Happiness is a newly mown lawn. And yet how hard it is to get started. I will do anything but get that mower out and have even been known to hope for rain on a day I have agreed to cut the grass.

But the quiet satisfaction of getting it done is so sweet. The slightly aching muscles, the smell of petrol and newly mown grass, the neat, alternating, light and dark lines drawing your eye down the centre of the garden. It feels good for a short while. I resolve to try harder next time.

But I know I won’t …

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Paperless Field Guide was my first experience of reading an interactive book created with iBook Author and what a great experience it was. Written by David Sparks, author of iPad At Work and presenter of Mac Power Users, it is packed with really useful information on how to go paperless using the various Apple devices. David has done a terrific job of deploying the multimedia capabilities of this format to the maximum effect without going mad with them. The book is really easy to read, clear, and very, very useful. Highly recommended. (Requires an iPad)

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As some of you who have seen my grumpy tweets will know I have been having significant problems with my broadband access from Orange over the last few weeks. It would run fine for a while then go for days only managing to stay connected for a few minutes at a time – apparently more than 500 disconnections! Given how much I work online and with a family all wanting to use the web for all sorts of things, this is a not insignificant irritation.

Things started going badly from from the beginning. When I moved to them in November  Orange got my login details mixed up with another customer. When I pointed this out I was told that they couldn’t correct this simple bit of information and that I would have to start again with the ten day registration process. I said this was nonsense and to get around it I now have to log in under this other customer’s login name.

They then failed to cancel my previous ISP causing double payments on my account for a couple of months which led me to two sets of call centre hell to sort out.

This more recent technical problem involved approximately 30 phone calls to Orange technical support who insisted on conducting about 8 line tests because that was part of their rigid system. They also replaced my modem, triggered a visit by a BT engineer and lost my landline as well for half a day. On top of this they closed the fault twice because we had triggered some time delay or particular response from some part of their check list. I would then have them announce that the fault had been resolved while I still had no broadband access!

The reason I am writing this post though is to comment about the over systematisation of everything. Each time I called the Orange operatives in the call centre in India they wanted to start from scratch with their script. Literally. If I am ever asked again if I am using a wired or wireless connection I will scream. Not only that but no one seemed to know anything about what had happened previously. There was no one apart from me seeing the whole picture. It was like being in my own Groundhog Day nightmare. It was all very frustrating.

No one really owned my problem. Not even the databases that stored my info owned the problem. And when the system didn’t work no one was willing, or able, to step out of it and take reponsibility for solving my problem. As I said in a pointless email exchange with a gatekeeper in the chief execs office their company was in a race to the bottom with other ISP’s reducing costs to such an extent that their product was becoming unuseable. I had little confidence that moving to another ISP would make a lot of difference as their whole industry is afflicted with the same corner cutting mentality. Feeling stuck in this disembodied, call centre hell is an unfortunately common experience these days with all sorts of services.

I got to the stage where I didn’t care how much my service cost so long as it worked or at the very least I got looked after well when it didn’t. In response to some advice from friends I have switched to Zen who cost more but who I understand still employ grown ups who can take responsibility for solving my problem and aren’t hamstrung by a broken system. Here’s hoping!

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“What day is it,?” asked Pooh.

“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.

“My favorite day,” said Pooh.

ht Dina Mehta

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Some time ago I suggested iTunes for journalism and compared newspapers to albums – having to buy two crap tracks along with the six you really want. Why not build an RSS playlist of journalists you rate rather than having to pay for all the stuff you don’t?

This tweet from Mark W. Smith suggests taking the next step and giving journalists their own platform – at least for longer form pieces. I know all the arguments about the need to fund good investigative or foreign journalism but this might in the long term prove an interesting alternative.

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It was interesting to read The Guardian’s interview with Sergei Brin today in which he expresses concern about commercial interests and governments damaging some of the principles that have made the web so successful, and Google so successful at searching it.

I was lucky enough to meet Sergei years ago at the first Super Nova conference in Palo Alto just before their IPO. We were each allowed to ask him one question. My question was what he was going to do, being an American company with, at the time, most of its servers on American soil, when the US Government asked them to index some bits of the web better than others or in some other way tried to control their activities.

He didn’t really have an answer but from his comments in The Guardian interview it would seem he has been trying harder to come up with some recently.

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O reader! Had you in your mind

Such stores as silent thought can bring,

O, gentle reader! You would find

A tale in everything.

- William Wordsworth

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“Destructive criticism is the biggest single enemy of human potential. It is worse than cancer or heart disease. While those diseases can ultimately lead to the deterioration and death of an individual, destructive criticism kills the soul of the person but leaves the body walking around.” – Brian Tracy

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It is really interesting to watch first the Internet population’s ability to turn back SOPA through the strength of a collective response, and now to watch both the phenomenon of KONY2012 and, more interestingly, it’s backlash.

Part of me loves the way ideas can spread so effectively and so quickly on the Internet, and part of me is worried by it. In “real life” we have all sorts of social and practical constraints on our righteous indignation. On the web we don’t have such constraints.

We need to individually take responsibility for our power to amplify, or to ignore, each wave of ideas as they pass through the internet. We need to apply our own filters and make our own judgements as to the truth or otherwise of what we are passing on. As I wrote in my book we all have a volume control on mob rule and we need to learn to use it.

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Last week I took part in several events at Social Media Week London. It is an amazing event and kudos to Sam Michel and his team at Chinwag for helping make it happen.

I met loads of interesting people and had lots of interesting conversations but came away bemused by the amount of business there is doing something for people that I believe they should be doing for themselves. We have turned social media into a thing that can be bought and sold and are attempting to industrialise something that I believe is organic. Just turning it into a thing is problematic (thanks to Mark Foden for the word “thingification”) and I had a few rants about this throughout the week.

You can watch one below!

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