likes abandoned places, art and artists, books, buildings (preferably old or vernacular), Europe, Greece, history, Italy, Palestine, pirates

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Found, or abandoned, here


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Facebook -- sooner or later we'll all join

 

To those who have never tried Facebook: give it a go — the notes below will help you start

To those who “hate” it: I did too, but I hadn’t been able to get past the spammy games and family albums; I didn’t know what lay beyond

To those who are already au fait: click “next” — you don’t need this

To those who can’t believe I’m writing in support of FB: you may have had the same prejudices as me, so maybe read the notes that follow …


The annotated chart, below, of the features you’ll find on your FB home page is a good place to start — click the pic to see it at full screen size.
On the Facebook page, scroll down for close-ups of some sections.
Screenshots that have plus signs in the corner open to yet another close-up.

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In the left sidebar you’re looking at links to your own pages, photos, tabs etc.

The middle section contains a feed of what is being posted by your friends and on the pages and groups you’re subscribed to.
There are two versions of this feed — “Most Recent”, which includes everything as it comes up, ie in real time, and “Top News”, which selects highlights including status updates and items already commented on by others.

The right sidebar can be safely ignored most of the time as it is reserved for ads — although alerts and “suggested” new friends (friends of your friends) are placed there too.

The heart of Facebook is the status update.
Attention seekers should update theirs frequently and perhaps attach photos, links, videos or whatever - though they do risk flooding other people’s feeds and pissing them off that way, much the way overly-prolific Tumblrs hog our dashboards here.

I follow a few funny people though and don’t mind how often they throw something in there.

From the profile tab at the top right of the screen you access your own pages – and by default the Wall, which is what people see when they click on your av.
This is a log of all your recent activity plus whatever others have written on it as a message to you.

Do go though your privacy settings under the “Account” tab at top right – and you will see that you can decide section by section how public you want your personal info, photos and postings to be.
The options are everyone, friends of friends, friends only and a customised option allowing and prohibiting specific people or groups (lists) of people by name.


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Friend Wheel generated in Facebook


Be choosy about games apps and if you find any becoming a nuisance go to the applications settings (again under “Account”) and remove them.
Each app also has a profile page giving background info and updates.
If you subscribe to those pages you will get updates in your news feed as well.


What I have found most rewarding so far though has been just to use the search engine.
Whatever you type in, name, phrase or word, you will get a summary of relevant public pages, groups and people and also any instances where the searched term has come up in recent comments by your friends or on pages you’re subscribed to.

I am not sure that public pages even existed as a feature when I last spent time on FB — 2-3 years ago — but they have become a huge resource.
Now most major websites seem to have set up shop there, and other pages are set up by individuals with a specific interest and links to share.


More practical tips

1)
Whenever you have a website, article, video or whatever on screen and want to share it with friends you can do so instantly with FB.
It is a one-click process if you can see the FB logo on that page or if you’ve installed the Facebook toolbar

http://www.facebook.com/toolbar?v=info

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3794

You can also use a sharing service like Stumbleupon or Shareaholic.


2)
Do read the Help page to get a sense of what FB means by different features …

… because stories are not stories and news is not news as we’ve understood them in the past.


3)
Lastly, you can have Tumblr automatically send all your posts from here to Facebook, and they will go into the feed your friends get and appear on your wall. Mine are also being collected in a tab called “Notes”, which effectively operates as a blog (albeit rather hidden). To set up automatic transfer of your posts from Tumblr to FB, go to “Services” under “Customise” in Tumblr and click on the FB option there - it needs to know the name of your account and permission to access it.

Alternatively, there is also a Tumblr app in FB, which has FB seek permission from Tumblr:
http://www.facebook.com/help/?ref=drop#!/apps/application.php?id=48119224995


~ ~ ~

I do think Facebook has come a long way in the last couple of years.
It would be better if they killed the games though, not cos they’re games but because they work in a viral way and spam your friends with totally inane information with only one purpose in mind – to rope them in as well.

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POETRY

 

I’m not generally a fan of it on Tumblr pages.
For one thing, poetry is something to be read slowly, and maybe reread. Each word has to be sounded. This requires a different head space, and a different pace than the main fodder I see in blogs and especially Tumblr logs.

Of course I could also mention that most of what is posted by anyone under 25 is crap, but that would be to lose followers and worry friends.
I do think it’s best though if you write poems to lock them away for a couple of years to incubate.
If when you return to them you don’t cringe they may actually be good and worth sharing.

Unfortunately, all those wonderful instant publishing tools we have now encourage people to post anything and everything w/o evaluating it.
I have even seen people transfer their half-formed thoughts from mobile phone to blog just because technology makes it possible, and post those with a sense of triumph.

Thus we are forced, increasingly, to scroll and skim through screenfuls of inanity to find the odd item that reminds us of why we’re here.
Depending on the day, it can be like panning for gold and finding enough nuggets to make it worthwhile, or rolling Sisyphus’s stone uphill.

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A short visit to the gulag

 
http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/camps/camps.html

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Photographer and adventurer Elena Filatova explores places that are out of bounds, in a nation full of secrets. I featured her impressions of Chernobyl here a couple of weeks ago.

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This time the images are from a tour she made of one of Stalin’s labour camps in the gulag. They are so remote they can be reached only by helicopter, and for prisoners there was no hope of escape.

The gulag system flourished from the 30s to 1953, when Stalin died. Gulag was an acronym for The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies — click the drawing below for more on this charming agency and its workings.

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Zardo in DeviantArt is a 25-year-old Belgian guy with
a love of Tim Burton and dark landscapes.
Large collection, high quality.

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Happy tree families created by Sarah Ogren

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Anyone wondering where I’ve been? No I didn’t think so.
Well I’ll tell you anyway.
I’ve been exploring forbidden places — and in particular, a network of underground tunnels with the hard-core guys at Sleepy City.

Thoroughly recommended if you’re game.

More cautious types could check them out within the safe and familiar confines of Facebook first. You’ll get a lot of the links there, but not the big picture.

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Don’t ask. This one’s for Cloggo.

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Skip Holden in Flickr (from a huge collection).
Mostly urbex but his sea and sky shots are riveting too.


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