Today is the international Water Day. Change.org has asked, to as many blogger as possible, to write, on the same day, a post about water: here I am.

Funny enough I am writing about something that I feel there should be many solutions available and often struggle to understand why there aren’t.

Water is the most abundant element on Earth: 3/4 of its surface is covered by water and yet providing clean and drinking water is one of the main issues to be addressed by developing countries.  Yes of course most of the water available is sea water therefore salty water that cannot be drunk directly but, hey, it’s just about removing salt from it right?

Removing salt from water requires desalination that is well known to require specialised equipment and infrastructure and to be an energy intense process.  Energy is required in terms of heat that is used to boil the water, produce steam and, more or less, distil it to separate it from the salts diluted in it.  A very simple observation I am making is that most developing country are hot countries, places where the sun is visible and very hot for most of the year.

The question I am asking with this post is:

can the energy required for desalination be derived by sun and build eco sustainable plants that run next to the sea, in very sunny areas and produce huge amounts of fresh water by using just the sun light and heat?

I wish some scientist could see this and consider whether my question is too simplistic or, perhaps, it just requires people to take action…

Posted under blogging, rambling

More and more people are using twitter as a marketing tool and yet too many fail to understand how it works.  In a nutshell Twitter is a microblogging site with a very distinct limitation: all messages are limited to 140 character very much like an SMS message.

If you have a blog, very much like any other website (imagine a newspaper site) you don’t write to a particular person (Email and other messaging services can help for that) but to your audience.  If your blog is popular you will have many readers, if you are at the beginning probably just a few, unless you are famous person (e.g. celebrity) or a successful blogger at your third or higher number launch.  If you keep writing good content (what Chris Garret, one of my favourite bloggers, calls Killer Flagship Content) then you will build up a broad audience.  Your audience in Twitter is made by your followers.

Who are your followers?

Anybody interested in you and your tweets that decide to follow you. At the beginning you are likely to have no followers but as you start following other people many of them will start following you back and so on.  The more followers you have and more and more people will start following you.  When I encounter an individual with a Twitter account and many hundred or thousands of followers I feel more inclined to follow him or her than if he/she is a beginner with a few followers.

What do you do with Twitter?

You Tweet. You send out these messages and your followers have the opportunity of reading them, simple.  Considering that 140 char is not really lots of information many people have developed a way of writing words in a VERY succinct way or simply adding the URL of a site/blog/page they want to promote.

What do you tweet about?

Everything you like. Many neophytes of twitter tend to be confused about how to use their newly created account.  My style is to promote some of the business activities I am involved in and re-tweet similar content from other people I am following.  I personally find nearly disturbing those that mix business activities with random personal messages about their family life or what they just had for lunch… A Twitter account is free so it makes sense perhaps to have more than one and channel different content to different accounts and keeping each of them coherent to the main topic.  In my case the main business account maxgaet is only for my entrepreneurial activities while carismauk is used to promote my martial arts activities and saluswellness is tweeting about my other business venture.

Why re-tweeting?

To promote a tweet from a person you are following to your followers. People that ask this question usually don’t get the basic mechanism behind Twitter.  You can read what is written by people you are following: if you like what you see then re-tweet it so also your followers will get the same tweet.  If many people start re-tweeting a particular message you have what is called the viral effect and the original tweet, re-tweeted many times, become a very popular topic.

Twitter is a great marketing tool and is has been proven to be a great contributor to traffic generation.  If you found this post interesting perhaps the best thing you can do is tweet about it

Posted under Marketing, Social Networks