On social networks like Facebook and MySpace, you can show off to the world your favourite music, movies, books and interests as well as who your friends are. On MySpace in particular, you can redesign the look of your page with wallpaper that reflects your personality and you can play actual music that plays when your visit to comes to your page. On both social networks, you can add a picture of yourselfand people often change this photo to reflect their current mood or status. Some people use a photo of their dog or a cartoon image of themselves. All of it is a way of saying to the world: this is who I am.

It seems to me that this is a very human instinct going back beyond the Victorians playing their parlour games to time immemorial. Wherever we humans have been, we have wanted others to know us. Perhaps those ancient hand prints and paintings of buffalo in dark primeval caves are no more than a prehistoric people’s way of saying, “This is who we are. This is what we are like.” Archaelogist usually interpret these markings as religious symbols or cultural totems but perhaps they might be no more than the graffiti of a Neanderthal teenager who might have been trying to impress a girl… (”Me, I like bison, you like too? Look, me have big hands, you - hands so small and sweet.”)

We tell each other what we are like when we first meet as friends or when we go on a date. We want to find common interests and we want the other person to like us. We often present ourselves in the best light or at least, in light of that we think will appeal to the other person. I guess this is what we are doing on Facebook and MySpace when we share our music and favourite things online for our friends and also the world to see. On the Indian marriage and dating site Shaadi.com, users can include information about themselves such as their hobbies, interests and also there Indian astrological signs. They can also add photos and videos, and in fact the more information they include in their profile of the more helpful this is to the “eMatchmaker” that will be searching the database to find mutual matches for them. So, In the same way that the Victorians bonded with their friends - and perhaps grew closer to potential love matches - during the fun and flirtation of their evening parlour games, these days we find friends and modern day love matches via the pixels of online digital parlours.

So, lets see - what I would put on my Facebook or MySpace profile ( if I ever got round to filling those boxes in):

• My favourite animal - hmm, the problem is I dont really like animals.
• My favourite clothes - a pair of old, comfy jeans.
• My favourite place - home.
• My favourite pastime - writing and blogging.

Picture: thanks to mrnizz.blogspot.com

For background to the project, read my post about our involvement in Dulwich OnView

The Singapore Straits Times reporting on the event, wrote, “Mr Lee’s candid camera moment held a serious point. Anyone can now be an amateur film-maker, capturing politics on film, and people will do so.” The PM’s use of Qik indicates a relaxation on the ban of political films that had been in place for 10 years, according to the report, and is welcomed by local filmmakers.

Interestingly, Singapore’s satirical blogger “mrbrown” is also using Qik . The tagline of his blog is “L’enfant terrible of Singapore” which hypes up his reputation as the country’s “badass” blogger. In 2006, he hit the headlines for “hit[ting] out wildly at the Government and in a very mocking tone”, as reported by Asia Media. He was allegedly suspended from his position as a part-time columnist for a local newspaper for this, according to Vnunet.

As new technology empowers citizen self-expression globally, these are going to be interesting times for countries like Singapore which have traditionally preferred their citizens not to engage in outspoken public debate about political matters or matters that are deemed culturally sensitive by the powers-that-be.

My associate here at ZenGuide.co.uk who specialises in web writing and communication, Angie Macdonald, offers some tips on improving your written communications, especially when emailing and using other online spaces.

Angie writes:

Have you heard the one about the two psychoanalysts who bump into each other on the street. One says to the other, “Good morning. How are you?” And the other one thinks, “I wonder what he meant by that?”

We’ve all had that experience. We read an email from someone and it makes us sit back because this person seems rude, abrupt, aggressive, sarcastic or brusque. You read a phrase or a sentence and you think, “I wonder what they meant by that?” because you feel that they are getting it at you or making a dig at you. Your perception of this person changes and you may start to dislike them.

When it comes to writing business emails, it’s worth taking your time if you don’t want to have that effect on your recipient.

Check what you’ve written and rewrite parts if you need to, before clicking on send. In fact, it’s not only emails. Any written interaction, whether it’s commenting on a blog, instant messaging on Skype, or writing on friends’ Facebook walls can benefit from taking your time to make sure you use the right words and right tone to say what you mean.

Ask yourself: How are your words going to be perceived by your recipient?

The person reading your email isn’t going to be able to see you smiling and they won’t be able to hear your lighthearted or ironic tone or sense your attitude. All they’ve got to go on are your written words. Delivered and read in silence. What if they take it the wrong way?

How many people read an email, feel offended or confused, and pick up the phone to the author? “Hi John, I’ve just read your email and I wondered if in line 2 where you say such and such, if you really meant to insult me?” Not many, I’m guessing.

So you may never know that your email sent off in haste has offended, upset or angered someone. But you may find that your friendship or business relationship with them may cool in the future for no apparent reason.

Or you may find that the person comes back at you all guns blazing because they have been offended, upset or angered when you didn’t mean to have that effect on them at all. Trying to untangle that and reconcile in those circumstances can be exhausting for all concerned.

And what about spelling and punctuation in emails? Some people think that because email is an informal communication medium it’s okay to conduct business in broken English, without the need for spelling, punctuation. Some people use the same language they use for sms text messaging. On a mobile phone it makes sense to abbreviate but in an email? It can be perceived as laziness or sloppiness, especially in a business context - and that can be damaging to your reputation over the long term.

It’s easier to communicate effectively if you know and understand a little about the person you’re communicating with. You can then tailor your words to their personality – treat a matter seriously if you know it’s important to them, wish them a good holiday if you know they’re going away. Or ask them to do something in such a way they feel it’s their decision to do it.

Here are are a few points you can bear in mind next time you have to draft an email.

# Take your time
# Read your communication from the recipient’s point of view
# Be sure what it is you want to communicate and what response you’d like from the other person
# Be consistent in your approach and style
# If you use capitals people will think you’re shouting at them.

Whatever you do, don’t let your emails reflect badly on you. A little time spent planning what you want to say can save a lot of misunderstanding later.

Photo: thanks to ronsho from flickr.com (CCL)

The main page shows a Top Story and below it, the Latest News from No.10 in a scrolling reverse date order layout - like most blogs. It is updated pretty much every day, sometimes more than once. But for those hoping to learn what Gordon Brown had for breakfast will be disappointed. It’s not Gordy’s personal blog but rather a site where the latest official news from the Prime Minister’s office can be posted up quickly and easily. Each post or news update is tagged for easy searchability and there are buttons you can click on to share the posts that grab your attention on Facebook, Delicious or Digg. However, there’s no option to add your comment so there is no real blog-like interactivity.

The “blog” serves as a hub for the other PM’s other multi-media activities. There is a link in the sidebar to the latest photos on Downing Street Flickr page where you can see Mr Brown strutting his stuff at press conferences, meeting the public and shaking hands with other politicos. None of him in his shirt sleeves doing a spot of gardening.

You can also click through to the Downing Street YouTube channel which has videos of the PM on foreign visits, sending a Ramadan message and making speeches. So far, so “ho hum”. But there’s an interesting attempt at reaching out to the people via the “Ask the PM” initiative where Mr Brown will be “responding to the most popular questions submitted by the YouTube community.” Apparently, people have already left questions and the PM “will be back in September with his answers” - but I can’t seem to find the videos of those who asked the questions and I can’t easily work out which videos of Mr Brown currently on the site are answers to YouTubers’s questions. Can anyone give me some pointers on this?

I think my favourite of all the these social media initiatives is the Downing Street Twitter feed - it’s a bit less impersonal than the other to-be-expected press release/ photo shoot/ sound bite style multi-media offerings as you can get a little bit of the voice of the staffer who is behind the tweets, although most of the the updates are still fairly formal in tone.

Of course you wouldn’t expect the official website of the British Prime Minister to maintain a certain distance and dignity - and to be filled with official content. What is significant I think is the use of a blogging platform such as Wordpress as the host for the site and the dissemination of the multi-media content across video-sharing and micro-blogging sites to reach an audience that might not otherwise sit down and read the papers or watch the news on TV. It is a great example of thinking outside the box and using the technology because it’s the right tool regardless of what that technology is called - see my discussion of how misconceptions about “blogging” can limit your communication toolbox in A Blog by an other Name

For more commentary on the Downing Street “blog” from various bloggers, see:

Neville Hobson (blogger, podcaster and business communicator) - New 10 Downing Street site runs Wordpress

Simon Dickson, principal consultant at web and online communications firm Puffbox (which also inputted into the site) - Sneak preview of new Number10 site

Photo: from number10.gov.uk

We’ve recently enjoyed working with Savile Row tailor, Carol Alayne, to create her new business blog Tailoring for Women.

There are very few female Savile Row tailors, so it was a real privilege to get an insight into Carol’s world and the unique service she offers.

I used to associate Savile Row with men in suits making suits for men, but things are changing, and Carol Alayne is part of that change. She has twenty years’ experience and a particular passion for tailoring for women. Her background in banking means that she fully understands the tailoring needs of professional women and what their jobs require of them.

Through our coaching sessions on how to use blogging as part of her marketing strategy, we got to know more about Carol. Particularly fascinating is the fact that she learned how to sew on her grandmother’s knee at the age of five and started her first tailoring business when she was fourteen. Her other passion is playing the fiddle, which means she also understands the tailoring needs of musicians very well.

Together with our web design associate, David Robertson, we worked with Carol to design a site that would function both as a website and a blog, with the blog being the focal point.

The Tailoring for Women blog and website is now live. On the blog, Carol shares her expertise and insight on the tailoring industry. She is also creating a knowledge base that will demystify the process of the bespoke tailoring tradition and educate present and potential clients. Do go over and check it out. You will be able to learn about the differences between bespoke and ready-made and where to find extraordinary fabrics, for example. I was fascinated to learn that in many mass-produced ready-made garments the seams are fused together with glue!

Carol also has many high profile clients, including the British Olympic Shooting Team, Dame Kiri te Kanawa and one of my heroines, performance artist Laurie Anderson. From time to time she features garments she is making for high profile clients so it’s a good way to see who’s wearing what.

I hope Carol will enjoy blogging as much as we enjoyed showing her the ins-and-outs of blog posting, linking and commenting. We wish her every success!

You can email photos, videos, MP3s audio files and other files such as Word documents, Powerpoint presentations and pdfs and they will be instantly uploaded as a blog post. The text of your email will become the text of the blog post. If you are in the US, you can even blog by SMS by authorizing your phone once you’ve got yourself a posterous blog.

Posterous can also automatically cross-post whatever you email to your other sites such as Twitter, Flickr and the major blog platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger as well as self-hosted blog sites. Also the audio feed is an iTunes-ready podcast feed so people can subscribe to your audio content via iTunes without your having to do anything more.

In the interests of simplicity, Posterous does not offer options to add widgets to your sidebar and there are no tools such as Categories or a Blogroll that you would normally expect to see on most blogs. For most people who just want to post items by email as and when they feel like it and wherever they may be, that simplified interface means there is less to think about - all you have to do is send an email and voila, you’re blogging.

You also cannot customise the design or layout of your site but then, again, the focus is on simplicity. So while Posterous may not be right for people who want the full blog experience with the ability to have a customized design, widgetized sidebars and all the usual elements such as Categories etc that help your visitors navigate around your blog, it’s a great starting point for people who are happy with the simple, streamlined way to post their content online.

For those of us who already have blogs, Posterous can be a fun supplemental tool - if you set up the automatic cross-posting function, you can blog by email via Posterous. It also means that your content is available on another platform and this can be helpful for making it more widely available to a different audience. Via your Posterous control panel, you can subscribe to follow other people’s posterouses (posteri?) and vice versa so it’s a great way to explore other multi-media posterous bloggers.

I’ve been using Utterz.com for my multi-media blogging but I will try Posterous. I like Utterz because it gives you the option of blogging by phone - ie you just dial a number from your mobile or a landline and speak, then press a couple of buttons on the phone and you have an audio-blog which is automatically cross-posted to your blog(s). I may still use Utterz for that. But from what I can see, Posterous has the advantage on other points in that the video player looks bigger and cleaner and for text posting there is no text character limit, compared to Utterz.

This is likely to be the first time that many people are using their mobiles to watch TV, according to the report, and no doubt a lot more people are watching online who cannot get to a TV. So the increased viewer numbers overall is good news for the US TV channel NBC as they are one of the key US broadcasters offering live coverage of the Olympics online and via mobile - once people get the hang of using new technology and get used to having that universal access, they are likely to want more. Increased access to content via a variety of media means, of course, increased viewer numbers overall and that’s good for advertising revenue - and may even translate into people willing to pay in the future for the convenience of, say, mobile content delivery.

The NBC online site offers viewers the option to be alerted when an event starts as well as “video to go” if you missed it. There are also downloads of highlights, results and medals listings, information about competing countries and online games to play. And, evidence of the growing Hispanic demographic in the US, a Spanish version of the site.

In the UK, the BBC also offers live video coverage of the Olympics online with a live text commentary. You can receive video masterclasses on your mobile phone - eg explaining the art of tae kwan do - and also take part in a live streaming discussion via text (Text 81111 with “OLYMPICS” as first word - UK users only). You can also receive text alerts for the events you want to watch live. For the mobile site, type http://news.bbc.co.uk/mobile/ into your phone’s browser. Like the NBC site, there are medal and results listings. There is also a section featuring BBC Sport’s Olympics Monkey - a cartoon mascot of sorts derived from the Chinese mythic hero Monkey - with games and quizes.

In fact, checking out the BBC mobile page opened up to me a whole world of mobile BBC content beyond the Olympics - including previews of the thriller series Spooks, text recipes from a cookery programme and the chance to share your snapshot of a newsworthy event direct from your mobile phone.

In China, too, mobile coverage of the Olympics is ubiquitous, according to Reuters. The report quotes Yun Weijie, president and chief executive of Telegent Systems, a Silicon Valley semiconductor maker: “TV will become a standard feature for cellphones in China by the end of this year, just like cameras.”