Sinéad

New York City is possibly the best place in the world to learn how to take photos. Everywhere you look there is something beautiful, interesting, gigantic or overwhelmingly familiar to snap away at.

I’ve talked about upgrading to an SLR for a long time, and was finally encouraged by my other half (a Canon 400d owner and a wonderful photographer/teacher) and the cheap prices of B&H in Manhattan. Straight after checking in to our hotel on 35th Street we rambled around the block to B&H and I picked up a Canon 450d, known in the USA as the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi – everything in the states sounds so much cooler.

We spent the next 5 days camera happy in New York, the results of which I’m really quite proud of. I’ve been taking photos for years, but have always been disappointed with the results of my experiments, until now. The differences between an SLR and a bridge camera are vaster than I realised and being able to carefully tweak all the settings for each set of photos you’re taking is a skill I’m going to attempt to master. Granted some of the photos I took in NYC aren’t perfect, but they make me smile nonetheless.

I feel like I’ve been able to capture the feelings I experienced there – the familiarity, the grandness, the beauty, the intrigue and the fun we had together. I’m looking forward to the next time I visit (somewhere in the near future), where I’ll bring back memories and photos of the city in snow and covered with Christmas.

Inspired by a twitter conversation [1, 2] – here is a simple hack which can turn your twitter favorites into a Tumblr blog. Of course you could publish anywhere you wanted, but Tumblr is traditionally used to post links (rather than fresh content) and twitter favourites are often used to save interesting links posted by other tweeters (or ones you’ve posted yourself).

The first step is finding the rss feed address for your favorites.

This is always the following: http://twitter.com/favorites/[insert_your_ID_here].rss

As long as your tweets aren’t protected, you will be able to view this rss feed in any feed reader. You could even add a link to this in your blogroll if you didn’t want them published as individual blog posts. You could also add your friend’s favourites to your feed reader, thought it might spoil any upcoming links-posts they’re planning on publishing on their blog.

This is how mine: http://twitter.com/favorites/sineadcochrane.rss looks in Google Reader.

The second step is creating a Tumblr blog and then using the import rss feed feature. Once you’ve signed up, click on “Customise” and in the top left hand corner menu choose “Feeds” and add your favourites rss feed address. Doing this will mean you can automatically publish a new blog post every time you favorite a new tweet. Unfortunately it won’t import all of your old favorites, only the new ones.

For an example of all of this working, take a look at mine. It’s a small experiment you might like to be a part of…

Independent movies have become synonymous with interesting soundtracks, recent favourites like Juno and cult classics like Empire Records benefited from this by being able to promote themselves to music lovers as well as movie lovers. The up coming indie romance movie 500 Days of Summer is no different and is using a wide variety of methods online to engage with both audiences.

The stars of the movie have posted a bizarrely funny little cinemash online, mixing together the new movie with a scene from Sid and Nancy, they’ve also filmed a really cool bank heist/movie musical homage, you can listen to the entire soundtrack streaming online, and there are countless behind the scenes videos available online that you’d usually have to wait to see on the DVD release. Obviously there’s the website and a Facebook page but they’ve also been running some interesting hybrid engagement ads on Facebook and have a widget you can add to your profile. They’ve definitely been attempting to encourage elements of crowdsourcing and tapping into the viral nature of information and social networks online.

It’s not often that an online campaign stands out to me in such a way that it’s worthy of more than just a tweet. The difference between this campaign in comparison to the many others before it is how feature rich it is and it gives the sense that there is an understanding of the behaviour and motivations of the target user – i.e if you want a user to help promote your movie, your brand, whatever, you need to give them something actually worthwhile in return and they will be much more open to reciprocation.

Visitors to the website or facebook page have the option of creating an alternative movie poster using their facebook photos (or new uploads) or create a  a highly personalised custom mix tape – features of the campaign which are engaging, and create something worth sharing – they can also access all the free content on the website. They’re also just about to launch a microsite where you can create a Spotify playlist reflecting various stages of the movie romance (with the best playlist wining the creator a ticket to all the UK festivals next summer).

By facilitating an engaging user experience that produces user generated content, you increase your chances of the user reciprocating i.e allowing the application to access their Facebook profile, to promote the movie with a profile update, or auto-tweeting a link to their personal mix tape, or embedding it in a blog post or sidebar etc. I personally spent about 20 minutes creating a mixtape, and quite enjoyed the experience and end result (pity those tracks are only 30min samples though).

This is just a great example of integrated movie marketing that takes a step further than those boresome movie microsites that allow you to distort your face into a Vulcan, a Transformer, a Terminator etc. and I’m hoping to see much more creativity like this in the near future.

There’s a Blackberry one too, though that one is a little bit more age appropriate.

A few weeks ago I had my first experience of running a Facebook Page, as we wanted to set one up for Culch.ie.

The primary goals of the Facebook Page were going to be the same as our Twitter account:

1. drive traffic to the site by informing followers/fans that a new blog post had been published,

2. tweet/update-status with exclusive competitions,

3. and interact with followers/fans with a little bit of fun and frolics.

These goals have been easily succeeded on Twitter, but the Facebook Page has been far more difficult and it has been a serious source of frustration for me. All of my Facebook Page energy has been spent trying to achieve the first goal. Something easily achieved on Twitter, thanks to Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed syncs our RSS feed with our Twitter account, so every time  one of our many authors updates the blog, the title and a link to the post  is tweeted. A significant amount of traffic for the site comes from Twitter (this is partially down to followers retweeting links) and we had hoped to achieve same on Facebook.

Facebook offers a number of applications for user profiles, but the majority of these will not work with Facebook Pages, including the Twitter application (and other popular apps like Tweetsync). Initially I discovered that the only solution to goal no.1 was to allow Facebook to import blog posts into their notes functionality, but by having your blog posts imported into Facebook your content is being copied into their walled garden, I’ve discussed before about the negative repercussions of this and have been reluctant to allow this to continue. It also gives rise to privacy and content rights concerns.

After trying and testing numerous Facebook applications I finally stumbled upon one that actually works with Facebook Pages, though it requires a less than direct approach.

The Selective Twitter Status application is designed to allow you to update your Facebook status, but only with a tweet ending/starting with the hashtag “#fb”. This proves quite useful when combined with the Twitterfeed option of adding a piece of text to every autotweet. For example you can set it so the text “New Blog Post…” appears at the beginning of each autotweet (so your followers know the link is to your own blog). However, by setting it to post “#fb” to each autotweet, Selective Twitter Status will then recognise the hashtag and push the tweet to your Facebook status. Also, so as to not pollute our main Twitter account with a hashtag meaningless to our followers, a seperate Twitter account was set up for this rss feed alone.

Now that goal no.1 has been succeeded with the Culch.ie Facebook Page there will be far more time/energy for goals 2 and 3, and I’m hoping the fan numbers will soon rival that of the Twitter account.

This is exactly the kind of problem solving I thrive on, so at least the frustration ended in a solution as well as few lesson about Facebook and Twitter along the way. I hope this is of some help to other frustrated Facebook Page users.

When I was in Primary School one of the boys in my class had a seizure in the middle of Irish lessons. Being children, we were frightened by how his body seemed to shake unnaturally and though he never had another seizure in class again, there was always a sense of unease around him. Looking back, I realise that his remaining school days could have been far happier, if only his classmates had been properly educated about his epilepsy. Instead words like “fit” and phrases like “foaming at the mouth” were passed from the adults to us.

I never reflected upon this, until Mam had her first seizure.

It was only then that I learned how much misinformation there is about epilepsy, and how much ignorance and unjust prejudice there is. For example, a layman understanding of epilepsy is the photosensitive form which is a reaction to strobe/flashing lights, but only 3-5% of people with epilepsy actually suffer from this.

My first source of information has always been the organisation Brainwave. Thanks to them I was able to educate myself, and in doing so I was able to prepare myself for the next seizure (this is a straightforward and simple guide to first aid for seizures [pdf] that *everyone* should read). In understanding epilepsy, it stopped being scary.

I often wonder if my hysterical reaction to Mam’s first seizure would have differed if I had been taught to understand why it was happening and informed as to what an epileptic seizure looked like. I now know that sometimes during a seizure a person can go blue in the face; but I had no clue about this during her first seizure and went into a total and utter panic. More importantly, if I had known how to recognize a seizure from the start, I would have been better able to report this to the doctors in A&E – who were adamant that the seizure followed her cracking her head open on the tiles of the frozen food aisle. I was certain that it was the opposite way around. But they wouldn’t give her a diagnosis, or run any tests, or treat her… until consecutive seizures followed.

Thanks to Brainwave we learnt how a seizure isn’t a dramatic emergency (unless she had hurt herself, like the first time) and that she could easily recover without the need for doctors or emergency rooms (thank god). Luckily for Mam, once she was medicated she stopped having seizures, except for the occasional nocturnal seizure. More recently she has also managed to be weaned off her medication, after going a couple of years seizure free (yey!).

Not everyone is that lucky though, and without Brainwave there would be a total lack of information and support for sufferers. As you can see from what’s been discussed here already, being educated about epilepsy in Ireland is falling solely to them. Unfortunately Brainwave is not a government run organisation and they rely on donations to continue providing support, information, advice and improving public understanding of epilepsy.

That’s why I’ll be attending their benefit night “The Horse Show Hustle” on August the 7th –  tickets are on sale here. For €33 you can dance the night away  with the satisfaction of knowing the proceeds will be going to an organisation that is greatly needed in Ireland (if you can’t make it to the show you can alternatively make a donation via MyCharity.ie).

I definitely needed them, and in the future, someone close to you might need them too.

Having very much enjoyed this same event last year, myself and some fellow Cyberpsychology students will be road tripping it down to Limerick again for the barcamp unconference 3Dcamp “the internet beyond the 2D browser”. This event is taking place on Saturday the 6th of June and you can register to attend and/or present here. One of the most interesting components of the M.Sc. Cyberpsychology course is the study of the psychological effects of virtual environments, hence our interest. However, 3Dcamp also covers a variety of other technologies and has a wonderful ability to showcase current research and development.

Talks of interest to a Cyberpsychologist?

Mark Campbell from eMedia will be showcasing 3D Medical animations employed as elearning tools for life sciences.

Ronan Skehill from YourPinPoints shall discuss the business, societal and privacy issues surrounding location based services.

PhD Researcher David McKeown will be discussing the shortcomings of 2D mice and keyboards being used to interface with 3D environments, and demonstrating the use of wiimotes with 3D PC applications and robots.

Artist Miriam Lohan will introduce Sound Mapping – how to read a map by listening, perceiving presence and filtering information for navigation or pleasure.

PhD Student Fabiano Pinatti will explore how technology can support the nomadic/mobile aspects of modern work and life.

I’ve spent the last 6 months with my head buried deep in research – the effect of which is that my brain has grown tired of reading. Believe me, when you’ve been reading and synthesising thousands of words a day this can happen. I’m burned out and I can’t seem to convince myself to process the written word (unless perhaps it’s 140 characters). I have reader’s block and graphic novels are about as close I’ve come this month to reading anything substantial. This is unfortunate considering I’ve managed to accumulate 10+ new books since the New Year that I’ve been too busy to read.

I’m not going to force it though, I think I just need a break, but I get bored far too easily slumped in front of the TV. I’ve just been in need of an alternative form of stimulation, but rather than allow my mind go soft, I’ve been enjoying aural and tactile stimulation instead – through podcasts, photography and putting the pieces together.

Podcasts: Every day I’ve been listening to “Stuff You Should Know” from howstuffworks.com – which are exceptionally easy to process because they make you feel like you’re listening in on someone else’s conversation rather than being lectured to. I can close my eyes and let the words sink in, my brain is softly soaking up what it finds most interesting and finding this aural input a wonderful break from concentrating on words on a computer screen. These 20 minute conversations have covered a wide variety of topics and I’ve been enjoying learning about subjects outside of Psychology and Technology for once.

Photography: I’ve wanted to take up photography as a serious hobby for many years. Now I’m finally starting to action this desire. I’ve taken 100’s of photos in the last few weeks, some of which are on my Flickr. I’m finding this a great source of relaxation, especially when combined with a long walk – Two weeks ago I walked for about 3 hours through the beautiful Portumna Forest Park, it’s been the most relaxed I’ve been all year. We just walked and walked, not looking at our watches, just snapping anything of interest or beauty to us. I can definitely see myself doing this more often.

Putting the Pieces Together: I’ve always enjoyed solving problems and working with my hands, but recently this has also been a great source of frustration for me. There’s always been a ticking clock, a deadline more important and distracting. So one of the first things I found myself doing once college was finished was buying a new desk, because I finally had the time to put the pieces together. (In retrospect, the comfy new desk would have been handy during my studies…) I really enjoyed the simple act of creating something from all the pieces and I’m sitting at this now with a small sense of pride. Following this I couldn’t resist picking up a Chinese 3D wooden puzzle when I saw them in George’s Street Arcade last week; my bookshelf is now home to a Tyrannosaurs Rex.

Both photography and putting the pieces together are simple acts of creation that require a person to conceive them. Without you, it’s just a scene or a set of instructions and pieces sitting idle. They are actions that require some focus and put YOU firmly in control. I find myself calmed by this. I imagine other people would too. Perhaps you’re feeling the impending doom of the recession and/or that you have no control over what happens to you, my suggestion to is that you try to relax by doing something physical that will lead to creation. If you prefer art, paint a picture, put it on your wall and let it remind you that you’re capable of being in control, of being that volatile element in your own environment.

Sometimes, our minds just need a break, and not just from reading.