Slow Notes
About: Twitter
Twitter is probably one of the first examples to come in mind when talking about social media or social networking. Usually Twitter is described as a microblogging service which allows the users to send and read messages, called tweets. In the following I will take a brief look on what Twitter is and how it can be used. The basic idea of Twitter is allowing users to send and read short, 140 characters long messages telling what they are up to or sharing their ideas. Formerly Twitter asked it’s users to answer the question “What are you doing?”, but just last year the question was change...
O service, where art thou?
As you may have noticed from my Flickr, we had a little Summer vacation trip on the Finnish countryside for a couple of weeks. But as any vacation, this one had to come to it’s end and on the other day we purchased train tickets from the VR Journey Search, their online shop. VR Journey Search is not the easiest to use, not even for someone who has practically lived most of her adult life online. For instance when we tried to buy the tickets the Journey Search gave us a weird notice, something about advance benefit ticket (in Finnish ennakkoetulippu) not being refundable or changeable....
Fix this
Maintaining a website sounds like an easy job. Especially if the job is to just copy and paste the texts someone else has written or to upload the pictures someone else has taken. Yes, it sounds like an easy job, but really it's not just mindless copy pasting. Usually the photos or texts need some work to be done on them before they can be posted on the website. Sometimes it's hard to understand what the person sending the texts or photos really want to be done with them. Or sometimes the requests are made in a way it's hard to tell if the person behind them has been really busy or if they...
Planning to be social
Many companies and organizations dive head first into social media. They create accounts and pages to services such as Twitter and Facebook without stopping to think why. The outcome is usually empty, hollow and dull and it interests and impresses no-one. \ On the other hand organizations spend huge amount of time and effort to plan everything in advance. Social media and it's services are like living organisms. They evolve. Users of these services also evolve and their ways using them change all the time. New users' groups may take over the services that earlier used to attract another...
I don't exist
I don't know at which point this happened. A couple of years ago, if you made a search with my name, Mervi Eskelinen, it would have returned my site (the one that was here before) as the first hit. A couple of weeks ago I noticed my site was fourth or fifth on the list. So I decided now it's the time to stop stalling and launch the new blog. So I did. Nothing happened. I was still fourth or fifth. And the address was something like helmikuu.net/mervi/blog, which wasn't there anymore. After some days I created a URL redirect from the non-existing blog-folder to the real front page. It seemed...
Free for marketing
Giving for free doesn’t sound like great business. Free is free and there’s no straight monetary gain from it. However freebies are great marketing and great marketing is something any business needs. Obvious freebies are the trial versions. Offering a (full) version for the clients to try for a limited time is good. It shows you are confident of your product and you are sure it is so good the client trying it out will most certainly buy the actual item after the trial period is over. However trials tend to have a feeling of being forced. Being forced to either stop using the product when th...
Idea book
I think too much. No, I'm not bragging about it, it's just a statement. When I go to bed I usually stay up for quite a while and think about things. When I have a shower I may sit there under the water thinking. \ And all the time I have new ideas. Ideas of things to blog about, ideas for websites, ideas for this and that. Sometimes the ideas are bad or even awful, sometimes they seem pretty good. Sometimes I make them happen and they work really well. But often it gets hard with all the very much unordered ideas roaming around in my head. Today I had another idea. It's pretty simple actua...