sinéad's lifestream

Twitter is a great place to share and receive information about all sorts of things and each of the users are entitled to control who sees their tweets. This is why you are able to either have a public account or private one. You are also able to block users that you don’t want seeing your tweets. However, this doesn’t work very well with public accounts because all the user has to do is sign out of Twitter and then visit your profile page to read all of your tweets, but I suppose this is pretty inconvenient, even annoying.

Recently Fianna Fáil, who runs a public account (obviously) blocked David the editor of Politics.ie. So, out of spite to Fianna Fáil, I have set up a new twitter account for anyone that has been blocked by them, this account will essentially tweet everything they do, except it will never block anyone, ever. You can follow this new account here.

This works because basically any public account on Twitter is the same as an RSS feed, you can even follow Twitter accounts in a feed reader (which is pretty handy if you don’t use Twitter but are interested in one or two people’s daily mutterings). To follow someone in a feed reader simply find the link to the RSS feed of their Tweets (underneath their followers mosaic) and add this URL to your feed reader the same way you would with a blog.

Now I’m no political analyst and won’t get into how ghastly it is for Fianna Fáil to block any member of the public from viewing their “informative” messages, but let this be a small lesson to them that they’ve absolutely no idea what they’re doing online.

Have you been blocked by Fianna Fail on Twitter? Has any other Irish political party started blocking members of the public online?

Back when I was studying for my degree and my masters I always got really excited about any project or essay that allowed me to read and reference the work of Dr. Jennifer Preece. If you have studied interaction design you will no doubt have come across her book “Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction” but the work of Dr. Preece that always completely absorbed me was her perspectives on the relationship between usability and sociability, particularly the impact of usability on the design and management of online communities.

If I could choose any person to be my research mentor it would be Dr. Preece. This woman has a 35 page CV online describing her incredible academic career. As early as 1975 she was working on e-learning initiatives in the UK and after completing her PhD studies in 1985 she pursued research focused on ground-breaking topics such as information systems, computer mediated communication, human?computer interaction, and online communities. She eventually moved to the USA in 1996 to lecture in the University of Maryland Baltimore County, in the Information Systems Department. Today she is the Dean of this department, supporting a long list of PhD students. Her work has taken her all around the globe, she has published hundreds of papers and authored numerous HCI books. She has achieved so much, in what had been a traditionally male dominated field. Her career is certainly something to aspire to.

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Psychology is all about understanding, explaining, and predicting human behavior. We are fascinated by our own behaviour and those of us around us. By understanding behaviour we hope to gain insights into how our minds work and perhaps how to change our undesirable behaviour. An understanding of human behaviour can also lead to the design of good software, hardware and even guide policy writing relating to technology.

These days technology like the iPhone helps us to track our own personal habits, Twitter gives us an insight into popular topics and analytics give us fascinating web usage statistics. Whilst technology has greatly enhanced our ability to collect interesting data about human behaviour, it’s important to realise that using such data to make conclusions about why we behave in such a way is unwise without investigating the differences between causality and correlation. Take for example the problematic question of whether the Internet is addictive or if addicts use the Internet.

The Relationship Between Psychology and Technology

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A big thank you to Damien Mulley,  Willie White from the Project Arts Centre and Alexia Golez for the hours of fun we had participating in and winning the Dublin Tweasurehunt on Saturday.

Team “Invasion of the Booty Snatchers” was a combination of old friends and new ones led by the lovely Dena. Though we were exhausted by the very end, it was worth every heart pounding second, taking us all over Dublin 1 to places I’d certainly like to revisit (possibly at my own pace though!). Overall a great bit of exercise and loads of fun. Check out the #tweasure hash tag on Twitter to read all the buzz about it and check out the brilliant video below.

Dublin Tweasure Hunt from Jentertainment on Vimeo.

When I was little I caught a fluffy bumblebee.

I put him in a glass jar and was careful to punch air-holes in the the lid and I left him overnight in the backgarden on the windowsill.

The next day he had died, and I was really sad to see him go. Myself, my brother and the little girl and boy next door decided to give him a proper burial. We dug a little hole in the flowerbed in the next door neighbour’s backgarden and had a funeral for our dearly departed insect friend. In the middle of the ceremony the bee climbed up out of the hole in the ground and scared the bee-jesus out of us. We ran screaming from that garden as the zom-bee flew away never to be seen again.

It’s one of my earliest childhood memories and it still creeps me out a little bit.

What’s your earliest memory?

Inspired by a Twitter conversation with @Burkie.

I’m surprised the phrase “Couldn’t sleep last night.” has yet to trend on Twitter, it’s certainly a common tweet I see in the mornings during my commute to work. Not only that, flicking back through the wee hours of my stream it’s also pretty common to see “Still can’t get to sleep.” appearing at 3am.

I would argue that if you’re tweeting, you’re certainly not trying to sleep or doing what’s good for your body in preparation for shutting down for a few hours. I myself have suffered some restless nights and made a real effort to combat the problem, rather than accepting it and suffering through more zombie like days in the office.

Turn Off Your Computer 30 Minutes Before Sleep

If you’re suffering from occasional difficulty getting to sleep at night you should consider the effects of using a computer late at night. Studies have shown that the brain remains stimulated after using a computer (or watching television), which in turn makes your sleep restless. The simple act of shutting down the computer 30 minutes before you’re planning on going to sleep can help relax you.

Research has also shown that the bright light of your computer monitor (let’s also not forget that mobile phone screens also produce a bright light) suppresses the production of our sleep hormone melatonin. If you are suffering from an especially bad case of insomnia then try shutting down the computer at least two hours before planning on going to bed.

Though you may enjoy the calming effects of using the computer, your brain on the other hand is thinking “light = daytime”. Staring at your computer screen means keeping yourself alert and wide-awake and returning online to complain about your inability to sleep is simply aggravating the problem.

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I seem to be in a minority group that sees the potential that the new twitter re-tweet function brings. For someone that has worked on a method of highlighting Irish tweets for the benefit of non-twitter users and anyone offline for a long period of time, it’s possible that I’m able to see the potential a little more clearly.

The biggest benefit of the new retweet function is how it adds a method of highlighting localised trends. If 20 of your twitter friends retweet the same message you won’t see it 20 times, but you’ll see 20 “likes” beneath it instead, giving weight to the content of the message. It also stops your stream being diluted by the same message over and over again, which can be frustrating. And at the end of the day, if you’ve not had much time to use twitter you’ve got the “retweets” section to conveniently show you the highlights you’ve missed from your own personal stream that day.

The retweet feature also takes into consideration attribution; the original composer of the tweet appears in your stream and this is a wonderful way of discovering new twitter users. In essence it’s a solution to the fix @replies issue twitter had, everyone was so angry that they wouldn’t have an organic method of discovering new users to follow, now you do.

The other great thing about retweets is that it adds an extra dimension to keeping track of the tweets YOU find most interesting. If like me you use the favorite feature in twitter for something else entirely than the ability to view “retweets by you” will help keep track of the tweets you found important enough to share.

Overall I’ve enjoyed watching the evolution of the service and will continue to do so. I find it most interesting how, just like with Facebook users, change is scary and new but after awhile everyone gets used to it and moves on to being mad about something else entirely.

The lovely Clarabel on Twitter posted this photo last week. This is a fine little collection of psychology text books (and a Philosophy one thrown in for good measure) that would be perfect for any undergraduate psychology student. As a psychology graduate myself I understand how expensive psychology text books are, so please, if you know anyone that could do with a helping hand with their first or second year of college ask them to get in contact with us. Leave a comment here, send me an email (sineadcochrane at gmail dot com), a tweet, or, contact Clara via an @ reply on twitter. These books are free to a good home and are in perfect condition. Even if any of these books have new editions now available, more often than not there are only slight changes made and they would be perfect to help you with your long road of study ahead.

*Update* Two hours after posting this the books found a home. Yey books!

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Social Media for Business example, Thanks to Comply – who I am in no way involved with, but have just made a €20 purchase from them due to their successful use of Twitter.