When I started using Twitter, not so long ago, only in October, last year, I did it because I was curios, but the last push was given by @valentinaneacsu who recommended me to try and see what’s it all about. After some time I became hooked on it, then I tried to cut back a little and now, I think that am reaching what is a balance for me, or at least for the time being.
During my first twitter days I read a lot of “advices” and how-to’s about Twitter, and among these there is one that I consider most valuable, and it is, as many good advices, quite simple.
Take it slow!
That’s it! I don’t know where I’ve read it, probably in more then on places. It could of been TwitTip or some other place. Maybe these are not the exact words. But it is so true! All you have to do is to take it slow, start small, then look at what people are doing. Don’t follow 1000 people, start with you friends, or people you’ve heard about. See how they interact with the community. Add people slowly and this will give you the opportunity to find your own voice, to adapt and see what’s fun and OK for you and what’s not.
There’s one more think I would add to this great advice, and that is: Use your common sense!
If you read tips about Twitter, that’s great, but do things your way and use your common sense. It will tell you how you should interact with the others. You are who you are, you are unique and that gives you the right to have your own voice. But in the same time use your common sense and respect the others, this way it will be more fun for everybody.
If you want, you can find me on Twitter as @LiviuLica, see you there!
Tails, long and short, niches large or narrow. These are all words that flow around in the buzz words soup. Seth Godin talks about Tribes, which, in my view, is just a fancy way of defining your place in a niche or to create you own niche. Niches are cool, and there is a reason for it.
In the end all of this talk about The Long Tail and Tribes comes down to the idea that any of us, as an individual, can put in more effort into something that is irrelevant for 99% of the world, but incredibly valuable for the rest 1% than any company or organization will ever be able to. And that 1% may be more then enough to satisfy our needs, whatever those are.
This is so obvious! isn’t it? If yes, why didn’t we talked about this so much back in the “Pen & Paper” era? Because it was too expensive and risky to target such narrow niches. No book store could afford the Long Tail approach and much to rare were the opportunities when we could gather enough people at one place to forge our mighty community (don’t really like the word tribe).
But now we have the mighty internet, the all reaching web with it’s websites, blogs, microblogs and all variations of this sort. Any of us can have a small piece of the web that can be reached by anyone in the whole world with more ease than picking up the phone.
And this gives us the power to be unique and be great at it. Most people may think that we’re not for them, but if there are 10, 100, 1000 people out there that share our uniqueness, then we are in business. And business != $$$, it may be just fun, or ego, or need to be with your peers.
You have not eqxcuse of not being yourself and expressing it any way you can. The only hurdle left is to let people out there know you exist. Google / MSN / Yahoo / etc are all good friends, but these are not enough. You need to build your community. Or if you are just a person that want’s to be part of something, you need to be able to find your community.
But how do you do this? How can you shout out far and wide that you exist?
NOTE: Through this post you will see links to clips I took at the concert. The purpose is to give you an idea about what’s like at their show.
Buena Vista Social club was in town, so we went to see the show. Us geex know our culture, sometimes. But anyway, we were there, on the 7th of February 2009, we were in Bucharest, Romania, at Sala Palatului to see a great show and listen to some very good Cuban music. It was with intention that I used show instead of concert, because before anything, Buena Vista Social Club puts on a show like no other.
The tickets sold out 2 weeks before the show, the hall was packed. I’ve never seen Sala Palatului so packed before. This alone created a great deal of anticipations.
And the lights are off and the music starts. They opened with Chan Chan, which is probably their best known song. This gave a big boost to everybody and the show was on. 15 minutes in, people were on their feet, dancing and clapping like crazy and enjoying every moment.
What I liked most, though, was an 12-13 minutes instrumental piece done by the two guitarists (one electric and once classical guitar) and the rest of the orchestra. Everything had to have a story, so the story was that one of the guys (the electric guitar) was said. Why? I have no clue. My Spanish skills stop at “magnana”. The other guitarist was trying to cheer him up. Excellent musicians, all of them, and what a show they know how to put on!
For encore they played Guantanamera.
All in all, great show, great audience, great concert! In that order. It’s something to see, if you have the opportunity, even if you’re not too much into Cuban music. I’m not either, but I enjoyed every bit of it.
NOTE: I will most likely update this post, so stay tuned if you’re interested.For now, just I’ve updated the post with links to the clips and thank;s to Grooveshark with an widget for one of Buena Vista Social Club’s albums For all the clips take a look at our geeky Youtube channel for some bad quality clips from the show. Please leave a comment :) !
Just got this from a friend. Probably an known joke but it’s the first time I see it.
The Six Stages of Debugging
1. That can’t happen.
2. That doesn’t happen on my machine.
3. That shouldn’t happen.
4. Why does that happen?
5. Oh, I see.
6. How did that ever work?
How true this is, isn’t it? Para shared with me that he’s previous boss would say that that the most common phrase you will here from a programmer is – “It works on my machine”.
I dare you to proove this wrong :).
