Facebook, Twitter and the new media space

If you're like me, you've probably watched the growth of the new Social Networks and seen them as just another fad - no more. They are here to stay and are fast becoming how more and more people communicate with each other, forming their own movements in the process. The use of Twitter in Iran following the elections is the most recent example. I was reminded by viewing a presentation by Clay Shirky, professor, speaker and author of the new book 'Here Comes Everybody', as he gave a TED Talk last month entitled “How Twitter can make history, that the earthquake that hit the Sichuan province in China on May 12th, 2008 was first communicated to the outside world on Twitter.
The US research group Nielsen has also just released a report into 'How Teens Use Media' It's free and well worth reading.
Link this to a presentation I published a few weeks back on 'Gen Y, WMDs and learning from Obama' and you can see a real trend.
What does it mean? Time will ultimately tell, but Clay Shirky makes the comment that for the first time in history, everyone can be both a consumer and a publisher of information. What we do with this will be the real test.
Comments?

Korean technology - check out this lecturn

Check out this 'all purpose lecturn' in the lecture room we're using as a seminar room in a Theological College in Seoul. The base of the lecturn contains a computer (mouse on the right), a monitor and then remote controls for the projector, screen up and down, lighting and level controls for mic, DVD and PC audio.
Amazing piece of technology and the room is only a normal sized classroom. Means the teacher can do it all himself.
Quite remarkable.

Heading for Korea and Hong Kong

When you land in Seoul, Korea you need to take the train from the terminal where you land to the main terminal for customs, baggage collection, etc.
In true Asia style, you're given guidelines on where to stand as you wait for the train ... Seoul is a series of high-rise buildings, one after the other all the way from the airport into town. The Han River divides the city into two which is spanned by myriad bridges - all with arched spans. We're staying up on Walkershill - named I am sure because of the number of walkers (dressed in suitable Korean walking gear) who parade up and down the hill. Enjoying the food and the mild summer weather.

A day at Berrima and the Southern Highlands

We spent today at Berrima - a beautiful Australian colonial village in the Southern Highlands - about two hours south of Sydney.
Home to the Berrima Correctional Centre, great food, jams, pickles and spices and all things antique. (These jars of Apricot Mustard caught my eye - haven't yet tasted it, but sounds fascinating). Lunched at Josh's Restaurant, fabulous food and the coffee in the Southern Highlands. The quality of the woollen goods and the handcrafts here continue to be a delight.

IPhone Update

For three years I used a Blackberry, linked to my exchange server account where I worked. In practice all I did was set up a rule in exchange to forward all my e-mails to the e-mail address associated with my Blackberry. Simple.
At the beginning of this year I started my own business - hence this web site - and had to decide what phone to buy. All my sons had an iPhone as did a few of my friends. I had also made the jump from a PC to a Mac. The dual processor Macbook meant I could boot in Windows of OSX and have the best of both worlds.
This made me lean towards an iPhone, given that I assumed it would work better with my Mac.
There were a few things I needed the iPhone to do:
1. Access my Bigpond e-mail
2. Sync my Entourage diary, notes and To Do list with the same functions on the phone.
3. I didn't think I needed web access or Google maps of a lot of the other things that come standard on the iPhone.

I researched the e-mail synching, using MobileMe, where all your data is stored in a 'cloud' and syncs to your Mac or iPhone or any web based machine. It looked pretty good.

Theory intro practice
I moved my number from my previous provider over to Telstra and decided on a suitable plan. (Since upgraded when I realised how much mobile plans costs - the joys of a company phone were no longer ..)

Calls and texting were as I expected, they worked OK and whilst it took a while to get used to the way the iPhone worked, this was no real problem.

Setting up my e-mail so I could receive it and reply from my phone took a bit longer. I discovered that MobileMe only works with a @me.com e-mail address so I had to set one of these up. Plus there is an annual fee - which I didn't really mind.

In order to then get my Bigpond mail 'pushed' to my phone, I had to forward all the mail using Bigpond's on-line e-mail manager, to my MobileMe account. I suppose this is no different to how I set-up my Blackberry, but it took a while to work out.
So I set up both MobileMe and my Bigpond POP account in the e-mail section of the iPhone.
Whilst the MobileMe mail is pushed to my account, I have to 'pull' the Bigpond mail down my opening up Mail and then the Bigpond account.

After all this, I have decided to de-active the forwarding of my Bigpond mail to my MobileMe account and now just 'pull' down my Bigpond mail when I am out of the office. Being forced to have a MobileMe account was not really how I wanted to work, given that I have had my Bigpond account for 10 years or so.

Calendar/To Do/Notes
Synching my calendar etc between my phone and laptop was another key part of how I wanted to work and for the Calendar part, I use MobileMe's Calendar function. In order for this to work I did need to start using ICalendar on the Mac, but because this can sync internally with Entourage, I discovered this is actually OK. I have also discovered iCalendar's multiple calendar function, which is great.

To Do
This was a real pain as there is no native sync of a To Do list on the iPhone. Seems strange I know, but it wasn't built into the software - at least not yet.
So, the work around is almost as good - I use Appigo's To Do product. It is an App you can download and install on your phone, plus these is a companion program that runs on the Mac and syncs with ICalendar's To Do function.
Synching the two is done via a wireless connection. I have a home wireless network which both my Mac and my IPhone connect to. Once this is done and working, the synching of my To Do list works fine. It would be nice if this was part of the MobileMe service - but at least it works.

Notes
I have a stack of notes in Entourage. All imported from my exchange account. Unfortunately there seems to be no product that syncs Notes in the 'ics' format with the iPhone, so at the moment I have to live with this problem. I do tend to carry my laptop with me everywhere , so that's not too much of a problem.

Other Apps
Air Sharing is a great App that uses the same wireless connection to enable you to put any files on your Mac onto your iPhone. Its easy to do, just as you would with shifting any file from one device to another. It does need a program on your Mac as well as the iPhone

Evernote
Not yet sure of this app and I am currently using it to get around the lack of Notes sync. Its designed to enable you to 'clip' something from a web page, image, text or the whole page and then sync that with the Evernote server somewhere in the sky which then syncs with the Evernote app on your iPhone. It seems to work OK and I use it for copying images, addresses, articles etc from the web to my iPhone.
I'm sitting in the Q Club at the moment and before I left home I browsed to the hotel I am staying at and clipped the address, etc to Evernote using the Safari Evernote plug in. A few seconds later it was on my iPhone.

Overall
My iPhone and I are slowly becoming friends. Can't wait for the promised software update which will hopefully allow cut and paste, To Do sync and a whole lot more.
The keyboard is a pain though - blowed if I can get anywhere near the accuracy I got on the Blackberry. Not sure what it needs ... bigger keys or smaller fingers?

Time till tell.

So - who can't read?

This is my local high school, where all three of our sons went. As I drove past this morning, something about the sign caught my attention. It wasn't the spelling, because that's correct. Ah yes - when did you last see a book with 3,400 pages?
I tried to imagine it - with some airport novels around the 900 page mark, a book with 3,400 pages would surely be too big to carry?
My NIV compact print Bible is 1,000 pages - so such a book would be over three times the size of a Bible! Wow ....
I think either the school has very high expectations of their student's reading ability - or someone has made a mistake? I wonder if the person who put up the sign went to the school? I hope not.
Wonder how many days it will take for them to fix it? I'll let you know. See this story in Column 8 in today's (May 5th) Sydney Morning Herald. Click here >

The Shack - my thoughts

Took the time to read The Shack over the weekend. This is a novel that seems to have taken parts of the Christian world by storm, with over three million copies in print. Its a story about a guy (Mack) who's daughter is abducted during a vacation and how he deals with her brutal murder. Most of the words written about the book are to do with how it portrays Mack's meeting with the Trinity - Father, Son and Holy Spirit back at The Shack where his daughter was most likely murdered. Author Paul Young (He calls himself WM. Paul Young - which is a pretentious way of saying William, I assume) portrays God as a black woman, Jesus as a not too attractive looking guy and the Holy Spirit as some form of free spirit with no real bodily form. The relationships between the three of them and how they then relate to Mack is the basis of most of the book. The key thing of course is that this is a novel - a work of fiction. Some of the stuff that has been written about the book would make you think it was a new version of the Bible. Its a novel.
Is it helpful in understanding the Trinity? In part I think it is - it would be worth hearing a theologian discuss the way this is portrayed in relation to what the Bible says.
Must go looking on the web.