Wordlings in a web 2.0 world | Carolyne Lee

It's easy for business people to be dragged into managerial speak. The jargon of an industry sucks us in to talking in the lingo of our "ist". But all too often it's a language that becomes, as Carolyne Lee, describes it, "turgid". Words and phrases are emptied of meaning. Passion vanishes, swallowed by the carefully measured, lawyer-friendly, litigation-safe press release.

In Wordlings in a Web 2.0 World, Lee proposes that "word bytes" are memorable. They're loaded with meaning and full of colour and life. They build images of subjects and events, ones that come to life and create emotion.

When I read Lee's high praise for short, cleverly-crafted, meaning dense poetry I can't help but reflect on the critisism heaped on Twitter by the uninformed and the intellectual alike. Twitter forces the writer to create meaning despite brevity. It is this Zen-like brevity which demands creativity, enforces discipline and has the potential to produce lasting word bytes.

Lee's article is one that encourages me to write from the heart and to write with passion and soul. It urges me to write with brevity and purpose and to expose my humanity and imperfections.

Be it known, it's official

I graduated last night.

 

 I'm a bit chuffed.

My honours thesis

If you want to read my honours thesis you can find it here.

Starting Your First Blog? 29 Tips, Tutorials and Resources for New Bloggers | Problogger

Darren's post contains a range of resources about getting started as a blogger. Tip Top.

What is FriendFeed?

What is FriendFeed?: "FriendFeed is a web service that allows you to add all your updates from social media websites, social networks, blogs and social bookmarking and micro-blogging services into one place, along with the more common feed types like RSS and Atom."

On being fascinated by Superbowl advertising

The US Superbowl has just finished for another year. It's a big event by any stretch of the imagination, one that's designed for TV and that is used by marketers to launch big budget advertising campaigns designed to get sales flowing.

From a marketer's viewpoint advertising during the Superbowl is understandable. A chance to reach a huge national audience with the use of a cleverly conceived advertisement is an opportunity not to be overlooked quickly. But these are matters of only passing interest here.

On Twitter this morning (I'm in Australia) I noticed something quite unexpected. It came as no shock to me to see people tweeting about touchdowns and timeouts and all else that happens in American Football. But what caught me out was the amount of people who seemed fascinated by the TV ads appearing for the first time during the breaks in the on-field action.

Some urged their followers to vote for their favourite Superbowl ad on sites that had sections dedicated to just that - Superbowl ads. Others provided links to sites that contained video re-runs and still others were either critical or complimentary of the advertisements displayed.

Hashtags.org (as of the writing of this post) reported that on Febraury 1 and 2, the hashtags #superads09 and #superbowlads were tweeted 3352 and 2778 times respectively. The hashtag #superbowl was tweeted 8288.

So why the fascination with advertising during the Superbowl? In a time when people are supposedly time poor and when advertising is seen as an imposition on our time, why is Superbowl advertising of so much interest to the population of Twitter? What does this fascination say about our culture and our society?

I propose the fascination comes from a desperate urge to escape. Advertising promises an escape from the harsh unreality of the meaningless of modern life, an escape to something that can only be achieved through consumption. If we buy this product we are sure to feel better, look better, do better. Our salvation and emancipation is directly connected with consumption.

Our consumption provides us with a tentative social existence and gives us an opportunity to reveal ourselves to society. Advertising during the Superbowl provides us with a suite of possibilities about who we might become through future consumption. When ads resonate they give us hope that the future might be better. When they disappoint they do so because they fail to provide that hope; hope for an escape from an almost unbearable world.

Fascination with advertising then is no more and no less than a fascination with all of the other artifices of consumerism. Whether it be advertising or wrapping or product design, each promises something that's missing. Each promises escape. And each is essentially empty.

Just like capitalism.

HTML Entities

The following is from w3schools.com and is useful for adding text into an HTML page that would normally be reserved for an HTML tag.

HTML Entities: "Some characters are reserved in HTML. For example, you cannot use the greater than or less than signs within your text because the browser could mistake them for markup.

If we want the browser to actually display these characters we must insert character entities in the HTML source.

A character entity looks like this: &entity_name; OR &#entity_number;

To display a less than sign we must write: < or <

The advantage of using an entity name instead of a number is that the name often is easier to remember. However, the disadvantage is that browsers may not support all entity names (while the support for entity numbers is very good)."