My Top Blogging Tips 2: Protect Your Relationships

The idea of management of our web shadow was probably clear to most of us for a while now - as we are all responsible for each other here, in on-line spaces. But it was really Antony Mayfield's book that made it clear to me just how crucial it is to keep an eye on our own privacy and monitoring of on-line conversations around our own data (name, nickname, address, blog title, hashtags, etc). I strongly suggest it as one of mandatory reads for everyone wishing to use the web wisely. 

Writing up blogging tips for mothers present on-line has made me realise that increasingly we are becoming more and more responsible for our kids and their web shadow, for our friends and family, even for our work contacts. Increasing linking between social networks helps us to manage the noise and amount of updates we are to send to all our audiences but we need to be aware of consequences of various access levels we provide to 3rd party applications on Facebook, Twitter, Google+. Klout - Twitter grading service was strongly criticised for pulling in family members from Facebook and in some cases publicising relationship that its users where not even aware of! We have a lot of options to manage our data, our privacy levels and group our relationships in various categories - let's learn to use those for the sake of our families and friends! Let's start to expect the same from our on-line friends too! 

Just as a side note from someone who talks to KS1 and KS2 kids about on-line behaviour I would like to point our that as parents we tend to overlook the fact that all the information we share about our kids on-line - even if it's just a photo of a newborn baby or first day of school - contribute to their on-line footprint so we need to wisely consider what to share and what to leave for private on-line communication. I have no intention to scare you off from using social media, I would just like to see confident and competent usage of on-line spaces in conversations about and with our kids. 

What would your on-line friendship boat look like?

My son came home with the following piece of art today:

It made me think about our on-line relationships! At first the geek in me thought - wouldn't it be great to have a virtual version of a boat of friendship where we could automatically pull in all our valuable on-line relationships? But just a second later I thought - well, actually, I do not think it's possible to visualise or categorise clearly who belongs to what group of on-line friends. Each of our on-line relationships is unique. Here is just one example from today. 

When I took few photos of Howard Lake last year in summer at the IoF National Convention I was not expecting that one day I will see a reference to my name on his Twitter account. Back then in summer 2011 Howard Lake has asked me if I could take a few pictures for his profile photo on Huffington Post (I was really excited for him as not many knew back then about this yet). Even though I have already exhibited and even sold my photos in galleries, I am really stressed out when it comes to personal photos of my friends - I simply do not want to let them down! I have this almost medieval perception of an artist working to present the model in the most flattering light - I simply want to make my friends see the way I see them - and my vision is obviously distorted by my friendship with them. Anyway, I am digressing. The point is - I was happy that Howard like the photos and left it there.

Today I was adding his bio to the Barcamp Nonprofits website (17.02 - put it in your diary, dear friends from London!;)) but to ad a photo I needed to download his Twitter avatar. Just look how the file is named:

Isn't that nice! Such a small, yet very strong gesture! And maybe I would never had known. Maybe at some point some of our common friends would point it out if they happen to download this picture. I was happy to follow it up on Twitter too:

Howard has always been a great mentor of digital fundraising to me and has many times help me, suggested new tips and kept me in the loop on new developments. We have been both watching charities popping up on Google+ branded pages one evening sharing initial observations and have many similar occasions where we simply support each other so obviously this small gesture is the extension of our off-line/on-line friendship. 

Today if you ask me about the real power, real goal of Twitter I will probably bounce it back at you - it's like the entire web - it's what you really make of it. But with seemingly limited options Twitter can be very powerful in building stronger on-line relationships if you care for your those, who care for you!;) 

Woudl you be able to put few people in your on-line friendship boat and leave out the rest?