Happy Birthday Twitter - you beautiful freak

Seven years.

At seven you can star-jump, sing, you probably know the basics between right and wrong... You are self-aware, empathetic  you've got a social diary, you're learning, engaging, interacting, deliberating and deciding.

I celebrated Twitter's seventh birthday by lodging a harassment case with Devon and Cornwall Police against my very own digital harasser who dedicated two whole months to obsessing about me on Twitter. Seven is apparently old enough to be a gutless bully, too.

But that mustn't detract from the enormous joy Twitter has, and still does, frequently bring me.

It connected me to the city when I felt completely detached and far-from-home. It connected me to new friends by the seaside.

It's connected me to men and women whom I admire, agree with and disagree with. People who've informed me, enraged me, advised me, or just given me a little boost when I needed it.

I am joined to colleagues, old colleagues, friends, politicians, presidents and strangers alike, every day.

Is there a more random, more versatile, more powerful invention of the 21st century?

What a beautiful freak. Happy Birthday Twitter.

RelationshipBook: For the couples you already know everything about

I've frequently been of the gooseberry disposition.

Dinners, parties, luncheons, when you might as well have a kitten purse for all the help it would do you in remaining invisible amongst all the couples.

These days  my relationship status is 'in a relationship'.

'In a relationship's not quite good enough now, though, for my time in life. 'Not married, then?' is the suffix to 'in a relationship' when you're in your 30s and we all know it.

Online you'd be scouring my photos to see if I was, at least, a mother. Perhaps a knowing smile if I'd had one out of wedlock - got my number.

It's hard to escape the judgement, these days. Keeping off the web is pretty tough, especially as a digital journalist who is expected to be leading strategy on the very platforms which tell you all you'd ever need to know about me.

And now Facebook launches, for want of a better phrase, RelationshipBook. Not satisfied with unabashedly asking as to my relationship status, there's now a place for my partner and I to house all our most intimate keep sakes - holiday photos, corny messages, winks, pokes, worse...

I can see the couples this will appeal to - those who regularly post to their boyfriends wall '12 weeks and counting! I love you more than ever, cuddlemonster! xxxx'. The couples who Facebook each other while sitting on different sofas in the same room. Those for whom their love knows no bounds. Or should we say boundaries.

I'm rather pleased that this one I'll be forced to sit out, for my boyfriend is a rare new-age creature who isn't even registered on Facebook.

He does, however, bookmark twitter steams, which still confuses me. Still - each to their own. If I even so much as suggested a RelationshipBook he'd throw his designy-crayons at me (probably Pantone).

I appear to have accidentally, and thankfully, dodged a digital bullet...

When a Secretary of State can meme herself, you know she's a keeper

She might not be a friend of Iran, but Hilary Clinton sure knows what to do when she's being memed, with the old adage, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Make no mistake, when a meme of Clinton start pinging across the tumblrs and twitters there's just no way of stopping it.

But spoofs of the Secretary texting with her sunnies on and being mocked for her 'scrunchie' wearing apparently had the politician clutching for her sides, not clutching for her lawyers.

They say Obama's twitter account won him the election, and they might not be far off the mark.

For nearly a generation we, the underlings, thought we owned the web. The social side of it, anyway.

Our elders and more responsibles didn’t know about things like blogs, tweets, memes, and so away we went, safe in the knowledge we had them on a platform they didn’t understand.

So refreshing is it, then, when one of the highers join us down here. Not just tweeting, but genuinely getting involved.

When a Secretary of State can actually meme herself, well, you know she's a keeper. Because she's just proven she knows where we are, what makes us tick.

It's connecting with the people that counts these days, not the policies you carry, just look at our Dave.

With a snazzy photoshopped campaign poster, and promise of hugging a hoody, we voted in (not me, personally, I hasten to add...) the most ruthless Prime Minister in terms of public service slashing my generation has ever seen.

And he had us at 'mydavidcameron'.

The evolution of snail mail

I had post last night.

It had a hand-written envelope - oh, that's the good stuff.
That means it'll be something nice, something interesting. This was definitely not a bill.

A slight sinking of the heart then, on discovering it was a leaflet to a art course I had been looking at online. And from April, soaring postal costs will probably mean the option of having something sent by mail will only diminish further.

"I saw this and thought of you" was the major post office campaign to get people re-connecting by royal mail again and it worked, at least for a little while.

People imagined once again opening letters from grandparents and seeing a Natural History Museum dinosaur rubber tumble out. Or a knitted scarf from an auntie in Wales.

And then we metropolitanised - even on our coasts and in our valleys - with email, Facebook, Twitter, mobiles, online banking and electronic billing.

Why post when you can post to someone's Facebook wall? Why send when you can do just that on email without ever being weighed with the burden of knowing what street they live on.
What real need is there for 'snail mail' anymore?

My other half's father collects old postcards. Not the 'wish you were here' type from abroad, but black and white, tea-stained, local communication tools.

The best ones, I've learned, are the ones that have been written on, a voyeuristic peep into life decades ago when carriages rattled down cobbled streets and local bobbies wore hats which teetered skywards.

From the small town of Newquay a good deal of these postcards were sent upcountry from holiday-makers in the very tropical holiday destination of Cornwall.

But a good fair few are even more fascinating. "See you at 5pm for supper" sent at 10am that day from a neighbouring village. A little investigation throws up that post used to go not once, not twice (even I remember those days) but three or four times a day.

A local card could be posted in the morning and be happily at its destination not long after lunch. I still have daydreams of finding one which says something like 'Darling, waters have broken, meet me at hospital" - not impossible in a time when you more-than-likely not only knew your postman's name but the names of his wife and children (who probably went to school with yours).

It was a more romantic age, that's for sure. Love letters, letters from abroad, pictures of family additions, parcels at birthdays.

All replaced by a back-lit screen and an Amazon voucher. It's certainly change, but not necessarily progress.

The conundrum of pinterest

I joined as a bona fide member this week. Months after pouring over delicious recomendations and inspirational 'pins' from other people I was free to do it myself.

Pin, pin, pin. Over 50 of the things in fewer than 24 hours.

That was before I read a little part of the pinterest site called 'etiquette'.

I wasn't forwarded to this part of the site on joining. I was emailed with basic instructions, how to download a pin button on Firefox, and merrily nudged to steer clear of posting nudity (shudder at the thought).

But now I've done my research. In fact, right down there in the small print pinterest asks that the pinners are exclusive owners of the content they are referring. Or at least credits source.

That hasn't been my experience, either in browsing or pinning. In fact, the very idea of a 'pin' button encourages the recommendation of content while you are 'out and about' in the web-esphere, hitting the button whenever you come across something worth sharing.

I fear I've broken 'the rules' 50 times over (although the pins still link to the original source -is that 'credit' enough?).

However, if I was exclusive owner of everything I pinned, surely that would just be an image bank of my own blog (pretty boring and not all-encompassing of everything that inspires me - far from it)?

Even more confusingly it then asks that you don't self-promote. These seem to be at total juxtaposition to each other.

Does pinterest obscure the *actual* terms of use in order that we use it as we have been, accepting that websites against will embed the coding which restricts people from pinning?

Or should I just give myself up now? It's a fair cop...

Taking on Twitter. And Nigella

It's easy to get sucked into arguments on Twitter. I do try to avoid them.

Celebrities who've never so much as jostled bottoms past each other on the red carpet have an opinion on each others extra-marital activities, on their clothing, on their partners of choice.
But generally it's left there.

On hearing culinary goddess Nigella Lawson being called a 'tubby old trout', however, I had to draw the line. I did what I know, as an online editor, one must never, ever do - feed the troll.


A few back and forth’ings with a tweeter using a pseudonym and fake avatar I realised what I already knew. It wasn't worth it.

Posting as a fictional 78 year old grouchy man the tweeter was indeed just in existence to stir trouble and bitch at other users.

All my tweets served to do was lather them in more fame than even their retweet by Nigella herself had done (and Nigella said she was taking 'immense pleasure' from his insult).

The torrent of reply to this twitter troll, however, is testament to how far the online community has come.

No longer do we, as visitors to an online public space, turn and blush when someone is getting an unprovoked lashing from someone not even courageous enough to post as himself.
Oh no.

We use 160 characters to shout them down. Power to the people. Twitter troll himself admitted 'Well my dear, you certainly stirred a bees nest up with your RT.' And for that alone, I think I'm grateful I did it.

I wonder how much time someone must have on their hands to be bothered with such a pass-time, but who am I to judge?

I think we all just ended up feeling a bit sorry for the person who took on Nigella on twitter. And lost.

Marketing in a social environment

With the arrival of frictionless apps from Facebook it seems the line between private, social and professional life has finally and irreparably been blurred.

Facebook used to live under strict rules akin to Google+ - no business need apply. In fact, if they found out you were a business with a profile page they'd suspend your account.

Then came targeted ads - remember those? It would announce what you just bought on amazon and target similar products to your friends. Well, we rebelled and Facebook tucked its tail between its legs and scampered off to think again.

Finally pages arrived and we all jumped right on board. Newfeeds became an amalgamation of what colour your mate’s bra was followed by what special offer dominos had on that night, followed by what the current situation in the West Bank was...

And it worked.



In choosing to allow which organisation can sneak into our life on Facebook we accept that marketing and information dissemination from news agencies, corporate conglomerates and PR agencies might actually occasionally be of interest, nay of use to us.

With frictionless apps we can take it to the next level and not even have to leave the blue and white platform to take in every aspect of online existence. Scary? Or clever? Or both?

I fear until Google+ catches up it might simply limp along behind Zuckerberg’s online ‘social’ giant.

New-Age Anonymous

You used to be branded a recluse if you were a techno-geek.

Now it appears the tables have turned.

Last weekend Google-lovers in the Bergerhausen area of Essen, Western Germany, apparently egged houses whose owners had opted to blur them out on Google's well-loved Street View.

Not satisfied with a good old-fashioned egging, the vandals taped 'Google's cool' notes to their mailboxes.

Yes Google's cool, but is criminal damage on Google's behalf really that cool? Really? Nothing more imaginative going on up there? Nothing better with which to ocupy your time? I'm already shuddering at the possible IQ of the perpetrators.

Google was quick to "distance itself completely" from the craziness saying of those who chose the blur: "we respect their wishes".

It's quite some world when you can't even choose anonymity for fear of being targeted as a kill-joy.

My other-half remains free of even Facebook. I know this is a serious slur on new-age humanity but each to their own, no? In years to come my Grandchildren will probably disown their wayward Gran for her online idiocy, while Granddad takes the limelight of their affections. The rough with the smooth, you see...

Social Networking melts your soul

Social networking is 'devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance'.
Or at least that’s what Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution thinks.
According to this leading Neuroscientist, Facebook, Twitter and any other networking site you may be getting your ‘fix’ from, infantilises our minds, gives us a shortened attention span, and makes us all ravingly egotistical and self-centred.
I rather suspect I was all of these things to begin with, but that, perhaps, is a whole other blog.
The theory goes that by encouraging instant gratification, one becomes unable to bear anything which may take any amount of time.
That by setting up a profile page dedicated to you, with pictures of you, information of you, with blogs you wrote, and videos you made featuring you sitting in your home going about your daily life might just give us the feeling that we are the most important thing in the universe.
I beg to differ. Too long did we wait for a medium with which to connect to friends, (equally as important as ourselves), the ability to message them (while patiently waiting for a reply), poke them (while patiently waiting to be poked back), and generally have everything we ever needed to know at our fingertips.
Sure, it throws up problems like the diminishing need for libraries, and our inability to remember the alphabet the few times we’ll ever need to go to our dictionaries again.
Looking for something to blame for short attention spans and a lack of real-time face-to-face contact with others? I hope she took a good hard look at the effects of excessive gaming.
But leave our networking sites alone, lady. Thou who does not accept web 2.0 simply doesn’t understand it. And probably has too few friends to make it worthwhile.