Twitter – espresso coco

attention-seeking

I spotted this out of the window yesterday. Crepuscular^[1] rays of sun on the Town Hall in Leeds.

Grabbed camera, took the shot. Quick tweak and upload to Flickr.

Cross-post to Twitter, bounce it up to Facebook, schedule a couple more tweets across the evening. Watch as the likes and favourites ping up. Retweets happen. People like it.

Woke up this morning a flood of emails from Flickr as the photo hits Explore. Tweet about it again. More interaction, more people like it.

Then ask myself the question. Why?

I took the photo because I like taking photos. The light was spot on^[2] (and indeed was gone thirty seconds later) and I could tell it’d make a nice photo.

Why share it on Flickr?

Well, I’ve got a lot of friends on there, and I thought they’d like to see it. I like taking sunset photos, and the Town Hall looks ace.

Why Twitter? Someone commented that they’d seen the photo a *lot* on there.

Again, I’ve got friends on Twitter, some of whom live in America. They might like it too, so I’d post at different times, to give them a chance to see it.

Facebook?

Friends and family who live on Facebook. Surely they’d like it?

It becomes clear. It’s all about the attention. And here I am, blogging about the attention, drawing further attention to it.

So, why crave the attention? Would I go up to someone in the street and show them the photo? Pester someone in the supermarket or coffee shop?

No, of course not. But here I am, sharing it to the world at large.

It also raises the question of why blog? I’m sure we do it to amuse, entertain or even educate, but ultimately isn’t it all about showing off, even just a little? Here’s what *I* think of stuff. Here’s a nice photo *I* took.

Look at me, look at me, look at me now. Listen to what I have to say.

I’m not like that in real life, so why am I so garrulous online? There’s an advert on television at the moment which shows a guy in real life versus his online counterpart. His online self is slimmer, fitter, a better dancer. Online, we can be who we want to be, rather than who we are. I’ve written about this before.

Or are we just two sides of the same person?

Thoughts, comments, questions are, as ever, welcomed.

Are you the same online as offline? Do you blog, tweet, share photos? Why?

^[1] and isn’t that a brilliant word?
^[2] no pun intended

life online

I’ve been thinking about blogging recently and how it’s changed over the years.

I started blogging on Livejournal ten years ago. The thing I loved about it was the sense of community that existed – I’d arrived there along with a bunch of others from another online forum, and before long I’d made some really good friends there. In the early days there were times when the conversations going on in the comments on a blog post were often more entertaining than the original post itself.

But a few years ago something changed – people started drifting off to other sites, predominantly Facebook. The one thriving hub of activity that was my LJ friends page started to drop off.

I was as much to blame as anyone, I’ll be the first to admit. The lure of the shiny meant more time on Facebook and the weird kid on the block Twitter, with its odd insistence on 140 characters or fewer.

It made sense, in a way. Livejournal was a place where groups of friends would congregate for a chat. Facebook made it easier to share photos and find your real-life friends to go with your online friends. People who’d never have gone near LJ in a million years were now online. It had the now ubiquitous ‘like’ button, which meant that you didn’t need to actually interact with the poster, a quick click to show you’d been there and move on. Times were changing.

I miss the old days of LJ. My friends are now scattered across different social networks. Some now live exclusively on FB, some go between that and Twitter, some still hang out on LJ and some have ventured into the side new world of Google+

Me? I’m all over the place. Facebook for people I know in real life, or who only live there – often for them Facebook *is* the internet. Twitter for the random stream of consciousness. LJ for the occasional post. Flickr for photos, GoodReads for books, the list is ever-growing.

I’ve also been tinkering with G+ since it started and am starting to get a real feeling of community there. Could it be the next LiveJournal? Should it be? G+ has its quirks too – it doesn’t like you cross-posting content *out*, but is more than happy to pull content in. I can’t use automation to post to G+, whereas I can to Twitter, WordPress, Livejournal and many other sites. My posts on espressococo get automatically tweeted out and cross-posted to LJ. I have to manually add them to Google+, for now.

G+ seems to have the most potential in terms of posting significant content (like blog posts) and interacting with people. I get a few people posting comments or likes here on WP, but nowhere near the level I used to see on LJ.

So, dear reader. Where do you live on the internet? Are you a digital nomad, wandering from site to site? Or have you set down roots?

blogging quick, blogging slow…

I was reading Liz‘s excellent post the other day on ‘slow blogging’ and some things she said really struck a chord. Trying to find a schedule that works for a blog can be tricky, when you have to squeeze it in amongst Real Life, work, family and so on. There’s always something else to do, somewhere else to be.

Take tonight^[1], for example – by the time the kids are in bed, the dishwasher loaded, the house straightened up, school and work stuff sorted for the morning, it’s half ten and all I really want to do is slump in front of Game of Thrones (OMG HOW GOOD? Two more episodes! WOE!) with a large mug of jolly hot tea and maybe a snackerel of something tasty and highly calorific.

I’ve sometimes wondered if this blog could do with a proper schedule – regular readers (well done for keeping up, you’re all lovely people) may have noticed that I tend to blog in little flurries at various times of the day and week. This is usually down to me trying to be clever (stop laughing at the back) and scheduling a bunch of posts spread out during the week. Of course, then I promptly forget I’ve done this, and schedule a bunch more, or spot something on the way into work which requires immediate sharing with the world (I have a post brewing about a solar-powered bin I spotted this morning. More of that later).

And thanks to the joys of mobile internet (and good coffee shops), one can quite happily blog at lunchtimes, on the train, in the post office queue…

So I end up with some carefully-scheduled posts, some not-quite-so-carefully-scheduled posts, and some utterly random posts all jostling for position and attention. Some of these come with automatic twitter postings too, which result in a bombardment on social media. Though oddly, not Facebook. But there’s another post waiting to happen.

See? They’re like rabbits, these blog posts. Take your eye off ’em for a second…

Then I got a lovely comment over on the ‘My first job‘ post from Ofglassandbooks

Loved this post You should write more often and longer posts, dear Espresso coco, although I do like the pictures too

Perhaps I should take the slow blogging advice and work on one (or two) longer-form posts each week, interspersed with the photos and the hodge-podge of shorter stuff.

What do you think, dear reader? Slow and steady, or all higgledy-piggledy brace-yourself-he’s-off-again?

^[1] though I’ll probably schedule this for autoposting tomorrow morning. Which will be this morning when you read it. Or even tomorrow evening. Time travel is confusing. Speaking of time travel OMG DOCTOR WHO! HOW GOOD WAS THAT? *cough* sorry.

Slow Blogging (margot-and-barbara.com)

Never judge a book

(originally seen on http://cheezburger.com/7426380800)

It’s interesting how we so often judge books by their covers, isn’t it? I know I do when I’m browsing in a bookstore. Interesting cover, pick it up, check out the blurb. Sounds interesting, buy it.

Speaking of covers, I highly recommend checking out this article: Coverflip: author Maureen Johnson turns tables on gendered book covers. It started with this tweet:

I do wish I had a dime for every email I get that says, “Please put a non-girly cover on your book so I can read it. – signed, A Guy”

— maureenjohnson (@maureenjohnson) May 6, 2013

Maureen threw out a challenge –

1. Take a well-known book. (It’s up to you to define well-known.)
2. Imagine that book was written by an author of the OPPOSITE GENDER. Or a genderqueer author. Imagine all the things you think of when you think GIRL book or BOY book or GENDERLESS book (do they EXIST?). And I’m not saying that these categorizations are RIGHT—but make no mistake, they’re there.
3. Now, COVERFLIP! Make the new cover and put it online. Tweet or Tumbl it with the tag #coverflip.

The Huffington Post picked up on some of the entries. Go have a look and see, the results are absolutely fascinating.

I’m completely certain that I’ve missed out on a great number of excellent books this way, so it’s nice to have the backup of recommendations from friends, either in person or on a site like Goodreads. I’ve also been fortunate to get a variety of books from various lovely publishers via the magic of Twitter. See a book competition, enter it – I could fuel my To Read pile from Twitter-sourced books alone!

Which leads me back to the brilliant photo above – what books might you be missing out on purely down to them having a cover which doesn’t catch your eye?

Also, with the advent of the Kindle, we’ve lost (or are starting to lose) that link between book and cover – no longer can you sit on the train and peer at what your fellow commuters are reading, and I’m sure we’d be surprised at some!

Have you read any great books despite the cover?

Coverflip: author Maureen Johnson turns tables on gendered book covers (guardian.co.uk)
YA Author Takes On Gendered Book Covers With the Coverflip Challenge (themarysue.com)

These boots were made for…

I saw these boots via a link shared on Twitter.

In the words of the wonderful George Takei, “ohhhh myyyyy!”

They are quite possibly the most fabulous boots I’ve ever seen. I do love a pair of brogues, and these are utterly brilliant.

By an odd twist of fate, I realised the other day that I was in need of a new pair of shoes. My current shoes are a rather nondescript, functional pair of smart(ish) black work shoes and are, to put it mildly, starting to show their age.

I really fancy something a little more… interesting. I’m saddened by the fact that I’m fairly certain I’ll never be able to afford to drop £340 on a pair of DMs, gorgeous as they are. I really quite fancy a pair of DMs in oxblood red, as a compromise!

Abi (@sewyou) from Sew You Handmade set up a Pinterest board for lovely man shoes. It’s full of lovely footwear. Go check it out!

Best start saving…

Twitter’s magic number

wordcloud of the twitter bios for people I’m following

Last night, as I was surfing the stream of consciousness that is my Twitter feed, I stumbled across a problem.
I’d seen someone I wanted to follow, but got a message telling me that I couldn’t follow them. I tried again, with the same error.

I had a poke around, and realised that I was following 2,000 people. Once I’d recovered from the size of the number, this rang a bell – wasn’t there some kind of limit?

Ah, yes. Twitter says:

Every account can follow 2,000 users total.
Once you’ve followed 2,000 users, there are limits to the number of additional users you can follow. This number is different for each account and is based on your ratio of followers to following; this ratio is not published. Follow limits cannot be lifted by Twitter and everyone is subject to limits, even high profile and API accounts.

I’m quite careful who I follow – I don’t randomly follow people back just because they add me. I know some people do this, and treat Twitter as a numbers game. This baffles me, but that’s a topic for another day.

I have a look through recent tweets and see if they post interesting stuff. I’m a listener – I follow interesting people, without necessarily expecting (or needing) them to follow me back. I’m quite sure there are some defunct accounts in there. but who has the time to weed out unused accounts?

For me, there are a couple of categories of people on Twitter that I follow:
People I know, either in real-life, or via interacting online. A lot of local Leeds/Yorkshire-based folks

Local businesses, for example the great indie coffee shops in Leeds such as @LaynesEspresso, @BottegaMilanese and @BrewbarEspresso.
High-profile ‘famous people’ accounts – the likes of @stephenfry, @neilhimself, @NathanFillion and so on.
Other high-volume tweeters – people from the coffee scene, book/music people, authors and publishers who I’m interested in. Tech journalists, bloggers etc.

Now, I can realistically expect that the first group may well want to follow me back. I interact with a fair number of them on a daily basis and have made some good friends online via Twitter.

Same with the second group – small local indie places build up a following and again, interact with their customers. My day wouldn’t be complete without seeing what the coffee guys are up to.

The third and fourth groups though? They’re the broadcasters, spreading a message. They’re not (usually) interested in following, and there’s no particularly compelling reason for them to do so – they’ll see any @-replies mentioning them and can interact with their fanbase without following individual users.

There are some exceptions, obviously. I’ve chatted with a few of my favourite authors via Twitter and some do follow back. Others purely use twitter as a broadcast medium (which is fine) and don’t respond or interact at all.

Anyway, I digress (slightly). Twitter has some advice on what to do if you’ve hit a follow limit:

If you’ve reached the account-based follow limit (2,000 users), you’ll need to wait until you yourself have more followers before you can follow additional users.

That’s not really helpful though, is it? At time of writing, I’m being followed by about 1,390 twitter users. Now, I’m not sure what the magic ratio is to be allowed to follow more people, but say, for example, if I hit 1,500 followers, I can follow a few more people.

For that to happen, I’d need to get another 110 people following me, and this is the crucial bit, without me being able to follow them back, should I wish to do so...

What are my options?

Have a cull of people I follow.
Suddenly become really really interesting and magically get more followers.

I’ve had a go a the first one using one of the plethora of twitter ‘unfollower’ tools (I tried ManageFlitter) and trimmed off about 100 accounts. But I’m sure I’ll hit the magic 2,000 limit again before too long and I’m back in the same boat. And, as I said earlier – I’m following these people and companies because I’m interested in what they have to say.

So, Twitter. Sort it out. Do you really need a limit on the number of people someone can follow?

I’m @dakegra on twitter. Feel free to follow. 🙂

It’s my twitter birthday!

I noticed a tweet this morning from @TwBirthday

@dakegra Happy 5th TwBirthday! You’ve been around since 14 November 2007! twbirthday.com/dakegra/

So, in five years I’ve posted nearly 22,000 tweets. That’s about 12 tweets a day, give or take.

Here’s a nifty breakdown of tweets by time of day, courtesy of xefer

Apparently I’m following 1,794 people (lawks!) and I’ve got 1,252 followers (crikey!).

Quite how many of them are really real isn’t entirely clear – the number fluctuates on a daily basis as spammers get caught and blocked or people get bored of my tweeting.

So. Five years, eh? Cor. Doesn’t feel like that long.

I often get asked what the point of Twitter is. People sign up, follow @stephenfry, get bored, and stop using it.

With Twitter, you really do get out what you put in. Following some interesting people, talk to them, interact.

Set up links to Flickr or Instagram. Take some photos & share them. Comment on other people’s stuff.

The more you give, the more you’ll get. I’ve made friends around the world & down the road via twitter, blogging, taking photos.

Go on, give it a go. It’s fun.

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