Weather in your FACE

So. After Elisa made a offhanded comment about people loving to put weather related content into their status updates it got me thinking.

I thought...

Am I guilty of this?
"Guilty" because I HATE benign drivel.

The answer is yes. I do do it. However much I hate weather status updates it is over-powered by my love of whining, bitching and ranting in general. So if I am uncomfortable for days on end then eventually, unfortunately for you, you are likely to hear about it.

So I decided to take a little look around Facebook.

First I went through my news feed. Yep, as I suspected. I have friends that LOVE to talk about the weather, there are a couple of them and it doesn't bother me so much, but I must admit once I get the gist of the status I dont read on.

Instead of exposing these friends in all their meteorological glory here on our blog I decided to go hunting for weather status updates of others in pages and groups for like minded weather enthusiasts. What I discovered was hundreds of non-specific weather groups. I grabbed a few snips of conversation and left as the effect was soporific to say the least.

well the cuddling bit did peak my interest....

Next I decided to find out what other people on Facebook thought about weather in status updates and found by far the most popular weather related facebook group.

498 people like this? Only 498...pfffft!

and this one....which I quite like

It would also seem that people who like to talk about weather probably share some of the thoughts of like minded domestic animals

and my personal favourites...

parallels people parallels!

But no matter what you opinion is on others inane weather status' I think that this group should have A LOT more members.

Now excuse me whilst I curl up in bed, and as is my custom, check my Bureau of Meteorology iPhone app for tomorrows forecast.

Little Green Door

n.b. For this Fiction Challenge we had to write anything fictional in any form, including the words vessel, extinguish and market.

It's very interesting for me, who usually only writes when the universe moves me, to write fiction to a deadline. In fact, I questioned my ability to do it at all. I looked at the clock tonight once the children were in bed and I had spoken to a friend on the phone and saw that it was 9.30pm. I nearly didn't write this piece. I thought that I wouldn't have anywhere near enough time to throw anything together. But for a first draft I am over the moon with it. In fact, I think that I like it so much that I might keep working on it.
Yay for our blog and it pushing my boundaries!

Little Green Door

The terraces in Abercrombie Street sat back from the tree lined road upright and statuesque. Gabled windows like hooded eyes, glaring in judgement at the little wooden workman's cottages that dotted the street amongst them. The cottages sprawled, some of them shedding their splintered timbers into unkempt yards that were framed by small rusted cyclone-wired fences. Their size and disarray gave them the kind of hang-dog look of a condemned man. It was only a matter of time until they too would be transformed. They were vessels waiting to be filled with modular leather lounges, flat screen TV's and Laura Ashley linens. But only once they had been squared off, set right, extended, and painted from the same palettes as their superiors, in their pretty uniform party dresses.

Oh the new Newtown gentry knew how to extinguish character from a perfectly friendly little street, Bob thought, as he sat on his front verandah watching the women with prams parade up and down the footpath. He watched the sunlight play through the trees onto the path and spat a piece of orange pith into the long grass beside him, wiping the juice from his chin with his sleeve, swearing silently as it made its way into a shaving cut and stang smartly. That bloke from the real estate had come by again, said he had buyers for the house, a likely story! He wouldn't bloody sell it to them anyway, if that was what they were going to do with it. He stared at the house opposite,that no longer resembled the house it had once been. And if he sold more of them would move in too. No, he couldn't be responsible for more of those people in the street, or in the suburb for that matter. He didn't freakin care if the market was “red hot.” He thought of the real estate fella again and snorted audibly, though there was no one to hear him.

The woman across the road was coming out of the house with the florescent yellow door. The door had always been a bit of a mystery to Bob. He hated the poofy muted colours that “those people” in the street had painted their houses. But he hated that florescent door more. It just illustrated his point, weirdos...the lot of them.

Sara was in a hurry. She ushered the kids out the door and over to the car “chop chop”. The truth was that she was always in a hurry. From this to that, no time to think. Yet what did she really do? She wondered as she strapped Henry into his car seat. Crap....the registration papers, she thought, and told the boys that she just had to pop back into the house to grab something. She wasn't really thinking of anything other than retrieving the papers when she put the key in the lock and started to turn it. Then, as if she had not noticed it for the last 8 years, she suddenly realised that the door was still that disgusting, god-awful yellowy/green colour. She stopped, mid-turn with the key. It wasn't the colour so much that offended her, though that was what had annoyed her initially. No, what bothered her was that it was still that colour 8 years later, and all that that represented.

Tweeting off your Face..a BIG no no (and other wisdom)

This may well me one of my first deadly serious blog posts. Meaning that if you are not at all interested in the topic you should stop reading right about now and perhaps go here...Twin Babies Conversing...amusing no? The first point to make is that the question "Facebook & Twitter: Serious business tools, or just messing around?"almost treats; a. A serious business approach and b. just messing around as mutually exclusive concepts. In my opinion if you are using Facebook(FB) and Twitter(Twt) as a business and you are not sometimes messing around you are making a big mistake. You have mis-judged the space that is social media and are regarding it as just another marketing (sales, advertising, and PR) platform.

The great thing about these social media platforms, and the reason that every marketing manager wants to do well in this space, is that having come from an environment where we have for years been sending information out in a unidirectional manner, all of a sudden we have the promise of an open channel of communication. A conversation. Oh the excitement!

Initially Social Media seemed to hold the promise of breaking though the barriers of the attention economy. But like every new medium, it eventually becomes old and with it the return of the old problem of how to get noticed on Twt and FB.

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it" Simon 1971 pp.40-40

But before we get onto that I should note here that Facebook and Twitter are actually quite disparate platforms, and thus should be treated as such by the business user. From a personal perspective I actually find Twt quite a lot more difficult to use, and less rewarding. There are several reason for this but mostly:

1. Because you often have to send people away from the stream to read anything other than the 140 letter limit, and based on my own experience people do not like to navigate away from the page they are on unless highly motivated to do so.

2. It's also much harder to build, and keep track of relationships on Twitter as comments and retweets etc have a much more separate nature from each other than Facebook. Many businesses simply use an application to sync their Twitter and Facebook Updates, by using an application such as the Twitter App on Facebook.This is a mistake! Use each platform in a way that is more suited to it's specifications and remember that if someone is interested enough to follow you on one, then it is quite likely that they may follow you on another - see my comments on spam that follow.

3. Twitter sucks up more staff resource that Facebook. Twitter needs more tweets per day than Facebook needs status updates (1-2). Twitter also (as previously touched on)relies on other platforms, so in some cases there is some double handling, where as often,comparatively, FB is a one stop shop.

Keep it cool
This is where the "messing around" bit comes in. Social media is voyeuristic. People want to know about the people behind the brand. What is the company personality? Please please please have one - a personality that is. Your followers will be much more interested in what you have to say if what you have to say is a little personal. It doesnt hurt to have multiple professionals in your business tweeting. From my perspective there is nothing better than a CEO or CTO or equivalent that tweets, blogs and/or publishes on Facebook.

Save the Jargon for the Board Room
Cut out that marketing language. People want to know that a real person is tapping that information out. If the only people you want to talk to on Twt and FB are other Business Owners, then take it to LinkedIn and spare everyone the boredom. There is some room for B2B marketing on FB and Twit, but if that's what youre doing on there, and if you're not occassionally having fun, don't expect any end users to follow you.

Don't Spam
Facebook and Twitter has for personal users become a real community in their consciousness. They don't want to clutter up their newsfeeds with Marketing Messages in Spam-like proportions (Twitter with it's short messages and fast moving nature will tolerate this more but not much more) So you had a lot happen at your company today? There was the new product launch, the 521 media items it produced online in a 3 hr period, your CEO wrote a piece for the company blog etc. That's lovely. But there is no need to produce 5 status items out of this information. Choose wisely and be sure to mix it up. No one wants to hear the same message everyday.

Use the tools around you
If you are an up to date kind gal or guy you can run an entire marketing campaign online for absolutely nothing. It pays to know about all of the free stuff you can grab to enhance the end users Twt or FB experience. From surveys programs like wufoo to do it yourself animations like xtranormal (in which I published my last poem for this blog) I am discovering new and varied ways to up the ante everyday and the only place I need to look is in my own personal FB stream, my friends use FB like it's going out of business and it is wise to pay attention to what your savvy friends are posting/laughing at. The point being; previously we addressed the point about not posting the same information daily; well, now, we are addressing the point about not posting in the exact same form daily. Mix up your media and cut through all the same same. Warning - if you drive people back to your business website continually they will eventually stop following your links. This is why I made the decision for our business to host our blog on Blogger, insisted that our CEO and CTO post blog items, as well as myself, and asked them to keep the language, and some of the topics accessible.

Be Responsive
So now that you have it, make sure that you respond to your followers. People who follow companies on Twt and FB have reported that they have been able to resolve problems by posting complaints on the walls/feeds of the relevant company. This is FANTASTIC! This kind of translucency is exactly what users are looking for. Some people have claimed that SM has rekindled good old fashioned customer service. And the reason for this of course is because people are watching. Of course people are also watching to see how well you as a company handle, and how quickly you resolve the situation, and in the end this is a WIN for you. At this juncture I would also like to make a complaint about ninemsn. Who provided NO reasonable platforms for me to make complaint about their gratuitous selling of advertising space on the front on of news items about the severe loss of human life in Japan. They have a FB page, and posting to their wall is disabled. This is not what social media is about ninemsn!

An important note about "going viral" - A case study
I recently launched our business FB site. We went from 7 followers (staff I forced to follow us) to 50 followers. But please don't think that they followed out of the kindness of their hearts. I sent out video invitations to quite a significant mailing list and the promise to be in the running to win an iPhone4 in the process. The competition closes this Friday. The point of this little diatribe is to illustrate that ROI on social media is extremely hard to measure. I will tell you however that we have gained 2 proof of concept trials that could net us 10's of thousands of dollars, opened many a discussion on highly technical aspects of network monitoring and reestablished relationships with contacts that we have not heard from in some time, all in the period of 3 weeks. This may sound like small fry, and we are a small company, but in fact these wins have incalculable value.

I should also mention that every one of our followers is market relevant. There was one horror moment when I realised that a Twitter user, who collects competitions and publishes them to his stream had included us in his mad ravings. I do not want 1282 followers who have nothing to do with our space but fancy their chances of winning an iPhone. Sheesh..If I wanted that I would have opened it up to my friends (who are in fact much more likely to need a free iPhone than my peers). Long story short; Going Viral aint all that in some cases.

Happy Web 2.0 My friends.

A Current Affair to Forget

My memory of current affairs programmes in the 80's and early 90's is that they seemed to be filled with overly earnest TV hosts who almost seemed to lean into the camera whilst they divulged the latest and most disturbing news, some from far flung posts around the world, with bombs exploding in the background and dirt flying up into the lens. Serious debates on current issues. Fodder for the thinking man (or woman).

It's a far cry from the absolute drivel that we see today on ACA (as we are now too demented to remember the name "A Current Affair"), and Today Tonight.
But are these shows reflecting a seriously dumbed down society or are they indeed contributing to it? Does art reflect life, or does life reflect art? When did the move into celluloid begin?

As far as I can work out, and I remember the day, ACA lost their last "real" journalist in Jana Wendt, when she left ACA on principle, because she did not agree to them showing tat - In the form of a pair of decontextualise naked breasts in 1992.

Ahhhhhhh..the memories. Current affairs programmes on commercial channels hosted by professional journalists, with PRINCIPLES - heaven forbid! Now, as far as I can see (and I dont watch them) they are hosted by what my grandfather would have termed "dolly birds" and men that spend more time staring into the mirror than I do, who's greatest achievement is to read someones else words off an autocue.

And what words!
"How to drop a dress size in a week"
"Your microwave could be killing you!" (they are into the killing you thing,for microwave also insert, house, car, vacuum cleaner)
"neighbours from hell" (almost always set in a housing commission environment - ACA and Today Tonight love housing commission)
"landlord from hell" (see above)

sigh...

I don't watch commercial tv at the best of times. And, hand on heart, I have not watched one of their current affairs shows in years and years. Though I can imagine that I may again one day. There will be a time when I want to watch mindless entertainment and be told what to think on the most mindnumbingly unimportant and completely irrelevant subjects. That day will be the one on which I lost my mind to dementure and seek to be told my opinion, which I will then gleefully push on all of my frightened grandchildren (who are only more frightened by my spiky whisker kisses)and use as fodder to make shouting complaints about the staff in the nursing home.

Ode to the 7:06

I just couldn't put my post in late.
So I re-wrote my poem and it's hard to say if it's better or worse...
Sometimes the funniest things come out of 15 minutes...




Ode to the 7:06


Oh Gleaming Silver Horse of dubious hygiene Your endless silver skin shines
a light so fierce my sunglasses are rendered redundant


Yet it is with such delight
I wait for you, then alight
and ride with you on endless lines


under conditions so repugnant
windows filthy, made redundant
and weirdos seeking conversation
that don't dismount till Redfern station.


iPods pounding non beseeching
music, fighting with you screeching
tones


moans
of madness from the drunk
who spews his words within his funk
and strewn across a three space seat


the stander will admit defeat.
at this
and this only.


Not a laptop bag, or ladies purse,
or walking frame or extra girth


Yet I would not miss your small delights
florescent lights
the loud phone-fights
and people who like to carry kites
in rush hour.

Coins are Shiny Delicious!

A Cashless Society! In this, my brain dump, initial thoughts are:

1-Putting a Key Card out of your bra is nowhere as impressive as cash!
2- It would be very difficult for strippers to dance with EFTPOS machines strapped to their??? - not so sexy. (this is your chance to be first to market with cunningly designed transacting knickers)

3 -Will the homeless actually start taking up your offer of a McDonalds feed - instead of turning their noses up at it in?

4 - I misplace my keycard at least twice a week - where does that leave me? (see picture at the end of this post - not posed..thanks Corrine for the evidence)

Perhaps the answer is a microchip. But that could have its own problems. Would bag snatchers become murderers, set to dismember and remove the chips of wealthy folk? You cant just pull off you arm and throw it at them as you run away can you? It'd be a real pain in the.....arm if your chip malfunctioned and needed replacing.

But seriously. I remember there being a movement against barcodes, say about 20 years ago...maybe it was more. Hazy memories of strange looking folk handling out flyers in the street and notice thingos taped to telegraph poles. I thought they were nuts and couldn't quite work out what their problem was.

Perhaps they were projecting into the future? Perhaps they were worried about the day when we would be all issued with National ID cards (as in Nazi Gemany). Perhaps with minds like crystal balls they could see the day when we would all be FRIGGEN MICROCHPPED like our pets and the very last semblance of privacy would be torn from us.

OK, so a little dramatic, and let me put my calm, professional and reasonable hat back on and say, completely flippantly:

1. I like cash because when it comes down to it, as involved in technology as I am, I am at heart a luddite who has a sentimental attachment to the cash economy. As well as books in print (mmmmm..,..breathe that smell in)

2. Coins are shiny delicious and Notes are crunchy.

3. I can not be trusted to retain cards of any description and am at this moment waiting for a replacement of mine, for the 2nd time this year (yes...already)

4. Recently I was walking down George Street and a $20 note blew into my shoe...unexpected thrills are far and few between.

Hmmm..not the most well constructed blog entry. But I love a little SOC every now and then.

Sexuality - Choice or Hardwired?

Sexuality - What is “normal”?

Unfortunately the topic of sexuality is so controversial I can barely think of another that people taking surveys would be more likely to bend the truth about. Making “normal” or “average” almost impossible to gauge.

My personal belief is that sexuality is a fluid concept, and that though most people identify themselves as completely heterosexual, or completely homosexual for that matter, the truth is more likely to be that they fall somewhere on the spectrum other than completely heterosexual – or completely homosexual.

This does not necessarily make them bi-sexual. And most likely doesn’t come anywhere near Pan-sexuality (some guy told me he was this once and I had to look it up). As far as I can fathom, one can be bisexual and have a general preference for one sex. Pan Sexuals claim not to see gender at all and thus also dig transgendered types.

So why am I carrying on about all this stuff…well…. To make my point which is;

Sexuality is all about how you Identify yourself.

Unfortunately there are people like me that don’t believe that you should identify yourself at all.
You see, I believe that it’s possible for me to fall in love with and be attracted to a person of either sex. Does that make me Bisexual?...Well only if we have to stick a label on it peeps!

What about a person’s experiences? Is that the thing that defines their sexuality? In that case is the preference they have shown for in terms of sexual partners or in terms of love affairs? In this case stacking up my stats gives me a 98 percent chance of batting for team hetro. :P

Born this way?
I do think that people are born with a propensity to be attracted to either a member or the same sex OR the other one (somewhere on the aforementioned spectrum). And I do think that a WHOLE LOT of people have a feeling, in a society that is geared towards heterosexual relationships that something “aint right” from a very very early age.

My Uncle I think is a good example of this. He died of HIV Aids before I could ask him in more detail about what it had been like grown up in the 1950’s “not quite fitting in”. He kept his sexuality from his parents and brother and sister until the last moment, until the HIV tuned to Aids. He could never have a relationship in the daylight. And when he died my beautiful, gorgeous loving Catholic Grandmother, who meant to do the right thing, told everyone that her son had died of Cancer. She told the family that it was just something he “tried” and “look what happened”! We knew better. But that story, in its entirety and my feelings on that whole matter, are a story for another time….stay tuned.

My Uncle was born that way. He never had a girlfriend. He found himself attracted towards the same sex, as far as we can fathom, from the beginning.

In THIS way I believe that sexuality is there from birth and not a choice one makes, as if choosing between the 1.25ml “Full Strength” Coke and the “Zero”

Are there “things” that can happen in a person’s life that make them swing more in one direction than the other?

Sure, I think so….but it’s hard to know.

I have known quite a few women who identify as Gay, who have been sexually abused by men at a young age, sometimes repeatedly. Did this experience turn them off men so much so that they looked towards women instead – I think there’s a feasible argument to be made here, but for a minority of people.

Then again, I also know at least 2 gay men who were sexually abused by men as teenagers. Did the fact that they were exposed to sexual concepts that may not have otherwise crossed their radar make them more likely to consider these things, where they may not have before? Maybe. But in all I think that this is a considerably less convincing argument than the former.

Where the “Choosing” comes in
So, we’ve gone full circle now and ended up where we began…sorta.

The choosing comes into the equation because unless you’re living in some sort of sectarian sect, or other repressive situation YOU get to choose your own Identity.

Let’s not be the ones who repress.