brithday – Electric Eclectic's Blog

Today, as its Electric Eclectics third birthday, (hip hip hooray), rather than post about books, or writing, or authorship, or ‘being Indie’, I thought I would share a useful tool with you.

It is one I often use when communicating ‘overseas’ via the ‘net’.

I am sure you will find it as useful and as helpful as I…

As the founder of Electric Eclectic, part of my job is to keep in contact with our authors, which is not as easy as it might appear.

One of the main reasons is, Electric Eclectic authors are dispersed around the world, from the USA, through Europe, right to the Antipodes, which means there is no suitable panoptic time to engage with everyone simultaneously.

Okay, there is UTC – Universal Time Coordinated, which is another term for GMT – Greenwich Mean Time. It has nothing to do with Greenwich village and everything to do with Greenwich in the UK, which is on the Zero Meridian, that’s 0° longitude meridian, also known, unsurprisingly as the Greenwich Meridian.

Now, to have a standardised time the whole world can utilize when communicating, especially when using the internet or worldwide web sounds a great idea… but for a few issues.

One is DST – Daylight Saving Time, or in the UK, BST – British Summer Time, (Other countries have various terms for the same thing), it is where the clocks are advanced for one hour in the spring.

The other is Local Time. Knowing which Local Time Zone you are in.

Considering the USA has 9 time zones, Canada 6, Europe 7, Asia 11, Russia 11, China 5, Australia 3 and New Zealand 2, you can see arranging an inclusive scheduled event on a global scale is not as easy as it may first appear.

I often query those who create Facebook events without considering the above. Those who do so are surely naïve if they do not understand the importance of looking further afield than their backyards?

Therefore, to schedule a live global meeting between, say, seventeen authors, who reside over four continents needs to be planned carefully.

One tool I have found to be immensely helpful is World Time Buddy https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ Here you can see your time and those of locations you select so you are in no doubt of what time it is, anywhere.

The ‘Event Widget’ is an excellent tool, schedule your event using the Widget and all those using World Time Buddy will have the time automatically displayed in your time AND there local time… you need do nothing, its automatic.

Bookmark ‘World Time Buddy’ now. There is even a mobile/cell app for Android and Apple.