Twitter @Replies Kerfuffle: Not Just About Discovery [en]

[fr] La suppression de son flux Twitter des @replies à destination de personnes que l'on ne suit pas n'est pas un problème uniquement parce qu'elle entrave la découverte de nouvelles personnes. C'est un problème, parce que cela nous prive d'une partie (parfois importante) de ce que partagent sur Twitter ceux que nous suivons.

A day or so after my blog post alerting you to the change in the way Twitter showed you @replies from the people you are following, Twitter broke the silence with a blog post giving more detailed information on the technical reasons why they removed this functionality. (Don’t see a direct cause-and-effect phenomenon here — I’m not that influential, despite what some may believe.)

Though I appreciate their apology about the communication disaster, there are still a few open points as far as I’m concerned:

  • 97% of accounts did not use this functionality: this does not mean that they had chosen not to use it. Had the default setting been “show all @replies”, you can be sure that more than 3% of users would have been viewing all @replies
  • if I follow somebody, why would the default assumption be that I don’t want to see what they write to other people I don’t follow? Here’s what would make sense for me: default setting should be that if you follow somebody, you see all their tweets. Now, to cater for those who get frustrated by half-conversations or chatty followees (hey, you chose to follow them in the first place), allow suppression of “@replies to people I don’t follow” on a per-user basis.
  • the reason I am mad (and others too) about having @replies to people I’m not following stripped out of my stream is that it is depriving me of part of the public tweets of people I chose to follow. If I hadn’t seen @giagia’s tweet responding the @isntit on May 11th, I would have missed out all the fun around the heated “babies at conferences” debate. This isn’t about discovering a new person. This is about keeping up with stuff somebody I’m following (Gia in this case) is tweeting about, and involved in.

So, please, Twitter: don’t assume that all this is about discovering new people. It’s not. Since you removed @replies to people I’m not following from my stream, everything is more quiet, and I’m missing out on important parts of my friends’ lives.

Edit: oh, and while writing this post, I discovered that Twitter search does not go very far back in time. What next? are we going to discover that our oldest tweets have silently been removed from the database, one day?

More Musings on My Blogging [en]

I’ve been a blogger for the better part of my adult life. At 34 this summer, I’ll have spent 9 years of my life writing in this blog (which started its life as Tara Star’s Weblog) — and you can add to that an extra year of online publication experience before I discovered Blogger.

I have never really tried to accomplish much with my blog: it’s really mainly a place for me to dump stuff in written form, reaching a certain number of people who happen to read it every now and again. Though I do try to “think of the reader” to some extent when I write, it’s probably obvious to most of you that I have not put a huge amount of effort into tailoring my blog to make it as successful as possible (define “successful”, while you’re at it).

In that respect, I’m a bit of an anti-ProBlogger. Not that I have anything against Darren at all — he seems to be doing good stuff, but… well, I guess I just can’t be bothered.

The result, I’ll admit, is that CTTS is not exactly very reader-friendly: long periods with nothing, then spurts of posts during a week or two, huge long unreadable essays, and don’t get me started on categories and cross-post navigation in general. It also doesn’t do the best job it could of showcasing my writing and expertise (as my most valuable or important stuff is drowned amongst the over 2000 posts).

So, in a way, despite the modest success CTTS has attracted over the years, I tend to consider myself a Bad Blogger. Not that I don’t know how to do it (I do it for my clients pretty well)… but I wouldn’t say I’m a role-model 😉

All this to tell you that I’ve realised, again, that the less you blog… the less you blog. Specially when you have a tendency to write long-winded essay-like posts that take days (or at least a full whole day) to write. Blogging, for me, used to be about jotting down quick tidbits, Tumblr-like, and I keep having to drag myself back into that here on CTTS, because otherwise I just remain stuck not writing posts about Big Ideas and Serious Research. When I do things, I like to do things well. It’s a disease some call perfectionism, and it gets in the way of doing things — I’m mostly cured but I relapse regularly.

When I don’t blog, it’s not that I’ve run out of things to say. It’s usually that I have so many things to say I don’t have the time to do it properly. So I don’t. Because maybe a part of me would like to be a Good Blogger, writing well-researched and well-built posts, and Getting It Right.

Once again, then: back to the messy writing you’re used to see around here. Oh, and if you have suggestions for 20 or so categories in which to sort my posts… I’m listening.

Sortez vos agendas pour juin [fr]

[en] Not much writing, but a few dates. The next Bloggy Friday, eclau apéro and breakfast, my birthday barbecue. And where to sign up if I know you and you want a chance to go out on the lake with the boat.

C’est un peu la panne d’écriture ces temps-ci, non? Trois billets entamés mais pas finis, le soleil qui brille et m’incite plutôt à rester sur mon balcon avec le chat et un bon bouquin, le lac et la montagne qui m’appellent… Envie de faire autre chose que m’asseoir devant mon ordinateur, et de laisser au repos les divers combats qui souvent me poussent à prendre mon clavier.

En attendant, je vous invite à sortir vos agendas et à noter:

  • le Bloggy Friday du 5 juin à Lausanne (c’est vendredi!)
  • côté eclau, p’tit déj le 10 et apéro le 16
  • pour ceux de mes lecteurs qui sont aussi mes amis (en gros, si je vous connais aussi ;-)): mon traditionnel barbecue d’anniversaire aura lieu cette année le 11 juillet (plus d’infos suivra) et si vous voulez profiter des sorties en bateau, c’est par ici (une place de dispo entre autres le 12 juin pour descendre à Genève avant le Bol d’Or)

N’oubliez pas de bien profiter des longues et chaudes soirées de cette époque de l’année!

Unbelievable: Twitter Hides Partial Conversations AGAIN [en]

This morning, I see a small notice on Twitter once I’ve logged in: they’ve done a “small settings update” involving @replies.

“Small settings update”? You have to be kidding me. What they’ve done is once again removed partial conversations (@replies from people you know to people you don’t know) from the stream. Yes, two years later (I wrote Twitter: We Love Our Partial Conversations in May 2007, and they fixed it soon after), they’ve done it again.

Given Twitter Support is all but nonexistant nowadays (another sad turn of things) please join us on this Get Satisfaction thread to express our disappointment at the removal of the possibility to read all @replies from our friends.

Sans regrets [fr]

[en] Regrets are there to help you find the energy to dare or do things differently. Beyond that, they are just a ball and chain which shackle us to our past hurts.

Les regrets servent à puiser l’énergie pour oser, ou agir autrement. Passé cela, ils ne sont qu’un boulet qui nous enchaîne à nos douleurs passées.

Steph Booth: Not Running for Parliament! [en]

[fr] A la lumière des récents événements, il ne m'est plus possible de rester dans la course pour le Parlement britannique... Article en Anglais pour toucher l'électorat un maximum.

It seems that my attempts to subvert British democracy by running in the forthcoming parliamentary elections are starting to be hard to keep under wraps, despite my careful use of a wig and face mask for public appearances. As I will be travelling to Leeds on Sunday, and in the light of recent controversy, I would like to put to rest the question of my participation in the elections.

I think it is quite clear now that given the current circumstances and the facts that have come to light, I cannot run for MP. My lack of involvement in local Calder Valley politics is starting to be hard to camouflage, and the fact that I have my main residence abroad is clearly an issue for many.

I deeply regret this, though, for had I stood a chance in this election, free bandwidth, Twitter accounts, and Swiss chocolate for all would have become a reality, as well as “change that we can believe in”. My meteoric rise to fame in the recent weeks, however, has convinced me to leave the Labour party behind and put my efforts into the creation of a proper Pirate Party in the United Kingdom.

As you are now most certainly aware, it is the discovery of my secret blog by an astute member of the Hebden Bridge Web Forum which has set all this in motion. I would like to assure those of you who know me as a social media strategist and consultant that my writings on Climb to the Stars will not cease, even though they have been judged pretty harshly:

Stephanie Booth’s blog will on its own cause plenty of people to doubt her fitness for purpose as a prospective MP. Big chunks of it are in French and most of the rest is geeky drivel about her phone, computer, Twitter et al. No local issues, or much at all outside herself. Hardly evidence of a shrewd political mind keen to grapple with the economic and social problems of the Upper Valley.

Graham Barker on Hebden Bridge Web Forum 2009

The geeky drivel which has entertained and enlightened you over the past nine years will be the backbone upon which I will build the future of my political career, and I trust that all of my supporters will follow me on this new path. In the meantime, if any of my fellow candidates would like to benefit from my expertise in social media, now that I am out of the race, please feel free to get in touch.

Disclaimer: the other Steph Booth is not a social media consultant (but at least she’s using WordPress). No hard feelings, but I’ll be very upset if she gets her Wikipedia page before I do. Many thanks to Suw for drawing my attention to this issue, and for her editorial assistance in preparing this declaration. She and her husband Kevin have already been hired as the official speechwriters for my next campaign.

Feedly: More Than a Newsreader, Maybe Your Search Engine of Tomorrow? [en]

A bit over a year ago, I switched from Google Reader to Feedly. I have a troubled history with newsreaders: I tend to not use them, partly because I don’t really read blogs. But I used Google Reader for some time, and then Feedly. I really like Feedly. Really. (Plus, it saved 4 months of posts for CTTS after the dropped database disaster.)

All this to say that for many months, I have not really opened Feedly, and I feel kind of sad/bad about it. Twitter and Tumblr are my main sources of “new information”, and I’d love to find a way to use Feedly in a way that works for me. But it just doesn’t seem to happen.

A couple of weeks back, I saw this tweet from Ewan:

Twitter _ Ewan McIntosh: Over the hols I managed to ...

He says that he has sorted his feeds into “30 must-read-daily RSS feeds, with the other 2000 sitting behind as personal search engine”.

Whee! For some time now, I’ve been convinced that the future lies with allowing search in subsets of the web. There’s too much stuff out there, right? Also, in this era of partial attention (which I don’t consider to be a bad thing, in the “keeping a distracted eye on” sense), you often end up trying to “refind” something you know you’ve seen (but where?) — just like I had to dig out Ewan’s tweet ten days after I’d seen it in passing.

That’s why I like Lijit, for example (I’ve put the search box back here on CTTS, by the way): it allows me or my readers to do a search on “my stuff”, including CTTS, Digital Crumble, Twitter, del.icio.us… Sometimes I know I’ve said something, but I can’t for the life of me remember where (see this? having to search your own words…)

Feedly is pretty good at allowing you to search all the stuff you’ve subscribed to:

feedly | explore facebook

It offers a mix of a little bit of generally popular stuff with “your sources”. I like that. So, I like Ewan’s idea of feed subscription as “add this to my search sources” rather than “oooh, I’m going to read this every day”.

I have to say I’m interested in hearing about how you use Feedly or Google Reader (particularly the social aspects) if you’re not a “religious-daily” newsreader enthusiast. There has to be something between “keeping up with my feeds” and “never opening my feedreader”.

Life Comes in Bursts [en]

A few weeks ago, it looked like I had time on my hands. Things have accelerated recently (including a series of disruptive personal and professional issues, all over the course of a couple of weeks) and I’m now looking at a very busy week before I head off to Leeds next Sunday (not tomorrow, Sunday 10th).

I’m working on a long article in French around “Piracy is not Theft“, and also an English version of my article on care of indoor cats for Kits and Mortar, which partly explains the silence here these last two weeks.

Do you also notice this in your lives? I know all about the “feast and famine” cycle for the freelancer, but I’ve found this to be true (for me) in almost all departments. Nothing on the week-end for weeks, and suddenly 4 things in one. Everything is fine for ages, and suddenly 3-4 nasty pieces of news over a few weeks. Work goes smoothly, and then issues start coming up with a bunch of clients all at the same time.

I understood years ago that imbalance is the source of life. Oscillating chemical reactions are what make our hearts beat and what keep us breathing. Life is never stable, at all levels. So I’ve got better at dealing with these “when it rains, it pours” phases… but still, isn’t it annoying sometimes?

Une série de dates [fr]

[en] A few dates for local events around eclau.

Ce vendredi, 24 avril, c’est Backup Awareness Day. Publiez un article sur votre blog pour encourager vos lecteurs à faire leurs sauvegardes, aidez vos amis à le faire, et faites vos propres sauvegardes (ordinateur + sites!).

Vendredi 1er mai: Bloggy Friday à 20h, comme d’hab! (Je ne serai peut-être pas là, mais qu’à cela ne tienne…)

Lundi 4 mai: Website Pro Day 4 à l’eclau. On se retrouve dans un même espace physique pour une même mission: se consacrer à la mise à jour ou au dépoussiérage de notre site web professionel (ou de notre présence en ligne professionnelle). Inscrivez-vous ici sur Facebook.

Vendredi 15 mai: P’tit déj de l’eclau, ouvert à tous, il suffit de s’annoncer.

Mardi 16 juin: prochain apéro de l’eclau, notez déjà la date! (Apéro dînatoire, dès 18h.)

Today is Backup Awareness Day! [en]

Two months ago, on February 24th, I hit the wrong “Drop” button in PhpMyAdmin, resulting in the immediate deletion of the blog you’re reading. I didn’t know when I had last backed it up.

The story ends well, though it cost me (and others) many hours (days, actually) of work to get the whole of Climb to the Stars back online again.

I’ve always been careless about backups. Like many of you, probably. We can afford to be careless because accidents don’t happen very often, and as with Black Swans, we are under the mistaken belief that having been safe in the past will keep us safe in the future. Not so. As I like to repeat, the first time a disaster happens, well, it had never happened till then.

So, I’ve decided to declare the 24th of each month “Backup Awareness Day”. Here’s what it’s about:

  • Back up your files.
  • Back up your website.
  • Blog about the importance of backing up (sharing tips, stories, advice).
  • Tell your friends to back up.
  • Help your friends back up.
  • Put in place automatic backup systems.

Bottom-line: decrease the number of people who never back up, or back up so infrequently they’ll be in a real mess if things go wrong.

Now, perfectionism is the biggest enemy to getting things done. Backup Awareness Day does not mean that you have to do all this. Here are a few ideas to get your started (better a bad backup than no backup at all):

  • If Time Machine (or any other regular backup system you use for your computer) has been telling you it hasn’t done a backup in ages, stop what you’re doing right now and plug it in.
  • If you use WordPress, when was the last time you went to Tools > Export to make a quick backup? It’s not the best way to do it, but in my case, it saved CTTS.
  • Do you use something like Mozy to have a remote backup of your most important files? Time to sign up, maybe.
  • Are you working on important documents that exist only on your computer, which is never backed up? At the minimum, pick up a thumb drive and copy them onto it — or send yourself an e-mail with the files as attachment, if your e-mail is stored outside your computer (Gmail, for example).
  • Do you have an automatic backup set up for your database or website? Set some time aside on Backup Awareness Day to figure out cron.
  • When did you make the last dump of your MySQL database? Head over to PhpMyAdmin, or the command line (it’s mysqldump --opt -u user -p databasename > my-dirty-backup.sql)
  • Do you have the backup thing all figured out? Write a post for your readers with a few tips or tutorials to help them along. (Tag your posts “backupawarenessday” — I thought about “BAD” but that wasn’t really optimal ;-))

I’m hoping to develop the concept more over the coming months. If you have ideas, get in touch, and take note of Backup Awareness Day for the month of May: Sunday 24th!

(Now stop reading and go do a few backups.)