A couple of days ago, a couple of friends put the following on their status on Facebook:

People need to understand that children with special needs are not sick. They are not searching for a cure, just acceptance. This week is for special needs education. 93% percent of the people will not copy and paste this. Will you be part of the seven percent that will and will you leave it on your wall for at least an hour?

Now raising awareness and understanding is a fine thing, and I know and love the kids my friends were thinking of when they cut and pasted this message. Today’s topic is not the important subject of children with special needs, the above just happens to be the latest example of what I do want to talk about, which is how not to win people to your cause. Read more »

Photo by Milen Dimov, Used with permission’Twas a year ago today that I started using Twitter and Facebook. I kicked it off with a test message to see if I got my twitter missives automatically being sent to Facebook properly. Hardly an auspicious start. I was not an early adopter of social networking tech, and at first blush, you can’t blame me. Do I really want to read 140 character messages of what people had for breakfast and their progress on the house work? Fortunately I found it wasn’t all asinine ephemera. Read more »

Today I mentioned that I’d started posting my micro-blog messages to Identi.ca, which pushed to Twitter, which pushed to Facebook. A non-techie asked me what I was talking about, so here is the explanation I sent:

Identi.ca is a microblogging service like Twitter, but based on open source software.

The pickings are pretty slim. I want something that can:

• At least lay out messages in columns. Being able to have columns of tabs would be a bonus.

• Be able to resize the columns. Tweetdeck is limited as to the number of columns you can have in practise by with width of your screen. Seesmic Desktop is almost there, but not quite.