A couple of years ago i decided that I was going to use the slack time around Xmas and the new year to give myself a Digital Upgrade. This was partly for my personal entertainment but also it was hard to be a convincing bluffer on all things digital if I myself did not have an iPod, Sky+ or my own blog at the very least. So those three items constituted the Digital Upgrade of 2006.
Prompted by a post about Facebook on the eminent salon that is Adliterate I found myself being expertly advised on this topic by the magisterial trio of Richard Huntington, Rory Sutherland and Tim Hayward.
So 2008's Digital Upgrade has the added dimension of having been enhanced by the digerati themselves.
There are three planks :
1. To keep this blog for professional/planning/PR stuff.
2. To create a Facebook profile (but not MySpace, LinkedIn or Bebo) for general social and semi-workish things. Announcing that you don't have a Facebook profile is starting to feel like saying you don't drive : it seems a bit perverse, lazy and even somwhat selfish in some social situations. So despite the real leading edge guys saying that Facebook is "so over" (and heading off to Twitter or whatever) it seems that not being on Facebook will be like not being on email soon. So I am now looking for a suitably non-alarming photo to use. This may take some time.
3. To create a BT Tradespace profile. A bit left field, this but I heard about this about 9 months ago and saw one of its architects talk about it at a conference. The point of it is that small businesses can get a basic web site with some good Web 2.O functionality for free (and the bigger version, much like blogs, isn't that much extra). As I have a small training business that I never quite get around to sticking up on the web this could be just the sort of Digital Upgrade i need for that part of my life.
I will report back on all this at a later date - but that is the current plan.
PS I have also made another digital discovery on my moby over the last few months. I am with Jon Steel that planners need to stay "off-net" quite a bit if they are going to think hard occasionally (or is it planners of our age?). So no Blackberry for me. But when you occasionally do need to pick up your e-mails in an emergency, a basic 3g phone (mine is a Nokia N73) hooked up to a Hotmail account does the job reliably enough (if a bit slowly). You can also read the Guardian on-line and various other bits of net content for when you are marooned watching your son's Karate grading for five hours in community hall in the rough end of Hampton. Tecnhnology - don't you just love it.
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