9
February
2009
In a nation that sends millions upon millions of SMS text messages a month twitter was at some stage going to hit it big in the UK, it’s just so simple and very much like a kind of group SMS for the web.
Hello, I am @lee_jordan!
I’m a proper geek, I’m a web professional and at times quite femine, ha now I’ve got your attention! My tweeting started in Mid 2008 as a way of updating my facebook friends on the happenings and stage performances at the Summer Sundae Festival in Leicester, in the East Midlands of the UK. As a keen photographer, of course I took photos of the event and here are those photos of Summer Sundae 2008. As I learn this was the orignial useage case of twitter, to organise a group of contacts around a music festival.
Everyone is now at it and why not, like passing through a party tuning in to what circles of friends are saying, you can join in too! It is a public blogging service, I love being open, however I will open and close the doors as deemed fit. At the moment the UK is in the grip of a weather event that is getting everyone talking and I would like people to read my tweets. However if there is a danger of things getting too out of hand or I get followed by too many creeps or spammers I’ll just close the doors for a bit. If I feel a tweet flow is getting too personal, it’ll stop or go to DMs or at least try to.
Why follow me?
I’m very good and spotting subtle differences around me and have a very active imagination and a very smart outlook on things. These are qualities I love about my creative and theoretical side, having somewhere to jot these random thoughts down can be quite interesting. A brain dump if you will, I won’t share everything and where possible if I do tweet someting of contention it’ll be in a cryptic form.
I tweet:
- random thoughts, are Lion Bars really made of Lions?
- my mood sometimes
- what music I’m really liking at the moment
- replies to amusing or interesting tweets
- the occasional picture or link
- any national event, the weather unites us, #uksnow did!
- the hash tag is something I’m starting to tweet in sentance flow
I tweet from these devices:
- Daytime: Write only, primarily via SMS over the 2G mobile network
- Evening: Read/Write, Twitterific via WiFi on my iPod Touch
- When on the home PC/laptop I use the website or TwitterFox
What do I say?
If you follow me, it’s usually an entertaining insight into the musing of a random brain, and a person who deeply enjoys live music, so if I’m at a gig, so are you! I don’t usually narrate what I’m doing, I tend to note down my observations more than anything else and that I hope makes my tweets something more than “now drinking tea” but sometimes I do just add a mundane detail to my stream as the mudane can actually be quite comforting. Ever been shaken up by an event? The small things matter.
When am I around?
I’m not around much during work hours, as I don’t really have a need to converse on the service while at work and as it is blocked (good move I say) I don’t tend to be chatty or reply during the wroking week day. I catch up with my tweets when arriving home and when waking up, and I’m not a morning person by any meassure but may tweet before 8am. My big twitter sessions usually come in the evening.
I’m British and very sarcastic, also very sensitive myself
It’s easy to get offended, firstly I’m British and we have a nack of being dry and mildly cliquy sometimes or let’s say we have our own brand of humor. A wisecrack, a sarcastic retort, even a pet name such as Dumbo are all signs that we really like talking to you, if that makes sense. It’s banter, brightens up the day, a wry smile translates to wink the emoticon 
Direct Message me if there are any issues, but I use emoticons to back up my feeling behind the sentance. It’s a public place and so I tend to keep all messages upbeat, I won’t slag off someone, a company or service but anything along those lines will be constructive if I do, which is rare anyway. I don’t swear in my tweets and I don’t use CapsLock.
My following
My flock is generally of a similar age, doing similar work something in the creative or marketing or media industries. I have a lot of my local flickr contacts on there and usually know the vast majority of these people in real life, not to mention my friends some of them old, some of them reunited through social media and networking. I often SMS or email a few of my twitter contacts.
I also follow some very creative people indeed, so creative they actually make a lot of money from it and are mildly famous, which can at first seem creepy, however it’s really not at all. These “famous to me, but maybe not to you” type of people, like @imogenheap are using twitter in very much a similar way to how I would like to be using it, to explain the creative process.
Typos: Have you tried the iPhone keyboard?
So in summery, take my typos as you see them, they are a manifestation of my personality and not a weakness at all, you can understand anyway because you are smart! I generally converse in the evening or when I have two way twitter access, so please don’t worry if I don’t reply right away, we are all busy people! And most of all enjoy my randomness, offer some of your own and yeah we’ll have a great time!
I’m also trying to see how I can use twitter within my work projects. The twitterverse is a great place, only because there are good people, that won’t always be the case, however for now while the badwagon is starting, welcome on board, as Jem says, it’s just a ride, it’s just a ride …….
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23
January
2009
Here’s an interesting article on alistapart.com about web development education, summarising that being self-taught is pretty much the way it’s done, offers I think a powerful lesson to employers and educators; self exploration and freedom, not lectures and limits.
Elevate Web Design at the University Level
The notion of self exploration makes sense, my experience of web learning in uni was near to awful, we did more in Macromedia Director for example than HTML, I was at one point more skilled in LINGO than HTML and as for CSS it was just a rarely used language. I learned more about the web at 5am working on my own projects and surfing websites such as HTML Goodies, with some element of monkey see, monkey do. In fact I picked the basics up at college in a very small class called telematics. My radio tutor at the time played us videos on VHS of Tim Berners Lee explaining what his technology was and how it was to be used. Hexcode for colours was something I’d never seen before in my life back in 1998 and I was truely baffled, but you know what? The inspiration provided by Tim and my tutor along with some free web space at Geocities, Fortune City, Lycos, helped me get motivation to find out that FF0000 meant red and what a H1 was and how to use them. Of course we all made bad moves, but at the time the displaced javascript rollover was an utter revelation and I downloaded the code from the F.R.I.E.N.D.S website just to see how it was done and if I could use it and make it better.
Even in previous jobs I got more from mucking about with new sites at 3pm, downloading code, replicating and improving, then giving it back to who I nicked it from, than I ever have in a training session. I guess in web people we need to look for and develop that level of self tuition exploration and belonging-ness, what projects outside of work/education is that person involved with, how do they use the web, what sites do they use as learning resources, are they playing with new things? Do they spot technologies and websites before you’ve even heard of them?
So where do we go from here? Educators must really be there to inspire their students not dictate, nuture ideas and allow self expression. There are some levels of traditional thoughts impeeding on a student, such as what might be classed as “plagerisim” is often a great way for people to learn web languages, copy/paste, change the code see what effects it has, as long as it’s refrenced I don’t see the harm. Creative Commons and Open Source is an important aspect there. For employers, not much is different, staff should be inspired and motivated by being listened to, allowed to muck about at times when there’s not much going on and generally be seen as inspiring people, full of ideas and deep desires to improve on the work that they are doing by engaging with the web community at large. All of which means no walls, your web staff and web students are creative people who will explore and the best will be gained from them if they aren’t held back or dictated to, these people will need space to be at their best, but really good guidance on how to avoid proven traps such as table based layouts. To some extent self-tution is much less a drain on training budgets, there are challenges in getting the balance right but the pay-offs are immense for everyone.
Inspire and guide, self exploration is a way forward.
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31
October
2008
How apt that Heather Champ, flickr.com’s director of community found the Birmingham flickrmeet group and arranged a photo meetup while she was in town for the Hello Digital festival!
Embrace the Chaos
Her talk at millenium point on the Friday was very interesting, talking about how flickr started and how the project could have continued to be an online game with a community aspect. However a vote was taken and so one of the best photo sharing websites started, subsequently the project was taken under the wings of Yahoo! and now hosts around 2.6 billion photos! Heather talked about some of the changes to the site, including the use of video and offered some colourful uses of geotagging as well as highlighting how quite often flickr users know a lot more about how to do things than it might at first appear. It’s not just about photos, a lot of it is about people.
Flickr has for me turned into a slight addiction, a healthy one, because of the range of content and also the friendlyness of the people I encounter on the site. I guess flickr users also get to see the world in a different way, there are some 2.6 billion photos, spanning the entire aspect of human life and Heather highlighted this as a strength of the site and her job as you can see personal stories as well as insights into news events that you might never have seen in the main stream media, and crucially get feedback and comments from entire strangers. In a silimar way people get feedback on their photography skills, there’s also the chance that flickr becomes a different sort of microcosm of the world, with commenting not just on composition or lighting, but the stories that people are telling with their photos. How long before there are more flickr photos than people on Earth?
The most interesting points for me were about the social ascpets of the site, from the online groups to the offline relationships that were foster through the site. I know many people offline, I would not have known if I had not been active in local flickr groups. There was a QandA session at the end hosted by an FT.com journalist. I raised the prospect of flickr being more supportive online, of the offline communites that spring up through the site and perhaps in the same ways we have an explore page for photos, we could have an explore page for people. The site could ask where you are from and suggest local meet up groups.
Her closing comment was to Embrace The Chaos!
The Flickrmeet
Flickrmeets for me have become a great hobby and escape from the normal way of looking at the world, I see things through photography that I would have otherwise been too busy to see. Going around in groups of people also gives you the confidence to take photos that normally might appear to be strange or bizzare, or get you ridiculed by family, plus there’s the aspect of saftey in numbers and often I find myself chatting to people more than taking photos.
We are lucky in the midlands that we have a large community of active meet members, who are just great people, as I’m sure up and down the country and around the world many other population centres have the same joy of exploring photography with other people because of flickr.com, I guess perhaps that really has steamed from the sites starting point of being a gaming community, but the meets are more about having fun with photography than taking it seriously.
Flickrmeets are great for geting some fab shots, like this one! We were treated with swag too by Heather, which we are very thankful for and it was really cool that she took the time to hear our feedback, plus I hope I helped raise a couple of things about how hidden the offline meetup communities can be and how to make flickrmeets a lot more visible outside of upcoming.org.
The rest of the meetup set is here, along with some other photos from Hello Digital 2008. The festival, was the first of it’s kind in Birmingham and I hope it grows in future into an essential event for the creative industry in the Midlands and surrounding areas.
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27
August
2008
An amazing story which shows how important it is for the general public to be aware of what some cancers can present outwardly as symptoms.
“Madeleine Robb spotted the unusual shadow in the left eye of one-year-old Rowan Santos’s emailed picture. Suspecting there was something wrong, she went on to the internet to find out more and discovered it might be cancer. She immediately emailed Rowan’s mum Megan at her home in Florida, America, to warn her. Within hours, Mrs Santos had taken the baby to a doctor, who found she had eye cancer retinoblastoma”.
Full Story
What I take from this is imagine the number of moles which don’t look right? People tend to know what is and what isn’t right, but 3 simple rules known as the ABC of melanoma can, very much like this story, be a life saver. Thus it makes sense for people to stop talking about the sun
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23
August
2008
The Big Picture Mosaic
Originally uploaded by Lee Jordan.
Guinness book of records confirms that at over 100,000 photos, this is the current largest photo mosaic in the world. Get down to Millenium Point in Birmingham by the end of Monday to see it.
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19
August
2008
Yet again another story about a young person facing melanoma, who recalls vividly being careful in the sun and taking steps to avoid skin cancer, yet ending up with the worst kind.
“I vividly remember always having to wear a sun hat or a sun visor when I was playing outside, too. Every few hours, Mum would call me in from playing to put more cream on - especially if we were abroad on holiday. I definitely wasn’t a child who got sunburned”. Story
It’s this paradox which has always been at the heart of my questioning on how effective sunsmart is at preventing serious skin cancers because the evidence suggests contray to common sense that staying inside and out of the sun puts you at higher risk of melanoma.
Sunsmart pretty much targets the most common form of skin cancer, non-melanoma, which is less serious and caused by over exposure to UV, so how is it that being careful and being sunsmart can wind you up in a worse off position? because there’s no focus on skin!! I mean it shouldn’t be sunSmart it should be skinsmart, I only hope the right people are listening?
It’s the short intense bursts of UV which could have an effect on Melanoma, simply because if you think about it pigment producing cells are not having to do any work, then all of a sudden, they have to go into ooverdrive and work overtime to produce melanin. In Type One skin that can’t happen and if it does, then might it cause these cells to go mental and not shut off, thus leading to melanoma?
It’s a serious issue that cancer research UK have so far failed to address in their education on skin cancers, they need to think along these lines with sunSmart. The notion of short intense infrequent incidental bursts of UV doesn’t even figure in the advice on sun exposure. The type of exposure you’d get by waiting for a bus to college, not the kind of exposure you get on holiday. Have you noticed the advice is to go outside after 3pm when UV levels can actually be HIGHER, depending on the day? If it’s cloudy at 12pm, but clear at 3pm, it’s slightly better to go out at midday under cloud, even though cloud isn’t protective, the advice for sun sensitive folks, should never have been to go out in the hotest part of the day!
Sunscreens are an issue too, UVA could now be the cause of melanoma, not UVB and if that’s the case sunscreen makers should ready against law suits. “UVA rays remain the same strength year around and can penetrate such things as clothing, windshields and hats” is perhaps a line we all need to read over and over until we get why action on melanoma awareness is shamefully ineffective.
Filed under: Melanoma | 1 Comment »
28
July
2008
Column of smoke
Originally uploaded by dobbo_sf.
OMG!
Birmingham by the sea in flames 
Also on this day three years ago, our Tornado.
Join the facebook group, Rebuild Weston-Super-Mare Pier
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21
May
2008
Melanoma; it’s a puzzle with peices missing. I’ve thought about this one long and hard, what if UVB doesn’t matter? Let me entertain yet another example of where we might be going drastically wrong.
“Most sunscreens do a good job blocking UVB, but fewer sunscreens filter out most of the UVA, so they do not help to prevent the beginnings of melanoma formation … The precise wavelengths of ultraviolet that contribute to the formation of skin cancer still need to be sorted out.” Source
We could be getting damaged melanocytes without the sunburn, right so how can you get skin cancer without being sunburnt? Well this question has never been asked. Nor has the “stay out of the sun between 11am and 4pm” bit of sunsmart been challenged.
UV index varies
I’ve noticed that peak UV hours and the times where I burn are after 4pm and before 6pm, not only the hottest part of the day but also what’s to say the UV index isn’t lower at 12pm because of cloud cover and greater at 6pm because of clear skies?
UVB might not be doing the damage
There are three types of UV radiation, and each type bassically vibrates the skin more or less. UVB is often connected to the burning effect the sun has on skin general rule is UVB = burning. Even if you get factor 50 sunscreen, SPF only measures effectiveness against UVB radiation not both UVA and B. UVA is often thought to really only age the skin and thus sunscreens have been utterly useless against UVA, but isn’t cancer linked to the ageing process?
Still we think UVB triggers most melanoma’s, but how can this be if most people with melanoma admit to making good use of sunscreens? UVA protection is measured by the star rating not the SPF and the star rating is really only a recent introduction and Ambre Solair’s UVA photostable filters have only just made it from Europe to the USA.
Sunscreens never protected against melanoma?
What if in the 1980’s and 1990’s we were told sunscreens would protect us, but it turns out that in fact it’s UVA which triggers melanoma and thus the protection we thought we had, simply never existed and still may not exist? Some retailers don’t sell lower than SPF 15, but what if it’s SPF 30 and still UVA rating of 1? Isn’t that also as bad as stocking SPF 2?
What if you can get melanoma skin cancer without a long history of sunburn, ok it is a bit far fetched, a lot of people did burn most of the time by accident and without intending to. But what if you can damage your skin even if you don’t burn, if you are genetically unable to produce melanin? What if it turns out UVB is attributed to non-melanoma and UVA to melanoma, suddenly you would need to advise people at risk of melanoma to not rely on SPF as a guide but the star rating.
Let’s get sunSmarter?
Everything you know is wrong, everything I know is slightly less wrong and everything they know is really wrong, so let’s re-write this. sunSmart needs to get smart about the UV index, for instance it might be safer to go out at 12pm under cloudy skies than it is to go out at 5pm under clear skies. so the 11am - 4pm curfew needs chucking out in favor of words on suncreen bottles explaining the UV index, what it is and how to check it for your location.
sunSmart also need get smarter about the advice given out to people at risk of melanoma and non-melanoma, each risk group needs different messages not the same messages and I was pleased to see that at least that bit of my campaign got through to Cancer Research UK.
Re-write the rules!
Filed under: Melanoma | No Comments »
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