James Avery’s blog

November 5, 2009

A serious point about the Cowfilms joke thread on twitter

Filed under: Blogging, Internet, Politics, Social Networking, Time Management — Tags: , , , — admin @ 12:22 am

For anyone who isn’t a regular twitter user, this post will probably make little sense, so I’ll try and unravel it slowly, rather than at the 140 characters maximum speed of light that twitter operates at.

Each day, twitter lists top ‘trending topics’, which could be on any subject - some serious, some not so serious. The cowfilms thread is definetely on the silly side - basically, make any connection between a film title and a cow related theme.

Here are a few of my favourite 10 so far:

  1. Moo Cowsand and One: A Steak Udderssey - @julianyon
  2. The Cud, the Bad and the Ungulate - @ginpitwarrior
  3. Bonfire of the Vachequirits
  4. Friesian Loathing In Las Vegas - @scoop_cooper
  5. 24 Hour Patty People (featuring Happy Moodays)
  6. The Cudfather
  7. Cry Friesian - @davidschneider (of Alan Partridge fame)
  8. Methane, myself and Irene @rumdoodle
  9. There Will Brie Cud
  10. Ruminator 2 : Cudgement Day

So what’s so great about this obviously pointless and frivolous waste of time? Well, actually, if they say that laughter is the best medicine, then this thread is the best stuff in the cabinet. In some respects, it feels like the internet can turn into one big pub conversation - yet no-one has to pay a penny to get their round in, and there’s no side effects to this humour pill, apart from a little bit of procrastination.

Now I know that I’m part of the fortunate digital elite, and that I can dip in and out of twitter as I please - some workplaces have quite wisely cracked down on internet usage, and not everyone has the internet at home.

But there’s another serious side to all this - today’s big twitter topic may have been humour related (there’s another thread going about blaming everything on P Diddy), but at other times, the top trends are politically related, as we saw when the UK truly dominated the twitter charts two weeks ago when Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time. For non-British readers, Nick Griffin is the leader of the far-right, racially motivated, British National Party.

Another top trending topic today has been the elections in Iran. Now there was a lot of media attention back when the elections were first run, and a lot of people were able to get their opinions out on twitter. This time round, on the 30th anniversary of the US embassy hostage crisis, we’re hearing calls of support for the USA, rather than the usual death chants.

So, let’s say long live twitter, and long live the American dream which created it, all the way from the farms of Nebraska.

November 2, 2009

Pushing the balance limits on twitter

Filed under: Social Networking, random rants — Tags: , — admin @ 10:26 am

OK, I’ll admit it - my vanity has the better of me, and over the last couple of days, I’ve been trying to grow my twitter following as rapidly as possible. I know that twitter sets an initial ‘ceiling’ of following 2,000 people, and my two main accounts (one in my own name, the other for Flightmapping) were both approaching the 2,000 followers level, so I was curious to see how much further I could go.

No of course, all these nerdy statistics shouldn’t really matter, but I love numbers, and I like to find out how things work. So I pushed both accounts until I got the warnings, and then worked out the ratios. This is what I got:

  • Flightmapping - following 2147 & 1951 followers - 91% followers : follows.
  • Avery_James - following 2052 & 2251 followers - also 91% followers : follows.

Now I could have just looked at other accounts and seen what sort of ratios other large users get - does this figure go up or down as the number of followers gets bigger? Would twitter want to publish that? Probably not, they don’t seem to like people using third party software to grow their follower base, but then again ‘organic’ sites have never liked anything automatically coming along and ruining their systems, but there always will be cat and mouse here.

This is what twitter officially say on the matter:

What is aggressive following?

Following users is a way to see their updates in your timeline. If an account seems interesting, feel free to follow it! Many Twitter users receive email notifications when someone follows their account or check out the profiles of new followers to see if they share common interests. If some accounts are aggressively or indiscriminately following hundreds of accounts just to garner attention, it makes Twitter a less-nice place to hang out.

So wouldn’t it be easier just to follow a certain number of new accounts, wait for a certain proportion of them to follow back, and then unfollow those that don’t? Well, again, twitter have something to say about this:

What is aggressive follow churn?

If you decide to follow someone and then change your mind later, that’s fine! You can just visit the person’s profile page and then un-follow them. Aggressive follow churn is when an account repeatedly follows and un-follows large numbers of users. This may be done to get lots of people to notice them, to circumvent a Twitter limit, or to change their follower-to-following ratio.

 So the usual rules about common sense would appear to apply. Sure, it’s nice to watch those numbers tick over and see your following grow, but what’s the end game? I think it is time to get back to work!

November 1, 2009

How long could you live without money?

Filed under: Blogging, Internet, Making Money Online — Tags: , — admin @ 3:41 am

OK, let’s take a break from any posts about making money online. How long could you live without the stuff for?

I’m just skimming through a blog written by Mark Boyle, who is approaching the end of living for a year without money - a concept he terms as the ‘freeconomy‘. I’ll have to admit that there’s a lot that I like about some of the basic ideas of the Freeconomy - in essence, the idea that not everything is about money money money - but for me, this is always something to exist alongside our greedy capitalist world, not as a replacement for it.

Apparently, Mark’s big conversion was from watching ‘Gandhi’ during his final year as an economics student at university. I think that’s when many of us started our conversion away from wishy-washy idealism and towards how things work in the real world. Still, every day without spending money is a day when an internet marketer can’t fail to improve his or her bank balance - but I guess not spending money, and just not using it full stop, are two separate concepts. I still prefer the former, but it doesn’t take an idealist or a beatle to tell you that money isn’t everything, and that all you need is love - most entrepreneurs and self improvement manuals will tell you that aswell. You just might have to fork out a small amount of cash to pay for them.

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