New Year Resolutions?

2012 — the year the world ends? I sincerely hope not; there’s work to be done, and I wish anyone reading this all good faith, hope and love in the coming year.

Among many cards and messages recently, a fair few friends have asked after this blog. After four heavy years, December has been my month off blogging, aided by three realities — an extended educational development trip to India, the need to do a bit more work elsewhere, and curiosity about taking a break. That and the Day job.

Any result? This is how things are shaping up, at the start of a new year of Grace...

• Over the autumn I have put more time into Facebook, as a more interactive space in which it has been possible to explore some in depth conversations.

• I've certainly decided that having a very open policy on responding to friend requests on FB is an excellent wheeze, and much of the goof-about stuff I had been using this blog for as a kind of commonplace book, is probably better done through FaceBook. Friend me, and I will friend you, er, friend.

• I have finally disconnected from Fleet Street. When the Times paywall came in, I subscribed, mainly because someone’s got to pay for journalism and it could have been a fruitful way to go. I've let the sub go now, mainly because it was adding little value to my life. The upside was occasional pieces of themost superb journalism — Simon Barnes, I will miss you, sir. The downside was a tedious sense of being trapped at a fundamentally narrow andsuperficial party, surrounded by low grade right wing bores, stories spun up in a hurry, often lifted from the internet or agencies anyway, a dreadfully sparse and low standard of scientific, historical, educational and religious reporting. By December I noticed I could only be bothered to download the Times once a fortnight, out of a sense of duty. Why? I wondered. So I stopped. Mr Murdoch, I sucked it and saw. Now I’m out of here.

• Twitter has been my space of choice for immediate news, keeping up with events and opinions, and reportage. 

• The odd meeting or event, anything with potential news value, has proved to be well worth tweeting, and I have been using Twitter to trawl reactions and opinions all over the place. 

• If I worked at a desktop rather than being out and about so much, I might use Twitter even more, but certainly it remains my best immediate reaction and comment source, to listen as much as to talk. I use Echofon to thread conversations on iPad and iPhone.

• What is best done on this blog, however, are short comment pieces with the opportunity for follow-up conversations. As to frequency, I had been writing a piece then seeing through conversations arising from it until they dried up then sticking another on.

And in the meanwhile I'm also experimenting with a far cleaner simpler design. Some have been telling me they find the old one took ages to load, and had even produced the odd malware warning. I'd love to know reactions, especially if anyone misses any of the elements I've eliminated in the interest of de-cluttering.

That seems to me the way to go. Twice a week? Let’s see...

Out of the (Student Loans) Labyrinth

An exhilerating feeling of achievement sweeps through me, to have completed three epic struggles;

• Steph’s student finance application
  for next year, a simple matter of confirming how many kids we’ve got.
  
  
• Shaking off the vicious Pink Spambot Succubus attached to my Twitter account.
  
  
• Renewing Family Tax Credits; we need the money, without which our children end up living on squirrels in the woods. This had to be done by the end of July.

1. This evening’s silver spoon goes to HMRC for Family Tax Credit, where after a short delay the whole matter was dealt with on the phone, with the right paperwork to hand, in under five minutes. Their agent dealt with a potentially snaggy private matter kindly, efficiently, and speedily on the phone. Top Drawer!
   
   
2. The Wicked Pink Spambot Succubus has been off and on my Twitter account most of this week. It came back for four messages 24 hours after its original demise, sporting a new and previously unheard of web address. The general effect was very cat-and-mouse, like a U-Boat movie. At one point it seemed to be changing my password back as fast as I could change it to lock it out — a distinctly unnerving business. I wonder whether the Twitter API itself was doing strange flaky things. I have since been doing a roaring trade in helping fellow sufferers. My fear was that my whole Twitter account would become unusable. I am very grateful to followers for their kindness and understanding. After four days, it looks as though I’m clear.
   
   
3. Grand Labyrinthine Wooden Spoon, however, gloes to the Student Loans Company. All Lucy and I had to do was click four buttons to confirm we hadn't had any more kids, or, I suppose, given any away, in the past year. How long can it take to click a mouse eight times? The answer is just over two hours of craziness, trying to get in, juggling passwords, getting locked out, changing secret answers, staring at blank screens, phoning the helpline times 2. The guy who helped us the second time round did his best, but it still took another half hour of high jinks with him on the line, and at times apparently as bemused as us, before Lucy could confirm her details.

Let’s celebrate endeavour and struggle, good and bad, noble and pointless. Edwin Muir’s Labyrinth is still, to my mind, the best blank verse to be had in modern English:

THE LABYRINTH

Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth,
Dazed with the tall and echoing passages,
The swift recoils, so many I almost feared
I’d meet myself returning at some smooth comer,
Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal
After the straw ceased rustling and the bull
Lay dead upon the straw and I remained,
Blood-splashed, if dead or alive I could not tell
In the twilight nothingness (I might have been
A spirit seeking his body through the roads
Of intricate Hades ) — ever since I came out
To the world, the still fields swift with flowers, the trees
All bright with blossom, the little green hills, the sea,
The sky and all in movement under it,
Shepherds and flocks and birds and the young and old,
(I stared in wonder at the young and the old,
For in the maze time had not been with me;
I had strayed, it seemed, past sun and season and change,
Past rest and motion, for I could not tell
At last if I moved or stayed; the maze itself
Revolved around me on its hidden axis
And swept me smoothly to its enemy,
The lovely world) — since I came out that day,
There have been times when I have heard my footsteps
Still echoing in the maze, and all the roads
That run through the noisy world, deceiving streets
That meet and part and meet, and rooms that open
Into each other — and never a final room
Stairways and corridors and antechambers
That vacantly wait for some great audience,
The smooth sea-tracks that open and close again,
Tracks undiscoverable, indecipherable,
Paths on the earth and tunnels underground,
And bird-tracks in the air — all seemed a part
Of the great labyrinth. And then I'd stumble
In sudden blindness, hasten, almost run,
As if the maze itself were after me
And soon must catch me up. But taking thought,
I'd tell myself, “You need not hurry. This
Is the firm good earth. All roads lie free before you.”
But my bad spirit would sneer, “No, do not hurry.
No need to hurry. Haste and delay are equal
In this one world, for there's no exit, none,
No place to come to, and you'll end where you are,
Deep in the centre of the endless maze.”
I could not live if this were not illusion.
It is a world, perhaps; but there’s another.
For once in a dream or trance I saw the gods
Each sitting on the top of his mountain-isle,
While down below the little ships sailed by,
Toy multitudes swarmed in the habours, shepherds drove
Their tiny flocks to the pastures, marriage feasts
Went on below, small birthdays and holidays,
Ploughing and harvesting and life and death,
And all permissible, all acceptable,
Clear and secure as in a limpid dream.
But they, the gods, as large and bright as clouds,
Conversed across the sounds in tranquil voices
High in the sky above the untroubled sea,
And their eternal dialogue was peace
Where all these things were woven, and this our life
Was as a chord deep in that dialogue,
As easy utterance of harmonious words,
Spontaneous syllables bodying forth a world.

That was the real world; I have touched it once,
And now shall know it always. But the lie,
The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehood, roads
That run and run and never reach an end,
Embowered in error — I’d be prisoned there
But that my soul has birdwings to fly free.

Oh these deceits are strong almost as life.
Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth,
And woke far on. I did not know the place.

Beware the Jabberwock, my Son

Interesting times battling against “followersfree.com” an evil Twitter Spambot thing! This is a first for me, and, let it be said, entirely my own silly fault. Whilst in the general Twitterstream at the weekend, I noticed a grow your numbers scheme called “followersforfree.com.” This, I thought, was a reincarnation of a similar automated scheme Twitter banned earlier this year which included the ability to follow/ unfollow people en masse. I have at the same time been trying to get round a change in the Twitter display that doesn't show immediately whether you can direct message people you follow, in other words whether they are following you. I thought I’d try and see if this site held some way of getting multiple follow/ unfollow/ people listed, as this is a classic pattern indicative of activity by spammers and the like. Big mistake.

Do not touch this site with a bargepole. The advice Twitter itelf gives is good — never give out details to any scheme that claims to be able to build your numbers. Within minutes I found this evil SpamBot was sending out a message in my name, which had transferred across to publish through Facebook.

I then tried to unsubscribe, and blow me down, it sent out another spam in my name to say I'd unsubscribed. I tried changing my Twitter password, but it kept on changing back! I tried suspending access privileges on my account, but it hadn't got these in the first place. Every time I changed password, out went another evil Spam message!

Twitter has currently limited my acccount’s ability to change password, probably as a reaction to all the gyrations. I am wondering whether the evil bot has some way of changing my password back (I can’t see how that would work). In the meanwhile I need to say:

1. Nobody else has got infected through this. It's just an annoyance.
   
2. There is no evidence this SwineFlu of Evil Bots can touch you unless you go to their site and engage. So just don’t.
   
3. Nor is there any evidence that it can infect anyone else through you. It just sends out messages plugging itself as though you had sent them from your Twitter account.
4. I have now had three clear hours without any message going out in my name — touch wood.
5. I never did find out how the thing from the Swamp’s unfollow unfollowers routine works.
6. The story may not be entirely over, but I believe it is for now. I am retreating back to my cave to clean the Exorcist style green puke off my cassock, and rub out a few bits of Jabberwocky spam that got splashed around the place in my name. It's all in a day's work, I suppose, and an interesting learning experience...

Tyrants Quake: the Twits are coming

or How new media, ubiquitous, social and global, can make monkeys out of repressive regimes ‚ incuding, perhaps, Old Media Barons’ fiefdoms. Here’s Clay Shirkey:

Two Real World Interludes

As someone who leads a strictly non-profit, but I hope not entirely unproftable, life, I don’t do advertising, but my eye was caught by the Trail of Hope. In a year Slumdog drew attention to Indian Streetkids, two friends from South Africa have hatched a vision for creating a community of Capetown’s homeless young people, under the auspices of the MyLife foundation. Albert Arcona and Tendai Joe are riding motorbikes from Capetown to London this autumn, taking in various sights along the way — the HIV/AIDS context mkes the need particularly acute, and anyone interested in Streetkids, Zimbabwe, South Africa, could well want to be part of this project.

Meanwhile, Beyond the Fringe taught us there is a time in any struggle when a pointless gesture is called for. As thousands take to the streets of Tehran, there are not many oogedy boogedy Ayatollahs using Twitter, but we know many democracy campaigners are. If they open the main Twitter stream, which we know they are using as a significant tool in getting and keeping their act together, and see a large number of green avatars, they know they are not alone, and have an instant database of overseas friends and allies.

The proposal is that anyone anywhere else in the world who supports Iranian democracy can “Green their Avatar” to show solidarity and support to people who need it, when they need it. So, that’s my futile gesture for a bit. I'm greening my Twitter Avatar for a while in support of Iranian Democracy. If you’re a Real Twit, why don’t you?

Time Marches on: 1612-1713

The March of Time on Twitter strides boldly into the future, going where no one has gone before... to infinity and beyond. There are interesting milestones on the way. In May we did the 17th century:

19.04 (1611) — the King James Bible hits the news stands... Great Date for literary/ cultural as well as theological history, surely?

20.04 (1612) — Edward Wightman, a Baptist Minister, is last person in England to be burnt at the stake. March of Namby Pambly Liberals begins, as staking ceases. Also the year of the Northampton Witch trials - woman plus four executed by dunking for bewitching pigs. Pendle Witch trials later that year.
 History doth not record whether bewitched pigs do that funny wiggle thing with their noses Samantha York used to do on TV, or fly.

21.04 (1619) — first meeting of Jamestown (Va) House of Burgesses (first representative assembly) of American colonies
. First boatload of black indentured laborers delivered to America by Captain Jope, to be traded for food and supplies :-(

22.04 (1624) Oops! Oslo and Dunfermline burn down. Versailles started, as Cardinal Richelieu joins Louis XIV's government

23.04 (1638) world’s first movable type newspaper in Beijing; Swedes make Peace of Hamburg with French and found "New Sweden" in Delaware.
 We, the last generation to bother with movable type newspapers salute the pluck Ming Dynasty for the Beijing Gazette of 1638!

24.04 (1647) Civil War starts up again Parliamentarians raze Aberystwyth Castle, and ban Christmas. Lord Rochester the Restoration Rake born...
 (3 R’s?) Also in 1647, Dutch West India Co appoint Peter Stuyvesant Governor of New Amsterdam (> NY): Face that launched a million Cancer Sticks
. Also, Rhode Island separate Church and State: Humans get the State and Poultry the Church?

25.04 (1672) Synod of Jerusalem: Orthodox response to challenges raised by Western Protestantism. In UK Charles II Declaration of Indulgence tolerates Protestants along with booze, chocs & floozies: Parliament not impressed
. Meanwhile in Dutch "rampjaar" of 1672 everyone, for different reasons decides to invade Holland simultaneously. Just one of those things. They got over it.

26.04 (1688) The Glorious Revolution — incl. Very exciting Battle of Reading where Dutch whupped the Irish. James II ran away soon after... not everyone realises there was a glorious revolution in England. King loses Crown, both literally and metaphorically. Subsequently English Monarchy goes Dutch, with William & Mary. Also in 1688, Turks besiege Vienna, & Edward Lloyd goes into Insurance business.

27.04 (1690) Battle of the Boyne consolidates William III's position. The Pope was actually on the Dutch Protestant side, (Anti-French League of Augsburg). 
Also new in 1690 — Clarinet (Nürnberg), American Paper Money (Massachussetts), and the Planet Uranus (Titter ye not) sighted by John Flamsteed

28.04 (1700) What d/you get man with everything? Louis XIV gets Spanish Crown for nephew Philippe & triggers War of the Spanish Succession. Oops! Messy!

29.04 (1708) Queen Anne refuses to sign Scottish Militia Bill - last time a monarch witholds Royal Assent. J. S. Bach gets a job in Weimar...

30.04 (1713) Treaty of Utrecht ends war of Spanish Succession; Philip d'Anjou gets Spain. British get Gibraltar & Menorca. Monkeys delighted...

Get a Bloomin’ Move-On

Twitter can distract. Time I would have given to reviewing Is there anybody there? which Lucy and I went to see at the flix last night, went instead on a hugely enjoyable silly conversation with fellow twits, conducted largely through the medium of quotes from The Italian Job (and Educating Rita).

This was the day I helped Catherine and Tim move into their new flat in Reading (with Anna’s help). There was no spare time for being silly. I will review Mr Caine’s latest Screen Gem tomorrow, but was intrigued to come across the following information from Wikipedia about our all-time favourite Caper movie:

In 2008 the Royal Society of Chemistry held a competition for members of the public to propose solutions to how the cliffhanger was solved, insisting that the solution had to have a plausible basis in science, and was to take not more than 30 minutes and not use a helicopter...

The winning solution: Break and remove two large side windows just aft of the pivot point and let the glass fall away outside to lose its weight. Break two windows over the two front axles; keep the broken glass onboard to keep its weight for balance. Let a man out on a rope through the front broken windows (not to rest his weight on the ground) and he deflates all the bus's front tyres, to reduce the bus's rocking movement about its pivot point. Drain the fuel tank, which was aft of the pivot point; that changes the balance enough to let a man get out and gather heavy rocks to load the front of the bus. Unload the bus. Wait until a suitable vehicle passes on the road, and hijack it and carry the gold away in it.

So there you have it. remember where you first heard it...

1066 and all that (for Twits)

Back on 16 March I noticed that my number of twitter followers had reached 1066 and was growing steadily. I started a series of daily tweets, which reached 1592 this morning, with the occasional Humphrey Lyttleton-ish silly comment thrown in. Here, for the Record, is the March of Time thusfar (or at any rate the passage of historic Time in March), in multiples of 140 Character tweets:

16 March: Weekend followers count up from 1066 (Battle of Hastings) to dark age of 1110 (First Crusade). Heading for the anarchy of 1135... ooer.

17 March 1138, therefore time to recall the election of Cardinal Gregory as Anti-Pope Victor IV. Anti-Popes had such butch names...

18 March: 1165 — when King Henry II had a major affair with the Rosamund Clifford. A right old Royal Story for ye Sunne...

19 March: 1189 — 3 Sepember 1189 was fixed as “Time immemorial” in English Law from 1263-1832. Significant milestone, surely.

20 March: 1220 — completion Chartres & start of Salisbury Cathedrals, and papal approval of (Dominican) Order of Preachers

21 March: 1230 — ye Teutonic Knights were invited into Prussia to forcibly Convert the Yatvags to "Christianity." Creepy Stuff.

22 March: 1258 — Provisions of Oxford (Henry III forced to recognise parliament) and, of course, siege & fall of Baghdad.

23 March: 1271 — Baibars captures Krak des Chevaliers and the 5th Crusade flops. Also in 1271 (in spirit of the late Humphrey Lyttleton) Emperor Ottakar II fails to invade Hungary [and starts a chain of bookshops instead] also in 1271 (Humph would say) Emperor Bing of Song is born: Emperor Bing waited until 1942 to record White Christmas at the age of 671

24 March: 1284 — year Wales was joined to England (Statute of Rhuddlan) & the foundation of Peterhouse, oldest college of Cambridge University. 1284 also yr legend says pied piper visited Hamelin. Massive bail-out of City rats resourced by ye city's children. They ended up with him in their own toyshop in Regent Street.

25 March: 1292 — the year Edward I appointed John Balliol as (puppet) King of Scotland over Robert the Bruce, much provoking the Tartan Army

26 March: 1299 — Time for the Mexica to settle in Chapultepec: Schlocky sacrifices and one flower ceremonies in today's Mexico city...

27 March: 1315, & plucky Swiss Confederates defeat Leopold Habsburg @ ye battle of Morgarten securing future independence of Switzerland. At Morgarten Confederates hold up knights in a pass between two bulbous mountains: Early Confederacy/ Dolly Parton thang?

28 March: 1335 — Otto the Merry becomes Duke of Carinthia around the time slavery is abolished in Sweden - everything looking up! People wonder why they called him Otto the Merry:


29 March: 1345 — pray silence for "Miracle of the Host": Amsterdam 12.3.1345: dying man vomited host, flamed it; didn't burn: http://is.gd/puzx

30 March: 1369 — As England reels under its third dose of Black Death, Tamerlane the Great makes Samarkand capital of his empire

31 March: 1395 — William of Waynflete weighs in: Bishop of Winchester, Head of Winchester College, Eton, & New College Oxford: Lord Chancellor

1 April: 1418 — Council of Constance 1414-18. Western schism over. 3 Popes into 1. Wyclif & Hus condemned. Early international law formulated.

2 April: 1429 — Joan of Arc busts siege of Orleans, & drives Sir John Falstaff’s English army from the Loire valley: JF retires to ye pub

3 April: 1449 — Last Emperor of Byzantium is crowned Constantine XI, & last Antipope (Felix V) bows out (founds Catfood dynasty instead)

4 April: 1451, and Nicholas of Cusa invents Concave Spectacles for myopic people.

5 April: 1465 — Henry VI, pious but completely round ye twist, is imprisoned by Edward IV in the Tower, & Margaret of Anjou legs it to France

6 April: 1469 — Ferdinand acquires Isabella (Aragon+Castile = Spain), Scots acquire Orkney & Shetland, Lorenzo Medici acquires Florence. Busy Bunnies!

7 April: 1477 — William Caxton prints first English book on English printing press (Dictes or sayengis of the Philosophres)

8 April: 1485 — a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse! it could be arranged... Bosworth. Henry VII wins crown off wicked uncle Richard III. Tudor dynasty begins: & with it, some say, Modern England. Meanwhile in France, the Peace of Bourges temporarily halts the Mad War.

now off for a run, dodging brickbats from Richard III supporters... Richard used to do a good chocolate advert too...

9 April: 1495 — As we leave the middle ages Brother Jon Cor, a Franciscan Friar, records world’s first Scotch Whisky. March of time speeds up...

10 April: 1504 — Michaelangelo’s David in Florence; & naughty old Leonardo dV & Machiavelli divert Arno river against Pisa. Also in 1504 Matthias Grünewald paints Crucifixion....
Karl Barth kept a copy on his desk

11 April: 1510 — Catherine of Aragon produces stillborn daughter, Thomas More becomes Under-Sherriff of London Henry VIII wins a joust without cheating (they say)

12 April: Happy Easter! 1530 — the year of the Augsburg Confession, prepared for Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.

13 April: 1537 — Monasteries dissolved in England, foundation of Recife by Portuguese in Brazil; first mention of Bangalore in India

14 April: 1545 — The Mary Rose sinks near Portsmouth, and the Council of Trent starts up: eyes down for a full house...

15 April: 1563 — English lose LeHavre; Council of Trent closes, Northern seven years war breaks out... (Big Danes/Swedes punchup) Council of Trent organises RC Church as modern denomination, but fails to organise Brewery, Nottingham University, or Boots the Chemist.

16 April: 1570 — Ivan the Great's Massacre of Novgorod, & Pius V Papal Bull excommunicates Elizabeth I

17 April: 1581 — Union of Utrecht proclaims independence from Philip of Spain & becomes republic. Francis Drake, Circumnavigator, knighted... As Elizabteh I knights old pirate she askes him "But where are your buccaneers?" & he replies, “Why, Ma'am, stuck to both sides of me buccan... (at this point 140 character limit cut in)

18 April: 1592 — Henry IV of France converts to Roman Catholicism, divorcing Queen Marguerite of Navarre. Mistress Gabrielle d’Estes bore him four kids, though... Punters down 1591 betting shop might have put serious money on France ending up Protestant! Henry's conversion to Roman Catholicism involved divorcing his wife... Minus Henry VIII = Henry IV. The tale also shows how pre-Louis XIV/ Napoleon France was loose conglomeration of landes, not modern nation.

How our grandpas twittered...

People ponder the point of Twitter... In future we will want to research its origin. Stanley Tang has discovered a mechanical precursor called the “Notificator” from a London mainline station of 1935, combining Twitter & Tweetdeck.



Vatican City, 1943. Surrounded by hostile forces, Mussolini flees and His Holiness Pope Pius XII, begins to conceptualise a new way to communicate in a hurry (h/t Ruth Gledhill)







1940’s San Francisco was opening its golden gates to exciting innovative communications concepts:







All was not plain sailing though. The problem of excessive volume of Tweets remained. This experiment from 1963 seems to have gone badly wrong:

You mark my words, there’s PhD’s in them thar pictures...

Twitter: The Compleat Twit

Social media seem to be catching the imaginagtions of some imaginative colleagues. It remains to be seen when they will begin to touch fogey untouchables, but from Obama to the Telegraph all sorts of people and organisations are on the game now. Twitter is becoming not so much a website, more a way of life — or, to use the jargon, a Platform.

Getting the best out of Twitter?
Take this lunchtime. Cooking with friends at half term furious disputation arose about feeding spring onion stalks to Lara, our neighbours’ rabbit. Do spring onions make rabbits, er, windy? Theories and counter-theories raged around the room, so I twittered it. Within 3 minutes reply came from Alexander Chow in Los Angeles, ably assisted by Mr Bunny & Pumpkin. Rabbits are OK with spring onion, friends, and unless you are kind to neighbours’ rabbits, the Great Rabbit Paw in the Sky may Finger you. All in under 140 characters.

Now thoroughly convinced of the power of Twitter, off you go. I’ve been on Twitter a wee while, and after a few wilderness weeks wondering what the point was, the penny dropped in December. People with an instinctive feeling that my Twittergrade may now be as high as 97·9 have been asking me about getting the best out of it.
What do I know? You just sign up, dive in, explore, network, have fun. That said, Trimmings have their uses, and I’ve got a few suggestions to help the curious make themselves into more compleat (or “Upper Class”) Twits.

Start with Twitter, and play much with its Twitter Search. Enter a subject that interests you, and pick stuff out of the Tweetstream, and follow the authors. Easy. Next, if you’re using Firefox, beef up your basic Twitterpage with PowerTwitter. This fluffs out the information (names, pictures, movies) and puts a bit more on the page; not necessary but perhaps desirable. Next, if you have a blog, head for Twitterfeed. That will automatically feed your blog posts into the twitterstream, and to Facebook (if you do that). Finally, you need to find a way to get Twitter onto your desktop without having the fag of opening a fresh page? (For Mac Users Twitterific will do this in an elegant occasional column, and it’s probably the best iPhone twitter client.)

This next bit is very important. Whatever you use, Mac, PC or Linux, head straight for TweetDeck and install it. T/D will allow you to filter tweets, search easily, handle replies, find people to follow. It also has a simple facility to shrink URL’s — very useful when you're stuffing them into your 140 character limit. Alternatively, try Twhirl: less resource hungry, if that’s an issue, single column, but better for multiple accounts.

After a while you wonder who’s following you. To find out, follow Mr Tweet, who will come back with suggestions based on your profile and recent record. Check out those elite influencers with Twidentify. TwitterCounter will tell you simply, but for deeper analysis and pretty diagrams, use Tweetstats. This also has a screen to alert you to general trends in what people are talking about in the twitterstream. If you get hooked and want historic data as well, check out Retweetradar.

But who are these people following you, really? Check their websites and blogs (given on their profile pages) when you get the email alerting you to the fact they’re following you. Or look for trends, and Round up your TwitterSheep. Are you getting any good at this? Find out on TwitterGrader. Do you come over as a miserable old so-and-so, or what? Find out with HappyTweets. Still in the Affective Zone, you can empty all your fears and worries into the dark, secret confidential dustbin of Secret Tweet (useful for illustrating talks on Prayer, too.) It's like confession, but without absolution, note. If you want to find out what people think of anything (“ask the audience”) use twtPoll.

Finally, the Top Shelf of twitter widgets. I do not really approve of all of these, but, heck, its half term... Half the fun of Twitter is the 140 character limit. Haiku is crude by comparison. However some playmates can’t bear to stop talking. Twitlonger allows you to churn out longer tweets. use with care. Tweetlater enables you to schedule future tweets; a marketer's dream, but if you annoy people by semi-spamming them, they will unfollow you.

There you go: 17 key twitter applications and widgets. You won’t want all of them, but you may well want most of them. The one to die for, the Must-have? Two, actually: Tweetdeck or Twhirl.
Enjoy, people, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul... !

Atheist Secrets and Lies...

Secret Tweet is fascinating — people can post their inner secret thoughts for all to see, anonymously. Recent examples include “I’m alone in life and I hate it” and “I’m an an atheist, yet in times of desperation I plead with God.” That’s confession. There’s a screen for anonymous reactions. Is that absolution? ’fraid not. Many, but not all Comments are sympathetic. This second tweet drew fury from one ranting atheist:

I don’t wanna be anonymous! I’m @MissJia and I think you’re full of shit. You can’t call yourself an atheist, denouncing God but then reaching out to him in your time of need! That’s some ole selfish bullshit. Either you’re an atheist who doesn’t practice or believe or you don’t. But don't be wishy washy with God b/c that shit aint right.”

Remember Maurice Bendrix (in Graham Greene’s End of the Affair): “Oh God, I hate you so much. It’s as bad as if you existed.” Plainly atheists count among their number rabid fundamentalist bigots every bit as fiery and intolerant as the ones you get among Christians, Druids, Branch Dravidians and Druze. It’s one in the eye for the demonstrably false notion that it’s religion causes crazy fundamentalism, rather than human folly and wickedness.

Secret Tweet is the ultimte Twitter stream for nosy people. It’s definitely going into my talk on prayer next week in Chesham. This morning I noticed “I don't want to lose weight. I just want to find someone who loves me as I am.” Food for thought...

But finding someone ain’t the end of yo’ troubles. Steve and Leigh Buttell from Sydney, got married recently. Eighteen months and several thousand dollars later they experienced a dream wedding, followed by a A$3,850 wedding night in what turned out to be Indiana Jones’ Temple of Doom:

By the time the group left three days later, the newlyweds had allegedly found maggots described by the groom as "the size of chocolate bullets'' in their wedding bed and a dead bat, covered in maggots, above their bedhead.

One guest awoke at 1.30am with a reaction to what he believed were insect bites and spent the night on a couch. Other guests fled their room in the middle of the night when a bat emerged from the fireplace and "flapped around the room''.

The newlyweds abandoned their suite on the wedding night after allegedly pulling back the sheets to find maggots in their bed, believed to have come from the dead bat on a shelf above their bed. The couple sought refuge on a blow-up mattress on the floor of a cottage occupied by Mrs Buttell's father and grandparents...

The cottages' owner, Sam Haymes, waived the outstanding $1850 and gave a bottle of sparkling wine as an apology, but Mr Mason was not satisfied with the offer. The family said the complaint was not about money. Mr Mason said: "Mr Haymes was apologetic and polite and removed the dead bat, but in my view it shouldn't have happened.'

Quite. Finally for this morning, Marcus Warren twitters the dumbest Inaugural line ever uttered by a US President, before the 43rd President (43rd dimmest, as well) invented the Bushism, from one Richard Milhous Nixon in 1969:

The American Dream does not come to those who fall asleep.

And, of course, a dead bat above the bedhead is one way to stay awake after hours. That’s how Aussies do it.

Twitter: How to be a Twit

What is Twitter, what isn’t it? People wonder how so much small talk can have any value. If you don’t read it all, what’s the point of having any of it? In fact, very few people religiously read every word of a newspaper, and most of the stuff in there is trivial or made up. Fact is, Human beings, social animals, have an immense appetite for low-grade information from and about people they barely know. Only Twitter’s cultured despisers, Hampstead journos, people like that, stuff all their social encounters with serious social analysis & breaking news:

Ah, the eighteenth Century! London grew wealthy on the back of its coffee houses, the birthplaces of significant institutions like the Stock Exchange and the Bank of England. Why were they born in Coffeehouses?

Well, BBC R4 women’s hour has been dramatizing Joseph Addison’s pieces for thee Spectator. This is how Addison described his work in 1711:

I have passed my latter Years in this City, where I am frequently seen in most publick Places, tho’ there are not above half a dozen of my select Friends that know me; of whom my next Paper shall give a more particular Account. There is no place of Resort wherein I do not often make my appearance; sometimes I am seen thrusting my Head into a Round of Politicians at Will’s and listning with great Attention to the Narratives that are made in those little Circular Audiences. Sometimes I smoak a Pipe at Child’s; and, while I seem attentive to nothing but the Post-Man, over-hear the Conversation of every Table in the Room. I appear on Sunday nights at St. James’s Coffee House, and sometimes join the little Committee of Politicks in the Inner-Room, as one who comes there to Hear and Improve. My Face is likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa-Tree, and in the Theaters both of Drury Lane and the Hay-Market. I have been taken for a Merchant upon the Exchange for above these ten Years, and sometimes pass for a Jew in the Assembly of Stock-jobbers at Jonathan’s. In short, where-ever I see a Cluster of People, I always mix with them, tho' I never open my Lips but in my own Club. Thus I live in the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species; by which means I have made my self a Speculative Statesman, Soldier, Merchant, and Artizan, without ever medling with any Practical Part in Life. I am very well versed in the Theory of an Husband, or a Father, and can discern the Errors in the Oeconomy, Business, and Diversion of others, better than those who are engaged in them; as Standers-by discover Blots, which are apt to escape those who are in the Game. I never espoused any Party with Violence, and am resolved to observe an exact Neutrality between the Whigs and Tories, unless I shall be forc'd to declare myself by the Hostilities of either side. In short, I have acted in all the parts of my Life as a Looker-on, which is the Character I intend to preserve in this Paper...

There you go. Twitter, in 1711. Addison wasn’t a printing press enthusiast, but a people enthusiast. I realised years ago that our kids go MSN’ing not to explore hi-tec, but to chat with their mates. It’s a social process, stoopid. The sign of a technological dimwit is to think it’s all about the technology.

So, to recap, this is how to use Twitter. You have a stream of short snatches of conversation fed to your desktop. Imagine a drinks party at which several hundred people stand in small self-selected circles talking. Like Addison, you circulate and engage, knowing fullwell you don’t have to respond to all of every conversation, or even hear it, to give and take social value. Unlike Addison, you can:

• select as many or as few as you want to be of your party;
  
• engage people simultaneously all over the world;
• read and recall every conversation going on in the room if you really want;
• paticipate or not, if, for example, you have a condition like Aspergers affecting enjoyment of social interaction, on terms of engagement with which you can be comfortable
  
• search every conversation almost instantly to find people talking about whatever you want. For example if you really must go on about Treaty of Westphalia, you Twittersearch it and if anyone else has been talking about it, off you go. If they’re not you can start a conversation;
  
• turn it off and do something else at any time;
• Spend your cash on other things as the whole party costs almost nothing in either time or money terms.
  

These are useful things to be able to do with and at a party, but that’s all there is to it. You need to bring and mix your own cocktails, or not. Some people hate social gatherings, and that’s OK. Others think they’re going to hate them, but enjoy them when they push themselves. Other people were made for them.

Small talk is both entirely trivial and the essential stuff of life. In that spirit, why not let’s all just relax and enjoy Twitter for what it is? or not?

For my basic first thoughts about Twitter, click here.
There’s a brilliant post by Matt Kelland on the Haiku aspect of Twitter here. Thanks, Matt.

Excellent Introduction and tips for Twitter by David Pogue in the New York Times, here.

Is Twitter Twaddle?

In the balmy days of my post-Christmas break I have been flexing my muscles as a new media junkie with Twitter. Some say this is the next Big Thing — but it has recently been excoriated by the Daily Mail, no less, for enabling celebs like Jonathan Ross, John Cleese, Will Carling and Stephen Fry to publish trivia about their lives.

Mind you, British newspapers have been known, themselves, to post trivia about celebrities, along with Celebs’ profound reflections about religion, philosophy, art and science. What seems to have got the Mail’s goat is that the celebs are now posting their own trivia for themselves, rather than having it dug up against them by Mail hacks; who sound understandably ratty about the time they wasted on Twitter digging for juicy dirt, rewarded by mere banalities.

So what is Twitter? It’s a free Micro Blog/ stream of collective consciousness/ social networking tool. From laptop or phone you enter up to 140 characters (limited because that's the max for a text message on some services) answering the simple question “what are you doing?” (like Facebook “Status”). You follow people you want, and are followed by people who want to follow you. A stream of “tweets” is served up to your desktop from the people you are following, sometimes in a clever and engaging form by applications like Twitterific (and PC equivalents). Additional tools like Mr Tweet dig out an expanding pool of people to follow, relavant to your postings and proclivities. You can also search the whole database of tweets for opinions about anything. Thus Twitter becometh, potentially, a serious marketing tool.

So, for example, I learn through Twitter that Jonathan Ross has been off in Florida on his hols with his kids, felt jet lagged when he got back, enjoyed Planes Trains and Automobiles whilst there, and hot tips Benjamin Button (available in the UK Feb) for his BBC TV show about film. Some of these information gobbets are more trivial than others. How interesting you find them depends rather on how interested you are in Wossy. I’m no dyed in the wool fan, but I actually rather like the guy more, and feel closer to him, for having some personal if trivial information about him. If I were a true fan, I’d love it. Whereas the media often dehumanize Celebrities, Twitter rehumanizes them.

As well as purely trivial tweets, people post links to their blogs, marketing tips, and the like. BBC and other media outlets post news stories as they get ’em, with links to follow up. Aha. This gets to sound more interesting. People post mini thoughts, impressions and experiences that wouldn't make a full blog post, but were good to note along the way. And you can feel your tweets through to your Facebook Status (killing, er, two birds with one stone) as well. The bigger the number following you, the more you have a purpose built advertising network for your blog, or whatever. As I twittered away last week, I noticed a steady and increasing stream coming to the blog, never more than a dozen a day with my little circle of 79 followers. Actually that's a very good conversion rate, in marketing terms. If I actually knew who half these people were...

Ah, there’s the rub. Some I do and some I don’t. Does it matter? I hate to admit it, bt I am finding Twitter to be an interesting news feed, facebook input mechanism, and marketing tool for the blog. If my little brownie ring of 79 grew into Barack Obama’s 154,878 followers (inluding me), it might become a significant component in my online presence.

You have to get your mind round what Twitter is and isn't. It’s a stream of collective consciousness, not a Big Po-Faced Hello magazine. You dip in and out of this river and dabble your toes. One would be unwise to invest more than five minutes a day in twittering, or maximum ten. Most tweets are trivial because most human information is trivial. It could have its uses, and the more people use it, the more uses it will find, no doubt. I’m definitely committed to tweeting for a few minutes this month, to investigate what it is and isn’t good for, and will say when I know... Anyone interested in following the saga blow by blow may click here.

For twitter as an Eighteenth Century Coffee Shop experience, see here.