Category
Work
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08.16.07Facebook and the perils of prodigious sociabilityAnother post in the series of musings about Facebook as user experience and social microcosm... The trouble with Facebook is that it's a confused social space. There are too many different facets of personality being exposed through social openness. So much so, in fact, that it gets a bit difficult to manage. For example, at present on Facebook, I have (among others) the following listed as "Friends": My husband Several people I've known since I was 11 College friends I haven't talked to in 15 years My boss A couple of people from university I'd lost touch with Several people I know from t'internet, but haven't met / ...
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08.07.07Gonna look you up on Facebook (and poke you)*When I was at college, in Canada, I had a facebook. In fact, everyone at the college did. It was a physical thing - a slim volume handed out at the beginning of the year, containing photos and pertinent information about each student and faculty member. The photos we'd had taken in a classroom a couple of days after we arrived young, blinking and mostly jetlagged onto the campus on the western edge of Canada, photos which had been used already on student IDs and bus cards, were reprinted in the book along with the scantest of details - each person's ...
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06.12.07Old Guard, New TricksSo, anyone who reads this site at meish.org rather than via the feed might have noticed (via the little speaking events chunk on the right hand side of this page) that I'm speaking at NMK Forum tomorrow. Actually, I'm participating in a panel in the morning, which wil explore the following burning questions:How is so-called MSM (Mainstream Media) facing up to the new wave of interest in social media? Is it absorbing social media strategies or ignoring it? What does social media mean for the bottom line of big media? And how do the social media startups view their efforts? Forum ...
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06.11.07Women, Business and Blogging. And cake.I spent last Friday at the Women, Business and Blogging conference at DMU in Leicester, at which I was giving a talk about new ways of thinking about content and publishing in the era of the social web. My presentation essentially covered the different sorts of content activities and their established and emergent forms online. This then provided a context for talking about...well, context, actually, as well as publishing models and control and the lack thereof. I wound up by talking about community, and more specifically, user engagement and community management, including the ways that communities can be nurtured and supported for growth. ...
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05.09.07Soapboxes in Cyberspace eventTomorrow night (Thursday 10 May), I'm participating in a panel (and audience!) discussion entitled Soapboxes in cyberspace: how can the media facilitate debate online? The focus of the event will be to consider some of the challenges and (sometimes missed) opportunities for mainstream media in making (or letting?) online debate and Weblog-based commentary happen around politics and current affairs. This is another in the series of Innovation Forum discussions initiated by Nico Macdonald, aimed at bringing together people from different disciplines to share knowledge, and I'm chuffed to be appearing alongside such an interesting bunch of people, including Lee Bryant from ...
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04.02.07Too close for comfortWhen The Office appeared on our screens a few years ago, I barely watched it. This is because despite there being some very perceptive - and no doubt funny - writing, Ricky Gervais makes me want to grind my teeth into sand but also, and probably more significantly it was, in some ways, too close for comfort. The thing is, anyone having worked in an office environment, whether large or small, can identify with and recognise the reality in many of the situations it depicts - team bonding training days, bosses who want to be liked and feared at the same ...
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03.30.07MultiplicitySo, I had my leaving do from work last night. I'm not leaving quite yet, but since loads of people were going to be away for the Easter holidays, it seemed like a good idea to get it out of the way early. Anyway, fun times. We'd booked a big area at the back of a local pub, but when I showed up early on, to secure the perimeter, there was already someone there, someone I didn't know. "Are you here for the leaving do?" we asked each other. "Yes!" we both answered. "Whose?" we questioned. "Mine!" we both answered. Hmm. Most puzzling. A quick trip to ...
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03.26.07Keep on movingHome moves are traumatic - for a month before the big day, you live in a netherworld of boxes and packing tape and realising that you have far, far more books than you thought along with a nagging worry that you should probably take this opportunity to sort through some stuff rather than packing it and having to deal with it at the other end. You must not succumb to this temptation, however dire the need. Because you know, as we all do, that as soon as you start doing through the contents of that drawer - whether it was stuffed ...
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02.21.07On Attending the Future of Web Apps Conference, day two(A work in progress) Lunchtime, and I'm just taking a moment to reflect on the morning's presentations before downloading (or should that be uploading?) my notes and thoughts on what was said. Actually, I'm listening to ear-shattering volume AIR in an attempt to block out the drone of multiple mobile conversations - the perils of locking geeks up in a room for a while is that when they get out they need to connect with technology again - I imagine that it's about a billion times worse at 3GSM, only with suits, to boot). In brief: Khoi Vinh, the Design Director for ...
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02.20.07On attending the Future of Web Apps conference - day oneSo I'm at FoWA London 2007, and so far...meh. Bearing in mind that there's still a chunk of the afternoon and the whole of tomorrow to go, I'm willing to give the Carson folks a bit of a chance to pull it back, but so far, I'm a bit underwhelmed. So first up, the positives: there are more women here this year. Last year there were about 600 men typing away furiously on laptops to the sound of millions of sperm dying from radiation exposure. This year, more women...and less macs. I don't know if these things are related. Probably not. Also, ...
recent posts
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