I hoped that the Mashable post would enable me to expand the survey I ran, so that I could gather a more consequential amount of data. I was a little surprised to only gather another 80 or so data points, but that did move the numbers a little bit.

Working with about 140 responses who collectively have 333,000 folllowers, I found that the average clickthrough rate was 1.7%. The trend of more followers equaling a lower click through rate has definitely held true, though. For those respondents with more than 5000 followers, the click through rate is a mere 0.9%. For those with less than 5000 followers, it’s 3.5%. For those with less than 1000 followers, it’s 6%. This scatter graph hopefully illustrates that trend. That’s followers on the x-axis, and CTRs on the y-axis. To make the diagram more readable, I excluded a couple of the really big follower counts (click for the largess):

A recent FriendFeed comment from Tim O’Reilly also bears this out. He’s discussing the huge boost in followers he’s received since being added to Twitter’s Suggested Users List:

I had about 60K twitter followers when I went on the SUL; my peak click through-rate has perhaps doubled now that I have 10 times as many. Organic followers are what matters, except, as I say, for the media credibility that you get from people who don’t know any better.

As I mentioned on Mashable, I’m not a statistician, so take this kind of analysis with a big salt lick. I also mentioned several other mitigating factors. I’m uncertain about what impact bots spidering Twitter and following links are having on these results. I welcome any insights you might have on that, or any aspect of my sketchy math. Another consideration is that when a URL gets retweeted, you’re adding the retweeting user’s followers to the mix. Lastly, I asked those who completed the survey to pick an ‘average’ number of clicks, so that depends on each respondent’s potentially unscientific estimate.

We’ve taking the rest of the summer off, but, come September, we’re going to take our bootcamps on the road. We’ve scheduled events in Kamloops, Kelowna, Calgary and Edmonton in the second and third weeks of September. The details and registration links are below:

In promoting these events, we’re looking to connect with local marketing and communications groups. We usually offer a discount to their members or a free spot for a staff member in exchange for an email announcement or mention in their newsletter. If you’re such a person, or know such a person, drop me a line.

Because I’m a big nerd, I made a Google map showing the bootcamp locations. Google actually chose the route, so I welcome alternative suggestions. We’re also going to spend a weekend somewhere between Kelowna and Calgary, so I’m up for recommendations there, too.

View Social Media Marketing Bootcamp, Roadtrip Edition in a larger map

For longer, sweatier commutes, I read about the Green Pod on Springwise:

About the size of a parking space for one car, the Green Pod comes in two configurations: one with a single shower and changing room along with 10 lockers and parking for as many bicycles, and the other with double those facilities. The pod features a solar hot water system, electronic locking system, LED lighting activated by motion sensors, timed showers and a grey water treatment unit that discharges grey water into green areas. The unit can be integrated into indoor or outdoor applications, and it operates on a 12V DC system that can be powered by solar panels on the roof. Also part of the pod is a self-cleaning mechanism that can detect when no one’s inside and lock its doors for some self-cleaning, according to a report in Catapult. Access is via swipe card for registered users.

It’s developed by an Australian company, and definitely looks designed for warmer countries. Hopefully they’ll design something that’s a little less gappy for us Canadians.

Photo by TMAB2003.

First off, what kind of index or algorithm are they using to generate those categories? They’re very peculiar, and, at least in this particular case, useless to the user.

Is this sort of thing a good idea? From a user experience perspective, my answer is ‘maybe’. If MTS presented the user with, say, a set of search results for “www.darrenbarefoot.com” and pointed them to the cached version of the site, then that’s plausibly useful.

From a privacy perspective, this is not cool. I don’t want my ISP highjacking my web connection, even to be helpful. They’re a utility, and should act like one. I don’t want the City of Victoria offering me flavoured water from my taps, and I don’t want my ISP volunteering to help with my web browsing.

After 31 days, only 250 of my YouTube hatchlings had more than 1,000 views—that comes out to 3.1 percent after you exclude the videos that were taken down before the month was up. A mere 25, 0.3 percent, had more than 10,000 views. Meanwhile, 65 percent of videos failed to break 50 views; 2.8 percent had zero views. That’s the good news: Your video is slightly more likely to get more than 1,000 views than it is to get none at all.

An site called, uh, Rubber Republic ran a similar study (PDF), and found that 10% exceeded 1000 views, and 1% received 500,000 views.

It’s interesting how much this video predicts the vast majority of YouTube videos: a young person speaking in direct address to the camera. He’s not in his bedroom, but otherwise it’s utterly typical.

• In the first round of the draft, the Canucks selected Jordan Schroeder, a 5′8″ American forward from the University of Minnesota. College players usually take longer to development, and enter the NHL later, so don’t plan on seeing him in a Canucks uniform any time too soon. He led the US team in scoring at the World Juniors last winter, so that’s encouraging. Hopefully he’s the second coming of Cliff Ronning. Here’s a two-minute video profile of him.
• Credit Canucks GM with re-signing the Sedins. I hoped and expected this to happen, but I think it’s an excellent deal. $6.1 million a year is, to my thinking, a little below market value for these guys. That money makes them the 34th and 35th best-paid players in the league (great looking salary site there, by the way). If you check out some of those players (Jovanovski, Stastny, Gaborik, Gomez, among others) ahead of them on the list, that money looks well spent.
• The team lost Mattias Ohlund, which was almost a certainty. Ohlund is never a player who’s seemed comfortable in the limelight, so I suspect he’ll be quite happy being more anonymous in Tampa Bay.
• Maintaining the Canucks’ Swede quotient, Gillis signed Mikael Samuelsson. The 32-year-old winner scored 19 goals and added 21 assists last season. He’ll make a decent replacement for Taylor Pyatt, who I expect to be signed by another team over the coming weeks. Well, a decent replacement on the ice. Samuelsson’s eyes are decidedly less dreamy than Pyatt’s. More importantly, Samuelsson has a ton of playoff experience and even played with the Sedins for a bit back in Sweden.
• The team extended restricted free agent Kyle Wellwood a qualifying offer, which I imagine he’ll sign. He was kind of a revelation this year, and an excellent reclamation project. They same goes for another RFA, Jannik Hansen.
• I’m optimistic that the team won’t re-sign Mats Sundin. He’s done, and looked it in the playoffs.
• The Canucks’ most urgent need is on the blue line. Even with Ohlund, the defence looked decidedly creaky against Chicago in the playoffs. They urgently need to get younger and faster. I’ve read some rumours about signing Francois Beauchemin, who would be a great addition. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s anybody on the farm team who can step up, and the team doesn’t have a lot of spare assets with which to make a trade.

So, what will the line-up look like come the opening night of the 2009-2010 season? Here’s my best guess:

Sedin - Sedin - Burrows
Samuelsson - Kessler - Demitra
Raymond - Wellwood - Bernier
Hordichuk - Johnson - Rypien

Mitchell - Salo
Edler - Bieksa
O’Brien - Nycholat

Luongo
Schneider

I thought it was all girls, but you can spot a few boys in the latter half of the video. And then something a little more old-school:

Of course, that immediately reminded me of the Langley Schools Music Project, which has achieved an odd sort of fame. Here’s the first part of a documentary about the project:

Becoming a regular cyclists has made me more observant of some cycling-related behaviour. So, in no particular order, some random thoughts on cycling:

• My new favourite pet peeve is asshats who cycle on the sidewalk. As somebody said on Twitter when I complained about this: “it’s called side-walk, not side-ride”. If you can’t cycle on the road, then leave your bike at home. When someone’s riding on the sidewalk toward me (and they’re frequently grinning like an idiot), I refuse to change direction. If they run into me, I’m pretty sure they’re going to end up worse off.
• There’s an odd camaraderie among cyclists with which I’m uncomfortable. They always want to chat with me when we’re stopped next to each other at an intersection, or when we happen to be locking up our bikes at the same moment.
• As you probably know, there are a lot of retirees in Victoria. I’m often struck by how many more elderly men I see out riding than elderly women. Why is this?
• I still think Critical Mass is a lousy approach to cycling activism. When I think of Critical Mass, I think of this insightful comment that Christine left on my blog three years ago:

I watch these guys go by, yelling “we’re not holding up traffic - WE ARE THE TRAFFIC!” and I wonder about the definition of traffic, and whether they fit into it. Before they got there, traffic on my way home consisted of people obeying traffic laws, and doing their best to get home in time for dinner while allowing others to do the same. Critical Mass riders seem to take glee in subverting all that. They are the traffic? Huh. How is it, then, that they storm through lights and disregard numerous traffic laws, getting away with it just because there are so many of them?

I gather that the airport is used for regional flights and private air travel. It also gets annually converted into a race track for the Edmonton Indy. Larger aircraft and international flights come through the Edmonton International Airport, which is 26 km southwest of the city centre.

According to the CBC, there’s been a long debate about the airport’s future:

Some of the people who have made submissions to the public hearing want the downtown airport closed and the land developed into a transit-oriented community with housing for thousands of people, along with commercial and retail space.

Other presenters have told city councillors the airport must stay open because it is vital for the business community. They describe it as a hub to the north and argue that it is critical for medevac flights. About 4,000 medevac flights a year go through the facility.

I learned about this whole business from Mack’s site. He’s started NotMyAirport.ca (here’s the associated Facebook group), which argues for replacing the airport with “a new transit-oriented, green community”, as well as an expansion of Edmoton’s NAIT campus. Removal of the airport would also apparently change building height limitations in the city, which is a good thing. A dense city, after all, is a healthy city.

Mack launched his site in response to SaveOurAirport.ca, which argues that the airport “plays a vital role in making Edmonton one of Canada’s leading health centres, as a hub for air ambulance and other essential health services for all of Alberta, the Northwest Territories, British Columbia and Saskatchewan.” This claim is disputed by the CEO of Edmonton Airports in the aforementioned CBC article, who says “”what the City Centre Airport offers is a tremendous amount of convenience for corporate travellers and those people who live in the downtown area and have private aircraft.”

SaveOurAirport.ca is run by the Alberta Enterprise Group. Looking at their board members, they seem to be mostly local business owners.

Are you an Edmontonian? What do you think of this debate?

The movie’s plot is frustratingly thin. Verona (Maya Rudoplh) and Bert (John Krasinski) are expecting a baby, and so travel the country looking for a new home to raise a family. The film’s inciting incident–Bert’s parents announce they’re moving to Belgium–reveals the protagonists as selfish slackers. It’s as though we’re watching Juno and Paulie, fifteen years later. This isn’t really a legitimate critique of the film, but I found the lead characters’ charmless entitlement really frustrating. So much so that it distracted from my enjoyment of the film.

Which is too bad, because the movie is comprised of a bunch of great scenes. The script, though overly concerned with meta-discussions of language, feels truthful, and the supporting cast–Jeff Daniels, Catherine O’Hara, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Paul Schneider, among others–are all excellent in their one-off scenes. But the movie never seems to coalesce into a fully-realized work of art. Like Eggers’s books, it meanders.

Sam Mendes directs, so the film is a visual treat. In “American Beauty” and “Revolutionary Road”, the British director seemed a little obsessed with the American suburb. In this movie, Mendes heads out on the highway, looking for adventure. The result is splendid road trip fare, from Phoenix to Montreal.

Roger Ebert liked the movie. A. O. Scott did not (I see he started his review with the same as I did), and I like what he has to say about the protagonists:

And even though they express themselves with a measure of diffidence, it’s clear that they are acutely, at times painfully, aware of their special status as uniquely sensitive, caring, smart and cool beings on a planet full of cretins and failures.

Metacritic gives the film a 57, which feels about right.

Yesterday I spotted a yet another new missing cat poster. Mylo (troubling spelling there) apparently a “has a ‘belly’”:

It’s charming the way the owners choose to describe their pets’ girth. Why is ‘belly’ in quotation marks, anyway?

I’ve got a chapter and a half left to write, but all of the other eleven chapters are complete and well on their way through the editing process. The book is scheduled to be released in the latter half of October, 2009.

Here’s what the cover is going to look like. Click for a super-size version:

Our publisher, No Starch Press, has posted a sample chapter (PDF) on their site. I’ve embedded it below:

Sample Chapter from Our Social Media Marketing Book, “Friends With Benefits” - Get more Business Documents

Glancing through that chapter, I spotted a couple of errors. The final proofreading hasn’t been completed, so no need to worry for the time being.

It’s exciting to see a bit of the book laid out, and to see it on Amazon and such. I just need to finish another 5000 words or so, and I can move on to resurrecting and re-theming our ebook site.

I think all that hair helps to cover up the lousy fight choreography. Hey, Spanish speakers, what are they fighting about? A man, no doubt.

There is no longer even a debate, let alone a stigma. “If you did an advert, you were a sellout,” notes Billboard Executive Editor Tamara Conniff. “The Rolling Stones broke that when they allowed the use of ‘Start Me Up’ for the Windows campaign. Though there was an initial backlash, it suddenly made it okay for bands of integrity to do commercials. Now, it’s almost as if as an artist you don’t have a corporate partner [or] commercial, you’ve not really arrived.”

Mr. Wyman still doesn’t think it’s a very good idea. However, he wants to quantify sellouts, and devise “an objective formula for determining just how offensive a particular rock-based advertisement is”.

Tongue firmly in cheek, he enlists the help of a mathematician. They invent a formula for calculating what he calls the Moby Quotient. Here’s an illustrated version, with a number of examples. The Clash’s “London Calling” selling Jaguars? Bad. Bachman-Turner-Overdrive’s “Taking Care of Business” selling Office Depot? Not so bad.

This season both of the female leads, Alyson Hannigan and Cobie Smulders, were pregnant. In the second half of the season, I enjoyed watching the meta-show of “Conceal the Pregnancies”. The show’s producers devised all sorts of creative strategies to hide the actresses’ growing bumps.

You’ve got the clothing options, which the show deployed early on. There’s the big flowy scarf, the loose-fitting shirt and the big dressing gown:

Several variations of the big bag:

The rather unconvincing newspaper:

The cereal box:

Finally, if you’re looking for something really formidable, just have the actor stand behind something solid, like a cooler:

Or, she can carry something and stand behind something:

I posted a photo set of 18 bump-hiding tactics on Flickr.

In what I’d imagine to be a nod to this issue, both actress’s characters make a joke about being pregnant in the final episodes of this season. I’m not sure what the thesis would be, but there’s surely a Women’s Studies essay in the metaphor of hiding these women’s pregnancies. What’s the opposite of ‘emasculated’?

There was a vaguely voyeuristic feeling to the proceedings, however. The public sits in a cordoned section at the back of the church, just past the narthex. We’re separated from the rest of the church by a railing (though those wanting blessings or take communion pass through a gate at the appropriate time). The monks, most of them clad in a kind of cowl (you can see a bunch of them here), amble in and take their places in pews. The ceremony begins–there’s no obvious officiant–and you watch.

Extraordinary Lives

Rituals aside, I was actually fascinated by the life the monks lead. It’s exactly what you’d expect. It’s also nothing like what you’d expect.

Every day (with no exceptions–monasteries apparently know no weekends), the monks rise at about 3:00am. They take their first prayer service at 3:15am–Vigils. Then, I gather, they go to work.

In terms of work, I kind of imagine the Abbey like a big, permanent summer camp. You need cooks, caretakers, gardeners, cleaners and so forth. Monks fill many of these roles, though they’re getting a bit long in the tooth and do hire laypeople for certain work.

The monks also make chesse, fudge (with bourbon–very tasty) and fruitcake on site, and apparently do brisk business through their online store. They also run a retreat centre with 45 beds. It’s very popular, and is booked ahead of time for months.

There are also scholars (many have advanced degrees) writers and artists among the monks. I spoke with a monk–a published photographer–who recently went into Louisville for a Photoshop course. Another was consulting on a movie script with a number of Hollywood names attached to it.

These monks are a cloistered, silent order. So while you might expect them to live in a kind of jovial brotherhood, I guess they actually choose to live solitary lives. I heard of one monk who, in twenty years of shared living, had only had one conversation with a fellow brother.

The Last Generation of Monks

There were 400 of them in the early fifties, but through attrition and departures it’s down to 50 mostly old men. Judging from what I saw in at Compline, I’d say the average age is north of 65. One brother, in his nineties, rolled into church in a motorized wheelchair. The abbey was founded on December 21, 1848. The next morning, forty-four monks said the seven prayer services. They’ve been said every day since. They probably won’t be said in 2048. This is almost certainly the last generation of monks at this abbey.

It’s an extraordinary lifestyle, and I’m glad to have glimpsed it. I feel about the abbey the same way I do about Cuba under Castro. I’m glad I could experience these places when I did. Before they change.

If you haven’t seen it, the film tells the story of Drew Baylor, played by Orland Bloom. When his father dies suddenly, he must return to his ancestral home of Elizabethtown, Kentucky. He meets and falls in love with a flight attendant, played by Kirsten Dunst, unsullen and doing her best work.

Elizabethtown, as it happens, is only about 40 km from where we were staying.

Taking the movie and the town’s proximity as a bit of a sign, we made a short road trip there. It’s pretty unremarkable, and as far as I could tell the town has resisted the urge to exploit any connection with the movie. We did have a nice dinner at the Back Home Restaurant, which is everything the name promises. I had potato-wrapped cod, and homemade coconut cream pie for dessert.

On our way to Elizabethtown, I was scanning the local radio stations (the radio mix here was much better than in Texas) and happened upon U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)”. That song is featured on the “Elizabethtown” soundtrack when, in the midst of his own road trip, Drew visits the scene of Martin Luther King’s assasination.

We decided to spend our last night in Kentucky in Louisville. We used Hotwire to pick a hotel. As you may know, Hotwire shows you pricing and details for hotels that match your search without disclosing the actual name of the hotel. You book (often at a robust discount) and then get notified of where you’re staying.

We got a very favourable rate at a downtown historic hotel. It’s turns out to be the Brown Hotel, where Drew stays and where much of the second act of “Elizabethtown” takes place.

Is Cameron Crowe trying to tell us something? I don’t think so, but the coincidences were too numerous not to remark upon.

This dog was awaiting its owner outside of the monastery. It came over to confer with us, and paused only momentarily to check out this box turtle. The turtle, as you might imagine, was non-plussed:

Even in rural Kentucky, you can’t avoid the social media:

This sign is pretty self-explanatory:

I’m pretty happy with this mushroom photo, taken at dusk. Here’s a slight variation:

We’re staying in a house near the Abbey that’s operated as a retreat centre. It’s commonly called ‘the Solar House’, as it was a kind of early green architecture effort. It used to have a translucent roof, to let in the heat. It’s built right into the hillside, on a gravel bed, which I gather helps moderate temperatures throughout the year. It’s got a peculiar, pyramid shape (here’s a photo), though it sits very pleasantly at one end of a huge meadow.

The surrounding countryside brims with life. I’ve seen deer, box turtles, snakes (larger than we grow them back in Canada) and all sorts of birds–blue jays, cardinals, herons, owls, turkey vultures, turtle doves and dozens of other species I don’t recognize.

Of all the places I’ve been, Kentucky reminds me most of Ireland. It’s extraordinarily green–it has rained here every afternoon, like it does in the tropics–and has charming rolling hills. Of course, in Ireland the fences are made of rock, not barbed wire, and there are very few pickup trucks, but there’s a lot of similarity. For no reason other than my own naivete, I expected Kentucky to be more like the country around Austin, Texas. Where Texas was dry and brown, Kentucky is humid and verdant.

I’ve posted a few photos from our trip to Flickr. Tomorrow, time permitting, I’ll tell you about the monks.