Blogging & Communities

Twitter introduced list functionality a while back, and I’ve used it a bit here and there (mainly so I can find the real life people I know on Twitter amongst the “noise”), but I wanted to start using them a little differently so did some research.

Lists Are Great

I follow well over a thousand people, so if you’re in the midst of that and aren’t in the 25 most recent tweets when I look at my main stream, then unless you’re on a list (a column in my TweetDeck) I’m not going to see what you tweeted! Sorry, but that’s the way it is (of course message me if you think you shold be on one of my lists, I’m @Keiron).

My lists so far have been mainly to make my life easier, local people, real life, a “see-all” for people I find interesting (and I try to limit that one to 20-30 people), a tech one etc. So I can see all of these people’s tweets at once. I have a few private lists too (customers, suppliers etc).

Following a List

You can also follow a list, say for example you wanted to follow all the comedians I follow – that’s easy you just follow this list, and when I update it you get all my recommendations:
http://twitter.com/Keiron/comedians

This functionality means that you can get a moderated list by someone who is an expert in their subject, for example I’ve followed in the past, Will Carling’s list of rugby players, whenever he finds a new one – I see their tweets (without having to go hunting for them, and he mixes in the right circles to know these people!).

I’ve followed one or two lists belonging to other people in the past – but I usually tend to follow a list for a while – work out who’s interesting on the list and then follow those individuals, adding them to a similar list of my own (which other people can follow if they wish!).

Ok, so lists are great – what’s the new thing?

It’s not exactly new, but it’s new to the way I think about lists! After some discussion over the last week and a little experimentation it turns out I might be able to clean up my main twitter stream somewhat (I can hear a lot of you breathing sighs of relief about how good that would be for you!).

You can add users to a list, without following them.

Why is this good? Well, taking one example – I follow a lot of rugby people, they don’t tend to follow me back – probably because as rugby players they aren’t particularly interested in my random tweets about doing the accounts, deciding if Big Brother’s going to be any good, or the latest PHP programming project! So I’m unlikely to get a reciprocal follow from them…

You’ve probably spotted where this is going now…………If it’s somebody I want to read their tweets but are unlikely to follow me back, I’m going to add them to lists rather than follow them that way they’ll appear in a specific niche column in my TweetDeck (or Seismic on my Milestone).

I know what some of you are thinking:

“You need to follow people, follow more people, then follow more people – it’s the only way you’ll get followers yourself!!”

I used to think the same, but I’m coming away from that now, I want people to follow me because they want to, if they don’t want to – that’s fine as well! By unfollowing all those that I’m interested in who don’t follow me and adding them to a list this will clean up my main stream so that in future it is full of people that interest me most of the time (and maybe don’t fit into a niche).

I’ll see how this goes initially, and if it goes well I’ll probably take it one stage further and unfollow people that are on my lists (even if they’re following me), I suspect this may lead to a mass unfollowing of me. But hey if they’re only following me so I’ll follow them back are they actually going to bother to read any of my tweets?

I haven’t quite sussed out the finer details of this yet, but I suspect I’ll have some kind of workflow:

1. Follow a User,
2. If they interest me a lot stay following (and add to list),
   If they interest but are quite niche unfollow them (and add to a list),
   If they make no sense and I simply don’t want to see their tweets them simply unfollow.

That said I’m going to have to put in quite a bit of legwork initially to clean up my initial followers, I’ll probably use friendorfollow.com to do this. Saying that, I started to use it the other day and opened 230 tabs in Firefox (after it had used up over a GB of RAM it settled down!). So I’ll be doing a Father Chistmas:

“Making a list, Checking it Twice… Going to find out who’s naughty or nice”

How do you use twitter lists, is there a way they make your life easier? I’d be interested to hear!

I outsource some work overseas, but I’ve moved away from single contracts and now have someone on a regular long term contract to work with me, but this post isn’t about that, it’s about some of the spam I’ve been getting on this blog recently!

I use both Akismet and WP-SpamFree to keep this blog reasonably clean of spam, but more has been getting through recently (well through to the point where it’s held for moderation). I wanted to tell you about the two most recent (and persistent offenders)

Battery Man

The most recent items are all about batteries and hard drives on my posts about MyXerver and my PINES USB Battery Pack. The spammer merrily went through several posts telling me his iPod Touch was dead and would I help, until he got to my post about spam comments, when his spam comment with links to a battery site simply said:

i konw this is a spam comment..

I almost let that one through it was so funny! But really, if you used a real name (instead of having me believe your name is battery) I’d let you link to your site!

Outsourced Link Building

The second one was quite strange and I’m not entirely sure how much information to give out about it! Let me explain…

The poster systematically went through a lot of posts, using a real name and linking to a UK company (I’m not sure whether to release the name of the company as they were probably unaware of the problem!). To be fair I would have let the comments through if it hadn’t been:
a) so obviously systematic .
b) so many pointless comments like “great post”.

What I found annoying about it was the IP address was in Bangladesh, no problem there we all outsource, but the email address being used was for a UK SEO company – yes, yes I know they’re entitled to outsource as much as the rest of us. But I wonder if their customer knew that spammy comments would be used in their SEO campaign? I somewhat doubt it?

I debated revealing the UK SEO company (and I know a few people on Twitter have asked me to do so at the time I was watching the spammer do this), but I’m not going to for now.. I’ll probably drop them a link to this post and ask for their feedback?

Interestingly, I did a search for links to their client’s site in Google and only two blogs allowed comments through – nothing else. So it can’t be that effective surely? Do you have any experience of this on your blog?

Maradona by Kusturica dvd

I’ve never turned on Twitter syncing my Facebook status, I’ll be honest half of what I tweet I wouldn’t want as my Facebook status! Plus it would result in 20-30 status-updates a day!

• Alpha Dog move
  
  Diary of the Dead move

Devakishor posted (and tweeted) today a great solution to this, after asking his Twitter followers for a solution.

The solution to this appears to be Selective Twitter Status Application

• Final Voyage psp

! With this installed, when I tweet something that I want to appear on Facebook, all I need to do is add #fb to the tweet!

Uh-oh! Mum’s at it again with yet another meme! This time she wants to know seven weird facts about me, I’m not so sure about this… I don’t class any facts about me to be “weird”…

Here are the rules:

1. Link to your tagger and list these rules on your blog. (iRamble) – Check
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog – some random, some weird – Well I’ll see what I can manage!
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blog – 7? You’re having a giraffe aren’t you?
4. Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog – oh heck that’ll confuse some of of this lot!!!

Here we go…..

1. I like the cold side of a pillow
   Come on now, that’s not odd, that should be downright normal for absolutely everyone!!!
2. Automation
   I love it, I’m a real geek for it. I’d automate everything if I could. I’ve practically got Emma convinced on the remote control light switches, and the entire house sound system now! Woohoo!
3. Blogging
   Unlike almost everyone else I don’t know why I write this blog… Other blogs have a specific purpose like making money, or self expression (or therapy in some cases). I’m not sure why I started Skillett.com I just did! It barely makes anything off the adverts, and is full of content.
4. Rain makes me nervous
   I have good reason…. Very good reason! I got married in the Great Floods of 2007 in Gloucester.We were getting married on the 21st July 2007, and on the 20th July 2007 the heavens opened, surrounding the village we were due to get married in!

   Needless to say some people almost didn’t make it to the wedding (myself included), my flat tyre on the morning of the wedding just continued the saga. However all but 4 people made it I think, and guess what – the most amazing day ever – made all the more special by the stories of how people had got there:
   The Girl Next Door move
   - Army Trucks
   - Nights in Crisis Centres
   - 21 Hours in a car from Newcastle.
   (Believe me – some of the photo’s are hilarious!!!)

   I somehow forgot about my nerves on the night before watching the Sea king helicopter land people in the hotel car park – as I rewrote my wedding speech from start to finish!

   I’m allowed to get nervous alright – it’s not “just a bit of a rain!“

5. Jim Carey
   I’m saying nothing more, just typing his name has made me cringe – I can’t stand him.
6. Trash TV
   Luckily I’m not alone on this one, the X-Factor makes me laugh, I think Strictly is brilliant and people wonder about my mental state, however Emma likes them as much as I do!
7. Weird Fact #7
   The reason it’s taken me weeks to post this is because I couldn’t think of #7, the rest of this was written before I went on holiday! As such I’m classing Weird Fact #7 writers block as my weird fact #7!

Oh I can’t think of anyone who might not have done it already…. I haven’t read enough blogs recently (see my last post!)

Update: I’ve actually had a request to be tagged! Here you go Tim.

The Express hd

I was raving about BackType only last week both on Twitter and on this blog – It’s a great idea and the list of features they sent me this morning in their newsletter looked great!

FriendFeed
Not something I use, but I know a few people who do that will be pleased about this.

Alerts
I love my Google Alerts so this should be really useful for keeping up on what people are commenting on.

Twitter
Not sure I fancy every comment I make anywhere showing up in my twitter feed though!!

Widgets
Something Matt and I discussed, getting places where we’re commenting to show up on our blogs.

Developers
Aha an API, not that I’ll have time to use it but I know it’s there if I want it.

Trends
This will be interesting, Analytics for comments

This post nearly started off as rant, until I went and did a little digging – it seemed BackType wasn’t updating and had at least a week old comments for me! Then I remembered I had moderation of comments switched on!!!

I don’t get notification’s that there are comments for me to moderate there… Maybe I should turn off moderation for comments?

I registered with backtype the other day. I quite like it as a way of seeing where I’m commenting and on what!

Speed movie Matt pointed out that he couldn’t see the point of it, but I quite like the idea of using their widget to show other people what I’m commenting on and what I’ve said (beats a blogroll any day in my opinion!).

I went to post a comment on a website today, it was a Blogger one (I always dread this – it’s just not as easy as commenting on a WordPress blog is it?). This particular user had chose to allow comments from:

• Registered Google Accounts
• OpenID users

I usually just select the anonymous option and fill in the form, like I would a WordPress form – that was a non-starter.

I don’t want a WordPress hosted WordPress blog, so I need to do something else… I want my own OpenID!

Then I found eric’s post on Using your own WordPress URL as an OpenID!

A quick download and activation of the OpenID Delegate WordPress Plugin, an account created with myOpenID and we’re away:

• Into the WordPress settings page to enable OpenID Delegation.
• Fill in myOpenID information…..

Wahey, all the way back the original blog and post my comment using my new “myOpenID persona”!!!