Today my youngest sister had her confirmation party (humanistic confirmation held by The Norwegian Humanist Association) which involved relatives, friends, a lot of food and a challenge solved by Skype.
My other sister is currently an exchange student in the US. And the two sisters are close. The one abroad wanted to give a speech during the dinner party. My brother and I therefore rigged a laptop, some cheap speakers, a projector with screen and a webcam. With the simplicity Skype offers (as well as other IM and video call apps) she held the speech to the main person tonight, my youngest sister, as well as all the other guests.
“Nice moment for technology” I said to myself and took some pictures with my mobile phone, while grandma shed some tears.
It’s springtime in Norway now a days, and when the snow melts away you may see what the frost and cold does to the tarmac during the winter. The roads usually take quite a beating during the winter, and in the springtime they are in pretty bad shape. It’s the same every year and the newspapers write quite a lot about the subject. The local officials are trying their best (naïve assumption) to fix holes however they usually spend some time finding all the holes.
One year ago one of our newspapers, Drammens Tidende tried an experiment with letting their readers email them about the cracks and holes and they put it all up in an “action map” that they use to show the readers where things are going on. This year, Fredrikstad Blad has tried the same, and this is the first time I’ve heard about it.
I think it’s a pretty innovative and interesting way to interact with the readers, even if the readers has to send in emails to report of holes. Nonetheless the reports I have gotten tells me that it has received quite and amount of response and that is a very good thing.
Read about it here in this article, and see the map here.
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Photo credits: SXC.hu
Continue reading “Innovative way of using maps in a news setting”
Ole Emil at Buzzblog had what he calls a ”revelation” to the question ”How to be heard” when he watched The Beetles video ”Shout”. He implies that the only way to be heard in the jungle of social media is to shout out your message.
After reading Hamman’s post about his “revelation” that auto-feeding links to twitter is spamming, I couldn’t be more certain. The best way to be heard is to be relevant, relevant, relevant and smart. Use the technology at its best, make sure your message can be found, linked to and serve those who link to you.
Telling everyone everything is just helping one thing. Information overload. We all know that after some time with irrelevant information we go blind. If you have something you would like to say that is of no interest to anyone, rethink your message. Make it relevant to something that people want to listen to.
Including to this I also noticed a post by Eirik Solheim regarding his trouble with these services. As he describes it, when he published a post on his blog, it generated 5 entries in his news feed on facebook. Theese things goes out of hand from time to time don’t they? Take a look at his diagram about the Web 2.0 chaos describing the setup.
I might shoot my self in the knee by this, since I’m a big fan of the “Champagne to frozen pizza” doctrine from Torry Pedersen and VG, but still. Relevance people, relevance…
After the whole DNA2008 thing I started to check Robin Hamman’s blog from time to time. In a post from 11th of March he really pinpoints with some examples what’s so important with social media. I do believe that the general assumption from many in the media business is that social media is exactly just a plug-in. Or, a piece of software if you like. And as Hamman expresses: “It’s not something you add to a website, it’s something you do”. I believe there still is a pretty long way to go before this is something that is being done correctly, and it gives me great hope that this is still just the beginning of something we quite yet don’t cant se the scope of.
And to quote him once again, I found this one ridiculously funny and accurate: “Doesn’t Work: A blog where comments are simply ignored isn’t social media, it’s just media.”
Photo credit: Mikael Damkier
I’ve twisted my brain in all different angles today, trying to get my first custom Array property in mootools to work.
For some reason my code kept returning the content as an array, and not as an object like I’d set up my piece of code to do.
It turned out that there was allready a property with the name I selected for Elements, which Array then had inherited..
thus, it allready existed, returning an array of objects (the same object I was trying to return, actually..).
I ended up adding the property to Elements instead (for another reason), with a new Property name.
Lesson: before you try to add a new property to Array, Elements, or any Class in general, check if it allready exists :p
