It’s just a blog.
In case you haven’t heard my music, there is now an opportunity to do so for free (if you don’t mind ads).
I went and got an official artist channel. This is like YouTube’s version of the Twitter blue tick and basically means I’m all official and stuff.
Oh, and there’s also my Pilchard website if you want to dig a little deeper.
Old website went belly up because of a very poor choice of web host.
It’s going to take a while to get things sorted…
There’s a spider in the kitchen,
it’s really got me itching.
I could squash it flat or feed it to the cat,
Or I could just sit here bitching.
My soul melts for you
My arms ache for you
Time stops for you
Just let me through
What can I do?
Teardrops for you.
You always speak with intelligence and eloquence,
You have a kind of elegance with your rambling irrelevance
About 18 months ago, my iPhone decided to quit life and leave me phoneless. Unfortunately, this was 2 days before Christmas so funds were tight but due to being away from the office for the next week, I needed to replace it with something cheap. With that I proceeded to ask Twitter what I should do and like a flash, @JonChoo gave me a solution. The Sony Ericsson Xperia 8. On his advice, I went out and bought one.
This phone (yes, I’m using it right now) is a piece of junk. Not only when compared to the iPhone but to every smartphone I’ve ever seen. Hardly any apps work on it and those that do, more often than not haven’t been optimised for such a small screen so some controls might fall out of view and/or out of reach. Not only do apps struggle to function, I only really have room for about 4 due to not being able to install to the SD card. Oh and don’t get me started on the battery life…
Does any of the above bother me? Not really. It did at first but these days I spend more time looking up, looking at the real world, rather than looking down at my phone.
If I go out for the day, or even just an evening, I turn it off altogether because the battery will die if I leave it on (yes I know how to switch off background data etc.) and I might find I need it.
So as much as I complain about my phone, the reason I haven’t replaced it with something better is that I’ve learned to appreciate the value of looking up.
I’m sure you know exactly what I mean…
Someone just told me about the dream they had last night. It was weird, bad, good and epic all rolled into one so I thought I’d share it with you:
I dreamt that i ad an identical twin that was put in a mental home from before i could remember…
Somehow i found out, and when i asked my mum she said to me: “Yeah didnt i tell you” as if it was really trivial….
I went to see him and he didnt seem mad at all, just sat there all looking hawt like me…. I went to leave but they wouldn’t let me and threw me in this padded cell with my mental twin. The way he was staring was scaring me and freaking me out. Then he satrted crawling towards me and i could feel real fear… I was petrified… He got closer and closer and i was hudlling up in the corner cowering….
Then i saw my whole family at a window and could hear them saying whats wrong with him its like he’s scared of something but there is nothing there… I DIDNT EVEN HAVE AN IDENTICAL TWIN!!!!
I woke up in a sweat and still felt scared..
Guess I’ve been naughty, not nice this year
that bloke with the beard failed to appear
I hoped for the best and hung up my stocking
woke up this morning, it’s empty, how shocking
We’re finally here, Christmas day
thankfully soon it’ll be out of the way
It’s almost time to lift my beer
and toast to the end of another shit year
Once again the world has gone crazy about another Apple product but is it really that useful? To the average geek, it probably isn’t because it’s not really very practical for hardcore computing; we have better devices. Portability wise, everything we need to do on the move is taken care of by our smartphones and it’s just too damn big to cart about.
Let’s take it out of the hands of the geek for a second and put it in your average domestic situation. It’s perfect for sofa or bed based browsing, ebook (or iBook) reading and with the keyboard dock, it will even sit on your desk and work quite well for basic correspondence needs.
The base model is perfectly suited for this role at a very attractive price. OK, so it can’t multitask. It’s a leisure time thing. Who really needs multitasking when they are sitting down at home casually browsing, reading a book or playing a game?
It doesn’t do Flash… Big deal.
Content providers are already creating iPhone apps so TV on demand and the likes will no doubt come to the iPad in a very nice slick format soon enough and without any negative impact on the user experience.
So at first, I was like “meh.” But then I was like “OH I SEE!” So there might even be a place for one in my home too.
You should use twitter this way if you plan to do this…
As the title suggests, you are all probably wrong. Twitter is far too new and not far enough into its evolutionary process for us to know how we should be using it as a business tool. There are lots of these so called “social media consultants” in the twitterverse and blogosphere telling us how we should be using Twitter to get results and improve our brand identity… Or Whatever… What a pile of utter balls.
Twitter is on the verge of going mainstream. When that happens (and it will happen really fast) the entire dynamic of the application and its global community will change. I don’t know how it will change and I don’t believe you do either. Please correct me if you have a crystal ball.
If you follow my twitter stream (thanks by the way) you will have noticed me harping on about follower counts lately and the fact that the number of followers is unimportant if they don’t genuinely have an interest in what you’re tweeting about. This is all part and parcel of the same thing. I’m seeing a lot of relatively new tweeters out there with ridiculous UFF ratios (updates to Followers to Following) indicating the use of what I call the followback method. A method popular with spammers where you follow lots and lots of people and hope some will follow you back. A lot of people are using auto follows so they are guaranteed easy meat. You can rack up thousands in days using this tactic… Not for much longer though. I think people are getting wise to this now, probably because they are getting spammed into oblivion. Eventually it will just be spammers following other spammers. Well, we can hope I guess.
It wouldn’t be right to leave you mulling this over without telling you how I use Twitter and what I get out of it. I’m not suggesting that this is how you should use it. I am not a “social media consultant” nor do I profess to be.
How do I go about getting followers?
I don’t go out of my way to. I don’t employ any tactics. My followers are mostly people that have found me through my content or conversation. Sure, there are a few rogues in there but they don’t hang around long. I don’t have a massive follower count but I know most of them are valuable because they are following me for what I consider to be the right reason. My follower count is growing slowly, organically and with high value. I like it that way.
Who do I follow?
I follow various types of people who use twitter in many different ways. I generally follow people that interest me. That’s all really. I tend not to follow anyone that doesn’t engage unless their stream is really interesting. I like conversation. For me it is a huge part of what Twitter is. More often than not I’ll follow you if we get a good chat going too. I like making friends!
Do I follow back those who follow me?
I quite often do actually but I always try to look at the profile of a new follower. If they look spammy I don’t follow back. The first thing I generally look for is @ replies. If there aren’t any on their profile I don’t consider them very social and generally won’t bother. I also look at the UFF ratio. If they are using the followback technique, forget it!
What annoys me most on Twitter?
I hate automated DM’s when you follow someone. To me it just says “Thanks for joining my spam list, I can’t be bothered to talk to you in person. You’re just a number to me”. If it spams me with a link it REALLY gets my back up. Saying that, I always give a second chance and usually DM back to see if there’s really a human there at all and if there is will they engage and win me back? Sometimes they come back to me and save themselves. Those that don’t get binned.
So there you go. That’s pretty much Twitter and I in a nutshell. I have nothing to sell so no agressive techniques here. However, if I were selling something I have a feeling that could work for me too because I would have people following me that want to buy my stuff… Something like that anyway…
Sorry about the composition and terrible construction of this post. I have no concentration tonight whatsoever and as it is not a professional blog it doesn’t matter that much so I won’t lose any sleep over it. If by some kind of miracle you got this far, thank you for reading it! I hope it is in some way useful to you.
Comments as always are welcome and encouraged!