If that’s true then my MBP is waiting for me in Switzerland but I’m stuck in London for another week before i can go back and get it. Tonight I’ll find out whether a note was left by the delivery company and soon I’ll start up the computer for the first time.
I’m looking forward to that. Once it’s home it’s home and the suspense is no longer there.
Last night Hill & Knowlton organised a Social Media club event in central London to discuss a number of aspects surrounding blogging, marketing and PR. The Event started with a quick introduction to how certain bloggers have voiced their intense dislike of being pitched to by PR companies whilst others are more relaxed about the whole thing.
A number of conversations took place as sub groups were split to discuss specific topics. The group I was in discussed Pull factors and how to encourage them to come to see your message, how to generate interest and take advantage of the social media and what they’re good at. A few case examples were given and discussed by this group. People from a variety of PR firms joined in the conversation.
Two key things that were talked about in the debrief to the whole group found that no one knows how to deal with the social media and that at this moment in time it is about experimentation to find what is most effective and with whom. Blogging and social media were seen as a hard thing to quantify because conversations don’t have any concrete measurable effects until later. This led on to the point that at this moment in time it’s a challenge to value how you are attempting to raise awareness of what the company would like people to know about.
It was an interesting event and i hope to go many more of this type.
I am old enough to remember a teacher writing on a board or piece of plastic for an overhead projector. “Why don’t you just give us photocopies of what you’re writing instead of asking us to copy down what you’re writing. “Because you will remember it better if you write it down.”
At the time this seemed stupid and a waste of time. Years later I think that we could have been taught to take summarised notes rather than literal notes but that isn’t the point. The point is that learning is as much about writing as it is about understanding the material Every day for weeks in a row I have taken the time to write a 300 word post and it’s difficult. Not only do you need to come up with an idea but you need to develop it into something that is at least three hundred words long.
In my opinion chatGPT is going to lower the quality of people’s ability to write, by doing the writing for them. The process in and of itself is the learning experience. You don’t learn by typing a term in a search engine and reading. You learn by thinking of something, and then putting it into words. You learn by trying to write, finding that you have knowledge gaps, and then reading more, before returning to the document you are working on.
The notion that you can get AI to write essays. academic papers, articles and more, is destructive.It is destructive because writing is a skill that is learned through practice. Writing requires us to learn how to think, elaborate, and then make clear. Writing is about elaborating ideas, and rewriting, to make those ideas clear to understand.
Writing is a conversation that you can have with yourself. There is a lot to be gained by writing, rather than getting AI to write.
I love technology, and I love when it can replace boring repetitive tasks, such as entering data into a database and more. I like when it takes data from a form, and places it into a database.
What I hate about tech like chatGPT is that it is designed to replace human beings with artificial intellgence. It is about generating revenue for shareholders, without thinking of the humanity that is lost by doing away with human writers.
One of the reasons I don’t like YouTube, blog farms, Buzzfeed and other sources of “news” is that they have clickbait headlines and rubbish content. We need humans to write content that we read because human written articles are personal. AI is cold.
Recently tech giants, that doubled their profits from one year to the next, with billions of dollars in cash, or at least savings, fired thousands of people, not because they were running out of cash, or struggling to survive, but because they had to maximise profit, not for the human staff, but for the shareholders.
It didn’t end there. Even the execs are taking pay cuts. We live in an age where companies are making billions, or even trillions in profit, and yet the money only flows one way. If a company is profitable it should be investing in staff, giving them better conditions and making sure they stay.
Instead companies are making record profits, to pay dividends, rather than staff.
We are living in affluent times, but the wealthy benefit whilst the rest of society lives in insecurity. That’s why technology like chatGPT worries me. We live in an age of enormous wealth, but it is being funnelled out of society, into offshore accounts, never to be seen again.
Remember “The medium is the message” and “The manufacturing of consent”. If AI, rather than individuals write what we read, then those who control the technology control how we think. Read Mindf*ck and look at how FaceBook played with our emotions. Look at who has bought into chatGPT and you will see why I do not like or trust this technology.
I love tech, when it is developed and controlled by moral, rather than corrupt people.
Facebook and friendfeed are now the same thing. They both provide exactly the same thing but for different audiences. Facebook is a network of real friends, where you share everything with those that count on you as a friend. That’s where you get party pictures, relationship statuses and more. Friendfeed is where you go to get world news, current affairs and industry information from people you have yet to meet.
Both of them now allow you to filter your information by groups or lists. I for one have two twitter lists in Facebook, twitter friends I’ve already met and had a good time with, and a second twitter stream where it’s twitter friends I have yet to meet. That’s where I can follow those of you whom I have unfollowed on the real twitter, for lack of proper interaction.
On friendfeed I have a twitter stream as well, but this is raw, I can still react to your twitter stream by selecting to comment straight into the twitter stream or by proxy through comments in friendfeed. In part this evolves according to how willing you are to adopt the friendfeed lifestyle.
I’ve been thinking of friendfeed and how friends in news could use it. I spent four hours at work, off the clock, chatting with someone that works in news, but doesn’t use google reader and speaking about how we, as individuals filter our news. Everyone does it, but most people are happy jumping from one site to another to get the information. The website that person looked at does have RSS feeds which could be aggregated into google reader and feedly.
That’s an important advantage. It means that when you’re off work, in between shifts you can still get all the news coming to you, but without using the professional systems. It means that you shape the information flow, as well as it’s speed. The more sources you add to your reader, the faster information comes in and overwhelms you, if the right filters are not in place.
Look at the social media landscape now and it’s not that busy if you’re looking for hard news but that will change as people grow more accustomed to the way the current social media types use it.
We need to shift away from the social media types to the lifestylers. I use this term to describe everyone that uses the social media, not as a promotional tool for their activities and their blog posts, but instead for the content created by others with society at large as a source of information gatherers and sharers.
How would friendfeed look if the film and television industry used it. How much more conversational would the WEF Davos room on friendfeed have been if those participating in the conference conversed here, as much as at the events. A lot of conversation is invisible because those who talk about it do so with those in the industry. What if part of that discourse came online?
Look at the BBC website for example, and how it provides three top stories today, Madagascar and the new president, Russia and it’s rearmement plan and Fritzl. If the news editors for the News agencies met on friendfeed and discussed the top three international stories how much richer would the dialogue be? How many more related stories would we find?
We can get a taste for this from Google’s news page, according to country. You can see which stories are the most written about and see how the dialogue is advancing but that’s an algorithm. It requires little time or involvement to exist. As a result recommendations may not be that interesting, or that well selected.
Imagine a top three international stories room on Friendfeed and how that would progress, as news agencies provide items for national news bulletins. You could have sub sets to that room according to regions according to treaty alliances. There could be a room where NATO encourage Europt to work closer, making Europe as an entity more powerful. You see that with recent discussions from various recent Nato events.
I watched and listened to plenary sessions taking place in Africa during the changes-challenges.org when live streams were being made available by the event organisers for greater transparency. Some sessions were on the front page of the website. As a result even if you were not invited to the event there was a certain degree of transparency, the same was true of the World Economic Forum. As part of my work I have been streaming such events and I have tried listening in, to see what people were saying.
What is a shame is that at the moment there is no diversity in these online communities. Only the earliest of the technologically adopters are participating. the conversation, as a result is boring for anyone but those hyper-engaged within these communities. I use the term hyper-engaged because in reality there is a lot of information coming in. All of that information takes time to ingest. The best way to absorb all of that information is for us to watch it in real time.
Facebook have that option now, the real time view, if I remember the term correctly, and that will help to introduce a large portion of people to what is called the “Real time web”. The real time web is best demonstrated by the real-time view on friendfeed. People are finding new sites, commenting on links and more n real time. As soon as something is added to the stream you see it. If you’ve got two or more screens then you can monitor all of this in real time. There are apps to help with the assimilation of all this information.
Of course we’re not there yet, at the moment the geekiest of the geeks are playing with it, and some have more time than others to be invested in this. It’s just that it’s so well adapted to all professions that it will be interesting to see how Friendfeed and Facebook revolutionise the way we get our information and how we react to it. What I love most is that because facebook brings that to over three hundred of my university, school and work friends we, social media types have an easier job of driving adoption to the masses.
I have 100 move day goals reached. The difficulty of this goal depends on how high you set the bar. If you set the bar at two hundred calories a day then the goal is easy to achieve. If you set the goal at 500 or 600 calories then the achievement is slightly more interesting.
I would have reached it sooner if the screen on the
I still haven’t had a perfect month. To have a perfect month I would have had to burn 550 calories every day for a month. I’d tease myself by saying that I set the goal to high but I reach it almost every day. It’s fun to set it high enough for it to be a challenge. It would be cheating if I set it lower.
Despite its simplicity these goals and medals are having a positive impact on my fitness habits. Sometimes I reach the goal by sitting very little. On days when I go for long hikes or
On other days I burn less than 200 calories over the day and I rely on the evening Zwift session to get myself over the daily goal. This habit is great. Earlier this week the CDC issued a statement that people should do any form of exercise for two and a half hours a day. They even removed the requirement for it to be in ten minute or more sessions. I exceeded this requirement by five and a half hours a week over the last four weeks.
In August the monthly challenge was to double the move goal eight times. In Octobre the challenge was to do 27 workouts in a month. In November the challenge is to move 189 kilometres. If I put the road tyre back on the rear wheel of my bike then this is an easy challenge to reach. My bike rides range between 20-50km a ride. If virtual bike rides count then I would have achieved this goal days ago. As things are we’re half way through the month and I have just 80km.
In the valley close to Champéry there is a via ferrata. Via Ferrata are routes passing on rock faces thanks to the help of metal pedals, hand and foot pedals and bridges. On this Via Ferrata you climb up vertically and horizontally depending on the moment. Some obstacles are easier to get past than others but overall it’s good fun.
One of the things you should take the time to watch, especially on a rainy day is the way the water erupts out of the rock. The first waterfall reacts to what the second waterfall higher up spews out. It’s fun to watch how much power this water has.
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