Exton, Rutland

Iran's Post-Election Uprising: Hopes & Fears Revealed

Read, digest and understand

If I were to look back a few posts on here, I'd eventually find that this blog got set up a good couple of years ago, since when traffic has been somewhat tricky to come by. I don't know much about SEO, in fact I know virtually nothing. I post something, I get a few views, there's a cross link here and there at flickr and on some of the forums I partake of, but nothing too serious. That said, Izdihar.com does come up as the fourth ranked link if I search for "Izdihar", but who does that other than me?

Now I've never really played around with too many of the social networking sites, to be honest their point was eluding me. I have a Facebook account but I turned that off around 18 months back, as I was getting a little jaded with being asked to take part in the dumb games and inane quizzes it plays host to. In a moment of weakness a couple of weeks back, I decided to re-awaken the account because I'd noticed one of my favourite flickr contacts was on there. Before I know it, I've ended up tracking down a bunch of work colleagues past and present, as well as family members, some of whom I've not seen in 20 years. I add the blog link to my Facebook profile and maybe I get one or two views showing up in the stats that suggest a small connection has been made somewhere, but I'm not exactly being inundated.

A few days back, I decided to set up a Twitter account, mainly because a man in the office suggested it's worth registering yourself on all these things, just to protect your identity and prevent someone else passing themselves off as you - seems a reasonable suggestion. Now I mentioned a while back in these parts that I'd had a Pownce account which lasted right up until Six Apart pulled the plug on it - thank you Messrs Rose, Burka & Ms. Culver :no:. I used to quite enjoy it, I liked the idea that it was smaller than Twitter and I could get my head around what was going on.

Anyway the new account is created, but I know (as in have actually met or spoken to) no one on there, so what's the point? Who have I heard of then that's on there? Well I knew that Photoshop Creative had something going, there was an article on doing Twitter backgrounds for your profile page in the latest issue, let's add them then. So far so good, I'm now seeing a whole bunch of links I can look up, vast quantities of which seem to be using the bit.ly thing - no idea what that is, but make mental note to investigate when I remember. Who else then? Well I noticed that Ms. Margolis had a link listed across at 'The Girl' - that could be interesting, let's follow that one then and in the process I added SandieQ who'd listed Twitter as her homepage in a comment on one of Zoe's blog posts. So that's three then - not very many but enough to try and work out what's going on - and there's that bit.ly thing popping up again...

So a few days pass, I start adding some random thoughts of my own (they are very random I assure you) and once in a while, I'll see a comment from either Zoe or SandieQ and perhaps I'll add my own thought to theirs. So far so good, but I don't see any fireworks going off in this, it's just good clean, low level fun with a small 'f'.

So a day or two passes and Monday (today) arrives in the calendar - no real reason why it should be any different. The weather here in Riyadh has been crap the last couple of days, no real sign of the sun due to the dust hanging in the lower atmosphere, looks like it's going to rain, the sky is brown, but it's still 45C out there. A few more posts get made of no great import and the working day draws to a close. Then Ms. M makes a post about a book she's contributed a piece to - it's called "The Atheists Guide to Christmas" (snappy title), exactly what you need in June, and there's that bit.ly thing again. 'bout time I found out what that was...

It turns out that bit.ly is a URL shortener much like TinyURL, but unlike that one, it's not blocked by the KACST, or at least not yet. In itself, URL shortening is nothing new, but it really comes in its own where Twitter is concerned, because of the 140 character limit that it imposes. But the real benefit comes from a couple of clever little tricks that have been included there: One is that you can create an account, use it to create your shortened URL and post it directly into Twitter; secondly it will give you stats based on the traffic that passes through that short URL. Now that is interesting, time to do some tests...

Newly armed with a bit.ly logon, I notice that my flickr photostream has just ticked over the 11,000 views mark, 11,001 to be precise - let's try Twittering the stat from bit.ly. By the time bit.ly has managed to refresh the screen, it's showing that the short URL has been clicked on 3 times. Now bearing in mind I've only got 11 people following me on Twitter, 4 of whom I've blocked, this comes as surprise. By the time I get flickr refreshed, it's had 11,011 views. OK, let's try that on the blog and see what occurs. One Tweet later and I can see the stats in the blog back office collect another 10 referrals.

Now out in the serious world of SEO, the figures in of themselves are quite pathetic and not worth a mention, but considering I have a largely ignored blog, a flickr account that gets maybe 40 views a day and a Twitter following that ranks barely above single figures, the ease with which I've driven traffic from one to the other (in minutes) is something of a revelation to me. I've now converted some of my forum links into bit.ly URLs, more because I want to see what the stats do, what's more I can see where to clicks are coming from.

This could be worth watching, in fact for my next trick, I'm going to turn the permalink for this post into a short URL and Twitter it - if you've read this far, you may well have just become a statistic...

Not an obvious title for most I grant you, but he has cropped up in my browsing twice in the last two days, before which I'd never heard of him. Sisyphus was cursed to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again, for all eternity as a punishment from the gods. My first encounter was as a comment on a photograph by Joannablu over at flickr yesterday. The second was at a blog post called Commuters Exchange Interaction. Now in and of themselves, neither on their would have raised an eyebrow - it would have just been something new I'd learned. The unusual thing is that both of the ladies who raised this mythological individual are listed in my blogroll here. Admittedly, it's only very recently that The Daily Smoke has been added to the list, but it was before Sisyphus ever got mentioned.

It got me thinking about the kind of connections that blogging makes and I finally think I twigged why so many people do it - it is those coincidental and unexpected links between people that join us to the rest of the world - it should be stated here that I'm referring to personal rather than business related blogs. Where the pace of life and the promotion of the individual over the collective have given us the disintegrated society we witness today, blogging somehow recreates the connections and sense of community that have been lost in most of our daily lives, albeit a community linked electronically rather than geographically. Now I'm no student of social anthropology and can offer no evidence to back up this supposition, but it seems to me to be one of those ideas that just makes sense. Does this explain the rush to follow a cause and support fellows individuals perhaps in BlogWorld? I don't know, but it could happen.

Wonder whether Sisyphus knew what he was starting...

Have any studies been done to understand the relative importance of blogs in disseminating news when compared to more traditional media (newsprint, books, radio, TV)?

I mentioned in Reading Material that I'd read Girl With a One-Track Mind by Abby Lee. The briefest moment of Google based curiosity turned up the circumstances around what happened next. For anyone who might wonder where I've been for the last 3 years, I've been living in a vacuum constructed of sand.

Following the trail through from 'Outed' to yesterdays' 'Integrity' paints a very sordid picture indeed, and I don't mean Abby Lee's extracurricular proclivities.

The banner of 'public interest' has long been one that the press have been fond of quoting in justifying the sometimes dubious means by which they 'create' copy. They are happy to let the public believe that 'public interest' is synonymous with 'what the public is interested in'. It's long been known that 'sex sells', and on that basis, surely 'more sex sells more' doesn't it. So having gained the rights to serialise excerpts from 'Girl...' and presumably in the process exhausting what it could reasonably include in a national newspaper, it went after the identity of the books' author. The manner in which they went about this resulted in Zoe Margolis losing any semblance of privacy she had enjoyed and her career into the bargain, all for the sake of a 'work experience' journalist trying to get onto the bottom rung of the ladder. Was it not enough that they ran up the circulation with the serialisation, did they really need to go for the vinegar stroke [if you'll pardon the expression]?

There is a fair case for saying that in running the blog, the success of which resulted in her securing a publication deal for her words, Zoe was reliant on exactly the same public reaction to the subject matter as the newspapers rely on to sell copy. I cannot argue the point either that there was probably some naivete on her part to believe that her anonymity could be retained for any extended period of time given the interconnectedness of all things web and the need for interaction with others to put a book on the bookstore shelves. If you want to keep a secret, tell no one, not even that there is a secret, should be the adage here.

That said though, this just one of the very many non-stories that we're fed on a daily basis, to titillate and distract us from what is often the mundane life we lead. I mean, what sort of story is "man and woman have sex; then do it again shock!" - isn't the entire history of evolution predicated on the experience? I'm not suggesting for a moment sex is boring, far from it, but I really don't care who is doing who no matter how well known or otherwise they may be. Was there nothing more valuable to society that could have been typeset?

Seems our hack journo is now crying foul over the reaction caused in Blog World because it turned their attention on her - frankly, 'Unlucky'. The only silver lining I see in this is that in publishing this latest article, perhaps some of their customers have had their attention drawn to the furore this has caused - many of them will never have engaged with blog world and to quote Anton Ego, maybe some are due some "fresh perspective".

OK, so I broke the layout a bit. All will be fixed shortly, assuming I'm reading the b2e forum advice correctly - needed to restore the index.main.php for Vastitude to how it was around 6 months ago first though.

EDIT: All done and I can now sleep soundly at night.

EDIT2: Upgraded b2e to 2.4.7 whilst I was at it.

In the normal course of events, I'm not overtly political, but I was struck by the image below from Telzey (Lydia Marano), one of my flickr contacts, which seems to me to sum up what is happening in Iran at the moment.

Whilst neither I nor many others beyond the boundaries of Iran really know what the outcome of the Iranian Presidential Election really was, it is clear that vast numbers of the Iranian people believe that it was not as it was called. The basic human right to free speech is essential if Iranian democracy is to be seen as a fair and open process within that country's political system. Every indication is that this right is being abused.

I know precious little about Iran, most of what do know comes from the media and a recent focus on the country in NGM. It is though a place that has long intrigued me and a place I would like to see for my own eyes. I get the impression that the people their have more in common with Western society than the many Middle Eastern countries that mainstream media would like to lump them with. Iran has long held a tradition for making its own mind up - something very vividly demonstrated in 1979 - hopefully the beneficiaries to the inheritance of the revolution will reflect on that tradition and will allow its own people to speak.

For some obscure reason, I decided to log into Facebook tonight and almost instantly was passing messages with my (much) younger sister. I used to do this, but some of the crap that gets circulated at times is ever so slightly juvenile (old fart alert), so I dropped out about 18 months back. Anyway, a few minutes were passed, then she said she was heading off to bed, on which topic I haven't yet made a move and am listening to some Audioslave. I have though cut out the middle man of lying in bed wide awake, and have gone straight to the Horlicks - thought I'd try breaking the pattern tonight :roll:

Or at least that's what I wish I was doing.

Since coming back to Riyadh and the workplace that goes with it, my sleep patterns have got majorly disrupted. Go to bed tired, lie awake for a while, get too hot, maybe my back starts nagging away at me, realise that lying there is going to do nothing to help, get up again, have a drink, surf the net, go back to bed at maybe 02:30, finally get to sleep, alarm goes off at 05:45 and somehow at around 06:30, stumble into the bathroom and try to get into the office at best semi-conscious.

For anyone who actually wants to do a days' work, this is probably not the most practical solution in the world. I've tried medication on a couple of occasions, but they just turn me into a zombie the following day and leave me feeling like I've been sedated (best guess, never actually been sedated). The problem now is that I think my body clock is developing a pattern, though I know that over the weekend, this will magically go away. At the moment, I'm not sure how to get this out of the system, in the intervening period though, I will be the one who looks like this in our office XX(

Turned the blog trackbacks on again this evening - not a clue how they work or what I need to do to ensure they are working for me rather than against me, so drop me a line if you know.

EDIT: One other thing whilst I think about, who exactly is responsible for the views the blog seems to be accumulating and why don't you ever say anything?

Over the last few days, since getting back from the UK, I've managed to finish off a couple of books. One was 'What, is the What', an autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, the other was Girl With a One-Track Mind by Abby Lee a.k.a. Zoe Margolis. What very different books they were. One has taken me months to read, the other took less than 24 hours, I'll leave you to work out which way round that was :))

Shall we say that these two books were very different? I think we shall. Both though were very endearing and thought provoking - I don't think either life is one I would wish to lead. In one, the chances are that I wouldn't have survived the experience, and in the other AM would have probably got in their first.

Anyway, should you wish to read more, you can always have a look at their respective websites:

• The Valentino Achak Deng Foundation
• Girl With a One-Track Mind

The chances are that this is both the first and last time that these two links will appear side by side in a list, but I do though thank both for enlightening me in a most enjoyable manner.

This is what you get when you mix oil, water and a photog --> check the link out to see how it's done - Adorama & PPSOP

This was taken at the Melton Mowbray market during the TPF Rutland Meet-up. The guy running the stall was from Nepal and had loads of these fantastically coloured shirts, trousers, jackets and what not. How could a guy with a camera resist when one of the few patches of sun passed overhead - it was a bit breezy that day.

A little something from the Rutland trip

...lots more

For anyone who wants to find them --> Map

Hadn't realised that it's been a while since I last went down to the wrecks on the River Wyre, over 18 months in fact. Given that they are only 2.15 miles away from my house (Google Earth measurement), that's actually pretty poor. What was interesting was how much further they've degenerated. In fact, give it another couple of years and I think some of the wooden ones will be barely recognisable as ships at all. Some of the shots I took back in August 2007 are not actually possible now, such is their state of disrepair. Oddly similar though was todays' weather, very windy, cloud flitting across the sky and bright late afternoon summer sunshine, as it set in the west. Don't think I took 163 shots though last time.