A couple of years back I decided to give up the cigarettes for a totally smoke-free lifestyle. As many ex-smokers will know this is not the easiest of tasks! I was plagued with withdrawal symptoms including dreams of being chased down a hill by large cigarette shouting, "You know you want me don't you!"

Having said this I have some great smoking memories. I think the height of my smoking career was at university. During exams revision in the university library, I would nip out at regular intervals for a ‘quick smoke’. I would usually be met by other fellow smokers outside the building where we would discuss about how we should get back in and do more revising.

Smoking culture can be quite a big deal at work too. In one of my previous jobs I remember how people would congregrate in the designated smoking area with a fag and acan of Redbull discussing the usual office politics. It was at this point that I began questioning whether I wanted to be a part of this or not.

However, giving up smoking is always fraught with difficulties. There is always at least one annoying smoker friend who tries to test your resolve by waving a packet of Marlboro Lights in your face. The new laws on smoking in the UK have certainly helped me though. It was too often the case that after a couple of drinks my anti-smoking resolve was weakened.

Another point is that in the UK it is becoming more and more expensive to smoke. In fact I think that the UK is probably the most expensive place in the world to have the habit. A packet of 20 cigarettes now costs a £5.67 compared £3.88 in 2000 and it just keeps rising. This current price is almost twice what the same packet would cost in Italy.

As a result of this many people opt for making their own cigarettes with rolling tobacco. I tried this for a while when I was smoking but have to admit I was not the best 'roller' around. Call me lazy but part of the smoking experience is to have your cigarettes ready made. When you are desperate for a smoke you don't necessarily want to be faffing around with rolling paper and filters.

Having given up now, I suppose can now reminisce with other ex-smokers about the glory days of waking up in the morning with a mouth like an ashtray. Ermm maybe not, but I will always be reminded everytime I manage to catch a whiff of cigarette smoke. I certainly understand how Chandler from Friends felt in this clip!

Anyway if you are trying to give up smoking or are an ex-smoker - I feel you brothers and sisters! Only those who have been there understand! :-)

With the rise of new social media channels and other online tools many people have been talking about the decline or even death of the conventional media. This could be one explanation though I feel it could be seen more as an evolution of media.

Unfortunately this evolution is happening very fast and leaving some people in its wake. As Matthew quite rightly put in his comment on my previous post this process is also being quickened by the recession. For instance in Bristol, regional newspapers such as the Western Daily Press, have made large redundancies to their staff. Bristol’s radio scene seems to have shrunk as well with the relocation and redundancies. I think there must be similar trends throughout the UK.

Across the pond in States papers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (one of the oldest in Seattle) rolls out its last newspaper today and becomes a totally online entity. They follow in the footsteps of many other US publications to the online realm. Around the world people are utilising media in new ways.

However, I am not sure that journalists and conventional PR people should get too fearful of the new online world. What is needed is an understanding of how their skills could be best used within the online realm. Social media allows obtaining feedback and interaction with an audience which simply was not possible in previous media channels. While this may involve learning a totally new IT skill-set it is preferable than being left on the sidelines as more social media tools appear.

That being said, the instincts for clear communications and stories that conventional PR, Journalists and other people in the media have developed over years of experience are still greatly needed especially in a confusing online world. While web wizardry and social media can dress things up very nice you always need something with substance to begin with.

It seems like everyone is going social media mad! Whether it’s businesses or individuals, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook or Myspace; everyone suddenly wants a piece of the action. I wonder if this will really help us though and where it will end up.

Recently Twitter seems to be the new social media ‘weapon of choice’. Since it's successful use in the Obama campaign it has gained popularity in recent months. Celebrities like Stephen Fry have become high profile ‘Twitterholics’ which have given us a snap-shot into their lives. If I get stuck in a lift I’ll know what to do!

I am hearing a lot of talk at the moment about how Twitter is going to revolutionise everything from businesses to social lives. I still remember when Facebook was flavour of the month. When I went to the pub and I would hear people discussing what they were doing on Facebook. Gradually, now I am hearing more people talking about Twitter.

My point is that Twitter is a very useful tool but it is just one of many tools. While it may facilitate people’s approaches to business and social lives, it is not the revolutionary ‘silver bullet’ that everyone seems to making it out to be. It is nice following people and following others but this assumes that they have something vaguely interesting to say instead of how ‘the train was late again this morning’. As many Twitter users will know, it is all too easy to get lost in a mass of irrelevant updates, photos, videos, etc.

I accept that Twitter has been successfully used to organise global events like Twestival but a closer look leads us to see that many other online tools were used in that campaign as well. Twitter can also be used by businesses to update customers with latest news and organise internal operations/events. However, the online social media landscape is more complicated than Twitter and we still at the tip of the iceberg as far as what the internet can do.

It is important to have some perspective on these tools and IT evolution as a whole. As I have discussed in my previous post about Google, the IT world moves very quickly and it will not be long before there is something newer and more shiny than Twitter for people to go crazy about. I feel like people seem to be jumping on the Twitter bandwagon without really understanding it and worse still because they think they may be ‘missing a trick’ if they don’t.

In fact there are many other social media tools that have sprung up like Friendfeed and BrightKite. Friendfeed works by collecting all your feeds from other networks and displaying them all on one feed. You can also subscribe to other people’s feeds and have them subscribe to yours. BrightKite is still currently in Beta development stage and is location-based social networking. Old favourites like Myspace are not as popular as they once were but are still very useful for bands and musicians. We are also seeing a resurgence in blogging with the use of free services like Blogger (which I use for this blog!), Wordpress and Tumblr.

To make things even more complicated all these different services offer integration with each other and mobile phones! For example this means that you can update your Twitter status on your phone via SMS or online with the use of Twitter mobile application. You could then add Twitter to your Facebook page with use of a Facebook application and get it to update you status there too. There are now services like Ping.fm that also allow you to update multiple networks at the same time.

While this might be a tech enthusiast and social media whore’s dream I fear it may ultimately lead to mass of irrelevant confused communication flying across different networks. People will pick up bits of the story but may find it more difficult to pick up the ‘whole’ story. The original message that was trying to be communicated will be diluted and dispersed over many channels and hence may lose its power.

This may be a long way away and we are still in the ‘honey-moon’ period of social media, however, it could be time we took a look how we are currently using these tools and how they will be used in the future. It is also important that people spend some time learning exactly how these tools work before throwing themselves in the deep-end.