Social Media - Local Connections.

Recently, i have been involved in helping to organise some local charity events/projects. Some more successfully than others i might add!
But, one thing that has struck me whilst doing this, is the way in which i have been communicating with the other people involved.
Yes, i have been using those, relatively, old fashioned methods of communciation, email and text. I have even been using the antiquated telephone system, albeit mainly the mobile/cell variety.
All of these methods have their uses and that will probably continue to be the case, for much time to come..
But, what has surprised me has been the way that i've found myself using social media sites, such as Facebook, to help with both the communication and organising of these events.
These sites, especially the messaging side of Facebook, have enabled me to quickly contact and keep in touch with all the people involved with these projects and all within one site too.
One of the beauties of doing this on Facebook, is that your interaction can be done both privately and publicly, depending on what you wish others to see. I know that other sites allow direct/privtae messaging. But, i do find Facebook to be especially good for this.

I must admit that i was never much a fan of the idea of Facebook.
I know that this probably sounds very familiar to those of you who may have read other blog posts that i've written here. But, Facebook, like Twitter before it, was a site that i had to be convinced to try out and more, or less dragged onto.
Even then i was not a big fan, at first. But, i have finally come to see it's worth and strangely enough, it is the way that i interact on Facebook with local people, that has helped to change my opinion of the site.

Now, that is somewthing that i never expected.
My experiences with social media had, until fairly recently anyway, been mainly with people from right across the world and not with people living on my doorstep. But, the advent of both Twitter and Facebook has changed that and has opened up my social media world to a brand new community, my local community.

Both Twitter and Facebook are social media sites on which my virtual life and my real life collide. Facebook, especially, does this and that has been a slightly strange experience at times. At first my Facebook experience essentially mirrored my time on YouTube. I interacted with the same people, albeit using our real names.
But, then the local aspect started to become more prevalent and this is what really took me by surprise. I never expected that collison of virtual and real worlds to happen. But, it is something that seems to work. It has also led to a blurring of the lines between those two worlds.

I have met, both virtually and in reality, many new people from my local area because of social media. People i would quite probably never have met and interacted with, without the aid of sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

This is an aspect of social media that does tend to get overlooked when people talk about social networking.
We all tend to think of social media as a global phenomenon. But, sometimes the most interesting people might live right around the corner from your house and you just never knew it.

Just because you live in the same town, or city, doesn't mean that you can't, or shouldn't use social media to interact with the people within them.
Social media has the power to enable you to meet and interact with people from countries throughout the world and i have met many interesting people precisely because of this.
But, don't forget those people who live in the same country, or even the town as you.
Who knows what you might be missing out on?

There is a famous saying, usually used in a totally different context, "Think globally, act locally"
Maybe we can put that saying to use into social media as well?

Blogging For Action.

On Friday October 15th, myself and 5,693 other bloggers, took part in this years Blog Action Day 2010.
This has now become an annual event, since Blog Action Day was founded in 2007.

I took part for the first time last year, when the theme was the environment and straight away i realised what a great idea this was.
This year, the theme was water and once again i decided to write my own blog post, to help with the global discussion, on this increasingly important topic.
As did Ken, one of the other contributors to this blog.

So, why am i talking about all of this here?
Well, i just feel that this illustrates how far we've come over the past decade, or so. Especially, in the ways in which social media is used, or can be used.

In the past, the ordinary citizen, didn't have many ways in which to convey their thoughts about important topics. Well, certainly not in ways that might actually be heard, read, or listened to.
We could have written to a newspaper and hope that our letter might be published. Or, maybe, we could have rang a talk radio show, if we had the courage to do so.
But, now, we can all express ourselves far more freely and to a potential worldwide audience as well.

According to the Blog Action Day website. The blogs posted this year, have been read by over 41 million readers. That's a very impressive figure.
Now, i'm sure, that my own blog was not read by that amount of people. But, at least it was available to be read and by a potentially far bigger audience than any newspaper, or talk radio show. If you were allowed to air those views in the first place that is.

We all have opinions and now we have the means and the technology to share them with the rest of the world. Most of us bloggers now have an audience for those views, that just wasn't possible a decade ago.

But, there are other aspects to this that i also think are important.

Blog Action Day and many other campaigns like them, are global campaigns. They have the potential to bring people together, from across the world.
The rise of the Interent and social media has, in effect, encouraged users to integrate and collaborate, on a global scale. That, may well end up being it's greatest legacy.

Campaigns, such as this, also expose us to new ideas and global concerns. They make us think about topics that we might not otherwise have concerned ourselves with. Or, maybe even knew anything about.

Whilst writing my own blog post about water, i had to do a little bit of research. I doubt that i was the only one to do so either. That little bit of research taught me things that i was unaware of and even corrected some misconceptions.

So, apart from expressing my views, i was actually learning from the experience too. And, of course, that learning was only enhanced by reading the blog posts of my fellow bloggers.

Bloggers do get some bad press and i'm sure in some cases, deservedly so. But, something like Blog Action Day, shows that blogging can be a force for good.
It gets people involved. It opens our minds to new topics and global issues. And it teaches us along the way too.

So, i guess the lesson to be learnt from all of this, is - Get Blogging.
You'll, quite possibly, be a better person because of it.

The Global Village.

This video was originally posted on YouTube on 20th September, 2007.
It was inspired by the use of one of my videos, by an English teacher in Bogota, Columbia. Showing how our videos can be seen and affect people around the world.