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#IranElection vs #MichaelJackson

Posted June 26, 2009 – 1:05 pm in: Rants, Twitter

(Apologies if this post is a bit rushed, I am writing this on my lunch break.)

I’m not really sure where to begin with this post as my emotions are rather mixed. To put it bluntly, on the one hand, I’m deeply saddened by the tragic news of Michael Jackson’s death as he was an absolute legend, but on the other hand, it really is a shameful state of affairs when something like a celebrities death is more important than certain other things.

This is not a ‘new’ problem at all. The old media (TV, Newspapers, Radio) have ALWAYS reported on whichever story is going to get the most views, sales, listeners. That is a known fact, it’s a sad fact, but that is the way it is and always will be. (There is also the issue of bias in the old media, but I don’t want to get into Politics etc in the 23 minutes left on my lunch break!)

As you should well be aware of, there is now Social Media, controlled by people, not big companies, but as amazing as Social Media is, it shows how brainwashed we as ‘normal people’ really are.

I compared some ‘tweets’ in a graph that I call “Iran VS Michael Jackson“.

mj-vs-iran1

Sick isn’t it?

Live Graph

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Twitter strangeness – Bald guys with glasses.

Posted May 20, 2009 – 5:30 pm in: Twitter

Hello again, I have returned from my hiatus of online ’socialising’! However today, when I loaded up Twhirl for the first time in a while, I was greeted with the strangeness seen in the screenshot below. This inspired today’s blog post and a more up to date personal twitter philosophy!

strange-similarities1

Click here if you can’t see the image.

3 tweets in a row from bald guys wearing glasses, you will agree with me that this is certainly a strange thing to see. Looks like mugshots of psychopathic stalkers.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not being prejudice against bald guys with glasses! But those 3 made me realise how much random shizzle goes through my tweet stream! Why am I following these people? Well, in my early days of twitter naivety, I will admit, I was going to try and use Twitter as a ‘marketing tool’. Follow everyone and they will follow back, and to make the whole twitter-verse work how you want it to, you have to do the same, follow everyone who follows you.

Now though, the repercussions of that decision are obvious.

I get relentlessly followed by:

  • Spam bots – you can tell this by seeing every tweet has the SAME short URL.
  • ‘SEO Experts’ – says ‘SEO Expert’ in their profile description.
  • ‘hot babes’ – Their username is in this form: Firstname + Surname Initial + Year of birth (Like MorganN1977). These have stopped now, so I assume Twitter has worked out how to stop that spam!

I seem to be following:

  • Bald guys with glasses.
  • People who spread information that is completely useless to me.
  • People who copy, paste & tweet philosophy quotes 20 times a day.

I am going to have a serious unfollowing session over the coming weeks. Any tweets that I deem useless to me will make me visit that persons profile and check their most recent tweets. If they are all mainly useless to me, I am going to unfollow them. (People I know and people from Oxford will generally be exempt from unfollowing btw!).

It will be interesting to see how much my twitter follower count drops. So for giggles, I am going to monitor the numbers. As of this post, I am following 710 people and have 846 followers.

Below is my follower graph for the previous 3 months (courtesy of TwitterCounter). I have put a note in my diary to write a follow up post on the 20th June and will compare graphs. I bet you can’t wait!

twittercounter-836-20-may-20091

Click here if you can’t see the graph.

p.s Don’t follow everyone on #followfriday like I did on the 20th March unless you want a crazy looking graph!

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Blog Reader Appreciation Day 2009

Posted April 16, 2009 – 7:00 am in: Bloggers Unite

Hello kind readers!

Today is Blog Reader Appreciation Day 2009, don’t believe me? Click here!

It’s a chance for bloggers to say thanks to the readers for subscribing or reading in one way or another.

Without readers, blogging would be an entirely pointless waste of time! So thanks a lot for reading and I really appreciate it and I will try my best to keep bringing you fresh content and ideas!

Objective of Blog Reader Appreciation Day: Bloggers thank and celebrate readers with special tributes, posts, contests, and give-aways.

I’ll be honest with you, I would love to thank the commenters for their insightful comments and discussions. However, the problem is, the only commenters I have are spammers!

So how about, if a genuine real person, writes an actual genuine comment on this post, I will make a 12seconds.tv thankyou video for you!

Thanks a lot & I look forward to hopefully getting at least ONE real comment :-)

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Charities/Non-Profit Organisations & Social Media

Posted April 14, 2009 – 12:00 pm in: Blog News

This is a quick post to let you know whats happening with this blog!

I have been thinking long and hard about which direction I want this blog to go. I could write about Social Media but who wants to read another Social Media blog? Or I could write about charities and non profit organisations but who wants to read another charity and non-profit organisation related blog? So here is the solution. I am going to write about how different charities and non profit organisations are using (or can use) Social Media to increase exposure and awareness of their causes.

I have also written 3 new pages (as opposed to ‘posts’) to help make it easier for everyone to get more information about the blog:

  1. About
  2. Contact
  3. What is RSS?

The other main piece of news is, I am involved with a brand new non-profit Social Networking website. I am on the ‘Public Relations and Marketing’ side of things and I can’t wait to reveal more information about this exciting project. We are having a staff meeting tonight, Tuesday 14th April, to discuss timescales and marketing plans, so stay tuned for more news!

If you haven’t already, then I recommend you subscribe to this blog or follow me on twitter to get the latest updates.

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What I find annoying about Twitter & what they need to improve.

Posted April 5, 2009 – 12:02 pm in: Twitter

I’ve never written anything on Social Media before, I guess the main reason is that I always thought “What’s the point?”. The blogosphere is so full of people writing about social media, just like “Make Money Online” and “Blogging Tips”. So why am I writing one now? I’m not sure, but one thing I do want to make clear is… I am NOT a so called ’social media expert’. I just like talking about it all the time, so why not put it into written words!

When I first heard about Twitter, I was seriously put off by the whole introductory video on the front page of www.twitter.com.(Long gone now, but watch the video below if you havn’t seen it before).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&v=ddO9idmax0o

I had already started removing friends from facebook, purely on the basis that they spammed me to hell with their status updates, a typical day in the life of said person was:

  • Woken up, so tired
  • Just had a shower
  • Just eaten breakfast
  • Waiting for bus
  • On bus
  • At work now
  • On lunch break
  • Finished lunch
  • Finished work
  • waiting for bus
  • On bus now
  • just about to have dinner
  • just finished dinner
  • watching Eastenders
  • finished watching eastenders
  • watching repeats of QI on Dave
  • Going to sleep now

The Introduction to Twitter video actually scared me. It would have been a relentless non stop barrage of pointless updates, could also call it ‘My own personal hell’. However, I did one day decide to take the plunge and try and figure out why everyone was going on about it. One of the first things I did was use the search facility… after that, I was hooked.

Now, skip forward a year or so and we find ourselves at a rather interesting point in Twitters timeline. There is all this talk about ‘How will twitter monetize?’ and ‘Will google buy twitter?’. Here is my little view on what is going on in the twitterverse and what they need to sort out.

SPAM

As I wrote before, there is a sudden surge of ‘Social Media Experts’ which equals spam. Yes, you know the ones. They are following about 15,000 people, have about 10,000 followers and have posted about 40 updates, or they are the ones that auto DM you if you follow them. Had any of these?

  • Thanks for following? Any questions about dating you would like me to blog about?
  • Thanks for following me :-) I run a rakeback site, if you want to get paid to play poker visit *website here*
  • Thanks for following me! Free 6-part website traffic course *website here*
  • Thanks for the follow. Twitter is so cool – are you having fun?
  • Thanks for following me. Heres a free gift you may enjoy *website here*
  • Thanks 4 following me. Pls add me on Facebook… I post things that make me laugh & parenting tips
  • Thanks for following me. Vist my web & watch video & sign guestbook. Thx *website here*
  • This is a great intl company – *website here* 150,000 a month are joining – no recession at this company

You get the point yeah? I know there are ways to stop the auto dm’s, but in all honesty, I want to recieve them, because it gives me easy notification of who is blatently spam. After an AutoDM, I follow this same practice:

  • Go to their profile.
  • Unfollow them.
  • Block Them.
  • Alert @spam about them

I know that not much is done if I alert @spam about auto dm’ers, but it makes me feel good!

INFORMATION OVERLOAD

For those slightly more tech savvy among us, we can use programs & services like:

  • TweetDeck to save our tweeple into groups.
  • TwitterFall for watching ‘breaking news’. My personal favourite was keeping an eye on the #G20 hashtag a few days ago. Really shows you the absolute power of twitter!
  • Saving search queries as RSS feeds imported into your prefered reader of choice for the ‘not so important but still interesting’ updates.

There are many other ways of sorting and organising your tweetstream. The problem is, what if my Mum or Dad decided to use twitter? They would have no idea about anything outside of the twitter.com website! So I think that even though Twitter knows about all these external sites and programs (well, obviously they do as they released the API), twitter itself should really build in some of these features to help the non-tech savvy users get more out of the twitterverse.

MORE INFORMATION IN THE NOTIFICATIONS

I think that to help users speed up their mundane actions, you know what I mean:

  • Get an email about a new follower.
  • Open the email.
  • Click on that users twitter page
  • Go through past tweets, check number of updates, how many following? how many followers?
  • Decide to follow back or not
  • Close window
  • Go back to email
  • Delete email

If you have been putting off this task for a while, its extremely tedious (especially if you have a list of 20 or more new followers!) and leads to the possibility of spammers finding their way into your tweet stream because of a lack of concentration. So how about this as a solution… When twitter sends you an alert, it should contain the following information:

  • Profile Picture
  • Name
  • Bio
  • Number of Followers, Following & Updates
  • Last 10 tweets
  • Auto login link to follow user or any other ‘action’ you want to take, which will land on twitter in one way or another, so twitter will still be getting people ‘on the site’.

This would make life a whole lot simpler for us!

CONCLUSION

I guess I don’t really have a conclusion, because I wasn’t asking a question, I was just listing a few of my thoughts!

The Internet is changing rapidly more and more every day, who know’s if twitter will be around (as we know it) in 6 months time.

Will something else better, more complex in information sourcing but better streamlined for the end user be invented?

If twitter do want to still be around, then I think they need to do a LOT more work on twitter.com itself, or just sell their souls to google asap!

Anyone agree/disagree with me? Let me know in the comments. Or you could @williamclaxton me!

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Trout2Trout 2009 Update: Now onto 3 figures raised!

Posted March 29, 2009 – 10:23 am in: Charity Work, Trout2Trout 2009

Am happy to announce that I’ve reached £100! I still have another £150 to go to reach my £250 target, but with 4 weeks to go, I’m sure I will reach it.

As I wrote in my previous post, I haven’t ever tried raising money for a charity before, it is fun planning and figuring out the best way to ask different groups of friends, family & work colleagues for sponsorship! I have even got a bit of a ‘list’ going on of dates when people say they get paid.

I think you do have to be quite firm though when raising money, if someone says no, then that’s fine, I wouldn’t ask them again for this or any other sponsorship in the future, but if they say ‘When I get paid’ or something along those lines, then that gives me permission to remind them relentlessly until they either do sponsor me or say no!

Luckily, I can say that I’ve only had 2 No’s so far! I didn’t really expect them to sponsor me but I thought I would mention it anyway.

Onto a lighter note.. as for training… I haven’t really done any! Have been drinking more water and fruit drinks (as opposed to fizzy pop drinks!) and been eating more fruit & veg (as opposed to crisps and microwave burgers!). Other than that, I’ve just been power walking to and from work. I will be doing a 20′ish mile walk to and from my parents house next weekend so that will be a good test to see if I am fit enough, if it seems that I am unable to do even 20 miles, then I will start some intense training to get myself in the right shape in a couple of weeks haha

Now for some ‘plugging’ of my sponsorship page on JustGiving:

If you are reading this post from a link on Twitter, would you be so kind as to consider sponsoring me? If you do sponsor me, leave your twitter @username in the sponsorship page comments and I will publicly declare my everlasting love to you on twitter! If I can get at least ONE donation from someone through the use of Social Media then it would prove how good it really is!

http://www.justgiving.com/williamclaxton

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Trout2Trout 33 Mile Walk around Oxford – Update: 22% collected

Posted March 26, 2009 – 1:54 pm in: Charity Work, Trout2Trout 2009

Howdy,

Just thought I would update you all on my progress on the sponsored walk I am doing. I have so far been sponsored £55. So thanks to everyone who has sponsored me so far! My target amount is £250 but I’m hoping to raise more than that! This is my first sponsored ‘anything’ and I must say I am enjoying the challenge of raising money and getting people to sponsor me.

I have had a few people say they ‘will’ sponsor me, so I kind of have to ‘remind’ them, but I need to do it so subtly because if I don’t, then they will get annoyed! Thing is though, if I do reach my target (which I WILL) then I will be so much more motivated to do sponsored things in the future.

I would love to run the London Marathon, infact, I have just decided, I WILL run the London Marathon 2010! Better start getting into shape lol.

However, back to the Trout2Trout sponsored walk… I have never walked anywhere NEAR 33 miles before. My plan is this weekend to buy some walking boots, wear them in for a week while walking to and from work, and then the weekend after, I am going to walk to my Mums house in Botley, have a few cups of tea / eat some lunch, and then walk back again. All in all should be about 20ish miles.

I really can’t wait to do the walk, it is going through so many little villages around Oxford that I’ve never even heard of. Will be nice seeing new places and also meeting new people that I most likely would have never met had I not decided to do the walk. I’ve also decided I’m not going to get my haircut until after the walk, don’t ask me why!

Anyways, I need to finish my lunch now and then get back to work!

P.S If you wish to sponsor me, here is a link to my JustGiving page!!!

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New blog, new beginnings, charity work & other stuff!

Posted March 23, 2009 – 1:39 pm in: Blog News

Well, this is my first post on this blog. I use to have a blog here years ago but after a problem with the hosting and all that stuff, I kind of ‘lost it’ all. I had then been succesfully running a Poker blog for 6 months or so, but as I am no longer really playing the game at all any more, I have decided to revive this site/blog again!

I don’t have any particular plans for this blog, it will mainly be a place for me to just ramble on about what’s going on etc, kind of a central place for me to also keep track of everything! And for you to keep track of me if you so wish!

I am hoping to use this blog, twitter & various other social networking tools to raise some money for various charities. Lets just say I’ve had a sudden urge lately to get off my a**e and take part in raising money rather than just donating. My first challenge is a 33 mile walk around Oxford for a charity fund called ROSY (Respite nursing for Oxfordshires Sick Young) which is part of a Charity called the Oxford Primary Care Trust Charity. The event is called Trout2Trout. www.justgiving.com/williamclaxton if you wish to donate!

Am hoping to raise at least £250. I’m 10% there already but I will reach the target and more! Feel free to donate now if you want! But I will be posting more in depth information over the coming weeks!

I would really appreciate it if you could let me know if there is anything I could do to improve my writing, blogging, or tips & advice on how to raise money for charities!

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