It’s a decision made because currently this is a self-indulgent hobby site that serves no real purpose. Initially I bought the domain and hosting because I wanted to further my knowledge of web design and this was to be my playground. Well it served its purpose admirably in that regard but now I know enough about the web that I’d be best served playing on the development environment I have set up offline; having a blog on my own domain is nice but unnecessary, I am NOT a ‘brand’ or business and so until that becomes the case I’m better off reverting to an interface that requires no financial outlay. ..and on the plus side it also means I can have a truly private journal again.

Why is a private journal such a plus..? Well, I used to write as a means of blowing off steam, it was cathartic and helped me to cope with stress and worry as well as to sort out in my own mind the things that were truly bothering me – as soon as I put all of those thoughts on the web and allowed people access to it I had to censor what I write, the more I learned about the web the more I censored – I even deleted several posts in an effort to ‘spin’ my ‘image’ (stupid as I think the wayback machine has everything cached but heyho, you can have a looksee if you really want to..)

Yes, I know I could create a private journal and keep the public one but that’s hassle, why not just have one journal and use category tags to separate the content?  That way if I do upload my blatherings in the future I can just remove the private stuff and have all my education, social media, web and jewellery musings available for those of you inclined to read it.

So.. rosevibe.me.uk has served me well but it’s time to let it go, I shall be backing everything up and getting things shipshape as i’m 90% decided to do this even if one or both of us do gain employment before the June deadline: If I do create a website for myself in future it will be under a different domain using my own name and not the username I’ve had for so many years (probably).

There was a slight twinge at the thought of giving up the google juice I’ve garnered through this blog but a search on 3 different search engines shows that “vicky stringer” will likely still have me in the top three if not the coveted top spot in the UK listings (and in one case global listings) with my linkedin and twitter profiles – although that may also change once the links to this blog are removed; but even that’s not a bad thing.

As I said before I’m not a brand or a business, I’m just an individual with nothing to sell; let the coveted top spot go to someone who really wants and needs it and let me fade into some of the less checked results until such time as I choose to do something more productive with my ‘skills’.

Saving money and using resources responsibly is the name of the game for 2012 as far as I’m concerned; this is my first step. I’m getting my virtual house in order and downsizing; what are you doing..?

These topics all have a bearing on my degree subjects and any future career choices based upon that degree, the fact they were coming from the marketing perspective as opposed to a technical one shouldn’t really matter..

Should it?

..But first a word about the event itself, the chosen venue was easy to find as Earls court is directly opposite an underground station – definitely a bonus over a few other events I’ve been to in London, but the wifi was sadly flaky at best and as mentioned by another a blogger in the blur group the event app (should you have been able to locate and download it) was made pretty useless by this fact.

Seating areas were few and far between and the chairs used in the sessions were not designed with short folk like me in mind – It gets very tiring very quickly trying to balance a notepad or laptop on your lap when your feet are swinging 2 inches off the floor! Not exactly a fantastic scenario for someone who suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome when combined with all the travelling and walking attending such an event necessitates.

Session 1

The first session in my ‘not to be missed’ schedule was given by Neil Burton representing Web Spiders the company responsible for creating the seemingly elusive web app for the event.  I have to say he presented his material incredibly well – that may sound patronising but having tried my hand at presenting I know it’s no piece of cake.

He knew his audience and distilled usability principles into bite size demonstrable chunks without naming folk like Schneiderman and Nielsen to get the point across. The one page shopping cart he demonstrated was truly a thing of beauty and had me itching to find out if it was built in flash or used jquery (as you’ll see if you click the link; it’s flash.)

I will admit much of what he covered was old news to me but I admired his delivery. However he also covered something I should have been more aware of but coming from a tech rather than marketing or design background had not really looked into in this way before: multivariable testing along with a useful statistic and source for my soon to be written final report:

22% of companies spending at least £50000pa on seo (source; econsultancy search engine marketing benchmark report 2010)

(So that alone made the trip into London worth it for me)

session 2

The second session I attended was “SEO the latest keys to success; John Heffernan, MediaCo (UK) Ltd.” as I tweeted at the time; some of the information he gave had me arguing with him in my notes so that I wouldn’t vocalise my dissent and disrupt the session.

I’m not an SEO expert – or even practitioner (yet) but having attended more than a few mediaCamps and social media gatherings I know a little more than the average joe – and I like to think that the information I cull from my twitter stream along with the books I read help to add to that knowledge daily.

The claims made about this session were that the audience would:

It is these points on which I’d quite strongly disagree.
He had slides with a lot of different social media sites on them, he didn’t mention the need to see which ones fit best with your customer profile but you’d hopefully expect the audience to figure that out for themselves, he did however make the very valid point that in a marketing sense:

Social media is about syndicating content back to you – direct quote.

What he didn’t say ONCE to all these impressionable eager to learn people is that social media as a marketing tool is NOT a broadcast medium. It is about building relationships and hopefully fostering a sense of ownership amongst your audience in order to derive feelings of loyalty and positivity towards your brand.

Yes, he mentioned making link backs natural (and JC Penny was spoken about) and he eventually mentioned that a successful use of social media needed time devoted to monitoring the channels (with HSBC and a prominent house builder given as an example of #fail)

..but the most basic and fundamental thing about social media is that it is SOCIAL, and not once did that observation raise it’s hand.

Despite learning several things of interest during the session that one lack left a taste of disappointment as it felt like I’d seen an intelligent guy almost get it right.

Arrogant of me? Perhaps, but learning is subjective and that was my take away from Johns session.

If you’ve managed to get this far; congratulations! You’ll be pleased to learn I have only one more session to discuss:

Session 3

This was one I’d actually been incredibly excited about after reading the session page on the TFM&A website; Catherine Toole; Kingmakers: why 2011 is the year of the content strategist.

..Perhaps I’d been too excited because the 30minutes of waffle and example upon example boiled down to 2 points:

1. Reduce effort – make everything as quick and seamless as possible for the user
2. Use text and images effectively – have professionally written copy so great ideas from the top don’t fall at the bottom rung.

Now to be fair, the lass started on the back foot due to several technical issues (microphone not working, new mic battery died, laptop power started going 5 minutes into the presentation..) so maybe she is normally more of a Neil Burton type of presenter, but my attention began drifting after the 4th slide of examples and her offer to carry on into the lunch break for questions held no appeal for me whatsoever.

That being said, again I received a source that made the trip into London worthwhile; upon her recommendation I’ve read a couple of articles from the Harvard Business Review and can see how this one at least will be a useful citation in my forthcoming report.

Conclusion

After these three sessions I couldn’t summon any enthusiasm for the others I’d jotted into my schedule; my back was killing me from trying to balance on the slightly too high chairs and my disappointment at not learning as much as I’d hoped in those sessions was tempered slightly by the knowledge I know more on those subjects than I previously thought.
I wish I’d taken the time to track down the web spiders stand but as I had company it was hard to fit in the things we both wished to do – I’m especially gutted I gave into tiredness when I did as it meant I missed out on meeting up with @farhan who was also in attendance and tweeted the fact while my train was heading homewards, but all told it was a good day.

..and having a small child exclaiming in delight over the red ball and flower pen I obtained for her from the confex side just made it all that more worthwhile *grin*

The ‘always on, always connected’ mentality of folks growing up in this internet enabled world, combined with the growing interest in being green and the always indisputable need for a business to save costs seems to point at a death knell for the tabloids and broadsheets.

I can’t see ebooks killing off the paperback any time soon, but with the uptake in smartphones, netbooks, tablets and internet TV, it could well be bye bye newspapers and sunday supplements as people opt to find out what’s happening in the world their own way on their preferred medium.

Even in Africa – one of the most poverty stricken continents on the planet has a mobile penetration of up to 52% and though I would guess few of the mobile phones in use over there are web enabled right now; think what a decades worth of technological innovation could bring.

We already have scientists working on batteries made from cloth, cameras that can shoot around corners, and a possible breakthrough in memory devices. with all that happening NOW, who is to say what will happen in 10 years time?

I envisage a home where a wireless box connects the tv and various handheld devices to the internet and all news and entertainment is routed through those – something that already happens in several households that I know of now..

..In a decade a paperback book may be the only sign of times gone by – but even that may not be in evidence if drm issues can be resolved and rfid tech may be one of the ways in which that happens; but i’ll leave the whys and wherefores of that to your imagination, this post is long enough and I haven’t even gotten to my tv vision yet!

In 10 years I see a large flat screen led tv with internet/ wifi/ hd/ 3d that is fully immersible smell-o-vision ready (you may need to buy replaceable ‘smell cannisters’ for the scent infusions – Glade will have a tv channel that sends a signal to the tv at certain points of the day to release a different mixture into the room, the heat of the tv is what activates it and cookery shows will have a device to ‘scan’ the dish and transmit the same aroma to you – press the red button NOW to sample it..)

..all tvs will have an ipad-like controller that also acts as a channel previewer, it will likely be programmable so it can also be used as a games controller and video phone with a thumb print lock to stop the kids accessing services and channels you don’t want them to.

..I’ll leave it there for now while you imagine what cookery shows with smell-o-vision will be like and just how popular farming shows will really be when you can tell what working with livestock will do to your personal aroma..

Before the internet and this new ‘open social’ approach to sharing the minutiae of your life, you could meet and talk to a new acquaintance without many preconceived notions about them – and vice versa.

Now, the colleague you have barely exchanged 3 words with will suddenly reference a personal event in passing conversation leaving you with a slight gut punched ‘how did they know about THAT’ sensation.

It lasts a brief second before common sense kicks in and you first mentally revise every conversation you’ve had within their hearing and then the inevitable realisation that they must have read about it.

Early on in my online life (pre-blog) I was stopped in the street by a total stranger calling me Rosevibe instead of my name (hi Mark) who informed me that he lived a few doors away in my block of flats, he knew my taste in books and films, my occupation and various other items I’d posted to my profile.

It completely freaked me out at the time.

Yet now I have given complete strangers far more than a profile to go on. This and my other blogs give insight into my thoughts and feelings, my twitter stream and facebook detail my activities and my wishlists show purchases I plan to make – I’ve created the textual equivelent of a reality tv show without the excuse of a pay cheque and in doing so have given the psychological upper hand in any social meeting in the real world to the person who reads any of this.

It’s insane yet I continue to post; why? Well to be honest the ‘damage’ is already done; Almost everything I’ve written over the last 6 years has been cached somewhere and while a few of my views may have changed, those posts won’t.

To stand any chance of not being embarrassed by stupid things I’ve said or done I need to KEEP putting myself out there so that in this day and age of search and virtual reputation, prospective employers don’t judge me on events long past.

Like 99.999% of the human race I have issues – quite a few of ‘em, but I’m far too British to ask a headshrinker to sort me out, I’ve always gone down the ‘bottle it up til you can write it down route.

I cringe to think of my naivity during the ‘early years’ of my virtual life. I started a blogger blog at the prompting of a friend and got so into it I also decided to transfer my diary online where it was ‘safer’

My thought process was; paranoia that family member/ other half would find my paper diary. Same applied to a file on my pc so far better idea to start a seperate blog, mark it private and keep everything online where those it may feature could never find it.

..Was a great idea until it started getting comments and my stat counter revealed the extent of the unexpected traffic.

I felt violated despite knowing that the only reason those private thoughts had been observed was because i’d put them on display.
The blog was deleted in its entirety.

That was my initiation into the reality of the web; the realisation that NOTHING online is private – no matter the passwords and settings you apply there is always the chance of someone finding it, either by innocent accident or malicious intent.

I can’t take back anything I committed to the electronic aether but I can temper the past with revelations of the present. It’s too late for me to completely audit my online presence because I’ve already put too much information out there, to you, the person reading this – learn from my mistakes; think twice before sharing anything online because the person you are becoming may not appreciate it being put before you out of context 2, 5 or 10 years down the line.

You see those grades? they’re mine they are *grin* ok, ok so what if it took me an entire academic year to do it!
..Considering I’ve had 75 days of it (that’s right, just over 2 months) bedridden by fatigue (and that’s not counting any crashes prior to the diary count starting mid January else it’d probably be at least 3 or 4 months lost because I had to defer the above modules due to an uncounted relapse in November that lasted right through December)

..and god knows how many other days of productivity I’ve lost to the joys of brain fog (I’m never mentally aware enough on those days to think of keeping count!)

To be honest I’d say I did really bloody well.

Lets put it this way – I’m on track for a first class honours in my specialist degree subject so it’s worth the blood sweat and tears of studying with ME/CFS (and a toddler)

As Chris said on my Facebook page: Vicky rocks!

So, what now you ask? Well, on top of actually being a mum again instead of a snappy, stressed out work beast;

• I’m re-designing and updating several websites (mine and other peoples)
• updating and improving my knowledge of wordpress for this very reason (so a fair bit of reading)
• researching and organising ideas for my final year project (which funnily enough involves the need to understand wordpress VERY well)
• creating several ‘how to’ videos for the ESCAPE project at uni using Camtasia.
• making time to re-read my notes and try to keep what I learned to get those A grades fresh in my mind (important to do when you have CFS memory to contend with)

I know, you’d think I’d kick back and relax wouldn’t you – but I really don’t dare to. One thing I learned this year is that I can pace, but I can’t stop; If I stop I lose any headway I’ve made.

So, gotta keep the momentum going (without over doing it) because I REALLY, really want to be able to get a job at the end of all this.

Oh.. and for those of you interested, here’s the video part of the DES assignment that netted me the top mark:

Click here to view the embedded video.