The ROI of Thieving Scum!

A couple of weeks ago, a full Marie Curie Cancer Care collection box was taken from The Village Café in Stanstead Abbotts High Street, leaving owner Jill Lovegrove distraught.

Thankfully these sort of events that erode your faith in humanity are not commonplace, despite what the media might tell you, and are simply a sad reminder that not everyone has a working moral compass.

This could well have been all that was ever heard about this particular incident, a few short paragraphs in a local newspaper. But one local resident decided that something needed to be done, and so began #stolencharitybox.

Steve Berry (@unloveablesteve) turned to the people that he knew just wouldn’t stand for this sort of thing and encouraged them to chuck in whatever they could afford to replace the £200 that had been stolen.

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Quora, what is it good for?

Now that the hyperbole has calmed down and most of us have finally turned off our new follower email updates, I’d like to take stock of what happened during those days of madness.

First, let’s look at some of the gushing praise that came out of the UK press for this new social darling. There was “Quora will be bigger than Twitter” from The Telegraph which, quite frankly, bordered on idol worship and “Quora: the hottest question-and-answer website you’ve probably never heard of” from The Guardian which at least seemed a little more balanced.

I can’t blame the papers, with the ever increasing number of citizen journalists who can provide the news faster and with less bias, any story has to be jumped on quick to ensure that they are seen to be relevant. Both however were keen to point out that it was the strong preponderance of Silicon Valley’s finest among its users that has led to Quora’s sudden success.

It was this fact that, I felt, led to the second thing I’d like to talk about… the backlash!
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Who's with me?

Spartans! Ready your breakfast and eat hearty... For tonight, we dine in hell!

Social media has the capacity to be the great leveller.

There are many stories of heroic Davids defeating mighty Goliaths, although not quite cutting off their heads, through the use of connections made possible by services such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube etc. But a recent campaign from eBay for Charity has left me feeling that maybe the Goliaths need to take some moral responsibility and stop fighting altogether.

“The world will know that free men stood against a tyrant, that few stood against many, and before this battle was over, even a god-king can bleed.” – King Leonidas

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#Top10Thursday :: Classic Films You Haven't Seen

This weeks #Top10Thursday was inspired by a conversation concerning a previous Top 10 list. After some debate about which Toys from the 80’s each of us had owned, the discussion moved on to the classic film The Goonies. Without considering the consequences I said that I had never seen this particular 80’s classic and suddenly the full force of Twitter was unleashed upon me.

Clearly I had touched a very raw nerve and I set about discovering what other classic films my fellow Tweeters hadn’t seen. I created the #filmconfessions hashtag and started an amnesty on classic movie misses. Here, in their own words, is the Top 10 Classic Films I Haven’t Seen…

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We all want to help one another, human beings are like that.

Cofacio x You = Help2

I believe that, deep down, everyone wants to help. But as humans gathered together in larger and larger numbers, this universal understanding was forgotten and we began to see other people as not like us. When we lived together in small communities it was easy to remember as we either saw the helping going on, or we heard about it.

As our global village grew, the conversations were taken over by the broadcasting media and their content twisted to reflect only those events that were negative. No longer would we discover all of the good that people were doing, instead, people were to be distrusted, even feared and suddenly we all felt alone and powerless.

And then along came social networks. Now we could talk directly to these people and discover what it was they really were… the same as us.

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