We continue...

Anyone who ever listened to Radio 1 in the early 90s surely can't hear those words without remembering Pete Tong's radio show, each track preceded with those sternly intoned syllables. Weirdly, I notice that noble-minded but severely irritating Gok Wan has adopted exactly the same intonation pattern with Every. Single. Sentence. he utters. Bugs the hell out of me, even though I have to tip my hat to his efforts to reverse the trend in body dysmorphia among women. A trend which, walking around the UK, I saw absolutely no evidence of. Curious.

Anyway, that small digression aside, this week has begun much like the others, with visits to recruiters and not a lot else. For some reason the Wii has stopped working, hopefully something to do with the fuse - I have yet to replace the plug with one of the worryingly fuseless NZ ones, so perhaps I'll get round to that today. This little event will be the highlight of my week so far, replacing one of my key distractions at the moment - along with Facebook, Twitter, numerous blogs and the odd bit of cooking, the Wii makes up the group Things Which Keep Me Sane at the moment.

Twitter I continue to find fascinating. For some reason though, what fascinates me most about it isn't the application itself, or even the ecosystem of other bits and bobs which use it, but the way it's exposing a very basic human need for interaction, boiling down this need to very simple components; sharing, informing, questioning, assisting. Twitter is just a vehicle for this sort of thing, and in time will be seen to be one of many increasingly refined vehicles - the important thing is the human component.

This got me thinking a bit lately. I've said before that good advertising is relevant advertising, both in terms of content, context and timing, but I suppose a slightly cynical refinement of that would be in saying that advertising is good in inverse proportion to how irritating it is to an individual. This adds an extra dimension to the whole thing, in terms of how likely I am to be irritated by the mouthpiece of the advertising message: TelstraClear, for example, are right at the top of my shitlist right now, so even their fairly bland advertising gets my blood pressure up.

On the other hand, before Christmas, I was getting discount vouchers emailed through from friends at the rate of two to three a day, and although none of them were remotely relevant, it didn't really bother me all that much. Perhaps if they had all been from the same person, I might have politely asked them to stop, but my point is that I'm more likely to put up with spam from someone I know. It's like a 'micro-irritant', as opposed to the macro-irritants we get every 10 minutes on commercial TV. Questions about Twitter's moral responsibility to allow users to filter out commercial (or technically, semi-commercial) traffic are pointless. My feeling here is quite the opposite - Twitter has an obligation to allow and even encourage commercial use of the service - users themselves have the responsibility to control what they do and don't want in their feeds. I'll happily put up with my friends spamming me every now and then if they're getting something out of it.

Anyway, since I left work in the UK, I no longer have a professional blog, so you'll have to put up with musings like this on this one.