How I came back

I stumbled across someone’s old school online community blog a few months back – a guy that worked at the BBC in the early 00s and who has been blogging since 2005. It reminded me of my own blog, as I had discussed things like Facebook in 2007 (when they launched brand pages), in 2009 (when they started advertising), and in 2011 (when they tried to get me to set my homepage to Facebook).

Zero Intention:

I had no intention of restarting this blog but two reasons caused me to do so:

1. Seeing a young YouTuber’s YT channel (19-year-old)
2. Thinking I have a role to play (I am part of an older online culture, web 1.0 if you will)

When reading back some of my old blog posts, I used to approach and interpret the Internet largely through a media angle. Partially because I originally had a cultural studies / media background (rather than a business and management one), but partially also because ‘in those days’ it wasn’t as commercialised as it is today (this blog didn’t use to have ads when I wrote my first post on  21 July 2006.)

Now I see everything through the ‘Marketing’ angle, even the draft title for this blog post was a click-baity SEO headline! So. I always wear my marketing / brand / blah blah head. I can’t look at digital media neutrally any more – I existing in the matrix so to speak (as a personal brand).

I need to take a meta–angle. It is quite difficult to have a ‘voice’.

Archive publication:

I also thought it would be useful to make the site available again to be crawled by the search engines (this means they’ll be shown in the Google search results pages).

There is some useful content e.g. in relation to the time when I did my PhD (this blog originally documented my PhD journey, see e.g. the PhD Viva (= oral examination) category. The category list on the right admittedly is rather chaotic!

I may have even have time to do some more tidying over the summer 😀

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What killed Amy Winehouse?

Image via Wikipedia

Speculation has been rife as to what killed Amy Winehouse. Was it drugs? Drink? Today, I read that Mitch Winehouse (her dad) claims that  alcohol rather than drugs was responsible for Amy’s death.

Apparently, she had replaced illegal drugs (from which she’d been clean for 3 years) with booze. This is more common than you’d think – I know 4 people that have stopped illegal drugs -specifically cannabis –  and replaced them with the legal (but much more harmful!) drug of alcohol.

One case is someone I used to know quite well. The person was in their early 20s and had developed an addiction to cannabis that they weren’t comfortable with. They were unemployed and an excessive stoner (of the ‘wake and bake’ variety), and cannabis exacerbated existing feelings of high anxiety and paranoia.

So they stopped.

However, because they were an addict they started consuming the legal drug of alcohol, and excessively so. A few years down the line they were very fat and unhealthy and reeking of beer, and totally in the grip of booze. From the health side of things, the addiction to alcohol was much more damaging than the previous one to cannabis. OK, they may not have had the same anxiety and paranoia issues, but the liver was on the way out and braincells were being killed every day. It was obvious.

The worst thing about alcohol is that it’s much more addictive than cannabis. The alcohol addict can’t just ‘stop’. So, with booze you have both a physical and mental addiction, all the while it destroys your body.

I’m very sad that alcohol killed Amy Winehouse. I know the illegal drugs she took were more than cannabis, but had she just stuck with cannabis (the least addictive, most beneficial drug of all legal / illegal drugs), she wouldn’t have needed to start boozing.

What killed Amy Winehouse? What ruined my mate, and will ruin many others? Society’s insistence on glorifying alcohol (= a killer drug) combined with its demonisation of the most natural herb that’s never killed anyone: Cannabis.

Getting Away from it All

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been thinking of reducing my Internet use at home to the bare minimum, i.e. just emailing (when I have to) and ‘information search’ (including buying stuff).

Why?

For a number of reasons.

One, security/privacy. I don’t like the idea of putting myself about online – I’ve completely gone off that idea. I don’t want anyone to know anything about me 😛 . I’m thinking about googling my own name and deleting every profile etc. that I can find that’s under my name.

Two, boredom. Producing stuff online, putting myself out, using online tools to tell the world about me, just doesn’t hit the spot any more. I’m in the grip of some kind of internet fatigue.

Three, general media apathy. I’ve completely reduced the amount of media that I consume, especially, visual media, and I feel better for it. The only visual media I use in my private life is the occasional game, and, the occasional (mostly educational) programme on iPlayer.

Thus, I’m going to think about it. I might just stop blogging and twittering for a while. Or I may disappear altogether 🙂

Britney Spears’ Online Media Manager

Image via Wikipedia

This strikes me as a great idea – and no doubt other ‘celebs’ already have a ‘personal online brand manager’.

Britney Spears (well… her ‘people’)  is looking for her own Brand/Social Media Manager. Apparently this was posted on the Harvard-only private job board (according to TechCrunch, link above).

You don’t have to be posh to be geeky. I’d say rather the opposite. There again, Facebook was founded by Mr. Zuckerberg while at Harvard, I believe.

Either way, I can’t think of anything duller than having to maintain Ms Spears’ various online identities. Yawn.

iPlayer – Live Broadcast of BBC1 / BBC2 from 27th Nov

When phoning the thickos from TV Licensing yesterday to reiterate that I no longer had a device able to play/record live TV and that therefore, I didn’t need a license, they asked me to put all this into writing and send it to them ASAP.

They also informed me that iPlayer, since September, had been streaming live TV. I was sure this was incorrect and that it was about to be launched. And sure enough, after googling it today I found out it’s going to be possible from this Thursday 27th November (and NOT since mid-September!).

What I’ll have to do is send them a letter confirming that I not only DO NOT have a working TV set but also that I WILL NOT watch live TV online. It’s so tedious! NB this ‘live streaming’ will ensure that iPlayer fans will in theory be able to watch live TV (but ONLY if they purchase a license…), as the Register points out:

Jana Bennett, director of BBC Vision, said: “The launch of BBC One and BBC Two online completes our commitment to make our portfolio of channels available to watch on the internet. From 27 November licence fee payers will be able to watch BBC programmes, live, wherever they are in the UK on their computers, mobile phones and other portable devices.”

Note “licence fee payers” in that quote. While catching up with shows on iPlayer does not require a TV licence, watching any live broadcast – including over the internet – does.

Argh. I may get that TV set repaired after all. At least I’ll then be able to play my PS3 on a big screen 🙂

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