Halving it

When I was doing a Writing Course years ago, I remember being appalled when asked to cut down a short story by half. Impossible! 

But, no, it's not, and the good thing was that it gave me confidence to edit more effectively in the future. No line is ever inviolable, and no word is so perfect that something else can't substitute for it - if you need to chop things back. The great thing about the English language is that you can almost invariably find a synonym for any word. 

I posted the following on Facebook today: 

For years we've been getting the nasal spray Flixonase in a plastic squirter. Simple and not too unenvironmental.
Now the product has morphed into a wide plastic package - the kind you have to use an axe to get into - and most of what's inside the package is air. Not only do these packets take up much more room on the shelf at the pharmacy, but they are a total waste of resources. Neither the packaging nor the container is reusable in any sense.

I attached photos of the package, front and back, including one of the previous models for comparison.

Plenty of room on Facebook, so I could use as many words as I wanted, and play a little with the text. 

But I wanted to put the same thing on Twitter, and of course, even with their doubling of the size of a tweet a couple of years ago, you're still limited in how many characters you can use. 

So I called on my old skills, and produced this:

For years the nasal spray #Flixonase came a simple plastic squirter. Now it's morphed into a wide #plastic package, and most of what's inside is AIR. Not only does it take up more room on the pharmacy shelf, but neither the packaging nor the container is #recyclable in any sense.

Exactly 280 characters!

In the tweet there are 50 words, or 280 characters. In the FB version there are 85 words, and 449 characters.

Yes, of course, a few interesting things have gone - like the bit about the axe - but in general nothing important has been lost. It can sometimes be a struggle to get your text down to an allotted number of words (newspapers are usually the most keen to keep words to a certain fixed figure) but it's doable, and what's more, it's good for your editing skills in general. I've had to review several books over the last few years that looked like they'd never end - a 1000 pages seemed to be the minimum some authors could tell their story in. Except it wasn't. It was indulgence, and the editors at his publishing house should have told them so.

So when it comes to the point where you have to cut that massive tome down that you've been writing for several years, just think: do I want to publish a Facebook version, or a Twitter one? The latter may well help your book reach more readers.

Marketing for self-publishers - does this idea work

Yesterday I came across a blog post entitled: The Fool-Proof Twitter Book Marketing Strategy You Need to be Using. My first reaction was, Yes, this is what I've been looking for, but having considered overnight some of the things the author is saying, I'm having second thoughts. 

One thing I do agree with is that merely announcing on Twitter that you've written and published a book will probably not add a single sale to your sales chart. I get tweets like this all the time from different authors, and most of the time I switch off, or just flick straight past them. Once in a blue moon I will actually consider buying the book on the strength of the tweet, and occasionally (perhaps five or six times in nearly a decade of being on Twitter) I've actually bought a book. 

So it's not a total loss, but it certainly won't bring big sales - unless you're already very well known as an author. Even then it's only part of the overall marketing strategy. 

Another thing the writer, Derek Murphy, says is that interaction with other readers - not other authors - is necessary. And again don't hammer them with the sales pitches: befriend them as people, and respond to their tweets and talk about mutual areas of interest. 

Neither of these things were news to me. 

However, Murphy starts off his article by encouraging us to add 100 tweeters per day, ones who are interested in the genre in which we write and who are likely to read the sort of book you've published. In three months you'll have 5000 targeted followers, he claims. 

This is where things start to fall down, for me. Finding and following even an additional 100 people a day is quite a commitment, even when you only take a quick squiz at their tweets. Furthermore many of these tweeters will not necessarily just tweet about writing and books and such. They, like me, have other interests. 

But the bigger problem is that just because you follow these particular 100-5000 people doesn't mean they will follow you in return. Some will, many won't. So in fact you won't necessarily have 5000 targeted followers after three months. In fact, it's unlikely. 

You might argue that some of these people will retweet your tweets to their friends and, if those friends are book-focused people, they may follow you. You'll get people on board you hadn't originally followed. Yes, this is true. 

But there's no way you'll have time to have twitter conversations with even a small number of these people. 

Murphy goes on to say that you also need to be writing blog posts about writing and your genre, and cross-referencing other people's posts, and thus building up your profile. Furthermore you need to be following up on hashtags that relate to your genre and area of interest. 

Here's another problem: doing all this work will severely curtail your available time for writing books. From experience I know that as soon as I start to work on marketing, hours flit by, often with very little to show for it. 

I'm beginning to think that there are a number of writers out there who don't actually write very much in the way of books, but spend vast amounts of time writing about how to market. Which means, for me, that their real focus isn't writing, but marketing. 

Some time ago I followed a bloke - his name now escapes me, but no doubt others will know him - who, having written a series of books, basically said that he wasn't really interested in writing any more books but in marketing the ones he'd written. And that was certainly his focus. His aim was to make as much money out of these few books as possible. 

I understand the frustration that self-publishing writers have in terms of marketing. It tears the writer in two. It's no wonder publishers take on the marketing role in the normal way of publishing; writers just don't have the time. 

I'm not sure what the solution for self-publishers is - throwing heaps of money at marketing, maybe - but I know that trying to write and market just doesn't work for me, however enthusiastic I may be about such posts as Mr Murphy's...at first. 

Promoting your product

I've been spending a lot of time in the last year promoting my three e-books. It's a tough task but it has to be done. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's a chore. You meet interesting people online in the process, and there's always plenty of advice as to how to do it better - too much, perhaps.

But one thing is certain, if you're not a big name and not already a big seller, you're going to have to be patient and let the sales trickle in bit by bit.

I was thinking about this while walking the dog this afternoon. I came across a sign on the roadside which had blown over (not the one in the picture; that's just an example, and doesn't look as if it would blow over easily). It was advertising firewood and so on. I wondered if it would have been anymore effective even if it had been standing up.

Firstly, it was right on the corner of the road that the customer was expected to go up. No warning further down the road, nothing. Just the one sign.

Now this isn't a road where motorists are doing any great speed, but even at 50 kmph, it takes a bit of doing on the motorist's to read the sign, understand it, think about whether he really wants that product, think about whether he really wants to stop or if he's got better things to do; it takes him time to realise the sign relates to the road they're just about to pass, to discuss it all with his wife, to find a way of turning around and then going to investigate. Even if he thinks about all this and decides to come back later, it's possible he'll forget, or find something else more urgent needing to be done.

I know all this because I've often not stopped when going through the orchard area in Roxburgh. At 100 kmph it's even harder to make all these decisions.

At the very least there needs to be two or three signs further down the road at considerable intervals (and yes, I understand that's all a cost to the seller), each one pointing to the road that's coming up, and giving the driver plenty of time to consider whether he wants to make the effort of stopping and buying the product.

Without those warning signs, however, it's unlikely anyone will stop, unless they're absolutely desperate for what's on sale.

Now compare this to an author trying to sell his/her book on line. If I post a tweet, or a facebook comment once, and don't bother again, all I've done is announce to a few possible followers that I have a product. Big deal. If they happen to know me, happen to have read my previous books and enjoyed them, then it's vaguely possible they may suddenly decide on the spur of the moment to purchase the latest one.

It's more likely they'll pay no attention at all. In a digital sense, they'll keep driving.

However, if I post tweets at regular but not annoying intervals, and make them different, enticing, and interesting (that is, not just sales blurbs, but like real tweets or comments) then over the course of time, interest will be aroused, and the reader/follower may think: I remember that from a week or two ago. I might be interested.

They may still switch off and go to the next more interesting tweet or pretty picture. But after seeing these tweets/comments several times, couched in creative ways, they may start to say: Yes, I will look into this. They may click on the link, investigate further, check out the sample. They may even buy.

But notice what a long process this is.

This is why advertisers keep on hammering away at us on TV, in the newspapers, online. They know that the first time we won't pay any attention. We might like the ad, if it's clever, but as for the product, we may find we have no use for it, or it doesn't appeal just at that point. But over successive weeks, months and so on, the product starts to click in our memories, and we slowly change our view. We may resist forever - some ads make me resist, though obviously the advertisers don't realise that. Equally, we may finally think: now's the time.

Perseverance, creativity, continual exposure. All keys to telling the world that we authors have got something they'd like to read. Just this week, a person who has their own online app and with whom I've had a lot of contact via email about what he's selling, suddenly announced he'd bought my book. I think the only way he'd have known about it is because it's on the bottom of my emails. And has been for months.

Dunedin wins gigatown

To immense jubilation on the part of the supporters, Dunedin won the Chorus gigatown competition last night. I wasn't among the crowd in the Dunedin headquarters (formerly the National Bank in George St) but watched the live streaming from Wellington in which the announcement was made, and then saw the gradual build up of tweets and Facebook comments and photos and videos as people got sufficiently over their initial excitement and shedding of tears and began to digitally announce to the world that we are Australasia's first giga-city.

It's a huge achievement. There were times when it seemed as though Dunedin didn't have a hope. We were well down the board in the earlier stages of the competition, and then did a major leap as a result of one particular effort. After that we remained pretty much in the top five. Thankfully.

I was involved from about March, mostly tweeting, but some had been competing since late last year when the competition started, tweeting day after day and putting up photos and so on. A massive effort from the long-haul people.

But then, when the tweeting/FB side of it came into the last stage, hundreds of people came out of the woodwork, it seemed, and some of them spent a phenomenal amount of time tweeting and retweeting and commenting, until, on the last day for that side of the competition we nearly managed to break Twitter in NZ. It got so overwhelmed that it couldn't keep up. That was extraordinary.

It was at that point that I discovered there were people who'd been involved from early on that I'd never encountered. Which was strange considering how much retweeting had been going on for months.

My only unique contribution to the thing was that I seem to have introduced the word 'twibe' to describe those who were tweeting faithfully day after day in Dunedin. I'd borrowed it from a blog post I wrote some years back, in 2009 in fact, and it took off. Last night a number of my friends on FB were congratulating me on how much I'd done in the competition. I had to remind them that the reality is that I was one of the minor players, especially towards the end, when some people easily outshone me as the sun easily outshines the earth. It was good to know I contributed something, but let's not go overboard, people!

Of course now the gig thing will gradually come to pass in the city. Home users probably won't see any difference for some time since many parts of the city aren't yet connected to fibre, and won't be until 2015, 2016 (in our case) or even 2018, which officially the discounted price will be over and done with. Hopefully businesses will be enabled to get on and use it in the more central parts of the city. That's certainly going to be a plus for many of them.

#gigatowndun

I've been involved in the #gigatown competition since March 2014. Some people have been involved since November last year, I think. That's a horrendously long time to compete at something.

Most of my involvement has been on the tweeting side, sending dozens, sometimes hundreds of tweets on many days with the hashtag #gigatowndun. In the process I've gradually lost track of the people I've been following on Twitter who aren't involved in the competition. Which is a pity.

Some of them gave up because they got swamped themselves with #gigatowndun tweets. And fair enough. Even people on Facebook, where all of my original tweets get sent, eventually reacted in the same way.

In the early stages it was a fun way to get to know other local people and write some crazy tweets as well as some sensible ones. Certain weird themes came through about baths, and two people being the same person and such. Innocuous, but quite entertaining, especially if a conversation got going between participants.

In the latter stage when things really got serious, we weren't able to be quite so facetious: the rules changed and we had to spend time tweeting or FaceBooking about things that #gigatowndun would do for the city if we won. That became limiting, especially when a whole pile of new people got involved and basically began tweeting about the same things that had been tweeted about time and time again. Not quite so inspiring.

I've had a few days on Twitter since the later part of the competition, but have found myself struggling to be very creative anymore, and I think there may be a few longstanding Tweeters who've come to the same place. Exhausted with dealing with the same topic over and over.

Yes, I know we should remain enthusiastic, because we're nearly there, and there's every possibility that we may win. I know we should keep the idea of a marathon before us and be thankful that in the last stage a whole pile more supporters have got on board. That is terrific, and kudos to those who've worked hard to get them there.

But I had some other things I wanted to do, and #gigatowndun-ing all day chews up the hours that could be spent productively on other stuff, such as finishing a book - The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret, which was published on Kindle yesterday. And then there's the marketing of the other two books I've published this year, and the work on a fourth....

I'm sure, if Dunedin wins the giga comp, it'll make a huge difference over a period of time. But much and all as I'd like to spend the last couple of days plugging away at it, I think I've just plain run out of steam.

Payu2blog gone?

Over the years I've done a lot of posts here for a site called Payu2blog.com. It seems that they've run right down, however. I've had no assignments for a few months, and they're not answering any emails (not that they were ever very good at that). They've begun to use Twitter as an alternative to blog posts, but the Twitter approach doesn't seem to be working. I never got paid for the one assignment they offered that I've tweeted, and the latest assignment along these lines is so confusingly laid out, I've had read trouble trying to figure out what they're talking about.

It's a pity, because Payu2blog was a reasonable source of small income over several years; my PayPal account was kept topped up by it. Ah well, that seems to be the way of the Net. Some things have their day and then suddenly they're gone, when the crowd moves on...

Promoting Grimhilda!

I've been working hard on promoting my ebook, Grimhilda!, but it takes a lot of time, of course. Still, the great advantage of ebooks is that you don't have piles of unsold stock lying around eating up your income.

At present the book is restricted to Kindle, but from the 20th April will be available much more widely. I'm hoping this will make a difference in its sales. I've been working with a company called Wheelers, too. They supply ebooks to libraries around NZ, and possibly Australia. (I think they supply to Australia, but trying to find where I saw that is proving a little difficult.) They've been very friendly and helpful, and respond quickly to emails. Grimhilda! is now in their capable hands and hopefully will begin to make her way around some of the NZ libraries from mid-April onwards.

I won't restrict my next book to Kindle - it's restricted to them for the first three months, if you choose that option, an option that's supposed to make it more visible, but obviously hasn't. Some advice I got from elsewhere has suggested that even though Kindle appears to be top-dog in the ebook world, it isn't, in fact, and there are a wide number of other opportunities out there. I'm preparing Grimhilda! for Smashwords too, at the moment, so it's all go.

I've hammered away at promoting on Twitter and Facebook, and have had some interest there...and a few sales. It's slow, but then Grimhilda! is competing against thousands upon thousands of other titles around the world, so she's got her work cut out.

Sales here in Dunedin have been rather sluggish, which surprised me considering that the musical version was presented here, and had good feedback. Several people have told me they'll get a copy, but it's easy to say that and then forget. Perhaps I should purchase a number of large vinyl banners and get the City Council to hang them from their banner poles around the city. Might be a slightly expensive option, considering the skimpiness of my advertising budget!

The other thing that's held up promotion has been the writing of my other book, on my experience of having a prostate operation. It's difficult to write and promote at the same time, something I've always had a problem with. I'm better at writing than promoting, although I do the latter because I have to, and a great deal of the promotion for the musical version of Grimhilda! fell into in my hands. A steep learning curve, as the cliche goes.

Anyway, that's where things are at present.  No doubt there'll be more news in due course!

Trio sets

I was just telling someone on Twitter today that my first fiancee broke off our engagement on the minuscule pretext that I ate apples too loudly. I think the real reason was that her brothers had arrived from South Africa to warn her off matching herself up with a no-hoper from NZ, and any excuse was good enough. Ce la vie.

Why do I mention this, because you can get trio sets from Reeds.com. Okay, you say, what are 'trio sets'? Are they string trio players doing a 'set' of popular classics? Not quite, I reply. In fact, all I know is that trio sets have something to do with engagement rings,

A bit more investigation shows that the trio consists of an engagement ring for the fiancee, and a wedding ring each for the bride and groom. Obvious, really. Naturally they come in diamonds. What else?

Now here's a marketing idea. And it would be an encouragement for the young couple to stay together too. Each major wedding anniversary - the silver, gold, ruby, etc - would be commemorated by yet another ring for the bride that fitted the original trio set. If the groom was keen, he could have one too. They probably wouldn't run out of fingers...

Sidderences

One of the people I follow on Twitter came up with a new word by accident today.  While intending to type differences he came up with sidderences.  Now you'd think that an accidental shifting of the keyboard by one key would produce nonsense, and in a way you'd be right. Except that when you go onto Google and look up sidderences, you find that in its singular form (in particular) it's quite commonly used.

On AnswerParty.com someone asks:What is the sidderence between multigrain and wholegrain? I presume they did what the Twitterer did, and typed a couple of letters out of kilter.  In a response on the Apple Support Communities, someone else writes: ...nothing in my setup has changed. Ive done a full reinstall and that doesnt make a sidderence. [And neither do apostrophes, apparently.]

We get the plural version on GL1800Riders forum: There was another link here that someone has posted two pics showing the side sidderences between the stock '10 and '12 seats. This is actually quite clever, because if you've managed to substitute the 's' for the 'd' in the beginning of the word, why haven't you typed: sidderenced?

Someone else says, It makes a sidderence to Qantas! Another person writes in relation to a video on You Tube the following somewhat short-handed note: Remember the sidderence between a rocco and a golf is almost nothing, the engine bay is a dif shape and bigger, that is the problem, mounts go in the same place they are just an awkward thing to fit and make. Note that the sidderence is corrected to 'dif [difference] only a line later.  In another place someone correctly spells and then incorrectly spells only a few words later: All the little differences end up making one very big sidderence - pour, nose, color, taste. This is in relation to something called Hefeweizen, about which you can read here. I like that phrase: pour, nose, colour, taste. It has a kind of poetic feel to it.

I thought I might find a reference for discount jewelry and sidderence, but nope; though you'll notice, yet again, that the Americans insist on spelling jewellery as jewelry. Quite a sidderence!

Superannuation

Yesterday there was a bit of flutter on Twitter about a pensioner in the Hutt Valley who was now being made to pay back his student loan - which he took out in 1999 for study - because the recent increase in the pension has meant he's crossed the threshold for repayments.  He complained about this being unjust, and got called a 'cry baby' in some places, as well as being reviled on Twitter.   I think the 'cry baby' post was perhaps a little over the top, but I guess that paying back the loan was always a possibility.  (It's a very small amount, though see below.)

However, what I found unpleasant on Twitter - and on the site where he was called a cry-baby - were the sarcastic and aggressive comments of younger people who have yet to experience what it's like to live on a pension, and nothing but a pension.  This is the pension where, if you're married, you actually get less each than if you're single.  Yes, I know there are ways for two people to economise, but why should they be treated as some double act financially just because they're married?

This is the pension that has been paid for in advance by years of taxation.  I worked for nearly fifty years.  I paid tax throughout that time.  I paid for that superannuation over the fifty years I worked.  Younger people go on about how they're paying for superannuitants.  No, they're not.  Superannuitants have basically paid for their pensions through their tax, just as those now working are paying for their own future pension. 

This is the pension that is about half of what I was earning before I retired. The figure I earned in my last three years of work was possibly the highest I'd ever received, and it wasn't anything like NZ's mean income.  I'd often worked for incomes that were considerably less than that.  Earning that kind of money makes it very hard to put anything away for your retirement, so in the end you're forced to rely on the superannuation.

I'm grateful for the pension, make no bones about it.  However, what many younger people won't be aware of is this little catch.  My wife isn't yet 65, but no longer has a job.  Because I'm on a pension, thankfully she is able to receive a 'supplementary' pension.  As a result, until she's reaches the age of 65, my superannuation figure goes down somewhat from the normal payment, and her payment equals mine.  So we get less than many married pensioners.  During the year she was able to pick up some work.  However, between us, we're only able to earn $100 a week over and above our pensions - until she reaches 65.  (The $100 a week, is of course, taxed, as is the pension itself - something many people don't think is the case, including Michael Laws.) The part-time, casual work she did in the last Work and Income year caused us to go over that threshold figure.  Every dollar she earned over that $100 a week, is taxed at the end of the income year at 70%.  This is not a typo.  You have to make up your mind whether you think it's worth working and having some cash in hand, or whether it's not and thus avoiding the additional tax you incur (it's worked out at the end of the W&I year). 

Perhaps I would at one time have thought superannuitants had it easy (although I was aware what my retired mother was receiving for many years, and it was never much).  But in fact many superannuitants in the country are much worse off than we are, and we don't exactly consider ourselves flush for cash.  So before you start criticising those over 65, think about what they may really be earning.  Once they've paid for the essentials each week (if they can afford to do that) there's next to nothing left.  Not much to show for years of giving your life to your country. 

Just a little overview

While commenting on Facebook this morning, I thought that it would be interesting to list the number of different skills that have been employed since I began to work on the musical, Grimhilda!   It hasn't been quite a matter of everything and the kitchen sink, (as in Sienna Sinks stainless steel sinks) but it's felt close to that at times.


Of course, the first skill was writing the thing, in collaboration with my friend, Cherianne Parks (she contributed many of the crazier ideas, and is very strong on structure and plotting).

Then the was the writing of the music, first in a piano/vocal score, and then gradually this was orchestrated.   None of these skills, so far, were new to me.

Next, and these aren't in any particular order, I had to discover how to apply for funding and how to fill in applications forms to funders.  I was greatly helped in this by Sally-Anne Howes, who's done it before and made editorial comments and did the budgetting side of it.  As a result we got some $6000 of funding!

Then there was my involvement in the auditions.  I didn't make the final decisions on casting, but was involved in the process with the director and music director.   When we didn't have a complete cast as a result, in collaboration with the D and MD, I began the search through every means I could think of to find the additional actors we needed.  So you might say I acquired some casting skills...

Then there was advertising.  Initially I was doing this in a kind of ad hoc way, and then somehow it became my job altogether.   It's been interesting, and I've met some great and friendly and helpful people.   And been overwhelmed, as always, by the willingness of people to get involved.

I also recorded two selections of music and put these on SoundCloud, along with some of the instrumental music - courtesy of the Sibelius program.   And last weekend, I went through and checked (and corrected) the instrumental parts, and printed them out, and, with my wife's assistance, taped all the individual pages together into a concertina format, so the musicians don't have pages flying everywhere during the performances.  That was a much bigger job than I anticipated.   And then we'd no sooner done that than we had to add in a number of bars because the Director wanted a bit of dancing in one place.  Such is his prerogative, but it's surprising how much extra work that was.  It's much easier to cut stuff than add stuff!

And then there's what you might call my 'producing' role: finding things, and people to do stuff, and making decisions that something is far too expensive to go with and trying to find a better and more economic option.   Surprisingly the economic options are often because other groups in town, or people, are willing to be generous to a degree that continues to amaze me.  This week has shown me just how generous people can be - we were even offered a keyboard for the celesta part in the score after I advertised on Twitter.  Someone retweeted the original tweet, and within five minutes, I was on the phone to a resident saying he not only had a keyboard he was willing to lend (to a complete stranger!) but was willing to drop it off to the theatre.   Wow!

I've just been having coffee and liaising with the MD and the man who's going to look after the mics for us.  He's even willing to go chasing up additional items we need to get this part of the show to work properly.  Again, Wow!   (And he's been willing to come to rehearsals and see how things run and what needs to be done.)

My list of helpful people is growing - and I'll keep it for future reference!

Meanwhile, Cherianne has also played multiple roles: props person (collecting them and organising for them to be built where necessary); overseeing the making of the costumes and liaising with the scenic designer; ongoing script consultant and much more which she could tell you about better than I can.  And of course, she'll be Stage Manager during the show's run.

I'm sure there are other jobs I've been involved with (such as putting together the promo at the Library yesterday) but they're all beginning to merge...maybe I'll update this as the other jobs come to mind!

Two interesting lists

I happened upon Kindle's list of Most highlighted passages of all time today. What this refers to is the way in which you can highlight (like the old idea of using a highlighter in a book with real pages) a section of a book you're reading because you think it's important, or it struck you as of interest, or whatever.  These highlighted sections can be tracked later, if you want.

Considering that this list has the most highlighted passages of all time, they're a strange bunch. (All time being somewhat hyperbolic, I think.) Passages from the various books in The Hunger Games prevail, which presumably means that a huge number of people are not only reading these books on Kindle, but are highlighting more than ever.  Initially it's almost hard to find anything else in the list, but wait! Jane Austen is there, third in line with It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. (Let's hope they read further than the first paragraph.)  She manages to sneak in at eighth place as well.   Sherlock Holmes makes an appearance in the top 25 along with a book entitled: Heaven is for real: a little boy's astounding story of his trip to heaven and back.  Hmm.  


Dorian Grey gets in at around number 27, and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People makes more than one appearance in numbers 26-50.  After that it becomes open slather, with a real mix of books turning up.   The interesting thing about this list is that, unlike those lists produced by retailers and other places, where the greatest books of all time will include Harry Potter and suchlike, this list is actually related to what people are reading and highlighting.  The highlighting is the relevant factor.  It will be worth checking out this list again when The Hunger Games has run its course.


The second list is related to Twitter, and appears in the NZ Herald, where a list of NZ's Twitter top 50 appears today.  Taika Waititi, who made the film, Boy, appears first on this list, with 11,520 followers, though he's actually the second most followed tweeter.  Comedian Rhys Darby has over 79,000 followers, Cory Jane (the All Black) has around 53,000, nearly twice as many as TV3's John Campbell, who almost ties with another commentator, John Lai.  Except that Lai is a social media commentator.  


The interesting thing about this second list, for me, is that I don't follow a single person on it, although a few of the names turn up in retweets now and then, notably Hamish Keith.  There are quite a few New Zealanders I do follow, but none of them appear on this list.  Maybe they'll turn up on the Herald's second list, which is due out soon. 

Shifting to Chrome

Well, the shift to Google Chrome as my default browser seems to be going okay.   Of course some things went missing with the change - not my bookmarks, which were happily imported from Firefox - though truth to tell, I hardly ever use the bookmarks now, as typing into the URL line usually brings up anything I want.

I did lose the add-ons I had - Chrome calls them extensions - and had to go and re-sort them: Evernote's clipper, for one, and RoboForm (which oddly turns up at the bottom of the screen rather than the top; some curious feature of Chrome, apparently).   Zotero also went missing - it's part of Firefox's add-ons, but not Chrome's as far as I can tell.  You can get Zotero as a stand-alone programme now, but I haven't yet figured out how to get stuff into the right folder in the stand-alone version: when you click on the little blue box that records the book item you're interested in, it just pops it in wherever it feels like it, and because of Zotero's set-up, you can't find which folder it's in, although of course you can actually find the item through their search box.

And just now I realised I didn't have the add-on that copied URLs to Twitter (or other social media).   Chrome has an extension for this, so that wasn't too much of a problem.

The main reason I shifted was because Facebook was becoming very sticky on Firefox.   (My geek son reckons Firefox has overloaded itself with all its upgrades).   Anyway, on Chrome, Facebook is behaving itself very well, so that's a plus.  Another plus is that there's no separate box for doing a Google search: the URL box and the search box are one and the same (this being Google's browser, naturally) so that's actually a gain.  This was starting to happen on Firefox, but not quite so effectively.

So, at present, all good.

PS 20.12.2011 Only realised this morning that Evernote is not working in quite the same way it used to.  Instead of clipping whatever it is that you want clipped directly to the Evernote database on your computer, it clips it now to your Evernote database online.  It's only when you sync the two that the computer version updates.  Before it was the other way round.  Odd.  On the plus side, the new look Evernote clipper is an improvement over the old one.  And doesn't require as much fiddling around with each time.

And another thing: everything is being spellchecked all over again (like the word, spellchecked, for instance).  Obviously Chrome doesn't import all the words I've collected over the last few years of Firefox usage.

Greens and the elderly

The political party debate last night on Channel 3 brought more Tweets to my Twitter page than any other subject has ever done.  Even my son-in-law made some comments.  It was all very invigorating, and it hasn't stopped.  I don't think anyone made any more sense of anything as a result (not assisted by Paul Henry getting in on the act) but at least everyone was involved.

Tonight it seems the Greens are taking over Twitter, pushing their policy on child health/poverty in NZ.  I think their concern for child health/poverty is admirable, but it's interesting that the only person with any concern - as far as I'm aware - for older people is Winston Peters.   On the other parties' radar, the older and elderly don't even appear.

I've replied to the Greens tweets about child poverty with a couple of questions about whether they're concerned for older people.  No tweets in response, at this stage.

Update on this: 
Someone at the Greens has sent me a tweet: We sure are. Sue Kedgley did a report about it last year.  

I've now downloaded the report and will have a look at it after Downton Abbey has finished....

You wanted to follow for Why?

I've hit the 111 mark with Twitter in terms of how many people follow me.   That may seem a positive thing, until you actually check out who's following you. 

Some are people I follow as well; some are people who know me from elsewhere.  

But some seem rather random in terms of why would they follow me?   It's as if they have some automated system that looks for a key word related to their area of interest.  If I happen to mention that key word in one of my tweets, voila!,  I have a new follower. 

Even then, some of them are mysteries: the 'official tweets for the Olympic Games'?  A stunt actor and fight choreographer.  Someone who's "Sexy, sassy and adventurous."  (She's definitely in the wrong place.)  "DocLocker [who] delivers the ideal combination of first-class maximum security and ease of use."  Someone who has a photo of a collie with boots on as his avatar.  

Someone who has this as their profile: My beloved Nelson died November 6,2009.Memory Eternal.My blog:The Unwedded Widow.Orthodox Christian,hypothyroid/CFS/spoonie,knitter,jobless,navigating grief.  The Brazen Head, that advertises itself this way: Welcome to Ireland's oldest pub, come and experience great music, award winning food & a unique atmosphere!  Terry, who....enjoys Maui sunsets with his wife! Real Estate & Tax Lien Investor. Realtor, Trainer, Speaker for Real Estate Investors. Internet Marketing Consultant.  Carl, who writes: Im married with 2 daughters and have an awesome recipe for chick pea curry. I also lead a UK and increasingly international mens ministry.

An awesome recipe for chick pea curry?   OK, Carl.

google + from facebook

Upgrading, or shifting sites, are both things that we tend to react against online. Unless there's a really good reason to upgrade a programme, I won't do it automatically; I've been hit too often by Firefox Mozilla upgrading and causing problems with add-ons and such, to take just one example.

The latest version of Sibelius - version 7 - is now out and I'm hearing less than enthusiastic reports. Seemingly there are a host of new sound samples, but it's also gone over to the 'ribbon' style of menu, and this has been decried by a number of Sibelius users. I'm not sure that that would bother me so much (since I'm used to Windows 7 anyway), but apart from this the improvements seem to be mostly cosmetic. Having not very long ago shifted to version 6 (being forced to, in fact), I'm not desperate to upgrade just for a few tinky-tonk changes.

And a couple of people have enthused about Google +. But I can't see the point. Changing from Facebook (for all its faults) is a major undertaking. Firstly, will the people you're in touch with on Facebook shift with you? (Not very likely.) What will happen to all your collected stuff? Who will care that you've gone to the supposedly 'better' Google +? Not many people, I think.

And you lose access to all those click here buttons that now dot the Net for Facebook and Twitter and so on. Certainly these aren't the greatest loss, and the loss can be overcome, but if Google + is so good, why isn't it available as well as all these other options?

I think Google might have got out of the starting gate far too late on this one; the other horse have won the race a long time ago and the next race is already beginning. (I once swam in a school race in which I was still plugging along when the next race started...)

There are nine 'good' reasons to shift to Google +, according to an article by Mark Sullivan in PC World:
Integration with other Google services (that's sort of a plus for me, but not enough of one)
Better Friend Management (Google's circles and inner circles and so on just don't grab me...it all sounds like too much effort).
Better Mobile App (I don't have a smartphone so this doesn't make me want to move).
Easier to find stuff and share. (A piffle reason, I think.)
You can get your data back. (Well, this might be a plus, but I'm not convinced entirely.)
Better Photo Tagging. (This relates to Facebook's recent upgrading - there's that word again - of the tagging scene and its implications. Hmmm, one reason out of six so far isn't enough.)
Strong group chat features. (I never group chat, so that one's out.)
Safer Content Sharing. (Assigning a privacy level to each piece of content I share sounds like a load of work to me.)
Google is a better steward of your personal data. (This is no different from reason five, I think.)

Sorry, Mark, you just haven't convinced me. And neither has the one person I know who's shifted to Google +. He sent me an email today via Google +, but of course I couldn't reply to it, or comment on it....not being in the Google + system. See what I mean?

Promotional

At the moment, life is a bit of a juggling act in relation the musical I'm writing: Grimhilda!

On one hand I'm getting close to finishing the music and that's taking up a lot of brain-space, and on the other, I'm involved with some other people in figuring out how to advertise the piece so that it gets plenty of coverage well in advance, and so that it's not an unknown quantity when it finally gets to performance stage.

Perhaps I should use some promotional items: pens with Grimhilda! on them, for instance, or promotional t-shirts. It's an idea that's been used before with some of the other musicals put on in town. I need to find out how effective people think it's been to do this.

One of our team talked about having an advertisement on the back of a bus - though this can mean that your show is still being advertised several months after it's finished! Still, people do see these ads. As well as some of these well-worn routes (well-worn not meaning they're no longer effective) I'm leaning also towards using clips on You Tube, and MP3 versions of a selection of music from the show, so that people can get an idea of the music before they go. My instinct is that people like to have some idea of the music beforehand, so that they're not faced with a wad of unfamiliar material. And of course I'll continue blogging and facebooking and twittering about it - hopefully not to the point where everyone is sick to death of it!

I only heard about the group, Phantom Billstickers, the other day. They're the people who paste up all those flyers on hoardings and purpose-built round thingees and fences and special boards around the town. Rather than you going out in the middle of the night in your black gear (looking like a burglar without anything to burgle) and sticking up a pile of posters, they'll do the job for you. So they're on the list too. As are many other things....which seem likely to eat up the budget before we're started!

You can see what I mean about juggling.

Books vs e-books

Interesting set of tweets as recorded by a site called 40Key, about which I don't know a lot. They say on the site: 40k means ebooks. Here you can find:

* Thinking. Culture is going digital. Our essays will tell you stories about this shift. and
* Fiction. A sophisticated selection of stories and a lot of award-winning authors.

Plainly their focus is literature in many forms.

The post's subject is If Book Then: a Recap, which I'm sure makes sense, but don't quite ask me how.

The topic in discussion (I think*) is the advance of e-books and the retreat of real books and bookstores. Some of the comments are just a little scary, especially from someone who goes by the Twitter name of mikeshatzkin.

Mike Shatzkin says on Twitter that he's interested in publishing and digital change.

Make sure you read the Tweet list from the bottom up, otherwise it doesn't make a lot of sense...!

* My lack of understanding here is because Tweets on their own, or even in a bunch like this lot, often don't make enough sense - they lack a bit of context, one might say.

Does it work?

Here's today's random question: Does Nutrisystem really work? Perhaps a better question would be: does any diet plan really work? The answer is 'Yes' if you stick to it like glue. The answer is 'No' if you're not prepared to stay on it for the rest of your life.

Seems to me that most diet plans only work well for the time you're on them. Once you come off them, you're on your own, and unless you've made progress in training yourself not to eat the way you did before, you'll go back to where you started.

The old issue of willpower is the problem; very few of us have enough willpower to completely change our lifestyles, even though that lifestyle may be threatening our life. I remember our pastor quoting some stats in church that the majority of people who had heart attacks went back to the kind of lifestyle they'd had before even though that could cause them to have problems again.

Human beings are notoriously difficult to change, and it's even more difficult for us to change ourselves. (Which is, of course, why we need God to work on us - but that's another story.)

Anyway, for something a bit more cheerful than diets...try this joke that @Liturgy tweeted on Twitter...

They canned the Twitter movie. Test audiences found it too hard to keep track of all 140 characters.

Second thoughts

Everyone should sometimes write with pen/pencil, to recall what it’s like to have 2nd thoughts before the 1st ones are complete.

Alan Jacobs, in a tweet on the 4th Oct, US time.