Nay Phone Latt - Burmese Blogger sentenced to 20 years

I am happy that social media picked up on Nay Phone Latt's case too! He was arrested in January for his blogging activities and recently sentenced to 20 years of prison.

The more I translate for Global Voices the more I realise the reality of freedom of speech in global socail media - and the tranquility of my own access to the web. I disagree with any unfair treatmet of bloggers and I hope Nay will be on Amnesty International's agenda soon as well. In the meantime, keep posting, as Global Voices and Commettee To Protect Bloggers did so already!

blogger interview - Andy, Look In Wonderment

Tt's been a while since I posted an interview, but I have been actually working on one - just this time I gave Andrew, the author of this blog, time to answer each question separately - so this one is a result of two weeks's worth e-mail correspondence. Enjoy!

Syl: Hi Andy, thank you for agreeing to take part in the interview! Here's the first one? When did you start blogging and why?
Andy: I started blogging in September, which marks a year from when I stopped doing science for a living. Now a I can take myself back and enjoy the best bits. I wanted to think about how how world-changing discoveries are presented and what people think when re-hashing them on the internet. Maybe later I will look at what the people who design and organise the internet can learn from the way scientists use information.

As for self-promotion, for now I will try my best not to keep my blog light-hearted, avoid inflicting it on the uninterested and talk about other things when not blogging. Maybe one day I will change the world, or at least ruffle the feathers of some of those black hole makers and frankenstein farmers.

Syl: That sounds very ambitious and I believe you can change the world! Tell me, did blogging change your life or affect it in any way so far?

Andy: I think blogging has helped me be a bit more expressive and articulate. When I'm writing a blog post I feel a real pressure to get the point across simply and in as few words as possible. The biggest plus is having something constructive to do when on the computer at home. Now I see that there are plenty of hours in the day, I just have to fight laziness. This has helped me tidy my life up and keep up with my sporting and voluntary activities.

Apart from that, no big changes, blogging's  quite one-dimensional for me at the moment. I will spawn further presences and meet people online at some point but I want to hit the sites with a bang rather than a sporadic whimper. For me this requires real-life motivating factors, until these occur I wont try to be something I'm not.

Syl: Hey, join me on Twitter then;) Seriously, do you think you will move to a different level with blogging, do you consider doing it more seriously, learning new tools or blogging for business in the future?

Andy: My attitude to tools is sometimes a bit like Michelle Greer's, that is, I want to see them applied to real-world situations before discussing them at length. I think some of the meet-ups you and Lolly have been talking about recently sound really interesting as opportunities to do just that.
see here.

I have thought about business blogging as it could be a great way to collate consultancy ideas and gain contacts. So the next question is what would my personal brand be about? My best guess at the moment is:

Managing knowledge better in business, science, and the voluntary sector.

But then how I would present that in a lively, colourful, engaging and concise form whilst "getting my butt off my computer" as Michelle puts it? I guess I could use some of the great community-built graphics programmes available on my Ubuntu desktop. As far as blogging on the move goes, I am still quite attached to my landline (I enjoy people thinking that it's their mum when I phone them) and not prepared to spend more than about £10 a month on my mobile, but maybe I could stretch to a linux tablet now wifi is getting more widespread.

As for Twitter, @strets123 signed up a few weeks back but needs to think of something suitably profound, inane or insightful for a first tweet. I'm also host a few bits on Flickr, play on last.fm and would like to try Linkedin.

Syl: Do you think about those presences as additional  to your blog? Or you just like trying them out?
Andy: Part of me joined twitter because it would be a good way to get to know other people interested in blogs. I also like the low effort involved and hickledy pickledy mixture of posts you get to read. Additionally, I think wiki tools like the cool thing you added to your blog recently could prove very useful.
Time will tell whether I will commit myself fully to other sites. It's certain that some are more equal than others, I guess I'm hoping for the market to become more mature and the way of using each site to involve fewer steps. Just like my favourite gadget, my DAB radio.

Syl: Did blogging change your life so far?

Andy: Yes! - it's been great having a window on the lives of my colleagues and fun interacting with you and others on different subjects. On the other hand, I want to stay in touch with my grumpy old man side, having reviewed "Blind Faith" I will have to take a look at Will Self's "Book of Dave" next.

Syl: :) I will need to shift the questions to cooking now (due to the fact I usually publish a part of the interview on Bar Mleczny) Do you know anything about Polish cuisine?

Andy: Not a lot, I think I've eaten quite a lot of great pickled gherkins from Poland over the years.  As for barmleczny I love milk and the idea of a milk bar intrigues me... The milk marketing people here in Britain are often trying to rebrand it and sell it as a soft drink. Take a trip to an ageing ice rink or swimming baths and you might see nice simple milkshakes available without thickner. The AMT milk steamers at stations are good too. There could definately be a niche in the market to exploit.

Syl: Great, Andy, thanks for that feedback!:) So, if I say 'Polish' what are the first three things that come to your mind?

Andy: My Polish bridge friends and their 'Polish Club' bridge convention
The once growing, now possibly diminishing Polish community in Britain and the various opinions about it.
Word with lots of zs in them

Syl: Zs, and sh, and csh:) And how about you, are you cooking at home?

Andy: Zs, and sh, and csh:) And how about you, are you cooking at home? Cooking has been a big part of my life for most of it. My late, great mum had me in the kitchen as soon as I could walk. We would make jam tarts, scones and nig-nogs (a name for brown oatmeal biscuits from our 1950s cookbook, unrestrained by the era of political correctness). I guess my mum taught me to just get on with it and not fear failure. This means I can often salvage an edible meal when others have given up hope.Either my girlfriend or I cook almost always, tonight it was a casserole with pork and home-produced cider.

Syl: Ah, you just made me hungry:) If we were to do a small Polish food party would you like to join us?:)

Andy: Sound's fun, I'm in!

Syl: Thank you, Andy!:)

Monitter and other Twitter tools I'm using

Someone asked me recently what are the Twitter tools I am using and as I started list those I realised there are too many. It's difficult to decide upon the most crucial ones by due to the tight schedule of blogging nowadays I was forced to choose a few ones:

TweetDeck - helps me to follow the conversation on Twitter and see my direct messages, messages, tweets from my friends and others - all those in four categories on one screen. It also allows me to find users, follow new ones and of course - tweet and respond to messages. All in few seconds!

Advanced Twitter Search - is good for specific searches, mainly when I am writing posts on a specific topic and need more info.

TweetBeep - I could not live without it, as much as I cannot imagine living without Google alerts. Using this tool I can get all the relevant information (with or without URLs) into my gmail inbox daily and read through it during lunch time for instance.

Twitterlocal - useful in locating fellow users, mainly before and after events.

Tweetstats - time to time I like to look at the trends and doublecheck (in responses column) if all my responses were noticed. For some reason Netvibes and web still come up as my main Twitter interfaces, whereas I am using Tweetdeck and HelloTxt, no idea why:/

And last one, quite a recent discovery - Monitter - brilliant for finding real-time tweets on three different keywords.(see below)



Well, I guess that's it. I bet my fellow bloggers are using much more, but for me those are main tools, and as for now, I am quite happy using them. Unless you have something better for me;)

Trying out lifestreaming with StoryTlr - 'new' social media?

Lifestreaming has been around for a while. I tried a few options, but never really got into it seriously and I think it's time and I have found a tool simple enough not to discourage me (lack of time is killing me). So here it is, Sylwia Presley on StoryTlr. Lifestreamblog posted about it this week, but it's actually Lolly who showed me how it it works and how user friendly it is! Already established services like Popego, Jaiku, Tumblr always took me too much time to set up, and StoryTlr took 15 min to register, customise and set up feeds. Brilliant! I had another few minutes to look around and I must say - it's simple, but all I need. Go and check it out.

We had this conversation in the office few weeks ago - is lifestreaming a blog? This service seems to be heading towards YES answer, some of us might stay sceptical. Me, as rather an open-minded person I will say - yes, I think it's blog. It does reflect basic blog characteristics - diary, personal content (for personal blogs of course), reverse chronology...just the technology behind it is different. If you have no time to write long posts, but create let's say visual content - you can easily direct it to one site and show to the world in a  friendly form.

BTW make sure you use the 'stories' option, it's very cool. (I promise to 'write' a visual story too, first one comes from Twitter:P). Looking at my StoryTlr site made me realize how text based my web content is....and I am not sure I am happy about it. Let me think about it;)

Update: Lolly's post on it here.

Age of Conversation

It's great to see on-line initiatives in published form! It's also extraordinary to read a book about social media and current state of communication written by the actual users, bloggers, specialists. When I read the first edition of Age of Conversation I felt that I am experiencing fresh breeze of opinions, tips and views. The type of 'hellou! look everyone! this is us and this is how it works!'. The antithesis of academic study about communication - tones of which I had to go through at the university.

I really enjoyed it!

More about the project here and here, the list of participants of the second edition (available to order from this site) here.



Worth buying, your money will go to this charity!