It has been almost 2 months since I last wrote here. There are a lot of reasons for that, many to do with overwhelm and a strange sense of dissatisfaction with what I was producing. I talked a little bit about why I hadn’t been keeping my book blog up to date here and some of the sentiments are just as applicable on this blog. Mediocrity annoys me, particularly my own, and although I can be highly critical of myself, I am feeling more and more like I want to slow down a little and think about what I write rather than just throw anything out there for the world to see.
I was really struck by a post I read this morning on TechCrunch by Paul Carr, as I related to it completely. Paul has closed down all of his social media accounts. This was in response to his recent discovery that while he has been spending all of his time firing out 140 character messages and status updates, he has neglected his blog completely (sound familiar?) and when he was hunting back for records of past experiences for his writing, he realised with surprise that actually he didn’t have any. Most of his Twitter updates were obscure, not really thought out and necessarily brief. It is something I have felt about Twitter for a long time.
One of the comments posted to this article elucidates this further. ParkerWest wrote
It is my personal belief that Twitter will fail almost quickly as it became popular. The reason I believe this is mirrored by your statement that no one actually reads tweets, much less cares about them. It’s simply a sounding board, a podium to a room full people standing at podiums, all spewing meaningless 140 character “pay attention to me’s.”
How true his prediction is, I don’t know, but I do agree that there has been a disturbing but inevitable move towards obscure and irrelevant narcissism in Twitter. Furthermore, as people are realising how simple it is to use Twitter and how little contemplation is required to write a Tweet (or a status update), they are spending more time there, and less recording and thinking, processing and evaluating.
I have said it before in this blog but the one thing in the world that gives me the greatest pleasure is to sit down quietly and read a well planned, well edited and well thought-out book or essay. To create these kind of works, authors need to have gathered information and dug back through histories, archives, letters, diaries, notes, thoughts, stories or writings. If what Paul says is becoming more common (and I have no reason to believe that it isn’t from what I can see on the internet) then this kind of writing will become old-fashioned and the rich resources which were drawn on will diminish.
Doomsday predictions? Perhaps. I think there is place for short, 140 or whatever character updates to get conversation going, post an alert or give a snippet of information. But if that becomes the norm to the detriment of more extensive production then I think the world will be a much, much poorer place.
As an Australian, I am afraid I struggle to build up the appropriate supportive fervour for an English sporting team no matter how long I may have lived here. Nevertheless, I am aware that English World Cup Football hasn’t been enormously successful over the past…er…decades, and despite everything I would like to see them do a little better if they could. And it seems that the FA would also like to see some improvement as well – and as a result, they have 
Let’s do a little bit of basic mathematics. Bear in mind my numbers are just assumptions based on my own life – I am sure there are large numbers of variations.
I was listening to a past episode of 
With all of the running around I have been doing recently, I have left my Ada Lovelace pledge until the last minute unfortunately. But I have been spending a lot of my time recently working with women in business and I know all of us suffer from the problem of having too much to do, not enough time to do it in, and worries over what we let slip. Well, today’s exemplary woman in technology is one that proves that you can be clever, beautiful, and successfully achieve two very different careers.
I don’t actually have a lot to say about this as I am pretty stunned. I don’t know how long this page will stand although I know we aren’t the only ones who have taken screen grabs of the truly atrocious way that Nestle have decided to deal with its customers, critics and the general public.
The amount of content, information and words that is now on the internet is immeasurable. With the number of people blogging, the amount of blogs they write, the frequency with which they write them and the enthusiasm with which they produce them, have you ever wondered how you are going to get your voice heard? It seems that you spend time and effort writing a post but because of the cacophony of noise, it only takes the blink of an eye and it has been lost or forgotten and all that hard work has been wasted.
I have been in this business for several years now. I admit, I haven’t been working in social media as long as some, but I have a good four years under my belt which is a lot longer than a lot of others. That doesn’t make me special or clever in any way, but it does allow me to have something of a perspective. Combine that with my natural tendency to question, particularly when I sense people evangelising (which to me is an immediate indicator that it is not all wonderful) and it has led me to a number of conclusions.
One thing I am noticing with Spring arriving here in the UK is that there are more birds in the garden first thing in the morning. I can sit with my coffee and listen to them tweeting away (remember when a tweet was a noise that came from a sparrow?) and it heralds the arrival of the sun, blossoms and some warmer weather.
