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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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?

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!

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?

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.