Last minute Glastonbury essentials

Some have already set off for Glastonbury by Wednesday, but if you’re like me and going Thursday there is still time to grab your festival essentials.

If this is your first festival, there may be some things you find useful on here.

First, some personal favourites:

• Bin bags
• Bulk pack of wetwipes
• Painkillers
• Wellies
• String and gaffer tape
• Cheap or old clothes, obviously
• Waterproof coat
• Batteries for whatever things you are taking, and a charger if you have the patience to queue
• Snacks, even if you plan to buy most of your food whilst there

…some other tips from around the web…

• Wine boxes - lighter than bottles and more efficient to packing
• Dialyte powder (designed for replenshing salts after stomach upsets and great for hangovers)
• A chair - a stool or a big folding chair. Something to sit on at the end of the day

…and from comments…

• Anti-bacterial hand wash (Sooz)
• Sunglasses! (Sooz)

Leave a comment if I’ve missed anything.

A definition of satisfying work

A short post to share a quote that is currently my desktop background:

[Three things] - autonomy, complexity, and connection between effort and reward - are, most people agree, the three qualities work has to have if it is to be satisfying.
Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers

Is your work always satisfying?

If not, make a step tomorrow to make it better.

If yes, congratulations. Be sure to keep it that way.

Twitter ‘RA’ - Reply All - emerges after changes to replies

This week Twitter updated their system so that we don’t see replies by people (ie messages beginning with @username) unless we’re also following the recipient of the message.

To counteract these new ‘hidden’ replies, some Twitter users are beginning to pre-fix their messages with “RA”, to escape the filter. The RA phrase stands for ‘Reply All’, and it’s a variant on the popular RT (Re-Tweet) prefix that is used when messages are forwarded.

Here’s an example of a RA (Reply All) message from one of my connections:

“RA @philsheard where from? (RA = Reply All)“

In case you haven’t heard about these changes here is a some background: Ev Williams, one of Twitter’s founders, explained that it’s so you won’t hear the answer to a question you didn’t hear. It’s a streamlining of the experience which many will appreciate but that others will miss as it allowed additional ways to discover new people to follow. There is follow-up comment on the Twitter blogposts We Learned A Lot and The Replies Kerfuffle.

Do you think that RA is a good idea to deliberately spread messages, or would you prefer not to hear them at all?

Google introduces public comments in search engine listings

I see via Drew that Google has introduced public comments against its search engine results. ZDNet has covered the news in the US and there will be lots more buzz about this over the next couple of days.

There is an overlap between what Google is doing here (comments and ratings) with the social web.

But my first instincts, as a digital PR guy and web marketer, are to ask “what does this means for the algorithms that Google uses to rank results?”

Remember, Google currently uses inbound links as a major indicator of a good or bad result. In the 90s, when a website was both hard and expensive to launch for us mere mortals, influence was in the hands of the (relative) few. Blog platforms have since personalised the search rankings and their growth has enabled individuals to exert influence through by the links that we create to other content on the web. However, success brings manipluation and websites are now so easy to create that there is a massive industry around using the technology to manipulate SERPs.

So, what Google could be doing is less of a ‘me too’ feature creep into social networking-style fan mentality but instead a way of adding human voice into the search results.

Oh yeah, and it will also help make sure that everyone has a Google Profile set up and that they continue to deepen their relationship with everything we do on the web

Twitter charging for adverts on Twitter.com

Links for external sites have begun to appear within the side bar for Twitter.com.

www.exectweets.com is sponsored by Microsoft and part of the endorsement for the service includes a promotion within the Twitter website.

There’s more to read at All Things Digital’s post Looky here! Actual revenue for twitter courtesy of Microsoft.

It’s a really elegant approach. If this sort of promotion can support the growth of the service then the Twitter community is in safe hands.

Wefollow: A lesson in superniches and mass marketing

Wefollow is the new launch from Digg’s Kevin Rose. It’s a user-generated Twitter directory to help us find each other.

How WeFollow works

You tweet @wefollow with 3 relevant tags that you’d like to be found for. Whever people search for that tag, you’ll appear in the listings along with everyone else who chooses that tag for themselves.

For example, Guy Kawasaki is tagged with #socialmedia - so if I search for ’socialmedia’ on Wefollow Guy will appear high in the listings. And appear high he will.

Forget alphabetical order, that went out with the phone book. Rankings are based on merit, and merit here is the number of Twitter followers you have.

My initial thoughts about current- and future-versions

With only 3 tags per person, this launch version of the site seems focussed only on getting high visibility users out front to draw in the crowds and to get volumes up (which they’ll need later if they want to get some cash from subscriptions or advertising).

If I tag myself with broad professional tags - say #socialmedia #onlinepr #onlinemarketing then I’m pretty generic. In fact, I’d be so low on the rankings that I’d be invisible. With only around 500 followers on Twitter I’m never going to rank highly against the top people in my category.

Is it useful to follow people with mega follower numbers?

So why do certain people have high follower numbers? There are two very visible types:

• Interesting people who do interesting things (BBC promotion aside @stephenfry is genuinely fun and fascinating for lots of people)
• People gaming the system, deliberately hoovering up followers by following thousands of people and hoping for a 70% - 80% re-follow rate.

Search for a popular tag and you’re likely to get a handful of Twitter celebrities who you can’t interact with as they have reached fame’s critical mass, followed by another group of people who are proactively seeking out followers simply to appear in this type of list.

You’ll find people sure, but is WeFollow a sign that with popularity Twitter is now turning into a broadcast channel rather than a place to interact?

My choice of tags, then…

I’ve decided to go superniche and only tag myself with the things I want to be found for. They are #supermodelmasseuse #volunteersuperhero and #someonewillingtobepaidasalaryforlearningtoplaypiano

If you’re looking for these things, you’ll hopefully only find me when you search.

How to find your power users and super users: strong passwords

If you’re looking to identify people who use your webservice who could be a poweruser, how about you run a search against passwords looking for strong passwords.

Obviously, you shouldn’t look at the password itself and instead use an algorythm that can detect these combinations of letters, numbers and special characters.

If you find any that match, and you have the appropriate permissions given by the customers to contact them for marketing reasons, you might have found some of your most enthusiastic and clued-up customers.

Facebook ’status’ changes no threat to Twitter

“You can take my status, but you can not take my community”

A post proclaiming Facebook Opens Status API, Say Goodbye to Twitter is good, Techmeme-grabbing stuff but it totally misses the point of why people like Twitter.

Twitter started out as a technology platform but it’s become a way of life.

The majority of people I follow on Twitter aren’t actually ‘friends’ at first. When I click that button that says Follow, I barely know them other than their recent messages. There are exceptions after a meeting in real life, but that’s the rul of thumb. They become friends over time through interesting conversational Tweets.

Facebook’s a different story for me. I won’t add anyone on there that I haven’t met in real life. Facebook is great for sharing intimate personal details with friends but I don’t know many people that use the status field for really regular communication.

That’s not to say that people aren’t trying to turn Facebook status into a conversational tool. A CNN Facebook mashup linked live video streaming of President Obama’s inaguration with a panel for you and your friends to chat in real time using status updates.

Twitter is here for a long time to come because there’s an amazing community on there, and the technology platform is so lightweight that it can evolve over time organically.

Let me know if you liked the post - I’m on Twitter as @philsheard

Twitter ‘nudges’ towards Facebook

Have you seen the ‘nudge’ feature on Twitter before?

I got an email about a new follower so popped over to their profile. On the right hand side, there were 3 options rather than the usual two: ‘message’, ‘block’ and also ‘nudge’.

After a quick search, I read about a Twitter rep explaining the nudge function:

We’ve decided to display the “nudge” link only if it’s possible for the person to receive it. Going forward, you will only see the nudge link on a profile if the person you’d like to nudge:

* is following you
* has a registered phone with notifications set to ON
* does not have a “sleeping” phone (some people set sleep times on phones to avoid messages during beauty sleep. Sleep time will always be honored, nudges or no!)

I’d missed this completely and mostly because the UK doesn’t have proper SMS support on Twitter right now.

It’s a useful feature, but it’s far from Facebook’s pokes and ninjas; more like the ‘nudge’ feature on Microsoft’s IM client (remember IM? Ah those were the days) which was a far-from-gentle reminder to someone that you were waiting to hear from them.

On a related note it looks like we in the UK will get Twitter SMS back, as announced by Biz this week and covered by Zee amongst others. Direct messages to mobile make Twitter into a really useful real-time facility for things like spontaneous Tweetups.

How far can communities go? Thoughts on ‘Us Now’ film

Update: ‘Us Now’ is launched online on the 12th May 2009 with the support of FutureGov - here’s the FutureGov post on the subject

Tonight’s showing of Us Now at the RSA was a revelation. Firstly because it was completely free to anyone who registered online. Brilliant for such high quality content in beautiful surroundings. Secondly, because of the content. It’s a thought-provoking film that you should see if you get chance.

The film looks at communities and organisations that are only able to form because of the technology advances - the internet, the home computer - and the cultural shifts they’re creating - mass collaboration, social empowerment and personal publishing.

One of the film’s core arguments was that today’s generation are taking for granted (in a good way) that they will be able to effect change and have a say in how their lives are run - their bands, their communities, their government, everything.

The challenge we all face is to achieve this in areas with major influence on our lives (football evokes passion but doesn’t topple regimes). This challenge is summed up in chair JP Rangaswami’s point that “I wouldn’t want [a grassroots group] to make my pacemaker. I want a trained professional, or a group of them.” There are some areas where only an expert will do.

Communities can definately pull together in new and exciting ways, but who decides which problems they are allowed to tackle? If there is a line (and there may not be one), where do we draw it?

National government was picked out as a ’sacred cow’ that needs to be updated to fit today’s world. I wonder if this is like persuading the doctors who control the installation of pacemakers that they should try the model that an amateur posse has assembled. If I was them, I’d want to see a lot of testing and guarantees that it works and even then I’m not sure which one I’d choose.

A fascinating film that’s capable of challenging your ideas. I’d be interested to hearing from you if this post has challenged yours