All posts by tc

Twitter: My part in Ian Hislop’s only tweet

thoughtcat, , ,

As a long time fan of topical TV comedy quiz Have I Got News For You, I was tickled to see in this week’s extended edition an item about Twitter. In one of the bits not broadcast in the initial 30-minute show last Friday night, the delightful Kirsty Young pulled the “one-armed bandit of news” to reveal a photo of Stephen Fry checking his phone. The news item it referred to, as the fabulous Ross Noble correctly identified, was Fry’s recent tete-a-twit with one of his followers who had called his tweets “boring”, resulting in the bipolar Fry threatening to quit Twitter altogether. Fry of course did no such thing and the two were back on tweeting terms the next day. (How this came to be national news incidentally baffles me, but that’s by-the-by.)

At the end of the item, Young contrived a link to another celebrity tweet, this one supposedly by HIGNFY stalwart Ian Hislop saying he “got caught shoplifting in French Connection”. The joke is, it’s not by *the* Ian Hislop but someone passing himself off as him. Some of this guy’s tweets are quite funny (the one in question among them) but some of them are clearly not the work of the editor of Private Eye.

I first noticed the fake Hislop’s Twitter feed back in May of this year and, fairly alarmed at the fact that the faker had nearly 9,000 followers, not all of whom would realise the feed was a fraud, decided to drop Hislop a line at the magazine to bring it to his attention. I had a nice email back from him asking how he could “snap up” the username “realianhislop” which I’d suggested he do to ensure he got himself an official Twitter presence. I wrote back explaining how to do it, and on 1st June the Real Ian Hislop signed up and tweeted: “I am the real Ian Hislop. Anyone else claiming to be me twittering is, unsurprisingly, a fake. This should be my only tweet. Thankyou.”

This tweet was shown in all its 140-character glory on the other night’s HIGNFY, raising a modest titter. Hislop commented, “I was told that if I did it, the person pretending to be me, who has millions of followers – more even than the Dalai Lama – would go away. But he didn’t.” I didn’t tell Hislop this would happen, but I do note that the faker hasn’t tweeted since the end of May, so something seems to have happened (whether he was explicitly told to cease and desist, I don’t know). The irony though is that in the past five months, the fake Hislop has managed to *increase* his followers to over 15,000! This compares with the real Hislop’s more sedate 200 follower count (albeit up from 177 when I first checked on Monday) – not that it means much anyway because he’s not tweeting, even though that’s the whole joke.

I’d like to think this incident demonstrates that even if you’re the real McCoy, nobody will follow you on Twitter if you don’t tweet, as that’s the point of the exercise. You don’t even need to tweet very often – it’s the content that counts, as the excellent Justin Halpern of @shitmydadsays fame goes to show, having amassed over 750,000 followers in a few months with just a few dozen brilliant tweets. (On that note there was a lovely little news item on the BBC site yesterday reporting that Halpern has landed a TV show on the back of his feed, the coy Auntie Beeb managing not to mention its name. I bet Halpern is wishing he’d called it “stuffmydadsays” instead now.)

Anyway I am happy to have encouraged Ian Hislop (the real one) to use Twitter, even if he has only tweeted the once, and even happier that HIGNFY used it on the show. (I should own up that I might have *slightly* emailed Hat Trick Productions back in the summer to bring the whole thing to their attention, but I shouldn’t claim full responsibility as I’m sure they would’ve been aware of it anyway.) You can see the whole hilarious exchange (Noble riffs on his own Twitter experience brilliantly) on the video below between 6:00 and 9:17 (sorry, I’d love to have the facilities to edit the vid to be able to post just the relevant 3-minute section, but I don’t, so if anyone’s offering please let me know, as the item is well deserving of isolation for the Twitter archives!)

 

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New blog entry: Old blog entries

thoughtcat

As Thoughtcat stalwarts will know, I’m currently migrating all my original blog entries from a series of clunky hand-“crafted” html pages to WordPress. I began Thoughtcat in January 2003 and since starting the transfer process this summer have got up to about half way through May of that year. For reasons known best to myself (modesty perhaps, as unlikely as that seems) I haven’t been commenting much on it on this end of the blog or on Twitter, which I update far more often, so as of now I’ll be tweeting the old blog entries as they’re transferred.

It’s interesting to rediscover things you wrote about six years ago; my first ever blog post on 10th January 2003 concerned a financial analyst’s observation that a war in Iraq “could be good for ISA business”, and a few days later I wrote about taking part in the Stop the War march, the first such protest I’d ever been on. The Iraq war politicised me like nothing else – I didn’t intend for it to happen but Iraq has ended up the biggest category in my tag cloud. That said, I’d forgotten about many of the stories I blogged about at the time, such as Robin Cook’s resignation or the ways in which the three main party leaders delivered their TV addresses about the war.

Thoughtcat wasn’t strictly a political blog, though – there have always been lighthearted things, such as the “miracle” of a map of Africa appearing in Nelson Mandela’s palm-print and a pithy analysis of TV cookery, interspersed with links to interviews with writers like Dan Rhodes and Sue Townsend and other cultural nuggets.

On a more mundane level it’s also interesting also to see which links still work and which don’t; almost every link from the Guardian and BBC still goes to the original page, as those sites have excellent archive facilities; interesting to see that the old BBC page layouts are unchanged whereas the Guardian’s content appears in the template of their new site. I’m disappointed though that every Independent link now redirects only to their home page, so those stories are effectively lost, as I haven’t got time to search the site to see if the story now appears under some new web address or if it’s just been removed altogether. Then again, the Independent is a shadow of what it used to be anyway, so I’m not too fussed about it; messing about with their URL/archiving system is their loss.

Many of the blog posts comment on two or three completely different subjects, separated by asterisks. This isn’t something I’d do now, but at the time I had in mind the format of a daily newspaper column, where someone like Simon Hoggart would spend a few paragraphs on this topic and then a few paragraphs on that topic without feeling the need to link them thematically. Thus you get some rather odd things like one blog entry about some newly uncovered Philip Larkin verses, a review of the new Matrix film and a few words about the Eurovision song contest. (Note to self: if Eurovision was about music, why didn’t they call it Eurosound?) It did occur to me to create separate new blog entries for the different items in such a post but again I don’t have time, and anyway I like the original format, weird as it sometimes is.

One aspect of the original posts has changed however. The old entries didn’t usually have titles, only the date on which I was writing at that particular time; again I looked at the blog then as more of a diary, which after all is where the word blog comes from. Thus in the new system I’ve had to make up titles for the old entries, which sometimes feels contrived and is often pretty difficult given the eclectic nature of some of the posts as described above. Several of them I’ve just titled “Stuff in the news”, which may lack imagination but is at least honest…

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11 essential tips for promoting your event on Twitter

thoughtcat, ,

If you’re running an event or conference, why not set up a Twitter account for it? You may of course already have a Twitter account for your firm or brand – so why set up a separate feed? True, it can be more work to update and maintain several accounts, and you might also argue that it dilutes your brand to separate an event you’re running from your main account. But it can also work in your favour, as people who are attending the event can “follow” it, not only because it’s an easy way for them to receive updates on it but also to show their support and interest. Here are my suggestions for things you can do to build an effective event Twitter feed. (Several of these points also apply to any kind of commercial Twitter feed/brand.)

1) Choose a good username as close as possible to the name of the event you’re running. In fact, when you’re planning your event, try to think of a name for it (or a version of the name) that is catchy and Twitter-friendly. ScienceWeekUK springs to mind – you know immediately that it’s about science, it lasts a week and it’s in the UK. Remember Twitter usernames are limited to 15 characters. Try not to use acronyms unless they’re memorable – NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) was invented in 1999, way before Twitter.

2) For your picture, use your event logo. Again, when first designing your logo, try to pick something that’s going to stand out not only when it’s on a huge banner outside your venue but also when it’s displaying as a mere 24×24 pixels (the size of the user pictures on a follower’s Twitter feed page). Look at other users’ pictures – you’ll find it surprising how distinctive many of them remain even in those dimensions. If you can’t manage that, find one element of your logo that people will associate with your event/brand/firm. Avoid using long text in your picture – words longer than around five letters will display in a font too small to read in 24×24.

3) Edit your design colours to match the branding of your event, or of your company. Avoid whacky colour combinations; yellow text on a pink background may make you “stand out” but people do want to actually be able to read what you have to say. You may argue that colours don’t matter since your tweets will end up in your followers’ chosen colour schemes on their own home page or Twitter client, but remember you’re trying to attract followers in the first place, and if the first thing they see about you is some garish feed page they can’t read they’ll go elsewhere. You don’t have to use a Twitter standard background image: instead design a skyscraper banner with the key details of your event (logo, title, strapline/slogan, venue, dates, web address) to be 100 pixels wide and 768 pixels tall (for best results use a regular 768×100 horizontal banner turned 90 degrees counter-clockwise). This will mean those details will always be visible to the vast majority of web users in the left sidebar of your Twitter home page regardless of users’ screen resolution. Although most people do have wider screens now than they did a few years ago, many users who may be interested in your feed are still viewing in 1024×768, so using a larger banner risks it being obscured behind your actual Twitter updates and the bottom cut off. Finally, don’t tile your banner! It’ll look horrible!

4) If you don’t already know, use Twitter’s search and “find people” features to see whether any of your event sponsors/partners are already tweeting, and follow them. Drop a line to your contact at the sponsor and let them know you have a Twitter feed, to be sure they follow you in return.

5) Also do a search for keywords and hashtags related to your event and follow users who tweet those keywords frequently, or who are running similar companies or events of their own. Listen to what those users have to say, especially about events they are attending which are similar to yours. One user who followed an event Twitter I was involved with complained about the venue being difficult to navigate; bear that sort of feedback in mind during your planning/research stage and be prepared to address those kinds of public comments – doing so will enhance the bond between you and your delegates/customers/audience; not doing so will alienate you from them.

6) A key question – what are you actually going to tweet? What is there to say about your event, apart from the fact that it’s happening at Great Yarmouth Town Hall next Tuesday afternoon? Plenty! Has a date or venue changed? Tweet it. Registration deadline looming? Tweet it (several times). Earlybird or other concessions available? Tweet them. Great new speaker come on board? Tweet their name and other events they’ve spoken at. New sponsor? Tweet it (that’ll keep the sponsor happy too). Press coverage? Tweet a link to the online article. (You will of course be wanting to update your website with most of these things, but when an update doesn’t necessitate a major announcement on your site, a tweet usefully fills that gap.) Obviously you’ll want to tweet when the event is about to happen – only a week to go! Three days! Two! It starts tomorrow!!! During the event itself (if you have time) you can be tweeting live about today’s programme, what sessions are available, feedback from ground level. After the event has happened you can tweet links to reports by yourself and others, or when conference proceedings or video presentations are available. No actual news for the moment? Break down the facts about your event into bite-sized chunks (programme, location, purpose, dates) and tweet each one as a standalone update, promoting or highlighting whatever aspects of the event you want to at any given time.

7) Having said that, as with all Twitter feeds, don’t over- or under-tweet. Tweeting is always a fine balance – too many updates and users become swamped and stop following you; too few and they won’t be encouraged to follow you in the first place as you have nothing to say. Users tend to be less keen to follow people who don’t tweet regularly (the average is 4 tweets a day, but even one a day is better than none, or 20). Frequency and number of tweets is one of the main criteria, along with content itself, that people use when deciding whether to follow someone for the first time.

8) No time to tweet? Get a free account with SocialOomph (formerly TweetLater) which allows you to schedule tweets in advance, so instead of having to find time to tweet something every day you can sit down for 20 minutes on Monday morning and line up a whole week’s worth of tweets, then sit back and get on with your work. You can also save tweets as templates with this system so you can repeat the same tweet or variations on a theme without having to retype them. Try not to tweet exactly the same thing all the time though, as that also turns users off. Remember that you should still tweet anything manually that comes up unexpectedly in real time e.g. venue/speaker/date change.

9) When tweeting, if you can’t contrive an update to contain a keyword you want to get across in order to catch the attention of your audience, add it at the end as a hashtag – these are keywords preceded by # e.g. #sustainability #climate #design – these automatically turn into links that when clicked, become a set of search results matching the hashtag. Hashtags and keywords get picked up by users who are generally interested in these topics and so may take an interest in your event, and not only attend but also re-tweet your tweets, which is a major way of circulating info about your event/brand.

10) As much as possible include a link in each tweet to a page on your website that expands on what the tweet says. If you’ve followed my tips in point 6, you will be updating your website with any actual news, so each tweet consists of a summary of that update with a link to the relevant page. Links take up a lot of room in tweets so you’ll need to shorten them; use a client such as Echofon (formerly Twitterfox) to automatically truncate long links, otherwise you’ll find you have to manually paste URLs in to a service such as TinyURL to get the shortened version. Or, if your website puts out an RSS feed, you can save yourself time on both tweeting and linking by signing up with Twitterfeed and having it broadcast each update from the RSS feed as an individual tweet – so that updating your site automatically generates a tweet, which in turn contains a link back to the item you just updated. If your site doesn’t put out an RSS feed, look into developing a blog with something like WordPress or, if you don’t like content management systems, simply email your content to Posterous which you can easily configure to “autopost” to Twitter, Facebook and your regular blog.

11) And finally, having said all of that, don’t even think of setting up a Twitter account for your event (or your company, come to that) if you can’t (a) get your head around at least some of the above or (b) devote the time to tweeting (or setting up an automatic feed as in points 8 and 10). Many Twitter accounts start off with great intentions only to fizzle out when the user finds he or she hasn’t got the time to maintain it. Having a Twitter account with hardly any followers or tweets can weaken your brand; worst of all, if you haven’t got time to listen to what your followers (and even people who are not followers) are saying about you, you won’t know if they are criticising it – in which case you should be replying publicly to address their concerns – or praising it, in which case you should be replying publicly to thank them!

(c) Thoughtcat 2009 ~ Digg this

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Cooper “gutted” at being passed over for “Wave”

thoughtcat, ,

One of the UK’s most influential technology people this afternoon described himself as “gutted” after not receiving an invitation from Google to participate in the internet firm’s exclusive new Wave product beta.

“I signed up to take part in the beta months ago,” complained Richard Cooper. “I didn’t hear anything after that, and then this morning I read on the BBC website that Google were sending out invitations from 4pm UK time.

“It’s now nearly five o’clock and I’ve heard nothing. I’m gutted.”

The web content manager went on: “The Daily Telegraph listed me this week as Britain’s 23rd most influential technology person. You would have thought that if anyone was going to be invited, it would be me.”

A spokesperson for Google commented, “We would love to have invited Richard but unfortunately we only had 22 invitations and they all went out to the first 22 most influential people in UK technology. Richard was unfortunately just not influential enough on this occasion.

“Nonetheless, each of those invitations allows the user to invite five friends, so hopefully one of those recipients will be kind enough to ask Richard to take part in our beta trial.”

Richard Cooper is 38.

Jolliman possible phishing/spam scam

thoughtcat

I just got an email to my Hotmail.com address from a clothing company called Jolliman thanking me for a purchase which I did not make. There was no link in it to click as such but it did confirm the name of the person who supposedly made the order, which was similar to mine (same surname, different first name) with a Stoke-on-Trent, UK address (not mine). I thought it might therefore be a genuine admin error by the company or customer so I Googled for Jolliman, whereupon result no 1 was a .co.uk web address. I clicked that and a dialogue box asked me for a user name and password, which I ignored, but the site loaded anyway. I then closed it and didn't go any further. A Google search doesn't show up anything like "Jolliman phishing scam" so I may just be being completely paranoid, but in case it is a brand new scam, this is a heads-up.

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Why I opposed Leonard Cohen’s Israel show today

Leonard Cohen, thoughtcat, ,

I guess it seems churlish to post this now the show has happened and some 55,000 people have gone home happy, and some good may have been done. But a principle’s a principle and I still think today’s Tel Aviv concert by Leonard Cohen was wrong.

This is how it started. Some months ago I had an email from an old friend expressing her dismay that Cohen, of whom we are both longtime fans, was to play a show in Israel as part of his enormously successful world tour. I hadn’t really given much thought to cultural boycotts before but I agreed that it did seem questionable judgment on Cohen’s behalf to play a show in a country that only months before had launched a devastating attack on the West Bank, causing the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians.

My friend wrote a letter to Cohen, emailing it to his manager Robert Kory, and set up an online petition calling for Cohen to reconsider his decision or at least offer to play a show on the West Bank in addition to the Israel concert, or to donate the proceeds to a charitable organisation working for peace on both sides. A second friend became involved and the three of us became the first signatories to the petition. We called ourselves the Leonard Cohen Boycott Israel Coalition (and then the Campaign), I set up a blog to host our letter and various links, and also a Twitter feed and a Facebook group. We put something of a disclaimer on the blog saying “We take no pleasure is asking Leonard and his management to deprive Israeli fans of their long awaited moment to see him live, but feel that with circumstances as they are in the Palestinian territories and Gaza in particular, the priority must be to appeal to them to refrain from giving credibility to the Israeli state by playing there.”

This didn’t seem unreasonable to me, even though it felt fundamentally weird to be opposing anything Leonard Cohen was doing. My love for the man and his work is profound; I first discovered him in the late 1980s during a pretty bad period in my life; someone lent me his Greatest Hits and his first novel The Favourite Game, and they turned me around. I wouldn’t necessarily be so grandiose as to say they saved my life but they did make me a different person. Nonetheless, we all make mistakes, and I felt Leonard – especially being Jewish – could have made more of an impact on the situation in Israel by refusing to play there given its politicians’ horrendous foreign policy.

To be honest though I was pretty surprised at what happened next. My first friend had thought the petition might receive one or two thousand signatures; although we got a reassuring 30 in the first few days, to date the total still stands at less than 100. I circulated the details to selected friends on Facebook and by email, and although I would describe all my friends as liberal, only two of them actually signed the petition. One friend, who also happened to be Jewish, rang me up within hours of receiving the email to express his own dismay at the idea of such a boycott, saying that whatever you think of Israeli foreign policy, it was impossible to separate Israel from Jewishness, and thus our campaign seemed anti-semitic. He went on to quote an article in that day’s Times by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks repeating this weary and depressing argument.

I have to say I was disappointed by the silence and staggered by the response of my Jewish friend; such thoughts couldn’t have been further from my mind or those of my campaign colleagues. When the campaign was later attacked by commenters on the blog for targetting Cohen, rather than the more “obvious” (and also, coincidentally, gentile) artists who have also played Israel recently such as Madonna or Depeche Mode, I began to realise how much hypocrisy and bullshit there is in all of this – and also how much fear. The possibility of being called an anti-semite is too much of a risk for most people to bear, and this is precisely why Israel gets away with flouting international law and bombing the crap out of Arab schoolchildren.

While further friends maintained an awkward silence, someone else also declined to sign the petition, saying, “I think, morally, at least, [Cohen] is more than entitled to [play the show]; his own humanity, I think, speaks more than eloquently about any predispositions it encounters along the way… and if people still don’t get it, then LC not playing won’t make a scrap of difference; positively, therefore, he may just channel a thought or two in the right direction.” I admit I agreed with that. But I also hoped Leonard would come to his senses. I didn’t think he would, but I hoped so.

I stuck with it, and as the months progressed other groups from around the world joined in the opposition (even though probably hardly any had heard of our campaign). The Facebook group rose steadily despite a few stupid comments from both extremes (one person who joined had a swastika as his profile picture) but topped out at around 130 members. (A Swedish version which predated mine scored several hundred though.) The Israel show appeared on Cohen’s official tour schedule, then inexplicably dropped off it; nobody was really sure whether the pressure groups had won or not. We didn’t get a reply from Cohen’s manager, but didn’t really expect one, especially as he’s on record in various places criticising the boycotters. Then it was announced that the show would go on and Cohen would also be playing a small gig in Ramallah after the Tel Aviv show; this seemed positive, but the Palestinians arguably shot themselves in the foot by withdrawing their support for the gig as long as Cohen insisted on also playing Tel Aviv. Various charities were mooted to receive donations from proceeds of the show, and this was denied. Amnesty International was reported as supporting the show, and it then pulled out, saying it never took a side in boycotts. The tickets for Ramat Gan stadium went on sale and sold out within minutes; protesters demonstrated in New York and Montreal. Academics wrote letters and Alexei Sayle recorded an embarrassing video of himself singing a comedy song poking fun at his own Jewish heritage with parody lyrics.

So anyway, here we are today and the show has passed without incident. Leonard greeted the audience in Hebrew, sang his great songs (including Famous Blue Raincot, apparently – grr, wish I’d been there), people Twittered about it, and The Parents Circle is set to receive a large donation. So maybe some good has come of it. But as my friend whose idea the whole LCBI campaign was said today in her post, “there can be no real and lasting peace for everyone and justice for the Palestinians until all the walls, real and metaphorical, are torn down and the Palestinians can be assured of their place alongside the Israelis with all their lands restored to them. Therefore a continuing international boycott of Israel is unfortunately necessary.”

The only thing left for me to say is that I regret not blogging earlier about this. I hope nobody has gone away thinking I’m a hypocrite or disingenuous for not owning up to my involvement from the start. It’s true that I and my two friends didn’t exactly splash our names across the LCBI blog, although we did use our real names when we signed the petition and all my Facebook friends knew I supported the cause.

I’m not bitter, though; a principle’s a principle and I think this was a damn good one.

A bit of blues

thoughtcat

This is an experiment to see if a video I recorded on Facebook can embed into WordPress and if it will be public!

OK, it didn’t work (see comment below). I can link out to the vid, i.e. http://www.facebook.com/v/157263331018 and this works in a nice Facebook-hosted full-screen. Not as good as embedding it though.

Also a mate suggested I put in the above address inside square brackets preceded by “youtube=” which displays a mysterious blank space where the vid ought to be, thus:

I’ve also just emailed the embed code to my Posterous and it worked straightaway: http://thoughtcat.posterous.com/attempting-to-get-facebook-video-embedded-in

FTR, the embed code Facebook gave me is:

<object width=”352″ height=”220″ ><param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true” /><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always” /><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.facebook.com/v/157263331018″ /><embed src=”http://www.facebook.com/v/157263331018″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”352″ height=”220″></embed></object>

Blogger renders it thus:

<object height=”220″ width=”352″><param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true”><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.facebook.com/v/157263331018″><embed src=”http://www.facebook.com/v/157263331018″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” height=”220″ width=”352″></embed></object>

– which looks exactly the same to me. WordPress just deletes the code altogether – it’s not even as if it leaves some in and takes some out.

Will this old Dell CD drive work with my new netbook?

thoughtcat

I got this CD drive with my first laptop, a chunky Dell Inspiron
(can’t remember the exact model number) in about 1999. It’s been
sitting in a box for years and as I’m in need of a portable CD drive
for my Samsung NC10 netbook, I was wondering whether (a) this will
work with it and (b) if so, where I can get a cable for it. I have a
lead that connected the CD drive to the old laptop, the laptop end
being a parallel port, but the Samsung only has USB ports. Any tips
appreciated 🙂

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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The Leonard Cohen Name Generator has moved

Leonard Cohen, thoughtcat,

I’ve finally got round to giving the Cohenator its own site, as part of the Big Thoughtcat “Frontpage-to-Wordpress” Migration Project. I’ve chosen Blogger not because the Cohenator is a blog but because it’s quick to set up a free site and easy to do JavaScript there, whereas WordPress, beautiful as it is, requires money before you can muck about with things like code and CSS. No doubt I’ll stump up one day, but for now (and probably forever) the Leonard Cohen Name Generator, which makes up silly names based on LC lyrics, can be found at http://cohenator.blogspot.com/

For more Cohen-flavoured items on this site see http://thoughtcat.wordpress.com/good-stuff/leonard-cohen/