Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

How could I visit this beautiful country and not arrange an informal gathering of like-minded people. Thanks to Jay Oatway for suggesting a venue and helping me arrange a meetup. Thanks also to Thomas, Siok, Sage and Lonnie for telling their friends about it on Twitter. And thanks in advance to Christine Lu for the tweet she will send to her friends

Shame I’m not around for the Web Wednesday meetup - looks very interesting. Well, I might still make it if the cyclone grounds my flight back to London on Tuesday night.

Provided I get agreement from the team, I might demo Wubud tonight.

• Where: Lotus
• When: tonight, 7pm

We setup an account for Wubud on Twitter a few months ago to raise some awareness for the company and promised to give away a Mac Air in a prize draw as soon as the account reached 5,000 followers. Numbers increased each time we talked about Wubud but they stagnated as soon as we stopped. So, in light of this and to ensure we give away the lovely kit on this side of the next millennium, we’ve decided to solicit your opinion.

Should we change the rules so that the Air is given away when my personal Twitter account reaches 5,000 followers, or, don’t change anything and continue the competition on the basis of Wubud followers?

By changing to my personal account you no longer subscribe to a product, which I personally don’t particularly like anyway. It will also mean the Air is likely to be given away more quickly as I have just over 1,300 followers. On the down side to changing, it might annoy those who signed up to Wubud and who couldn’t care less about my personal ramblings outside of that particular product.

[Update: if the majority go with the 'change', we'll add everyone who's following Wubud into the prize draw to guarantee that their name is in at least once for their effort]

What do you think? We promise to go with the majority and the final outcome will be announced on the 21st of July 2008.

Feel free to leave your general opinion about product vs person twitter accounts.

A reader tonight, highlighted a feature on this blog that upsets them enough to post the comment below. I’m not sure if they wanted to have a dig, or provide useful feedback because they care. It’s unfortunate that they decided to hide behind anonymity by not linking to their Web site/blog. If it wasn’t for trolls we’d naturally assume it was friendly feedback. I won’t assume either way. Anyway, here’s what ‘Edison’ had to say;

Why do you insist on linking keywords in your articles to your blog’s archive of that tag? To be frank, it’s retarded and makes you look extremely self-centered and obnoxious.

If I see the word Apple hyperlinked in an articlea bout technology, I assume it will go to Apple’s online presence.

If you are tagging your article on your blog, why aren’t you listing the tags at the bottom of each article? Your tagging serves no purpose in this case.

On a side note, your “Twitter updates” box in the sidebar has not been working for weeks, if not months.

I thought it was worth publishing a new post to explain the method behind the madness. I’ve pasted the response I left ‘Ed’ (may I call you Ed?) in the comments:

@Edison - thanks for the feedback. You’re not the first person to have asked that question. Mind you, the first person wasn’t so passionate. I thought it was obvious that the hyperlinks I create are in bold.

The tags to which you refer, are automatically created by the blog software. They lead back to previous posts which have been tagged with those terms. Given that the tag cloud was installed afterwards, I don’t suppose I need them anymore. I personally don’t like tags at the top or bottom of posts as they tend to look messy.

Also, thanks for the feedback regarding the Twitter plugin. The Twitter API instructions have a serious security breach which meant my login details had to be disabled when we found every blog reader ended up automatically signed into my twitter account. I didn’t realise it had stopped working altogether. Shame you didn’t report it when you first saw it. I’ll get my developer to fix it next week – or remove it altogether.

So, on Monday, I’m going to disable the feature that automatically tags words which have been tagged in previous posts. If you look closely you can tell which tags are automatically added. The text I hyperlink is in bold, whilst the tagged words aren’t.

Is there any value in having the Twitter updates on the sidebar? Do you ever take the time to read them? Should I remove or keep the updates from the people I follow on Twitter.

Here are some cool tools for Twitter users - thanks to Philip Wilkinson

1. TweetWheel - Which of your followers know each other? Tweet Wheel helps you find out visually.
2. TwerpScan - If there are opportunistic marketers following everyone under the sun in the hope those good souls will just automatically follow them back, this tool might help identify those whom you may want to block.
3. Summize - Good, fast Twitter search engine
4. Twitt(url)y - Does a nice job of providing a Techmeme style representation of up and coming URLs that are mentioned in individual Tweets.
5. TweetBeep - as Google alerts but for Twitter

Let me know via the comments if you know of any more and I’ll add them later.

Firstly, there are no missing features in the new iPhone. Well, as far as Apple is concerned anyway. They haven’t done anything different to any other handset vendor - how else are they to encourage consumers to buy the next release and the next and then the next… Nokia is actually the worst offender in my opinion. When has Nokia for example, ever released a device with everything you ever wanted - without the need to auction one of your internal organs to buy one. Which brings me onto my next point, how can anyone have anything negative to say about the new pricing structure? It’s free on certain tariffs. I think the same skeptics want everything for free in life and forget that every other vendor charge through the nose for high end devices.

It’s ridiculous (embarrassing even) to hear an audience applaud Steve Jobs announce a flush socket for a headset. It’s something that should have come in the first release. Get a life.

I’m a loyal customer of Apple but it’s just one (of the smallest) players on the field. It might be a George Best of our industry, but it’s still one player. I’m looking forward to the rest of the vendors playing catch-up to help encourage mainstream adoption of Web enabled phones at a reasonable price.

Regarding an improvement to the development community ecosystem I’ve been reading on the Mobile Monday email list - I don’t see a major change - major change occurred with the release of the first iPhone. For some reason, most people need to see a screen shot before they’ll believe what’s coming. The first iPhone changed the development community’s perception with respect to ‘how’ consumers will consume content. I remember when the *vast majority* of public comment from the mobile development community on mobile Web for example, was “it will never happen anytime soon, long live WAP’”. That was up to the actual release of the iPhone. After which, the comments were “it’s too expensive”, “it’s too slow”…

It’s not rocket science. Nor does it take a fortune teller to see that mobile technology is not only changing at incredible speed, but that the speed at which change occurs, is also gaining momentum all the time. Hope that last sentence makes sense Furthermore, connection speeds are improving, pricing is coming down and the interface is improving. So, nothing different to the landscape changes we witnessed on the Web during the mid 90’s.

I’m delighted to see a new 3G enabled iPhone, as mine, which currently supports EDGE (slower connection speed) only works satisfactorily when there’s an EDGE connection available. Without one, the connection speed is either too slow to download email or browse the Web, or it dies altogether. The new version is also more supportive of the development community. This means you won’t have to unlock your phone to download non-Apple applications. Check out Twinkle if you’re a Twitter user - it’s fantastic. The downside is that we’re going to see Apple-specific applications, meaning developers have yet another non-standard device that needs to be ported.

I think Kamrul (one of Segala’s fine developers) has been drinking some funny juice. After implementing a fix for a serious security breach on my Twitter account, he has decided to replace my twitter feed on this blog, with Aido’s.

The funny looking chap in the red top to the right of this page, is in fact, the infamous Aido (AKA Adrian). Not me. Kamrul, please feel free to fix this when you get a chance

If you’re not already, feel free to follow me on Twitter. You could of course, be fed up reading my ramblings. In which case, follow Aido and Kamrul instead.

Go to Twitter now and following wubud. A Mac Air will be given away in a prize draw as soon as it reaches 5,000 followers. If you’re an American, help the small Irish guy raise his voice loud enough to be a squeak amongst Scoble’s and Calacanis’ of the world. If you’re not an American, show them that we can be just as noisy, well, almost.

Presents will be given to those who help raise awareness around this silly game. No rules. I will simply do a little research to see who I can hear loudest. Blog posts are already being written.

Do your bit for the environment and head to twitter now and follow wubud

[Update] Since writing this post, I’ve been asked by journalists if they could have an exclusive and asked why I decided to run this little game. Here’s my response:

1. The exclusive has yet to be given. Although a national newspapper has it in Ireland specifically.
2. I’m running this little game to get people talking about my newest venture, wubud
3. I’m also doing it to demonstrate how the power of conversation with communities of people is the way forward. If it’s the way forward for brands then it must be the way forward for traditional media folk to embrace tools/communities such as Twitter in order to find out what’s happening in the world. I’m likely to announce what wubud is and who my shit hot team is, on Twitter at the same time as whoever gets the exclusive. Some of my team is known to every reader of this blog.

I’ve been using Twitter for some time now. It has almost replaced my RSS reader completely and to a degree, my reliance on Google to find stuff. If I want to find out the latest gossip or ask for advice on how to use something new, I head straight for Twitter.com. If I want to find the latest world news I simply scroll through all the conversations for the past few hours - everything of real importance is likely to have been discussed there before anywhere else. You won’t just find stories, you’ll find opinions on those stories.

I was in New York recently to take part in a panel discussion about Mobile TV. Whenever I wanted a recommendation for a restaurant within walking distance, or the address of a specific clothes shop, I turned to my Twitter community. Within minutes I had the answers to any question I asked. Some people went as far as to Google restaurants and read the reviews before making recommendations to me.

Here are some tips for new users

Most people will only spend a few seconds reviewing your Twitter page before deciding whether to follow you or not. The more followers they have, the less time they’re likely to spend. So, these tips should help increase the chances of people following you.

1. Use your full name - don’t just display a screen name.
2. Fill in the bio. Include a few words that describe you. Try to make it punchy. Say what you do for a living.
3. Link to a Web page that’s relevant, preferably a blog or Facebook page.
4. Don’t follow everyone you find interesting at once. Wait for some of them to reciprocate, or you’ll look like a stalker.
5. Using a company name as your screen name is ok for some people. Jason Calacanis, Loren Feldman and Mike Arrington are amongst the ‘exception to the rule’ category. I personally prefer to follow people, not companies.
6. Be honest, open and above all, be yourself.
7. Be patient. You won’t build relationships or feel the community spirit over night. It take a little getting used to. Use twitter to have conversations with people for at least a few weeks before forming an opinion.
8. If you’re unsure whether to publish a comment, publish it. Ok, that’s probably not the best tip, but it’s what I do all the time. Sometimes it doesn’t work in my favour but mostly it does as people know that what they see is the real me.
9. Make it easy for others to retweet your message.

If you’re new, you’re not likely to know what a ‘retweet’ is so, I’ll explain - it’s longhand for ‘RT’ and it’s something you do when you wish to promote someone elses twitter message to your own followers. All you do is type RT followed by the message you wish quote and where appropriate, include your own thoughts.

When someone retweets your message, they include your screen name, the letters RT and a space. So, it’s difficult or time consuming for others to RT your message if it’s almost 140 characters long and they’re forced to edit your message. My screen name is @PaulWalsh which means I must keep my messages to 127 characters or less to make it easy for others to retweet without the need to edit. Below is a formula which I think is pretty cool (thanks to Louise - it sums up what I’ve just said in less than 140 characters.

RT formula: <140 - (username + 4) x interestingness = probability of RT

Feel free to follow me on Twitter and drop me a note to say you read this post. It’s always nice to see where people come from.

Have I missed anything? What tips would you give?

I wrote a post a while back, highlighting the lack of journalists on Twitter. Today, thanks to Marie Boran (AKA
PixieVonDust), I read with great interest that Charles Cooper from CNET is of the same opinion. Charles goes as far as to say

Out of curiosity, I drew up a list of 55 technology journalists to find out how many use Twitter, arguably one of the most important social-media technologies on the scene.

Read the full article

Connect to me on Twitter

I asked the question on Twitter this morning, “Why can’t people who are nasty or sarcastic have to be anonymous on my blog?!”

Jemima Kiss’ response was so funny I felt it deserved a permanent placeholder.

Posts that mention me on TechCrunch seem to attract anonymous comments so bad that the type of people leaving them, are formally known as ‘trolls’. I don’t mind anonymous comments per say, mainly because we get them from companies such as Google and Microsoft on the Segala blog - they leave their real names and judging by the conversations I know their identities.

In general, I hate anonymous comments. If you don’t feel you can associate your name with a comment, don’t comment. Should we ban anonymous comments altogether? Should professional blogs such as TechCrunch ban them?

By the way, if we’re not yet connected on Twitter, feel free to follow my feed.