When you sit in media symposiums or conferences a winning comment is always that people need to see beyond the broadcast capabilities of Twitter and use it as a social tool. Interaction in networks is key to creating connections. And connections connect.
But when you are writing short fiction like my Twitter account @twae you write very tiny books so the obvious route is just to storytell. Just a little storyteller who you follow for fun. But opening up my account to RT any stories addressed @twae for 30 minutes taught me a lot about the power of interactivity. Of course the storytelling capability is universal but we each have our own version from what we see. And catching glimpses of those various perspectives is an art on to itself.
My esteemed colleague Sean Hill @veryshortstory caught on to this very early and his invitation to post stories with the #vss hashtag is spot on. But when that other great Twitter storyteller Arjun Basu @arjunbasu tweeted good stuff (not stories) from the #140conf he ended up with a net loss of followers, some of whom took exception to his sudden interactive role.
But my experience was that 27 different authors participated with only the reward of a RT. It wasn't about the results, just the process. It might have been annoying to a few that an only occasional feed suddenly erupted in multiple tweets in such a short time. Maybe the blow was softened because these were still stories in the spirit of the feed. But the overall feedback was so positive and I think people really enjoyed giving a story a shot, in a different way to how they might enjoy reading a story. Interestingly the whole 30-minutes with lots of exchanges and @Twae references all over the feeds had no impact on my follower list. It just isn't about that when people get down to sharing ideas.
@Twae is my latest Twitter experiment. The early stages of any social media platform is a great time to try out new formats and styles before we all get hard-coded into predictable patterns of usage. Twitter demands that every post be less than 140 characters so why not try and create fiction and short stories (Twisters) in the format? Or if poetry is more your style try your hand at 5-7-5 Haikus (Twaikus) on Twitter.
Writing short stories on Twitter raises a number of initial questions so here is a brief list of lessons learned so far:
Writing in 140 characters: One of the most demanding early questions is whether you should post stories of exactly 140 characters or write stories of 140 characters or less. This has a big practical impact on the process as if you decide on the former you often find yourself writing to conform to the strict format instead of letting the creative process drive the length. It really is the difference between writing free-form poetry and iambic pentameter or haikus. Twister short story maestro Arjun Basu takes the exactly 140 character approach and dismissed it as an issue in a recent direct message exchange - "140 characters. That's the only rule." But for me deciding a direction on this has been one of the biggest challenges of the form. I have experimented with both and am inclined to think that restricting yourself to exactly 140 is actually pretty arbitrary given there is no history of the form and the software doesn't impose this limitation. To each his/her own.
Twitter is a rolling real-time format and this contrasts greatly with the typical editing process. This suits the conversational nature of the form very well but presents different challenges to a fiction writer. When you tweet a twister (will soon grow tired of all the alliteration in this social network, but not yet) it enters the public domain and remains in its original form unless you delete and repost. But if you do that all your followers see the same post come up twice and are privy to your editing process. Best idea is to craft your tweet in a text editor and paste it in to post when it is ready to go.
Is fine to base some of your stories on real-life experiences but in general keep your short stories fictional. It can create a lot of confusion for your followers (especially if some are old friends or family) if you mix and match real-life with fiction. But it might makes things more interesting!
Connecting with other writers in the format is a useful experience as it helps you shape your own posts and gives you an idea of alternate styles. On Twae I mostly follow those engaged with the medium and format and for the most part that makes my feed a rolling list of short stories. Other Twitter fiction writers that may interest you include: arjunbasu, instantfiction, nanoism, tweettales, astoryin140 and microprose. For something a little different try maureen (haikus).
Twitter is the latest social network phenomena. By phenomena I mean it is reaching a tipping point in the public conscious, unlike say Seesmic or Qik, that might be hotter commodities in emerging social tools, but are still largely the domain of very early adopters.
As with all these tools the best way to find out if Twitter is for you is to give it a try. At the time of this writing Twitter seems ubiquitous in the mainstream media and it is likely that you found this article because you are trying to respond to all your friends demanding that you get an account. But Twitter currently has about 8 million accounts which means that only 0.001% of the world population tweet. It is still very early on the growth curve so anyone joining now can still consider themselves an early adopter.
Plenty of beginner guides to using Twitter out there. I started using Twitter about a month ago so plenty still to learn about using the tool but here are my five tips to-date for using Twitter:
Lifecasting and/or mindcasting: Lifecasting is summed up brilliantly in the Supernews animation "Twouble with Twitters" where a woman drifts by the screen and shares in a frail voice: "Found a parking spot". But mindcasters often take themselves and their ideas far too seriously and can be the equivilant of watching BBC4 in primetime - lots of people say they do it but hardly anyone actually does. Recommendation is to find a balance between the two approaches to tweeting.
Broadcast and/or conversation: You can't decide to lifecast and/or mindcast without also sorting out an approach to interaction on Twitter. Fundamentally it is a social tool so just using it to syndicate RSS from your blog or exclusively as a "micro-blogging" tool doesn't take advantage of the platform. But equally most of your followers are excluded from the utility of your feed when all you do is @ replies, turning a broadcast medium into a one-to-one conversation with lots of people over-hearing. Recommendation is again to find a balance between the two approaches.
Multiple accounts: It is fast and easy to start new accounts on Twitter and this can also really help to sort out your messages and audiences. Watch this video interview with PR-exec turned Peggy Olson Twitter superstar Carrie Bugbee to understand how this can really help. Personally I started Blogscholar to tweet about academic issues, Cutlines to tweet about media issues and ChrisBrauer as my home base and main account. Recommendation is to start as many accounts as you need to keep your tweets and audiences engaged with that holy grail of 21st century media - hyperlocal/niche.
Twittersearch & Hashtags: Just as Technorati tags were a clunky implementation, there seems to be some sort of cache in the start-up media world in using unrefined methods to get everyone feeling like they are actually doing something to shape the tool. Twitter search is a powerful tool to follow conversations on Twitter where Twits engaged in the conversation include a hashtag (eg #G20) in Tweets to be included in the conversation stream on twitter search. This has endless possibilities for launching new campaigns online, generating buzz about a concept or just enhancing access to feeds on ideas for readers. Recommendation is to start your own hashtag, tell all your followers and friends, and experiment with this powerful tool.
Followers: Left the most important to many of you to last. Am actually really surprised at how poorly thought through this concept is in Twitter. One way to get lots of followers is just to follow a whole bunch of people, if they don't follow you back, stop following them. Do this 1,000 times a day and you'll have tens of thousands of followers in a month. That's the common method of countless marketing irritants on Twitter. This approach is promoted by tools like wefollow that measure only volume of followers as a guage of Twitter popularity. Another way is to bring (or impersonate) huge celebrity status to the tool and watch the followers fall over themselves to follow. But what if you don't want to be a spamming marketer and don't benefit from a priori celebrity status? There really isn't any other way except patience and commitment. Lessons learned from blogging tell you that if you stay consistent in your frequency of tweets, stay on topic, and interact regularly with your audience, they will follow, slowly perhaps, but they will follow. Hope you aren't really surprised that there isn't any credible "get rich quick scheme".
When not working on finishing my PhD and teaching online journalism at City University I am kept very busy in my role as Director, Creative Industries for Clarity Capital. This involves recommending investments in the creative industries and developing web 1.0-2.0 strategies and sites for Clarity and investee companies. All of the design and development work is done through my company Smoothmedia. Clarity Capital has offices in Canada, Africa and the UK and a range of exciting and successful investments in diverse industries.
Working with Clarity Capital Executive Director Allan Dolan on the cutting edge of corporate web development we actively participate in the ongoing Internet revolution impacting operations, marketing and communications.
Russian students attend teetotaler sex camp, Chinese students buy stocks, and when British students aren't busy inviting Bill Murray and Hugh Grant to crash their parties, they apparently turn off the footie to watch property shows and scream "BUY IT, BUY IT ... IT IS ONLY GOING UP!".
According to a survey by high street bank Abbey students are following their nouveauriche baby boomer parents down the line by putting travel plans on hold in record numbers to save money to buy property.
William Blake wrote that "in the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors".
Maybe UK students are taking the door thing a bit too literally these days. For reference Blake meant a door of perception a la Huxley or a Sir Walter Raleigh style gateway to the world. What he likely didn't mean is a weather-tight, energy efficient exterior door on a corner property projecting a handsome first impression.
"House prices have brought in a harsh new reality for students," said NiciAudhlam-Gardiner, head of Abbey Mortgages. "They now need to weigh up the benefits of travelling against jumping straight into a career and being able to afford to get on to the property ladder."
What on earth is going on in Switzerland? The poster on the right is plastered all over bus stops, train stations and post offices in Swiss cities (except in Geneva where the campaign was banned by city council) in anticipation of federal elections on Sunday, 21 October. It is a rallying cry from the SVP (Swiss People's Party) to "create security" through the expulsion of foreign families who have broken the law. Activist groups in Switzerland and the United Nations have complained that it is blatantly racist but the SVP probably isn't worried about that as the party opposes Swiss membership in the EU and the UN.
Swiss President Micheline Calmy-Rey is worried that Switzerland's image as a "bridge builder and promoter of dialogue" was tarnished by violent demonstrations against the SVP campaign last week in Bern. But if you subscribe to the any publicity is good publicity school of public relations than maybe all this tension and worldwide coverage is a good thing for the SVP (known as the UDC in French and Italian).
The last time the SVP were at the center of such a political storm was when they led a call for the banning of minarets (mosques) in the country: "We don't want minarets," said SVP member of parliament Oskar Freysinger. "The minaret is a symbol of a political and aggressive Islam, it's a symbol of Islamic law. The minute you have minarets in Europe it means Islam will have taken over". Despite this almost absurdly simplistic rhetoric and action the SVP is currently leading in polls and looks likely to form the next government in Switzerland. The Guardian calls the SVP campaign "racist, Europhobic, isolationist - Switzerland for the (white) Swiss".
"Foreigners", many of whom are born in Switzerland but are denied citizenship, comprise a quarter of the Swiss workforce and make up around 20% of the population of more than seven million.
It is a great pleasure to sit in the Emirates and watch Arsene Wenger's Red Army play Total Voetbal. But for the sociologist the culture around the beautiful game can also be a goldmine of sociological insight and investigation.
For example, the unexpected and rapid departure of Jose Mourinho as manager from Chelsea to be replaced by relative novice Avram Grant. It was fascinating to see the initial press reaction and comment mania in the blogosphere. One particular exchange of particular interest to media ethics and sociology featured the Times Chief Football Correspondent Martin Samuel, the Times editorial staff and their online newspaper readers.
Let me explain. On 19 September, 2007 Chelsea held a series of talks that resulted in the replacement of Mourinho with Grant. On 20 September Samuel wrote a column for the Times that appeared in the daily edition and online. This moment was a massive one for football writers across the country and few are as influential as Samuel. Wenger famously said that Mourinho needed to do more entertaining on the pitch and less in the press room. An icon of the game was leaving and Samuel chose this moment to expound on a particular theory.
On the evening of the 19th it was also very interesting to see how few online publications responded within half an hour to the news that Mourinho was on the way out. TV and radio were all over the story but the sleeping administrators of vaunted 24-7-365 online sites remained largely out of view. When Samuel's story went live on the Times site an initial well articulated reader comment was published by "David Silver" along the lines of "... in speaking with others and reading this story on the train we find it the most anti-semitic piece of writing in a major UK newspaper in recent memory".
To understand how this comment got there it is important to note that the Times' online editors review each potential comment posted to the site for approval. So this comment had passed the editorial gatekeeper for the online version of the newspaper. It was shortly followed by a response post by Koldo, Galway, Ireland: "... can in europe, in 2007, a newspaper have an opinion and a comment on israel and its citizen that it is not consider (sic) antisemitic". In typical dualistic fashion for online comments the debate raged on in the form of those claiming anti-semitism and those denying the charge. Yes it is, No it's not ... Yes it is, No it's not ... that kind of thing.
This is where it gets really interesting. Logging in to the story 15 hours later that evening the comment from Silver was deleted, leaving Koldo's response dangling as the first comment on the post, part of an online conversation now interrupted by the editorial staff at the Times. In fact several of the comments claiming anti-semitism in the article were deleted. For a reader arriving at this time, or anytime after, the comments now read very strangely as ... not it's not, no it's not, no it's not, etc. The readily apparent question at this point is who on earth is saying it is?? The remaining fragments of comment make up not so much a conversation as a bunch of censored letters from a warzone.
It is apparent that someone approved the comments, someone advised deletion of the comments, and readers (and history) are left with the remains. An email query to the Times editorial staff asking why the comments were deleted went unanswered. So what about the ethics of deleting a standards meeting comment posted to the public record?
In order to analyse the situation it was first necessary to get a copy of an archived page from the Times that contained the original post. Many Internet users are not yet aware that this facility is available through use of the Wayback Machine that keeps a daily archive of every indexed web page on the Internet.
Or at least that is what I thought. In trying to access a Times archived page from the 19th the software informed that the Times was blocking access to the Wayback automated archiver. Debate on the impact of the Wayback Machine on copyright and intellectual property has been going on since its inception. There have been several attempts to use archived pages from the Wayback Machine in legal cases as evidence and this has also been cited as justification for blocking it. But I had never actually encountered a mainstream media publication that took this approach, let alone one with a long-standing claim as Britain's "newspaper of record". In the weeks following Grant's appointment Chelsea executives spoke out about a need to stop anti-Jewish chants at games, insisting the club would not tolerate such actions "whether in written correspondence, on the chat pages, on posters or banners or through singing and chanting". Jewish publications ran several stories warning of potential racism. Samuel - who reportedly has Jewish ancestors (if it matters) - wrote another column, this time insisting that Grant's hiring had nothing to do with his faith but was instead just a typical old boys club act. Samuel writes: "Chelsea believe that much of the negative reaction to the appointment of Grant is suspect, but that which is tainted by prejudice can easily be identified and acted upon or ignored, and the rest does not deserve to be disparaged so glibly". Would that be glibly as in accepting comments from your readers into the public domain, subsequently deleting these comments, offering no explanation for the actions and ignoring further public queries for clarity on the process?
So if a tree falls in the internet forest with no one to hear it and it is later dragged away and all evidence of its existence erased, does it make a sound?
Caveat Emptor!! Let the buyer be very aware when they deal with the company Crucial. They are a big market player in portable media storage. I had heard pretty good things about them that led me to buy two Crucial Gizmo 2GB USB drives on the Web. Never again!! While one worked fine the other one came with a cap that wouldn't stay on. Contacted customer service and they insisted on sending a spare cap even though I told them that the cap from the other drive didn't stay on either despite it fitting fine on the other drive. Not surprisingly the new cap wouldn't stay on either. In contacting Crucial again I was informed that "Your cap issue is not covered by your warranty so we would not be able to replace this drive for you" and the fact that the goods arrived with a manufacturer defect in the plastic casing was not their responsibility.
In their words: "The warranty that you have with this module covers you for any drive defect that would stop the drive operating it does not cover any issue with the cap of the module." Oh OK. The manufacturer of the cap takes no responsibility for a defective cap. Genius. All this for a $20 USB drive. It's like this company has never heard of the Internet and that customers are not helpless in the face of gross injustice. Screw you Crucial. Hence this post.
They say some people are suckers for punishment. But how can it be bad if it feels so good? Eleven years ago Manic Street Preachers bassist Nicky Wire entered Glastonbury folklore with the quote: "They should build a bypass over this shithole". But low and behold if it isn't those same Nicky and the Preachers playing the Pyramid stage this Sunday. It is just too good to stay away. And on this subject I can speak with a little bit of authority given my tent's position in the flooded plains of somerset circa Glastonbury 2005.
This year I've learned from all the mistakes from the last festival and am rip-roaring-ready to make a whole bunch of new ones. But I won't be watching the Manics on Sunday evening as Beirut is playing the jazz stage at the same time. Of course it is always a matter of opinion and taste but feel free to download my crib sheet for the Glastonbury 2007 festival recommendations and must sees.
Albert Einstein once wrote that "reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one". The incredible exploits of Wim Hof (aka the Iceman) and Manjit Singh (aka the Ironman) suggest that perhaps we live far too literally, encased in our self-made glass boxes, framed by a self depreciating sense of what is possible in life.
Hof and Singh share a philosophy that anyone can "move boundaries" in everyday life. The physical and mental achievements of the two beggars belief.
In 2002, Hof, 47, swam under the polar ice without any supplementary oxygen for an incredible six minutes and 20 seconds. In January he ran a half-marathon above the polar circle in Finland barefoot. He is currently climbing Mount Everest in shorts!
Singh, 57, recently managed to pull a 7.5 tonne aircraft four meters using just a rope attached to clamps attached to his ears. Previously he pulled a double-decker bus with 54 passengers for 55 meters using just one hand. He holds world records for squats in an hour (4288), step-ups in an hour (4235), fingertip push-ups in one minute (152) and parallel bar dips in a minute (124).
Both are humble men of lean build who attribute their success to keeping fit, meditation, consciousness and explosive physical power. Reading about their lives should convince anyone that the old standard that we as human beings can do anything we put our minds to is a powerful possibility that can explode the confinements of "reality".
Your typical supernova occurs when a massive star suffers gravitational collapse resulting in a transient luminosity comparable to an entire galaxy. It is probably the root of the phrase "going out with a bang". What makes it so incredible is that after about a month all the matter fades away through the powerful vacuum of the resulting black hole.
Nature's largest thermonuclear bomb goes off in spectacular pyrotechnics followed by nothingness, vast substance silence.
That's what makes the recent images provided by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory so unique. This time it appears that when supernova SN2006gy occurred the star spewed its remains into space over 70 days creating a radiance 100,000 million times as bright as the sun.
"'In terms of the effect on the universe, there's a huge difference between these two possibilities," said Dr Nathan Smith of the University of California at Berkeley. "One pollutes the galaxy with large quantities of newly made elements and the other locks them up forever in a black hole."
Makes you think that maybe stars are just hanging out in the universe deciding if they want to quietly into the night or live on in former self fragments of planets and asteroids. In fact maybe our humble planet earth is the result of just such a choice 4.5 billion years ago. And maybe the ancients weren't so crazy with their sun gods of Apollo, Helios, Ra, Inti, Surya and the rest after all.
As a kid my friends and I spent two weeks practicing our New Kids on the Block air band routine for Hangin' Tough. We performed it at the epic annual Battle of the Air Bands in front of all the teachers and cool kids from participating schools. Everything went well until bandmate Steve slipped out of Jamie and my hands trying his second backflip and crashed off the stage into the power cord feeding the music. A short roundtrip to the hospital took care of his injuries but our pride never recovered. Thankfully the art of the air band didn't die with our stage demise and the cast of Scrubs tackles it with their usual offbeat charm and skillz.
Blogger Beta is a minor upgrade for Blogger users who have their own domain and do not use the hosted option. But thankfully the software has been around long enough now that hacks have been created for virtually any missing functionality. The following is a round-up of the ones that are used on this site. All are free and most can be easily modified.
In order to get Labels to appear on the right navigation column I followed the steps documented in the Blogger Guide to FTP Labels
Comment functionality in Blogger is a bit clunky. Follow this guide to integrating comments using Blogkomm. This is one of the most challenging hacks to implement but worth it if you make the effort.
For search engine optimisation I reversed the order of the page titles on permalink pages using this hack from Freshblog. So instead of all my page titles leading with the blog name, the search engine friendly titles start with the title of the story.
Post titles are clickable on the home page of the blog thanks to another Freshblog beauty.
My list of archive months was getting a bit lengthy and taking up unecessary space in the right navigation so it was useful to implement this drop-down-menu solution
Thanks to 3spots and Freshblog for the very cool Popmarks button you see on the bottom of each post that allows users to bookmark or subsribe easily to RSS without all the clutter of buttons for the various services. It took a bit to customise it to my needs but it is easy to customise what services are available through it so I think it will really come in handy in the future.
