The Internet as a social history or people sticking old pictures on FaceBook

The Internet now makes saving peoples personal history easier than ever. That's a pretty obvious statement to people who's been using the web for a long time, but for some it's nothing short of a miracle.

Recently my sister died, very suddenly and unexpected. She'd just joined FaceBook and hadn't added must stuff but what she did add is still there and it's nice to look back and see her writing and pictures, I can hear her reading them as I read them. When she died I created a group for people to leave their memories of her and also as a way to let people who she knew but had lost touch with what had happened. The response was amazing with over 100 people joining and many leaving memories of her as well as their own pictures with her in.

My parents aren't on the Internet and probably never will be so they'll never get to see the group. I printed out everything which had been posted and gave it to them and her husband. They were overwhelmed with the response and amazed that this could have happened. The great thing is that that group, which is still active is a social history of my sister in a way that could never have happened before the Internet and FaceBook in particular.

I was just browsing FaceBook again a few minutes ago and found a group all about memories and pictures of Sheffield, my home city. Normally the images here, well over 500, would have been in dusty boxes in a back room or in a museum collection. But know they're there for people to look through, comment and add your own to whenever you want.

If I needed to find out about my past I needed to talk to the older generation who would take their stories and images with them when they died. My children will have an amazing record of nearly everything I ever did and everything everyone else ever did too. I still find that truly amazing.

Social Networking, Twitter, Linkedin, FaceBook and all that

When is it too soon to begin a social networking marketing campaign? Twitter, Linkedin, FaceBook et all are all the rage at the moment and lots and lots of companies are using them to great effect. But there are a lot of companies who fail to understand the strength of the opportunity and are waiting for the best time to add it to their armoury.

What they aren't grasping is that there is never a right time to enter this now. The time to enter was about 2 years ago. Yes Twitter may not last very much longer, but there'll be something else around the corner and when that comes on you should move over to it.

Social Networking is just the same as word of mouth which is proven to be the strongest form of marketing, what scares people is the technology and time involved.

Yes it can be a time vampire but it means that you're spending time speak to your customers, asking them about your products and services and listening when they tell you something is crap, taking it on the chin and fixing it. When you get down to brass tacks and speak to customers fixing their real problems that's when magical things start to happen.

All Twitter, Linkedin and FaceBook do is make the process so much quicker and direct.

So if your company or organisation hasn't started using Social Networking yet then don't hang around start it now!

Spreading your blog content around the web

If you are like me, and I'm sure you are or you wouldn't be reading this, you'll be on various Social Media websites my main ones are Twitter, FaceBook and Linkedin.

Did you know that you can easily syndicate your blog content to FaceBook and Linkedin? I didn't until recently.

To add it on FaceBook just nip to the notes application and point it at your blog. On Lined in add the Blog application and it'll automatically add your blog and all your connections blogs as well.

Then hey presto! All your blog entries will be automatically added to your profile as you post them increasing the scope of your readership instantly.

By the way the one caveat is that no matter where your blog is syndicated the content still had to be worth reading.

New Facebook? - New Coke?

Just upgraded? to New Facebook.

Not sure if I like it or not. Was old Facebook bad?

There doesn't seem to be any improvement in performance just everything is moved around and I can't find it any more.

The chat function was great when added. But why change the GUI?

What do you think?

A I Hate new Facebook group has already launched.

Social Networking Experiment Update

After sticking my toe in the Facebook water a week ago, I'm pleased to report that it's going really well. In fact better than I expected.

From a standing start there are now over 300 members of the Applied Language Translation and Interpreting Group. If you are interested in being a translator or interpreter then I'd recommend signing up to the group and to our suppliers data base www.talkbase.net.

Should you be nervous on Facebook?

I've started using Facebook recently and I've set up a few groups for work. We're a Translation and Interpreting company so to get more linguists to register with us I set up a group. It's worked really well. If you're a linguist on Facebook please join.

While I was looking for other related groups I found this quite scary one for United States Intelligence Community. It's an open group so anyone can join. What I can't tell is if it's a spoof or not. It looks pretty official and if it is maybe you should be nervous.

The web is a really weird place sometimes!