Posts tagged as:

Communication

Devil’s Dictionary

by Bill on July 20, 2010

The Devil’s Dictionary – 21st century edition In 1911, American writer Ambrose Bierce published “The Devil’s Dictionary.” Bierce claims it began it in 1881. It was made up of words reinterpreted by Bierce, “… lampooning cant and political doublespeak,” as Wikipedia puts it. Generally, I don’t like the trite negativism of things that are cynical. [...]

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How Kurt Vonnegut defined social media:
connection precedes communication*

by Bill on February 26, 2010

There are loads of books and gazillions of web sites and blogs on social media. You could spend the rest of your life reading about it – the data, the theories, the what-have-you. But if you really want to understand social media you can cut to the chase and read just one guy: Kurt Vonnegut. [...]

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The yin and yang of communications

by Bill on February 8, 2010

Communications is made up of two halves, something like yin and yang. I call them the positive side and the negative side. In using a word like “negative” we immediately think it is something bad. But it isn’t. Both sides can be done well or poorly so the positive side, done wrong, can be very [...]

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Repetition is good so it’s good to repeat ourselves

by Bill on February 1, 2010

It’s good to repeat yourself. By default I think we believe to repeat ourselves is a bad thing. However, if we’re trying to communicate it’s through repetition that it gets across. The trick is to do this without becoming redundant  — in other words, knowing when enough is enough. The other trick is to repeat [...]

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Social media and passing fancies

by Bill on January 27, 2010

I began thinking today about social media and all the tools we see. There is something of a digital cornucopia of “stuff”: Facebook, Twitter, iPhone apps, Twitter apps, aggregators and on and on. New ones pop up everyday. Accompanying all of these is the hype. There is the marketing from the companies that bring them [...]

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Saturday morning project — 2004

by Bill on January 9, 2010

I’ve completed my Saturday morning project which was to go through my posts from 2004 and find the ones I most liked. They aren’t necessarily written as well as they should but such are the hazards of blogs. It was fascinating for a few reasons. First of all, I was interested to see how much [...]

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A little something about experts

by Bill on January 6, 2010

I saw a rather disturbing comment in the letters area of the local paper (Fredericton’s Daily Gleaner). It went thus: “The average New Brunswicker is not qualified to make the final decision concerning the sale of NB Power. We do not have access to those in the know and the massive amounts of information required [...]

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