Since my last blog post about the subject on 14th April 2008, there have been so many online articles and items published about the current state of our planet’s climate, together with speculation about what the future may hold for us, it’s been difficult to keep up with writing it all up here in my blog. Hence my lingering, awkward silence. It’s becoming an overwhelming prospect. I need to find a new approach, or else my blog will stagnate and my writing “muscles” will wither away. I never intended to concentrate purely on the factual issues surrounding climate change; I wanted to try my hand at becoming a writer, pure and simple — and a fiction writer, at that. Instead I’ve become obsessed with pinning down what’s turning out to be an elusive chimera.

For the past few months I’ve been bookmarking web pages that contain relevant news items, hoping to use the information in my own write-ups as I continue to look for trends that back up the contention that we’re in for a sudden, disastrous change as we flip into a much cooler state of climatic equilibrium. I still fear we’re heading for a fall of monumental proportions — even more so, when things like the rising cost of energy and food is taken into account, along with the associated global economic turmoil that’s growing ever more chaotic with each passing day. But my mood this morning as I’ve been pondering how to make use of all this information has been rather bleak — and also, ironically, rather liberating. What difference will it make to the situation if I spend hours poring over this info and then re-writing it in my own words? My conclusion is: none whatsoever.

I’m finding that, more and more, I’m using Twitter, which is now linked to my Facebook account, to simply pass on links to relevant web pages to anyone who follows me on those platforms. They can then simply click the link if they’re interested in the subject and read the item first-hand. Sending a tweet on Twitter also updates my Facebook Status Update with the same information, and, in turn, using another excellent social networking app, FriendFeed, means that the info gets passed on to an even wider audience. Re-writing the articles here on my blog is really a redundant effort these days when social networking tools make the job of disseminating the original information so much easier.

So from now on I’ll be posting fewer blog items that are specifically about climate change. Watch my various feeds mentioned above if you’re interested in following the links to items I find on that subject. What I hope to get back to here is some liberated, creative writing, pure and simple. Yes, there’ll be comments about various factual subjects from time to time — but also some good old fictional story-telling. We all love a good yarn, and I really want to try and provide you with some.

Here’s a commercial I voiced via ISDN for the GMG Radio Group (also added to my Voice-over Demo MP3s post). It’s advertising holiday homes in Anglesey, north Wales. (I’m on the second half of it, after the female VO’s done her bit.)

“PLAS COCH” Radio Commercial, June 2008 - 996KB, 60sec.
(Courtesy Simon at GMG Creative.)
Stream it!

How do you explain Twitter to someone who’s never heard of it? Here’s how I tried, in a recent e-mail to a Facebook friend. (I think I got most of it right …)

Twitter’s been around for a while now and is extremely popular. It works in a similiar way to the Facebook Status Updates, in that you can tell people what you’re doing, thinking, planning, etc., but it goes out to the whole world rather than just your FB friends. (There are settings to either restrict the visibility of your posts, so that just friends can see them, or to allow the Public Timeline to display them, i.e. to everyone worldwide.)

You can send short messages of 140 characters max via the web, or various web applications that access the Twitter interface, or even your mobile (in a number of countries), and those messages are then sent to all the users who have elected to “follow” you. Similarly, you can elect to follow other users and see all their messages — or “tweets”, as they’re endearingly called.

Incoming tweets, and the tweets you send, can be read either at your Twitter Profile page (when you’ve set one up — which is very easy), and you can also have them sent direct to your mobile as text messages if you’re away from your computer.

Here’s my Twitter Profile page: twitter.com/SomersetBob

I started using it about a year ago, then discovered FaceBook and concentrated on using that. Now I’ve sort of rediscovered Twitter and am getting back into using it again.

Several applications have been developed to interact with Twitter and display the info in various different ways. Sometimes it’s not convenient to have your Twitter page open all the time in a browser (and you have to manually refresh it to see latest tweets), so something like Twhirl, which works without a browser, is better — it automatically checks regularly to see if there are any new tweets and notifies you with pop-ups: twhirl.org

There are a few FaceBook applications designed to work with Twitter. Unfortunately, almost all of them I’ve been playing with over the past few days have technical problems!

There’s one built by the Twitter Team called, appropriately enough, Twitter, which my Facebook friends can see working in my Facebook Profile, but unfortunately the settings page is corrupted and inaccessible until someone fixes whatever’s wrong!

Another app, called TwitterVision, was originally designed to work outside FB, and they then developed an app for FB, but although it works well at its own site, this app doesn’t work properly inside FB either! (It doesn’t seem to update the box in my Profile with my latest tweets.) Try it at its own web site — it’s a map that displays many of the tweets from around the world almost as fast as they’re posted. Fun to watch!

Finally, there’s another app called FriendFeed that works inside FB and also outside.

This one’s a bit complicated to set up, but again my FB friends can see it in my FB Profile — it displays various feeds (not only Twitter) from me and my friends, and updates every time we add either a tweet to Twitter, add pics to Flickr or add other things to other social networking sites such as YouTube, del.icio.us, etc. This one seems to be working OK at present!

There you go — checking out that little lot should keep you busy for a while!

Have fun!