So here it is readers, my new blog. I mentioned a while ago on my old blog that I would be starting a new one. Basically I have moved from wordpress.com to a self-hosted wordpress.org site, I know that will mean nothing to most of you but some of you might understand.

I have kept the same blog title, and this blog will be the same as the old one in that, my post will range from thoughts about life, to photography, travel to movie reviews and everything in-between. I have been blogging for 3 years this June, and plan to continue blogging for the foreseeable future.

Before all that comes though, I need your help. All you readers who read via RSS will need to change your feed that you have for my blog, you can either click the RSS icon in your address bar, or manually add the following address to your reader.

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/connormcc/AUPs

As well as updating your feed, any bloggers who link to me will have to update their links, the new URL to link to is

http://blog.connormcc.com

So please update your RSS feeds and links so that any traffic to my blog will be redirected here and not to my old blog. Also if you don’t currently link to me, but do visit, please feel free to link and I will link back. If you do already link to me and I don’t link back, I apologise, let me know and I will get it sorted.

Obviously as this blog is new there will be some changes being made over the coming weeks, but nothing major. If you have any suggestions about the blog please let me know, ether here, via email, or on twitter.

Finally, to celebrate the launch of my new blog I have decided to have a give away. One of my readers will get a 16×12 inch print (unframed) of one of my photographs, of their choice. To try and win that print all you have to do is leave a comment on this post. You have until Wednesday 3rd June 2009 to leave a comment, I will announce the winner on Thursday 4th June, that gives you one and a half weeks, so get commenting.

Social networking has really taken off in recent years, and completely rocketed in the past few months. Twitter is just one example, really becoming extremely popular with celebrity users, and endorsements from people like President Obama, and Stephen Fry.

I have been chatting to a few people recently about this rather interesting            subject recently.

I was chatting to Rick about whether twitter or second life for example actually enhance relationships, or are we unintentionally growing apart because of our love affair with technology. Are computer screens replaci

I read this article the other day, about how social networking is harming our health.ass=”first”>People’s health could be harmed by social networking sites because they reduce levels of face-to-face contact, an expert claims.

Dr Aric Sigman says websites such as Facebook set out to enrich social lives, but end up keeping people apart.

Even as I sit and type this I guess I can’t help but feel a little hypocritical. For you guys reading my blog, how many of you actually know me? For all you know this blog could just be a front, and I could be pretending to be someone that I’m not, and you wouldn’t know the difference. Having said that, most of my blog readers are genuine friends that I do interact with in real life.

I was thinking about this last week as I went out to the Belfast Twestival, I got seriously slagged off for heading to it. It essentially was a charity fundraiser event, organised via twitter, where twitter users in each city met up. Now while I will agree that on some level it is a fairly geeky gathering, I think it isn’t as bad as many people would initially think. Here’s what I mean, what is worse, having quite a few friends online, or ‘followers’ in twitter terms, living within a few miles of you, and never meeting them? Or having these friends and people online, but actually meeting them in real life, going to gigs, etc…

For me, personally, I enjoy using social networking to keep in touch with friends that have moved away from home, and people that I don’t get to catch up with very often. As well as that I use twitter, and blogs etc to connect with, and get to know other people across the world, I can chat with other photographers, and stuff, who without social networking I wouldn’t have heard of.

I would love to know what your thoughts are on this? Is social networking enriching or damaging relationships with others? kind of an ironic discussion to take place on a blog…

well… it’s not my actual birthday, its my blog birthday, I have been blogging for two years today, and this is post number 385 so thats roughly a past every other day for 2 years… I have gone from ‘technowhati?’ to having a blog rank of 281,182 (wow its like a numeric palindrome), i know thats still not a great rank, but im pretty pleased, because its slowly getting better… and more people are reading and interacting on here, which is cool…

If you read this blog via RSS, then you will notice no difference, but if you actually visit the blog then you will notice I have had a bit of a redesign on the blog. I got bored with the old them and fancied a new, brighter, lighter one… i quite like the new look, any thoughts?

Oh and expect the theme to change quite a bit over the coming few days until i get a theme that i properly like…