Tag Archives: Twitter

Dec 9 2012

The 12 ways of Christmas – Secret Santa


It’s that time again, we spend 10 months hoping it gets here, one month preparing and then the whole of December questioning the sense of it all.

I’m going to start with Secret Santa. This year over half the people in the #Cubefarm decided that they’d like to do a #SecretSanta.

I have some ideas why the other less than half opted out, the stress of finding a $10 trinket, or for a couple of course the obvious religious reluctance.

I managed to persuade one of the non participants to draw the random name thing for everyone, much easier than going desk to desk, person to person, get everyone signed up and then get them a name. Hopefully the person drawing the names made some common sense decisions about pairing people up, despite everything there are people that wouldn’t match well with others.

Really, it's a boob mouseIn previous years I’ve managed to accrue some really tacky things, things that aren’t even remotely funny or even vaguely related to my own sense of humour or interaction, the comedy computer mouse with boobs as buttons for instance.

Perhaps someone should have got me a funny bone instead.

To be fair I kept this in my office cupboard for ages before it suddenly made its way into oblivion.

There is, at least for me, at least a little bit of skill required to get something that’s at least pertinent to the person you’re buying for. But there are always the obvious and desperate box of chocolate gifts that are just thoughtless, at least they’re trying though.

But and also, I’ve been part of the #NZTwitterSecretSanta thing, whereby @Websam for the second year mashed together a webs site and a random pairing generator to connect nearly 800 people together for a similar process.

The obvious drawbacks, some of the twitter accounts turned out not really to exist, some of them were locked or protected accounts, some of the participants are not regular tweeters. Of course there is always a percentage that will receive and not give.

I’ve given, and wait patiently for reciprocated love, and I’m aware a few people in the same boat, waiting for both the receiver to acknowledge the gift, and to receive their random thing.

Last time up I received a water pistol. Like I said random, and not always thoughtful or pertinent.

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Jul 28 2012

The one about how twitter changed me.


I’ll admit to being a bit of a twitterer, and have been for a couple of years, well 3 years, 4 months, 3 weeks, 1 day, 20 hours, 40 minutes, 35 seconds, apparently.

And it’s changed me. In a good way. I think. I

For me Twitter has opened me up to statements, questions, positions, and opinions that I’ve really had to question, and it’s been deliberate. I’ve enjoyed a lot of twitter, as a participant and as an observer.

Sure it’s allowed me to group with people who feel the same way, and to form weak warm fuzzy bonds with some people, particularly on subjects like Cricket, or Rugby League, or Football, or Beer for instance. Sure it’s allowed me to participate in the current meme.

The thing with twitter for me, is to follow people that I have some association or empathy with, either they’re funny, authentic, urbane or mildly famous, but in Pdubyahworld I associate with them on some level. Although I “follow” less than 500 people in a timeline that I visit most often, I do have lists that contain perhaps 500 other people that I’m going to read.

And on some days it’s a challenge. Somehow it transpires that I follow (and have listed) a lot of left-wing socialist types. They have opinions and statements that make me grind my teeth, on some days. But they are authentic and they are genuine, and I’m sure some of them are mildly famous. Which makes me sound a bit right-wing and conservative. I’d rather be thought of as liberal and self-centric :-)

From this melange then, Twitter has made me question and form actual opinions about things. About things like same sex marriage. About things like welfare. About things like the justice system. About things like religion, About things like gender equality. About things like ethics. Proper opinions, not toss-off remarks to mates over a beer in a pub opinions, but real ones. And I’ve changed my opinions, particularly over the last 3 years. Not all of them. Some of them.

And I think that these changes have made me more tolerant, less of a bigot, and a calmer person. I’m sure not everyone uses twitter for the same reason I do, which is a whole other post about needy, and not everyone gets the same result. There are as many drop-outs as there are adherents.

The rest of the time is affirmation that I’m among a group of like-minded people who would probably be the sort to stop and help in a crisis. Which is reassuring.

May 26 2012

As I get older I get different – #3


The one thing that I learned from Twitter is that you have to talk about Religion, Politics, Finance and the weather.

And so Religion.  I don’t think it’s a secret that I’m Atheist. Dead set I am. But I don’t think that it’s something that I have to share in public, or in conversation, nor do I have to justify my position.

And I have  full respect for anyone that is “of the faith“, any faith and has the need to have a “God” that they worship. I do.

My parents raised me Church of England, which in an of itself is a breakaway church, which makes me smile. When I say “raised” I mean sent me to Sunday School. I don’t actually recall attending church on a regular basis at any time. I doubt that we did, despite my sketchy memory of my early childhood. I did R.I. at school, and had parts in the annual nativity at primary school. Fully grounded then in all aspects :0)

What I’m not comfortable with is bagging people of the faith. On a personal level. I’m happy to talk about the irrelevance, the inconsistency and stupidity of religious dogma, but I shy away from confrontation. It’s not that important. But also what I’m uncomfortable with is having a label, even if it’s “atheist”, as if having a label makes it more legitimate for scorn or derision.  I feel the same way about my stand on climate change, and my own belief that despite what you think I’m sure in my own way that it’s not man made,  and that because I have that belief I don’t enjoy being called a “Denier”, I don’t deny climate change, just that man did it.

I enjoy learning about the aforementioned inconsistencies in religious teaching to reaffirm that I’m not just a bit weird.  The more you read, and absorb logical and reasoned argument, the further you get away from a belief in a “supreme being”.

I wish I could pinpoint the day when I realised that I didn’t have to believe in a sky god and that it wasn’t going to end in tears. I know it was a long time ago, and that as I get older, and experience more things, and witness more pain, heartache, illness and death I realise that there in fact can’t be a caring God, and that confirmation bias just does’s cut it.

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Aug 31 2011

In an instant…


Way back when, before the internet and mobile phones we’d agree to meet somewhere and we did. The newspapers arrived with the news from far-flung places, with the best bits held for the Sunday papers. Junk mail didn’t exist. There were weekly local newspapers. We all watched either the news at 5:45, 9pm or 10pm or all three. There was no 24 hour TV.

Fast forward a bit. Now we have everything in an instant.”Social Media”. For instance  we have Twitter, which is about as real-time as it gets without being there, sometimes it’s accurate, sometimes not. If you’ve ever witnessed the rise and decline of a twitter meme you’ll understand how fickle it is.

And we have deal-a-day websites, by the hundreds, imploring us to buy now, immediately, things we don’t need at prices we can’t ignore. We have deal a day advertising on twitter of course, and Facebook.

We can’t just agree to meet somewhere, we have to text and call numerous times ‘just in case’ It’s scary how frail we’ve become, how unsure it all is, how needy.

Facebook has given everyone access to our lives, out thoughts and deeds. And we accept it. FourSquare has given you the ability to let people know what cafe, shop, street, bar you are in all the time. It’s “me” central!

But it can’t carry on. This explosion of socializing on the internet is doomed at some point, where it becomes intrusive. And I mean intrusive to me – I don’t really care that you’re the mayor of the donut shop, I don’t really want to see your party pictures on Facebook. There are bits of your life that I am interested in, just not some bits.

Twitter, Text, Facebook, et al, is where the wild west is. “Everyone” is trying to get a piece of the action, to make a buck, and to get you to spend a buck. At some point you just have to switch off and tune out.

Now I can’t actually think of a service that I’ve used that has fallen into obscurity, other than the web hosting Geocities, other than that Bebo, and MySpace perhaps. So I can’t see a tailspin for any of the services we use right now, or are familiar with, which are, to repeat them, Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, and Youtube. Even an aggregation of all these things into one super app isn’t what is going to happen, because why? It’ll be too cumbersome, too awkward, too heavy.

The thing that we overlook  with Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Youtube. Google+, Flikr, WordPress, LinkedIn et al is that they are all “free” That’s right we don’t need to part with any cash of any kind to use them. Sure we have to have a device that can access them interactively, but they are free to use. And we accept that without question that we’re giving up something for something. We just don’t seem to care about what it is we’re giving up, which in two words is privacy and ownership. Of our identity and our intellectual property.

Anything that rises will have to have some basics, speed, reach, ease and appeal. Anything that falls will have become bloated, tedious or have some cataclysm around it like bankruptcy, where users fall away like hair falling out never to return.

Dec 20 2010

Keeping it a secret


I realised something. The twitter me, and this the ranting rambling no-mates blog me, aren’t that comfortable that my real live friends could read it.

It’s bad enough having a boss that’s on twitter, and workmates on FaceBook.

What do I have to hide? Well I’m not sure, perhaps the real me, the insecure me? Or perhaps the frivolous me, the unfunny me, the me that is just me to me.

I can’t imagine any of my colleagues reading this, I can’t imagine them reading. I can’t imagine them twittering, although a couple of them do have accounts, they are passive observers.

I’m down with that. There is far to much ‘me’ in the twitterverse and a lot of me in here. I’ve bagged a few people cryptically and openly on both.

Am I afraid that I’d end with no mates? I’m not that sure I have more than a handful anyway.

Sep 22 2010

Truthing on Twitter


One of my followers is also my boss. This is problematic of course because there are days when all I want to say is how much of a doofus he is. ‘cept that he will read it and then it could go badly.

There are peeps I follow that seem to be angry all the time, and it’s like a stream of bad-tempered bursts of 140 character railing against the world, everything, men, pets, makes me annoyed because among them there are people I know, and like, in an internetty kind of way.

How important is the number of followers, what vanity is it to outwardly say that all you want really is x number of followers. We can all get those. But it must be quality rather than quantity. Do you think that your whole follower list actually reads your 140 character bursts ? What all of them ? Get on with you .

I could of course address my angst by making yet another twitter account- one which I can be anonymous in, but anonymity is not my strong thing. I’m a serial user of my own name as user-name and blogname places.

And Twitter- is it for marketing or presence ? Who are all these “experts” who actually don’t tell you anything or impart knowledge but pass the story from person to person like a parcel of truth. Am I having a pop at SM experts now? I guess I am.

Which leads me to the other bit. Of course I look after an account that is our corporate presence. ‘cept my boss thinks that he needs to follows x number of social media experts on our follow list, wherein I go and unfollow most of them as not appropriate. I’ve got away with it so far.

Social media then, tricky on the field as well as off it. I’ll get he hang of it one day.

Aug 27 2010

Twitter for Whingers


OMG!

It’s safe for me to say this here of course, but I thought twitter was a couple of things.

One for me to ramble and possibly entertain the unwary, two one for me to be entertained by the ramblings of others that I choose to be entertained by.

Three is to gather information by being a follower of a knowledge source, or vendor

and Four to interact with those people in a two-way way.

But crikey there are a couple of New Zealanders who use twitter, and who also have web-site and profess to “blog” that are dead-set out to abuse their freedom by haranguing and blustering on certain New Zealand companies, mostly the telcos.

Now the Telcos have to respond to a whinge and whine, and this somehow is taken to mean that the offensive twittering and whinging and whining can continue. It’s just being bombastic. What’s more it seems to give those individuals an elevated  sense of worth.

Lucky I can unfollow these from my personal account but I have to follow them from our corporate account, and that grates me so it does.

Sep 15 2009

Twitter in the workplace Pt4


The one where we get Blogged down

I am kidding the only thing we’re stuck with is motion towards, that is finding a blogging service that will ultimately suit our needs. And as I think we’re leading this from the from in NZ it’s going to be imperative that we get it right first time.
The project sponsor has a site host in mind – SquareSpace – so the next thing to do is sign-up for one of those on a limited basis as an individual and try-it and see.
As mentioned though it’s going to be a challenge to have enough things to post – no use starting with a hiss and a roar if after a week you’ve used your best stuff and get writers block or cramp.

Some of the criteria we are looking for include the use of tagging, so that we can identify an article in a number of ways, say for instance we have 5 key topics that drive our marketing and our vendors, call them 1,2,3,4 and 5. We need to be able to tag an article so that it can appear in 1,3,5 or 1,2,3 depending on its content.
What are the fabulous 5? Security, Virtulisation, Storage, Collaboration and Networking.

Like a said, quantity and quality of words, and a place to display your wares.

Sep 15 2009

Twitter in the workplace Pt3


In where we discover that all you need is time.

One of the things not mentioned in all the literature is how much time you need to build a following, how you really attract followers and when you can expect to get some traction

I believe that my organization in NZ is leading the way in adopting Social Networking in the workplace but it really is not clear just how long you need to make a mark. Sure following the leaders is one way to get news. Re-Tweeting may make your tweet count rise, but it seems to be to be likely that the same people following you are following them? I could be wrong.

Tweedeck can be a distraction, and you can end up absorbed in the twitterings about Cisco, for instance, who could be a person/Dog/Fish/Bar or nick-name – there is a lot a chafe with the wheat. So you have to begin to pick your keyword followings.
And there are things like #tags (hash-tags) to get a grips with, like keywords they can attract people to your followers list.

There are also a number of measurement services all starting with some variation on “tweet” that are 3rd party offerings that are available to use, mostly if not always free of charge.

And so then that brings us to our second step, we’re already tweeting our normal information to the twitterverse, and our next step in the social media project is to expand our usefulness. How we do this is to blog. And to blog you need content. And to get content you either have to be an expert in your field, have great opinions about a wide range of subjects, be good at research and be able to translate that into an article, or get someone to provide you the words you need.
We’re going to have a mix and match of in-house submissions and donated words.

That’s the plan anyway.

Sep 15 2009

Twitter in the workplace Pt2


The one with a stream and tweeting

Armed with a brief to incorporate “Social Networking” into the workplace I’de discovered the addiction of Twitter, Tweetdeck and of following, un-following and immediacy of the world. Michael Jackson had died- and I think it was the law for everyone to twitter once about it. No kidding. Even if some of the stuff was not complementary

But to strategy. The accepted wisdom is to follow the leaders. So I started just by watching from this account and gathering a list of people to follow. Starting with our Head Office company, the local press people, and publications that tweet, adding some vendors as they became apparent from articles and twitterings. A Range then of individual and corporate types that were contributing to the twitter stream. Watch for a while. It’s interesting what you pick up just by watching and honestly I gathered a couple, not a lot, of great leads and people to follow by observation.

What to tweet? As a Distributor company we have a fair amount of 1st hand information that we share with our partners so what better place to start than tweeting our regular weekly newsletter to the twitterverse? With TweetDeck it’s easy to shorten landing page URLS

So away we go with that, 10-15 regular tweetings that make up our regular NZ newsletter, 5-10 from our parent company newsletter which is similar but different, and the odd information piece as requested by the project sponsor.
We picked up some followers on the way, and discovered a few to follow, but we have some ways to go.