Having asked Twitter last night which mobile plug in I should use for this site the unanimous response was WPtouch.  Note when I say unanimous here I mean that every one that responded said WPtouch – not the whole of the Twitter world, most of who do not follow me anyway – just in case I confused you there, which I know I probably didn’t

Anyway I tested the plug in on a different site and it seemed to work out of the box so I have now activated it directly on trefor.net. If you are reading this post from a mobile device I’d be grateful for any feedback.

I was prompted to install this plug in as a result of a comment received during last month’s world record attempt. I also took on board the need to have individual buttons for Facebook Likes, G+ etc. These come from the Social Sharing Toolkit plug-in, now active here and which has replaced AddToAny. Looks like quite a handy plug in that one.

There is one more tweek I need to make and that is to replace the separate “most commented” and “recent posts” widget in the right hand sidebar with a single one that has tabs to select those with a further “most visited” tab added in for good measure. So far I’m to happy with the one I’ve found  to that one will need a bit more work.

Y’all have a nice day now

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It really really pains me to admit it but I have just blocked an absolutely gorgeous woman on Facebook. The friend request came in out of the blue and thinking she must be a friend of a friend I took a look.

This woman was highly attractive and had some very sexy photos in her profile. I have to say I left the invitation to friendship on the screen for a minute or two but then took the plunge and blocked her. She must have been a very lonely person – only had thirteen or so Facebook friends, three of who were clearly the same person with different accounts. I would have liked to have had the option of “block and report spam” but it was either one of the other so I just went for the former.

I shudder to think what I might have been letting myself in for had I accepted the request. Caveat Emptor.

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For me one of life’s little disappointments is to see that I have lots of new Twitter “followers” only to find that they aren’t worth following back. Sounds a little high and mighty?

My approach to life is that I am only here the once so I might as well make the most of it. Because of that I treat all waking hours as potentially time to be doing work but because I enjoy what I do I don’t necessarily consider it to be a chore. In addition I try to make my workplace a fun place to be.

Also I have a major vested interest in the success of the business I work for because I am a shareholder. It is in my interest to be on the case more often than not and I am not therefore a someone who switches off when I leave the office.
I use Twitter a lot – for much of my waking day. The platform suits my natural gregariousness and it gets used for a mix of purposes that reflects my approach to life – that is a mix of work and play.

On it I tweet:

• work stuff – usually blog posts on trefor.net but also links to online articles that I think relevant to the business, industry or things I cover on the blog
• non work stuff – usually creative writing posted on www.philosopherontap.com – latest post here
• and inanities that perhaps reflect my personality and which people can either gel or identify with or chose to ignore/unfollow – it’s a free world and a reflection of what happens in real life and not just online.

It is always exciting to get new followers on Twitter. At the time of writing I have 1,777 followers. However I only follow 1,058 people back. So what do I (quite reasonably) hear you say?

The point is that it is such a source of disappointment to see that you have new followers but not to think it is worth following them back. I’m a fairly easy going bloke so why don’t I follow these people?

To some extent this is because, just like in real life, you wouldn’t “be friends” with everybody you meet. The criteria for making this decision are however somewhat wider when applied to Twitter.

Whilst I do use Twitter to sell as part of the mix described above I don’t want a constant stream of sales pitches. In fact any sales pitch has to be so soft as to be almost not discernible (feel free to knock me down at this point if you think this cynically doesn’t reflect my own tweets).

Of my last 40 followers I only follow 18 of them back. The ones I don’t follow have profiles that suggests they can help me with things. These include:

• finding a mortgage
• finding a job
• finding a franchise to run
• making a fast buck
• helping me market my business
• etc etc etc

Drilling into the tweets of these followers they are invariably one way broadcasts offering advice, thanking new followers for the follow, selling left handed widgets (for example) or simply retweeting “interesting” stuff posted by others.

If someone wants to be followed back they need to be seen to be someone interesting or engaging enough to chat with in a pub or coffee shop. In fact one of the wonders of the Twitter world is that if you have already chatted with someone on Twitter then when you meet them in real life they seem to be very easy to get on with – you already have many things in common to talk about.

Sometimes “real people” don’t get followed back. Often their profile has no information on the person and not much in the way of tweets at all giving me no help with deciding whether to follow them. Also if someone looks implausibly attractive (I get suspicious – no offence intended girls) or as in one recent case, only tweets in Chinese, then they probably won’t get followed.

Although there are some journalists and news accounts I follow but who don’t follow me back I don’t usually follow people for long if they don’t follow back. It isn’t a personal thing. It’s just that I feel social networking isn’t a one way medium.

In the same way many of the accounts that follow me but don’t get followed back unfollow me after a week or two. Quite satisfying really. These are often accounts that simply seem collect followers because they presumably feel this is the right way to build influence. You have to question this when you see people who follow 70,000 people and have 70,000 followers in return. Who is going to notice anything in that stream? Also I often wonder how on earth do some people go about finding me on Twitter! Businesses advice in the Minneapolis area? No thanks.

The rules aren’t hard and fast. I often follow local businesses even if they are “just selling”. It seems reasonable to support your local businesses online in the same way as you might buy stuff from local high street shops. I also follow some businesses in my industry for competitive information purposes.

This has been a longer than usual post and many may not have stuck with it to this point. I understand:)

I will finish the rambling though with the observation/fact that I get many cold calls and unsolicited emails from people wanting to engage (sell). Most of them get filtered out because otherwise I would spend my whole day listening to pitches.

If you want to make it past the gatekeeper the best way is to first develop a non work relationship on Twitter. A subsequent work related approach via email is then less likely to be ignored because of course we will already know each other. Twitter isn’t a medium for selling but it is great for warming up the contact.

To help facilitate this my business card nowadays contains only my Twitter username (@tref) and no email or phone contact details. All the contact info you need is in any case findable online.

I have just realised Twitter is short for Tref’s witterings.  Better go.

That’s all folks

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We had a good go at it guys. When I first discussed the world record attempt for “most comments on an online news post” with the Guinness World Records® people there was no record in place. We came in at 5,455 comments in 24 hours.

Unfortunately in the meantime a Japanese pop star – don’t ask me his name, I was too distraught to register it¹  - has come in with 56,800 on his fan website. Apparently a quarter of all his registered fans left a comment. That’s life folks.

However we should not be dismayed. We should rejoice. First of all we raised just over £6k for the RNLI. The RNLI needs £150million a year to keep going. That’s a lot of two pences rolling down that lifeboat donation box and every little helps.

Secondly I contacted Charles Arthur, Tech Editor of the Guardian who after digging around a bit discovered that the most comments ever on a Guardian news post was 4,789.  The Guardian is reputed to have a monthly unique readership of 50 million people globally so the fact that we beat their number for most comments is huge news. NOTW phone hacking not unsurprisingly seems to be the subject that generally attracts most people to comment at the Guardian.

Perhaps I’ll change the subject next time to something more inflammatory. I think we will have another go – next year maybe. There was huge enthusiasm amongst everyone who participated. The main feedback from GWR, apart from the fact that they enjoyed following the attempt was that it appears that this sort of record is generally best suited to celebs with huge  followings. A bit obvious but perhaps we can prove that wrong someday:)

Still to do: tech post & look at the “most inspiring comments”. As regard the latter if anyone has any they would like to highlight let me know – leave a comment on this post linking to their favourite comment.

That’s all folks.

¹ tbh it’s ‘cause I couldn’t understand it & didn’t want to look stupid asking for the name again

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 The world record attempt started at 6am on Thursday 5^th Feb and ended at 6am the following day. There are three stories to tell here. The first is the charity fundraising aspect that was covered on Friday.

Second is the social media story. This was an event largely promoted using the #comment24 hashtag on twitter but the story was also posted on Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. The effort also caught the imagination of a good number of friendly journalists as the list of names in the table of top referrers for 5^th Jan illustrates.

In all according to Google Analytics there were 162 referring sites over the 5^th and 6^th January. A Google search for tref & “world record” uncovers around 53,400 results so the overall exposure was much higher (a lot of duplicates in there probably but it gives you a feel for the scale of things). Google Analytics misses a lot of links in my experience.  Forums and blogs were good  contributors of links.

Most of these links would have been sourced originally via one of the social media platforms – an obvious guess and in order of importance would be Twitter, Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn, the latter two being poor cousins.

The world record attempt did not therefore lack online web exposure.

WordPress

From a WordPress technical perspective the event went without a problem. There was an initial glitch with the WordPress setup where the number of guest comments were limited to one every 15 seconds.  We caught this early thanks to feedback from the first commenters.

The blog was effectively “opened” up to comments with little in the way of protection from spam – Akismet was deactivated for the day (it’s back on now). This was a risk but was done to minimise any hurdles to commenting and to reduce load on the servers that might have been occasioned by filters such as Akismet or Captcha.  In reality the servers were massively overspecified for this event and would not have had a problem – this will be the subject of a tech blog in the very near future.

Interestingly the native WordPress anti-spam controls still caught spam – anything with more than one URL in the comment. Louis Vuitton handbags seemed to be the main area of interest that day!  I am not aware of any serious problems that arose from the ”opening up” for comments. If we were going to get the hoped for level of traffic it would have been the only way to cope.  As it is with the numbers we did get this would still have been the only sensible way to go.

Visitor Statistics

On the 5^th jan we had 9,449 visits,  7,804 of which were “unique”. At its peak the blog was taking one comment every 8 seconds. At this time there were a significant number of active visitors at any one point in time – screenshot shows 162 but it was seen to go up to the 190s. 5,455 comments were left in the 24 hours (subject to final adjustment once I have verified the logs).

The comments were not from unique visitors ie someone could comment more than once if they chose, just as you would on a normal online news or blog post. The ratio of donors to comments and visitors 112/5,455/7,804 shows how difficult it is to raise cash.

The average time on site was, at 4:41 minutes, considerably more than the usual 90 seconds although 4 minutes is quite common for a popular/more detailed blog post. The 3.38 pages per visit is also up on the norm of just over 2. This could be due to the higher than usual number of new visitors (75%). The fact that 2,311 of the visitors were regulars to the site was gratifying – thanks for the support guys.

The number of visitors to the site seemed to be around twice as much as those leaving comments. After a few hours this made me cut down the size of the post. Perhaps it was too long – I had to fit in acknowledgements and an incentive for people to leave comments.

Incentive to comment

This incentive was a suggestion that people link to a person or organisation that has been inspirational to them and who will make a difference in 2012. In practice few people left such a comment. The charitable aspect was enough. Most comments were of the “good luck, hope it goes well” variety. So the “incentive” was pulled in the interest of shortening the post. I still intend to filter through and pick some good causes from those relevant comments.

The shortening of the post seemed to make little difference to the visitors/comments ratio. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some people were checking progress from more than one device – laptop, tablet and smart-phone and this no doubt accounts for some of visits that left without comment. See notes re mobile visitors below.

TweetReach

The TweetReach report for #comment24 suggested that it reached 1,129k people via 1,493 tweets. Exposure was 2,177,651 impressions with 257k people having seen 2-3 tweets, 55k people 4-7 tweets and a fairly impressive 20k people having seen 7 tweets or more. There were 475 retweets for #comment24.

Hugs to Jeff (you have to know him to understand) and Suzie (I don’t know her but I’m sure you understand) and firm handshake to Jason for helping here (ok hug if you want). I know Jeff but I’m sure that the latter two get inundated with requests from UK fans for retweets so thanks again. It would be nice to understand how many people left comments as a result.

There were other “celebrity” tweets or tweets from influential sources that perhaps didn’t make the #comment24 report. Occasional references were left indicating reason for commenting/source of link.

Anyone commenting with a Twitter account was encouraged to sign in using this. We used the “Simple Twitter Connect” plug in for this. Tweets generated here did include #comment24. As the total number of referrals from Twitter exceeds the number of #comment24’s found by TweetReach then it is assumed that either not everyone arriving via Twitter left a comment, or they didn’t leave one everytime they arrived or they just signed using their email address.

The JustGiving site had a Twitter integration but this could not be tailored to incorporate the #comment24 hashgtag which would have been useful. Not everyone donating tweeted #comment24.

The fact that we were using a single Add To Any icon for “sharing” rather than individual Facebook/Twitter/G+/LinkedIn buttons was also mentioned as a non ideal set up – clearly one click is better than two. Something to look at.

Trending

Both #comment24 (5^th) and @tref (9^th) trended in the UK during in the morning (fame at last!). By 11am #comment24 was 13^th globally.

This was due to a concerted retweet effort on the part of a number of people (me included). We could probably have sustained this trend with continued tweeting but I personally throttled back as I didn’t want

to spam my followers too much.

A planned retweeting effort or retweeting from an account set up for the purpose would possibly have kept the trending going.

Mobile vs non mobile

I did get some very useful feedback re the set up of the blog for mobile. First of all the experience for mobile users wanting to leave comments was not good. One of my jobs in 2012 is to identify a suitable mobile plug in to address this.

The split between mobile and non mobile visitors is shown below

The need to improve the mobile interface might account for a significant portion of the people visiting but not leaving a comment. It might also help with average time on site.

The vendor split is as follows:

This is interesting. The mobile social media/charitable types in the UK are clearly Apple fanbois. Moreover RIM and Nokia are almost on the list out of “politeness”. 70 different mobile device types were used in total.

495 of the Apple visits were from iPads with iPhone on 992 and iPod touch a creditable 46. 69 of the Samsungs were Galaxy S2 and the Desire HD was top of the HTC charts with 74.

84% of mobile visitors were new visits suggesting that people were following progress for the first time using their mobiles having commented by other methods.

Browsers

25 browsers were used in total – the top 6 covers most of them.

It would seem Google owns a third of this market.

Operating System

Symbian came in with 12 visits and quaintly the Sony Playstation 3 vied with “Nokia” (?) to be last with one visit each. I like the Playstation idea – play games and help charity. Microsoft has a long way to go in the mobile OS market.

Visitors by country

Geographic distribution of visitors

This was mostly a UK based activity. To have a convincing stab at a big record we would have liked a far higher participation from the Americas although the RNLI is of course a UK based charity. Existing media relationships were with predominantly UK based platforms.

We were hoping that the world record attempt would be sufficient news to entice US bloggers to comment and thus generate more noise.

The fact that many people were preparing for the Consumer Electronics Show in ‘Vegas probably didn’t help. Neither did the initial slow uptake of comments. It took 6 hours to make it to the first 1,000 comments and 3 hours to the second. Had the USA woken up to a slightly higher level this might have attracted comment and attention. So would the involvement from the start of people with big twitter followings and blog readership.

All in all as have been described here there were a few learnings from this exercise, not the least of which is that it helps to have famous people onboard and to have a team of people working for the cause.

There is one more post to write which is the technical analysis of the performance of the platform running in the new datacentre.

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I note that Sky has taken a 10% stake in Zeebox, a service that integrates TV watching with social media presence. This is the future. In fact this, to my wife’s annoyance is also the here and now.

How often do you see the twitter stream fill up with comments about a TV programme that is on at the time? It is usually stuff like Xfactor or The Apprentice, neither of which I can stomach. Yesterday it was the Manchester City v Manchester United FA Cup tie.

This is a pretty astute investment by Sky who scrapped their monthly Sky Magazine in print format last autumn despite it being profitable and one of the highest circulation monthly mags in the UK. Zeebox will add to Sky’s already powerful interactive online presence with Sky+,  an interactive planner on iPhone/iPad app and  SkyGO their app to watch TV on the move.

My wife may not like it but it is also the way forward in every aspect of life. She already shops online. It won’t be long before she is coordinating shopping trips using Twitter, Facebook or some other as yet unheard of facility. We have to embrace the new technology and the new way of living.

The size of the Sky investment has not been disclosed but my bet is it will be great for both parties and shows that there is still plenty of opportunity for the canny entrepreneur to make things happen even in this economic climate.

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This attempt at a Guinness World Records® Record all started back in November when I took a customer out to dinner to celebrate a bit of business. The customer mentioned that he read trefor.net and, to cut a long story short, I said that Timico would donate £1 to his favourite charity for every comment left by one of the staff from his company. I capped this at £100 – it was just a bit of fun. His favourite charity is the RNLI.

A glass or three of wine followed and we decided, as you do, that we would go for a world record. Considering this I upped the ante to 1,000 comments from his employees (£1 each) and said Timico would double up if we got a world record out of it. The record, whatever it was, seemed eminently doable. This customer has thousands of employees globally with many of them being industry analysts and commentators with large twitter followings.

I was sure that we could have a good time with this important customer and raise some funds for charity at the same time.

I woke up the next day thinking hmm what have I committed to and wondering what the record actually was! There was nothing on the Guinness World Records website but looking around it seemed very rare for a post of any sort to have more than a few hundred comments.

Making enquiries with the GWR people it turns out that there isn’t an actual record in place but they considered that 100,000 comments would be an appropriate level to make it stick. Gulp.

The scale of what lay ahead of us gave rise to a bit of an issue. One was that the “marketing” effort would have to be a big one and not just a few people from the customer leaving comments.

The second was that the trefor.net site sits on an old box somewhere in Timico’s HQ and this server would quite possibly not be up to the job of handling all the web traffic that would naturally be generated by a successful world record attempt.  We could be looking at millions of visits.

Also £2,000 started to look a bit paltry as a charitable donation for something that might attract global levels of attention. To be fair to the customer he was more than happy to continue helping and I spoke with the RNLI who suggested that we put a link in the blog post taking visitors to the RNLI website. This way visitors to the blog could also, if they chose, make their own donation supplementing Timico’s own input – basically now £1 per unique commenter up to 2k comments. This seemed to work for everyone. Update 3rd Jan – more sponsors are now continuously coming on board – check the most recent numbers here.

As far as the marketing is concerned everyone to whom I have mentioned the world record attempt has volunteered to help out. We now have a great team of folk up for the challenge and the fun of it really but also recognising that the RNLI will ultimately benefit.

From a technology perspective the blog is also about to move to a state of the art platform that should be able to cope with the surge in traffic on the day. I will be publishing more details of this and of the people who have helped in the run up to the 5^th January – the date of the world record attempt.

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Tinterweb is a wonderful place full of  great things that can change our lives. Of course we all know it is also full of pitfalls, dangers, threats, hazards, risks, problems, exposure, troubles and perils ¹.

I have just discovered the McAfee quarterly “Threats Report” . If you haven’t read it you need to rectify the situation. It is an amazing compendium of the threats to which we are exposed when we reach out into the land of the hypertext transfer protocol.

For the convenience of the busy reader I have selected some extracts for your delight.

• In Q2 the Android mobile operating system became the most “popular” platform for new malware.
• By Q3 Android has become the exclusive platform for all new mobile malware.

Look out that your phone doesn’t start texting premium rate numbers or broadcasting your personal data or even, as is the case with Android/NickiSpy.A and Android/GoldenEagle.A, start recording your telephone conversations. Don’t give any banking information over the phone will you. The malware stays on your phone for an extended period of time to make sure it catches the right phone conversation!

I’m not a worrier but I have started to think more about protecting myself and my family when communicating. There are some security solutions on the market and I will give them a go over the next few weeks and report back.

The McAfee report has tons of interesting stuff in it – Botnet growth by region, Social Media threats, new “bad reputation” URLs per day (hits 40,000 some days!!!). There are currently over a quarter of a million Active Malicious URLs. The report even tells you the going rate for Crimeware tools – $1,500 for Linux exploit tool LinuQ (with private exploit) – if you are unfamiliar with this don’t ask – it’s a need to know job and I don’t know.

I encourage you to read the report to which I link again here.

¹ My thanks to Roget’s Thesaurus for this contribution

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To get 2012 off to a racing start we will be having a bit of fun on trefor.net and aiming for a world record for “Most comments on an online news story in 24 hours”

This is a genuine Guinness World Records category in which the current record stands at 100,000. That’s just over one comment a second. Should be easy huh?

The attempt begins at 6am GMT on Thursday 5th January 2012 and ends 24 hours later. It would be nice to think that we could smash the existing record by a country mile. Someone mentioned 1million comments – why not?

Between now and then the blog is moving to a high availability, high performance platform, details of which will be made available in a blog post on Tuesday 3rd January.

In the meantime there is much spreading of the word to do to make this a great success.  You will be kept up to speed with any relevant news regarding the world record either on the blog, Twitter (#comment24), Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn (actually all of the above).

We will also be letting you know in advance the type of content that will be in the post for the record attempt so that you can get your thinking hats on in advance for your own comment.

It would be great if you could spread the word on this by “liking”,” Linking”, “sharing” “tweeting” or just telling your friends by good old fashioned “word of mouth”.

Trefor.net also has a page on Facebook where you can find out more and a Facebook event here.

Hope you can help  :)

Tref

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Over my toast this morning I was flicking through last week’s Hansard, as you do. Yaaawn I hear you say. Come now say I. Buried deep in this mountain of sleep inducing text can be found valuable nuggets of information worthy of dissemination to the wider audience. I am here to serve.

On 5th December the House of Lords held a short debate, introduced by Baroness Greenfield, on the impact of digital technologies on the mind. Beginning with the factoid that a recent survey in the USA found that over half of teenagers aged 13 to 17 spend more than 30 hours a week, outside school, using computers and other web-connected devices the Baroness asked three questions:

1. What is the impact of social networking sites on interpersonal skills and personal identity? The psychologist Sherry Turkle, from MIT, has argued persuasively in her recent book Alone Together that the more continuously connected people are in cyberspace, paradoxically the more isolated they actually feel.
2. Are video games harmful? Neuropsychological studies suggest that frequent and continued playing might lead to enhanced recklessness, reduced attention spans and even possible addiction. A survey of 136 reports using 381 independent tests and conducted on more than 130,000 participants concluded that video games led to significant increases in desensitisation, physiological arousal, aggression and a decrease in prosocial behaviour.
3. Can the internet actually improve cognitive skills and learning, as has been argued? Or as Google Chairman Eric Schmidt says “I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information-and especially of stressful information-is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something. And I worry that we’re losing that”.

There is so much change happening right now that try as it might it is not practical for any government to manage. It is perhaps worth trying to understand the effects of this change and Baroness Greenfield is proposing that we do this. Whether we could do anything useful with this understanding is another issue.

There has always been change. Lord Hill of Oareford reminded us of Socrates, who was worried about the invention of writing because he was afraid that people would “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful”. Should we have heeded the Greek philosopher’s caution and abandoned the written form?

The problem really is that this change is happening so quickly and on such a large scale that all we can really do is brace ourselves – find the right sized surfboard and catch that wave.

In keeping with the attention span of its subject matter demographic the Hansard record of this short debate is correspondingly brief and makes an interesting quick read. You might even be impressed by the knowledge of some of its participants who appear to have gathered much of the material for the debate by reading books as opposed to flitting across the world wide web.

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