In a move that reflects the increasingly prickly debate over the role of social media in the workplace, Nasa has ordered the Phoenix Mars lander to cut back on its social media activities and ‘get on with some real work’.

Since Phoenix landed in the northern polar region of Mars, scientists at the mission centre at the University of Arizona have become increasingly perturbed by the remote explorer’s obsessive use of Twitter and other social media tools to keep its followers up to date on arm movements, location and the new Windows 7 UI.

“We tried asking Phoenix about the icy substrate observed last Thursday,” says Alan McEwan, Communications Director, Nasa. “But all it wanted to talk about was the Yahoo reorg and the latest valuation of LinkedIn.”

McEwan is increasingly concerned about the impact of social media on the lander’s productivity. “It’s there to dig deep into the Martian soil and search for evidence of microscopic life. Instead it has posted yet another set of dull snaps of rocks and stuff. And sent 250 updates to Twitter. Viking’s photos were rubbish as well, but at least we knew it wasn’t wasting time obsessing about the number of its followers.”

McEwan has warned Phoenix that it needs to get back to billable work. “Who the heck is interested in entries like ‘I’m looking forward to moving my arm today.’ The wretched machine is posting more fuzzy photos than a whistle-blower in an iPhone factory.”

In response, Phoenix says that it needs to stay abreast of the latest developments in social media as microblogging, RSS and community platforms will play a critical role in future exploration of the solar system. Speaking to TNM Phoenix says: “Interplanetary Exploration 2.0 has a secure business model and a clear roadmap towards the monetisation of content.”  Pressed further to describe this activity, Phoenix said, “It’s not possible to say exactly when or how, but Robert Scoble says so, so it must be true."

One of the biggest challenges facing a technology writer is making the abstract as real and immediate as possible. Bits, bytes, networks, software, data. Scalability, security, availability and usability. The list goes on. Back in the good old days we used to send writers down to the Metia IT room and get them to look at servers occupying measurable space in the physical world. Which was fine until virtualisation technology started taking over the data centre abstracting everything.

So we'll take every opportunity to get a clear view of what we're writing about. If you can't pick it up, you should be able to look at it. Get your clients and their customers to send you physical architecture diagrams, schematics and screen shots. Or use your imagination. See the world through the eyes of a field engineer or a police sergeant as they switch on a 3G mobile device.

One of our writers took this approach one step further when writing an article on a new global logistics customer. In the space of two paragraphs she had to describe the shipping gateway at a major American airport. Using one of the popular mapping applications she was able to zoom down to the docking ports, study the railway link to the airport and get a clear idea of the scale of the operation. Rendering buildings in 3D really put things into focus - the copy was even sharper.

By the way we tried this out with Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth. Google was slightly faster to the address, Microsoft had better images, especially in 3D.

I really like the NHS Choices magazine that I picked up at my local General Practitioner recently.

Cover up the logo in the top right-hand corner and you could be looking at any of the mass-market lifestyle magazines that have dominated newsagents in the past five years or so.

The headlines: "Drinking Nearly Cost Me My Son", "Does Size Really Matter" are straight out of the Heat/Grazia school of copywriting. And the articles are well written too. Most are tabloid-style dramas involving all the usual suspects including drink, sex, food and dieting.

Of course it's a smart move to target a largely female audience with a handbag-sized format magazine. In most families, women whether choosing to work or look after their children, have a significant influence when it comes to health and other lifestyle choices.

As well as being a reminder of the power of the mass-media to influence attitudes and social behaviour - no surprise that the cover star is a soap-star actress - it should also shake the rest of us out of our Web 2.0 bubble.

If you want to see how far the mass Internet audience is behind the FriendFeed generation, take a look at the www.nhs.uk web site. The interactive element isn't bad, but will it have as much influence as a handbag format magazine? I doubt it.

We all know the impact of geocoding on the future of the internet. Just see the noise as Microsoft switches its UK mapping to Multimap.

And while Nokia and its peers play catch up with the Apple iPhone, the device 'most likely to' is the nuvifone, Garmin's expensive bet that GPS will become as indispensable as SMS, MP3 and Facebook - sorry FriendFeed - on your mobile.

Which is why the decision of the New York Times to code its stories so that they can be added as a layer on Google Earth is so significant. If GPS becomes a commodity found on most mobile devices, linking media to location makes perfect sense.  

But there's more to this than simply spreading the news. It also establishes the New York Times as a global brand in a completely new way. Take a virtual spin around the planet and it's the only media corporate logo that pops up everywhere from Santiago to Minnesota to Tokyo. What's more, it inevitably connects the brand to centres of government, finance, and war zones - places that are largely familiar to most readers.

It's a smart move for an organisation that has perhaps only two or three other competitors as the global newspaper of record. Don't be surprised to see the Godfathers of The London Times, or perhaps The Guardian, in talks with a Google competitor. Oh.

Most scientists agree that the modern human brain evolved to cope with social groups of 40, 50 or even 100 people.

So it's hardly surprising that social anthropologists have turned their attention to social networking where one person can have hundreds, or even thousands of friends. Here's a good article in the New York Times focusing on the parallels between social networks and tribal societies.

The focus on the spoken word is a critical one. The modern human brain evolved about 150,000 years ago, but the earliest forms of writing date back only 6,000 years or so. No surprise that this coincided with the first large settlements in Mesopotamia and modern day Turkey to ensure that laws and commandments were understood by the wider population.

Which gets you thinking about all those alpha bloggers and twitterers vying for status. Robert Scoble today announced that he has 17,000 followers. Note the difference there between a Facebook friend and a Twitter follower. Scoble and his peers are in a position of power. They control, influence and disseminate information. Above all, they claim a deeper connection with a phenomenon that few of us truly understand.

There may be better places to look, but I'm increasingly finding that my first page view of the day is Scoble's Twitter feed. For all the noise ("I'm on my way to the airport" etc.) I usually find at least three or four clues that set me linking through to the main technology and social media topics of the day. High priest indeed.

When it comes to language, most writers have unpredictable likes and dislikes. You never know when a harmless looking word such as 'ability' is going to make your otherwise placid editor foam at the mouth in rage.

This week the Metia editorial and content team drew up a lexicon of shame on our whiteboard.

Most of the old favourites are there: ‘leverage’, ‘commence’, ‘massively’, ‘learnings’ and ‘non-efficient’.

More recent additions include ‘paradigm’, ‘wellness’ and ‘place shaping’ - whatever that is. And right at the top, ‘unclarity’. Many thanks to The Most Reverend and Right Honourable the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury for that one.

It's a flat out Friday afternoon. No news there. But it does mean that this first post is much shorter than I would have preferred. Still, brevity goes hand-in-hand with wisdom. That's my line, and I'm sticking with it.

Reason for this rush? Another client request to source a writer who can draft content in an unlisted language. Last week Polish and Dutch, this week Russian and Turkish. Why bother going to all that trouble? Couldn't a translation agency take the English draft and rework the copy as required?

At Metia we prefer to use our Global Writer Network because it means that we can exercise a bit more control over proceedings for our clients. Not least because some of the English copy that comes our way, once translated from the original French, German or Mandarin, loses its way in translation.

I need to get back to my pals at one of the Russian press agencies. In the meantime, here are a couple of examples of translations into English that have come our way in the past.

Sometimes the copy betrays shameless bragging on behalf of the client. If only cluster servers had been around to increase operational efficiency and return on investment in the Nile Valley two millennia ago: “2000 years ago the ancient Egyptians didn't have any server clusters and had to laboriously make paper from mulberry tree bark or papyrus. Nowadays, paper manufacturing is significantly easier as it is automated: for instance, Acme AG in Oberkirch, Baden, controls its machinery with a number of XXXX servers…”

And this one turns the surreal dial right up to 11. “Comparing apples with apples is very difficult in that environment, even trying to define what an apple is, is extremely challenging. Acme Ltd has taken advantage of a new enterprise application layer that dictates how the system will be structured. This defines what an apple is. They will have a table of apples.”

If your head is aching, be reassured that we managed to tease clear meaning out of both examples in the final drafts, no tree bark required...