In social media everybody could hear you scream… not any longer

Man talking into shoeIt was when the Library of Congress in the US announced two years ago that it would archive every single tweet that people became serious about social media… and more to the point their data.

The idea of all that data being saved made many people more reticent when posting their 140 characters on Twitter. It seemed inconceivable that all that information could be stored, as much as 160 characters on SMS could similarly be saved via those operators that are as avuncular as Uncle Joe Stalin. Continue reading

Is social capital the new currency or a pile of Somaliland shillings?

Last summer I had an adventure and flew to Addis Ababa from Mumbai and then travelled through Ethiopia on African buses to the Red Sea and spent a week in Somaliland on the way. Right up there with the best of life.

I had to hire a soldier for $15 per day, had a few problems with child-soldiers off their tits on qat (a masticated opiate), saw amazing cave drawings at Las Keel, nearly lost a finger when ‘my’ soldier macheted a fruit melon and had my first ‘dry-swim’ in the Gulf of Aden, in temperatures of 50°C. Continue reading