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.

Hotmail gets Outed

Hotmail.com. Owners of such an archaic form of communications lurk in dark corners of comms existence. We exchange knowing nods in smoky corners of the digital universe.

The chosen ones. The ones who got there first. The ones who never dreamed these emails would open the gateway of our future lives - future bosses, old university friends, partners, parents, siblings and social clubs.

If we knew we would have surely given ourselves better user names. I got away lightly. Ish. LittleJoW. Some hotshot bastard must have nabbed JoW before me - or maybe I just thought it was 'rad' at the time.

An old university lecturer, in a moment of certain madness, had set himself up a far more embarrassing  bizarre  username, akin to LoveItLatinBaby. He held on to it, too. And why not?

As a dog must drag its tail, the original internet dwellers have lugged our hotmail accounts along with us through thick and thin, blindly ignoring the trendies on gmail; scoffing at the toffs of btinternet.

And just as we got old enough to become less embarrassed about those early-years hiccups, much as a tatoo owner must accept his or her mistakes, Hotmail consigns us to history. Hotmail has become outlook.

Those inspirational usernames looking more stupid now, right?

I don't care. I still LoveItLatinBaby.

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'.

Mind your step, for the lazy

Fancy ideas, these.

Visions of 'airport style' escalator walkways - one up, and one down - through the vintage town-to-harbour tunnel in Cornwall's most sinful of towns, Newquay.

Don't get me wrong, I love the place. I live there.

But assumptions like '1.16 million people [paying 30p a pop] would use the tunnel every year' are unfounded and unrealistic. That’s over 3,000 people a day, as one commenter on thisiscornwall cannily points out.

That's certainly not the pull of Newquay town at the moment, and the infrastructure is far from ready to deal with the purported 'cruise ships' these walkways would attract.

And since when did society get so lazy that a mechanised walkway taking you a distance of less than a mile (all be it, up) would change your mind about visiting a town?

150 years ago it existed as a rail line to transport ore to the harbour. Back in the days when manual labour was just that. Our forefathers would be rolling in their graves at the idea this old tunnel will be turned into a glitzy escalator for the unenergetic.

Please mind your step.

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...