The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

I love Twit­ter, but I fear my love for it remains unrequited.

I’ve been prop­erly on Twit­ter for about two and a half years. To be more pre­cise, as of this writ­ing, I have been using Twit­ter since the 31st of Jan­u­ary 2009, which works out to 931 days. I used howlongontwitter.com to cal­cu­late that, I didn’t count it up myself.

In that time, I’ve found Twit­ter to be indis­pens­able and addic­tive and while I am not the most pro­lific tweeter you will meet, I con­stantly read my time­line. I must dip in and out of it a thou­sand times a day.

What I don’t do is tweet or inter­act with other peo­ple enough. That’s why I suck at Twitter.

My tweets tend towards fee­ble and offen­sive (but orig­i­nal) jokes that prob­a­bly make peo­ple laugh uncom­fort­ably, if at all.

I also tweet, or rather retweet stuff about legal­is­ing cannabis and other drugs, because that is my pet cause.

Occa­sion­ally I may tweet some­thing that I feel strongly about, like the recent riots in London.

I tweet about what I’m watch­ing on TV some­times and the weather occa­sion­ally and even the odd food-related tweet too.

In other words, I’m not unpleas­ant or rude, just prob­a­bly not that inter­est­ing. That’s why I suck at Twitter.

I’m anony­mous online, by choice, mainly because I am so open about my own cannabis use and as its sta­tus is cur­rently ille­gal, anonymity allows me the lux­ury of hon­esty. I like to pre­tend this stance fur­thers the cause of legal­i­sa­tion, but I’m not always con­vinced it does and that’s a sub­ject best explored another day. This post is about Twitter.

The other rea­son I remain anony­mous is I pre­fer to be unknown. I am not seek­ing atten­tion for myself. If you Googled my real name, you wouldn’t find me any­where online; I’m not on Face­book, Linked-In, noth­ing. And while I have worked in the media for more than two decades, I’ve man­aged to avoid hav­ing a byline, screen credit, nor any men­tion of my real name and that has been intentional.

What it means on Twit­ter is I don’t use my real name or a pho­to­graph of myself as my avatar. That is why I suck at Twit­ter too.

I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that I suck at Twit­ter for the rather silly rea­son that I have been sucked into think­ing about fol­lower num­bers, some­thing I have man­aged to avoid until now.

I’ve never really been both­ered by how many peo­ple are fol­low­ing me, I haven’t done any­thing ever to inten­tion­ally gain them, never asked for them, begged for them, noth­ing like that. I’ve just tweeted when I felt like it, fol­lowed peo­ple (and accounts) that have inter­ested me and that’s about it.

I’ve always found it a bit dis­taste­ful when peo­ple tweet about the num­ber of fol­low­ers they have, in what­ever context.

“I need 27 more fol­low­ers to reach 500, help!”

“Please RT this [insert celebrity here] I really need more fol­low­ers urgently!”

“I gained 57 fol­low­ers today, all because [insert celebrity here] retweeted me.”

Worse, is see­ing celebri­ties tweet­ing each other and exag­ger­at­ing their worth by brag­ging they have the most fol­low­ers. I find this rather tragic.

Wor­ry­ing about fol­lower num­bers is a mug’s game and sadly in the last week or so, I have become that mug. Here’s why: I’ve recently noticed a few peo­ple I know online, who started on Twit­ter when I did, now have dou­ble or tre­ble the fol­low­ers I have. I am a vic­tim of com­par­a­tive maths.

I know its silly, I know its mean­ing­less, but its been on my mind recently

This is not meant to be a moan or a com­plaint, every­thing I’m telling you is obser­va­tional and self-critical, but not a whinge or back­handed plea for more peo­ple to fol­low me. I’m just try­ing to under­stand what I am doing wrong on Twitter.

What am I doing wrong on Twit­ter? Loads, it would seem.

There are quite a few peo­ple I fol­low on Twit­ter, who don’t fol­low me back. I don’t mean celebri­ties, but nor­mal peo­ple, like you and me. Well, more like you prob­a­bly as I don’t come any­where near being normal.

The lack of follow-backs from peo­ple I like per­plexes me.

Some­times, I scroll through my own tweets and read them back, to see if there’s some­thing in them that makes peo­ple not want to fol­low me. Noth­ing leaps out.

I think I’m fairly pleas­ant, thought­ful and I’m true to myself. So what could it be?

The lack of a photo and a name is off-putting, but my anonymity pol­icy is not going to change until weed is legal. End of, as the kids today say. Its a rea­son, but that alone can’t be the only reason.

I don’t inter­act or tweet enough, but guess what? I’m prob­a­bly the same in real life, being mostly a loner and mis­an­thropic with it.

If you’re shit at life, you are going to be shit at Twit­ter. This shouldn’t come as a sur­prise to me, but it does.

How can I be more socially suc­cess­ful on Twit­ter than I am in real life? Answer: I can’t.

Quite oddly, I think I am prob­a­bly more shy on Twit­ter than I am in real life.

Often I do think about respond­ing to other people’s tweets, then I think bet­ter of it and don’t. I don’t like tweet­ing neg­a­tively, if I dis­agree with some­one, how­ever strongly, I tend not to say any­thing. And if I do agree with some­one, I don’t want to seem syco­phan­tic, so I don’t tweet.

On the rare occa­sion when I do tweet some­one and they don’t respond, even with the sim­plest of acknowl­edge­ment, then I am crest­fallen and I think the fear of that often pre­vents me from inter­act­ing with peo­ple too. Maybe you know what I mean, maybe you think that’s a lame rea­son, but its true.

When­ever any­one tweets me and they are polite, I always make a point of respond­ing. I always try to thank peo­ple for RTs too, as long as I’ve noticed they’ve done so. I guess I just try to treat peo­ple on Twit­ter as I would like to be treated.

I suck at Twit­ter because I suck at life. I’m start­ing to believe I’m not par­tic­u­larly good with either pur­suit. That’s not a happy conclusion.

Or, I could take the tack that I’m not unpop­u­lar on Twit­ter, I’m just undiscovered.

The best lies I tell, are the ones I tell myself.

If you do fol­low me, well done you for find­ing Twitter’s best kept secret!

You are truly a per­son of excel­lent taste! You have keen, dis­cern­ing eye for the hippest and coolest, that your aver­age nobody tends to pass on by with­out a sec­ond thought! You’re a trend spot­ter and a trend setter!

Ah-hem.

I’ve pretty much accepted that I will con­tinue to exist in Twit­ter obscu­rity, while oth­ers around me zoom ever higher. I’m ok with that.

I take a lot from Twit­ter, I’m quite greedy in my quest for knowl­edge, I just feel guilty some­times that I don’t put enough back into it. I’d like to enter­tain and inform more peo­ple, but that’s not who I am, not in real life, not online. So it goes.

These truths should be self-evident, but its taken me nearly 1,300 words to get here.

So now you know why I suck at Twit­ter, and now I do too.

Like hello and whatnot.

Another year has flown by and I’m already cel­e­brat­ing my anniver­sary of being the northlon­don­hippy, again.

And by cel­e­brat­ing, of course I mean writ­ing this.

Whoopeeee…

Seven years ago today I started my orig­i­nal web­site on Blog­ger. Its still there, though I moved every­thing to this, my own hosted web­site a few years ago.

Go me!

Back at the begin­ning, I posted quite fre­quently, mainly because I had noth­ing bet­ter to do.

Blog­ging sprouted from a rel­a­tively brief period of unem­ploy­ment , it gave me some­thing to do with my time, when I wasn’t get­ting high or gob­bling magic mush­rooms, which were legal at the time.

You didn’t think I was going to get through this with­out a men­tion of shrooms, did you? Shrooms played an impor­tant part in the early days and I was a reg­u­lar con­sumer of them. Since the gov­ern­ment tight­ened up the reg­u­la­tions, I’ve been with­out them. I miss them, a lot. Shroom ref­er­ence ends.

Flash for­ward to seven years into the future, to this very day and you’ll see that I hardly post any­thing, any more. There’s prob­a­bly more posts about my lack of posts, than any other subject.

I don’t even attempt to make excuses any more, I’ve just accepted that my par­tic­i­pa­tion here is spo­radic and ran­dom. I pop up when­ever I feel like it, I just don’t feel like it very often.

That’s not strictly true, as I seem to con­tinue to main­tain a run­ning list of top­ics I want to cover, I just don’t seem to get around to doing it. Then, what­ever the topic might be, becomes less inter­est­ing to me, or less rel­e­vant and I delete it from my list and it just never gets written.

I’m back to mak­ing excuses again. Sorry, I’ll stop now.

It would be eas­ier if I could just beam my thoughts directly to the inter­net, I think that’s com­ing as a fea­ture this sum­mer in the iPhone 5, but don’t quote me on that. I wouldn’t want to be start­ing that sort of a rumour.

I know I bang on about Twit­ter a lot, but I do spend a lot more time there than I do on my own web­site. If you did want to bathe in the weird thoughts flow­ing through my head on a daily basis, that remains the best place to do it. Though again, my par­tic­i­pa­tion is ran­dom and spo­radic. I con­sume far more than I con­tribute to Twit­ter, but I do suf­fer from infor­ma­tion glut­tony and tech addiction.

That’s prob­a­bly one of the biggest changes to my life in the last seven years, the amount of tech­nol­ogy in it. I’ve always liked tech and toys, but here in the future, they are more per­va­sive and use­ful than ever before and I find that I am always con­nected, always con­sum­ing media.

A typ­i­cal day starts with me pick­ing my iPhone up from the bed­side table, switch­ing off air­plane mode and let­ting it check my email. I put it in air­plane mode when I go to bed, so it doesn’t ding or buzz with new mes­sages, but I leave it on because it is also my back up alarm clock.

I come down­stairs and fire up my iMac, which is the hub of my tech­no­log­i­cal exis­tence. The hard drive in it died last week and its being repaired this very sec­ond. Don’t worry, I have a TimeMa­chine back up, so I don’t think I’ve lost very much at all, but I am miss­ing my 27” beast very much.

I’ve been using my lifeboat com­puter in the mean­time, an orig­i­nal black Mac­Book that I think is nearly 5 years old. While I’m thank­ful that I’ve got it to use now, its painfully slow, its got about 25% of the screen space of my iMac and the view­ing angle of the LCD screen is not very good. Five years is a very long time in tech termss and my Mac­Book is def­i­nitely show­ing its age. Its bet­ter than noth­ing, loads better!

Any­way, my nor­mal rou­tine with the iMac is to switch it on as soon as I wake up, read the papers online, along with a few other web­sites, check my RSS feed reader, keep an eye on Twit­ter, do some work on some other web­sites I work on, deal with pro­fes­sional and per­sonal emails, sync and charge my iPhone and con­trol my Mac Mini.

My Mac Mini is around 4 and a 1/2 years old and is also show­ing its age. I use it as my media hub, its con­nected to my flatscreen tv and my A/V amp. I use it to play music (streamed around my house to two Air­Port Express units, one in the kitchen, one in my bed­room), I also stream online radio sta­tions the same way. I use the BBC’s iPlayer ser­vice, I down­load and play­back videos from Bit Tor­rent, I use it to screen XVID films friends give me, or even just to play­back videos I’ve shot myself. It gets used a lot. I mostly con­trol the Mac Mini with a remote con­trol, or I use OS X Screen Shar­ing to remotely use con­trol it from the iMac.

My iMac is a pow­er­ful com­puter, I use it to edit video and I mainly use iMovie. I also record my own music, using Logic Pro and a host of exter­nal toys and musi­cal instru­ments that con­nect to my iMac with ease

Once I’ve done every­thing I have to do on the iMac, I might move over to the sofa with my iPad. I surf, use Twit­ter, keep up with my RSS feed, all in a relaxed, com­fort­able way, but that’s not all I’ve done with it. I’ve also used it to edit video, write blog posts and record music. Some of the music pro­duc­tion apps I have are truly amaz­ing, espe­cially Apple’s new Garage­Band app. Its easy to lose hours of your day just play­ing around with it. I’m also a secret Angry Birds HD addict, but shhhh, don’t tell anyone.

My iPhone is always with me and I use it for so many things, its really a Swiss Army Knife of a gad­get. Its my cal­en­dar, my con­tact book, my mobile Twit­ter machine, RSS reader, inter­net browser, still cam­era, video cam­era, music player, film and video player, nav­i­ga­tion device, com­pass, photo edi­tor, video edi­tor, news por­tal, note taker, audio recorder, gam­ing device, clock, weather cen­tre, torch, hand­held track­pad for my Macs, email client, ref­er­ence library, text mes­sage device, oh and its a tele­phone and video­phone too! It does even more than that, I’m just run­ning out of steam think­ing of it all.

My point to all this tech his­tory is that none of this was pos­si­ble 7 years ago, 2 of the devices I just men­tioned couldn’t have even been imag­ined then.

In 2005, I had a run­ning joke here about my brand new all dig­i­tal lifestyle, right around the time I bought my first iMac. Its no joke today, my life truly is all dig­i­tal. So’s yours. So is everyone’s.

They like to describe all this as “dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy” and that’s a pretty accu­rate term, as long as you don’t see dis­rup­tion as a nec­es­sar­ily bad thing. I don’t buy CDs any more, I don’t go to record stores any more, because that indus­try has been dis­rupted by the ease and avail­abil­ity of music down­loads. If you own a chain of music stores, you’re not going to like this sort of dis­rup­tion, but if you are a keen media con­sumer, you’re prob­a­bly pretty happy about it.

Tech­nol­ogy isn’t the only thing that’s dis­rupted my life in the last seven years, there’s also been some ill­ness and some death. When it comes to dis­rup­tion, noth­ing else comes close.

Both of my par­ents passed away since I started this web­site. My father was already ill when I started it, and his can­cer fea­tured fre­quently back in the day. Some­where, in the archive, is a post called “Dad’s piss­ing blood again” and I’m sur­prised it didn’t win any awards. He died before this blog was a year old.

My mother crossed over to the great beyond at Christ­mas, two years ago. Noth­ing fills you with the hol­i­day spirit like a bereave­ment on Xmas eve, and that applies to the future too, Xmas will now and for­ever be a reminder of her death.

While my mother had health prob­lems for years, her sud­den death was unex­pected. My father died slowly over the course of a year and we pretty much knew when his death was com­ing to the day. I last spoke to him two days before he died and I got to say good­bye. I didn’t have that chance with my mother.

I’ve become old in the last seven years, at least in my head I have. In my head I’m not 48, I’m “push­ing 50”. One of those posts I haven’t writ­ten is enti­tled “My unhealthy obses­sion with death” and I will get around to writ­ing it, mainly because I’m hop­ing that spit­ting out a life time of death obses­sion might help me move past it. Or not. Who knows.

Blog­ging is like ther­apy for me some­times, its a good way to try to work shit out.

I don’t really think I will ever work out my weird obses­sion with death, specif­i­cally my own. I’ve imag­ined my moment of death so many times, in so many ways, yet I know that none of it has prob­a­bly come close to what­ever hor­ri­ble fate awaits me, as it awaits us all.

Keep an eye out for my death post, it will be a cheery lit­tle num­ber, guar­an­teed to lift your spir­its and make you want to do a happy dance down the street.

The truth is that I feel expend­able, dis­pos­able and irrel­e­vant because I am get­ting old. Maybe that’s nor­mal. Maybe there’s no such thing as normal.

I can feel my body break­ing down, I dis­cover some new ache or pain on a daily basis. My joints creak, my mus­cles throb, my bones ache and I’ve been diag­nosed with a long term health prob­lem that requires daily med­ica­tion for the rest of my life.

Mid­dle age is a joy.

Mid­dle age is stu­pidly named. Either you are young or you’re old. I’m old. Phys­i­cally I am, but in my head I’m still 18 years old and full of all the hopes, ideas and dreams I had at that age. Sad, eh?

I’m the same per­son I was back then, I might move a bit slower and have loads more knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence, but I’m still me.

And I still smoke weed.

That was one of my goals when I started blog­ging, to fur­ther the cannabis cause. I’ve been smok­ing weed every day, for a cou­ple of months shy of 30 years. I would qual­ify my use as a com­bi­na­tion of recre­ational and med­i­c­i­nal, though its cer­tainly more med­i­c­i­nal these days.

Weed should be legal and the fact that its not shows just how mixed up our cur­rent drug pol­icy has become. Cannabis can be so ben­e­fi­cial in so many ways.

Right now, in these dif­fi­cult and depress­ing eco­nomic times, cannabis is a cash crop our lead­ers should not be ignor­ing. A licensed, reg­u­lated and more impor­tantly taxed cannabis mar­ket would be a much needed boon to the econ­omy. Instead they would rather close schools, hos­pi­tals and libraries and let crim­i­nals con­trol the mar­ket. Its as fool­ish and short­sighted as it sounds.

I’m not going to bang on about it too much now, my posi­tion is clear.

I may not be as pro­lific as I once was, but there’s a giant archive of nearly 750 posts to explore. You might learn to love me, you might come to hate me, but I’m sure you can waste plenty of time here, if you desire.

So that’s it, my weird and ram­bling reflec­tion of the last seven years of liv­ing my life online, just for you. I’m always here, just a few mouse clicks away. Come hang out with me, any time.

If the first seven years are any­thing to go by, the next seven ought to be a real gas, man! Groovy!

Twit­ter recently intro­duced a new fea­ture you might have noticed if you access the ser­vice via their web­site. This new fea­ture is called “Who to Fol­low” and it gen­er­ates a list of sug­gested users and accounts Twit­ter thinks you should fol­low based on some algo­rith­mic com­puter magic voodoo.

To say this new fea­ture has been con­tro­ver­sial would be an under­state­ment. I’ve seen scores of tweets from peo­ple who hate the idea of being told what to do and who to fol­low. Most have dis­missed this new fea­ture as a dis­trac­tion. Many wish to know how to remove it.

I don’t think you can.

Instead of shun­ning this new fea­ture, I decided to embrace it fully, by mind­lessly fol­low­ing every account Twit­ter sug­gested to me.

Every day, I vis­ited the page with the sug­gested users and sim­ply fol­lowed them all.

Some days, Twit­ter would only have a hand­ful of accounts, other days they could have sev­eral pages worth for me. They’d even refresh it later in the day, with more accounts for me. There was no pat­tern or rea­son to the way they popped up and I just relent­lessly clicked on the fol­low button.

From the first day it went live for me, I started adding accounts. When I began, I had around 1,200 accounts that I fol­lowed and I added around 800 more, reach­ing the exact total of 2,001 fol­lowees, which is my limit.

One les­son I learned from this lit­tle exper­i­ment, is that there is a limit to the num­ber of accounts you can fol­low. Every­one has a limit which is cal­cu­lated based upon the num­ber of accounts fol­low­ing you. My ratio, if it has any mean­ing or rel­e­vance to any­one else, is:

1 fol­lower = 3.66 fol­lowees (approximately)

The point is, there’s a limit and it didn’t take me that long to reach it.

If I wanted to fol­low more peo­ple, I had to either: a) gain more fol­low­ers of my own so my ratio changes or b) unfol­low some accounts.

Here’s the funny thing, even though I had reached my limit of accounts to fol­low, Twit­ter con­tin­ued to sug­gest users to me and it was dri­ving me crazy that I couldn’t fol­low them.

When I hit my limit, I also couldn’t fol­low back any­one new who had fol­lowed me. I like to fol­low back if the account seems like it has a gen­uine per­son behind it and I felt bad that it wasn’t possible.

So what were my new 800 close friends like? They’re mainly polit­i­cally minded or politi­cians, but not exclu­sively. Many of them were British Mem­bers of Par­lia­ment, or for­mer MPs, or unsuc­cess­ful can­di­dates from the last election.

Why?

Twit­ter sug­gests users by look­ing at who the peo­ple you fol­low, fol­low them­selves. Every account sug­gested has a lit­tle foot­note, list­ing three peo­ple you fol­low, who also fol­low the account.

One of the ben­e­fits of this is it increases the num­ber of con­ver­sa­tions you can see, if your new fol­lowees inter­act with your old ones. I’ve noticed a big increase in crosstalk in my time­line, between two or more peo­ple that I follow.

It cer­tainly is engag­ing, being able to fol­low the con­ver­sa­tions of oth­ers, but the reverse of that is you can end up feel­ing a bit left out too, if you’re not par­tic­i­pat­ing in the discussion.

And you’re prob­a­bly not par­tic­i­pat­ing in any dis­cus­sions, because just about every­one Twit­ter sug­gests is impor­tant, famous, pop­u­lar or all three.

I’ve had very few, if any users sug­gested that were just plain ol’ reg­u­lar Twit­ter­ers, like me. That’s a big flaw in the sys­tem, as I would much rather be inter­act­ing with real peo­ple, who share com­mon inter­ests with me, than the great and the good.

What skewed my expe­ri­ence in this exper­i­ment is the recent gen­eral elec­tion in the UK.

How so?

As a con­cerned cit­i­zen and news junkie, I had a keen inter­est in the elec­tion. That meant I fol­lowed lots of accounts related to it, from news sources, to jour­nal­ists, to can­di­dates and sit­ting MPs that I was inter­ested in already.

When Twit­ter looked at that, it gen­er­ated a list of sug­gested users that included more of the same. But the more I fol­lowed, the more the sug­gested user list became a haven for MPs, polit­i­cal activists and think tank members.

My fol­lowee list read like a who’s who from the British polit­i­cal scene. Clearly that wasn’t what I was aim­ing for with this exper­i­ment, but its what I ended up creating.

After reach­ing my fol­low­ing limit, I ended the exper­i­ment and the great unfol­low­ing ensued.

I have now purged around 400 accounts, mainly MPs from obscure con­stituen­cies, but I also used an online tool to find the most inac­tive accounts and unfol­lowed them as well. Sur­pris­ingly, many of the accounts sug­gested hadn’t gen­er­ated a new tweet in months, which actu­ally made it eas­ier than I expected to rid myself of them.

I’m still check­ing the sug­gested user list daily, but I am much more selec­tive in who I choose to fol­low. There’s usu­ally one or two accounts that appeal to me, many turn out to be peo­ple I’ve heard of, but didn’t know were on Twitter.

Any­one I don’t wish to fol­low, I click on the “Hide” but­ton and I don’t see them sug­gested again. The whole process only takes a minute or two each day and has become part of my daily online routine.

The sug­gested user sys­tem is far from per­fect, but it is worth a look. If you can spare a cou­ple of min­utes each day, have a peek. While you might not fool­ishly fol­low every­one as I did, I am pretty sure you will find a hand­ful of inter­est­ing accounts that might appeal to you.

Oh and don’t wait for Twit­ter to tell you to fol­low me, you’ll be wait­ing a long, long time. Just add @nthlondonhippy to your time­line and you can in share my every thought and action. Lucky you.

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?

That’s a fairly bold state­ment up there in the title. How will I ever live up to its promise?

Sim­ple, its com­pletely trans­formed how I inter­act with the inter­net. (And please note not “sim­ples”. I am sick of that shit already).

Again, another fairly large claim about a “com­plete trans­for­ma­tion” of my surf­ing habits.

I ain’t lyin’ neither.

In the old days, I used a browser to explore the inter­net. I’d plug some­thing into a search engine and let it trans­port me to another site, which might then lead me to yet another site, and so on and so forth, until I returned to the search engine to start again. Of course, I book­marked sites too, but the point is I had to think of a site I wished to check out, then nav­i­gate to it again.

Over time, I devel­oped my own inter­net rit­u­als, vis­it­ing my favourite sites on a reg­u­lar or semi-regular basis, check­ing for new con­tent. This style of surf­ing meant I would occa­sion­ally arrive at a site to dis­cover it hadn’t changed since my last visit, but I wouldn’t find that out until the page loaded and wasted some of my valu­able online time.

And then, I dis­cov­ered RSS feeds and read­ers. Sud­denly, I didn’t have to visit all of my favourite sites to check for any­thing, instead I waited for their head­lines to arrive in my reg­u­larly refreshed RSS reader. If I wanted to explore the arti­cle fur­ther, I could click once and eas­ily open the page in my browser.

But RSS read­ers don’t work in real time, there’s no push-type sys­tem to receive the head­lines. Instead, they refresh auto­mat­i­cally at a pre-defined inter­val or if you are a bit obses­sive like me, man­u­ally refresh­ing every 10 sec­onds just in case. It worked, but it wasn’t perfect.

Then I dis­cov­ered Twit­ter and Twit­ter clients. The “client” part is impor­tant, because if you’re access­ing Twit­ter via your browser, you are miss­ing out on some of its use­ful­ness. I’ll come back to that.

Twit­ter is more than just read­ing about what peo­ple had for break­fast. There are other meals and snacks to read about too.

No, what I really mean is beyond fol­low­ing indi­vid­u­als, you can also fol­low web­sites. Web­sites with RSS feeds can marry them up with a ser­vice like Twit­ter­Feed and auto-generate a tweet link­ing to new con­tent pub­lished on their site.

I use Twit­ter­Feed here on my site and it auto-generates a tweet to my Twit­ter account, @nthlondonhippy with the title & first line of the post, along with a short­ened bit ly link to the full text.

Admit­tedly my site is not the busiest in the world, but if you are fol­low­ing me on Twit­ter, you will be alerted to any new con­tent. Even if you are not fol­low­ing me, you still may dis­cover the tweet and it might even be how you ended up here right now.

I would spec­u­late that around a third of the accounts I fol­low on Twit­ter are auto-generated from web­sites I reg­u­larly visit. Head­lines and links flow onto my computer’s desk­top via my pre­ferred Twit­ter client, which at present is TweetDeck.

I fol­low many news out­lets, loads of the Guardian newspaper’s Twit­ter accounts, the New York Times, var­i­ous Apple and gad­get sites, celebrity news sites, con­spir­acy sites, all sorts really. My tastes are var­ied and diverse, but luck­ily so are the choices avail­able to every­one on Twit­ter. If you’re inter­ested in some­thing, chances are there’s a Twit­ter feed (or 20!) that would cater to you.

Twit­ter is also a fright­en­ing good source for break­ing news. As Twit­ter exists in the “nearly now” and moves in real time, when some­thing hap­pens any­where in the world, it doesn’t take long for it to bub­ble up to the surface.

There’s an organ­i­sa­tion that uses Twit­ter for just this pur­pose, @BreakingNews — BNO News, which is run by a 19 year-old in the Nether­lands. They’re scary fast and often beat the more tra­di­tional old-style media out­lets by 10–15 min­utes. In the age of “now”, that’s quite an edge.

And yes, I do work in the old-media, but it doesn’t worry me. The smart old-media out­fits will adapt and change with tech­nol­ogy and most of them have started already. Twit­ter is re-writing the rules here too.

This is where a Twit­ter client really comes into its own. If you’re log­ging onto Twit­ter via their web­site, you are pre­sented with a fairly usable inter­face, with one flaw, it doesn’t refresh auto­mat­i­cally. To see new tweets, you must man­u­ally refresh the page. It works, but its not ideal.

A Twit­ter client is a stand-alone app, that sits inde­pen­dently on your desk­top and they can refresh in real time or nearly. Many of them are feature-rich and allow you to do all sorts of cool things with Twit­ter, often with one-click.

I have been using Tweet­Deck for a while, but there are oth­ers avail­able, most of them have free ver­sions, so you can try them out and see if they work for you. I like Tweet­Deck because it is col­umn based and is col­lapsable into a sin­gle col­umn, which is how I run it most of the time.

With Tweet­Deck, you can have sep­a­rate columns for your main feed, your men­tions, your DMs plus you can cre­ate other columns to fil­ter your stream even more. You can search with a hash­tag and see real-time results and you can cre­ate groups from your main fol­low­ers list too.

You can also do things like reply, send a DM or retweet with one click, as well as fol­low­ing and unfol­low­ing with the same ease.

With it set up like this, a quick occa­sional glance keeps me up to date and can alert me to any­thing that might inter­est me, while I do other things on my com­puter. Like write this post.

While I’ve been work­ing on this fine piece of Twit­ter related prose, I’ve helped some­one with an iMovie ’09 ques­tion and replied to sev­eral tweets addressed directly to me. I don’t see it as a dis­trac­tion, but rather it aug­ments what­ever I’m doing and in this case, actu­ally informs and enriches it.

If I have any sort of ques­tion that I haven’t been able to answer with more tra­di­tional means, like search engines or forum posts, I’ll tweet it. Before long, an answer will come back, one that wouldn’t have been easy to find any other way. Call it the col­lec­tive knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence of every­one inter­act­ing on Twit­ter at that moment, or the “hive mind” if you will, but what­ever you call it, it is a quite pow­er­ful tool.

You can instantly col­lect opin­ions and reac­tions to some­thing from a broad cross sec­tion of the planet, or find local knowl­edge of an event or sit­u­a­tion right now.

Twit­ter has become my point of call for just about every­thing online. I use it to keep track of the news, of web­sites I like and sub­jects that mat­ter to me. I engage in dia­logue with other, like minded peo­ple, shar­ing my own knowl­edge while at the same time, ben­e­fit­ing from other’s.

More sig­nif­i­cantly, I don’t surf in the same way I used to; I don’t really browse using a browser any more. Instead of seek­ing out sub­jects of inter­est to me, I have them streamed onto my desk­top con­tin­u­ously and in real-time, cherry pick­ing the spe­cific pages I want to see and only then open­ing them up in my browser.

Just as the inter­net has evolved in the last 10 years, from slow dial-up con­nec­tions with mainly text-only pages to fast, always on-broadband and media-rich con­tent, our ways of inter­act­ing with the inter­net have changed too.

Twit­ter has become my inter­net aggre­ga­tor, my media and infor­ma­tion fil­ter. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it too soon to tell?

How about you?

Has Twit­ter changed your surf­ing habits? Do you use it as I do? Or have you found some other ben­e­fit I may be over­look­ing? I’d gen­uinely like to hear from any­one who might have any thoughts, so please feel free to tweet me and include my Twit­ter ID: @nthlondonhippy in your tweet, to make sure I see it and respond. Thanks!

I flirted with Twit­ter for around 6 months before I prop­erly signed up and started tweet­ing. I didn’t really get it at first, which is not unusual, for it has become a vir­tual sub-culture on the inter­net, with its own rules and eti­quette, that must be observed if you wish to play a part.

By rules, I don’t mean any­thing offi­cial, per­haps con­ven­tions or an infor­mal code of prac­tise would be more accu­rate, but for sim­plic­i­ties sake, I’ll stick to “rules”.

As I’ve used Twit­ter, I’ve devel­oped my own set of rules, or rather they’ve evolved as I’ve learned bit by bit what works for me.

And that’s what I believe is the key to Twit­ter, learn­ing what “works for you”. Dif­fer­ent peo­ple use it in dif­fer­ent ways and I’m going to share few things I’ve picked up since I started tweeting.

Fol­low­ing people:

At first, I really didn’t know who to fol­low beyond @wossy and @stephenfry and while they are both enter­tain­ing and pro­lific tweet­ers, it wasn’t enough to make Twit­ter worth my time. And its one thing fol­low­ing celebri­ties, they expect your atten­tion and ado­ra­tion, but how do you find other peo­ple to follow?

I was a bit shy about fol­low­ing peo­ple at first, after all you are choos­ing to learn a great deal about some­one who is a ran­dom stranger on the inter­net, but I’m far less so now.

When I started, I only really fol­lowed peo­ple who fol­lowed me first. Silly, eh? Don’t be afraid to fol­low some­one if you want to, even if their updates are pro­tected with a pad­lock. Mostly, that’s to keep out spam­mers and porn­bots, not gen­uine peo­ple like you. Occa­sion­ally, an account is truly pri­vate, but I’ve yet to per­son­ally encounter one.

Nearly all of us are on Twit­ter because we want to be fol­lowed. And who wouldn’t want some cool rockin’ hippy like me trail­ing them in cyber­space? Now tell me, what colour is your thong today?

Unfol­low­ing:

Occa­sion­ally, I unfol­low some­one and if it is you I unfol­lowed, I don’t mean any dis­re­spect. The biggest rea­son I unfol­low peo­ple is they tweet too often and its mean­ing­less crap — and that’s my job on Twitter!

Recently, I’ve unfol­lowed peo­ple because of the con­tent of their tweets. I’m rarely offended, so if you man­aged to offend me, you’ve said some­thing extremely loath­some. And I’ve unfol­lowed peo­ple who’ve signed up for adver­tis­ing tweets — I don’t want your stream to be inter­rupted by a word from YOUR spon­sor. It reduces Twitter’s value for everyone.

Fol­low­ers:

Its not a num­bers game. Don’t be suck­ered into think­ing that it is.

At first, I was con­cerned about how many fol­low­ers I had, and what peo­ple would think of me, if I didn’t have many. I soon learned the num­ber of peo­ple fol­low­ing you doesn’t mat­ter as much as the qual­ity of your fol­low­ers. And if the qual­ity of your tweets is high, you will attract fol­low­ers soon enough.

If you have a smaller num­ber of like-minded peo­ple fol­low­ing you, that beats mil­lions of ran­dom fol­low­ers any day.

If I cared about the num­bers, I’d let all the spam­mers and mar­ke­teers con­tinue to fol­low me, but I don’t — I block them. If I did leave them in place, it would prob­a­bly dou­ble my num­ber of followers.

If you fol­low me, I won’t auto­mat­i­cally fol­low you back. I might fol­low you, but only after I’ve had a look at your pro­file to see if your style of tweets would be inter­est­ing to me. If I don’t fol­low you, please don’t be offended. I only take a quick look and then make a snap deci­sion. Some­times I get it wrong.

And if you want me to fol­low you, just send me an @ mes­sage and I will. There are too many “online mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ists” who can help me make money on Twit­ter try­ing to fol­low me, or girls who want to show me their sexy pri­vate pic­tures, for it to be sen­si­ble to auto­mat­i­cally fol­low back.

Find­ing people:

I stum­ble upon new peo­ple all the time, in many dif­fer­ent ways.

Some­times, some­one using a hash­tag I’m track­ing will catch my attention.

I often look at who other peo­ple are fol­low­ing or fol­lowed by as well. And on occa­sion, I see some­one I’m fol­low­ing exchang­ing @ mes­sages with some­one and while fol­low­ing the con­ver­sa­tion thread, the new per­son catches my attention.

A lot of peo­ple think #fol­lowfri­day is another good way to find new peo­ple, as its the day to rec­om­mend new peo­ple for you to fol­low. I have to be hon­est, I still don’t really get the eti­quette of the whole thing. To me, every one of the nearly 500 accounts I’m fol­low­ing are worth it, or I wouldn’t be fol­low­ing them. So I choose peo­ple to rec­om­mend, know­ing I’ve prob­a­bly unin­ten­tion­ally left some­one very wor­thy out, or I’ve embar­rassed some­one by rec­om­mend­ing them. Clearly, I’m too neu­rotic to be play­ing in pub­lic with strangers.

My tweets:

I make a lot of jokes, or at least I try to, but some fall flat on their faces. I am occa­sion­ally seri­ous, sin­cere, angry (more than occa­sion­ally), but mostly I am sar­cas­tic with a dash of irony.

I tend to treat Twit­ter like one giant open-mike night and let my inner-comedian run wild. If you worked with me or hung out with me in per­son, it wouldn’t be much dif­fer­ent, only I would type less.

The impor­tant thing is I don’t tweet any­thing that I would be embar­rassed or ashamed of later. I’m polite and friendly to oth­ers, but most impor­tantly I am true to myself.

It helps that I’ve blogged a long time and have learned how much of myself to share with the wider world. Too fuck­ing much!

DM’s and @ messages:

I try to reply to all I receive, as long as you are not offer­ing me a free Mac­Book Air or telling me how to get 16K fol­low­ers in a week, and make money doing it!

If I haven’t replied to your mes­sage, its because I prob­a­bly missed it. And Twitter’s not per­fect, as some mes­sages and tweets get missed out from client to client. I know this because I use a vari­ety of meth­ods to read my tweets and mes­sages and I can see that some­times things aren’t exactly the same from client to client or device to device.

Twit­ter is fast mov­ing plus I keep weird hours most of the time so I do occa­sion­ally miss things.

If its impor­tant, mes­sage me again — I’d rather have your mes­sage twice, then have you think I was ignor­ing you.

I’m happy to hear from any­one, espe­cially if you’re in Nige­ria or a mem­ber of the US mil­i­tary in Iraq and look­ing to trans­fer large sums of cash into my bank account.

Invest time

You need to prop­erly invest time inter­act­ing on Twit­ter. You can’t just send the same tweet over and over, sell­ing your prod­uct or ser­vice. Peo­ple won’t pay atten­tion, they’ll clas­sify you as noise.

Start out slowly, grad­u­ally build­ing your net­work. Give more than you receive on Twit­ter, if you can answer someone’s ques­tion accu­rately, then do it. Don’t be self-centred or self-serving — peo­ple can smell it a mile off and will avoid you.

Know what you want from Twit­ter:

This is the best advice I’ve found on using Twit­ter, so I will pass it along. Think about what you want to get out of Twit­ter and be focused on that.

If you want to extend your social net­work, or use it to pro­mote a prod­uct or ser­vice, go for it, but do it well. There are many guides avail­able on how best to use Twit­ter for your busi­ness. Heed their advice.

I won’t lie, I joined to pro­mote my web­site and “brand”. Are you shocked? Sad­dened? Will you not look upon me with the same ado­ra­tion you had for me yes­ter­day? I’m crushed.

Its worked, I’ve seen a dra­matic upward spike in vis­i­tors to my site since I started tweet­ing regularly.

What I didn’t expect but found any­way, is a com­mu­nity of extremely nice, kind, help­ful, gen­uine people.

I’m quite reclu­sive by nature and more than a bit of a loner, but I find myself exchang­ing @ mes­sages with peo­ple quite fre­quently. Its an unan­tic­i­pated, yet wel­come ben­e­fit of being a mem­ber of the Twit­ter community.

Now, I won­der how many of them would loan me some money? I don’t need a lot, just a few grand to get this shy­lock off my back. You don’t want to see a cer­tain north Lon­don based hippy with shat­tered knee-caps, do you?

I haven’t put any­thing new up here in a cou­ple of weeks, so I guess I should just post something.

This is that some­thing, or rather it will be when I fin­ish it.

I’ve only just started and I don’t know where this is going, so how will I know when its finished?

I’m still not feel­ing 100%, so this could turn into a hippy health bul­letin. There’s a lit­tle bit to report.

After count­less treat­ments with my chi­ro­prac­tor, my back is now 99.9% pain free. I’m sleep­ing well and mov­ing well.

I’m still feel­ing list­less and occa­sion­ally a bit breath­less, but I saw an endocri­nol­o­gist this week who explained why and made a rec­om­men­da­tion that should help.

With thy­roid prob­lems, like my Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, your blood is tested for two things, your T4 lev­els, which is the actual thy­roid hor­mone and your TSH, which is Thy­roid Stim­u­lat­ing Hor­mone and made by your pitu­itary gland.

While my T4 level was good, my TSH level is still on the high side and should be lower. Low­er­ing it involves increas­ing my dose of med­ica­tion again and another blood test in a month or so. I’m going to go see my GP next week to sort all that out and hope­fully I’l be feel­ing some ben­e­fits in a cou­ple of weeks.

That wasn’t much of an update, was it?

How about an update on my site?

If you haven’t noticed, even when I’m not putting new posts up here, I am still adding qual­ity content…well qual­ity if you are inter­ested in my musi­cal tastes or what I had for break­fast. I’m talk­ing about my Last FM playlist and my most recent Tweets.

The Last FM wid­get on the right, shows you the last hand­ful of songs I’ve lis­tened to from my home media cen­tre, my iMac and my iPhone. It also tells you when I was lis­ten­ing, so you can keep up with it in real time. I don’t know why you would want to, but you can if you like.

I’m still enjoy­ing Twit­ter and I do tweet a fair amount daily, often at weird times, like the mid­dle of the night or early morn­ing. I’m some­times around dur­ing the day and at night, it depends on my weird sched­ule. I tweet all sort of ran­dom crap, from inter­est­ing links to odd and sur­real jokes.

Today, just for fun, I started using a hash­tag for a vir­tual Glas­ton­bury fes­ti­val online — #vir­tu­al­glasto — for peo­ple like me who will watch from my sofa, shielded from the ele­ments and poorly cooked veg­gie burg­ers. I’m actu­ally look­ing for­ward to Spring­steen on Sat­ur­day night and I hope the BBC don’t fuck me over and only show a cou­ple of songs. We want the whole god­damn set, god­damn it!

Mainly, I’m post­ing today because I’ve been get­ting so many new vis­i­tors. I’ve had another sig­nif­i­cant rise.

This is to let all you new vis­i­tors know that I’m alive and well and liv­ing in north Lon­don, just like always. Keep book­mark­ing me or grab­bing the RSS feed and before you know it, I’ll post some­thing amaz­ing that will inform, enter­tain and amuse.

Just not today.

I think I’m fin­ished now.