"There’s little doubt that 2.0 applications afford important tools to organize citizen activism." (freedomhouse.com 2009)
In our weekly feedback, it was suggested to me once again that I comment more on other peoples blogs in order to increase traffic to my blog. I felt I had, up until now, done a fair job on commenting but took on board this feedback, and in an attempt to fulfil what is required of me I have this morning been busily commenting where I felt I could help or I had something to say. However not all the posts I read I feel compelled to comment on and I definitely do not feel the need to write on a public forum for the sake of writing. I also have to ensure what I write is constructive: I have very strong ideas on a lot of things, and as I think most of my friends would tell you always think my ideas are good ideas (that's a nice way of saying I always think I'm right).
Which brings me nicely onto....I find it very time consuming (as I'm sure many of you do) and an inefficient use of my time to trawl through everyone's blogs in one go making sure I don't miss anything, so have suggested to everyone today (I think) that we add a 'subscribe via email option' which I think will make all our lives more productive. We can peruse each post as it goes live and think about our thoughts and feelings in relation to the topic. I feel this would allow us all to give better feed back. Let me know what you think.
My main point to this post was wanting to highlight the following: For those of you living in the UK you do not even question the use of Web 2.0. You want to go on Facebook you do it. You want to Google something, all the information you could possibly require is at your finger tips. You want to write a blog post, not a problem! For me, it's not always so easy. Here is a link showing a non-exhaustive list of sites that are banned. I'm sure you'll agree not being able to access these sites would change the way many of us live our lives today. Fortunately, on the whole you can get around this problem, using something called a VPN. Before coming here, I'd never heard of a VPN and I certainly didn't know what it did. Now my life can't function without it...although sometimes, it has to! For example today, whilst trying to comment on blogs my VPN would switch itself off having been inactive for a period of time whilst I was typing - will I lose everything I've written? Please don't let me lose everything I've written! Without my VPN I cannot even access my blog, or indeed anyone's blog. Without my VPN I cannot upload anything to YouTube or Flickr. Even with my VPN I am limited on my Google searches until I remember to type in 'google.co.uk' before doing anything and even then I'm not sure I can access what I could in the UK.
I also have to be even more careful what I write. Just because I can't access these sites legally from here doesn't mean what I write on them can't be seen. There are words I avoid using, usually anything I think might be flagged up. I very rarely, on any public platform (Facebook, Twitter, my personal blog or here) write where I am or specifically refer to entire situation.
A plus to this, is that I do not allow Facebook (and other Web 2. tools) to take up as much of my time these days. I just don't think to check it as often as the facility is not always there. I'm living a little more in the 'real' world.
These are obviously situations I have had to work around whilst exploring web 2.0 over the last few weeks, and will have to continue to work around. It makes my life interesting! Less productive sometimes, but interesting. As they say here, there is always a way...
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