There is more option for social networking today than ever before. Now there really is no excuse for not doing it one way or another.

Today you can social network online through any number of community social bookmarking communities. These social bookmarking sites can be a hazard as well as a help. It just depends on your level of discipline as much as anything. If you are in business for yourself you will soon realise that you can spend waay too much time answering inane emails that do absolutely nothing to move your business forward.  (more…)

Everyone in business today is time short. There is always more that we want to do, have planned to do, than what we can actually get to do. This is no excuse though for not doing any business social networking.

Some business people have decided that they won’t do any social networking for business because they see that as a “perk” of being in business for themselves and decide they don’t have the time ‘just yet’ to go gallivanting around enjoying themselves. However, what they fail to realise is that they will really get to “gallivant around” a lot faster and with more financial security if they take the time to do some social networking with like minded business people.

Business social activities are enjoyable because you will be among a wide variety of people who have the same interests as yourself. (more…)

There’s something odd about people when they get into their cars and hit the road on their way to or from somewhere. Particularly men at traffic lights. I think men feel themselves sufficiently isolated and alone and don’t seem to be socially aware of other occupants in the cars around them.

Cars, even fogged up cars in bad weather, still allow people to see out enough from their windows when they look around them at traffic lights, to see what others are doing. Most people, drivers and passengers, sit patiently and wait for the lights to change before moving off. However, some men take this opportunity to have a good old nose pick. I watched one fellow the other day, I thought he was trying to mine his nose.

This is a seriously gross, socially unacceptable, habit anywhere but in public it is a totally unacceptable practice.

When people are in their cars on the street, even when the vehicle is only moving slowly in traffic, people around them can still see in. Passengers have no where to look except out their windows at people in the cars around them and to be subjected to a “nose picker” is enough to make one want to throw up.

Car windows, unless they are highly tinted, still allow others to see inside a vehicle. Here in Australia, many cars have tinted windows all around to cut down on glare and to try to reflect some of the suns rays away from inside the vehicle. There is legislation covering the percentage of tinting every car can have because if it is too dark, then driver visibility out is reduced.

Even with slightly tinted windows, people can still see inside a vehicle, so to remain socially acceptable to those travelling around you, it is a good idea to be aware of what you are doing and what others can see you doing.

Nose picking is one seriously gross, unacceptable and definitely unsociable habit.

The other thing I see too frequently at traffic lights are “the spitters”. “The spitters” are those men who hawk up nasal congestion into a big gob of phlegm and spit it out onto the street. This is another gross habit that actually has ramifications far worse than just being a socially unacceptable practice.

One of the reasons why TB (Tuberculosis) has largely been eradicated from western society is because we stopped spitting on the street. These “spitters” are endangering everyone’s health and well-being through spitting and I for one find this more than socially unacceptable. No one has the right to endanger my health with their bad habits. I have enough of my own and don’t need theirs. My bad habits don’t endanger anyone’s life or make anyone around me feel nauseous and want to throw up.

So if you are a man who has unacceptable social habits when you next stop at traffic lights please remember reading this article. Our world and environment will thank you.

Some people often say “”Hey”? today instead of “excuse me” or “pardon” or “I beg your pardon” when they haven’t heard or understood what it is that you have said. Is this a rude and discourteous response to someone’s conversation? How does it make you feel when someone replies to you with a straight or cranky look and they say “hey” abruptly.

If you are like many people, you may feel almost insulted but definitely disinclined to repeat in full what you have just said to elicit that response. It could make you feel rejected, hurt, angry and any number of other things. But one of the things it does do is to mark the person who responds to an unheard or misunderstood question with “hey” is that they are bad mannered individuals.

In a peer group of uneducated people hanging around a corner ’shooting the breeze’ it may be the accepted practice. This is a case of “birds of a feather, flocking together” so it may be acceptable to the group.

However, if you are in a job interview and one of the interviewers asks you a question that you haven’t heard properly or understood, and you respond with “hey?” then don’t expect to have a successful outcome to that interview simply because you have immediately shown that you have no respect for other people or their feelings and are highly unlikely to be a good team player. If you are going to be in a team, then you have to (a) be acceptable to the other team members and (b) have to be able to get along with the other team members.

If you are in a casual social situation and you turn to someone jokingly and say “hey, what’s that” with a smile on your face it could be construed as being playful but if you turn to someone and say “hey?” abruptly without a smile then you are most likely going to be thought of as being rude and or angry over something.

Spoken language and body language often mirror each other quite well in meaning when rude people say “hey”. Next time someone says it to you, remember to take note of their facial features when they do so and in particular their eyes. These will always give you the precise meaning of what they are feeling/thinking/meaning when they speak so rudely to you.

If a person is in a more formal social situation like a cocktail party or after-work drinks with colleagues and someone responds with “hey?” to something that you’ve said, take notice of how you feel at the time. Saying “hey” is rude in any educated social activity with colleagues and in a formal social setting like a cocktail party it is definitely a “No-No” if you want to be invited to the next social gathering.

Social Networking with one million people reminds me of the old saying “how do you eat an Elephant?” The answer is surprisingly simple: One person at a time.

Unless you have many big computer screens and a Maharajahs mansion, you will always be writing an article for just one reader at a time at any one location. That’s right, it’s always one reader at one screen that you are ‘talking’ to, so there is absolutely no need to get stage fright at the thought of talking to a million people through writing an article for publication and syndication.

Each person is reading your article and interacting with the words that you the writer have put on the screen. If you are a good conversationalist the reader will enjoy your chat and if you are all uptight and nervous because you are talking to those one million people, your words will come out flat, stilted and hard to plough through. They will only continue reading if they persevere, and I don’t know about you, but me as a writer would much prefer my readers to enjoy our conversation, no matter how one sided it actually is.

The good thing about the internet though is that these conversations no longer need be one sided. People can now comment and start up conversations back with you via the comment section on blogs. This is every writers hope, that someone will reply to their opinion or thoughts on any given subject and that other readers will chime in and add their two cents worth to get a friendly and fun group together all talking and sharing information and opinions on the same subject.

This interaction is really what Google with all their latest updates and inclusions is after. People having conversations and actually communicating.

The real problem today is that many people are unable to communicate well through words. They either have a very limited vocabulary, are too lazy to write more than six words at a time or they can’t spell the words they would prefer to use. This is very sad because for the first time in history people have a way to communicate with everyone else but are now limited by their inability to do so coherently.

So to overcome this educational defect or character flaw, people have evolved ways around it by reverting to “text” talk. Text talk is where words are abbreviated into one or two syllables to get their meaning across. It works but is a really big limitation on conversations and sharing of ideas and concepts because it is such a limited means of communication.

Communication is about sharing a whole range of many different things in many different ways and as long as you can find your group to communicate with, you will never be alone providing you input your personality, thoughts, ideas, share your knowledge and are able to get something back from other people; then you have communicated well even if it has only been in text talk.

The operative word here is “talk” and that’s what you will always  be doing with each and every article that you write and gets read by each one of those one million people because it will always only ever be read by one person at a time.