Festive best wishes to everyone
Have a great festive time everyone, and best wishes for 2011.
(Image from Inspired By Iceland: visit the site for more beautiful pictures)
Apart from the stunning scenery and the numerous opportunities to volcano-watch, there is now another reason to move to Iceland, as moves are afoot to make the tiny country the haven for journalists and writers - the "Switzerland of bits".
Those nice people at 1000heads have created a great infographic to summarize what WOM is (and where social networks fit in).
You can see it below, or you can grab it directly from the 1000heads site here.
Van Gogh claims divine intervention punished Uruguay for quarter-final handball to secure Dutch victory over Uruguay in semi-final: "It was the Hand of Clog."
I have just bought a copy of the Penguin Special 'Britain by Mass-Observation', and it's an amazing read. To the web-savvy researcher, used to massively cross-referenced web pages, and finding key documents in a few seconds, it's a welcome reminder of how to take time to read information of the era more contextually.
The book has no index, and the table of contents displays a variety of disjointed topics that the M-O team covered for that particular book. There is a weighty report on the crisis in Czechoslovakia of that year, and another on the role of newspapers and 'facts', as well as reports on such subjects as freestyle wrestling, and the song 'Doing the Lambeth Walk'.
The book indicates wonderfully how the tools of documentation, measuring and observing have changed so much since the 1930s. The dedicated volunteers of M-O had to go out to communities, stand on street corners, eavesdrop on conversations in pubs and shops, knock on doors to interview 'ordinary' folk. Today, the millions of us engaging in social networks are providing all this information for free, and anyone wishing to use all that data out there, for trend-watching, brand-awareness, or whatever, has it at their fingertips on a computer.
And yet, there are those who continue to call the Twitters of the world a passing fad.
During World War 2, there was a wonderful series of posters produced to warn against 'careless talk' (see the National Archives for some examples), as it was perceived that there was a national threat of enemy spies overhearing information. The slogan read: 'Careless talk costs lives.' These days, we might well say: 'Careless talk builds, or destroys, brands,' (not as snappy a slogan, I admit). Except that the talk is often not careless. Users of social networks take the time to post their thoughts, and whether it's careless or not, it's there for builders of brands, political campaigners, and so on, to use, and to respond to. From the business' perspective, a careless response to a customer complaint, can easily get blown into the blogosphere for millions of others to read and react to.
There are indications that the powers-that-be were aware, even back in the 1930s, of the potential of social networks to overtake the 'official line' (warning: the authenticity of this report may, or may not, have been verified!) After much painstaking research, I have located the secret report for you: read it here. But as a last hurrah for the work of Harrisson, Madge and Jennings, and their legion of dedicated volunteers, I will quote the introduction to their report entitled 'Castles in the air?', about amenities enjoyed, or not enjoyed, among the different classes of house in Britain. In a report that would these days be blogged, or made into a video diary and placed on YouTube, the subject documents a day in his 'ordinary' life. His words are introduced as follows:
(But) the document that follows, from an engineering worker, describes a day in his life at random, unmarked by politic, not exceptional, typical of a vast section of the population which has no public voice, expressing everything in "personal" attitudes and relationships. Despite crises, despite out-of-touchness, regardless of press and radio, he lives on.
Welcome to the era of Mass Social Networking...an era foreseen by the pioneers of the Mass-Observation movement.
Cluuster
Social networking, web and email strategy and concepts, blogging tactics...plus the occasional cartoon.
