Jude Clark

7 values

2012-02-06T18:33:00.000Z

Thanks to Venessa Meimis @venessamiemis for putting into words so well, how i also understand the life/passion/business 'un'divide http://emergentbydesign.com/2012/02/06/7-values-of-a-next-gen-agency/

nairobi

2012-02-06T17:29:00.001Z

The map of Nairobi is slowly growing in my head, the getting lost teaches me more than the getting it right, also the times i have to get off the bus and walk from a new place, like today when the bus crashed into a car at the roundabout or on Saturday when the #58 wasn't the #58 and took me to that very busy market just outside of town. Then i saw thew big coffee factory on the skyline and knew i must be somewhere near the end of Hailee Selassie. The traffic was awful coming back from iHub for the Pivot East Baraza this afternoon and so i jumped on the first bus, a new one going somewhere new in town, experiment... but as luck would have it before the destination i saw the street sign i like so much - Koinnage St - just cos Java the coffee house with MY sofa is on that street - DETOUR! When the traffic gets bad here matatu's get very creative about what constitutes a viable road, coming into buru-buru the one in front took the verge at the corner at high speed at what seemed to be 45 degrees - it bounced back level!

All of life is on the streets here, its busy like oxford street in London at Christmas shopping time but all day and all year round, the roads are full of people walking, men pulling wooden carts and traffic, the air filled at the bus stages by matatu touts shouting their destinations and beckoning people inside with passionate arm gestures with all the urgency of an emergency evacuation. They stop for no-one and nothing and squeeze through the tightest gaps all with local music blaring at full volume. There's nothing quite like it. The other lovely oddity here are the little local shops - with their security grills with the tiny 12inch holes for serving - no-one not even locals can see what's inside as the grills usually have sweets and other products pinned to their insides, to buy something you peer into the dark inside and ask and a hand pushes out what you need through the hole. I'm still not sure after nearly 6 months in this country what those shops actually sell apart from sweets, soda, milk, phone cards and cigarettes. Nairobi - nothing quite like it!

one not two

2012-01-23T21:38:00.001Z

complicatin intoxicating

pain no gain restrain

these are the daily grind

of a troubled mind

driven by an unsmart heart

all the lovers gone

the body to decay fray

unstitching

missing kissing

that soft n gentle whisper in the ear

the ooze of tear

from joy oh boy

the touch of hands

the tingle the mingle

not being single

waiting frustrating

for the time to be right

not to be alone in the night

taming the silyness of heart

n greedy eyes

need to be denied

not relied

upon in life there's more

work to do - roar

at injustice

feed the needy

not be greedy

strive for chnage

rearrange

the order

of disorder

make things fair

care

take the music

make people shine

passion will be mine

i am...

2012-01-22T13:34:00.001Z

I am not the money I have earned or squandered

I am not my successes or my failures

I am not who I am connected to

I am not what I wear or things I own

I am not my education or my job

I am not how much or little I have in the bank

I am not perfect

I am imperfect

I am body, mind, soul and emotions

I am the owner of this messy life

I am me

peace and love man!

2012-01-19T12:25:00.001Z

"PeaCe & Love", "peace man", "love life", "spread the love", this kinda thing all just make me want to boil inside. It's like somehow putting these words before or after something adds a layer of depth, a connection with higher things in the universe - adds meaning.
But... and this is what gets me - to fully understand the concepts of peace and love makes it hard to add them like a punctuation mark.

Love, whether it be to love a friend, to show love to others, to love family, to love a lover, to love God - NOTHING, not one thing about any of these is easy! Love is a challenge, its a process, its a journey on which, if we are truthful with ourselves we fail daily. There's nothing soft and squishy about Love its about strength to endure beyond our limits.

Peace, mental images of people sitting happily together, holding hands, smiling. But peace of heart and mind, peace between nations, peace between enemies, peace within a people, peace between friends, peace with God - eiishh! bloomin hard to achieve. Peace is often won and maintained as the result of battle, (not talking here about the fighting kind) but there's nothing lite and easy about Peace - it takes love and strategy but mainly ACTION.

If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it;a but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing. Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. 1 Cor13 v1-7

Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one. John Lennon

on buru buru

2012-01-18T22:46:00.002Z

my room shadowed from the mile high sun

window bars

metal doors

padlock and gate keep me safe

shops with openings 1 foot wide

sweets and biscuits hiding stock inside

labels that lie about their sweetness

begging ladies with borrowed babies

finger gun hiphops and football horn radio mixes

on

fifty bob air rides in matatu number 58

dreaming of chocolate

eye candies

where one voice can count

2012-01-17T12:20:00.002Z

One thing i love about the internet is that its leveled the playing field - everyone can be published, everyone can have their say, everyone has access to information, but more than that social media has connected us. Connected us to others, we can communicate better than we have ever been able to in history. We can say how we feel, we can talk jibberish, we can state our opinions, we can share what we find, with anyone anywhere.

Sure this creates problems, we are more visible than we ever have been, there's lots of 'noise', there's a lot of misinformation and negativity and bad stuff. but...its good news for the people at the bottom of the pyramid, those who would before never have had a voice. we are no longer a society waiting for the Martin Luther Kings to have an opportunity to speak and make movements - anyone can do this.

During the last two weeks - thousands of people at the bottom of the pyramid in nigeria did exactly this, caused a dictator to back down on the fuel subsidy issue, by peaceful protest - organised over social networks. In the big picture its a small half victory at best, but its a victory non the less, and an important one, the people do have power - their lack of trust turned into action - not the result of a charsimatic leader but a result of lots of single ordinary voices joining together. (BBC Africa news report)

It's no longer okay to say what can i do? me - how can what i think make a difference? so many examples in the last year where one ordinary voice inspiring and joining with others changed the course of events or history.

In the face of all the challenges we face today, is my optimism about the future of humanity idealistic? Perhaps it is. Is it unrealistic? Certainly not. To remain indifferent to the challenges we face is indefensible. If the goal is noble, whether or not it is realized within our lifetime is largely irrelevant. What we must do therefore is to strive and persevere and never give up. Dalai Lama

Time for boldness, anything is possible - what's your dream...

on stuckness and uncertainty

2012-01-08T16:36:00.004Z

when the randomness of life kicks us in the cajónes, our base human drive to flee or fight kicks in but not without cost - it knocks us, chips away at confidence and makes us question stuff at the core of our existence. if we didn't have some sense of belief in 'fairness' or 'karma' then how do we keep trying? why have ethics or a moral code, if it doesn't affect positively what happens to you in the universe?

and there it is! get knocked down enough times, try hard, be scuppered by others, watch the bad boys succeed often enough and a kind of hopelessness sets in; your thinking your ideas your skills your talents can all be the same quality as before but when it's happened often enough its easier to talk yourself out of action than it is to get up and try again - stuckness.

i spent a month last summer locked in the house curtains closed, not really eating, just thinking around in circles, not talking about it, trying to figure out a solution to my particular set of life's random things that had crash landed on my plate - blaming others, blaming me, blaming god, getting angry, drinking, all absolutely useless exercises only cutting more into any drive i may have had to change or fix things. The only place i was going with that kind of process was to hopelessness city.

the joke from the universe on this one is that when present this hopeless face to the world sure enough the world sees it and starts believing it too - and that's the slippery slope to isolation and self disbelief. thoughts go along the lines that if we were good at this that or the other then things would work out - right? and if they are not working out then we had it wrong - ergo we are worthless. the vocabulary changes 'I can't' or 'if only' or 'impossible' start tripping from the tongue too frequently.

why am i talking about this? not just because I've experienced it but also because its been in the focus of my story for the last few years and understanding it is at the core of my new project understanding how to change things at a personal level.

the 2 big options people tend to take are

acceptance - a kinda negative going with the flow - people who follow this route often become bitter or angry, or paranoid that people have it in for them or that their life sucks more than most
rescue - they look for others who are going to rescue them from the situation - a particularly unpleasant example of this are the mothers who train their under 3 yr olds to beg for money on the street

no judgement here - just observing and trying to make sense - but...

my pennyworth of thoughts go back to the original statement that life is or should be fair, its not, its random, its sometimes chaos. does everyone deserve the stuff that happens - sometimes yes mostly no. life is uncertain but its also a journey - staying still is not an option.

life is short, life is uncertain, so that also means that random blessings can come too - so the third option for stuckness - ride the wave of uncertainty, don't try to figure out what went wrong or how to fix it - walk around the side, start over, do anything. something - uncertainty can help to make even the slimest of opportunities work - go for change over staying stuck every time. if there's a great big wave heading right for you, don't accept it and give up, don't look for the helicopter to rescue you, point the board to the shore and paddle like hell - life is random - best we can do is try to enjoy the ride.

T.I.A

2012-01-06T20:01:00.003Z

So I've had this TIA thing quoted @ me twice this week, as if i needed any reminding that This Is Africa! I even let one bus go today so that i could wait for the matutu with music which would come along after. In town i walked past a man with what looked like 2 heads lying on a makeshift bed in the middle of the road, with a hand written notice, which i guess was asking for money. A few moments earlier i could have been in central London in the Nairobi Java House, taking coffee with the well groomed, buzzing with the noise of end of the work week chatter - so much eye candy, even for one just enjoying the view.

At the same time about 12 inches away on the map of Africa on my wall, hundreds of #occupynigeria tweets shout out the problems in Lagos, initially over a removal of fuel subsidy which sent pump prices thru the roof over new year, but which seems to have turned into a general grievancece over everything - i don't know enough to know whats justified or not, but i can see the evidence of a people wanting and needing to be heard, and i wonder if the fuel of social networking will fan this into something dangerous - i would hope that lessons have been learned on that one and that listening and responding to the people is the sensible move.
now if i didn't know where i was i could still tell just from being online; faith, belief, God, so openly talked about here, its actually a refreshing change, a pretty taboo subject in many circles in the UK, i like it, i like the openness of it, its not like an embarrassing stain on your shirt you try to cover up, i am not by that passing any judgement over one continent being more godly than other - just commenting on the expression of it.

I'm learning to navigate my way around the city via the skyline, though when someone asked me if i needed help today - out of politeness i just said the name of the road i was aiming for even though i was pretty happy to find it by myself - this later turned into an unwanted escort, commentary and 200 yds later a request for cash for the unwanted assistance, i had a choice in my pocket of a 50 bob note or 1000, so i offered the lower of course, flatly rejected it was! This Is definitely Africa.

geek central

2012-01-05T06:57:00.000Z

Nairobi's secret is out, with about a dozen articles in as many days from all over the world, it's claiming fame as geek central for east Africa. Geek is the new KE sheek, there are not quite budding techpreneurs on every street corner yet but for sure the vibe is there.
It seems that the success of mobile money (m-pesa) has a lot to do with putting kenya on tech investor radar, but it doesn't look like $millions are going to be made anytime soon in traditional online offerings - confidence in online purchasing is low here and businesses are being slow to migrate to web even for promo - but - mobile is a big part of everyday life. The future here is not about web but mobile web.

i came here to muster up interest for my start up 'for benefit' organisation ubuni CIC - enabling social change in Africa through mobile learning - I'd researched the mobile stats, checked the temperature in the aid/development sector, but have been surprised by the multitude of techcreatives carving out their niches here. There's a proper cross pollinating huddle of them in ngong road, iHub, nailab, m:lab - and not many girls i have to say (although geek groupies could do worse than get an iHub membership or hang in the restaurant on the ground floor). There's also a new big shared space opening in the same area late January by HumanIPO which has already attracted the Danish/Kenyan accelerator 88mph with its 6 start-ups.

2012 could be interesting.

please feel free to post links to your Nairobi web and mobile projects below - and the people i have missed.

in nairobi

2011-12-11T13:25:00.001Z

So i have been in Nairobi for just over a week, feels like a lot longer. Haven't managed to do as much on http://www.ubuni.org/ as i had hoped, turns out so many practical things needed doing, but actually sorta good research. Got myself a mobile money account yesterday so that i could pay for my electricity which had been beeping at me the last few days. An ID check, a couple of sms's, deposit some money and i can send money, pay bills, whatever - pretty simple - why doesnt everyone have this? The not so interesting bit about the pay for electricity by mobile phone is that in finding out how to do it, i read the pricing document - its an energy saving by brute force thing - first 50 units (economical consumption by 1/2 people per month) is priced a 2 k.shillings per unit but the more you use the more you pay per unit and it seems to quickly get up to nearly 10 times the starting price! It's scary what the bill would get to with a family in a largish apartment - no wonder everyone is using gas bottles for cooking!
Anyone that knows me knows i don't like shopping, but with an empty apartment i had no choice - an eye-opener - Kenya's are paying relatively highly for most things. I paid nearly 50p (UK for an orange today - in a supermarket so not hyped) - were sort of used to that pricing in the UK but the wages here are significantly lower. Soap, buckets, kettle - household things not far off UK prices, furniture significantly more (well more than Ikea anyway).
Not wanting to opt for expensive plastic furnishings I found a funnier alternative - the local carpenters have an outside workshop, piled high with broken bits, old signs and waste wood - so while they were busy making new bits of furntiure for locals i got them to recycle a door into a table and a sign into two seats - did my own sanding (didnt want it looking like new!) - they didnt really get it - but i'm very happy and much fun was had by all and it was supa cheap - maybe i can start a new trend for recycled (very distressed) furniture in Nairobi.
Everytime i go out i am followed by lots of kids, all asking for money for food, pretty hard to refuse, but i try to keep my eye on the big picture, my money better spent on the project, which should help in a different way.
Nairobi's about a mile above sea level, so while it gets hot in the day, cos now is their summer, it can get a bit colder at night. The rain, i had which made everywhere so muddy when i came seems to have stopped and now everything is covered in this dust, and there's always one million people on the streets day and night.
photos to follow as soon as i fix my camera

uLearning for change in africa

2011-11-21T19:24:00.001Z

Its been a convoluted journey to here - from my cute little bar on phi phi island where Tommy Moto came to play his music; which led via a twisty path to recording with a Thai band Rajahsie-i in Bangkok and a UK recording deal. Bizarre circumstances, which its not proper to go into here led to the Thai band dropping out and me going it alone to Nairobi earlier this year. Was only meant to be a stop over, but ended up a few months and Africa got under my skin. Although things didnt work out as planned a bigger music and elearning project sort of crept out of the debris - but turns out i wasnt thinking big enough and after meeting with Bitange Ndemo Kenya ministry for Information and Communications ubuni.org was born.
for me its like - why didnt i think of it before? Its like my life was working up to this point, the crazy blend of mobile software, teaching, eLearning, occupational psychology, business and entrepreneurial tendancies all seem to have been heading here.
But its just the beginning - its big, scary big, pushing water uphill big. But is not about me, its a project with space and need for many experts, its a project that's so obvious, why didnt anyone think about it before?
So the first phase - setting things up - joining all the social network and promo dots - collecting up the talent, putting the flesh on the bones, hopefully tracking down some funds.
Second phase - proper website launch, hopefully we'll get someone to offer design and branding - my homemade versions are workable not professional. deliver some courses - have a few nice ideas what the first ones might be (note to self to set up the ubuni blog and post those ideas on there) and errr onwards and upwards from there.
if you'd like to see what its about http://www.ubuni.org/ - and you can use one of the contact forms on the site to email and let me know if you have something to say about this - comments always appreciated, help always welcome - well its the end goal thats important - no - using learning to reduce impact of things like poverty, occupational hopelessness and malnutrition.
"As we let our own light shine we unconciously give other people permission to do the same."
Thanks for reading - the story continues...

change

2011-11-01T10:17:00.000Z

If the research and case studies in Chip and Dan Heaths book ‘switch’ is anything to go by, then some elearning projects are doomed before they start.

So many clients want an animated or interactive version of content notes, revamped PowerPoint-like travel through a story and this may be appropriate if the content is information, stuff to learn. But if the purpose of the training is to change behaviour, then its unlikely to be effective.

The Heaths reference Jonathan Haidt’s model from ‘The happiness hyposthesis’, which says our emotional side is an elephant and our rational side is the rider on top of the elephant. Their book nicely documents, through some amazing examples pulled from industry, finance, aidwork, and personal examples how hard changes are made easier by processes of

Directing the Rider

Motivating the Elephant

Shaping the Path

By use of starting scripts for the rider (small easy things to follow to get started), motivational destination postcards for the elephant (what the future will look and feel like) and then opening up the path to make the change easier (looking for bright spots where things are working , to emulate them)

I read this book following ‘Sway’ Ori & Rom Brafman and what I like about the Heaths take on what appear to be similar irrationalities in behaviour that the Brahman's document is that the use this as a starting point as say okay that’s what we’ve got now how to we work with it.

What this research is highlighting to me is that its very surprising how any elearning done in a traditional ID template form is working at all for any training that had a topic of organizational behaviour change (eg health and safety training), cultural change (eg environmental awareness), or even some personal skills training where changing attitudes is key. In those typical ID templates, we may be appealing to the rational analytical rider but we’re unlikely to be providing the motivational aspirational goals at an emotional level sufficient to move the elephant or doing anything about shaping the path.

From my perspective I think the biggest change required is client education, would they go to a doctor and tell him how they are going to be treated? How in these hard financial times do you say to a client who wants his PowerPoint slides and SME notes turned into an interactive online slide show, that it wont work but we can do the training another way, its going to be less easier for you to understand but it will work better. Are they going to buy that or just walk to another company who will give them what they’ve asked for?

I even have the feeling that if I mentioned these kinda things up front in the running for some ID freelance work, they could well panic and say ‘too scary’ we’ve got a maverick here!

How bad are we when we are anonymous?

2011-11-01T10:09:00.003Z

Three things during the last few days have highlighted this black side to human nature.

Derren Brown in his show “the experiments’ on TV last week, demonstrated powerfully how an audience can be wholly cruel to another person and be whipped up into some group frenzy of fun at the expense of making the life of another individual hell. They were given choices throughout the show to make nice or nasty things happen to an unwitting victim, starting with fairly small things and building up in the end where they could have him mugged or given a 10,000 prize. The audience at this point we’re not in somber mood seriously considering his worthiness for more trickery, but laughing, merry, vocal, cheering, egging each other on. In a startling twist, the audience watched the victim being run-over while the last choice was playing out. This last 3 minutes was the only set-up in the show, but a point was made, how far would people go egged on by each other in the name of fun?

Secondly the cruel twitter comments by fans of Xfactor about one of the girl band, calling her fat – causing her to cry on camera. I’m puzzled - what can justify such hurtful comments, what makes people think it’s okay? Is it that blessed anonymity again? One of a crowd – other people are saying things so I can too? Puzzling - are our morals and ethics so weak these days that we can lose them under such small peer pressure – are we really just sheep? Why is this happening?

My third, tripadvisor, being covered in a documentary on Monday, reminds me of the issues I had with them in Thailand. They offer wonderful anonymity to their reviewers (the general public) but none at all to the businesses. Reviewers are rewarded for their reviews, but businesses have to pay to get much control over their pages. A business cannot even take itself off the website if it wants to! The success of their website is based on clicks, so the premise being that anything that will generate a click is okay – bad comment more than good of course will generate clicks – people always want to read the sensational. Tripadvisor has moderators, who censor which posts get through and which don’t, I have evidence from Thailand that all good posts don’t go through, but bad ones do. Tripadvisor not the reviewers are in charge of which businesses end up with good reviews or not – so way off its spec. But again we see this acceptance of criticism, of bad comment of hurtful comment, here we see it sanctioned over and over, not only by it being the style of choice for the site but also condoned by the site itself, scathing unproven criticism being allowed through the moderation process, and tripadvisor will not retract defamatory comments about individual people within the reviews. Thus allowing and rewarding reviewers for being just downright nasty.

So what have we come to, where is human kindness, compassion, positivity gone, have we somehow moved into a world where we only want to use the freedom born out of anonymity for doing ill not good.

What’s the answer www.customerreview.com www.tasteof yourownmedicine.com ?

lessons on cracking the eLearn nut

2011-09-28T17:00:00.001+01:00

If you read the text books, eLearning should have overtaken more traditional classroom methods for business years ago. The case is strong, elearning winning on scalability, conformity, flexibility and cost to name but a few. The technology has moved on in the 10 years i've been working in the sector, and there are no longer huge technical barriers to participants, plus adults all over the world are getting more used to doing many things on the web. Instructional design and online learning - lots of research, lots of good brains, lots of theories. So, why are the results, in terms of participants' and organisations judgements of the experience often so lack-lustre? Why are orgnaisations still needing to see proof?

I've been reading - real paperback - not online! It seems that some pysychology reseach about relationsships (of all kinds) might hint at some of the reasons.
"Click: The Power of Instant Connections: The Magic of Instant Connections" Ori & Rom Brafman
They talk about 'clicking' describing how those magic connections work - deconstructing it with fascinating often anti-intuitive examples.

Dan Ariely gives a different but similar perspective too in his book 'Upside of Irrationality"
In particular this chapter on the lessons to be learned from online dating:

Just to pull these threads together - if people are enjoying social networks, googling, shopping online, movies, games etc. then we have something fundamentally wrong with the way we are presenting online learning, if they are not enjoying it and queuing up for more. I suspect it's more to do with the things these guys above are talking about than it is to do with learning theory. We need to make the magic happen - get in the zone, click. To a large extent it's got a lot to do with our obsession with data getting in the way - gettting participants to divuluge all sorts of attributes, like age, jobs, qualitications etc etc - these are often the first on ongoping strong aspects of a course - our need to quantify. But its the factual, thats probably tripping it up. we are prohibiting engagement on a 'magic' level. The level of enjoyment, of dopamine! We are not playing in the way we are made - where's that engagement going to come from if we are not exposed to any of the 'click accelerators' so brilliantly identified by the brafman bros: proximity of others, similarity, environment, vunerability. Dan Ariely also talked about how just changing in a very small way the way a group interacted online, making it more simialr to 'real life' meetings, changed the way connections were made. So - is this relevant to non-social eLearning - one person in front of a computer - well it turns out it probably is - the Brafman brothers found these instincts are so deeply ingrained, that they also work with human machine interaction, even when there is no attempt to make the machine take on an identiy.

So lets get touch feely - lets build 'magic' in.

misunderstood by a social network

2011-09-25T10:09:00.001+01:00

I like change, and have to say most of the developments so far in Facebook have been on point, that is, until this last one.

Unlike other platforms Facebook has always appeared to be more driven by end user need that techiness. however this latest set of changes seem to have been driven by a very techie approach of we-can-do-it-so-we-will! they seem to have misunderstood a key reason why it became so popular, something i called easily controlled sociability. now they've replaced it with something that the comfortable control of your exposure needs some in-depth tweaking to achieve. more options does not mean better.

Everyone knew what a status update was, people didn't want to use them in a million different ways to include /exclude various people - they either posted or they didn't knowing exactly what it meant. there was a sort of honesty and openness in that which was refreshing and encouraged openness and was embraced by many.

The latest moves however are mirroring something like a school disco kinda sociability, clique-iness, whispering, voyeurism.

Whether it was done by accident or by choice the earlier iterations were actually sort of more grown up, i guess why so many people felt comfy enough to belong. These latest changes show a disregard for the complexity of human sociability, does it mean that it was by accident they appeared to understand our needs before?

...and by the way there's a growing number of fb users, using it for work in one way or another, so privacy issues like open stream on the rhs, not funny at all.

So with these new changes - they are trying to encourage what exactly?

Learning in the adult world

2011-09-06T16:36:00.002+01:00

In the past i think we've been too compartmentalist and thought that when it comes to professional training we humans behave differently than we do in the 'real' world, when actually we all know that's not true.
Unless we have a huge passion for something, the default attitude towards learning tends to be on a needs must basis (well actually maybe a grudging 'if i have to then I'll try a bit'). In fact if you think about it we have more incentive, even if its begrudging, to learn how to be a better partner than we do for learning a new work practise or skill (and we all know how challenging that kind of learning is).
So for those of us in the professional training sector, making our living out of handling learning, how do we work around that. My feeling is that we don't; we accept it. If we accept 'relunctant learner' as the default, aren't we just going to improve the learner environment, hone down the content, make it more engaging, not expect so much - with that balanced against 'no change' in objectives doesn't it push eLearning to do better?

peace love and happiness

2010-12-21T17:26:00.001Z

Peace is not something that comes with soft words and sentiment

peace is something to fight for
but not with war
peace inside comes from inner battles, faced, fought and won
peace in the world will come from the peace Warriors

Love - a word too easily used

Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclined. Lawless, winged, and unconfined, and breaks all chains from every mind. William Shakespeare

Happiness - an elusive buggar!
it's twin is sadness, they grow together
without great sorrow how can you know great joy.

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. Victor Hugo

Be a Warrior for peace, love till your heart bursts and embrace your trials and sorrows so that your heart can know true joy.

hotel review websites: abuse of freedom of speech?

2010-12-07T07:48:00.000Z

I always thought before i became involved in the industry that public opinion was a good thing to be aired - freedom of speech and all.
My opinion has changed - where i work i sit and see people checking in and out of a resort on a tiny Thai tropical island. A good 90% of those who complain actually had no idea where they were coming, know nothing about Thai culture, have hugely unrealistic expectations based on 'dreams' rather than facts.
One read of the opening paragraph about the island in Lonely Planet would put that straight - give people some realistic ideas about what to expect.
It seems that a good percentage, if not the majority, of tourists only post reviews to vent or to retaliate for 'not getting their way' at the time. Those who were happy, had a good time, just spend the time more profitably posting their holiday snaps onto facebook or flickr.
So - whats the point of these review websites? Do people really want to base their holiday plans on the words of people who didn't know how to have a good time or who show their ignorance of localities & cultures by having unrealistic expectations - is this a wise way to choose a holiday?
Is it really legal to let defamatory or slanderous comments get posted without any comeback. Tourists can hide under anonymity of their posting where resorts/hotels/guesthouses/staff cannot - is this fair? Are these booking websites really within the law to allow unmoderated/unsubstantiated/unchallengable comments - when the 'free press' are not allowed the same privilege!
Just to give a couple of examples:

complaint at a 3star resort went along the lines of wanting a free upgrade because they booked a 5 star
Mother complaining about mosquito's on the island - and why didn't someone tell her?

Is the answer to this unhelpful practise to have websites where hotels can complain about difficult or angry customers ? i hope not.
someone has to sort this out.
In a conversation with one of these sites, they utterly refused to remove an openly slanderous comment - using the phrase - our customers value the reviews on our website - is this a reason to be lax with responsibility/legalities - are we entering a new age of say what you want consequences be damned?'.
Where does it go from here?

Where are the virtual 'A teams'?

2010-10-17T09:13:00.000+01:00

When we networked in physical spaces we were more easily able to share projects, put together adhoc teams, invite each other into contracts. The weird thing is that in virtual spaces all of these things are so much easier to handle efficiently but actually how many projects/contracts do we actually network virtually or put together virtually or work on virtually? I've worked more than 10 years remotely/virtually but i've never been polled by a fellow contractor to share in a contract or project - its always been top-down never peer to peer.
In contrast when i've worked in physical spaces i am often asked - can i do this or that, help with this or that other outside project. Sometimes tiny shared jobs others bigger projects. Selected for one skill or another and because colleagues know you'll be good at that part of the project or think you'll mix n match well with their skills.
The thing that sparked off this thought today was a job ad for a contract database specialist - which appeared to be a key role in a larger 'government funded' contract which appeared to have a significant information systems aspect. So what happened?
So where are the virtual teams of people who have worked together before - why aren't they putting together adhoc virtual 'A teams' to win contracts? So that all the key people are there to begin with????
Is it us - are contractors loners - do we talk the talk of networking but not do the walk? Or is it 'the system'? or is it something else that's going on....???

Foursquare - quadriplegic?

2010-10-10T07:34:00.000+01:00

So I've given it chances now over the last few months maybe its me and I'm just not getting it? but...

the addresses thing doesn't work - if it doesn't recognise an address it pops up a message in red and then its a dead-end - assuming i have typed something wrong rather than it not knowing and so not letting me proceed.
i look after several venues and there's no where for me to manage these simply
the verification for venues outside the US is just shoddy and inefficient.
waiting for venue validation for months, & the system doesn't update the status to show verification pending - just same form each time.
info missing (which i know I've entered for a location) so i think the tagging outside US is not working correctly
link to google maps is loose - ie. no connection back to update location
cannot add logo's to venues i manage even though i can post offers - guess this is because its not verified.
Venues I've added do not turn up in the search for that location, guess this is another tagging issue

i want to use it, I want it to work, its a nice idea, but the reality (for Asia) its actually rubbish and its trying my patience. If someone can tell me all these things are me getting it wrong I'd be a happy bunny.

Part 1 - Motives or Subplots?

2010-08-26T07:50:00.000+01:00

As promised.. the first in my series on small business and social media

Part 1 - Motives or Subplots?

So you run a small/medium sized business and people are telling you that you need to engage in social media? but these are not your motives - right?

If you don't have lots of time to spare or can't afford to pay a SM expert your first step should be to decide on YOUR motives - that's gonna determine where you put the effort.

3 motives for dipping your toes into the SM:

to reduce your AdWords spend or other funded campaigns or to get more/better results from the same spend
to build or maintain your brand
drive sales

First some self-analysis - is your business a square peg in a round hole? Dogan Dogs has something to say about the Psychology of Business in Social Media

Your next step is definitely to decide what it is you want to achieve from any SM activity, otherwise you could just end up sitting in front of tweetdeck until the small hours reading and commenting on really interesting tweets but be too tired to get up and run your business the next day.

What SM engagement for a business is not about:

getting your customers to be social. They already are!
selling through social networks - you can do that but its not SM is just another sales channel
recreating your website as a facebook, blog or twitter page.

So lets look at a real life analogy. You're walking down your high street and there's someone stopping people in the street

Which of these would you give up some of your time for and which would you avoid

to answer some survey questions
listen to a sales spiel
take a promo leaflet from them for some business or other
a funny demo of a product or skill
an interesting chat with no subplot or agenda

Okay, so i hope you get the picture, social engagement of your business with the world may be motivated by deeper business objectives but at the end of the day its about being social.

Part 2 follows soon (What's your social USP?)

Great britain?

2010-07-30T12:53:00.000+01:00

I've recently been back in the UK for a while and have come to the conclusion that the work/financial climate really is as bad I thought it was. There have been very few positive conversations/stories around the topics of work or money. What I love though is the great Bristish resolve - a mind to overcome, to conquer, to survive it all whatever. People are getting ingenious & creative - but in a consumerised society don't always know how to do stuff for free. We've been conditioned to 'pay the expert', 'buy-in the professional', get the right 'kit' - whether it's a company to print the business cards or someone to set-up a website - these become unnecessary obstacles fueled by the statements 'I don't have the money to do....' or 'I can't do this myself I don't understand it...'. Then there's the whole thing about self promotion vs waiting to be discovered - too many reality television shows I think make people veer towards the latter.
We are GREAT britains - but we've lost sight of it I think, lost the notion that 1 person can overcome obstacles single handed and make a difference. That we can still do stuff with very little money if there is enough passion - no - I'm not saying it's easy - because I think the opposite is true, I think we have lost as a country the mood and environment which nurtures creativity and entrepreneurial activity and often for those who get past the starting line, end up a year later in frustration city with zero support on any level.
Anyway - I'll get off my soap box for a moment - and say what I'd like to do about it.
I'd like to think some of the things that I know about promoting yourself/your business on the web might be useful to others - so in the spirit of making stuff available for free and of good blogging - I'm going to start a little series of posts with a 'how to promote yourself on the web for free' agenda. Hope others might follow suit with their bits of knowledge of use to the men and women with vision and passion out there - the ones who just need a little bit more expertise for free to make Britain great again!

twLearning - collection of links - using twitter for learning & teaching

2010-06-12T11:46:00.001+01:00

not so much a post as an aide memoire for me on uses of twitter for teaching and learning.

T Barrett - twitter a teaching and learning tool some good thoughts on how to build your own network

Collection of links from Judy O'Connell

Steve Wheeler on teaching with twitter which has lots of other interesting links

Top 100 tools for learning list by C4LPT

will add more as i find them - suggestions also welcome

the future - is it already here?

2010-06-11T07:37:00.001+01:00

This week i've stumbled on stuff thats blown me away. Stuff that makes 3D gaming consoles look like old school. Here's my pick of the inspirational stuff I've been watching and reading this week. read on....

John Underkoffler on the future of the UI (He was the guy behind the UI in Minority Report - yes it was real!)

Then there was Dave Merrill also on TED talking about siftables - how cute are these!

The website for these brainy guys making games with a new siftables UI

Liking twitter

2010-06-01T17:08:00.002+01:00

I had resisted yet another time guzzler, until it became obvious a couple of weeks ago that if i was taking SEO seriously then i should be tweeting. I couldn't see anything in the 'following' thing other than to claim prospective followers for my tweets - but i now find i have to eat my words...
I'm living on a tiny island where conversation, sorry interesting conversation, is very hard to come by and I've sort of learned to live with that, but I'm still hungry for the content it usually brings.
A couple of weeks into twittering and i get it.
Lots of rubbish, especially from my initial picks of who to follow (gleaned from searches) but also so many people sharing good stuff and i find myself feeling like I'm back in the loop of whats happening 'out there' off my island.
Now I'm stealing from other peoples 'following' lists, finding someone interesting and looking at who they are following - seems to work very well in the eLearn sector, (maybe cos we're all a bit too much online?).
It's not that twitter is providing more content than blogs - it's not! Its just that it's so much easier to scan lots of tweets in one place rather than surfing through blog pages and the re-tweets mean that the network expands so easily and naturally outside my known connections.
I don't find its taking up much time either, just means that off task moments i spend online are now more interesting, more content rich and more of the minute and focused on my areas of interest.
I guess i might hold different opinions a couple of months in, but for now it's surprisingly good. Tweet Tweet

mobiles and learning

2010-05-29T06:56:00.000+01:00

Around 10 years ago the BBC started bitesize - eLearning website with a modus operandi of covering the curriculum in bitesize chunks, kids swarmed to it - it answered their perpetual question 'tell us what we need to know 'quickly'. Times have changed and technology has changed and everything now is about smaller and smaller chunks delivered faster to anywhere. SMS, twitter... Should the argument about allowing students to use these in school be changed ? to "how can we as pedogogic experts harness these technologies for learning?". Yes, i get that dividing learning into 140 character chunks is probably too simplistic but we use more strategies as teacher than pure delivery. Aren't there other ways to use these tools for the good? There are lots of fine examples out there already.

Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! | Video on TED.com

2010-05-27T06:13:00.000+01:00

One of the most inspiring (and funny) talks I've heard in a long long time, about learning and how the future of education needs to be shaped.
Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! | Video on TED.com

Saving time by spending time automating

2010-05-23T13:17:00.000+01:00

Updating blogs, tweets and facebook pages for more than one business, all that logging in and logging out, starts to get confusing and its hard to keep up. Making sure that a blog post gets tweeted for maxiumum effect, making sure that the Facebook page has outgoing links to the other social media... etc etc - anyone thats promoting more than one site will know exactly what i mean.

So i've automated some of it using some tools. I tried out quite a few but here are the top 3 of the ones I ened up using:

Tweet3 for sending tweets from multiple twitter accounts from one simple deck
Twitterfeed for automatically tweeting when i post a blog. Feeds from different blogs to different twitter accounts were quick to set-up and then it all happens automatically
Selective Tweets FB App for sending tweets from seperate accounts to seperate facebook pages - this did the job in a few minutes and works like a treat. There doesn't appear to be a webpage but you can find it inside FB

Hope its useful to someone else out there doing the same sorts of things

Interesting SEO discovery

2010-05-22T08:14:00.000+01:00

I was fiddling with google webmaster tools and they've changed a few things recently which solved a puzzle i've had for a while. On Phi Phi Villa Resort website i had been puzzled as to why the swimming pool gallery page had been figuring high on all the searches, even ones where it would seem inappropriate; in fact the main pics that were showing up were ones of a staff party and i had buried this link fairly deep because it was mainly for staff viewing. Phi Phi Villa Resort has one of those listings that shows key pages under the main link in google searches and i had to adjust the settings so this link didn't show - but I was still puzzled about why it appeared there. Anyways... the new version of the google webmaster tools has more info and it turns out that Jalbum is the culprit. This turns out to be a happy accident because what it does mean is that Jalbum links are obviously figuring as high value and being counted as good inbound links. so new strategy starts today - more Jalbums!

T-wit T-woo

2010-05-16T06:04:00.000+01:00

Spent the last few days adding a another level of social media to all my sites and finding ways to manage this simply. What with tweets, buzz, digg & delicious and all the interconnections between them and my sites, looking for buttons and management tools, quite a headspin to keep track of it all.
Of course i drifted at points and ended up surfing; at first all the @'s & #'s and tiny unreadable URLS and coded shortened messages of twitter were a turn off and more easy to ignore than get engaged in. But yesterday evening after i got another message from the UK embassy about the BKK situtation - i followed their link and found myself in twitter zone once more because somone had posted a blog message with suggestions on who to follow on twitter the for latest situation updates - fascinating. There was one guy, @vaitor, training at BKK Uni in journalism - who's been out there in all of it, tweeting from his mobile phone just a few feet from the action, he's made it to CNN with video clips, has some 'front page' pictures posted on his blog and a gunshot wound for his trouble. There were others too, people with up to the minute info, what was happening where, people with local understanding, and suddenly the power of this new social media started to make sense: timely messages collated by # tags into a knowledge stream, giving perspective, linking to other media, blog posts, video on YouTube, webpages, photos - suddenly it was dynmaic news as it was happening. Okay, i know you have to apply some sensible critisism to the sources, there is no anlaysis/synthesis/verification/validation like a TV broadcast, but hey - in the case of BKK most of what has been reported outside of Thailand is based on trivial understanding of the issues - so for me this was better.

Welcome to my blog

2010-05-14T13:39:00.000+01:00

It's not like i don't have enough things to write each day - but... now its a business tool - this social media - drop out at your peril!
I'm just waiting for someone clever to create a single online interface which handles all the tweets, blog posts, facebook page updates, digg, delicious bookmarks etc etc that i need to maintain everyday for myself & clients. The content part i see the point of but logging in and out under different usernames & navigating through all these apps is sooooo time consuming and hard to keep track - find myself thinking - did i tweet today for 'x'? and have to check again.