiton at the library as well as the one now also running concurrently at the Cafe in Dulwich Park. The Dulwich exhibtion is on till 27 March.

Their next exhibition is at the Bankside Gallery from 28 April to 03 May.

As some of you may know, I’ve been involved in a community blog, in my local area, Dulwich OnView, which is the blog of the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery. We were invited to give a presentation on our strategy and volunteer strategy at a conference for the museums and heritage sector last week. This is my report from that event (which is also appearing on Dulwich OnView):

You may have caught The Virtual Revolution on BBC last Saturday night, which gave on overview of the way that social media has been changing our society and culture. According to the programme, 18 million people in the UK read blogs - that is about a third of the UK’s general population of 61 million. Blogs, social networks, Twitter and the like are now pretty much mainstream and and it’s not just businesses who need to adapt to these new ways of communicating. Museums, galleries, libraries and the heritage sector are more keen than ever to find out how to use these tools to engage with their visitors and users.

Which is where the Social Web Conference, organised by the UKOLN comes in. They are part of the University of Bath and are “A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities” and last Friday, they held a conference about Web 2.0 and social media for the heritage sector at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Marieke Guy, UKOLN’s research officer and organiser of this cutting edge conference invited our editorial team to give a presentation to the delegates about Dulwich OnView. It was a further opportunity to showcase our “online magazine” to the heritage sector as an example of how blogging is being used to raise the profile of the Gallery and build an online community around the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery, the charitable group that raises money and supports the work of the Gallery.

I was first up and outlined the strategy and context behind Dulwich OnView. One of the aims of the Friends is to invite more people to join as members and to encourage a diverse range of people to come along to Gallery and Friends events. The Friends put on a lot of events - films, talks, concerts and more - and the Gallery of course arranges many exhibitions with with associated art classes.

But Dulwich OnView, the Friends’ blog covers more than just these events and includes articles, videos and photo-stories about loads of arts, culture and music in Dulwich and South East London. Why? Well, we reckon that if you’re interested in all those things, you’re going to be the kind of person who’s going to enjoy Dulwich Picture Gallery - but you may not have initially thought of yourself as a “Gallery type” because, maybe, you’d never heard of the Gallery or it seems a bit too posh or stuffy and serious and is not for you. On Dulwich OnView, we hope that our readers can see that people involved in the Gallery and the Friends are just like anyone else who enjoys arts and culture in the local area and that you’ll be tempted to check out Gallery exhibitions and Friends’ events as a result.

We’ve been really lucky in attracting writers, photographers and filmmakers as well as wine experts, historians and just ordinary folk who love arts or the local area to contribute articles to the blog and to become part of the regular Dulwich OnView team - all on a voluntary basis. What this shows is that the Friends and Gallery are becoming more and more part of the local community through this blog as much as the local community becoming more aware of what the Gallery and Friends have to offer!

So how do we do it? How do we manage a team of volunteers on no budget at all and with no central office space? Next up was Angie Macdonald, web designer and Dulwich OnView trainer and editorial co-ordinator. She explained how we devised and set up a virtual system, working entirely online, to allow our bloggers and editorial team to be self-managed. There’s no “boss” although there are a handful of us who help co-ordinate the team. We all contribute a range of multimedia items about whatever we feel like (in keeping with the mission of the blog: “celebrating people and culture in the Dulwich area”). To avoid duplication of content and chaos, we note down what we’re going to post on the blog on an online editorial schedule hosted on Google Docs which our regular team can all have access to from any computer. There is a library of “how-to” online manuals which explain how to upload posts to the blog, how to add photos to our Flickr site and also sets out procedures and policies for our rota of editors. One of our team is in fact now in Belgium for her day job but can continue her role as one of our editors due to this virtual system we’ve set up! But we’re more than an online team - those of us who are around in South London meet up once every 4-6 weeks in the local pub for a drink and a catch up as well as to discuss future article ideas and plans for Dulwich OnView.

Freelance writer and museums consultant Steve Slack picked up on this theme and told the conference how his involvement in Dulwich OnView has led to some good friendships with people on the team, as well as offering opportunities to meet loads more locally through covering local events and interviewing people in the area for the blog. Articles on Dulwich OnView range from art to fitness, dancing to allotments, tattoos to wheelie bins - as well as events put on by the Friends and the Gallery. But being a blog, our posts publicising Gallery events don’t offer the usual PR blurb but we give them a quirky twist - for example, an opera themed event inspired a blog post with a special opera themed recipe for our readers.

Ingrid Beazley, former Chair of the Friends and e-learning project developer at Dulwich Picture Gallery, acts as our liaison with the Gallery and Friends. She rounded off our session with some stats that show how Dulwich OnView is having an impact on drawing more people online to the Gallery. Most of the organisations we have written about link to us from their websites. 53% of our incoming traffic comes from these local supporters. Although 98% of people visiting DOV are not searching for Dulwich Picture Gallery, 33% of onward clicks go to the DPG website, mainly to exhibitions and events pages. The Gallery links to DOV in places and 14% of our incoming traffic comes from mainly their events pages as people click through to find out more from the enhancing articles written by locals. DOV is the 9th largest driver of web traffic to the DPG website.

As to how much of that translates measurably to new Friends memberships or extra tickets bought for events and exhibitions is difficult to say at this stage as there is no system in place as yet that specifically tots that up. However, we reckon that increased web traffic to the Gallery’s main website via Dulwich OnView can only mean increased awareness of the Gallery within the local community and that can only be a good thing.

One last thing I should stress. Blogging and social media may be making headlines right now but they in no way supercede traditional marketing, which continues to play a key role for heritage organisations. Kate Knowles and her marketing team at the Gallery reach a very wide range of people through traditional media such as the BBC, broadsheets and other national and international outlets. Dulwich OnView complements their activities by making connections with a different community, especially those people who might not initially think of themselves as Gallery going types.

We are all thrilled that this blog that began as an idea over drinks among local neighbours has managed to have this small but significant impact for the Gallery and the Friends - and continues to impress the heritage sector: Dulwich OnView has been showcased at conferences in Iceland, Montreal and London and will also be featured later this year at the Museums and the Web 2010 conference in Denver, Colorado.

If you’d like to find out more or to join our team of regular contributors and editors, or if you just have the occasional article or multimedia story you’d like to submit, please email our Acting Editor via dulwichonview[at]googlemail.com (substituting @ for [at]). We’d love you to become part of our community!

Further articles about DOV:

Dulwich OnView in Iceland

Dulwich OnView in Montreal

A Museum Blog By The Community For The Community

The British Malaysian Society put on a great event the other evening at Jom Makan, just off Trafalgar Square, for the talk that I gave with my co-author Silvia Cambie on using social media for business. There was a good crowd there - a mix of Malaysians and British folk ranging from representatives from the Malaysian High Commission, Malaysian students and British and Malaysian business owners and solo professionals. Silvia spoke about the use of social media by global business, giving examples from multinational companies and also international associations. Changing gear, I focused on small business and solo professionals who use blogging and social networks, throwing in a mix of Malaysian and British case studies.

Here are some pics from the evening:

There were some interesting questions and also a good discussion after our formal presentation. To give you a flavour of the issues of interest, here are my notes on two of the questions that people wanted to discuss further:

How useful is Twitter for business use?

In Silvia’s response to this question, she gave some examples of how Twitter can be used to encourage delegates at a conference to participate in the discussions through Twitter - she is implementing this strategy for one of her clients, the European Commission, at an event coming up soon. The Twitter comments and conversations can be collected through tactical use of hashtags (a way of attributing a common keyword to a Twitter conversation eg including “#leweb” in your “tweet” to reference the Le Web conference will enable it to be collated via a search of that hashtag) after the event and analysed/ reviewed by European Commission ministers.

For small businesses or individuals, I suggested that Twitter is also a good way in every day usage to make an initial contact with people who may be tweeting on topics you are interested in and this contact can then be followed up by email, for example. It’s a good way as well to ask questions and invite opinions, especially if you are researching an issue eg for an article or a book. You can also raise your profile and expertise if you tweet about your speaking engagements and projects you may be working on as well as engaging in discussions on topics of relevance for your industry.

Can you make money using social media?

Silvia highlighted that sales of virtual items on the Chinese social network QQ brought in revenue for the owners of that network. There are ways to monetize social media through such innovations but it is a matter of identifying the right market and products that can be sold in this way.

I offered the counter view that the value of social media is not necessarily in direct sales but rather in creating networking opportunities. It falls in the ball park of sending out mail shots and newsletter or taking clients out to lunch or coming along to networking events such as that night’s events where you might learn something useful for your business and also meet some interesting contacts. There may not be direct monetary value but the value comes through making contacts and building relationships with them.

Thanks …..

And as a last word, Silvia and I would like to thank Haliza, Louise and Zehan as well as the other committee members of the BMS for inviting us and for organising such a pleasant evening!

via news.bbc.co.uk

We are so relieved that we hadn’t planned to travel anywhere this holiday season - the whole of the UK is frozen and it seems that the Continent and the north east of the USA are also locked in the weather’s icy grip. I’ve been watching the news reports of all those people stuck at airports and also traumatised by the Eurostar breakdowns (reported as due to the “wrong sort of snow” by Channel 4) - ooh, I really feel for them. What a hideous way to start the Xmas festivities!

We’re planning to spend the next few days snug at home. We have a full fridge and freezer, lots of wine and chocolate as well as a stack of books and DVDs. I’ve brought down some duvets and knitted rugs to the living room so we can sprawl on the sofas cosily. I also plan to catch up with some blogging and social networking on my cute little netbook - which I’ve worked out how to use while lying down!

Wishing everyone a happy holiday season - and to those who are trying to travel to friends and family: the very best of luck for getting to your destination as soon as possible!

Posted via web from Fusion View Lifestream

I had my hair tidied up yesterday and it looks much chic-er than the rather lanky, unkempt look I’d been sporting in the last few weeks until I managed to find the time for the trim. I’m told it’s sort of Demi Moore-ish (in the movie Ghost) so I’m quite pleased.

But if you look at it another way, it’s possibly also John, Paul, George and Ringo-ish. We went to the Beatles to Bowie exhibition today at the National Portrait Gallery and I felt a little bit self-conscious as I gazed at the photos of the Fab Four in their early days, while my own reflection from the glass frame gazed back at me. I’ve got a mop top, yeah, yeah, yeah…

It was fascinating to see their evolution over the 9 years or so of the 1960s, starting off with their mop top look and ending with lanky hair, beards and Yoko on the threshold of the 1970s. They were a band for only around a decade - and what a decade! - but they have come to dominate pop music in an iconic way even now almost fifty years after they first formed.

Bowie crops up from time to time over that decade, looking clean cut and non-descript for the most part. He only comes into his own in 1969 with Space Oddity and the uniquely odd persona of Ziggy Stardust. With him, the weird and wonderful 70s had begun!

The 70s were not my era - for hair or anything else. I couldn’t carry off long-ish hippy hair - it just looked oily and manky, draped down either side of my face. It was also they decade when I was a teenager. Ugh. I could do without re-living the pimples and moods…

But then I have to say, I’m glad I wasn’t a grown woman in the 60s - all the female pop icons of that time had impossibly feminine hair: Dusty Springfied with her bouffant beehive, some like Lulu with curved helmet like page boys, others with long Rapunzel tresses. Only Twiggy had short hair - and even shorter dresses!

I love my short mop top hair - so, hurray for the modern day and Demi Moore who made it OK for us girls to look like the Beatles!

Photo: of Demi Moore from hairfinder.com, with thanks
Photo: of The Beatles from the exhibition website, with thanks

The other evening, we went to The Mag pub in our little corner of South London for some live music. It was an event organised by a ukelele band so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. As it turned out, while the ukelele band entertained the crowds in the downstairs part of the pub, we discovered that some guitarists in the upstairs room were playing my favourite kind of music - acoustic folk/ rock! So we ended up spending most of the evening upstairs, toe tapping along to some great country/ folk music and getting a taste of Nashville in South London.

There was Doc King , who played a tiny “parlour” guitar - but the sound he made was amazing - ranging from folk to Irish ballads/ church songs reworked with an Indian sitar flavour and Spanish style melodies. And John Atkinson, who sang ballads with lyrics like “All I got is heartache and a hard-on” (!) and was like a Hank Williams on skid row.

But my favourite were Fran & Mike, a true-blue acoustic rock duo, whose sound was smoky and deep and rich with just two guitars and Fran’s terrific vocals. I have to say, I felt like a such groupie as we stayed for most of the gig and then I went up to them to tell them how much I enjoyed their music and to buy their latest CD The Road That You Believe In. I’ve been rocking away at home ever since!

You can listen to some of the songs from the CD on their MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/franandmike

The other evening, my co-author Silvia Cambie and I, along with corporate communicator Marc Wright, gave a talk at the Asia Pacific Technology Network (APTN) on Asia and the Interactive Web, at the invitation of Louis Turner, APTN’s chief executive. (Thanks, Louis, for inviting us!) APTN is a group for people interested in Asian technology and the evening’s guest included technology and patent lawyers, telecommunications entreprenuers and Asian affairs specialists.

Silvia spoke on the shift of economic power from the West to Asia and presented some case studies on use of social media in China by companies such as Toyota. I discussed the use of social media by the Asian diaspora and how the internet is helping an emerging class of affluent, influential and articulate Asians network around the globe. In counterpoint to the two of us, Marc gave the view from the West, highlighting that businesses no longer controlled their messages and the importance of engaging in social media with an authentic voice.

One of the things I enjoy about blogging and social media is how it has enabled me to connect with a range of talented and creative people whom I would never have met otherwise. As I went through my slides, I was struck that two of the three case studies I presented were due to Malaysians I had met via blogging:

• Photographer Steven Lee first approached me via my blog to ask if he could photograph me for his book on prominent Malaysians (as it turned out, I couldn’t participate in the end because, technically, I’m now British, but we’ve remained friends and hook on on Facebook, via our blogs and also in the real world). He was my first case study that evening - an example of how an Asian living in London networks globally through social media to raise the profile of his photography business.

• I learnt about Rantauan.com, the Malay social network, through journalist Zaharah Othman, aka blogger Kak Teh. I left a comment on her blog once and she then came along to read my blog. We corresponded via our respective comments pages and then by email and then finally met up in London for coffee. I’ve since interviewed her about political blogging in Malaysia for my book and she’s written a number of articles about my books for papers in Malaysia.

To top it all, I was really pleased to finally meet in person Chinese-English translator Nicky Harman who has written for this blog. She contacted me a few years ago out of the blue asking if I knew how she might find a publisher for her translation of Striking Root. Directly as a result of her blog post about the translation, a publisher got in touch and was interested to publish the book. As it turned out, Nicky went with another publisher in the end but there’s the power of blogging for you. Anyway, unknown to me, Nicky is a member of APTN and so the other evening, we were able to meet for the first time in real life!

Here are some pics of the evening, including one of me with Nicky:

One of the most interesting things about living in London is that history is all around us - often going back hundreds if not thousands of years. But I often tend to forget that history isn’t just about the great national monuments like Nelson’s Column or the London Wall and other tourist attractions. The suburb I live in in South London goes back to medieval times, I believe, though there are no visible remains of the Dulwich of that period. The current “settlement” arose in its present form in the Victorian times, created by developers out of fields and farmland for wealthy London businessmen and merchants who wanted to retire out of the smog-filled city to the countryside.

How do I know all this?

Dulwich has the good fortune to have a very knowledgeable local historian, Brian Green, who has written a number of books about the area when he’s not busy running the local art shop/ stationers. He gave a talk last weekend at the Dulwich Picture Gallery on Victorian Dulwich, which has changed the way I look at my little world around my house.

I tend to stride purposefully from home to the train station or bus stop and back again or hurry along to the local shops, not noticing much around me other than that I’m in a pleasant leafy suburb. After Brian’s talk and his brilliant collection of photographs ranging from fields and muddy lanes and a few grand Georgian houses (pre-1850s) to horse-and-buggies along the high street (late 1800s) and architectural details of terraced and semi-detached houses (as they are in the present day), I find myself looking at the houses and streets around me as if I were a tourist, ticking off in my head the various points he had highlighted for us. For example: ah, yes, there’s a Florentine style turret. And here’s a Victorian Gothic arch. There’s some Swiss hanging droplets. And some plaster heads and carved foliage - inspired by the Doge’s Palace in Venice.

These details were made available by builders in their catalogues to independent housing speculators looking to make a buck. The speculators developed clusters of houses (with a minimum of 6 houses per site) back in the late 1800s as an economic upturn fuelled a Victorian “buy to let” market. Aimed at the up and coming middle class family, the terraced houses in East Dulwich aspired to grandness within a modest budget.

But the market floundered as uptake of the properties did not meet initial expectations. The reason? Public transport to Dulwich was practically non-existent so the clerks and office workers targetted by the speculators didn’t come in their droves as hoped. It was only some decades later when the commuter railway was built in the wake of the Crystal Palace exhibition complex that this part of South London revived.

These days, we’re still cut off from the tube and it’s a hassle to get to and from London on the trains, with their ever reducing timetables, and on the buses, stuck in traffic endlessly along the Walworth Road. That’s the thing about Dulwich that we moan about - but it is also the thing that keeps this leafy “village” still village-like. So, while the Dulwich of today is home to both the wealthy and not so wealthy, at the end of our long days of slog in the smog-filled city we can still all enjoy feeling as if we’ve retired to the country for the night!

Photo of Lordship Lane: with thanks from ideal-homes.org.uk
Photo of Brian Green and me: my own collection