www.thegilmours.co.uk

This is probably a question for a poll, but hey, i’m going to blog about it instead.

What is this Facebook Phenomenon? I just don’t see the attraction of having a virtual network of friends whom i interact with solely through a third party website! And yet I received a stiff defence of its merits from my sister on the telephone today and I’ve now received countless invitations to join the network from ex-workmates, new workmates and friends from University.

Am I simply denying myself the pleasure of being hermetically attached to my computer for more hours of every day or am I - like Nero and his friends (mercenaries?) in the Matrix- among the socially excluded of the cyber world? Am I officially unemployed because, unofficially, i’m not yet registered to work on Facebook? Should I be claiming benefits for my ignorance of the social network available “freely” to all with a broadband connection? Maybe I should apply my social inclusion economic development planning skills to the cyber world and start teaching insecure individuals how to get recognised on the web?!

Personally, the risk of meeting ex-girlfriends, arch-enemies from school or even someone i know, puts me off completely! How low can our levels of communication sink? I don’t need a picture, profile and a display of my personal “web” of friends to maintain either my self-esteem or my friendships and i struggle to understand why someone might want to broadcast themselves to the world via a computer when the real world is so much more effective in doing so.

We might laugh at the cultural tendancies we observe here in Chile- the chileans and the Europeans working in Chile- but we do value them highly. Close family ties and the eternal stories of the intrusive Chilean “mother-in-law” may frustrate us foreigners sometimes, but we really respect it and recognise its benefits to society. Our ongoing debate about greeting a stranger with one kiss or two and on which cheeks might sound somewhat “simple” but the debate alone highlights the relative dependency that the english speaking world has upon the non-contact sport of networking via cyberspace, relative to our European counterparts. And the difference is not just explained by different levels of connectedness such as the number and cost of broadband.

Do we face a collective social confidence crisis that leads us to hide behind our computer screens to avoid real interaction or to hide our flaws and our sensitivities? Like e-mail, we can say so much more yet it can be so much more easily misinterpreted! In the words of Yusuf Islam, “please God, don’t let me be misunderstood” is both a guide to creating your Facebook profile and any responses to it!

Perhaps it is just a convenient way to avoid catching a dreadfully overcrowded/late/unreliable/slow train or bus to actually go and see that person? I don’t know… but it seems that Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting was not only right but profound in his analysis of the risks of substituting real relationships for other forms including cyberships- “Choose Life”! (I don’t mean 2ndLife! That could be another whole blog couldn’t it?!)

You won’t find me on Facebook yet but its only a matter of time before i drag my lazy, antisocial cyberbum into the highly connected, over-caffinated real-world-divorced community.

Who said Christians didn’t have a sense of humour?

This is the ultimate proof to the contrary! Submitted by men and women of the cloth, professing Christians, youth groups and anyone else who registers, this site contains a range of hilarious and inadvertedly funny videos relating to God, to the Christian faith or some of the more dubious theology/reasoning/arguments pitched by the Christian church.

We particularly liked the argument that a banana reflects the perfection of God’s creation!

Check it out! www.godtube.com

Well we pushed our website visitor numbers to an all time high last week, with the publication of a hoax about sighting a UFO over Santiago.

For those that missed it, you can scroll down and find the unusual (aka rubbish) photographs of the eclipse of the moon, visible in Santiago in March. As noted, i have Mandy to thank for that and a couple of beers. The latter may have inspired the webexperiment!
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So, how many people actually searched for UFOs in the last week and managed to find us?
343 over 7 days
How many people also read our front page (for more than 10 seconds)?
163 and, incredibly, another 180 by RSS feed
How many hits did we get in the last 7 days? (this includes robots and indexing hits)
3700
How many hits did we get on the day the blog was published?
523! Up from an average of 200 a day, around 30% normally robots and 40 unique IP addresses
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In the words of the Beatles, we ask “All the lonely people, where do they come from?”
Over 50% from the US, 35% from California alone! No surprises there….Roswell, Area 52, 51 and 746 not enough for you, eh?
4% was lower than normal (as a % of total)- come on you folk! Spread the word!
2% from Australia- thanks Dave & Jemima!

Well, a memorable week in the life of thegilmours.co.uk…. a lot of fun.

We’ll run another webexperiment soon, probably relating to 2ndLife or Chilean pies.

We were told recently of an incredible spike in visitor statistics on a Santiago newspaper website after the publication of an article relating to un-iden-ti-f-ied flyin-g obj-ects being visible in Chile.

So we’re going to try the same experiment. In exactly 5 days (thursday). I’m going to post a blog, with “apparent” pictures of said object in the sky above Santiago. In fact, better than that, i might just create an entire category on the subject!

Those pictures will in fact, be pictures of the recent lunar eclipse, whose credibility (if they ever had any), is damaged by the additional interference of a young 5 year old, Mandy, pulling at my left trouser leg. Yes, they are more blurred than the eyesight of your average canine friend after polishing off a pint of Newcastle Brown Ale.

I don’t suggest you give your dog an “Old Dog”, but I do suggest you do your bit to feed the frenzy of web traffic attracted to our website by my selection of related keywords…. in english and spanish.

We’ll see if it has any impact whatsoever on visitor statistics (you can detect my skepticism already). Now, time for that pint…