The lovely Clarabel on Twitter posted this photo last week. This is a fine little collection of psychology text books (and a Philosophy one thrown in for good measure) that would be perfect for any undergraduate psychology student. As a psychology graduate myself I understand how expensive psychology text books are, so please, if you know anyone that could do with a helping hand with their first or second year of college ask them to get in contact with us. Leave a comment here, send me an email (sineadcochrane at gmail dot com), a tweet, or, contact Clara via an @ reply on twitter. These books are free to a good home and are in perfect condition. Even if any of these books have new editions now available, more often than not there are only slight changes made and they would be perfect to help you with your long road of study ahead.

*Update* Two hours after posting this the books found a home. Yey books!

New York City is possibly the best place in the world to learn how to take photos. Everywhere you look there is something beautiful, interesting, gigantic or overwhelmingly familiar to snap away at.

I’ve talked about upgrading to an SLR for a long time, and was finally encouraged by my other half (a Canon 400d owner and a wonderful photographer/teacher) and the cheap prices of B&H in Manhattan. Straight after checking in to our hotel on 35th Street we rambled around the block to B&H and I picked up a Canon 450d, known in the USA as the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi – everything in the states sounds so much cooler.

We spent the next 5 days camera happy in New York, the results of which I’m really quite proud of. I’ve been taking photos for years, but have always been disappointed with the results of my experiments, until now. The differences between an SLR and a bridge camera are vaster than I realised and being able to carefully tweak all the settings for each set of photos you’re taking is a skill I’m going to attempt to master. Granted some of the photos I took in NYC aren’t perfect, but they make me smile nonetheless.

I feel like I’ve been able to capture the feelings I experienced there – the familiarity, the grandness, the beauty, the intrigue and the fun we had together. I’m looking forward to the next time I visit (somewhere in the near future), where I’ll bring back memories and photos of the city in snow and covered with Christmas.

The first step is finding the rss feed address for your favorites.

This is always the following: http://twitter.com/favorites/[insert_your_ID_here].rss

As long as your tweets aren’t protected, you will be able to view this rss feed in any feed reader. You could even add a link to this in your blogroll if you didn’t want them published as individual blog posts. You could also add your friend’s favourites to your feed reader, thought it might spoil any upcoming links-posts they’re planning on publishing on their blog.

This is how mine: http://twitter.com/favorites/sineadcochrane.rss looks in Google Reader.

The second step is creating a Tumblr blog and then using the import rss feed feature. Once you’ve signed up, click on “Customise” and in the top left hand corner menu choose “Feeds” and add your favourites rss feed address. Doing this will mean you can automatically publish a new blog post every time you favorite a new tweet. Unfortunately it won’t import all of your old favorites, only the new ones.

For an example of all of this working, take a look at mine. It’s a small experiment you might like to be a part of…

The stars of the movie have posted a bizarrely funny little cinemash online, mixing together the new movie with a scene from Sid and Nancy, they’ve also filmed a really cool bank heist/movie musical homage, you can listen to the entire soundtrack streaming online, and there are countless behind the scenes videos available online that you’d usually have to wait to see on the DVD release. Obviously there’s the website and a Facebook page but they’ve also been running some interesting hybrid engagement ads on Facebook and have a widget you can add to your profile. They’ve definitely been attempting to encourage elements of crowdsourcing and tapping into the viral nature of information and social networks online.

It’s not often that an online campaign stands out to me in such a way that it’s worthy of more than just a tweet. The difference between this campaign in comparison to the many others before it is how feature rich it is and it gives the sense that there is an understanding of the behaviour and motivations of the target user - i.e if you want a user to help promote your movie, your brand, whatever, you need to give them something actually worthwhile in return and they will be much more open to reciprocation.

Visitors to the website or facebook page have the option of creating an alternative movie poster using their facebook photos (or new uploads) or create a  a highly personalised custom mix tape - features of the campaign which are engaging, and create something worth sharing - they can also access all the free content on the website. They’re also just about to launch a microsite where you can create a Spotify playlist reflecting various stages of the movie romance (with the best playlist wining the creator a ticket to all the UK festivals next summer).

By facilitating an engaging user experience that produces user generated content, you increase your chances of the user reciprocating i.e allowing the application to access their Facebook profile, to promote the movie with a profile update, or auto-tweeting a link to their personal mix tape, or embedding it in a blog post or sidebar etc. I personally spent about 20 minutes creating a mixtape, and quite enjoyed the experience and end result (pity those tracks are only 30min samples though).

This is just a great example of integrated movie marketing that takes a step further than those boresome movie microsites that allow you to distort your face into a Vulcan, a Transformer, a Terminator etc. and I’m hoping to see much more creativity like this in the near future.

The primary goals of the Facebook Page were going to be the same as our Twitter account:

1. drive traffic to the site by informing followers/fans that a new blog post had been published,

2. tweet/update-status with exclusive competitions,

3. and interact with followers/fans with a little bit of fun and frolics.

These goals have been easily succeeded on Twitter, but the Facebook Page has been far more difficult and it has been a serious source of frustration for me. All of my Facebook Page energy has been spent trying to achieve the first goal. Something easily achieved on Twitter, thanks to Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed syncs our RSS feed with our Twitter account, so every time  one of our many authors updates the blog, the title and a link to the post  is tweeted. A significant amount of traffic for the site comes from Twitter (this is partially down to followers retweeting links) and we had hoped to achieve same on Facebook.

Facebook offers a number of applications for user profiles, but the majority of these will not work with Facebook Pages, including the Twitter application (and other popular apps like Tweetsync). Initially I discovered that the only solution to goal no.1 was to allow Facebook to import blog posts into their notes functionality, but by having your blog posts imported into Facebook your content is being copied into their walled garden, I’ve discussed before about the negative repercussions of this and have been reluctant to allow this to continue. It also gives rise to privacy and content rights concerns.

After trying and testing numerous Facebook applications I finally stumbled upon one that actually works with Facebook Pages, though it requires a less than direct approach.

The Selective Twitter Status application is designed to allow you to update your Facebook status, but only with a tweet ending/starting with the hashtag “#fb”. This proves quite useful when combined with the Twitterfeed option of adding a piece of text to every autotweet. For example you can set it so the text “New Blog Post…” appears at the beginning of each autotweet (so your followers know the link is to your own blog). However, by setting it to post “#fb” to each autotweet, Selective Twitter Status will then recognise the hashtag and push the tweet to your Facebook status. Also, so as to not pollute our main Twitter account with a hashtag meaningless to our followers, a seperate Twitter account was set up for this rss feed alone.

Now that goal no.1 has been succeeded with the Culch.ie Facebook Page there will be far more time/energy for goals 2 and 3, and I’m hoping the fan numbers will soon rival that of the Twitter account.

This is exactly the kind of problem solving I thrive on, so at least the frustration ended in a solution as well as few lesson about Facebook and Twitter along the way. I hope this is of some help to other frustrated Facebook Page users.

I never reflected upon this, until Mam had her first seizure.

It was only then that I learned how much misinformation there is about epilepsy, and how much ignorance and unjust prejudice there is. For example, a layman understanding of epilepsy is the photosensitive form which is a reaction to strobe/flashing lights, but only 3-5% of people with epilepsy actually suffer from this.

My first source of information has always been the organisation Brainwave. Thanks to them I was able to educate myself, and in doing so I was able to prepare myself for the next seizure (this is a straightforward and simple guide to first aid for seizures [pdf] that *everyone* should read). In understanding epilepsy, it stopped being scary.

I often wonder if my hysterical reaction to Mam’s first seizure would have differed if I had been taught to understand why it was happening and informed as to what an epileptic seizure looked like. I now know that sometimes during a seizure a person can go blue in the face; but I had no clue about this during her first seizure and went into a total and utter panic. More importantly, if I had known how to recognize a seizure from the start, I would have been better able to report this to the doctors in A&E – who were adamant that the seizure followed her cracking her head open on the tiles of the frozen food aisle. I was certain that it was the opposite way around. But they wouldn’t give her a diagnosis, or run any tests, or treat her… until consecutive seizures followed.

Thanks to Brainwave we learnt how a seizure isn’t a dramatic emergency (unless she had hurt herself, like the first time) and that she could easily recover without the need for doctors or emergency rooms (thank god). Luckily for Mam, once she was medicated she stopped having seizures, except for the occasional nocturnal seizure. More recently she has also managed to be weaned off her medication, after going a couple of years seizure free (yey!).

Not everyone is that lucky though, and without Brainwave there would be a total lack of information and support for sufferers. As you can see from what’s been discussed here already, being educated about epilepsy in Ireland is falling solely to them. Unfortunately Brainwave is not a government run organisation and they rely on donations to continue providing support, information, advice and improving public understanding of epilepsy.

That’s why I’ll be attending their benefit night “The Horse Show Hustle” on August the 7th –  tickets are on sale here. For €33 you can dance the night away  with the satisfaction of knowing the proceeds will be going to an organisation that is greatly needed in Ireland (if you can’t make it to the show you can alternatively make a donation via MyCharity.ie).

I definitely needed them, and in the future, someone close to you might need them too.