On writing (& social media)

When I read this, I also include social media (eg. blogging / photo sharing / social networking).

Commentators like Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater tend to be a bit snobbish when it comes to acknowledging the inherent human need to be heard, to share, to tell our stories.

Lawrence Sanger told me he was worried about non-experts getting together to construct their own knowledge. But he would say that.

I say - do it! Experts be damned. Speak your truth, and find others that share it.

[[ Just be careful about checking the facts that really matter. Which is not what we are talking about here anyway. The subjective realm is far vaster than many wish to acknowledge.]]

Writing is egalitarian; it cuts across geographic, class, gender, and racial lines… vice presidents of insurance agencies…factory workers…lawyers, doctors, gay rights activists, housewives, librarians, teachers, priests, politicians…

We all have a dream of telling our stories – of realising what we think, feel and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.”

Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones

Orwell on sincerity

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity

When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

- George Orwell

…

Added 9 July

This post has sparked some intriguing debate. Makes me want to suggest people read Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. And of course Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and Manjushvara’s Wolf at the Door.

Any other recommendations?

The Essence of Authentic - Dialogue

“Dialogue.. the art of thinking together.”

“A dialogue can be among any number of people, not just two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of dialogue is present.”

“Dialogue … a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which may emerge some new understanding. It’s something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It’s something creative. And this shared meaning is the “glue” or “cement” that holds people and societies together”.

“The object of a dialogue is not to analyze things, or to win an argument, or to exchange opinions. Rather it is to suspend your opinions and to look at the options – to listen to everybody’s opinions, to suspend them, and to see what all that means.”

“Take part in truth.”

David Bohm, “On Dialogue”

“He’s one of my scientific gurus.”

HH The Dalai Lama in the foreward to On Dialogue.

Mark “SCIP” Walker on Internet Fundraising

Mark Walker from SCIP has long been supporting local charities and communities with IT services. Not just through all the work SCIP does in information and computer technologies, but also via the very happening SCIP group email list, which brings people together all around the South Coast.

If that’s not enough, Mark is now researching how to help local charities raise funds via the internet, including a bunch of region specific resources. That’s all part of his role as ICT Champion  for the south east of England.

Read his post on this and the rest of his blog here.

We like lots of the same stuff (To Kill a Mockingbird and Atonement for a start), so it’s great to have found you Mark. Don’t you just love social media for short cutting all that “getting to know you” stuff. I think you can tell a lot about a person by the music/books/films that inspire them.

Scholarships available for next course

30 June, 2008

5:00 pm

Our Social Media for the Third Sector course is starting soon. Keep 11 July free for the group learning day, and make a commitment before early July so we can work with you on your learning needs analysis.

That’s if you want a taste of a truly educational, capacity building package, and not just a quicky training day.

We are looking for two motivated people / organisations to award 80% scholarships for Part One (and potentially, Part Two).

If you ‘get’ that social media is essential knowledge to:

• build stronger relationships with your stakeholders
• get attention online and in real life
• raise funds
• collaborate creatively and build innovative approaches to social and environmental challenges

.. then apply here.

Find out all about the way we give and support real learning here.

Any questions, just pick up the phone and talk to Libby on 07968 687 107.

As of today, there are still places available, and we won’t decide on the sponsored places until 30 June. But the earlier you apply, the better.

Word Play

Absolutely, totally, loving… wordle. (Try typing that without making it worlde). Tah Gra.

Click through for the big zappy version and make your own.

Give us a link in the comments so we can see what you make. So keen to see social media being more visual and creative.

As Claus Oldenberg put it so well..

“Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete of all communication.

That set of faces, top left: FaceMap

For the new nodestone banner, I made a little application that goes and builds that set of faces that you see on the top-left banner of the nodestone.com. This post is all about the why and how of that.

We were looking for a way to visually represent the human nature of social media. We’ve got the nice, nodey logo, but where are the people? All the people. All the faces, so that leads us to a bunch of avatars or icons with people’s faces.

Now there is a facebook app called FriendGrid which goes some way there:

But, too big and not enough faces for what we are looking for.  We needed something wide to fill that banner space.  Also, those question marks send the wrong message, no?

So, then, how hard is it to get that set of avatars photos, scale em down and place them in a single image?   Not hard at all, it turns out.

I turned to Twitter.  Twitter users are prety good at uploading avatars, and accessing them via the API is pretty straightforward, so I wrote a quick app with Google AppEngine to accept a twitter username and password and then fetch the avatar URLs and display them in a block.  It worked nicely, so I meddled with the display of the images, got them in a suitable sized block in a browser and screen captured them. I used the Gimp to manipulate the image a bit and make the fractured right hand end. Done.

Next features I’ll add:

• Add more source twitter IDs, so the starting set can be our friends, not my friends.
• Follow friends of friends until we have enough unique faces, this avoiding duplicates
• Remove the ‘no avatar’ images
• Do the actual image manipulation to build a single image from all these.
• Auto-update the nodestone banner once a week or something as friends change,

Sometime over summer I’ll tidy up and publish the app over to AppEngine and let you all know.

Welcome to Nodestone - What does it mean?

Dear friends, colleagues and extended community

Here it is. Our new entity, website, direction. Nodestone. What does that mean? It’s a made-up word that just felt right. We did branding workshops and brainstormed and came up with all sorts of kooky ideas.

But Nodestone was what came to pass. My dear Mum (a great wordsmith) Jenny Davy had a good go at explaining it:

“The name Nodestone for me resonates with Lodestone which is something that has a magnetic attraction and a node is of course a part of a computer network - so Nodestone is a part of a computer network which will have a mega attraction to people!! .”

Here are some other reasons we chose it, or accidental associations:

• Lodestone’s:
  • were used in China in the 12th century as a compass for navigation.
  • long associated with the “lore of attraction” and considered by many as a “magical” stone.
  • magnetite, a mineral related to the coating on magnetic disks and tapes used by computers.
• Nodes:
  • connecting points on networks where information comes together, is refined and retransmitted.
  • the point on a stem from which the new leaf grows.
• Stones:
  • solid, reliable, of the earth. Good for building things with. Good for making strong foundations.
  • found as pebbles all along Brighton beach and make beautiful (if a little heavy) business cards.
  • They rock, and roll, and gather no moss. But actually, we like a little lichen ourselves.

You know when something just fits? We couldn’t believe the .com was still available, and pounced.

You can read about what we do, who we work for and what’s coming up all around the site. Hopefully the venture will live up to the name as we travel along.

Looking forward to sharing the journey with you.

Libby

Bringing in the New

We are in the middle of adding redirects for authenticblogging.com and presencelabs.com over to our new home at nodestone.com.

Surprise!

Hopefully it isn’t a surprise that you’ve landed here, but if it is, let me explain.   Libby Davy (of authentic blogging) and I (Graeme Sutherland of presencelabs.com) are putting our work and blogs together into nodestone.com.  So, we’ve built a new blog with the content of both of them, and I’m just now cutting over to the new site.

Basically, it should be business as usual once the transfer is complete. In the meantime, there might be a few little issues wih locating your favourite pages. Bear with us for the next few hours on that.

We hope you enjoy the new site.  We’ve had fun making it.  (Except for the late nights and the hard bits :-)

Technical Stuff

Don’t read this unless you care about the technical details of the changeover.

We’re basically putting in permanant redirects (301s) from the old domains to nodestone.com, with a bit of special redirect magic applied to make sure that old url parts map to the new ones.  This means (at least in theory) that google will still like us in the morning, and all our old paths will go somewhere relevant.  Permanent redirects also mean that records get updated permanently, so things like feed readers should get the new feed address if they have half a brain.

That’s all.  I’m off to arrange the nameserver changes for authenticblogging.com.   Ciao.

Pros & cons of blogging - for social entrepreneurs

Some interesting analysis and discussion around this question at Social Edge - the Skoll Foundation online space for social enterpreneurs. Check it out, join in and subscribe to Social Edge is that’s your area.

See other Nodestone posts on blogging.

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