Wishing all of our clients, customers, partners, friends and fellow geeks a very merry Christmas and a prosperous new year!

The eco-warrior within discourages me from sending actual cards – so we’ve made a donation to Shelter instead.

As I’m already donating some of my time working with Julia’s House, I thought it made sense to try and raise some cash for them as well.

There are hundreds of children across Dorset who are suffering from life-limiting illnesses. Julia’s House is dedicated to providing love, support and help to both them, and their families ensuring they make the most of the time they have together. Read more about Julia’s house here.

PLEASE NOTE: I’ve paid for the jump – ALL FUNDS raised go to Julia’s House
(big thanks to Dylan for giving me his time and expertise for free too)

I’d like to raise £250, so anything you can give is appreciated.

SPONSOR ME PLEASE

In my spare time, I produce and present a show on the local FM radio station, as much as possible promoting new (local) music – BomoBeats has been set up by a group of us with the sole aim of promoting this musical talent in Bournemouth to a wider audience.

Social Tech Solutions are acting as the technology partner by providing hosting and web design, as well as a package of online social media marketing.

UPDATE: Press Release now available on BomoBeats

As you’ll of read below, we’ve moved into a new home at Alex’s Creative Space (under Alex’s Good Food Cafe).

Put March 10th in your diary, come down and meet our associates from FirstExact and ICT South who we share the space with, sample the delicious cake and nibbles from Alex’s Good Food Cafe (above) and generally have a good old nose around at our office.

More details (inc a proper invite) to follow.

I’ve read “The Audacity of Hope” by Barack Obama and it did make me really optimistic about the years ahead… the wave of sentiment growing in Americe, could be seen as a real turning point in the fortunes of the world when we look back at this day in history.

Something that I’ve been pondering, and I apologise for going slightly off tangent today… the downturn was largely fueled (and caused) by the markets acting irresponsibly, the continued slump seems mostyl that they still don’t trust each other and that as this continues it becomes a spiral.

What if the recovery did not come from the markets?

What would the world look like if in a month or two’s time Obama sentiment is still running high?

Could their economy start recovering off the back of consumer sentiment?

There has been some commentary that the markets haven’t reacted to Obama because they fear some of his initiatives will harm their profit taking… does that mean the economy of America as a whole couldn’t recover despite the markets?

I don’t know, but I’m ever the optomist in some respects.

Your thoughts please on my “Springer’s final thought” – Does the UK need an Obama-like figure?

As the pace of change increases people seem to be looking for things that make them feel like they can make a difference in this uncertain world.

On twitter today, from 10-11am David Cameron was giving a new conference at Reuters, you could ask a question by using the #askdc hashtag*- mine was: “Do you think that the strength of single issue politics has made the current political party system useless?”

*hashtag – the # character and a short sequence of characters that acts, like a tag allowing you to easily group tweets from a variety of people on one subject. It allows you to create a conversation for a specific theme or event i.e. conferences often use tags like #myconf09. You can then search and see replies to that specific hashtag, which is a lot easier than wading through pages with relevant words that might not be related to that specific idea. you can use twitter search to find #tags or hashtags.org.

Technology enables single issue politics.

Take the Baby P example – the issue prompted people to sign up to facebook groups (2000+ I believe in one local group related to baby P) and generally soak up the media “outrage” (I hate using quotes but I do feel these were heavily stoked by sensationalist reporting) without actually doing much.

Of the 2000+ people who joined the dorset march for baby p facebook group, around 20 people showed up to the actual protest. Is this mobilisation of the masses? Hardly.

You often hear people say that more people vote on a big brother final than in a general elections (Not true btw: 2.7million vs about 18million) – this is possibly true for younger age groups where it is ESTIMATED that more young people aged 18-34 voted on BB than in the last election.

All of these things do add up, technology has created a world where issues are picked up and shared at such a pace, it must be almost impossible for politicians to keep up.

Voter apathy is caused by the politicians responses to these single issues rarely differing and the perception (and reality) that most political discussion is just shallow point scoring on detail and scandal.

Would it not be better to enable the masses to vote on single issues in some central way and just have MPs as representatives of their local area only and not as an illusion of some political ideal?

Or would this be creating a state by mob rule, based on sensationalised news bites?

UPDATED: X factor voting – 16.5million votes cast across the series – be interesting to know how many voters that was.

What I think this means for business is that you have to be ahead of the curve.  However much your marketing department think they know online, and understand SN, there’s always something around the corner that is bigger and better, and the guerilla nature of these new sites means that only those with their fingers at the bleeding edge can identify exactly where your efforts, and most importantly your spend should be going.  Sites like friendsreunited and Bebo still have their place in an integrated SN campaign.  But where will they be in a year’s time?  More importantly, will Facebook still be #1 in a year’s time?  Or is there a niche up and coming SN that will reward insider knowledge with a higher return on investment, and a more credible campaign?

Ever noticed how Web 2.0 (whatever that is) applications loves things to be in “Beta”… well Facebook has the ultimate beta…

You can now change your language setting to “English (Pirate) – Beta”.

No really…

English pirate beta

…amusing – yes

…useful – not really

…beta? – pirates in beta??