Alexia Blogs

I just came back from Cork yesterday and even after that short trip, I’m convinced that it’s the perfect place to hold next year’s Irish Blog Awards. The city achieves the Bohemian charm of Galway without making you feel old as you’re not a student anymore. It has more soul than Dublin, the people walk like they talk, with a small lilt. Wry humour is an added bonus. I’ve always given Cork a bit of a hard time, but that’s only because I like it so much.

Cork really is the spiritual home of the Blog Awards. In some ways, its the Blogging Capital of Ireland. Even a quick look at the pantheon of technology bloggers showcases some of the best blogging talent at work today - Conor O’Neill, Pat Phelan, Damien Mulley, Sabrina Dent, Tom Raftery and Donncha O’Caoimh.

So, while the decision still has to be made, I think Cork is the perfect spot for the 2009 awards. It’s a great spot, but what does it have to offer the bloggers?

The Photobloggers

There are so many interesting nooks and crannies for Photowalkers to get lost in. I like street photography, so walking the quays would be nice. However, the city is just a short jump away from Cobh, Kinsale or even Ballycotton.

The Foodie Bloggers

Cork is bursting with some many nice eateries and places to buy quality produce that you’d weep for. Perhaps like the Photobloggers, the Foodie Bloggers would go on a Foodwalk. Break into a small groups, have lunch in different restaurants and write reviews on them. It would be nice to read different takes on the same restaurant. And a walk through the English market to end the day is a must. I won’t even mention O’Conaill’s tingly hot chocolate. No, I won’t.

The Rest of Us

There are so many hip bars, cafes and places to slum that it’s dizzying. For those out-of-towners, the city is small enough to walk comfortably. I also love the fact that there are tiny boutiques and objects d’arse stores alcoved off in the side streets. Places to get lost, only to discover funky jewelery and clothes.

I can’t wait. What do you think? And Corkonians, are there any cool, hidden gems for us to visit?

Today is Vesak, the day where Buddhists observe the birthday of Buddha. Every single day we obsess over little things that really don’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things. Some more than others. We obsess on the negative, more than the positive as it’s an easier play. A more seductive choice. Alarm bells ring, especially when painful home truths bubble up. It’s time to let go and grow.

Damnit, it’s too late for me to find out that this weekend is Ladyfest weekend in Cork. I so want to attend an event that’s inclusive of women. It’s an “All-inclusive forum for discussion, performance and celebration” that excludes men. Smelly, stinky men. 

It seems that the rural loony element in Kerry are perpetuating the image of “mad boggers” with their protests over planning restrictions outside Kerry County Council’s monthly planning meeting last night. 

The protest was organised by the Irish Rural Dwellers Association. Here’s a snippet of coverage from today’s Irish Times: 

IRDA founder Jim Connolly told the protest rural dwellers were suffering from “British ideology”. “When we introduced planning laws in 1963 we invited British rule and ideas back into this country,” he said.

Oh, dear. British rule, well I never. 

Their website makes my eyes bleed. From their ‘About’ section: 

The IRDA main aim is: “To unite all rural dwellers and people of goodwill towards rural Ireland and in the context of peaceful, multi cultural co-existence in the common cause of ensuring, by legal and constitutional means, the growth and maintenance of a vibrant, populated countryside in the traditional Irish forms of baile fearann or dispersed village, sraid bhaile or street village and the clachan or nucleated (clustered village)”.

Oh, doesn’t the aim of the organisation seem to conflict comments made by Mr. Connolly? Bitching about planning regulations and comparing them to British ideology doesn’t seem very multicultural to me. How about you? 

And the About section goes on to use the obligatory JFK reference. Is it time to run about the arena, do a lap of honour and high-five people. Oh, dear:

To paraphrase John F. Kennedy – it is not a matter of what `they should be doing’ nor indeed `what we should be doing’ but rather the question must be `what should I be doing to make things happen’.

Anyone hear the Deliverance banjos in the distance? Do those hills have eyes? Landed farmers aren’t fighting in IRDA for anything else other than money. Cries about uniting people for the purpose of insuring that countryside remains populate is horseshit. It’s all about the money and that’s the way it’s going to stay. More of this to come, methinks. 

I’m tired of playing chicken on the Leopardstown Roundabout twice a day. Roll on the end of the year. Convinced I’ll be a greasy stain before the Luas extension goes live.

It’s a measure of the maturity of social networking that we’ve skipped from network to network refinding our contacts. Reestablishing those links that join us together as we dive from Bebo, to Pownce, to Jaiku, to Twitter, to Facebook and beyond has been a tough job. What I’m really interested in, is the coming wave of features in these social networks that will enable me to friend strangers in an organic way. If social networking is to grow, it needs to adopt intelligent, automated ways for distinguishing people of interest that I should friend. 

Facebook has started doing this to a degree. For example, new joiners that have graduated from a member’s mater alma are being suggested as possible old friends that could know. 

This form of suggestion is a blunt machete, it doesn’t necessary give me any relevant suggestions. Imagine for a second, I have graduated from a very large university, the chances that a suggestion based on the attendance of a new member at that institution is infinitesimal. The chances of me knowing that person become virtually zero. For a service that aims to reconnect me with old flames, it stinks. Fail. 

The second way that Facebook (and I’m not particularly picking on Facebook here, as it’s done most down this avenue), is suggesting mutual friends of my friends as potential contacts. It does this when, for example, a couple of my friends share a relationship link in Facebook with another person. This might seem like a good idea, but the suggestion is an objective one. There seems to be no way of targeting subjective topics such as tastes in music, books or business interests, in this suggest a mutual friend mechanism. And this is the crux of the matter.

What’s interesting for me as a social animal may not interest another. In the real world, the matching of interests is concentrated in the form of a connector. A mutual middleman who knows what both you and I are interested in and makes the effort in connecting us. In the Irish business sphere, the connector might come in the form of a Pat Phelan or a Paul Walsh. Someone who knows the value of contacts and is happy to make introductions where they see overlapping interests. What Facebook and other social networks need to adopt, is an automated Pat or Paul. 

I might like, for example, to search for an buddy to go to post-modern German plays in Dublin. Yeah, a pretty small niche, but there’s no way for Facebook to suggest a buddy for me. You could argue, that perhaps I ought to join a Facebook group or signup to an event and use this kick-start the operation to discovery my drama buddy. But why all the work? Isn’t the data just there? 

And now, we come to the heart of the issue. Data. Privacy is a biggie here. If organic friending is to work then it must operate in an opt-in mode, so that data that people are interested in sharing can be compiled and processed. Public data via RSS feeds ought to be fair game too. I want to have a 360 view of potentials. Of course, as with any friending contacts blind, it’s a case of buyer beware. Reputation must be weighed up before friending, but I’m taking it as a given that a person’s senses are operating. We’re not idiots. 

So Facebook, suggest me this and suggest me that, but until you add an element of intelligence under the hood that fetches me targets of interest based on subjective parameters, things that I like, your suggestions waste my time and pixel real estate. Organic friending needs to be the next big leap forward for social networking, else our networks remain stale little holes of interaction lacking vitality and freshness. 

There’s a universal truth we’re all subject to, ask us to recommend a service or describe a real-world object and we revert to talking about the emotional impact that they have on us. On that favourite album - a stolen moment somewhere special. That little black dress - the first place you wore it and who you met. You get the idea. Events, people, services, even sources of information are branded in our memories and concentrated as a single idea - One Great Thing. Ask us to articulate and we default to those emotional brands. Recollection of a sensual ideal. Hot-iron buffalo, like. Sans pain and the acrid stench of burning flesh. 

Big companies are built on the back of feeding Johnny Customer emotional messages. Just look at companies with good examplers of One Great Things include Nokia’s “Connecting People”, Coca-Cola’s “Always” and Apple’s “Think Different”. Each of these simply sets out an emotional aspiration or a comfort source as a branding magnet. A personal connection so my Euro its merry way into their pockets.

I have always wondered what it would be like to deconstruct the concept of blog branding. To look at the emotional triggers that hook both bloggers and readers in perpetual cycle of write/read/comment. We all blog to a brand. A fixed emotional formula set by our mission statement - our One Great Thing. While we’re all motivated to express ourselves, at a deeper level, we all seek to sate a gap that blogging fills. These are not negatives, rather emotional spots that help us compose that message. Here are just a few I’ve been playing with:

For business blogs: it’s about shoehorning agenda, spin and self-promotion to gain and retain clients. They play on the disconnectedness of your life and/or business and promise a brighter day. They try to inspire confidence and control, to gain your trust. All in emotional way, of course. The boom-boom message is all about inspiring awe. 

For personal blogs: it’s all about establishing and retaining identity. People don’t want to be lost in a sea of blank faces - readers and writers instinctively know that. Yes, pseudonyms can be used, but the one-to-one connection is unmistakeable. Exposing personal meanderings is all about stamping a spot on the web and building out personal relationships or making them stronger. At the extreme end of the scale, you find that some personal blogs tend to pile on the shock quotient in an effort to distinguish themselves from the rabble. It’s all a matter of personal style, but the fingerprints are sometimes all too visible. The fear of losing identity, the search for acceptance and/or censure is never far behind.

For rights advocacy blogs: here, it’s all about the eternal struggle for rebalancing inequalities. Isolation caused by social exclusion often stalks the writer. Readers look for comfort, acceptance or from a diametric position, a cause to rally  against. In a funny kind of way, I find these some of these blogs tend towards combining shock and awe into a heady mix. They aim to separate readers and ask them questions about personal givens.

Where does your blog fit in? What deep triggers make you blog or return to regular reads? What does this do to your brand and how does it shape your One Great Thing message?

I didn’t take part in the Creative Camp talk entitled ‘Women In Technology: Grabbing the Blogosphere by the Balls’. Here are some of the ideas that I was planning to speak on. 

The title of this topic has two distinct and different strands. Two subtle themes that branch off and build into discussions all their own. Firstly, the participation of females in technical roles and the secondly, women in blogging. You see, these topics really are separate. Some women in technology keep blogs, but not all women in blogging are necessarily into technology. And why should they be?

Women in Technology: ”Participation rates are at X%, let’s try super hard to shoot for Y%. M’kay?!” 

Time and time again, the proportion of women working in technology is played like a game of percentages. The obsessive numbers game is demeaning to women already working in the field. Technology is the application of disciplined engineering to solve a problem. The impulse that kicks off the creative journey into technology is curiosity. Ask any child that pulls apart their toys why they do it, and they’ll retort to the effect of “to see what happens”. Curiosity, pure and simple. Adding rules about how the curiosity of children ought to to be doctored to meet numbers that make the PC faction feel good about themselves, amounts to wholesale societal manipulation. 

What we ought to be doing as a society is encouraging children from all walks of life and all socio-economic backgrounds to question known precedents, be it in Politics, the Arts or Sciences. Questioning known principles and pulling apart the systems that we use to deliver education, justice, parenting, engineered solutions and every other convention of life pushes us into new ground. Challenging places, past perceived boundaries. This is motivated not by chalking up numbers on a gender scoreboard, but by opening paths for the children of today to pursue.

So, what’s the Secret Sauce? It has to include the provision of positive role models, quality education from tot to teen and community support mechanisms. There’s no easy solution to build a generation of children willing to challenge perceived norms. Curiosity ought to be nurtured. I want to see generations of engineers. Engineers of political science, engineers of education, engineers of parenting, engineers of software development. Is not the core practice of engineering the solution of problems? Does society not deserve the cold eye of reason bent on solving inequalities? Don’t close the problem of under-representation of women in technology into a neat little silo. Hasn’t that been done enough? Are you complicit?

Women and Blogging: “You Need To Be Like X To Be Taken Seriously”

Blogging is an act of expression just like fashioning a sculpture, telling a story or dancing the samba. We each possess our own unique style. Some like to unearth the fallacies that people artfully hide to get on in life, while others help us celebrate the little things in life - the importance of detail. 

Expression is all about externalising your beliefs. Those bells that sing to you, help your moral compass, and guide your humour. Stylistically, I like to blog neutral. I don’t harbour any ambition to follow a herd. I simply want to write material that I’d love to read. And isn’t that the primary motivation of a writer? And, returning to my geek instincts, that love of taximonising behaviour, isn’t blogging just a kind-of writing? 

But, nowadays, there are talking heads telling women to assume different voices so we can be taken seriously as writers. They tell us to adapt our commentaries, so they fit little boxes of masculinity. Just so the outside world will take us seriously. Is not this the greatest act of advocacy for separating the gender roles of writers? For sexism in a Wordpress edit box? As we brave our way deeper into the gender question, shouldn’t we question what why certain sectors of our society are advocating that women use soapbox artifices when expressing themselves? Why the nanny state advice? What’s in it for them? 

Edit: Coherence fix 

More and more, I seem to be coming across friends and contacts who dabble in other jobs in their spare time. Some have thriving side businesses doing consulting in similar to their day jobs. For others, it’s broadening their hobby into a small, but fulfilling cottage business. I like to call this phenomenon dabbling. Dabbling doesn’t have to come in the form of doing formal IT consultative work. Far from it. Dabbling could simply be a stay-at-home mum deciding to use her foreign language skills to help out local businesses operating in international markets or a student starting a crafting business from their bedroom. Dabbling comes in all shapes and sizes, and in every Hush Puppy flavour you can imagine.

Economic experts tell us that the demands of the modern working world mean there’s no automatic job for life (ignoring civil servants here, as they live in an alternate universe). They say that we’ll change job every couple of years. And they’re right, but aren’t we dabbling more in side projects? Hell, almost every big-name technology giant you can muster up started in someone’s back room or garage as a dabble. This is not to say that dabbling will end up founding a Google, rather, that there is potential in every seed to build out fulfilling businesses where you call the shots.

Dabbling is great for the indigenous Irish business scene and the creativity engine that drives it, but are there ways that we can improve the environs to seed more dabbling by the populace?

Providing easier roads to capital: Some time back Elly blogged how she contributed a loan of $25 in a scheme organised by Kiva to help entrepreneurs in developing countries. Now, I’m not advocating we set up local loan shark organisations to loan out to small businesses and then shake them down, but there it wouldn’t be nice to see local people contribute and investing in businesses near them? Perhaps through a scheme operated under the umbrella of their local Credit Union. Of course, ways to prevent cronyism and neighbourly oneupmanship would need to be put in place.

Being flexible with networking time: On the tech scene I see Open Coffee Clubs happening every week up and down the country, wouldn’t it be nice if dabblers could use that idea too? It could be called the Open Dabblers Club! Instead, of having networking meets in work hours, perhaps a Thursday or Friday evening would suit. Yeah, it’s time away from the dabble, but it could make good business sense, if the right connections get made or business gets done. People could the chat about their work, look for advice and sell their product to others. I think the more flexible and unstructured these networking meets can be, the better. Dabblers have too many demands on their time already, with work and family, so keeping it flexible is mandatory. Perhaps, even the local County Enterprise Boards could host some, get some speakers to talk and provide some teas and coffees. Just tea, mind, no booze, else it might attract opportunistic freeloaders instead of opportunistic entrepreneurs.

Open attitudes are vital to helping dabblers taking that first step from hobby to business. It would be nice to see big government take an interest in fostering that spirit of enterpreneurship. Taking to the nth degree, the next generation could get firsthand knowledge into the inner workings of business DIY by witnessing dabbles piloted by their parents. Lessons learned in the home are always more strongly reinforced than limp attempts by the secondary educational system to implant business know-how in grey vocational programmes.

There’s no doubt that dabbling can be big, but are we ready? So, what do you think? Are you a dabbler?

Our differences are insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Carl Sagan reads from his book ‘The Pale Blue Dot’.