Too Much Information?

January 8, 2010
by Rodney Olsen
6 Comments

the_withings_wi_fi_body_scale.jpgSocial networking has helped us to instantly connect to people around the world. We can share all kinds of things about our lives and update people on the other side of the planet with what we’re doing every second of the day. But how much information is too much information?

I blog, I use Facebook, Twitter and various other online applications but I still manage to keep huge amounts of information about my life private. I’m not trying to be secretive or to hide anything, it’s simply that I choose to choose what I reveal about myself and those close to me.

I don’t mind telling you that I’m trying to lose weight. I did pretty well last year, slipped up a little over the festive season, and am now back on track to start reducing the numbers on the scales again. What are those numbers? Sorry, that’s my business.

Of course if you want the world to know your exact weight every time you step on the scales you could always get a set of Withings Wifi Body Scales. I love many of the features of these scales. Just step on and they automatically record your weight, fat mass and BMI, then transmit the information to your chosen weight management application online. Brilliant. As someone who records their weight alonng with cycling statistics every day, this could be a huge boost, but I certainly wouldn’t be using the new Twitter feature.

You can select to tweet your weight every time you step on the scales or once a week, once a month or whatever you prefer. I’d prefer not to let everyone on Twitter know my weight at all but I can see that it’d be a useful feature for those seeking some external accountability.

So how much is too much? How do you draw the line on what you put online? Experts say that you shouldn’t put anything in an email or online that you wouldn’t be prepared to have splashed across the front page of newspapers around the world. Are people sharing too much? Have you ever wished that someone close to you had held back a little more? I’d be very interested in your response. Please leave me a comment or two.



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Being Downright Unfriendly

November 18, 2009
by Rodney Olsen
2 Comments

facebook_logo.jpgDid you see that the New Oxford American Dictionary has named “unfriend” as its word of the year? Reuters is reporting that it was chosen from a list of finalists with a technical flavour.

Unfriend the term used when you delete someone as a friend on a social network like Facebook or Twitter.

I must admit to unfriending people from time to time. When you get started on something like Facebook or Twitter it’s easy to say yes to every friend request but after a while you realise that as in real life, you should choose your friends more carefully.

While I know that anything published online can end up being read by more people than you intend, I still choose to limit those who I invite into my world. I guess that this blog and my Twitter tweets are open to the world while the stuff I put on Facebook is a little more private. I’ve got almost 500 Facebook friends which is still a lot but a while back I did unfriend a bunch of people because I simply didn’t know them in any way.

What’s your “Facebook Policy”? Do you open up your Facebook to the world or are you very selective? have you had to unfriend people? Did they know about it and if so what was their reaction?



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Is social media here to stay?

September 3, 2009
by Rodney Olsen
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Vincent

June 18, 2009
by Rodney Olsen
2 Comments

vincent.jpgI was reading yesterday morning that about 120 original letters by Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh are to be exhibited, alongside the works he was writing about, later this year at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

His letters are rarely shown in public due to their fragility and sensitivity to light. Most of the letters being used in the exhibition are addressed to his younger brother, Theo.

The museum apparently owns over 800 of the 902 letters known to have been written by van Gogh. The museum intends publishing them in a book in the near future.

I wonder what’ll happen in 50 or 100 years when a famous person is being honoured in a museum. Will they display their emails or perhaps their Twitter account.

If you ever became famous would you like having your private correspondence put on display?



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The Power of Twitter

March 30, 2009
by Rodney Olsen
4 Comments

twitter_logo.pngIf you’re a Twitter skeptic, you might like to reconsider.

Alison Godfrey has written at News.com.au that using Twitter helped her get the home loan she needed. Her article Commonwealth Bank all a-Twitter over mortgage approval tweet, describes how she turned things around very quickly by using less than 140 characters.

It seems that someone at the Commonwealth Bank saw her tweet about her negative banking experience and the head of Commonwealth Bank’s customer service team was in touch with her within an hour and seventeen minutes. Apparently a lot of the big business players are now monitoring social media to see where they’re being mentioned in cyberspace. I’ll have to keep that in mind when our house sells and we need to confirm our financial arrangements.

By the way, if you are using Twitter, feel free to follow me.

You’ll find my Twitter profile here.

If you don’t twitter and you’re wondering what I’m talking about, Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service, that allows users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are posts of up to 140 characters in length. Sort of a cross between text messaging and blogging.

Find out more at the Twitter page on Wiki.



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