Shani Lee

First experiences: Twitter

shani — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:11:53 +0000

I enjoyed finding Twitter recently. I had known about it for some time, but couldn’t imagine why I would want to know what anyone was doing at any moment of the day. Then, one of our NLab partners, Vijay Riyait, posted his twitter profile url in his blog and I went to investigate.

My early experiences were a mixture of delight (so simple, so playful) and violent frustration (having learned how to do it, how do you engage)?

For anyone who hasn’t joined yet, Twitter has several easy neat things you can do. I'm just going to talk about two here:

Twitter asks you the question: “What are you doing?”
You can reply by posting a small message with up to 140 characters, including spaces.

You can find and follow other people. Others can also find and follow you.

I started by going to Vijay’s profile and adding myself as one of his followers. This means that Vijay’s miniposts will show up in the stream of posts on my page. Then I had a look to see if I knew anyone that Vijay was following. Sure enough, there was Sue Thomas and JP Rangaswami. I’ve been following JP’s blog about information, Confused of Calcutta, for about six months now.

I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to use Twitter, but it seemed to be about making and joining in conversations. I’ve been on Facebook for a while, and although it has some useful features (more about those in another post) I wasn’t engaging in conversations as I had expected.

Deep in my Facebook “friends” were people I had come into contact with through obscure or tenuous means because I was interested in knowing more about them and what they did - but it just hadn’t seemed to happen through Facebook.

One of these was Chris Hambly. Twitter seemed to offer new opportunities for creating links and conversations and sharing ideas with him. Sure enough, up popped Do You Fall for Buzz Words? helping me to think about social networking processes and skills.

If you’d like to try Twitter, follow me and I’ll follow you.

Text messaging in the 1914-1918 war

shani — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:37:09 +0000

There was a fascinating programme called Not Forgotten on Channel 4 yesterday about women in the first world war. Part if it was about a munitions factory in Leeds where women were making shells. Apparently, they chalked messages to the soldiers on the shells before they were dispatched, the idea being that maybe soldiers would visit them when they were on leave. Soldiers unpacking the shells reported to their families that some of the messages were quite saucy.

I was struck by the parallel between this activity and texting, chatrooms and IMs ... I was reminded of Howard Rheingold's book Smart Mobs where he is talking about young people in Japan creating a private space through texting, and about the transmitting of ideas and connections across time and space, and the ingenuity of people in using the prevailing technology for purposes for which it wasn't originally intended.

So interesting, too, and touching, that in the midst of all that carnage, people were social networking ....

http://geo.channel4.com/player/simulcast/index.jsp

The Internet of Things

shani — Wed, 5 Sep 2007 09:27:20 +0000

Have just read Damien Waters's latest post over at The Fiction Front. He's having a bit of a rant about Jeanette Winterson*, or is it more a rant about the way some writers pose about science fiction as if they are the first writer who has ever thought of it?

I was thinking about the Internet of Things yesterday and thinking there may be a good sf story in there somewhere. It's all very well saying that you'll never lose a pair of socks again, but how will it work? Will you have yet another gadget in your house to wirelessly control everything? or will it be through your mobile phone? or just through the air from some central gadget that you pay Council Tax for?

And then how will you get your socks into it? Will you have to stand there scanning everything in, or keying it in on a little number pad? or will the gadget just register automatically, sort of plug and play style, that the socks are there and that they belong to you?

How will it know the boundaries of your house? or your garden or if you lend the socks to someone or if someone comes to stay and brings their own socks? It'll be good for freecycling, though - you'll be able to pull out an inventory of everything more than three years old and that you haven't used once during that time and its exact location (yes, that's right, right at the bottom of that pile of cardboard boxes in the garage).

But I guess the gadget will also register the movements of people around houses, bits they use most, familiar patterns over time, then they could design ergonomically, economically perfect houses, that maybe all nestled together, pod-like, in the most land/energy-efficient way.

You'd never have to fear mugging or burglary again, or at least, in the early days, you'd know they be caught, because they would have been tracked through the Internet of Things and if there were any breakdowns, there's always satellite images of their blue van and their mobile phone (on and on them burglars, eh?)

What about managing fidelity? How would it be done? You just check the wireless and pull off a report on the day's movements? Alternatively, view on screen for a paper saving option - download within six months and store in the usual Internet of Things way if you plan to use for divorce proceedings - but the other party would find it, wouldn't they ... erk!

And Drew Gummerson's outsiders living in St Pancras Station ... would they get caught up in the Internet of Things and what would happen to them?

Days of Wine and Roses

shani — Tue, 7 Aug 2007 04:21:52 +0000

Went to see a cheery little number at the theatre the other day, "Days of Wine and Roses". It was the first time I'd been to the theatre for some long number of years, surprising, really, given how much I like theatre and drama. It's not just the words, or the skill of the writer or the actors, it's the artifices and the "let's pretend" and the layering of reality and suspension of disbelief. I suppose it's about the relationship between the writer, the actors and the audience - the tension and the communication, the sometimes silent, unseen, but watching audience, and the naked (not literally) or dissembling actors, playing out across the stage.

Days of Wine and Roses was originally a play by J P Miller, circa 1958, later made into a film with Jack Lemon and Lee Remick. This one was an adaptation by Owen McCafferty, shortly of Belfast, transposing the play to two Irish immigrants making their way from Belfast to London, in 1964. I didn't know about the film, but I knew the phrase from a Van Morrison song and I'd always been fascinated by it. The play's about the disintegration of a relationship through alcoholism (you see? cheery). I don't know the original play, so I don't know how extensive the adaptation has been, but it took place in 90 minutes in a studio with no interval with every scene and prop change contained in the action and two large suitcases.

It was great in many ways, the acting by the cast (Allie Croker and Richard Galazka) was riveting, intense, raw, painful, but also warm and sexy. You could see why they'd caught up with each other, the attraction and magnetism, and also the jealousy and resentment. They were brutal to each other, fighting (well choreographed and, sitting in the front row, difficult not to duck as a natural reflex) but also tender, gentle, loving. Complex characters, and although one review cites Donal as the orchestrator of their disintegration, that's not really the case, it's more complicated than that.

The language was wonderful. The wikipedia fluff for Owen McCafferty likens him to Sean O' Casey and J M Synge. I was certainly reminded of The Shadow of a Gunman - the humanity and fullness of the characters and the extent of their tragedy.

Days of Wine and Roses is showing at the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick - strong stuff for the tourists, along with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, also playing in the Studio. Impressive and ambitious.

The Wild Surmise: Nature and Cyberspace

shani — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 08:00:15 +0000

Sue Thomas has started a new book project, The Wild Surmise: a study of nature and cyberspace. She's created a blog with five questions about your own experience of nature and how you view it in relation to your online life.

If you have a moment to contribute, you'll find info on how to do this at http://travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com/natureandcyberspace/

May - 75,209 page views

shani — Mon, 4 Jun 2007 07:37:52 +0000

We introduced some changes in May - the most significant was to stop advertising the website online through Yahoo and Google. We've seen a corresponding drop in page views and our www.alexa.com ranking but nothing too drastic, indicating that both media had served their purpose.

May 2007 - 75,209 page views; May 2006 - 19,468 page views
May 2007 - 61,428 visits and 15,396 unique visits
628,963 page views in the 12 months to 31st May

1,253 unique website pages were viewed over the month, with the catalogue receiving about 49% of page views. Blogs continue to generate interest with page views rising from 26% in April to 30% in May.

Top Content
1. Home Page
2. Log in
3. Competition: Win The Jungle
4. Love Poetry Hate Racism
5. Latest blog posts

Top Books
1. How to Read Darwin
2. Hegemony or Survival
3. The Scholar
4. Reasons to be Cheerful
5. Guernica

April - 79,781 Page Views

shani — Sun, 6 May 2007 22:13:33 +0000

Web Traffic for April
Page views 79,781 (2,600 daily) - April 2006: 15,328 page views
Visits 57,237 (1,900 daily)
Unique visitors 16,169 (500 daily)

The Catalogue attracts 45% of all page views (1,200 per day), but blogs have seen a spectacular increase from 6% to 26% of all page views (690 per day). This is good news for bloggers who want to promote their group or campaign through Frontline Books.

Top Pages in April
1. Home Page
2. Reading Groups
3. Pussycat Fever Competition
4. Drewblog
5. Putting Pictures in your Blog

The last one was an accident - a post with some follow up information for people who came to the blogging workshop in February. It's currently coming in as the most viewed blog post with 2,541 page views - a good example of how using the right key words in the title of your blog post will pull in a lot of visitors.

Progress So Far
First Quarter - Jan-Mar 2007:
228,604 page views (2,500 daily)
143,257 visits (1,500 daily)
29,000 unique visitors (320 daily)

12 months to 31st March 2007
473,973 page views (1,300 daily)
322,281 visits (880 daily)
62,121 unique visitors (170 daily)

12 months to 30th April 2007
553,754 page views (1,500 daily)
379,517 visits (1,000 daily)
75,457 unique visitors (206 daily)

Traffic Rankings
A quick visit to www.alexa.com to see how we're doing in the traffic rankings. These seem a little volatile, as our 3 month average global ranking is 3,416,183, but our 1 week average is 1,978,971.

UK visitors account for about 25% of visitors. A further 16.7% come from Saudi Arabia, followed by 8.3% each from the United States, Hong Kong and Israel.

UK traffic rank - 270,052
Saudi Arabia - 76,144

Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84

shani — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 08:30:02 +0000

An e-mail from GPJ brought the following news:

Humanist and sceptic ... Kurt Vonnegut in 2001. Photograph: Buzz Orr/AP

Kurt Vonnegut, the American novelist best known for his science fiction classic, Slaughterhouse-Five, which begins with the bombing of Dresden during the second world war and goes on to offer a blackly witty investigation of fate and free will, died yesterday. According to his wife, the photographer Jill Krementz, Vonnegut had sustained brain injuries from a fall at his home in Manhattan some weeks earlier.

Vonnegut's writing career spanned more than half a century and saw him produce 14 novels (many of which were bestsellers) as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays. He ranged from the conventional science fiction of his 1963 novel, Cat's Cradle (which hangs around the discovery of "ice-nine", a substance with the properties of water but which is solid at room temperature) to the satirical Breakfast of Champions (1973) and the semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five, the catalyst for which was his own experience as a soldier with the US 106th Infantry Division and as a prisoner of war during world war two.

Away from writing novels, Vonnegut, a self-proclaimed humanist and sceptic, was an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union, and replaced Isaac Asimov as honorary president of the American Humanist Association and worked as a senior editor and columnist for the politically progressive monthly magazine, In These Times, which was published by the Institute For Public Affairs.
Sarah Crown, The Guardian

Kurt Vonnegut was a favourite author of Frontline Books, and featured in our Radical Fiction Reading Group.

Get the new I blog at Frontline Books button

shani — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 07:51:18 +0000

Our snazzy new logo that you can add to your website, myspace pages or e-mail signature. All free and in two classy colours - Frontline Books red, or classic blue.

To get your button and full instructions, go to your profile and look under "promote your blog".

Adding the button to your e-mail signature, for example, significantly increases the number of people who visit your blog and that, in turn, pulls in lots more page views. It's a virtuous cycle.

The button was an idea from Jess Laccetti, one of our professional bloggers. Jess had added a link to us from her blog, but thought that a custom button would be much more attractive, so she approached us with the idea.

Here's a button in location (scroll down ... lots).

The button is the first of several new features we'll be adding to the blog pages - and nearly all of them are ideas from our bloggers. Most of them will be in place by the end of the month.

Radical Africa

shani — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 12:20:05 +0000

Reviews of this month's books at the Radical Fiction Reading Group. Comments from the group follow later in the week.

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
Giles Foden, The Guardian

A couple of years before the genocide, I left my parents' house and crossed the Uganda border in a bus bound for the Rwandan capital, Kigali. All summer we'd watched lorries full of munitions pass by on the same road, stirring up clouds of red dust. Sometimes they carried French arms for the Hutus; sometimes it was British arms for the Tutsis. There was something going on, and I wanted to see for myself what it was.

Reaching Kigali, I stayed in a hotel called the Mille-Collines: the same place that provides the opening scene of the Canadian writer and film-maker Gil Courtemanche's astonishing first novel, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali. We were probably guests at the same time. By then the killings had already begun: the first small drops of the coming blood-dimmed tide.

Against such a background, treading the margin between actuality and its representation is a delicate business. So it is important, as I can vouch, that the images of Courtemanche's opening are utterly authentic. Round the pool congregate: French paratroopers with shaven heads and something of the vulture in the way they watch female flesh; prostitutes rife with Aids; a grandly parading Rwandan bigwig back from Paris, with a sporty outfit "so new its yellows and greens are blinding, even for sunglass-protected eyes".

Courtemanche's novel conveys the pressure of lived experience very powerfully; yet at the same time experience is clearly mediated by a sophisticated literary imagination.

Waiting for an Angel

Lomba is a young journalist living under military rule in Lagos, Nigeria, the most dangerous city in the world. His mind is full of soul music and girls and the lyric novel he is writing. But his roommate is brutally attacked by soldiers; his first love is forced to marry a wealthy old man; and his neighbors on Poverty Street are planning a demonstration that is bound to incite riot and arrests. Lomba can no longer bury his head in the sand.

Helon Habila's vivid, exciting, and heart-wrenching debut opens a window onto a world in some ways familiar-with its sensuously depicted streets, student life, and vibrant local characters-yet ruled by one of the world's most corrupt and oppressive regimes, a scandal that ultimately drives Lomba to take a risk in the name of something greater than himself. Habila captures the energy, sensitivity, despair, and stubborn hope of a new African generation with a combination of gritty realism and poetic beauty. Winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing 2001.

Moses, Citizen and Me
Maya Jaggi, The Guardian

Julia, a Londoner in her 30s, is called "home" to Sierra Leone to comfort her estranged uncle Moses, whose wife Adele was killed before the peacekeepers arrived. Julia finds her orphaned cousin, Citizen, perched on the balustrade of his grandfather Moses's wooden house, "munching on some tobacco like a Cuban plantation worker more than twice his age". She discovers, as Moses had, that Citizen was responsible for Adele's death, her decomposing corpse unearthed in a swamp, several bullets in her back. Under instruction from "the big soldier man", he had killed his own grandmother. Citizen is eight.

Blogging Your Cause

shani — Mon, 9 Apr 2007 08:45:47 +0000

Blogging is a great way to keep in touch with people who are interested in your cause. Blogs are simple to use, easy to update and allow you to write as if you were having a conversation and people can have a conversation though the comments.

Although the technology is easy to use, people often have trouble starting to blog. They wonder where to start, and what people will think, and whether their writing is any good.

The other big thing when you're trying to raise awareness about a cause is how people will find your blog in the millions of webpages that exist.

Frontline Books will be running a workshop at the Festival of Alternatives that helps you overcome both these problems. We'll explain how to plan your blog and get started, and how you can help people to find your blog.

The Festival of Alternatives takes place on Monday 7th May at Regent College, Regent Road, Leicester. Registration for workshops starts at 10.15am (or e-mail info@frontlinebooks.co.uk with FoA in the subject line to book a place).

Festival of Alternatives - Monday 7th May

shani — Sun, 8 Apr 2007 08:21:02 +0000

Leicester's Festival of Alternatives, organised by Leicester Social Forum in conjunction with Regent's College, takes place on Monday 7th May. The Festival runs from 10.15am until 5.30pm and features stalls, workshops, films and talks by a variety of campaigning groups and organisations.

Seminars
The Struggle for Justice in Palestine & the Middle East
Climate Change - What Can We Do To Save the Planet?
Opposing Privatisation, Neo-Liberalism and the Attack on Public Services.

Morning Workshops
1. Asylum Refugees and racism.
2. Sweatshops and Global Exploitation.
3. Blogging your cause – Frontline books.
4. Make Poverty History.
5. CND – Stop Trident.
6. The role of the Left/working class representation

Afternoon Workshops
1. Building links with Bethlehem.
2. Youth Space – creating a Youth Social Forum
3. Keep our NHS Public.
4. Calculating your personal Carbon Footprint.
5. Raising funds through Frontline Books.
6. Stop the War Campaign.
7. Education Forum – A Charter for education in Leicester.

Stalls
CND, Leicester Social Forum, Frontline Books, Friends of the Earth, Green Party, No Sweat, Friends of Al Aqsa, Socialist Party, Hadeel Palestinian Crafts, International Socialist Youth/Youth Social Forum, Make Poverty History, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Workers Power, National Union of Teachers, Keep our NHS Public, Leicester Holy Land Appeal, PCS.

There will be a continuous showing of films and an exhibition of art work from local schools as part of the Bethlehem Link group ‘St George’ art competition.

The Festival of Alternatives
Monday 7th May Doors open 10.15am until 5.30pm
Regent College, Regent Road, Leicester

Page Value

shani — Mon, 2 Apr 2007 21:50:47 +0000

The value of a page is based on the number and value of sales that take place after a visit to that page.

Here are some examples:

Things A Woman Should Know About Seduction £1.44

The End of Faith - Sam Harris £0.70

True equality: to be, or not to be? £0.62

The Anthology of Leicester Chartist Song, Verse and Poetry £0.46

Create a New Identity £0.14

March: 77,984 Page Views

shani — Mon, 2 Apr 2007 06:29:29 +0000

Page views are up to 77,984 for March (I realised later that February figures are distorted as it's a short month - the equivalent full month would have been about 68,000 page views) with 12,651 unique visitors (about 400 per day). March 2006 had 16,844 page views.

This month we also recorded our highest daily page views to date, on Thursday 8th March, with 5,871 page views and 891 visitors.

Top Pages
1. home page 53 seconds
2. login 40 seconds; page value £0.11
3. latest blogs 29 seconds
4. reading groups 44 seconds
5. blogs 29 seconds

Blogs seem to fascinate people - here's the top pages this month:

Blogs: Longest Viewing Time
1. I'm a Gay Writer 13 minutes 28 seconds
2. French Kisses 12 minutes 7 seconds
3. Scarlett Johansson in sensational Microsoft takeover bid! (contains nudity) 9 minutes 50 seconds
4. Erotica 9 minutes 32 seconds
5. About Memory 7 minutes 46 seconds

Blogs: Most Page Views
1. International Women's Day 111 views 1 minute 43 seconds
2. The Future of Language: y bovr w grmr & wrds wen txt spk=ez
73 views 2 minutes 31 seconds
3. The Handless Maiden 71 views 2 minutes 26 seconds
4. February Page Views 63 views 1 minute 30 seconds
5. How addictive is Myspace? 57 views 1 minute 52 seconds

And here's the top keywords searches bringing people to the website:

Top Keyword Searches
1. new identity 46 visits
2. penny poyzer 31 visits
3. working class series ak 27
4. leicestershire walks 13
5. drew gummerson 13

These are slightly misleading as we had 4,093 visits from keyword searches, using 1,319 different keywords.

Website Visitors from Around the World
I'm always fascinated by where people come from to visit the site. This month our visitors came from 119 countries including:

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Peru, Congo, Guatemala, Botswana, Azerbaijan, Aruba, Uruguay, Khazakstan, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Palestinian Territory, Yemen, Guyana, Venezuela, Bahrain, Barbados, Oman, El Salvador, Syrian Arab Republic, Cote D'Ivoire, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Burkino Faso, Slovenia, Sudan, Senegal, Jordan, Chile, Kuwait, Puerto Rico, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Colombia, Korea and Vietnam.

Should We Be Beastly to Believers?

shani — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 11:07:09 +0000

Or is moderate religion just as bad as fundamentalism? ... is the question asked at the next meeting of the IDEAS Group at Leicester Secular Society on Thursday 19th April at 7.30pm. Suggested pre-reading is The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and The End of Faith by Sam Harris, both available from Frontline Books.

The IDEAS group is a new monthly discussion and study group which held its first meeting this week when they looked at "What is Morality Anyway?"

The meeting is open to members of Leicester Secular Society - joining the Society is easy and full details can be found on their website at www.leicestersecularsociety.org.uk.