As I’ve mentioned before, I’m expecting a baby – my first. Back in mid-October, we went for the regular 20 week anomaly scan at the local hospital. That’s what they call it, in case you weren’t already freaking out enough already about the status of your unborn foetus, which you can’t quite yet let yourself believe is an actual baby at that point, especially if you’re paranoid about the pregnancy progressing.

The thing is, they give you dates to worry about and fixate on. Before twelve weeks, you’re advised not to tell anyone, really, because it’s such early days and anything could happen.

After twelve weeks, your odds start to improve, but you still have other things to worry about: like the anomaly scan at twenty weeks, when they tell you if the baby inside you has enough lungs, or a brain developing on the inside of its skull, or whatever.

At twenty-four weeks, you know that, scientifically, the baby could juuuuust about survive on the outside – with a lot of medical support and a long spell in one of those premature baby units.

After an eternity of waiting, there’s thirty-seven weeks, when your baby is officially ripe enough to not be counted as premature, and you’re allowed (!) to give birth naturally.

And then of course there’s the always-looming due date at forty weeks, on which only 5% of babies actually arrive, but which is counted down to (and then up from, frustratingly, on the other side) as if it has magical powers.

If you’re like me, you can’t bring yourself to look forward to each date as it approaches (all-too slowly), but you give yourself a quiet mental fistbump at the passing of each milestone. We made it this far. Keep on baking, little bun. There’s another staging post a way ahead. And each new goal looks impossibly far away and impossibly precarious. How will we ever get there?

But back in mid-October at twenty weeks, I couldn’t even think about the later stages of pregnancy, because I was too overwhelmed with the immediate challenges, like staying awake on my commute, finding clothes that fit and flattered my changing shape, and scouring the anomaly scan for clues about the health of my – shush, whisper it – baby.

On the way back from the scan, where junior was pronounced healthy, whole and gender revealed, we stopped at the local garden centre for a much-needed cup of tea. We stared at the ultrasound screengrabs we never thought we’d see – A nose! Little fists! A footprint! – and contemplated the reality of the newest, not quite real member of the family. And then I did what I tend to do and swiftly found a displacement activity, because this was simply too big to consider: I bought bulbs.

Back at home, I planted daffodils, miniature irises, tulips, crocuses and more. I filled planters and pots and nestled a few in among the bottoms of the hedges. I lost myself in activity, and buried my worries in the soft soil, tucking the bulbs in tightly for the winter in the hope that they made it through to the other side.

I’ve always loved spring flowers. As a spring baby myself, my birthday – 12 March – is often accompanied by daffodils and tulips. Our wedding anniversary (5 March) is usually marked with tulips, because on the morning of our wedding eight years ago, I went to Newcastle’s flower market looking for tulips to carry down the aisle. Ours was a rather casual affair as you can probably tell, and there wasn’t actually an aisle. Neither were there any tulips, unfortunately – but Paul has made up for their absence every year since.

And for the last few years, we’ve been in Cornwall in early March, around our wedding anniversary or my birthday, and I’ve relished the cheerful golden blooms which peek out from every hedgerow and garden. I’ve struggled to resist the temptation to come home burdened with armfuls of fresh local daffs, because you can’t just have a few, can you? There must always be armfuls. What can I say? It’s a weakness.

So in any normal year, you’ll find my house full of daffodils and tulips for much of February and March, and since we’ve had a garden ourselves, I’ve ensured that at least at that point of the year, there’s something jolly popping out to say hello for my birthday.

When I planted out those bulbs in October, it was in the hope that they would grow at the same rate as the baby inside me, and emerge from the soil, to greet the pale spring sunshine at about the same time as she is due to make an appearance – which is coincidentally around my birthday, too.

When the weather was unusually warm in early January, I watched day by day as they tentatively poked their stems and leaves above the soil, in early exploration of the season. Too soon!

When just a couple of weeks ago we had a severe cold snap, followed by several sudden inches of snow which blanketed the garden for a week or more, I worried about their tender shoots, vulnerable and not yet hardy in the frozen ground.

But today, on the first properly springlike day we’ve had, I went out to the garden and noticed that it has finally started to spring into life.

The early irises have come out:

And the daffodils have sprung back from being flattened by snow, and are getting ready to bloom. I think they’ll be here in a couple of weeks.

And as for me, I’m nearly 38 weeks along, the size of a house, cleared for the home birth we’ve been preparing for, and as ready as I’m ever going to be for the arrival of the baby. It could be any day now.

I’m on maternity leave, drinking raspberry leaf tea, bouncing on my gym ball and going for occasional reflexology appointments or antenatal yoga classes, but otherwise just pottering around the house and garden, performing mild nesting tasks and pausing slightly, holding my breath at each Braxton Hicks contraction and flurry of kicks. Is it time yet? Is this the beginning?

Like the bulbs in the garden, the baby is waiting for the right moment to enter the world. And all I can do is watch and wait.

I see you getting yourselves into a froth about frictionless sharing on Facebook. These are the three things I observe people saying most often:

1. “I hate that [app] shares things WITHOUT MY PERMISSION!”
2. “But I don’t CARE if my friend has just been to a place/listened to a song/watched a movie/read an article. I wish it wouldn’t pollute my newsfeed!”
3. “Ugh! I don’t want to share EVERYTHING with EVERYONE all the time!”

These things are, needless to say, usually expressed in the strongest possible terms on Facebook, Twitter, in comments etc, and almost invariably paint the individual as a victim under the conspiratorial cosh of a big evil megacorp. How very bally dare they?

If these things bother you, gentle netizen, might I offer the following solutions?

1a. Apps need permission to share (post) things on your newsfeed on your behalf. In fact, you have to opt in to use them. Opt IN, not opt out. You may not have paid attention as you whizzed through the screens, but there’s a point at which you usually have to click a box that says ‘Yes, I give my permission for this app to do what it does’ – even if that box is actually labelled ‘install’. And somewhere not too far away, there’ll be a description of what it does.

So before you rant about apps posting ‘without asking your permission’, spare a moment and ponder whether you installed an app without reading what you were signing up for, perhaps.

I know EULAs are a pain and no-one reads them, but this is hardly one of those 193-page epics you get in iTunes, where you may very well be giving up the rights to your first-born on p78 for all you know. It’s a couple of lines, that says quite clearly what’s going to happen, and what’s going to be shared. If you click install, you’re giving permission. If you click cancel, it should set a cookie and not ask you again.

2a. If your friends are bothering you by constantly sharing things they do/read/eat/watch/listen to, you can quiet them down. Next to the thing that they’ve posted – sorry, the thing that has been posted on their behalf by the app they gave permission to – there’s a little down arrow. Click it and then select one of the options to fine-tune the signal you get from your friend. You want all their updates? Just the hand-written ones? Everything apart from music and videos? Nothing from this app at all? No problem. Just highlight your choice.

3a. You can fine-tune your sharing permissions, too. If you are bothering your friends (or you are bothered) by frictionlessly sharing every step you take, every move you make, every video you watch and everything you add to Pinterest, to name but a few possibilities, you can fine-tune your own sharing preferences. You can do this not only where you originally gave permission to the app (see above) but also on the app preferences page.

On the left hand side of your main screen (what you see when you visit facebook.com) there’l be a list of apps you use. Click on the little “more” icon that appears next to the apps header, or on the little pen icon (this means “edit” in Facebook-land) next to the app you want to tweak.

This brings you to a magical place where you can change your preferences about who sees what – choose to share output from this app with the wider public, or just friends, or only yourself.

Or go for “custom” settings, which enable you to share with particular lists of people (which you can set up in your friends settings area) or even *exclude* certain individuals or lists, as illustrated below.

So you don’t mind sharing what you’re listening to, but you don’t want to share it with your boss? No problem. You can tweak that. Or you want to share your Foursquare checkins with everyone apart from your real best friends? Also completely achievable via the same method.

I’m not suggesting that frictionless sharing is always brilliant and Facebook is perfect or anything like that – these are topics for other blog posts, as yet unwritten (at least by me). I’m just pointing out that there are options, and you have agency in this experience.

You are not a sea-slug. You can change things.

So take some damn responsibility for customising your own Facebook experience. If it’s not working for you – or your friends – tweak it. Frictionless sharing is not a massive conspiracy to infringe your privacy at every moment, even though you may not like the implementation or philosophy or even the name. You have choices and options about your publishing and reading experiences. Use them.

If you care enough to publicly moan, please care enough to fiddle with your settings, too.

—-

NB Although I work at The Guardian and was involved with developing the Guardian Facebook app, these thoughts – like all the others on this site – are entirely my own. I’m not speaking on behalf of any other individual or company at this point. This is my purely personal rant encouragement for people to take a bit of responsibility and exercise a bit of choice in their web experience, or STFU.

The author of this article is right to scoff at the marketing around Weightwatchers’ traditional seasonal membership drive. After all, the messages are designed to appeal to the kind of people who make generalised new year’s resolutions – “MUST LOSE WEIGHT!” – but aren’t bright/motivated/organised enough to figure out how to do it.

Gamification, a neologism that has risen to prominence in the past two years, describes the act of taking an activity that is not a game and turning it into a game to increase audience engagement.

Proponents argue that gamification can be used to positively influence human behaviour by incentivising constructive activities that humans otherwise can’t really be bothered with.

It’s a bit like offering a child a biscuit if she cleans her bedroom, or awarding a New Year’s honour to a Conservative if he gives some money to the government.

Gamification is a concept at the heart of the Weight Watchers’ new campaign, driven this week by the launch of the website PlayWeightwatchers.co.uk – although here, the idea is to find a participant and remove their money and biscuits.

“Weight Watchers is a game we play to lose weight,” states the first line of the site’s copy in a crisp attempt to move the gruelling work of dieting away from the imagery of self-flagellating, fasting monks to the rotund bounce of Super Mario.

Dig deeper on the site to uncover the rules of the Weight Watchers game and details are disappointingly thin on the ground. “Playing” appears to be little more than an obfuscated version of calorie counting.

So the rather frivolous marketing message is annoying, yes.

But at the risk of defending weightwatchers, there is something effective about the points/goals/scoring system they operate which appeals to those motivated by targets and personal challenge, if not fully “gamers”.

Personal disclaimer/experience which allows me to comment on this in more than just a mediasnarky way: I lost 4.5 stone in 12 months a few years ago. I did this via a variety of methods (eating better & moving more being the main and most effective contributory factors – ’twas ever thus!) but I did sign up to Weightwatchers online and used the system to log (food diary), count (via their points system, which isn’t the current ProPoints, but whatever came before) and chart (via weight tracking graph) my progress. It was useful for that.

I didn’t attend a single meeting (can’t think of anything worse) and I ignored all the shuddersomely ignorant messageboards (sample question: “Which has more points? A BigMac or a Quarterpounder with Cheese?”)

The discipline of keeping track of food in and energy out and weight up/down was absolutely key for me, and has been cited by all sorts of people and organisations as a common factor in helping weight loss and healthy lifestyle be a life-change not just a crash-diet. Even the most intelligent among us can benefit from seeing a direct relationship between fuel consumed, fuel burnt and load carried. Because it is that simple.

Part of this was setting small, achievable goals – weightwatchers recommend 7lb increments, and at the time awarded you badges for hitting these targets. I took a different approach, because I’m not motivated by badges (apart from that Blue Peter one I got for painting a stegasaurus in 1983), and instead made a giant spreadsheet containing lots of weight equivalents which I could visualise better than numbers*. Because I’m a geek.

For example, 1st 7lb is the average weight of a female badger. Why on earth would you carry a badger around all the time? What a ridiculous thing to do. You’d feel far better if you put that bloody badger down and let it go snuffling off into the hedgerows or whatever (etc).

Other people may be more motivated by hitting round numbers, or dropping a BMI unit or whatever. YMMV.

Nevertheless, tracking was key for me. And WW – however full of mouth-breathers eating ready meals and fast food it may appear – was helpful in doing that. Other apps and schemes and software is available – including paper and pen, though you would have to do some jiggery-pokery to convert calories etc into something consistent to take into account that calories from saturated fat or carbs are different from those derived from protein.

Weightwatchers online database does that, for a lot of common foods (banana, 1 slice of wholemeal bread, glass of orange juice) as well as branded things (1 slice dominos pepperoni pizza, 1 muller light strawberry flavour, waitrose macaroni cheese ready meal). But on the whole I found it easier to set up and save a bunch of meals on there myself by inputting the recipes from fresh ingredients, because I cook from fresh most of the time and don’t eat ready meals e.g. “Meg’s Veg Soup = 1 onion, 1 tbsp olive oil, 1 tin tomatoes, 2 carrots, 1 bunch spinach, 1 pt stock, 1 slice bread, 10g lurpak light = 2 servings @ 2pts/serving” (in that example, the points came from the bread, butter and olive oil, the other things being “free”)

Since I knew that I was supposed to be aiming for a certain number of points a day, doing this sort of tracking allowed me to “budget” points throughout the day – so many for lunch, so many for a snack, and so on. If I’d already used up more points than expected on breakfast and lunch, then mid afternoon I could have an apple (free) instead of a biscuit (2pts). Sounds obvious, but if you lack discipline and willpower, then structures help, even ones that should be obvious.

And yes, “earning” points through physical activity is part of it, too. Cardio, swimming, running (I did couch to 5k) and even walking an extra tube stop or two earn you points to deposit in the bank, which you can offset against the fuel you consume. Walking an hour a day meant I could continue to share a bottle of wine with my husband as a friday night winding-down ritual. When you set activity against reward like that, it’s easy to put your trainers on.

But while it’s easy to say “walk around the block and you can have another biscuit” the key is probably to think of it the other way round: “Had a biscuit too many? Get off your arse and go for a walk”

* Here’s the spreadsheet. These values were collected from a variety of sources. As you can see, there are some values I haven’t been able to find direct equivalents for. Suggestions welcome!

Weights and equivalents

The Background
In December of 2000, I met an old friend for dinner. We hadn’t seen each other in nine years, and hadn’t been in contact for eight. With only a few hours on a chilly evening in London to catch up before his plane left for Canada, we shared our stories in breathless bursts. So much had happened. We had to narrow it down to the essentials.

The best brief biography I’ve ever heard was for a mayfly:

Born. Eat. Shag. Die.

Because Ephemeroptera lives only for twenty-four hours, the summary of its life is refreshingly straightforward: To the point. The stuff that matters. Just the essentials.

I realised on the way home from the restaurant that there’s nothing quite like embracing the constraint of brevity (whether time or wordcount) when summing up the last year of your life to make you re-examine your priorities, or focus on what has affected you or was important to you over the last twelve months.

When I got home from seeing my friend, inspired by my evening and the biography of a mayfly bumping around in my head, I asked readers of this site to sum up the last year of their lives in just a handful of words. The Mayfly Project was born.

Due to popular demand, I’ve been running the Mayfly Project at the end of every year since then (here’s the 2006 edition, and here’s what happened in 2007 and 2008). It seems that people have got a lot to say or rather, that a lot of people have got not a lot to say: twenty-four words, to be precise, reflecting the mayfly’s short lifespan.

Another year has passed, and it’s back again.

The Instructions
Scroll down to sum up your 2011 in twenty-four words. But before you do, check:

1. Is it twenty four words?
2. Does it sum up the last year of your life?

If the answer to either of those is no, you’re going to look silly.

Whenever I see fireworks, I’m reminded of a favourite poem by Elizabeth Jennings…

Remembering Fireworks

– Elizabeth Jennings

Always as if for the first time, we watch
the fireworks as if no-one had ever
done this before, made shapes, signs
cut diamonds on air, sent up stars
nameless, imperious. And in the falling
of fire, the spent rocket, there is a kind
of nostalgia, as normally only attaches
to things long known and lost. Such an absence
such emptiness of sky the fireworks leave
after their festival. We, fumbling
for words of love, remember the rockets
the spinning wheels, the sudden diamonds
and say with delight “Yes, like that, like that”
Oh and the air is full of falling
stars surrendered. We search for a sign.

And what’s the life that’s got in the way for updating here? Well, a hectic work life, as ever. But also a new life. A baby.

Excitingly, Paul and I are expecting a baby (our first), due in early March 2012. Feeling completely appalling for several months plus the constant soul-draining exhaustion that has accompanied it has made doing anything interesting somewhat challenging, and though I’m now feeling a bit better, I’m still being careful not to overpromise or overcommit (after several years of doing both, which came to a juddering halt in the middle of the summer with this marvellous news).

I don’t talk about personal things much here at all, but this is worth mentioning and celebrating, especially if you’ve been with me on this blog journey for much of the nearly dozen years I’ve been at it. We’re naturally over the moon about the incoming addition to our little family, as well as somewhat overwhelmed with the prospect of all the changes and challenges that will bring. But what an adventure.

So that may explain – or excuse? – my recent absence from bloglandia, and (if you have been trying to engage with me in a professional context) why I have been maddeningly difficult to pin down to speaking commitments and the like at the end of 2011 and through into 2012. I’m doing one more overseas trip this year (Brazil, in a few weeks, for MediaON) and then I’m hanging up my passport and carry-on bag for a while, not least because the airlines won’t let you fly after a certain point in the pregnancy.

Anyway, I won’t promise to update more, because I don’t want to raise expectations. But I will promise to try and find time to share some of the stuff I’ve been thinking, doing and working on over the last few months, and the months to come.

As to what happens next year, clearly that’s still being worked out. I’ll be on maternity leave for a bit, obviously, and following that, back to the exciting world of media, social & community development/engagement. But I’m not gone yet. And even when I am, I’ll be back soon enough.

In the meantime – hello! I’m still here.

I find it hard to read white/pale text on dark/black backgrounds online (it triggers occular migraines), so some sites are painful to read and end up being a victim of the back button (even MetaFilter can fall into this category).

If you, like me, find some sites use of negative contrast hard on the eyes, here’s a possible solution.

Short version: Drag this bookmarklet to the bookmark bar of your browser:

nifty!

Longer version: Copy and paste (and adapt, if you want to change the colours) the following into the address field of a new bookmark, then drag it to your bookmark bar.

javascript:(function(){var newSS, styles=’* { background: white ! important; color: black !important } :link, :link * { color: #0000EE !important } :visited, :visited * { color: #551A8B !important }’; if(document.createStyleSheet) { document.createStyleSheet(%22javascript:’%22+styles+%22′%22); } else { newSS=document.createElement(‘link’); newSS.rel=’stylesheet’; newSS.href=’data:text/css,’+escape(styles); document.getElementsByTagName(%22head%22)[0].appendChild(newSS); } })();

Whenever you get to a page which is designed in high negative contrast (pale text on dark bg), simply hit the Nifty! bookmarklet button on your browser toolbar, and the page will magically change into something more soothing on the peepers.

For example, it turns this:

Into this:

(The original link above is this page from the BBC College of Journalism blog, which I find interesting in terms of content, but unreadable in terms of design)

Another example from this MeFi post:
Before:

After:

Eating lunch on the grass today, I watched several bees buzumbering around, alighting on clover and other flowers, collecting pollen to take back to the hive. And that got me thinking.

Twitter, facebook blogs – the social web is a network of hives, abuzz with social interactions and personal journeys, experiences, passions crossing over.

The web is full of tasty pollen. Objects of interest, curiosity or value which sustain the social web as currency or bring (micro) glory to the finder. We’re born foragers. We like to collect, and share. Curation is the new creation.

Word of mouth recommendation and/or curation is a web waggledance. Tweeting about a link shows other hive-members where the juicy goods can be found. Knowing where the good flowers are is one thing, but the real skill is communicating to others how it can be found, in compelling ways.

Being known as a good signal – a finder of pollen sources with smooth moves to tell others about them – is a social prize.

Shake those bums, people of the internet. Aspire to be bee-like in your content waggledancing.

And now I’m in the BA lounge at JFK, on my way home, and rather thankful that this is my last travel commitment in 2011. I’m not saying I won’t go anywhere else – I’ve got a sabbatical coming up, after all, and I need a holiday at some point, too – but I’m done with the travelling and airports and hotel rooms and currency exchanges and shuttle buses and air conditioning for a while, I think.

Now that things will be settling down a bit, I’m going to try and blog a bit more/often about some of the things I’ve been getting up to, some of the ideas I’ve been exploring, and some of the things that have been going on. Please hold me to this!

For the moment, though, a slight change of pace.

I’ve fairly recently started using instagram to take and post photos on the move both at home and on my recent travels. I’m megpickard there if you want to link up. Here (and after the jump) are a select few that I’ve taken, along with a little context…

Sparkcamp this weekend was held at the CUNY (City University New York) school of Journalism, which is in a building next to the New York Times HQ, in the middle of the garment district in midtown Manhattan. The streets are lined with fabric shops, piled high with rich colours and bolts of material. As I was walking to the conference this morning, I glimpsed this scene through an open doorway. I liked the framing, and the face there was no-one else in shot, despite it being such a crowded, bustling area.

On my second night in Toronto, determined not to fall asleep by 9pm (like I had the night before), I went for a long, looping walk up Yonge Street, then west along Bloor, up through the Annexe, and then down through the University area to the Harbourfront. In the middle of university buildings, on the ground between two cycle racks, I found this (painted? stencilled?) onto the pavement. I thought it was rather lovely, because it was so unexpected.

I took this photo while walking through the rain in Brighton, down towards the sea from my sister and brother-out-law‘s lovely new house. The rain meant the pink of the door was particularly striking, and the checked tiles really popped out in contrast.

On a recent Saturday night, Paul and I went into town for sushi and a glass of wine on a hot day. On the way home, we hustled to London Bridge to catch a late train. As I came down the stairs to the platform, I thought the scene would make an interesting timelapse image. I took several shots, then pieced them together using the autostitch iphone app, then put the resulting image through instagram to increase the contrast. I like the movement in the image (and the fact you can see P on the right hand side, checking his watch, concerned – and not for the first or last time – that my photo-taking is going to make us miss our train…)

A flying visit to the Isle of Mull (or Isle of Mum as it’s known in our house) for a family birthday in May meant only a short amount of time for walking on desolate, windswept beaches this time around. But we got one in, at least…

When I (finally) got to St Louis, MO, I still had a 2+ hour journey to Columbia. It’s very flat, and the highwayside is peppered with these tall billboards against an impossibly blue sky.

And finally…

On my way to Manchester one morning, I passed through Victoria station, and glimpsed this out of the corner of my eye. I have no idea what was going on, though I suspect they were shooting an ad or something. Rather concerning, though!

This is the (highly simplified!) way most content gets published at the moment: lots of work for editorial staff up to publication, and reaction from users afterwards, though (very) limited opportunities for them to get involved beforehand – letters to the editor, for example). This is the way publishing (and indeed other kinds of media, like broadcasting) has worked for a long time.

It means that journalists all too often create, publish and then go back to the beginning. And when something is out there live in the world, their engagement (interest) may already have moved on, even as users/readers are starting to consume, interact, share…

But there’s opportunity within the empty quadrants – how could users/readers get involved before publication? And how could staff/journalists continue to be involved following publication?

We could involve users more before publication. We could be more involved after publication. Here are some of the ways that editorial staff and users could get involved in the production, reaction & curation of content.

And of course the single moment of publication is a thing of the past. In a realtime, liveblog, breaking news context, things look different.

Instead, there are many mini launches, and activities above and below the line become a constant, rippling collaboration of skills, insight and activity around a context of mutual interest, for mutual benefit.

In fact, that blue line in the middle doesn’t have a beginning and end – it’s a circle. The context unfolds, is followed up, creates more opportunities for collaboration, and so on.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. What are the opportunities?