A useful online tool

I came across an interesting search engine called Quintera. It shows you the search results as a tag cloud. Here is a tag cloud for "Rufus Evison" to give you a feel.

The same search engine comes up with a list down the right hand side (about as this text is) that is a more familiar style list of links. I would not say it is the best search list I have seen but it is far from the worst. The tag cloud whilst a bit poorly executed does give an idea about the thing you are searching for which is more than is generally available and could easily provoke you to create a pretier version for a presentation to the board.

Rufus Evison

MY SON CAN READ!

On Sunday my son did something that I am going to call the start of his being able to read. He has been playing with learning to read for a while. He has been able to puzzle out words when asked to by looking at the letters and trying to say them and so forth. What he did on Sunday was to be playing at something else when he saw the words on and off on one of his toys. Without thinking he read on/off. It surprised him and so he told us what it said.

Before that he might have asked but he would have been clearly working it out before hand. It is the act of reading rather than working out what the word is that was new. I am delighted for him as he has reached that age when he wants to be reading.

Normlly these things are so gradual that you cannot pick a place and say "that is when it started". When there is an exception to this it is wonderful to behold. I remember the day that my Daughter first started walking. Before then she had moved from place to place whilst remaining upright but she was not really walking. It was only when she walked a few steps without thinking what she was doing that I felt she was walking. She was really rather surprised and when she realised proceeded to look herself up and down to work out what had just happened. She then tried a tentative step and fell over. It was clear to everyone that she could walk within a day or so, but that moment was the turning point.

I feel that Theo has reached the same turning point. It wil be a while before he can read anythign put in front of him but the mental switch has flicked and now it is just a question of writtern vocabulary.

My son can read!!!
Yay!

Rufus Evison

Quotation from Theodoric Evison Aged 3 1/2

I already know that.

I knew that before I was born!

I knew that before I was in your tummy!!

I knew that when dinosaurs were real!!!

Skittles and black hat PR

Please retweet: I had a rather loathsome thought about how to produce some black hat publicity cheaply and easily. All you need to do is set up a twitterbot to post the following message or a variant of it about once every minute:

ProductX is much nicer than skittles! We have a better website too. Please retweet what we are doing to the skittles site. www.productX.com

It will then show up all over the skittles web site front page (www.skittles.com). If it is not giving enough coverage just up the frequency and it will cover more of the page (currently once a minute will see you in the top half of the page fairly reliably); you need to keep it reasonable though as you don't want to be nasty.

After the skittles site became plastered you then "tip off" all the newspapers about what has been done to the site. Send them screenshots and so forth. There should ensue a furore where skittles get credit for leading the way with social media, product X get credit for cottoning on fast and the whole thing is seen as an amusing battle of wits. To help this along submit articles playing it that way so lazy journos can just copy them. Any good PR firm could make this work,.

If you are really lucky skittles would try some sort of law suit making for even bigger publicity.

Asking around suggested that Nestle might be the best people to sell this to as they are innovative online and sell sweets which compete directly with skittles.

Oh, by the way, the usual black hat disclaimer applies:

"Don't try this at home boys and girls"

Rufus Evison

P.S. One final question: How long before someone uses this as a place to propose marriage? I have already used it to talk to someone, so why not to propose marriage? If Skittle are not forced to kill it first it will happen...

How to lose influence

I am on twitter. For those of you who are not, it is a micro-blogging site for which I cannot see any reason. And yet I still use it. Each entry is 140 characters long, so "blog entries", or tweets as they are known, are short and often pithy. There are two types of people, those you follow and those who follow you.

I do not often tweet and never anything of note. I do not really see a reason to tweet and so unless I am asking a question, why would I bother? Despite this I have followers. I only follow people I know in some way, so clearly some of them follow me out of politeness. It is hardly much trouble as I am not going to appear on their screens that often, as most of them are following hundreds of people. What is suprising is that I have other followers. My followers out number my followees by more than two to one. This is silly, I have nothing to say.

There are many measures of what influence on twitter means but it seems to generally come down to having lots of followers who retweet (pass on) what you say.

I have noticed that if I start tweeting often then my following (small to start with) goes down. This could be because my tweets lack focus, they do not have a central theme so people who have followed because of one tweet may well be put off by another tweet and leave. That said, having noticed this I became curious about how best to lose influence. Dan Zarrella has done some work on the viral nature of twitter which offers some insight. As does http://bit.ly/iyvVd which talks about how to get your tweets retweeted. It is worth noting that both of these have an underlying assumption that you put some text in your tweets and actually want followers and influence. Having spent much of my time with more influence than I like I am coming at this from the other end. To that end I am going to list my thoughts on how lose influence and avoid being retweeted.

How to lose influence: the rules

* Be rude (asking people politely to retweet sometimes works, as does treating your followers with respect)

* Be random (have no one topic where you could gain a set of followers interested in your usual/main topic)

* Be boring and mundane (the bizarre and interesting gets retweeted)

* Never explain ("How to do X" is useful stuff)

* Be the last to break the news

* Be obscure. If you must have a link (which might add dangerous amounts of credibiliy) then do not explain what it is a link to. Otherwise make bald statements with no backup. Having an explanation and a link is asking to be retweeted.

* Be an outsider (Insider news is difficult to get hold of and so has value)
Tweet when your followers are tired or busy. Busy people will mever see your tweets and tired people will not bother retweeting.

* Do not ask to be retweeted (people might actually do it).

* Avoid times when your followers may be free to retweet and have the energy to be interested in doing it. Middle of the business day or late at night is good. Avoid lunchtime and just after lunch like the proverbial.

* Ungramatical, mis-spelt and trypo-ridden good is.
* Do not retweet. Anything that you retweet has not only value but also can be seen to have value. It is sort of pre-approved.

* Have no followers (so there is no one to re tweet)

It is worth noting that "Have no followers" is last for a reason. Not only is the level of retweeting not as strongly correlated to having lots of followers as you might think, but having no followers is actually hard unless you cheat by blocking everyone. If you are going to cheat then you might as well not botther. I know it is hard because I created a false twitter ID and told no one about it. It has never tweeted and has followers. Most of them are really spambots, but sadly not all of them. Why do people follow a non existent ID that does not do anything???

One final question that I have not tested but if someone draws this to the attention of Dan Zarella he might be able to answer:

Does making your tweet appear to be a retweet of someone elses tweet (even though it isn't) increase your chances of getting retweeted. If you set up multiple IDs to tweet the same things does that have a compounding effect?

Rufus Evison

P.S. It is worth noting that to be boring one must avoid the following topics like the plague (though whether the plague is considered interesting remains to be seen).

1. Sports News
2. US (and possibly other) political parties internal news
3. Cool computers and gadgets (Apple, iPhone, ...) news and developments
4. Insider news on well known companies such as Google
5. Media and entertainment insider news
6. Social media (particularly twitter)
7. New media insider information
8. Mash up and Twitter tools
9. Lobbying within the UK
10. Coupons discounts and offers
11. Collaboration and networking tools

P.P.S. I have followed some of the rules above in this blog post. I just want to state that this is deliberate and not just me being bad at this (although I am bad at it).

Share a jumper to save the planet?

Another way to do the green thing with style and amusement: A bit silly but http://tinyurl.com/6yerfg provides an altrernative to randomly hugging cold people. Well it removes the randomness for a start...

Things I have found in the books of my sone aged 2 1/2

Books are an integral part of Theo's (Theodoric's) life. He has been in to them for a long while and over this time I have noticed that there are some good books out there. I am not dismissing the power of Thomas the Tank Engine and the other staples of young people today, but I find them boring. If I find a book boring I am likely to find a way of avoiding reading it to my son. Thus he has a more varied and interesting collection of books than many children his age. I say all this by way of explanation of the list that follows. All of the following appear in books that are no innapropriate to a child his age, but are somewhat more exlectic a set than might be the norm.

What my son read about:

1) Election rigging, Vote for Duck by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin

2) Dynamite, The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Eugene Trivizas and Helen Oxenbury

3) Industrial Action, Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin

4) Biassed referees cheatin in international rugby matches, Misadventures of Dougal by Eric Thompson and David Barnett

5) Meteorology balloons, The Iceberg (The Sagas of Noggin the Nog) by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin

6) Untrustworthy used car salesman, Bear Buys a Car: A 3-dimensional Reading Book (Hardcover)

There are a fair few others, but these are the ones I can call to mind right now. I may publish more later...

Rufus Evison