As I have written before I have been thinking about quitting this blog for a while. I think that is what happend today when I set up my new blog at http://maria.hagglof.info. It will be written in swedish and will mostly be about things related to media and webb somehow, with a personal touch. And for you who cares about technical details my new blog is of course set up with WordPress 3.0.
If you look a bit to the right, there is a little badge about Sweden Social Webcamp.
SSWC is a camp for people who love the Internet more or less. It all started last year with SSWC09. I would’ve loved to be there but my brother turned 30 and I couldn’t let him down so I went to Helsingborg, while the rest of Helsingborg (at least the Helsingborg I know of) went to Tjärö. A little island in the south of Sweden where over 250 swedish web geeks had gathered up with tents among the sheeps for an unconference that has become the most talked about among swedes on the social web. The week after I listed my favorite blog posts about SSWC09. When reading about the weekend it felt like it was magic and I knew that I just had to go there next year. So… Today at 19.00 the tickets for SSWC10 was released and since I had set the alarm at both my google calendar and my iPhone I was on my toes for a ticket. My Twitterfeed was filled with people being on their toes as well, a monday evening has never had that much activity on Twitter before. And you know what? I got a ticket! 600 geeks had registered their interest for the camp and 250 tickets were released. So tonight I am a really happy geek :)
See you in august geeks and tweeps!
Yesterday I held a seminar about web 2.0 at Hela kyrkans hemsida in Stockholm, an event for people from all kinds of christian churches who are interested in the web. During and after the seminar I got a few questions that I want to share here as well.
General questions:
Q: What’s the thing with Twitter? You can just write 140 signs. That’s just nothing.
A: Don’t think about Twitter like that. About how little you can share. Think about how much you can get out of Twitter. When you start following people who share things your are interested in, you will see that Twitter is a goldmine. Also, most people have time to read 140 signs so alot more people will read your tweet than your blog post of 1400 signs.
Q: But how do you get people to follow you on Twitter?
A: Listen to others and they will start listening to you. You choose to follow people because you find them interesting, soon you will start to interact with them and they will most likely follow you back.
Q: Doesn’t the things you talk about go deeper than the actual web? We can’t keep on doing as we always have done in the church with the sermons as they always have been.
A: Exactly. That’s what I said in the beginning of my seminar and also showed in the Youtube movie clip. We need to rethink most things in life, of course also the church. The churches need to think about how to make services and sermons more interactive. And how to share them on the web.
Q: If I want to start up a new charity organization and advertise it through social media. How do I do?
A: There are alot of things you can do but this is how I would start: Start with making a blog. Write about the questions that are important for your organization. Use links to news articles and other blogs about these questions to get trackback links back to your blog. Make a Facebook fan page, let the RSS-feed from your blog be published on your fan page to give it content. Also add a Facebook fan page widget to your blog so that your readers can see that you are on Facebook as well. Charity works pretty good on Facebook so it should be pretty easy to get some fans. When you have got a fan base, join Twitter if your fans are there. Cause if they are they will most likely help you to share your message through Twitter as well. This is a start, the rest is individual and developed over time.
I also got a few personal questions:
Q: Why does an 8 year old kid (me back in the days) sit in front of a computer and write code?
A: I have all my life been interested in things connected to engineering. When I was a kid I liked to solve jigsaws, play with Lego, Briomec and cars. In the house there was also a Commodore64 and a book about programming in Basic. One day I just copied some code from the book to make a simple program. And then I started to analyze the code and realized that if I change the value of some variables, the program behaved in other ways. It’s just as easy as that, 8 year old girls don’t have to play with dolls.
Q: You said that you are a webjunkie and live your life through the web. What do you actually mean with that?
I got this question when we had lunch and here is where I picked up my iPhone and checked in at the restaurant with Gowalla and said:
A: I mean like this. Right now it will be known at at least four websites that I am at this restaurant. If anyone who notices it is in the neighbourhood they can come by and say hi. But this is only a part of it. I read the Twitterfeed as soon as I got a free minute or two and share things with my followers if I feel like I have something to share. I check my RSS-reader several times a day to see if my favorite blogs are updated. And I share things I am interested in, with others on the web all the time.
Q: Don’t you get stressed when living your life like that?
A: No, not since it’s so natural for me. I could cut it all off for a day if I want but that would be to strangle my life since everything I do is done through the web. That would probably make me more stressed. Most of my friends are connected to the web in the same way which means that afk-life and web-life isn’t separated for me. It’s all one life. My life. I am addicted to the Internet but I also want to be. Like you are addicted to your cellphone for example to be able to call your friends.
I probably got more questions… that I don’t remember. But I hope I answered them well on site.
This week was a four days week at work, a week that has been pretty calm since we haven’t recorded any shows at my internship with 30minuter. Instead we have had an election special week with shows that we made two weeks ago at the mall Hageby Centrum. The most interesting conversation this week was about transparency in small towns, a subject we discussed for a whole day, which lead to a blog post at någotsmart. The same evening I made a little page (in swedish) about an idea I had talked to @jimmyasklund about before. A tweetup at the zoo in Kolmården. Weirdly enough I got response from more people that I don’t know than from people that I do know at Twitter.
Evenings and today I have spent on trying to prepare for the presentation of my examination project and the opposition of Sanna‘s project aswell as the seminar I will give at Hela Kyrkans hemsida next saturday. I am getting a bit nervous for that seminar since seminars actually aren’t that common on my agenda. The presentation of the examination project feels like nothing in comparison.
Tomorrow I will visit my mothers work to get some physiotherapy in their warm water filled swimming pool. It’s a part of the recovery after the broken bones.
Phew, time for the very last blog post in this summary of 2009. It’s been boring, probably even more boring for you. Next year I’ll do it in another format. Promise.
December was a month I don’t want to experience again. Some days I was frustrated and angry, some days I was sad, some days I was happy but I don’t remember those days…
I celebrated minichristmas at Pernilla’s, Stefan’s and Alice’s house together with Anna, Andreas and Tobias. We ate good food (not Christmas food) and had a nice evening together. One week later I celebrated New Years Eve in the same house with the same people, plus Jenny. A nice evening as always with my friends in Linköping.
The 28th of December was the last time I met my grandfather Bernth on this earth. He slept while I was there but when I was about to leave and realised that I had forgot to say good bye I ran back to his bed, grabbed his hand and said “Good bye grandpa”.
My family tried to celebrate Christmas as we always do, but it wasn’t like any other year. After spending the whole day by my grandfathers bed we went home in the evening. But we were all thinking of the only one who weren’t with us when we ate the Christmas food and handed out the gifts. It was all done in about two hours.
I wrote a blog post about how I felt about living a journalist life.
Interviews, interviews, interviews.. and a lot of writing in vain.
I worked at Lagos Mode one day in December, or not even one days, I think I worked for about three hours. It was the first day on the sale, the 26th of December.
I won the autumn competition at skyltat.se and got a Nokia 5800 Xpress Music which my brother is the happy owner of today.
I had a down period in this blog and just published five blog posts. I was probably out of words…
I made one weekend-trip to Östergötland in the beginning of the month but the day before Christmas Eve I went there and stayed for the rest of the month.
I bought my lovely iPhone 3GS 32 GB. Probably the best thing I have ever bought.
I actually got 6 movies from Marcus and CC for Christmas. The Lord of the rings trilogy and the Beck 21-24 box.
Third Advent
I forgot my camera at home when I went to Östergötland for Christmas and I hate myself for that. No photo of the month. I suck.
Now when it’s really cold outside it’s all forgotten that we had an indian summer in September. The weather was lovely and made us swedes in a happy mood :)
Lorraine, Stephanie, Susanna and I had a little party at Susanna’s place before we went to Lemon Bar where we met up with Hanna and Malin. The night ended with a little walk in the “early morning” together with Lorraine before we went home.
I went home to my family to attend a funeral together with them. Even though Bosse weren’t a family member he has always felt like one and it felt like a matter of course to be there.
I started to write on the series of personal blog posts about my interests. I didn’t finish this project though and since I hate to start with projects and not finish them I hope that I will get time to write the rest of the posts this year.
In school almost everything was about the dementia project but we also had some nice lectures and workshops with among others Björn Falkevik and Joakim Nyström.
In September my hunt for an internship in social media got a result when I got my internship at Tredje Statsmakten Media who are producing Medierna in Sveriges Radio.
I read a lot of blog posts during September and I even had time to blog about some of them that I really liked, I blogged about Brit Stakston and about Kristoffer Björkman. The big discussion in the social media bubble this month which started already in August was about the pointless babble and even I wrote a blog post about it which I don’t feel ashamed about yet ;)
In my own blog I tried to write about my interests as I mentioned above. The blog also got a little revamp with new plugins and widgets.
I also got my second internship period through Twitter.
There was only one trip made during September and that was to my home county Östergötland.
Andreas Ekström announced the “no Google day” at the 1st of September. Something he failed upon already 7am but Google failed aswell when Google mail crashed in the evening.
I made a list of 100 tunes from the 00-decade which I realized was to early when Markus Krunegård released a new album with the song Benny. Although I have listened a lot to my list so I am happy that I made it.
I watched the TV-series Signé Chanel (Fashion House Chanel) in September and I loved it. Within an episode of 26 minutes I laughed, was annoyed and felt sorry together with the participants.
This is what happens if you give me a banana cause I don't eat bananas.
When I am browsing through my photos I can’t find any photo from September. Can it really be true? No photo of the month? I don’t use my camera often enough…
In February I cut and dyed my hair at Peggis Barbershop in Norrköping. Something that was really well needed.
I cut and dyed my hair.
In the beginning of the month I visited Daniel & Emma to play some boardgames with them and Stefan & Pernilla to see their new house.
I also was at the Resumébar with some classmates to hang around with our future colleagues.
In the end of the month I visited Frida, Jimmy and their daughters but I also made a second visit at Stefan and Pernillas place where I also met Anna, Andreas, Tobias and Björn. Björn had also brought his girlfriend Josefin for the first time, a really nice girl who I’ve got to know during the year.
I visited my family in Norrköping twice this month. My parents in their house, my grandfather at the recovery clinic and my grandmother in her apartment.
In February I published a personal poem for the first time ever.
I was at Café Sturekatten to write a report for school. While I was there I ran into the Swedish pop singer Robyn.
In the beginning of the month I went to Östergötland to visit my chiropractor, dentist, grandfather, and some friends. The month ended with another trip to Östergötland to cut my hair and visit more friends.
I found Nanoblogg and was in love with a new social media platform. Although I don’t use it anymore, it was a great idea but I didn’t get much use of it.
I bought a Saitek Eclipse keyboard.
Saitek Eclipse Keyboard.
A boardgame evening with my neighbours was announced so I brought Ticket to ride and went there, even though I usually don’t go to places where I don’t know anyone. They weren’t boardgame geeks like me but I had pretty fun anyway. I played against three guys and won :)
I listened to my old friend Gustaf Spetz at Mosebacke and bought his new album. I really like to listen to it from time to time, not only because he is my friend, he is also a great musician.
Photo
In February my camera died so I can’t say that I have any photo of the month :(
I have been fiddling a bit with the blog today.
In the sidebar I have rearranged the widgets a bit. I have also changed the Twitter widget to a more legible one and added a Twitter visitor widget. If you can’t see yourself there it is probably because that you aren’t signed in on Twittercounter, which also is a nice site showing statistics about your Twitter account.
To the blog posts I have added Sociable, a plugin that displays buttons which makes it easier to share my posts via social media. I have also added the plugin Emo vote which makes it possible for you to vote about how you feel about my posts. That is very useful for those of you who are afraid of commenting in my blog, now you can show what you feel while still being anonymous :)
When I was a kid I had a few dolls that I had got from my parents. I never understood the fun in playing with them. Instead, I preferred to play with my brother’s cars, built cranes with his Brio Mec and cities with his Lego. The only own properties that I really liked to occupy myself with were my puzzles. Puzzles were apparently girlish enough to have my own ones. I even had a period when I had to do at least one puzzle every day before I went to the day care. All this was just the beginning of what was to shape me into the engineer type.
When I was about 6 years old the computer came into my life. My dad borrowed a “portable” computer from work that I was unable to lift. Its screen had two colours, dark orange background and bright orange signs. I thought it was fantastic. I played games called Pacman and Frogger and I wrote on it. I wrote and wrote, completely pointless things, just to get to sit by the computer. For example, “Mommy is cooking, she has a red shirt today, now Dad came home, he said hi to mom.” I soon began to nag at my parents that they would buy a computer, but they thought it was too expensive.
Then a summer day in 1990 my beloved father won a Commodore 64 in a running race. The happiness was complete! We had a computer at home and you could connect it to the TV and play games in different colours! My brother and I played every day. A couple of years passed and when we came home from Grandma and Grandpa late Christmas Eve 1992 there was a big box in the living room. On the box, we read “Merry Christmas to the Hägglöf family, from Santa Claus”. You can probably guess what the box contained … Well, there was no PC. Thanks to my old fashioned and stingy father there was a used Commodore 128 including monitor, disk drive and any other accessories you can imagine. The carton also included a book and with help from that book, I wrote my first Basic code in green signs.
10 PRINT "Maria"
20 GOTO 10
The little hacker is having a cold.
Years passed and I still liked to build things even if I became too big for toys. When my parents bought furniture from Ikea, it was always me who put them together. When a cable would be deducted or dad had bought a technological gadget, I was always there to help with the installation. When I was 12 years old, we got a PC to the classroom at school. Since we didn’t have a PC at home I used to remain after school and sit by the computer in the classroom. Here is where my former teachers deserve thanks for allowing me to sit there.
Middle school was worthless in every way. There was a computer classroom where we weren’t allowed to be and because we still did not have a PC at home, I didn’t have any computers in my life any longer. But my friend Johanna came to the rescue. She had got Internet at home, the year was 1996 and we sat by her dad’s computer and chatted at aftonbladet.se. Oh, how I wished that we had a computer with Internet at home so I could explore the Internet alone, in peace and quiet.
Autumn 1998 it finally happened, what I had longed for half of my life. My mom took a lease-PC through her work and we also got the Internet. I started chatting at IRC, used ICQ, downloaded MP3’s and build my first website. Internet became my life, fairly quickly, and when someone in the family had problems with the computer, I was there to solve it.
This is what is left of my first website.
When I finished high school, I had given much thought to whether I would continue studying economics (it was the numbers that made me choose economics in high school) or if I would choose something technical. After much reflection, I followed my heart and chose the Information Technology program at Mid-Sweden University in Sundsvall. At the university I learned more about programming and even though I understood that I don’t want to work as a software engineer, my interest in technology will always be a big part of my life. My interest in technology is the one of my interests that has characterized my personality the most and although I have many different kinds of friends that I like, it is with the company of my engineer friends I feel “at home”.
About a month ago Pear Analytics presented a study about Twitter. The result showed that 40% of Twitter is “pointless babble”. A few days later the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter wrote an article about it. They brought the conclusion to an even higher level when they added the word “worthless” and the discussion in the Swedish social media bubble was a fact. I had my position clear, I like the babble and I think it is good.
During the last weeks I have been thinking of the babble and how much it actually means to me and how my life would have been without it. First of all, I have been social over the Internet since 1998 when I started using IRC (/me waves to #örebro@ircnet ;) ). The “pointless babble” in the irc-channels I have stayed in over the years have been huge. I have also played multi-player games which I probably wouldn’t have played if it wouldn’t have been because of the social factor. The “pointless babble” exist in a large scale even there, even though the gaming is in focus. The last years when being social over the Internet has become mainstream and got a new name called “social media” I have started to use services like Twitter as well, and the “pointless babble” continues of course.
So, why is this “pointless babble” so important?
Let me take this from the beginning. Being social is always about relations, so even if you want to call it social media it is actually relations and relationships you are talking about. And how do we build up relationships? Well, we can be boring and just talk serious shit, but do we get to know each other? No, it’s when we start with the “pointless babble” we get personal and when we get personal we are building relationships that last. And with relationships that last we get friends and are more likely to recognize each other further on. And people we know or recognize we are more willing to help out if they are in trouble or have questions.
Of course a social media like Twitter can’t be a flow of just intellectual information 24/7. We would all get headache. It’s just like at work, do you work for eight hours straight every day without any “pointless babble” whatsoever with your workmates? If that’s the case I don’t think you have any useful exchange of each other. And what’s the point with social media anyway if we don’t have any useful exchange of each other? And why would it be worthless to babble about “pointless” things over the Internet when we do it everywhere else?
For me personally the “pointless babble” has given me friends from whom I have learned a lot of useful things. I have built up relationships that I know and care about. I know who I can trust when it comes to fact, advices and serious discussions because I know the people I am discussing with. I have also got to know my best IRL (in real life) friends through the “pointless babble”, friends to share my interests with and to talk with about serious things and choices in life. Without the “pointless babble” I am pretty sure about that I would not have been the person I am today. I would probably have been more like an eremite.
So, first of all. Whoever at DN who called the “pointless babble” worthless information, I would like to have a chat with you.
Second, I love the “pointless babble”. I have been living with it for over ten years (my entire adult life) and it has probably formed me to a non-pointless person.
Third, can’t we just agree on that the babble isn’t pointless?
My “något smart” blogposts