I’ve started seeing Twitter as  a digital destination, and at the extreme… a living organism!

Why?

Maybe its the way it breathes with life, ebs and flows with trends, grows and shifts with popularity. Surely I can’t be the only one to notice that this thing has a very natural feel to it?

Humans mimmick each other, we influence the people we surround ourselves with, and from that, ‘life’ becomes more stimulating – conversations flow faster, we bounce off of each others gestures, we pull closer when things are good and move away when things feel bad. If we are away from people for long periods of time, well – no surprise – time continues and when we return, things have changed and they have grown.

This is all normal behaviour.

But exactly the same happens within Twitter as well. If we are away from it for too long, we miss things, and need to catch up and back track through links and rewind conversations to figure out pieces of conversation, people leave and join, and get misunderstood and apologise and when we find good new or old people, we gravitate towards them. That place operates exactly as if it were a real location we could drive to.

As a place of gathering full of people, you can get lost in it, and definitely lose track of time, meet new people, gain new experiences and get a suntan (ok not that last bit) … but, it can feel like a real ‘place’… like we should be able to find it on Google maps or something.

The reason Twitter is so full of life, is because the organisms inside it are alive too. We, human beings are like the red blood cells… swimming about flooding its veins, animating and gesticulating every area within it. Without us, it would not have life – it would be a dead place to visit. Collectively we are all giving it an apparent intelligence – it is as if ‘we’ are the electrical neurological connections within a brain, stimulating it to learn.

With our input, Twitter is building a new language, which isn’t surprising because we are restricted to 140 characters and need to develop a shorthand language and natural etiquette to achieve that… but the most surprising thing is Twitter is also producing new organisms within itself.

I’ll give you an example.

Has anyone seen or joined @wefollow? Well its not a person, but an entity that has been released into Twitter, by its creators. Now its out there (or ‘in there’) doing its thing, spreading and multiplying and distributing itself in a viral way – its become one of those really bouncy balls in a box, feeding off the energy we give it to keep moving, and its not going to stop… as long as Twitter exists and as long as the wefollow website exists, it will continue bouncing about. As I’m aware, its the only thing that got enough human energy behind it, to fuel its motion indefinitely.

@followfriday is a similar entity, but I’m not making comparisons, for reasons still to follow.

Hope you’re still with me.

@wefollow has maxed, it’s fixed in size and cannot grow any further, it is an ‘adult’ – fully formed. This thing isn’t like a chain letter that grows and grows, until it struggles to move about under its own bloating weight. Its lean, and its only purpose is to stay inside Twitter, feeding its purpose, which is to fuel the website outside of Twitter: http://wefollow.com. Much like a heart of an organism?

This little thing is smart, or rather the people that set this thing loose inside of Twitter are smart. I’m wondering if they realised what they were doing? To what extent did they consider this ‘thing’ was going to operate? Most people drop links inside Twitter and ‘hope’ that someone will love it enough to retweet and keep it bouncing about, but this @wefollow thing with lifeblood 3 hashes is all it needs. Its sourcing and feeding its heart… and its feeding on us - our desire to be part of it.

There’s more.

This thing is going to remain inside of Twitter forever. To many of us, it will appear like a little fragment of spam we can’t get away from – but unlike spam, we will be happy to co-exist in this ‘twitter space’ with it, as it will serve as a constant reminder of our attachment to its ‘heart’ (the website) … meaning we, unless we cease to be active within Twitter, will continually for the rest of our tweeting days, return the ‘heart’ and update our #hashes to reflect our position in the real world.

So this is viral entity is behaving like an infection. A skin condition we can happily live with, like a friendly life form which attaches itself to humans that we can neither get rid of, do us harm, nor live without.

As long as people ‘want’ to register their status on the wefollow website, and as long as people want to update their status and Twitter receives a continual stream of fresh newbies to feed off of – its going to continue, and I don’t believe that its going to be the only one.

Yes, there’s going to be a Twitter plague… and we’ll need a cure, for this ‘infection’.

As more and more companies realise the power of twitter, and repeat this process of dropping a new piece of tweet-lingo into the system (or ‘host’), then we’ll need a tool to filter these things and their connecting websites out of Twitter.

I understand if you disagree with me when I say that ‘Twitter is creating…’ when you may think that individuals inside or outside of Twitter are actually creating these things… but I’d challenge that. It takes humanity to keep this thing operating, and it can’t work effectively with just a few – it needs and has millions of users. These users (us), give this thing life. Just like how in the brain, 1 electrical connection is useless, but billions of them operating within it, creates ‘life’. Otherwise, we’d just have a lump of dead mush jelly in our brain caps.

So tweet away my friends, and next time you come across the @wefollow entity, say hello, because you’re going to be friends with it for a very long time indeed.

thoughts?

mark

Hey mark, how’s the writing going?

Not so good. Today I have learned. Setting a ’start date’ is only great if you have all the elements in place to continue forward. I didn’t. So I stopped. For the last week completely.

I began writing thinking that I’d iron out the problems as I wrote, but it kept niggling me all the while that, I hadn’t figured out a particular point of the story: the ending. Yes, its a small thing isn’t it, but a necessary one that I, and the entire planet, agree’s should be present in a story. Hence the difficulty for me to continue.

Well today (last night technically) I figured out the problem, or I should say, the solution.

I watched ‘Sunshine’ last night, and the pivotal point in the film, begins with two words ‘I forgot’. Everything after that point spirals outwards with various plot twists which ultimately leads to everyone dying. Now ‘I forgot’ is a relatively simple couple of words that everyone accepts happens in their life, until you put a gaggle of cosomologists, physists, botanists, mathematicians and astronauts in a room, all with enough intelligence to float a boat full of thesauruses and one of them suddenly announces ‘I forgot’.

‘I forgot’ wipes out everything (literally, in the film) regarding Knowledge, Rehersal and Intelligence.

1. Knowledge: you don’t have to be intelligent, but you can learn something.
2. Rehersal: you don’t have to be intelligent or know why something ‘is’, you just have to be able to do what is needed, when it’s needed.
3. Intelligence: you don’t have to know about anything in particular, or be able to do anything currently in existence, you just need to be good at figuring out what now is the best course of action, based on a new set of circumstances.

Anyone that has watched the film, will probably disagree with me and say the pivotal point in the film is the ship discovering the distress signal from the previous ship. Which is true, yet it’s not the one that sets off a chain of events causing them all to be killed. That is achieved by ‘I forgot’ dude forgetting.

Now I’m getting carried away here, but the point is: human error.

This is the connection here with my story – human error. We can think ourselves round in circles looking for rational explanations and reason why and how to prevent things from happening again, but human error is unpreventable. When it happens, nothing else really matters except damage limitation. Apologies aren’t relavant, excuses do no good either, neither does explanations or analysis. These things are only useful prior to ‘I forgot’ being discovered and announced. None of it is of any use after the event.

I find this interest, because normally ‘I forgot’ leads to more questions, like ‘why did you forget?’, ‘how can you not forget again?’ etc.  Completely negating the understanding that it was an accident of human error.

Human error – should be the ‘full stop’ in a conversation – but it rarely is. Blame, understanding, exploration and analysis – the search for reasons why, do nothing but spiral on and on uselessly. Humanity needs to learn when to stop searching and accept certain things.

Anyways… all this thought helped me out.

Sometimes I think to myself, that a lot of these only apps, would be much more useful if they only worked together.

As a bit of a writer, I’m looking for a product that does all I need. But I can’t find it. I have tried so many services and apps and they all have great great features, but all lack one thing – the complete customisation that ‘I’ need.

Take for example the excellent visual customisation that Capzles allows, combined with the online sync’ing that Evernote has. Then throw in the lovely drag and drop useful rearranging of something like bubbl.us, with the problem solving features of Solvr. I’d love Zemanta suggestions of imagery, and perhaps a nice timeline option from timeglider? Then finally tidy it all up into a gorgeous looking air app that looks a hybrid of Tweetdeck and Buzzword?

So what I’m thinking is, would it be great if all these apps and services were built less like puzzle pieces and more like lego bricks? I’m sure this has already been thought about and I’m even more certain that someone can point me in the direction of a service that is providing it.

As a non-programmer, it appears ludicrous that building apps and services, people are having to design their own building blocks each time to do so. Imagine for a second if everything was standardised, it would do a app building what the humble bolt did for the Industrial Revolution. People would be able to stop worrying about creating existing things and focus on combining all the great elements already out there to further technological services for one and all.

Maybe then, I could ‘collect’ all the components I need to establish my own perfect software?

What do you do over night, when its too hot to sleep? Well, if you’re me, you spend the night time thinking about Art obviously! Inspired by the Banksy exhibition and the question from Em’s mum, ‘What’s the difference between Art and Graffiti?’

Here’s my thoughts:

Firstly in order to determine if something is Art to start with, I’ve narrowed it down to 3 things, the first 2 being:

• Intention (of the creator) and
• Interpretation (of the viewer)

Notice I put ‘creator’ up there, and not ‘artist’? There’s a good reason for that…

These 2 elements satisfied me until about 1am, until I broke things down a little further and realised that someone can emote ideas visually as an urge of expression without any intention at all. In a nutshell, someone can be an Artist without realising it:

• Art as a means of Expression

Here’s how I came up with this thought:

Take a pair of identical twins, sit them motionless in a room together. The first sits there because she is bored and has nothing better to do, the second sits there because she wants to see how long she can sit there. Both twins are performing the same action (or lack of it), but only one (the second) has Intention in her actions, only it isn’t obvious as it is internalised and no-one can see it apart from themselves. Sooo…

….now freeze the scene and add a third person into the room observing the twins. He can see them both and have no idea regarding each others intentions, or lack of them. He may Interpret the scene as questionable, creative, emotional or insightful etc. His Intrepretation determines what is infront of him.

Indeed he may choose to see them both as Artistic forms of Expression or not – just people sat in a room doing nothing.

So with that in mind, there’s probably a natural order to these elements that define Art – and until about 4 am I was quite content with this. However it took about 1min to glue them all together, wait for it to set, paint with acrylics and varnish, whilst I tidied up the idea.

Using the above thoughts, I’ll return back to the original question of:

What’s the difference between Art and Graffiti?

Obviously Graffiti is a form of Expression (you are presented with a form of indirect communication), Intention is present (unless it happened by accident??) and Interpretation is placed upon it (It’s beautiful: It’s a mess)

So by my theory, Graffiti is Art, as it has all the elements which make up ‘Art’. However, a piece of the puzzle is missing when refering to Graffiti, and that is: Acceptance.

Think of Acceptance as Interpretation on steriods. If Interpretation is the opinion of 1, 2, 10 or a million people, Acceptance is the categorisation of Interpretation within Society. If Society, (whoever that may be) decides that Graffiti isn’t socially acceptable, then this messes with our Interpretation of what Art is – it clouds our judgement. It looks like Art, smells like Art – but everyone says it’s a mess, so it’s a mess, right?

Wrong. Graffiti is a form of Expression with Intention open to Interpretation which equals: Art

Don’t let the Acceptance of Society en masse cloud your Interpretation.

Ta-daa, its 5:25am – time for bed again

(btw – any first year art student should have been able to tell me all this, and put me straight on my wrongs, however I didn’t go to Art School, haven’t read any books on the topic and haven’t discussed it with anyone – these are my thoughts solely: think of is as a disclaimer for idiocy)

Day 5 of (possibly) 90 and I’m sat hunched over a steaming laptop with my fingers bleeding into the keyboard.

No word count this time, no strict deadline, no peer pressure (other than self inflicted) and no prize at the end of it – unless you count a reasonably readable novel as ‘a prize’.

bugger – i said it again… its not a ‘book’, its a fictional document. Thats what it is. Books are works of literary genius, printed, bound, barcoded and on sale in Waterstones. Mine? Mine is not that. Its practice, its a place to play and experiment and discover if, given enough time, one 36 yr old monkey in a room can eventually bash out a reasonable tune on a qwerty xylophone with a rubber mallet.

If ‘genius’ looks like a car crash, then I might be in with a chance.

Whats been happening for 5 days? Well a lot of timelining, figuring out characters, ripping thoughts apart and wondering how to glue them back together again. The biggest u-turn taken, compared to the previous efforts, is the attempt at writing in the first person. Maybe it was reading Catcher in the Rye, maybe it was reading ‘Money’, maybe it was an attempt at forcing me to be more descriptive instead of crushing a bag of pringles over my screen and telling people its ‘dialogue’.

So yeah, I’ve planned enough to get me going – and its been a strangely enjoyable process.

Not one I’m used to at all.

News of the Welsh council to axe youth clubs in the area, in order to save money, I’m sure will be met with horror and apathy for the council and may cause a backlash or petition activity against them. When in reality it may well be the best thing for the young people concerned.

Its easy (as was my first thought) to start damning the Council, however it is possible to see the benefits for bringing the informal play spaces, and the formal education spaces together.

So in an attempt to understand why (other than financial) this idea could work for all parties concerned, I took a moment to consider the reasons why. Here’s my top 5;

1: Instills the notion that school is ‘the’ place for young people
Duplication in anything is not good. Currently school is a place for young people and Youth Clubs are a place for young people. Whilst in the minds of adults, they can identify the need for formal learning and relaxing play – young people wouldn’t agree. Life is life to them – formal or informal. Creating separate spaces, doesn’t give clarity, it creates confusion as to where their ‘place’ actually is in society. Home is home, there is no substitute, School is school, Play is play – Youth Clubs are what? a Home/School/Play hybrid? Cut out the confusion, instill that School is the place for young people inside or outside of the home – be it formal or informal learning and play.

2: Education and play can overlap
How many times have you taken a less0n in school that you ‘wanted’ to continue after the bell had gone? How many times have you learnt or discovered something whilst playing that became applicable in the classroom? Play and Education overlaps. As does formal and informal social interaction. In life there isn’t a ‘cut off’ regarding how and where we interact with each other, so why separate this for young people?

3: More access to facilities
If you’ve ever been inside a Youth Club, you’ll notice that many of the facilities provided are either poor, or duplicates of what is provided at the local schools. However, how many Youth Clubs have access to a library, or a full range of sports facilities, or a lack of space?

4: Not running from problems
Youth Clubs allow young people to get away from their school life stresses. Whilst this is useful, it can also prolong resolution of issues, and forge stronger resentment towards something that has either happened that day, or is ongoing in the young persons life. Having the Youth Club within the Educational building, will keep them in the space to resolve issues there and then.

5: Reinforces teacher / pupil relationships
If you have a great, inspiring teacher, then being able to converse about topics ‘other’ than the current classroom agenda, will build bond the relationship. I’m not assuming that teachers will be working in ‘School Youth Clubs’, but the overlap of time, whereby the teacher is still at work, and the pupil is still on the educational premises, will allow for occasional interaction to occur. Likewise if a pupil doesn’t have a good rap-or with a teacher, this is can be down to communication differences, and/or no knowledge of what the other enjoys doing outside of school hours. E.g.: A struggling pupil of a french teacher, may approach said teacher if they have a common passion for music creation realised in the ‘youth clubs’ music facilities.

OK, these are my thoughts, and I only agree that any of these can work ‘if’ the new version of Youth Clubs are managed correctly inside the school buildings – if not, then they could all potentially fail.

I’d be interested to hear what other people feel about this.

Whilst in conversation with @kieranmasterton, he offered up this little piece of genius advice to new twitter users:

1. Tell people when you’re making a coffee
2. Tell people when something is awful
3. Tell people when something is great
4. Ask a question

As I said, genius.

It covers everything;

1. the essential ‘banal’ to prove you’re human,
2. the gems we find online to help others,
3. the crap we’re faced with to give ourselves credibility,
4. and the humility required to prove we don’t know everything.

advice I’ll certainly be following in future.

mark

Why I don’t agree with #fixreplies

What is #fixreplies?
People are gathering momentum to get Twitter to switch back a recently changed feature -preventing people from ‘listening in’ on conversations by people we don’t follow. (or whatever it is)

I’m not an employee at Twitter, I don’t have analyists, access to statistical data, market research information and knowledge of their future business plan or anything else about the company. They do, I don’t.

I am on the ground looking up at them, I can only look sideways towards my friends and aquaintances (those I’m following). It would be fair to say that I’m literally on the ‘ground’ of Twitters service. But that doesn’t mean I’m more qualified to advise, or create a movement against them. Look at it from their perspective.

They created this lovely monster, they nursed it to life, invited us all in to use it and gave it all away for free. Fair enough – so many other services have. But they also have a experts with more knowledge than me, they have a business plan to follow and a requirement to possibly make money in future, they will have access to user data and other stats about what we do online, how long we stay there and whether a feature introduced is even used. It would be fair to say that they are looking ‘over’ all the users. They see what I or we can never see – if anything it is we, that are not seeing the wood for the tree’s.

Some people within Twitter, have a huge following, they appear to be very influencial as most of us want what they’ve got – an audience. If someone ‘influencial’ puts together a string of words that makes sense to the masses, strikes a nerve into our social freedoms and makes us feel tricked – we feel hurt, we feel foolish, that we have allowed ourselves to be pushed around in that way, we feel like revoting, voicing our concerns, retweet the smart words from those ’smart influencial’ people that ‘must’ be right.

hmm. Retweet? Rethink more like.

I don’t know what’s best for Twitter, and I don’t know what’s best for their business model and I do like change – I like things to evolve, for people to shift and shuffle about. I do like it when I’m challenged and I do like it when companies ruin things. It makes me rethink the value I put into a service, it makes me look around suddenly and realise, that not only are the people within the service, shifting, moving and alive, but the service itself is alive and evolving too.

…and I want to be a part of that, no matter what.

so sorry #fixreplies – I’m out, I’m happy with change… as it keeps me on me toes and doesn’t let me get complacent with the service I’m using.

(don’t reread, don’t edit, just hit Publish)

mark

(sicks scars / six scars – did you see what I did there?)
Everyone has them – and they normally happen by some hilarious circumstances – here’s my top 5! (6):

1: Barbed wire
I have a scar on my left forearm, from where I caught my arm on some sharp barbed wire as I was racing through some woodland with my bro and friends as a kid. It pulled a chunk of flesh out of my arm and has left a raised ‘bump’ of new flesh covering the hole. Very similar in appearance to people’s BCG injections.

2: Brick face
As a small child, I fell and head butted a breeze block. I have 4 small scars across my forehead because of it.

3: Bottled
After watching people smash bottles over the heads of people in Films and TV shows I decided to try it out for myself with an empty panda pop bottle. I swung it against a goalpost and promptly sliced my thumb in a hook shape across one side.

4: Impaled
Underneath my right forearm, I have a small long thin line scar, from a time when I climbed a tree as a kid to retreive something stuck in it (a frisbee possibly). The tree was young and had a metal cage around it to protect it from the elements and vandals. On the climb down the cage with frisbee in hand I impalded myself on one of the spikes on the top. I got stuck for a moment until I realised I had to lift myself up off of it, in order to get back down to the ground. It hurt me.

5: Faceplant.
I photo’d a good vert skateboarding competition. Once it was over I was charged up and ready to roll myself. I didn’t know the ramp well enough and launched into a big backside ollie, pulled out too much and headed for a slam. I tried to kneeslide, but the new surface gripped my pads and flicked my face to the floor and smashed my jaw into the ramp. I took a chunk of flesh out of my chin and had a little ‘facelift’ to close the gap up again.

6: Eating Razorblades
As a small kid I found one of my dads razorblades in the shed, put it in my mouth and enjoy chewing it and breaking the brittle metal up into small pieces in my mouth. Eventually I got scared because blood came out of my mouth. I now have scars on the inside of mouth on both cheeks. I am therefore one of the very few people in the world that know what it feels like to eat razor blades – as opposed to people that appear to do it as part of some magic trick *grins*

I just can’t bear to read about people slating any form of e-ink technology:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cartoon_kindle_xl.php#comment-137386

Its like someone has designed a new car engine that saves the planet, yet people are moaning about ’shoes are fine, why do we need a fancy mechanical ’shoe’ to get us from A to B?’ (said in a Monty Python style voice)

ergh.

If these companies manage to sort out a decent affordable readable fast colourful ‘low power consumption’ compact way of displaying any electronic data – who’s going to benefit? 

All of us!

Embrace it people – you don’t have to buy it until its perfect – but don’t knock its development