Thanks Alan Yentob for reminding me what a great game it is - invented by an architect, and world champion is an architect from Thailand - shows that it is a game of strategy and that the meaning of the word really doesn’t count.

And yes, I did ‘breathe’ a deep sigh of relief when I could play QI and collect 44 points

Now time to find some more local players (anywhere on the axis between Manchester and London will do if the players are good enough). Apparently there’s a good pub in London where people play regularly, and I’m sure the rude words are welcome!

(When posts are too long for Facebook and way too long for Twitter, they end up here)

Teflon Tony liked to duck and dive his way round most people, and on that particular edition of the programme, he fended off a range of questions from irate students and their representatives, yet each time he gave his characteristic “what I say to you” or “well I’d like to help, but”.

Somehow, I managed to get him a bit more agitated, as he instantly snapped back saying that he “totally and utterly disagreed” with me. Granted, I had just compared him to a sofa salesman, by pointing out that the whole culture of study now, pay later would result in a glut of over-educated but unemployable students who were saddled in debt.

But now it looks like the government are finally realising that they can’t just spend their way out of the next education crisis. Nor can we keep pretending that having half the population go through a university course will be of benefit to the wider economy. Back then, the argument was that we needed more degrees so that we could compete with developing countries like India and China. Talk about a race to the bottom!

Now we will get the factory-farmed two year degree as standard. What should really matter in education is teaching people how to think for themselves. The best learners are the ones who want to learn and who can take their own initiative. Somehow I just don’t think that kind of entrepreneurial spirit is the sort of thing Old Labour want people to know about.

I am trying to create some extra large files, which are essentially for use in a slide show or on a website (typical resolution similar to a wide screen monitor, but still clear on, say, 1200×800px - ratio is 3:2). I also want to be able to print out right up to A1 size, and this ideally needs a pixel resolution of around 12,000 x 8,000.

Now I know flash has an export limit of 8,000 px in any direction, so that would be fine - or sticking to a clear ratio of 3:2, I’d be happy with 7,500 x 5,000 - or even 6,000 by 4,000, but when I enlarge anything above the current file size of 2,700 x 1,800, I just get around 40% of the right hand side of the image either wiped out completely, or text only with no graphics - and therefore useless. I also sometimes get the same problem towards the bottom of the file.

I don’t know if this is a particular problem with my version of Flash (Professional 8), with the file (it is just a simple diagram) or some other technical glitch, but I hope there’s someone out there who has encountered a similar problem and can offer some help.

Cheers

James

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.

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!

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.

But assuming the main way of getting twitter followers is to follow other people and get followed back, why should I place my trust in people who promise upto 400 new twitter followers per day? And why has everyone selected 400 as the magic number? My guess is that this is based on following 1,000 people each day in the hope that they will follow you back. This is the maximum amount that twitter will let people follow without bringing up a violation warning.

If you want to get followers, there are plenty of simple and free systems available, which don’t need any cash outlay to use. Oddly enough, the one I currently use, buzzom.com, was recommended by a friend, after I tried to use a wefollow plugin which didn’t offer any way of limiting the number of people I was following. This very quickly took me straight up to the 1,000 limit, which then gets really irritating, as there are other people I wanted to follow manually, but I could not do so for another 24 hours.

So if I admit to using an automated service, which could potentially add 1,000 new follows each day, why don’t I want to go this far?

Spam, Spam, Spam

Buzzom.com selects people to follow based on your user profile, and I presume it also looks at who you’re already following, and what kind of tweets you make. I’ll happily stand corrected here if I’m wrong, but for people I elect to follow personally, this still leaves a good chance of following people who are just out there to spam twitter with online MLM schemes or junk about making money online, when the only ‘product’ is a website which tells you how to make money online. I’m not into that - I want to build decent content, engage with people as I go, and talk about the experience. But even when I look for people to follow on behalf of Flightmapping.com, which is tagged up as a travel website, there are still a fair few spammers lurking.

100 at a time should be enough!

Every time I follow new people, I am likely to delve into their tweets, and read up on worthwhile blog posts they make. But I also have to do a fair bit of sifting through the spammers before I get back to reading the tweets of people I already know, and have chosen to follow manually. So for now, I think that working on 100 new follows at a time seems to be a reasonable balance. As I said in my last post about reaching the first milestone of 1,000 followers, I have guestimated that I need around 10,000 followers before things start ‘getting serious’. My initial expectation was to build this up slowly over a year or so, but this can clearly be done in around 3 months by getting 100 new followers each day. I just don’t think there are enough hours in each day to build up followers any faster than this, although of course, once you get established, there is no reason why you shouldn’t pick up lots more followers automatically, as you get established as a good quality contributor.

Balance follows and followers

Like it or not, twitter is always going to be governed by a certain element of  ’social proof’. If you are lucky or skilled enough to pick up loads of followers without having to make much effort, then fine, but otherwise it is best not to follow thousands of people until you start to get a few followers yourself. Having a massive imbalance just makes you look desperate.

Flushing Out

One key tool I like with buzzom.com is the ability to flush out users who haven’t followed you back. However, I think this is a bit easy to use too heavy handedly, as the default button to click is ‘flush and block’. Blocking out people just because they haven’t followed you back is needlessly harsh - not everyone uses a system to follow back people who follow them, and they may be away for a few days. Even so, it really isn’t worth getting so worked up about who follows you and who doesn’t - just remember SW-SW-SW: some will, some won’t, so what! When using the flush tool, it is key to pick out the people who’s tweets have been memorable, or who are known authority figures in their field (and not just because they tell you they are!).

I hope these are a few useful points about how to grow twitter followers in a sustainable manner - and no, I’m not making myself out to be an expert, just someone who wants to follow a steep learning curve, to help and be helped, and to use twitter as the great conversation tool that it is.

I have guestimated that I’ll need about 10,000 to start seeing any worthwhile difference. This is based on an assumption that 1% of people will respond to tweets about new blog posts, and that five new blog posts and site updates each day could generate 2 x 10,000 x 1% x 5 = 1,000 new visitors. At this stage, I am dealing with very crude maths, and I’ll adjust my forecasts as I go along. I’m interested to hear from other twitter users who are out there to build decent traffic to content related blogs, and not just to get people to sign up to online get rich quick programmes. How are you doing?

Compound Growth of an Online Business

On Sunday, I posted about how little I was actually earning from my blogs, and how I hoped to enter a steep learning curve in order to improve this. I’ve never been shy of writing content, but the social media arena has always been something I’ve never quite got round to entering. So I decided to hold my hands up and admit to being a total newbie, and see where things go from here. I have entered the steep learning curve of twitter, blog promotion and blog optimisation, and I am looking forward to enjoying the ride. So how realistic is it to expect to follow a growth curve which keeps on going up, and how can website builders ensure that their growth is exponential, rather than just solid and linear. Or is linear growth better?

Well, I have always found the prospect of compound growth far more exciting. Prior to turning my attention to blogging and offline print maps, I maintained a 60-70% annual growth rate on Flightmapping.com. Of course, the big question when anyone makes claims of massive growth is what level they are starting from. It doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that 1000% growth from £10 per month is still just £100 per month. But what if that is just the start, and within a few short months, you can double that figure again several times over?

Of course, the possibilities are endless - and there is no reason why a relative beginner can’t build up a substantial and stable income through building highly relevant content-focussed blogs - providing that there is a revenue stream which can be built from them. It is no use blogging about a subject which either has very few potential readers (although believe me, on the internet, there are people out there into just about anything), or which is just not going to generate much revenue (note to self - stay away from long political rants!).

So what are the dangers?

Judging by the endless streams of spam on twitter, the first pitfall has to be to go down the ‘I made millions of dollars online and so can you’ route - almost all of these systems are built on bringing more people in below you in the pyramid, and they just aren’t actually out there to generate any kind of sustainable income, except for those who are in right at the very start. Quality content blogs take time to build up, and this is the big question. Do you have the time to spare? Can you sit back and wait for your websites to grow? Well the good news here is that you will never have to sit around twiddling your thumbs - on the internet, everything can move like lightning, so it’s totally unlike opening a retail store and waiting for the punters to come in off the street. The simple question is - can you build up your website(s) quickly enough? Well, as long as you are starting off by building your website as a secondary income generator, the answer should always be yes. Expecting to become a millionaire overnight is almost certainly going to land you in disappointment.

So even if the rate of growth slows down as you get bigger, it still pays to go for explosive growth.

Happy blogging!

I don’t want to earn a fortune, I just want to double this amount every month for a year! Hang on a minute, after a few months, this starts to look quite juicy:

Oh, the powers of compound growth! Of course, doubling for the next few months should be child’s play, but who knows what will happen after that.

To clarify - I am looking at building up Adsense and perhaps other affiliate revenue from blogging alone, and not from Flightmapping.com, which is a dedicated travel website, albeit one built using very last millenium web 1.0 Architecture! Flightblogging.com is a standalone blog related to, but getting very little traffic from, Flightmapping.com, and my own personal blog is now building up slowly too. I also expect to re-instate a couple of other long standing blog projects, whereas the World Tube Map concept may evolve into an online discussion with some revenue opportunity, but the main aim of this is to actually sell physical printed maps, which don’t count as online revenue.

You might ask why current earnings are so low. The reasons are simple - I am a relative latecomer to the social networking and blogging scene, having put so much effort into building Flightmapping.com as a content portal, and focusing purely on SEO around the quantity of text, rather than playing the link building and social networking game. I am declaring my hand as a newbie in this field - and I want to learn - FAST!

Hopefully progress will develop with some good advice from friends old and new.

As always, keep your seat backs firmly upright, Pay Attention Meticulously, and enjoy the journey!