Going online without losing your social life

Before You Go Online

1. Do all your social networking at a desk. The people around you will get mad at you if you are on your handheld device all the time. Consider a desk the appropriate space to connect with the Internet,. It's a very bad idea to tweet and walk at the same time.

2. Limit your sessions. Choose a maximum number of times you can be on Facebook or Twitter in a given day, say three or less. Also limit your total amount of time on Facebook or Twitter to a reasonable amount -- say less than an hour total daily. If you go over these, take a non-judgmental attitude, but realize that you are online a lot, and may want to find ways to cut back

3. Take time away from being online. Each month, take a short "Internet cleanse," say three days where you are completely unplugged. Set up an autoresponder and don't check a thing. The cleanses can be difficult, but they are also amazing. My next one is coming up this weekend.

Doing a Mindful Session Online

1. Set your intention. Before opening your browser, contemplate the truth of interdependence and raise a compassionate intention toward everyone in your network you are about to connect with (yes this may be thousands or millions of people). You could contemplate a traditional phrase such as "may we all be at ease." Whatever you do, notice if you've logged on before you are even aware you did it. Setting an intention slows down the pace of our mental chatter and makes our efforts much more effective. Whatever you do online touches many many other people. To put it bluntly, slowing down and being aware are the keys to not peeing in the pool.

2. Practice Appropriate Speech. If you are going to post something, Before pressing "Tweet" or "Share" on anything, take three deep breaths. Then ask four questions associated with the practice of responsible speech: A) Is this True? B) Is this Helpful? C) Is this an appropriate time to share this? D) I am an appropriate person to share it?
If the answers to all four questions is yes, then feel good about hitting "share." When contemplating these questions, cut yourself some slack. Something doesn't have to be monumentally helpful to be shared, but at least this contemplation will help us stop spreading harmful cynicism and mindless gossip.

By Ethan Nichtern

Encourage Exchange @ AUB October 26 & 27

I attended a training session at the American University of Beirut on security exchanging through information technology; the workshop was sponsored by The Development Research Center –Virginia.

 The training was presented by Mr. Alan Patterson, Global Security Instructor; He covered a lot of topics: Security Risks Analysis, Cyber Security topics, Censorship & Circumvention. I really learned many useful things in this training, I learned about the importance of security in protecting our information by using strong passwords not less than 12 characters & preferable to be alphanumeric and about updating anti-viruses on a daily basis and also that we should not use pirated version of software to avoid being insecure.

Do you know that our emails are like a postcard & everyone can read it? To avoid this, check URL addresses of emails you received.

Today we are less secure than before due to our using of social media networks and because of this I will share with you some resources which I have got from this training as we always do in E-mediat: sharing information, but keep in mind nothing is secure 100%.

To be more secured on Internet:
http://onorobot.org
http://trucrypt.org/
http://secunia.com,
http://isc.sans.edu,
http://us-cert.com
http://www.icanstalku.com
http://web.hbr.org/email/archive/dailystat.php?date=082410
http://www.citizenlab.org
http://www.tacticaltech.org

Photography Session presented by CANON @ IT Lebanon, Tripoli

Interesting photography session presented by canon, participants learned how & when to take a photo & the right way for holding a camera. They can now know what to ask for when buying a camera.

Najah Ahdab from Safadi Foundation won a digital camera from CANON during a competition to choose the best photo.

Twitter tips and tricks

Below is a listing of our top 10 favorite Twitter tips and tricks. These tips will help make your Twitter experience more enjoyable and can help increase your followers.

Customize
• Change your profile picture. Use a picture of yourself to make it seem more personalized if this is your personal Twitter account.
• Utilize as much of the 160-character limit Twitter BIO space allows. Include keywords your followers or potential followers may be searching for.
• Create your own background image. However, do not make the image too much like an ad or sales pitch. The background image must be less than 800k and we recommend a size of 1600×1200 for a large image or smaller if you plan on tiling the image or just having it on the left-hand side. Finally, keep in mind that smaller resolutions and monitor sizes will hide much of the background.

Take advantage of the hundreds of different third-party online tools and services that enhance your Twitter experience. Below are a few of our favorites.

• TwitPic – Take advantage of TwitPic to post pictures on your tweets. If you want to post pictures while away from the computer, use the Twitterific app.
• Qwitter – Great service that sends an e-mail any time someone unsubscribes from your Twitter profile and mentions a possible Twitter post you made that may have caused them to leave.
• Manageflitter – Fantastic site for managing your followers and getting an easy to read overview of people not following you back, quiet users, and inactive users.
• WeFollow – Great website that allows you to add yourself to a listing of Twitter users by tags you find interesting.
• SocialOomph – Another great service with a collection of free Twitter tools including the ability to schedule when a tweets gets posted.
• Tweetbeat – An excellent site that takes the trending topics on Twitter and gives you a clearer explanation of present and past trending topics.
• TwitterMeme – Another great location to find the hottest links on Twitter.
• Twitter Grader – Great service that grades any Twitter account and gives you additional details and ranking information.
• Twitter Fan Wiki Apps – Finally, this wiki has a listing of several hundred different Twitter applications and tools for users wanting more.

Use Twitter searchTake full advantage of the Twitter search tool. Below are just a few tips that can help improve your search capabilities on Twitter.
• Search for your website or blog URL and see if others are mentioning your page.
• Search for anything near you by adding near:”city state”. For example, typing near:”Salt lake city Utah” club would return current tweets that have happened in Salt Lake City, Utah with the keyword club in them.
• Find people who you may enjoy following by searching for keywords that interested you.
• If you do not want tweets with links add ? -filter:links at the end of your search query.
• Need more options, use the Advanced Twitter search.
• Any time you get excellent results click the “Save this search” button to save that search. These searches can then be found under “Saved Searches” on the right-hand part of your profile on the old Twitter interface or under the “Searches” tab next to your timeline on the new Twitter interface.

Followers
• Engage followers.
• Do not follow too many people. No one is going to follow someone who is following thousands of people but only has 10 followers.
• Retweet interesting posts.
• Retweet and participate in conversations with people with a lot of followers.
• Realize it is impossible for anyone to read every tweet.
• When first joining do not follow hundreds of people, doing this may mark you as a bot.
Create useful and interesting tweets
• Try making all your tweets informative, useful, or funny.
• Do not post mundane posts, e.g. eating a bowl of cereal.
• Add hastags to your tweets. For example, if your tweet is about computers, consider adding #computer in the tweet.
• Tweet frequently. No one is going to follow someone they do not know who has not tweeted in months. Try at the very least to tweet a few times a week or daily if you can manage.
• Do not whine or complain. Everyone will unfollow anyone who constantly whines or complains.
• Try making your valuable tweets during the times people will most likely see them.
• Keep some space available in your tweet in case someone retweets your post.
• Use special characters in your tweets.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online service that enables you to broadcast short messages to your friends or "followers." It also lets you specify which Twitter users you want to follow so you can read their messages in one place.
Twitter is designed to work on a mobile phone as well as on a computer. All Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, so each message can be sent as a single SMS alert.
Twitter is useful for close-knit groups (although there also are some fairly large mobs on Twitter). If you follow your friends, and they follow each other, you can quickly communicate group-related items." Twitter is conceptually similar to Dodgeball but is simpler to use.
If you enter items into Twitter, they can be private, so only friends you've authorized can see them. Items can also be made public, which means anyone who knows your Twitter ID can read and subscribe to them.

How to get started Twitter is free.
Go to Twitter.com and click "Join for free." For best results, use your real name when signing up; otherwise your friends won't be able to find you easily. It's also helpful to upload a picture. If you select the "Protect my updates" box, people won't be able to read your Twitters unless you authorize them. You'll have more fun if you leave this box unchecked. Just be sure not to Twitter, "Leaving house open and unlocked for the weekend: 1520 Main Street."
Now that you have a Twitter account, tell your friends your username or send them the link to your Twitter page.

More & more in Workshop3

Emedait workshop3: Social Networks (Facebook & Twitter )

In workshop3, participants will learn how to use Facebook and Twitter & link to their social media strategy plan.

- Facebook Strategies for NGOs
- Facebook Engagement & Twitter Strategies for NGOs

How to Promote your BLOG & Make it Successful

Tips For Making Your Blog Successful

1- Talk about your destination – Local area attractions and exciting information – rather than about your hotel.
2- Commit time to manage your blog – Unlike your website, your blog does require commitment of your time. Moderate your blog carefully on a weekly basis. Socialize with bloggers who are blogging about your area and request that they review your blog.
3- Convert readers by offering time sensitive offers, discount tickets to attractions, and information about local deals, etc.
4- Offer local videos and podcasts about your area on your blog.
5- Under a dining category, add a post about your hotel’s restaurant and add a personal touch by offering a great recipe from your hotel chef.

Promoting Blogs

The journey of blog promotion is never ending. Here are 10 steps you can take to promote your blog. The more action steps you will take, the more successful you will be and the more ROI you will gain.
1. Create a step by step marketing plan for promoting your blog.
2. Enroll your blog in to blog search engines.
3. Enroll your blog RSS in to RSS search engines.
4. Inform your customers about your blog and the flexibility of adding comments. Make sure to moderate your comments.
5. Offer online functionality for surveys and polls, etc.
6. Offer time sensitive offers, such as coupons, local specials, etc. at least two to three times a month. Send an email campaign to let people know that they can find offers only on your blog.
7. Let your visiting hotel guests know about the blog and ask them to post comments about their experiences with your hotel and the destination. You may want to check first that the guests had a great time.
8. Socialize your blog – this is a very important step towards promoting your blog. You have to seek out bloggers who are blogging about your area and your topics. It is easy to find bloggers specific to your industry by using blog search engines such as Technorati. Make a list of relevant bloggers and write about their blog on your blog. Ask these bloggers to review your blog. If they find your blog relevant and informational, they will post positive reviews on their blog about your blog and will give your blog a very qualitative link.
9. Offer periodic podcasts about local events, attractions, and things to do, etc.
10. Inform and train your employees to be aware of the blog and be a part of the promotional strategy. When they answer a call, they should be able to provide additional information about the blog.

Workshop2 @ITLebanon-Tripoli –7&8 July

HTML

- Basics of HTML & create front page
- practicing on HTML (http://t.co/ZFfhHzg )
- Blogging on Word press

Web design- Web design depends on creativity
- learning how to choose colors of our website: http://t.co/HLfK8ZD
- Latest Website Templates, http://t.co/vTv9nSa

Online Safety & Privacy
-Importance of online safety to get out of panic: The internet is not dangerous it is a place to get info
-How to help our children to work online in a safety way
-Ways to help protect our computers: Backup, read privacy statements

Listening
Listening tools: google alerts, RSS, Twitter search, blog search, social mention & igoogle

Difference between Blog and Website

A website is a group of pages that are placed in a server meant to deliver or gather information. It is organized in such a manner that you can navigate from one page to another with the links that are provided. There are many types of websites that exist. There are websites for selling products, for providing after sales support, and there are even websites that operate just on information. A blog is a type of website that is maintained solely to provide information to people. It is just one subcategory of websites that can be built. A blog is an informal media for sharing news, information, views, and ideas about a niche topic. It doesn’t have to be as formal as a book, or even as a newspaper article. Sometimes, an eclectic collection of information on a given subject is the best way to go. Usually the posts in the blog is in reverse chronological order.

A blog can be built on a variety of topics available; there are blogs about current events, fashion, religion, and so much more. The proliferation of blogs is due in part to the simplicity in creating one. You wouldn’t need to have in depth skills in making your own webpage just as long as you can follow the basic format that some of the CMS for blogging offers. There are even preloaded themes that can take care of the majority of the tasks you need to do in setting up a blog. The only real job that bloggers need to take care of is the content that they input. It should be attention grabbing in order to entice a great number of readers. And the blogger should maintain the quality of his content so that the readers would keep coming back.

Building a website could be as easy or as difficult as you would want it to be. You could stick to static html pages that offer the barest of essentials or go all out with dynamic and interactive pages that employ multiple technologies like PHP, AJAX, Java, and many more. Having a website could be a lot more difficult since you don’t have the templates that are provided to you in blogs, you would need to build the necessary structure and links that would lead to your various pages. But building a website provides you with a great amount of flexibility than with blogs.
If you want to create something that would fit in a blog format and you don’t really want to delve into the inner workings of website building then blogging is the best option for you. It is hassle free and you could get started in as short as a day. But if you want to build a website that would require adding a lot of content, menus, and other navigation aids, then you would need to create your own website because that is beyond a blogs capabilities.

How to be a good trainer. 5 rules that always work

Trainings today form one of the core activities any organization plans, to excel in the industry. And so should be the case. We are living in a knowledge driven world. You simply can’t assume to hire the best of all available in this world. Most of us simply can’t whether startups or well settled conglomerates. And with regards to cost perspectives in startups it makes business sense to groom someone rather than throwing high paychecks to poach skilled teams.

Training again is not limited just to office teams. You train the customer about the product; you train the franchisee, the broker, the regulator, every one. And when training becomes so very important it makes sense to have a checklist of things that we are supposed to follow.

The very basic every training manager should know

At the outset we do understand that training is a kind of communication. So rules that you apply for good communication, applies to training too. But then there are certain parameters that weigh higher than others. Going through and conducting couple of trainings myself now-a-days at office, I have compiled a list of attributes that I found will enhance any training and make you a good training manager.

As I said there are certain parameters which will weigh higher than the others. I have mentioned them separately out here. Do save this post for future references and use it as a checklist whenever you are planning to train someone.

Qualities of a good trainer

1. Firstly who are you training

This can be always claimed as the golden rule of trainings. Since you have been chosen to train a group of people I am assuming that you know the subject you are going to train about and you are identified as an expert. That forms the lifeline of the training (Knowing the content). Post that, knowing the audience forms the backbone. All the strategies that you devise to train depend on your understanding of the audience.

That’s the prime reason most of the trainers ask the group to introduce themselves and describe the reason what motivates them to attend the training. Bottom-line, if you don’t know the profile of the audience simply do not proceed.

2. Humor adds life to your training

To better make this engrossed in your understanding let me say Humor adds life because It keeps your audience awake : -) A good joke cracked at the right time rejuvenates the whole environment. Though there are certain precautions to be taken on this humor driven communication (Will probably have a separate post for that subject).

I have attended classic presentations where humor was not just to make environment lively but also to increase the retention period of the topic. For example talking about the best practices of sales, rather than telling what’s wrong and what’s right; can you pull a joke of what will happen if something is blindly followed? Creating satire in the right way too makes a person remember. Bottom line Humor is important; it has to be timely, healthy and relevant.

3. Good Training is all about engagement

Training is an important activity but getting trained is not so exciting. Why? Because most of the times it is passive. People sit there listening to the trainer (Some even fall asleep with eyes wide open, I don’t know exactly how that is done). So first change the rules. Change the way the training is done. Engage them in every section of training, ask them questions, answer there queries in different ways. Push them to think new things.

Till the time the audience is engaged, the audience is active. As a trainer you have to maintain eye contact, rehearse the whole presentation, actively listen, move slides, use the whole area, and a bunch of few more things how can you concentrate and make sure that each listener is actually listening to you? Bottom-line Engagement is not a good to have quality it’s a compulsion.

4. Show them the real world

Try to answer this tough question, what is more interesting – watching Jurassic Park or understanding a new business process that your team has to comply to? Well that was easy. That’s what happens. If the audience understands the importance of the training and still is not active, the blame is on you. Try to create a Jurassic park!

Derive maximum examples as possible. Try to articulate the concepts to which the audiences connect. Tell stories, Create scenes, make relative analogies. That way you make the content easier to absorb. Bottom line if you draw pictures in their minds you ensure that they retain content.

5. Ask the right question

As trainers we are very much engrossed in answering the questions. Resolving doubts. Is that really required? Understand this – which concept would be retained more in the minds of the audience, the one which you answer or the one they understand? That’s a tricky question of course. I believe making the audience derive an answer by themselves will make them have a connect with it. Finally they have derived the answer.

How that is done? I tend to cross question the one who raises a doubt. While answering my cross questions I lead the person to derive answer to his question. That way not only he understands the concept far better, even I win an image of an expert for myself (whether I am or not? that really doesn’t matter). Bottom line, it’s not about the right answer, it’s about the right question.

Finally…

There are a heck lot of more tips that are buzzing around my ears right now, but let’s put it to the part two of this post. Next time when we discuss this topic we would probably have tips as one liners and try to compile as much relevant tips as possible.

Up until then, what about your training experience, do you feel bored in some types of trainings. Have you been a trainer? How will you rejuvenate trainings in that case? The baton goes to you, comment on this post and let me know your views about the same.

And in case if you found this post worth, do pass share this real experience with at least one of your colleague. Now!

http://bizdharma.com/blog/how-to-be-a-good-trainer-5-rules-that-always-work/

Transparency

 

The concept of social media is not familiar to most of Classic Arab NGOs. Most of them think that being transparent means losing their privacy. To build the trust of other NGOs & individuals, these 

NGOs should be open to share:- 

- Objectives

- Activities

- Budget & Financial Statements

- Elections

- Political Affiliations

- Services

- Reports (Quarterly, Yearly)

- Staff background

- Beneficiaries

Things to keep private:

- Personal information about staff

- Internal meetings details

- Internal memos

- Staff Assessments