Social Web Sites

As I am giving a talk on Social Web sites, I have been reflecting on sites that I have used during the last five years. Social web sites are those where you can communicate with other people and share information with them. The growth of web sites like Facebook and UTube has been truly astonishing. Utube allows anyone anywhere to share videos with anyone else. Facebook used to be for college students but now has nearly 75000000 members and allows you to personalize your own profile, upload photos, and write messages to friends. My next posts will each be about the social web sites that I have visited and I will label them all as "social".

Please add your comments on your own experience of Social Web Sites so that I can include them in my talk.

Chichester Cross

What an extraordinary phenomenon is Wikipedia! It is an encyclopedia, created by web users, which can be altered by anyone who signs in to the site! One might imagine that it would contain a lot of inaccurate information but it is suggested that in some respects the information is more accurate than that in a published encyclopedia, being more up to date. Wikipedia is the biggest "multilingual free-content encyclopedia" with over two million articles.
I have been trying to find out about some buildings in Chichester, Chichester Cathedral and Chichester Cross. Not surprisingly there is a very good web site for Chichester Cathedral including its history, its present and information for visitors. One way find a relevant web site is to click on "I'm Feeling Lucky" using the Google Search Engine. For Chichester Cathedral, I'm Feeling Lucky gives you the Official Website, for Chichester you get The Chichester Web but for Chichester Cross, you get the Chichester Cross entry in Wikipedia.
I have signed into Wikipedia and made some changes to the entry for Chichester Cross. I wonder whether they will be altered further by the moderator and other authors. I have added something about an earlier wooden cross, the Caen stone and the reason for building the Cross, using information from recent books by Roy Morgan and Philip MacDougall.
The use of many hotlinks is one of the best features of Wikipedia but one of the hotlinks in the Chichester Cross site was to a potentially pornographic site. I have deleted it.
A more difficult problem was the misspelling of Bishop Storey. There is a separate entry in Wikipedia for Edward Story(sic) and so that spelling will have to be changed as well.
I can understand the fascination of writing for Wikipedia. I have found some most helpful entries, providing information that I could not find elsewhere.I can't imagine writing for Wikipedia without the speed of Broadband though. Where will it all end?

The Valley Diary

Broadband has enabled me to make contact with people in different parts of the world. However it was a surprise to make contact with a local newsletter through this blog.
The printed Valley Diary is published monthly in the villages of Singleton, East Dean, West Dean, Charlton & Chilgrove but new items are often added to The Online Valley Diary on a daily basis. I live only a few a miles away and I had not heard about these interesting publications.
My post about Arcimboldi following my visit to West Dean House was "noticed" up the valley and was reproduced in the April 2007 diary. I hope that I will be able to include further items of interest for readers of the Valley Diary in my blog.
I have been following up my interest in the history of the house and its previous owners.
William James, an American millionaire and the father of Edward James bought the West Dean Estate c1893 and built the unique Monkton House in 1902. Some of its contents were on view in the recent exhibition at the barn. The architect was Edward Lutyens.

In 1905 he bought another Lutyens house called Greywalls, Gullane about 15 miles east of Edinburgh. This house was built as a holiday home in 1901 for Alfred Lyttelton, the first sportsman to play both cricket and football for England. It is next to the Muirfield golf course and Alfred was also a keen golfer. The house and gardens were designed by the "dream team" of Edward Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll.
Mrs William James was born in the Scottish highlands. It is said that she was the natural daughter King Edward VII. Edward James was born at Greywalls in 1907. He inherited West Dean House when his father died in 1912 and Greywalls was sold to the Horlick family in 1924, who have created one of the best hotels in Scotland there.
I have happy memories of the Greywalls Hotel as I stayed there for a "holiday job" as private tutor to one of the Horlick family in 1958. Much of my time was spent playing golf and tennis and listening to a 78" record of My Fair Lady which had been brought from America and was not yet available in England. Another visitor was Dorothy Sayers who used to come there to write.

The Chiff Chaff

Someone mentioned the Chiff Chaff the other day. Was this really the proper name for an English bird? I found out that the Chiff Chaff is a kind of Leaf Warbler which breeds throughout the temperate parts of Europe and Asia.

And then yesterday as I was looking at the BBC web site, I found a most interesting page about the Dawn Chorus. I have never been able to recognise a bird by its song. This is one of those subjects where I do not feel that I have a starting point and so I began to learn how to do it. "Want to identify a dawn chorus bird? Hear the songs of eight of our most common, and listen to naturalist Brett Westwood explain how to identify them by their looks, songs and behaviour"

The best thing about this web site is that you can do three things at once. You listen to the bird singing, you can listen to an interview about the bird and at the same time you can read a fact file about each bird. This would be impossible without Broadband.
Now I have a starting point to build on. And by the way, Chiffchaffs are active birds and constantly flick their tails and wings while feeding. They are one of the earliest migrants to arrive in the UK, appearing in mid-March and often staying into October. And you can hear the Chiff Chaff sing and read more about it if it has not yet arrived in your part of the country.

Welcome to my Second Blog.

In my first Blog I reflected upon how I learned to Blog.
In my Second Blog, I will be reflecting upon ways in which using Broadband has changed my activities and indeed my approach to life, how it has helped me to keep in communication with many friends and relatives, how it revived my interests in photography and family history, how it has changed my working practices....
I hope that my readers will be able to share their own reflections upon Broadband with me. I would like to hear about your frustrations, your hopes, your problems as well as your successes.