I am not really reactivating this blog, but its name, Social Blus Hamburg, has become, surprisingly, more relevant than ever in the last few weeks.

I am back in Hamburg, where I am working and this work has a lot to do with internet and social media, but from a new point of view. More on that later, when the time is right.

I just have to work on the blues side of things, since the Mobile Blues Club is closed for the winter. But now, living close to the Hauptbahnhof, I guess I will be able to go a bit more out for some live music.

By the way, on the 4th of February there will be the Blues Celebration at the Fabrik, with Steve Baker, Abi Wallenstein and Martin Roettger as Blues Culture plus friends. I'll be there.

For the mean time, here a great video I found from Dave Matthews Band's concert in Rio last year, with Gabriel Grossi doing a great solo on chromatic harmonica around the 8th minute.

This is a short post. I was thinking about all the cases where people were fired because they published something on Facebook thinking only friends would see and forgot that work colleagues or even the boss were connected to them. Or when they were tagged by friends in not very complimenting pictures.

First of all, I believe you have to be careful with what you do in real life and on Facebook alike. Don’t want a picture of you drunk in a frat party to pop up on Facebook? Don’t get drunk in a frat party. It is not about Facebook, it is about you, what you choose to do and what you believe is cool or OK. If you do what you think is OK, than you won’t have a problem if it gets published, regardless where.

The second thing is that, in many cases, people didn’t get fired because they got drunk in a frat party. What you do in your own free time is none of your boss’ business, and, usually, bosses know so. I read some cases where people when to a party on Sunday, got wasted and called in sick on Monday. Well, the problem is not getting wasted, it is calling in sick when you are not. And that’s a lie. And that is reason to be fired. So, again, social media is not the cause for being fired, but just another way that the real reason for such was found out. In Brazil we say that lies have short legs (they don’t go far). Internet shortened their legs a little bit more.

I am doing this mostly for my father (@jbresslau), but I thought that this how-to might be useful to others.

Blocking someone on Twitter is simple enough, but maybe some pictures make it even more clear. There are mainly two ways of doing this and I will show you both.

Through the followers list

First, navigate to your Twitter home page at www.twitter.com. If necessary, log in.

Click on your number of followers, as shown below.

You will get to your followers list below. There, identify the Twitter user you want to block and click on the gear button to the right. A drop down menu will appear, click on “block [username]”.

You will get the following dialog box, please confirm.

Ready, you have done it.

Through the user’s profile page

Go to www.twitter.com/[username] or click on the user’s badge somewhere in Twitter. you will get to a page like the following one:

Click on the linke “block [username]” highlighted above. Confirm your choice on the following page.

Done!

Unblocking someone

One way to do this is to navigate to their profile page and click on the unblock link there.

There you are, you can love each other again.

Now go out and spread your twitter love.

This time the Social Media Club Hamburg meeting took place at the Hamburg offices of the Public Relations firm Weber Shandwick. Today is said to have been the hottest day in Hamburg this summer (the temperature in my room is still 28°C) so the idea of holding the get-together on the building's terrace was a good one. The view was certainly very nice, looking towards the city from the harbour.
Jörg and Mark from Weber Shandwick told us about their experience in using social media for the promotion of the first Android phone in the German market, T-Mobile's G1. I forgot to ask them if they had any for testing available, still ;)
From my perspective, the most interesting aspect of the presentation and the questions at the end was the insights into the relationship between a PR firm and its client and how actors at both sides act.
I made notes of the presentation using my Livescribe Pulse Smartpen and hope that the audio quality is good enough to publish it as a pencast. Let's see if the experiment works out, I have preliminary permission to do so.
After the presentation we enjoyed more of the summer evening on the patio with drinks and barbeque German style: sausages.
I left the event with Jan and Alex from Atenta and we ended up discussing how people will be using their mobile devices in 5 to 10 years. An interesting discussion involving Pokens, near field communication, interfaces, the increasing availability of computing power and storage, different stereotypical technology user profiles, Open Office and open source software in start-ups.
A warm day brings, usually, heavy rains; and I got caught in it, arriving pretty wet home. Nevertheless, it was a great evening meeting interesting people and getting to know acquaintances better.

Oh, by the way, have you checked the 2 posts in the blog series I am writing at the Wollmilchsau blog about my job search? Part 1 and 2. In German, I hope you enjoy.

On the patio, before the presentation

Jörg and Mark presenting in old-school style.

Very good attendance, as usual

More patio, this time with food

Well, almost.

I just received another newsletter from the http://www.mba-channel.com/ website. It is a relatively new website, started this year, and it has developed nicely.
What I like most in that website are the reports they write about different topics with a very critical view. From time to time they actually critic or put some school in check, which I think is very healthy.

One of the things that I found out during the MBA is that there is MBA reality and what I call the MBA "media hype". MBA schools are very clever in using the media for publicity. Of course. Positive reports go hand-in-hand with paid advertisements, as is usual in any industry. This gives MBA candidates a skewed impression of how an MBA develops, what one can expect of it, the job market reality afterwards. This gets reinforced by the fact that those owning an MBA title, like myself, will very seldomly critique the title and its institutions in a negative way. After all, we don't want to diminish the value of our degrees, do we? We have to care for our brand.
I continue to be extremely happy with my MBA experience, don't get me wrong. I met a lot of great people, visited interesting places, learned a lot, had lots of fun and, all going well, will double my salary in February.

Anyway, I just though of writing quickly to endorse the mba-channel.com website, which has also an English version.

Ah, they also tried to build an MBA community, which is commendable, but it hasn't really picked up yet. Maybe it is because they are offering features like blogs, photo albums, polls, etc., that people already use in other sites which are not MBA-specific. Maybe, instead of trying to create a whole new community environment, they might focus on getting content from elsewhere together, or focusing user interaction around their best features: their specialised stories and information.

Thanks to Sascha, MBS FTMBA08, now there is a network for the Mannheim Business School on Facebook.

If you have an e-mail @mba-mannheim.com, you can join. 

Go to:

• Settings
• Networks
• Type "Mannheim Business School" in the "Newtork name:" field
• Fill in the details
• Click on "join network"
• Check your MBS e-mail for a confirmation link

That's it. 

BTW, I highly recommend you to send an e-mail to the IT guys and ask them to forward your MBS e-mail to your personal account. I use it with Gmail, it works like a charm.

I have been reading about Disqus for some time now and tried to give it a shot.

Disqus is a comment system for blogs which should make commenting here more interesting.

Please, try it out and let me know what you think. From this post on, new posts will use Dis qus.

Since mid-August I had been locked out of blogger.com. Today, after almost a week without posting, I found out that my login at blogger.com works again. No idea why, no word from the not so nice people at blogger.com.

Funny that this happens now, because I have been thinking about this blog and its future. What is its purpose and who my audience is or should be.

When I first started blogging, it was a way to keep friends and family informed, and it was relatively private. I had a robots.txt file which prevented google to list it. It was written in Portuguese. And I passed the link to selected friends and family.

The MBA changed the aim of this blog. It certainly changed the audience I had in mind for it. I still wanted to keep family and friends informed. Luckily, they are all smart and well educated, so it was possible to change the language to English ;-) This was necessary to include three additional groups of readers: future MBA colleagues,  potential employers and future MBA candidates.

I am happy with the results. My MBA colleagues, their relatives and members of the 2009 class of the Mannheim MBA told me they read this. My family and friends certainly do. And, if your google "Fernando Bresslau" you find this blog followed by my LinkedIn and Xing profiles.

But soon I will be definitely employed. And I have been far from the MBA life for a couple of months already. So the audience of my blog will revert to what it was before: family and friends. With one big change: more of my friends now don't speak Portuguese, so the language will continue to be English.

I will certainly blog about my new job, the industry and the trends. But this will be on a blog separate from my personal blog. I could be blogging, starting in February 2009, about the chemical, automotive or wind power, depending where I'll land. And I would then blog with the interests of the company in mind. But this is the future, let's see.

I was also thinking about the declining frequency of my posts here. Sure, I have a project at DHL Brussels which keeps me busy 8 hours a day, job search and career decisions get another chunk of my attention and other beautiful things in life also captivate me, Brussels is an interesting city.

I certainly have transfered much of my broadcasting to a new tool, twitter. Actually, twitter linked to my Facebook status, through which I reach most of my MBA colleagues. Interestingly enough, Luli Radfharer, a professor at the arts and communication school at the University of São Paulo, whose courses I took in 2002 and 2003, twittered about an article stating that blogging was passé. I kept in touch with Luli over all these years through our blogs at first, and now through twitter. And I can see where Paul Boutin, the article's author, is going. He has good observations on how blogging has emerged and developed, and what we can expect from personal communication (or broadcasting) in the near future.

I will continue to blog. But I suggest you to follow me on twitter or on facebook. I will certainly be more present there.

And if this article is a bit confusing, please excuse me. It has been a long day, a long week, a long month and a long year. Can't wait to go to Brazil on Christmas and take the whole month of January off.