The northlondonhippy

Archive for June, 2010

I’m enjoy­ing ran­dom, manic thoughts, induced by 25 hours of con­tin­u­ous con­scious­ness. In my world, this is not uncommon.

I thought I would try to cap­ture the spirit and essence of the expe­ri­ence, but as you would expect, now that I’m typ­ing, the effect has dis­ap­peared. I’m focussing on being func­tional and typ­ing words that might make some sem­blance of sense, rather than con­vey­ing the sur­real nature of being me right now.

I’ve had spe­cial cook­ies. Its Mon­day morn­ing, at 10:30am and I’m wide awake, sleep should come soon, but did I men­tion the heat?

Its hot here.

Glad that’s out of the way.

I really should be sleep­ing, I will be sleep­ing, once I wind down. I’ve had a rather busy and event­ful 25 hours, and the week before that was a bit drain­ing, lit­er­ally, as I had a blocked one out back and it was a shitty ordeal deal­ing with it.

I need to blow off some steam, but its 10:33am on a Mon­day morn­ing, nor­mal peo­ple have things to do, peo­ple to see, places to be…but not me.

Also, said my sub-conscious, I got news yes­ter­day of the sud­den pass­ing of an old friend. My friend was a cou­ple years younger than me, just to add to the angst. I don’t deal well with death, unless obsess­ing about it in var­i­ous abstract ways for decades counts as deal­ing with it, in which case I win.

Blame the inter­net for this sud­den burst of ran­dom crap, if my down­load speeds were faster for my sto­ries, I’d be watch­ing them and not harass­ing the world with this stream of con­scious­ness bull­shit… because let’s face it, the delib­er­ate act of typ­ing this out removes any chance of shar­ing the state of my mind. Every word, every key stroke, forces a deci­sion, which then forces another, which then pre­de­ter­mines my actions as opposed to just let­ting the stream of weird run free.

Or I could go check my down­loads and leave all of you nice peo­ple alone. Sorry for the dis­tur­bance, please do call again.

I really did it, I spent the bet­ter part of yes­ter­day try­ing to do good deeds on Twitter.

So how’d I do?

Well, I wouldn’t call it an unqual­i­fied suc­cess, but I wouldn’t count it as a fail­ure either. I was able to give some gen­uine help to a hand­ful of peo­ple, but I do feel like I could have done a lot more.

The hard­est part was find­ing peo­ple in need of gen­uine help. I started by search­ing my own stream, ie peo­ple I fol­low, for ques­tions or pleas for help — there weren’t many at all. So I switched to the pub­lic time­line and searched for “help me”.

Turns out, the only help most peo­ple on Twit­ter seek, falls into three categories:

- Help me get more fol­low­ers
– Help me to get Justin Bieber to fol­low me
– Help me to get Miley Cyrus to fol­low me

I couldn’t help with any of those things, even if I tried. What this meant in real terms was that using the pub­lic time­line to find peo­ple in real need was like search­ing the prover­bial haystack for the prover­bial nee­dle, and I don’t even shoot-up. I had to wade through lit­er­ally thou­sands of tweets just to find one that was genuine.

So what did I actu­ally help with? Here’s a rough list:

- I re-assured some­one who was fright­ened by stormy weather
– I rec­om­mended the best places for a day of shop­ping in Lon­don
– I helped some­one trou­bleshoot an iPhone/Twitter app
– I pro­vided advice to some­one look­ing to adver­tise adult edu­ca­tion courses in the media
– I wel­comed a new user to Twit­ter and gave them some basic advice

That’s just the high­lights, I also retweeted loads of other people’s tweets and exchanged friendly tweets with loads of other peo­ple, includ­ing some I fol­low and some I don’t. Many of my #help­ful­hippy tweets went ignored, but that’s to be expected. Peo­ple are not accus­tom to strangers offer­ing assis­tance with­out ulte­rior motives, espe­cially online.

Over­all, I found the entire expe­ri­ence pro­vided me with a weird mix of frus­tra­tion and sat­is­fac­tion, much like real life. I was frus­trated at how dif­fi­cult it was to locate peo­ple I could help, but found it very sat­is­fy­ing when I was actu­ally able to, in a very small way, make a dif­fer­ence to someone’s life.

I’ve come away from the day with the desire, not to do a #help­ful­hippy day again, but to include this gen­uinely help­ful approach into my life online on a more reg­u­lar basis. It cost me noth­ing to help out strangers, my knowl­edge is free, so is my time fre­quently, so why not try to give some­thing back all the time?

Life is indeed incred­i­bly bleak, dreary and point­less, but it doesn’t take much to occa­sion­ally make it into some­thing more, even in almost imper­cep­ti­bly small ways. It felt good help­ing strangers and I’m going to try to do it more often.

So if there’s ever any­thing I can do online to help you, just ask. I might sur­prise you with the per­fect answer. Or not.

I’ve just woken up, parked myself down in front of my desk­top com­puter and I am ready to begin my exper­i­ment in social media engage­ment. I’m aim­ing help any­one online, in any way I can.

If you need any­thing today and you think I can help, just ask. I’m not long awake, so no heavy duty math-based equa­tions for at least an hour, but any­thing else is cool.

Ladies, gen­tle­men and any one in between, wel­come to #help­ful­hippy day.

Go on, tweet me, I’m here to help.

Hello. My name is the northlon­don­hippy and I’m here to help.

As I men­tioned a few days ago, on Weds 16th June, I will be mostly spend­ing the day online, try­ing to offer help and assis­tance to as many peo­ple on Twit­ter as I can, whether its try­ing to answer ques­tions, retweet­ing impor­tant and wor­thy mes­sages, or, well, pretty much any­thing else I can think of that might help.

I’m call­ing it #help­ful­hippy day and that will be the hash­tag I use on all my attempts at being help­ful. If you would like to play along at home, you can also tag things with #help­ful­hippy or you can just tweet me old school-style to my Twit­ter name, @nthlondonhippy — either way, I’ll hope­fully see it and respond quickly and helpfully.

I’m doing this because I want to give some­thing back to Twit­ter because I get so much from it. I’m hop­ing that by try­ing to engage with peo­ple on a pos­i­tive, life-affirming level will help alle­vi­ate my per­ceived debt to you all.

I’ll give you a small exam­ple. There are lots of peo­ple I fol­low on Twit­ter, who I think fol­low me, yet I’ve never (or rarely) tweeted them directly. That’s my fault, what with being a some­what shy, with­drawn, socially awk­ward mis­an­thrope, who lives in his own make-believe hippy world. On #help­ful­hippy day, I hope to let these peo­ple know I enjoy fol­low­ing them. If I played along with #fol­lowfri­day, I could have done it already, but I don’t, remem­ber the whole mis­an­thrope thing?

What I am not really aim­ing to do is exploit #help­ful­hippy day as a way to raise my online pro­file or increase my fol­low­ers. For a change this is not about shame­less self pro­mo­tion, its about gen­uinely help­ing oth­ers. If any­thing, I’ll prob­a­bly lose fol­low­ers because I plan on being a very full-on, #help­ful­hippy — search­ing for unan­swered ques­tions and pleas for assistance.

Tomorrow’s the big day, I’ll either fall flat on my face or in some small way, I’ll make the world a bet­ter place for a short time. Either way, I’ll know I’ve tried my best to pay some­thing back and maybe, just maybe I’ll despise myself just a lit­tle less.

Nah. Self-loathing is for life, you can’t shake it like you shake the com­mon cold.

See ya on Weds!

This is a post mainly about Twitter.

I like Twit­ter, I find it incred­i­bly use­ful. Its become my go-to source for cur­rent infor­ma­tion and you’ll often find me get­ting my tweet-fix peri­od­i­cally through­out the day.

I’ve been using it that way for about 2 years, since I got my iPhone 3G and played around with the early Twit­ter clients avail­able at the time. I had a dif­fer­ent account back then, one that I sub­se­quently deleted.

Why?

Because like many peo­ple, I really didn’t get Twit­ter at first. I didn’t know where to start. I tried to dive into the deep end, before even read­ing a pam­phlet on how to swim. I expect this expe­ri­ence is not uncommon.

I did con­tinue to flirt with Twit­ter, search­ing for top­ics of inter­est, or using the iPhone GPS to search for tweets local to me. It worked, to a point, but I really wasn’t that engaged or con­nected to any of it.

Around 6 months after my ini­tial explo­ration, Twit­ter started to make more sense. It didn’t hurt that the main­stream media was start­ing to get on the Twit­ter band­wagon. I learned more about Twit­ter and it started to make sense to me and in Jan­u­ary 2009, I signed up for another account, which is my cur­rent one: @nthlondonhippy

I now fol­low over 1,000 accounts. I thought about tweet­ing to mark this mile­stone, since peo­ple are always tweet­ing when they reach big round num­bers of fol­low­ers, I thought it would ironic and amus­ing to tweet the exact oppo­site by brag­ging about the num­ber of accounts I fol­low. Its funny, because all num­bers on Twit­ter are unim­por­tant, how many fol­low­ers you have, how many you fol­low, the num­ber of tweets you’ve sent, it doesn’t matter.

What mat­ters is what you get out of Twitter.

When peo­ple I know ask me about using Twit­ter, that’s usu­ally my first ques­tion back to them: What do you want to get from Twit­ter? Most of them don’t know, because they don’t know what Twit­ter can offer.

It offers a lot, it offers every­thing. It offers far more than you could ever want or need and with­out some sort of focus on what you hope to gain, you’ll never get any where with it.

I take a lot from Twit­ter, but that which I take is will­ingly given. What I really mean by that is that many of the 1,000 plus accounts I fol­low belong to web­sites and are tweeted, not by peo­ple, but by ser­vices such as TwitterFeed.

When a web­site updates with a new story, or blog post, a tweet is gen­er­ated by Twit­ter­Feed via the website’s RSS feed. My web­site does this and these days most do. When I post this finely crafted and immi­nently rel­e­vant bit of copy to my web­site, it auto­mat­i­cally updates its RSS feed, which is then picked up and tweeted within 15 min­utes or less via my Twit­ter account. I’m not going to get any more tech­ni­cal than this, so don’t worry.

There is so much use­ful infor­ma­tion avail­able on Twit­ter, what­ever your par­tic­u­lar inter­est, its just a ques­tion of start­ing an account for your­self and look­ing for inter­est­ing sources to fol­low. This takes time and some per­se­ver­ance, but the rewards are immense.

But Twitter’s not just about the lat­est news, its also about what real peo­ple, like you and me (I’m not actu­ally real) had for break­fast. This is where I fail at Twitter.

I’m nowhere near as engaged with indi­vid­u­als on Twit­ter as I should be or as I would like to be. I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that social media is just an exten­sion of nor­mal, real world soci­ety and if you are socially awk­ward in the real world, then you’re going to be socially awk­ward online.

I don’t mean I am some sort of unwashed pariah, fart­ing and belch­ing when­ever I’m in the com­pany of nor­mal folk, I save that for when I’m in the com­pany of super­mod­els. What I mean is, I’m quite a loner in real life, happy with my own com­pany and the world inside my head. I only really have a few peo­ple close to me and that’s prob­a­bly been true my whole life.

I don’t actively seek out indi­vid­u­als with sim­i­lar inter­ests to fol­low on Twit­ter, and I should. I would say most of the peo­ple I fol­low on Twit­ter, I didn’t find, they found me and I fol­lowed them back. I don’t actively look for peo­ple to fol­low with the same vigour I seek out news and infor­ma­tion sources. I’m com­ing to realise this is a mistake.

By my own admis­sion, I take a lot from Twit­ter, but now I would like to try to give some­thing back.

Here’s my cun­ning plan:

On Weds 16 June 2010, I will be con­duct­ing the very first #help­ful­hippy day. For the entire day, I will be avail­able on Twit­ter to help other users in any way I can, whether they fol­low me or not. I will be actively, pos­si­bly even aggres­sively, search­ing for unan­swered ques­tions and other pleas for assis­tance and doing my best to help out.

I won’t be directly pro­vid­ing cash, drugs, hook­ers or any­thing else peo­ple really need, but it is my sin­cer­est hope to, in what­ever small ways, lend sup­port, offer assis­tance, exper­tise and advice to any­one I can.

Maybe you need some­one to retweet a char­ity plea because you’re look­ing for spon­sors for your 10K run, or per­haps you’re strug­gling to remem­ber the name of an actor from an obscure film you saw. Maybe you just need some­one to tweet with you, I can do that. If its within my abil­i­ties and I can help via a tweet or two, I will.

I don’t know if this will be suc­cess­ful and at the point I’m not too wor­ried about that, I am going to be here ready to help regard­less of how it goes. I’m not going to be shy, either. I’m aim­ing for pos­i­tive, life-affirming inter­ac­tions with as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble. I want to con­tribute some­thing, I want to pay back some­thing to Twit­ter, because I think my debt is too high.

Play­ing along at home couldn’t be eas­ier, if you think I can help with some­thing, tweet me (any time, not just next Weds) at @northlondonhippy and I’ll see it. Or you can use my spe­cial hash­tag that I will be tag­ging all of my tweets that day with: #helpfulhippy

Think of this as not only me try­ing to give some­thing back, but also an exper­i­ment in social engage­ment. If it does work, this won’t be the last time I attempt some­thing like this.

So remem­ber, this is hap­pen­ing next Wednes­day, 16th June, from when­ever I wake up, till when­ever I go to bed, exclud­ing breaks for the toi­let and pay­ing for take-away deliv­er­ies. You didn’t think I was going to cook too, did you?