One of my most popular ‘off the peg’ group sessions is around defining the boundaries between you, that is “you” the person, and the professional you. I use the “These views are my own” line as an example of how one may choose to successfully negotiate this boundary friction but, if I’m really honest, I’m not altogether too sure it does.

I guess the nub of the matter here isn’t the people whose profiles contain this disclaimer text but rather the companies that they work for and just how risk averse they are. I’m not entirely clear who would misconstrue a Tweet from somebody’s clearly personal account but, as the legal world moves at a snail’s pace, one could probably make a fairly decent case that it could constitute an official statement if your lawyers really tried. The ‘views are my own’ clause seems to protect the company more than the individual though. In the advent of a controversial status update, the company would still be able to reprimand their employee whether they had applied the disclaimer or not, and perhaps you might say rightly so too.

So what’s to gain from including this statement in a profile? My feeling is not much really, gestural insulation aside it’s still the same person associated with the same company. My own personal rule of thumb is that if you mention your employers on your profile you are signing up to the attendant risks and benefits of doing so, with or without a disclaimer you are creating that association for good or ill. If you want to be free to tweet, update or blog what you want then keep your profile brand neutral and if you want to be associated with your company then you are signing up to their code of conduct, no matter how different it is to yours. No matter how well or poorly defined your company social media strategy may be it is down to you to negotiate the risks of your actions and ultimately, as with anything else in life, it’s about taking responsibility for your own course of action.

As ever, I would love to hear your thoughts.

So, with a few client calls to make and some artwork sign-offs still outstanding, I ambled into the seat at the back of the balcony of York’s beautiful Theatre Royal one last time and, almost completely out of charge in every conceivable way, settled in for the last talk.

The talk was from Jonathan Harris of Number27.org. Jonathan describes himself as “an artist working with complex datasets”, as you probably will have gathered from the tone of the piece so far that’s a bit like Caravaggio describing himself as “a bloke who paints Jesus and that”. Looking back on a lot of my past posts this year it seems I’ve been quite consumed by the idea of presenting information, and lots of it, in particularly beautiful ways and Jonathan certainly ticks that box in a big, fat way. Rather than hyperbolise much more about the man, he possesses the sort of profound, beat-poet Americana of Keroac, Dylan or early Woolf but manages to uniquely fuse it all with the sort of Bay Area timbre and vulnerability of a very modern geek. He is, in short, a pretty engaging guy. Personality cults aside though it was Jonathan’s work that I found the most interesting thing about him. You can see all of his projects on his website here but I’m going to just pick out a few highlights below.

We Feel Fine was the first thing of Jonathan’s that I happened across. It trawls the Social Web for mentions of the words “feel” or “feeling” to analyse and present fantastic infographics of the content. The really fantastic thing about We Feel Fine is that it presents its information back in such lovely ways, the realisations and the interfaces – of which there are many – are actually tagged back to human emotions. The database entries are also visually represented in a way which mimics the emotion they represent, so the “fear” entries act scared andthe happy ones group together. It even goes so far as to reference the weather in the person’s area at the time, mind blowing.

The Whale Hunt is a fascinating, if a little gruesome, project which uses tagged and Categorised photos to chart Jonathan’s nine day expedition with Inuit Whale Hunters using tagged variables like “blood” and “heart rate” to track the excitement – and also boredom – of the experience. It splits down in a number of ways like by cast member and chapter and you can also see a mosaic of all the images which really hits home the colourlessness of the ice and the gore of the blood when they actually catch the whale.

Lovelines works in similar territory to the We Feel Fine project, concentrating this time on the rawest of human conditions of Love and Hate. It uses the same data collector to harvest mentions of the words “Love” and “Hate” from blogs every few minutes, it then also collects the name, age, geolocation and any other data it can about the blogger and factors that into the presentation too. It’s formed through the three different themes of Words, Pictures and Superlatives and gives you an odd experience of being a detached voyeur.

Update: It would seem that the massive amounts of traffic my blog has sent to We Feel Fine has melted the servers. *cough* I’m sure it’ll be back up soon.

The Social Marketing Compass

This is a lovely graphic from renowned writer, analyst and speaker Brian Solis which sets out a very clear and well thought through vision of the social marketing universe with Brand as the Sun. Like or loathe the Marketing Speak element of the graphic it’s very eloquently put and has some real resonance.

Click for the full graphic

The Story of Twitter

Twitter has finally shed its New Kid on the Block image and is now firmly established as the tool de jour for quick and easy engagement.This graphic charts the journey between its birth and third birthday, see if you can remember a few of those watershed moments. I know I can.

Click for the full graphic

Facebook Growth

This is a lovely snapshot of the exponential (if that’s not too weak a word) growth of Facebook’s users. In six years the site has gone from a college dorm room project to one of the biggest new media companies in the world. To pick a stat out of the ether, 50% of users log-in every day. How amazing is that?

Click for the full graphic

Thanks for making this a fun series to do, as suggested I’ll definitely continue and if you have any requests or spot something you think warrants a mention then let me know.