Making It Up

as we go along

Social media

Colour my grey day

by 10 Comments

Right now I’m really enjoying photography, and particularly sharing it on Instagram, where there are some wonderful communities you can join in with by tagging your pictures. I thought I’d share a few of my favourites here.

#colourmygreyday is for those days when you need a pop of colour. This evening’s picture, taken during this morning’s cool down was perfect.

The tag was started by Marisa, who shares gems like this hydrangea

I also shared into #outdoorsandhappy a really supportive community who recently featured my autumn leaves. This one is also great for outdoor adventures with small children, and is run by Joy

and Becky who recently featured my autumn leaves

#smallmomentsofcalm is run by Rachael Lucas and her instagram is just filled with perfect illustrations of it.

For example:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BY0GnBpA7Wr/

Another lovely family of tags come from heitermagazine, and work around the heiter idea, so #beheiter #heitermoments and so on.

Look here

That had to make you heave a happy sigh, right?

Oh, and then there’s the creative tags. I started #acreativepractice and I use that to focus on fitting in regular creativity. Eg

I also like #ourcreativeselves from Shalagh – a lovely collection of her work here.

I find instagram to be a really supportive community, and love the friendships I’ve made there. Do you have any tag communities you love, or accounts you’d recommend?

Watching paint dry. 

by 10 Comments

Playing with my paints again. 

I’ve deleted twitter from my phone and am trying to wean myself off Facebook. I’m enjoying instagram, although I find the algorithm frustrating. 

Hopefully all this will mean less stress and more creativity. I miss the community though, and I don’t know what to do about that. There used to be community in blog rings, comment boxes and so on, but facebook, twitter etc wiped that out. And replaced it with what has become an angrier, shoutier place overall. Too much noise. 

I was clinging on for the friendships I’d found and cultivated there, but I don’t know how much room there is for that sort of thing to grow up any more. Is this a natural devolution, or have the algorithms and tweaks pushed social out of existence? 

(I’ll pop back with the finished picture when it’s finished. )

Internet matters – understanding the issues that can affect your children online

by Leave a Comment

internet matters issues

With 4 children in the family, ranging in age from 15 down to 3, and a steadily increasing supply of technology through the door, keeping on top of keeping children safe online is tough. Being asked to review the information on Internet Matters turned out to be extremely useful and informative, and no matter how clued up you think you are, it’s always good to take another look at things.

As a blogger and avid user of a variety of social media, I can sometimes forget that I don’t know it all, and lose sight of new technologies and networks that I don’t use. There’s a wealth of information on the Internet Matters site, and it gave rise to some interesting conversations with Small. (I’ve made notes so that I can chat with Big when she’s back from the 1920s 😉 )

internet matters technologies

With Small, his main interest rather than social networking, is gaming. He has a DS, and plays online games on the laptop and PC – mainly minecraft, although there have been a variety of other web based games he’s used in the past. We’ve had occasional issues, mainly when other people aren’t playing the way he likes to play, and while sometimes he’s been very upset by online interactions, it’s never been more than a transitory thing.

The younger children haven’t quite got into online gaming yet. Smallest does play minecraft, but networked with Small, rather than out to the wider world. I know that it’s just a matter of time before she wants to spread her wings though, and keeping an eye on what sites she’s interested in is made easier by the fact that she plays on a desktop with the screen visible in the living room, so I can peep over her shoulder at any point. Once she’s reading fluently and independently things are likely to get more complicated, and having older children who game makes her want to do more than they wanted to do at her age. (Nearly 10 years ago for Big, there weren’t the range of sites available. It’s slightly bewildering realising how fast the digital landscape is changing.)

The thing that worries me most for Big is the online reputation thing. This is all about how your profile online builds up, not just from what you post, but from what other people post too. We talk frequently about how nothing really disappears – even a system like Snapchat where the shared images delete is vulnerable to people taking screenshots or simple pictures of what is going on. You can’t say often enough that nothing is ever completely erased. The biggest problem though to my mind isn’t necessarily what your own children are saying, but what is being said about them, and that’s a difficult thing to do anything about.

The main thing to my mind is to try to keep talking to your children about all of these issues, and using the guides on this site might help you to be able to do that. Why not take a look and see what you think?

Disclosure: this is a sponsored post.

Binned the Klout, now checking out Kred.

by 14 Comments

Just over a week ago I blogged about why (and how) I’d opted out of Klout. I’ve read yet more articles about it since that confirmed to me I’d made the right decision – I particularly enjoyed the The Fairytale of Klout earlier. Given their recent glitch where many ppl saw another drop of anywhere up to 20 points, I think it’s possible the Klout bubble is well on its way to bursting, but hey, who knows.

But it does leave me lacking a social media metric. Almost as soon as I started reading rumblings about Klout, I picked up on rumours of a new kid on the block, called Kred. Obviously I joined the waiting list ;), and this week I got my invite to the beta system, probably because they got tired of me going on about it 😉

First things first, it isn’t supposed to be a Klout replacement. Instead of a one of score, you get a two parter – one is out of 1000 and is based on your influence – and is normalised against other users. The second is your outreach score and is out of 10. I’m told by Andrew Grill (the CEO of PeopleBrowsr UK who are the company behind Kred) that your outreach score will never fall and isn’t normalised. So the headline score on the Kred badge might not tell the whole story – you need to look at ppl’s recent activities to be sure of what’s going on. At the moment the badge isn’t available to put on your blog/ site, but it’s under development.

The site is a touch on the slow side just now, which is a bit disheartening given it’s in beta and presumably not under heavy use. However, the positive points are many. There is an open and obvious privacy policy, so you can set your profile to one of three settings, public, private or anonymous. The company is responsive on twitter – I’ve had good conversations with both @kred and @AndrewGrill which leads me to hope they are listening to their beta users, and will avoid the major holes Klout seem to have dug for themselves.

The biggest plus though is complete transparency of how your Kred score is reached. It’s all in the Kred Rules – you can see what you get points for and how that translates to your score. This is a major major plus point – one of the biggest criticisms of Klout is its complete lack of transparency. Similarly I find Peerindex pretty inscrutable, and despite one tweet from their CEO this afternoon recommending I look at topical influences, he didn’t come back to say what they are or why. (I did go look. I’m very influential on swimming. That would be because less than 50 ppl have mentioned it apparently. Hohum.)

The thing I’m not sure about on Kred is communitites. I get the idea. That we form communities around our interests, and also that you can be influential in a community you aren’t really that involved in, if ppl in that community RT your stuff etc. But if you look at the top of the home business community, for example, it consists of ppl/accounts who have very little interest in it, and are mainly tweeting streams of quotes. I know this is a problem for social media metrics throughout the system, and I confess I do wonder why ppl so slavishly RT cliches and quotes (dons hard hat and prepares to go down in flames) but I think it can probably be worked around. I did enquire as to whether self created communities are on the cards and was told it sounded like a great idea, so you never know.

I’m hoping to have a bit more of a chat with Andrew and possibly run a blog interview with him very soon, so if there’s anything else that springs to mind for you all, do let me know.

Of course, you’re all wondering why I care, given how negative I’ve been about Klout recently and stats generally in the past. The bottom line is that measurement of our activity online isn’t going to go away, and if I want to make some money out of my blogging/ social media hobby (which I do, we have three children and another on the way!) then I have to know what ppl think is important and how it all works. I got burnt by Klout, and I’m not prepared to have it happen again. I want to know how these systems work, as I believe information is power. And yes, I like numbers. So there you go.

What was that? What’s my Kred? It shows at 810/9 atm, thank you for asking 🙂

I am ashamed of myself.

by 20 Comments

For a while now I’ve been wavering over the deletion of my Klout profile. I’ve been aware of some issues over privacy and attitudes to users, but I’ve been allowing the benefits of having a high score to sway me.

What benefits, you may say? Well, the most obvious one for me is that Klout is a part of the metrics that make up the tots100 score, and I’m rather proud of my place in the top 100. I don’t know precisely what effect removing Klout will have – my understanding is that if I delete my profile my Klout will show as zero rather than the fake score given to ppl who’ve never signed up.

Oh yes, if you’re connected to me via twitter or facebook, I’m afraid you have a Klout profile. Whether you wanted one or not. I’m not sure whether they’ve resolved the issue with private profiles on fb – but at one point they were creating Klout profile pages for ppl who were locked down on fb, which then gave the person a preliminary score although I don’t see how they could follow connections through without having being authorised. Not good. If you want to opt out you can, the link is current hidden in the privacy policy in the footer of the page, but has a habit of moving around depending on how many high profile ppl are trying to opt out.

[ETA before you opt out, take note of which networks you’d added to Klout. Once you’ve opted out, you need to go to each network/ application and revoke Klout’s access or they can continue harvesting your data as per Dabney’s article here Link removed due to malware warning while I investigate].

So tonight, I’ve joined in with the exodus and I’ve deleted my profile. These are the reasons I gave:

“I do not like to be viewed as a commodity rather than a person, and I don’t like the attitude towards privacy that Klout is currently displaying. There is also no responsibility or transparency in calculating a score which has become vital to some ppl’s ability to hold down or gain a job, and this is something I do not wish to endorse. ”

By continuing to play the Klout game, I was endorsing a system that is giving individuals in marketing/ PR problems left right and centre as it arbitrarily changed scores without anyone knowing how it worked. I was condoning invasion of privacy via ppl with no awareness having profiles created for them, and letting brands think I agreed with my reputation being a part of their marketing. I don’t agree with any of those things, and so I’ve pulled out. It took an article Midlife Single Mum pointed me at to crystallize that thinking, but I’m there, and I feel somewhat liberated.

I’m only ashamed it’s taken me so long.