The death of Michael Jackson has provided further evidence for the power of the internet in general and of social media in particular. Here are some statistics courtesy of Clean Cut Media.
- Web Usage: Jumped to 4.2 million global visitors per MINUTE. Normal is around 2 million.
- Web Search: More than 50% of top 100 searches were related to Michael Jackson
- Mobile Search: Saw the largest spike ever with 5 of 20 searches being about Michael Jackson
- Yahoo: Single day record of 16.4 million visitors
- CNN: Significantly slowed as they saw 20 million page views and saw traffic jump 5x normal levels within the first hour after the news broke.
- AIM: Went down for 40 minutes
- iTunes: 8 of the top 10 selling albums for download were from Michael Jackson, 8 of the top 10 music videos were also Michael Jackson related. 5 of the top 10 songs.
- Amazon: 10 of the top 25 albums for download were Michael Jackson.
- Amazon: For all CD sales, Jackson held 17 of the top 20 spots including all top 10 slots.
- Youtube: “Thriller Video” currently has 43.5 million views and 185,000 comments.
- Youtube: Fans are uploading videos in droves in memory of Michael Jackson
- Twitter: 5,000 tweets per minute
- Twitter: 23% of all tweets dedicated to the star.
- Twitter: 9 out of 10 popular topics were about Michael Jackson.
- Twitter: Celebrities expresses sorrows while followed by millions on Twitter.
- Facebook: Groups formed to organize vigils and celebration of Jackson
- Domains: Nearly 4,000 domain names related to Michael Jackson registered on Go Daddy within the first day
Jackson’s demise has also triggered a whole range of morbid jokes, most unrepeatable but worth searching on Google if you’re not offended by the tasteless… my favourites from repeatable list are
‘Don’t blame it on the sunshine, don’t blame it on the moonlight, don’t blame it on the good times, blame it on the cardiac arrest’.
When Farrah Fawcett arrived at heaven, God granted her one wish. She wished for all the children to be safe… so God killed Michael Jackson.
It used to be said how polite we British were. Maybe we still queue patiently at bus stops, and unlike stereotypical continental Europeans, we wait our turn. But in general our tolerance for others and the way we react had definately changed over the last 30 years.
We appear to live in a more aggressive, indeed violent society, exemplified at one end of the spectrum as we’ve become a nation of complainers and the other by the knife carrying culture of many of the urban young males.
I’m sure we all like to consider ourselves to be kind, compassionate and reasonable human beings, not prone to aggression. Yet put us behind the safety of an email and for many us, our characters can change.
The very quick-fire nature of an email means that, on occasion, our correspondence can lose a degree of courteousness… and when you are not face to face, it’s easier to take a firmer, more aggressive stance.
It can develop into a semi confrontational, passive-aggressive process where colleagues face-off and exchange a series of ill-considered emails, usually in quick succession over a short period.
On several occasions in recent weeks I have taken an active role in such a dialogue, where each successive email attempts to out-score the previous one. Any satisfaction in ‘getting-in the last word’ is short-lived. It’s both time consuming and annoying, but ultimately unproductive.
When you walk down any High Street you’ll pass by loads of people deep in conversation with a phone up to their ear… occasionally they will be talking ‘hands-free’ and you begin to give them a wide berth until you realise that they’re not actually talking aloud to themselves. Clearly many people have much more to talk about now than they did before the invention of the mobile phone.
Mobile phones go off everywhere, including cinemas, restaurants and theatres… and at meetings. Some people check and switch off or reject the call, whilst others will say ‘I’m in a meeting and will call you back‘ or actually leave the room to take the call… I’ve done all three at one time or another, but either way it’s a disruption to the work place.
More and more of us have smart phones such as an iphone or Blackberry which can do the usual texts and voice calls of the standard mobile, but also email and web surfing and a wide range of other applications. And just as we can talk whenever we want on the mobile, we can now also interrupt our day by checking and answering emails or viewing online content anywhere.
There is a growing trend for people to consult their smart phones during meetings. IT Services even offers smart phones as a work tool so I guess we’ll be seeing more surreptitious use in future. I am frequently tempted especially when the meeting is straining my powers of concentration. A recent poll in the USA suggested that 1/3 of office workers frequently checked emails during business meeting. With twitter or IM you can also have ‘back-channel conversations’ with other people in the meeting.
It can be distracting to a speaker if it looks like people aren’t listening… is it bad manners to check something on your phone while at a meeting?
How we communicate is rapidly changing and there’s no defined etiquette or internal policy for using smart phones or even laptops at meetings… what do you think?
A photo taken this week in Southampton outside the Apple computer store.
Somewhat cheeky, not only to steal the trademark name, but also then set up a stand outside the Apple shop. There have been numerous examples of litigation over the use of the Apple trademark, with the Beatles Apple record label, New York – the Big Apple, but maybe Apple Home Improvements will get away with it.
As a County Council, we use the prefix “hants”. From Hantsweb, Hantsfish, Hantsdirect and so on, it works fairly well as a sort of trademark to say this is a Hampshire County Council provided online service… which got me to looking for other uses of “hants” that weren’t HCC.
- Hantscounty - a place in Nova Scotia
- Hantslug - linux user group, not for lovers of slimy garden creatures
- Hantsmoths - obviously moths
- Hantsastro – Watch the Space Shuttle STS-127 Launch here 13 June 2009
- HantsPlants - for botanists in Hampshire
I’m sure there are plently more examples, but my favourite has to be the Hants Apple.
Next blog post after 22 June.
The governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is looking to replace traditional paper schoolbooks with ebooks. Not only is it intended to save money but it will also mean that information can always be kept up-to-date.
I must be honest that it’s many years ago that I was at school and maybe things have changed, but textbooks were passed down from one class to another each time the year group moved up. Books were old and worn with a series of crossed out names written inside the front cover. Then there were the marks and stains, the source of which were usually to horrible to imagine.
School kids nowadays ought not have any problem adjusting to this technology, indeed I expect most are more familiar, and maybe more comfortable, reading off a screen than reading paper.
If the economic calculations are correct and there are savings to be made then maybe we’re at the beginning of the end of the traditional educational textbook.
Next blog post after 22 June
On Wednesday I was at a session at the CILIPS09 library conference. I listened to the speaker Brian Kelly from UKOLN, viewed his powerpoint slides and followed the twitter backchannel. But I was in sunny Hampshire and the conference was 416 miles away in a cloudy Peebles in Scotland.
My involvement was a quick and dirty experiment to see how the web could be used to open up a conference and broaden participation. It took a few minutes to set up. At the beginning of his session, Brian briefly introduced me as a remote delegate for his talk and I said hello to the audience through the tiny speakers in his netbook.
- Using Skype I was able to both talk to Brian before the session began and listen to his presentation.
- Using Slideshare I was able to see the powerpoint slides his audience were seeing
- Using twitter I was able to communicate with anyone who was following the twitter stream in the session
So did it work?
Yes and no… Firstly it was free! I did, however, feel dislocated from the action and not seeing the speaker made it more difficult to follow the presentation. Sound quality could have been better. I had to move through the slides myself rather than the speaker doing it, so a couple of times I got out of sync. But all in all it worked and as technology improves the experience should as well. I think that with more time we could have set up a webcam and I could also have watched. Either way I got to hear an interesting presentation without having to go to Scotland.
How can we use it?
We can open up some of our meetings to colleagues who can’t attend in person. In Hampshire we spend a lot of time travelling , and frequently the meetings take less time than the journey. Maybe these simple technologies will be able to be used to have virtual meetings. We certainly need to start thinking about the opportunities they offer.
On 4 June polling stations open so we can elect councillors for Hampshire County Council and also our representatives at the European Parliament. I’d like to think that you will all find time to exercise your democratic right and participate in this important process.
On the day you can head off to your polling station in a local school or community centre, line up in front of the electoral officers to get your ballot paper and then into the privacy of the booth to vote.
Using a stubby pencil tied by a length of string to the wall of the booth, you will then draw a large cross next to the names of your chosen candidates. Fold the ballot paper and slip it through the slot into the ballot box. At the close of polling the boxes are taken away for the votes to be counted.
There have been pilot projects in many countries to set up electronic systems that to allow voting via the Internet, by mobile phone, digital TV or at a touch-screen kiosk. Critics of electronic voting claim that it is inherently flawed and susceptible to fraud, however it can’t beyond the wit of systems developers to create a secure electronic voting process. India has used electronic voting on a large scale in 2009 when more than 400 million voters used electronic voting machines. Tallying such a large number of votes took just a few hours.
So why do we still prefer the paper and pencil method and manually counting millions of bits of paper?
Think of the Eurovision Song Contest… several hours of bad songs followed by an interminable period of voting which builds the tension up as votes are gradually added until the final result is clear. I’m not sure, but I guess they were using electronic systems, so they could have had all votes in at exactly the same time… in which case the final song is over… and immediately the winner can be announced… a bit of an anti-climax.
The same principle applies to our elections for both local and central government. If we could all vote electronically, the polling stations would close, electoral computers would feed their polling data into a central server and within minutes we’d know all the results…
Now imagine you’re a TV politics producer… like Eurovision the political pundits have been used to building up the tension as individual results emerge, discussing swings this way and that way, and over many hours throughout the night, incrementally leading up to the final results. Which system would you prefer if you were making TV programmes?
I, somehow, think we’ll be exercising our franchise in the traditional way for some time to come.
When I left to go on leave a couple of weeks ago I was working for Recreation and Heritage, but when I returned I found out that R&H was, like Monty Python’s parrot, deceased and no more, and I was now working for Culture, Community and Rural Affairs or as we now must abbreviate it CCRA.
There already a number of organisations using these initials…including the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, Cowboy Calf Roping Association, California Court Reporters Association and my favourite Certified Catastrophe Risk Analyst and surely no likelihood of confusion there.
Most of us are not good at change. It upsets our routines and unsettles us. But gradually we get used to things and it becomes the new routine. For about two weeks after each change of hantsnet password I constantly attempt to logon with the old one… but like a new password I am now getting used to the new name for the department and trying to remember to use it. I still have to think when I say who I work for when speaking on the phone, and a surprising number of the calls I make to Mottisfont Court are are still answered Recreation and Heritage.
It got me thinking about product naming. There’s both art and science in selecting a product name. The private sector spends an inordinate amount of time and money, testing and reviewing new product names to ensure that they meet all the required criteria. Our name change describes the restructuring of the department along with the broadening areas of responsibility, and hasn’t gone through the rigourous testing process that a commercial organisation would have done.
Recreation and Heritage or R&H had a mellifluous quality… it was easy to say whereas Culture, Community and Rural Affairs doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, adds more syllables and involves more complex mouth movements to say.
Perhaps it doesn’t really matter what we’re called? Maybe some of you have a better suggestion for a new name for the department! Let us know by commenting below!
Unfortunately the old name appears on hundreds of web pages, and the web team are going to have to find each one and change them one by one… not all pages need changing as amending a historical information such as an annual report has to refer to the old department name and not the new one.
We’re going to be slowly working through the website to replace the old with the new name… GIve us five or six weeks to work through, then I’d be grateful if you can let us know of any that we’ve missed! This time we have set up the system so that, if and when we again to a new name, a one click change will change it across all our web pages… but let’s hope it’s not too soon.
The newly released Star Trek movie reminded of watching the first TV series way back in the late 1960s. When a member of the crew of the Starship Enterprise entered the bridge, the doors would boldly open as they entered and magically close behind them… that was science fiction to have intelligent doors. Now we take it for granted that when we enter a building the doors will open automatically as we approach to let us pass through. It’s a constant disappointment that they don’t make the ’swooshy’ noise as in Star Trek, but nonetheless each time I use one I am reminded that I am living in “future-world”.
So where is all this leading?
It’s actually another piece of Star Trek technology – the computer. In Star Trek the crew talked the the ship’s computer. They’d say “Computer… give me the coordinates for the nearest Class M planet”… and the computer would talk back to them. How good would it be to be able to do that?
These days most computers can speak the text off the screen, and we’ve had voice recognition software for dialling on your mobile phone for sometime now… or for word processing… speak into a microphone and the words appear on the screen. But none of this has really taken off yet for general use.
I recently replaced my old iphone with a new 3G iphone. I downloaded the free Google app which is much like the Google web page on your machines, but with one exception… it has voice search… you can speak your search term into the phone and Google does the rest bringing up the search results page in answer to your query. Sadly it doesn’t yet speak back, but that can’t be too far off.
I’m sure we”ll see the gradual end of the mouse/keyboard in the coming years as touch screen and voice technologies begin to provide a more human interface, and maybe even intelligent conversations with our computers.
Beam me up Yinnon
Hello Everyone,Ericsson is distributing free laptops for their brand promotion. They are hoping to increase their popularity and sales by this campaign. All you need to do is send an email about this promotion to 8 people and you will receive an Ericsson T18 Laptop. However, if you send an email to 20 or more people, you will receive an Ericsson R320 Laptop.Kindly ensure that you cc to Anna at Ericsson so that she will know you have sent the e-mail.
I know you all received a copy of this chain letter email… how many of you thought- free laptop… great, and all I have to do is send a few emails!
Now let’s examine the mathematics behind this hoax promotion. You send an email to 8 people who in turn send it to 8 people and so on. By the first sending it would be received by 64 people, then 512, then 4096, then 32768, then 262,144. The exponential growth in emails would be mean that at the next sending it would be received by over 2 million people. Clearly giving away 2 million free laptops would bankrupt any computer business.
The email you received had already been sent to hundreds of people in the chain, and then sent to everyone in our department… senders, who should have known better, included the police, local government and Southampton University.
Even if it wasn’t completely obvious from just reading the email, a quick Google search would have shown that this was a hoax… use the delete button straight away and don’t ever send these on!
Here’s another hoax email that has appeared in the departmental email today.
HOTEL KEY CARDS Ever wonder what is on your magnetic key card?
Answer:
a. Customer’s name
B. Customer’s partial home address
c. Hotel room number
d. Check-in date and out dates
e. Customer’s credit card number and expiration date!When you turn them in to the front desk your personal information is there for any employee to access by simply scanning the card in the hotel scanner. An employee can take a hand full of cards home and using a scanning device, access the information onto a laptop computer and go shopping at your expense.
Simply put, hotels do not erase the information on these cards until an employee reissues the card to the next hotel guest. At that time, the new guest’s information is electronically ‘overwritten’ on the card and the previous guest’s information is erased in the overwriting process.
But until the card is rewritten for the next guest, it usually is kept in a drawer at the front desk with YOUR INFORMATION ON IT!
The bottom line is: Keep the cards, take them home with you, or destroy them. NEVER leave them behind in the room or room
wastebasket, and NEVER turn them into the front desk when you check out of a room. They will not charge you for the card (it’s illegal) and you’ll be sure you are not leaving a lot of valuable personal information on it that could be easily lifted off with any simple scanning device card reader.For the same reason, if you arrive at the airport and discover you still have the card key in your pocket, do not toss it in an airport trash basket. Take it home and destroy it by cutting it up, especially through the electronic information strip!
If you have a small magnet, pass it across the magnetic strip several times. Then try it in the door, it will not work. It erases everything on the card.
information courtesy of: Metropolitan Police Service.
PLEASE FORWARD to friends and family
