All the major news sites recently had live streaming footage of a home made hot air balloon that contained a six year old boy, hurtling through the air, and quite possibly toward his death. And yet on Twitter amid the shocked reactions were updates from people who found it hilarious, and who made callous jokes about a child in a frightening situation.

It turned out the child was safe at home, and not in the balloon. But that’s a whole other story.

Most of us have come across the same callous type of reactions popping up on the internet in relation to actual tragedies. Many posts have been made about anonymity on the web allowing people to be rude or callous, but on Twitter and FaceBook the same callousness is often apparent even when anonymity doesn’t figure.

What exactly is the nature of these types of reactions? Would the same people find the same event humourous if it was their next door neighbour’s child, their nephew, or their own child – or is it the disconnect from immediate reality that allows them to find the humour in the situation?

Perhaps it’s the nature of the medium – on the internet there is no emotion inherent in a story. On television, or radio, the humanity of the newscaster may invest emotion in the story that we can react to. On the internet it is often plain text. On Twitter it’s 140 characters of plain text, nothing else, bar the odd emoticon.

Colorado #BalloonBoy – sibling saw the boy get into the balloon. door was unlocked. no one there when it landed. :( *

Or is it the sheer volume of tragedies we are exposed to? How long ago was it when if it wasn’t reported in traditional media we didn’t hear about it. Now, we hear about everything, and even the traditional media has gone 24hour – we have 24hour news channels, and they have websites, not to mention the effect blogs and social media have on our exposure to information. As part of that informational deluge comes tragedy after tragedy from around the globe.

How can we afford to be emotionally invested in each tragedy we are exposed to? Are callous reactions on the internet a symptom of our inability to cope with the sheer volume of tragedy we are potentially exposed to?

If we were to react in an emotionally appropriate manner to each tragedy that we were exposed to, then surely before long it would have a serious impact on our daily lives. If that is the case, then what number of tragedies can we afford to acknowledge emotionally before an impact is noticeable and how do we begin to select the tragedies that deserve our empathy? How do we measure tragedy appropriately – particularly tragedy we have no personal connection to?

Balloon Boy caught my own attention due to the fact that it bore some similarity to nightmares I had when I was younger, if it weren’t for that simple personal connection I might have ignored it. I would not have gone so far as to post callous updates on Twitter, but how callous would my lack of concern have been?

In conversation with John Blackbourn just after the boy was found alive and well, he pointed out this tweet to me:

Someone should do a study on all today’s #balloonboy tweets, just for the terrible things it would reveal about humanity.
@permanent4

I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

Now imagine going to the counter and being told you can’t pay with it because your a regular. Not so happy now I’d say. In fact, on the wrong day it could even make you irate.

And yet this is what Google seem to be doing a lot lately with their Adwords vouchers. They are clearly trying to encourage new users by giving vouchers to new accounts, however they are also sending them to a lot of existing customers who then can’t use them (unless you sneakily set up a separate account, but that could also mess with your metrics and analysis).

In the case of your local shop it could be dangerous, because there is generally another shop nearby that you could patronise instead, however in the case of Google Adwords is there any real competition?

Should Google be concerned about the negative emotional fallout from giving unusable vouchers to their customers?

It’s a question that can’t really be answered, but I wonder what the cost / gain there would be to at least having a lesser option for existing customers – instead of simply being told your account is too old to redeem the voucher imagine seeing this message:

Oh dear – we’re sorry but you can’t redeem this voucher, it’s for new users only. We love you too though, because you’ve been a customer since ‹insert date›, so here’s a tenner added to your existing balance :)

For the rest of us who generally live vicariously through the interactions of our 72 dpi avatars, we are finally getting out into the blue (grey really) skies, green grass and wet muck of Stradbally and going to Electric Picnic. There we will meet up on Saturday at Midday. It was originally scheduled for half past, but I really want to catch at least some of these guys Cap Pas Cap who start at half past:

So I’ll be at the Pink Boat at Midday on the Saturday. The Pink Boat is a big Pink Boat in case you thought it was code for something. I’ll be hanging out by the boat having a coffee, hope to see you there.

Not sure exactly where the Pink Boat is this year, so keep an eye out for it on the Friday, you can’t miss it really. Last year it was quite close to the main stage.

My phone number is 087 2290235 if you want to text or call me at Electric Picnic.
Leave a quick comment below if you think you might make it!
WHOOP WHOOP! :)

I am working on two sites that involve a large amount of PDF documents, in thinking about how the PDF files would be disseminated I examined my own avoidance of PDF files in search engine results. My reasons for avoiding them are:

• PDF’s are generally slower to open in my browser. They can be horrendously slow to open depending on the size.
• A (small) percentage of PDF’s crash my browser – but that small percentage has greatly contributed to my hesitance to open PDF’s in my browser.
• I am too lazy to download a PDF to my desktop to discover if it contains the content I am looking for.
• HTML view of PDF’s tends to be fairly awful in their presentation making it more difficult to find relevant content.

A PDF result in Google

A PDF search result also means the searcher may never actually visit the website, and that needs to be weighed up against the benefit of potentially having extra content spidered by the search engines.

Jakob Nielsen is a divisive usability expert you either love or hate. I happen to love him, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say PDF’s were unfit for human consumption it turned out that he described pretty much all my reservations quite succinctly:

• Linear exposition. PDF files are typically converted from documents that were intended for print, so the authors wouldn’t have followed the guidelines for Web writing. The result? A long text that takes up many screens and is unpleasant and boring to read.
• Jarring user experience. PDF lives in its own environment with different commands and menus. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don’t work.
• Crashes and software problems. While not as bad as in the past, you’re still more likely to crash users’ browsers or computers if you serve them a PDF file rather than an HTML page.
• Breaks flow. You have to wait for the special reader to start before you can see the content. Also, PDF files often take longer time to download because they tend to be stuffed with more fluff than plain Web pages.
• Orphaned location. Because the PDF file is not a Web page, it doesn’t show your standard navigation bars. Typically, users can’t even find a simple way to return to your site’s homepage.
• Content blob. Most PDF files are immense content chunks with no internal navigation. They also lack a decent search, aside from the extremely primitive ability to jump to a text string’s next literal match. If the user’s question is answered on page 75, there’s close to zero probability that he or she will locate it.
• Text fits the printed page, not a computer screen. PDF layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user’s browser window. Bye-bye smooth scrolling. Hello tiny fonts.

But hold on, that was written in 2003 – what if Nielsen’s content is outdated, and so are my views? I decided to do a quick poll, just as a very basic temperature gauge as it were.

I set up a poll and asked the following question:

You do a search on Google and two results look equally good, one HTML one PDF. Which do you choose?

• PDF
• HTML
• Either, I don’t have a preference

The answers were random in order of appearance and the results were not visible to the polltakers. The results were as folllows:

HTML – 76% (107 votes)
PDF – 10% (14 votes)
Either, I don’t have a preference – 14% (19 votes)

I was somewhat relieved to be assured that I am not a fuddy duddy before my time, and that my reluctance to dive straight into a PDF is shared by many it would seem.

All of this is not to say that I hate PDF’s – I don’t, they’re wonderful, and if I am confident the content is valuable I will download them. The trick is to communicate the value in order to convince me to download. Usually a search result snippet is not capable of this communication. Enter “gateway” pages. Jakob Nielsen has a great article on presenting PDF’s through gateway pages if you’d like to read it.

For the client sites I was working on the gateway pages are vital, and we have ensured that the pages are optimised to be found for the most relevant searches and provided a link to the PDF documents with clear indication that it is a PDF and a note about the size of the document.

The question remained whether to allow the search engines to spider the PDF’s or not. In one case the PDF documents were third party licenced PDF’s and so I decided to avoid having them spidered by the search engines, as it would be vital to contextualise the PDF through the gateway page.

In the second case, we are still discussing the various merits of having the content spidered as it is proprietary content and therefore will have a brand awareness effect if downloaded and as the PDF’s will contain significantly more information than the gateway page, they may be found for certain searches the gateway page would not.

As always any and all thoughts are always more than welcome in the comments.

Many thanks for taking this poll – would really appreciate getting as many responses as possible :)

Perhaps you’d consider Twittering about it?

He has now published a book called Free (The Future of a Radical Price: The Economics of Abundance and Why Zero Pricing Is Changing the Face of Business). The book is not free, it’s about €18.99 as pointed out in Malcolm Gladwell’s review of the book.

Gladwell is another thought provoking writer and it is worth reading Anderson’s original article, then read the review and then for laughs read a third thought provoking author’s view on it from Seth Godin.

For the record? All three authors have interesting points to make but (admittedly without having read the book) I like Gladwell’s analysis best.

Books of this type like to put forward black and white theories on how things are, how things will be or how things should be done. Gladwell too may be guilty of this in his own books, but he speaks the truth here:

The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.

There will always be a place for free. But on the internet some tend to assume free is a right, but we should be mindful of being bullied into being free without a solid plan in place to actually generate revenue.

That said, I look forward to reading the book as a thought provoker.

FuelYourCreativity.com are looking for some cool t-shirt designs to put in their shop, anyone can submit an idea, and if your design is used you get a percentage of the sales.

On the left is the Fuel Your Creativity logo / branding, above is the idea I came up with, and below is how it might look on a t-shirt.

In accordance with the guidelines for taking part I put the concept up on Flickr – if you have comments, please head over to Flickr and leave a comment – thanks!

There are times when logging on to Twitter all you see is a list of “RT @thisperson”, “RT @thatperson” and updates with “pls RT” appended to them. And of course the retweeting often means you are seeing the same update over and over from various people.

Retweeting can make Twitter a pretty noisy, and echoey place at times.

If everyone had the option of seeing @replies to people they did not follow, the need for retweeting would diminish somewhat. By removing the option you make ReTweeting a more vital part of discovering new people.

As long as you can see @replies to people you don’t follow, and people send @replies instead of retweeting you will be alerted to the original posters update, and you have gained some insight into the replier’s viewpoint on it.

A retweet on the other hand is a passive form of update – you can assume the ReTweeter agrees or likes it, but they are simply repeating what another person has said.

The problem is that retweets are now seen as currency, and I think it’s largely because most people were not seeing @replies to people they were not following, therefore if you wanted to be heard outside your circle people had to add text such as RT before the @name in order for people who were not following you to see the update.

If you wanted to get more followers, or get your content seen by more people, you had to get people to retweet you. But if everyone could see @replies to people they are not following they would become aware of you through the interesting conversations you had with the people they do follow.

Twitter say that only 3% of people chose to see @replies to people they did not know, but then they also admitted on the settings page that “The @ Replies setting can be confusing. Read the help article if you’re unsure” – perhaps this confusion was part of what led to the low take up of the feature.

If everyone had the clear option of seeing all @replies, the retweet could take it’s proper place as a useful tool for certain types of updates. Not the holy grail of updates some people seem to think it is.

At a large party you can drift around pausing to talk to people you know. If they are engaged in conversation with strangers, you can join in if you find it interesting. Now imagine a party where all your friends are constantly coming up to you saying “Did you hear what this guy said? He said…”

I know which party I’d rather be at.

The short version

1. I registered as frankiep
2. I decided I would like to capitalise to FrankieP
3. Twitter said “That’s You!” and then “Username already in use”
4. Decided to try changing username to something different and then back to FrankieP
5. Twitter wouldn’t let me change back to FrankieP or frankiep saying username was already in use
6. frankiep and FrankieP still resolved to my account for 48 hours
7. After 48 hours they resolved to another users account – which was last updated 16 days prior to my username change
8. I have lost my username due to a glitch and I would really like it back.
9. I would love frankiep back, would ideally want FrankieP, and in an ideal world both would resolve to my profile!

The long version

Registered frankiep & couldn’t change to capitalised version

I registered with Twitter as frankiep. I was happy enough, but one day I decided that I would be happier if I had FrankieP – same username but with capitalisation. So I did some research and found conflicting reports on the web about whether capitalisation would be a different username, or the same one.

The only thing to do was to try and change my name – so I went into the settings and tried to change from frankiep to FrankieP. No luck – twitter told me the username was already in use.

I checked, and both http://twitter.com/frankiep and http://twitter.com/FrankieP resolved to my account.

Could change to capitalised version FrankieP temporarily

A couple of days later, Twitter implemented some cool changes in their web interface, and I wondered if by any chance they had fixed the problem which was preventing me from capitalising my username. So I went into the settings to try again – this time when I edited my username to FrankieP the interface when checking availability told me “That’s You!”.

When I then tried to save the change, Twitter told me that it couldn’t save because the username was already in use, but my account would show as FrankieP until I logged out. When I logged in again – using FrankieP – it would revert to frankiep.

For a while I changed the settings every time I logged in, in the hopes that one day the issue would be resolved and the change would stick.

I sent an @ reply to Twitter a couple of times asking about it, but no reply.

Thought changing my username to something different and back again might help

Someone saw my question to Twitter and suggested changing my name to something else and then back to FrankieP. That kind of made sense because if Twitter was being confused by the fact that it thought it was me anyway, maybe by changing and then reverting back to the capitalised version it would be a clearer change.

I knew I was taking a risk, but I felt if I acted fast enough my desired username would only be available for a moment or two.

So I changed my username to TheFrankieP, and then went to change it again to FrankieP – but Twitter said that FrankieP was already in use, and so was frankiep.

I checked and frankiep and FrankieP both resolved to my account – which was now officially TheFrankieP.

While I had username frankiep, I think another user was able to register capitalised version FrankieP

At this point I was worried, but I figured that there might be some form of caching or holding pool for recently changed usernames. So I waited, and tried to change my username every so often – always with the same results.

Until about 48 hours later when not only could I not get my username back, but frankiep and FrankieP started resolving to another user. I couldn’t believe it – I assumed at first that Twitter had released the name and someone had just got in before me, but then I noticed the guy had one update – 16 days ago when I still held the username.

My best guess is that someone else was somehow able to register as FrankieP while I was frankiep, but that he found he couldn’t use Twitter because Twitter allowed him to register but then wouldn’t recognise him as I had the other version of the name.

Now unable to get my username back

In the meantime, I’m stuck with a new username I don’t want and can’t get my old username back, worse, someone else has it, due to what would appear to be a weird glitch in the system.

I have submitted a support ticket, but I’m not holding my breath – reports on turnaround times are not good.

If anyone can help, I’d greatly appreciate it.

I’ll leave you with the advice not to mess with your username on Twitter at all, for the time being!

WordPress is a great simple content management system, but when looking at the Google Analytics for a site I implemented entirely in WordPress I noticed that a significant percentage of people were clicking on the link to the page they were already on.

I was concerned about the impact this might be having on visitors to the site – how much confusion was it causing, whether it had a negative impact on the bounce rate, where would the user have gone if they hadn’t tried to go to the page they were on, and so on.

I scoured the web for a solution to remove the link to the current page, but to my amazement found none. I contacted John Blackbourn who developed this plugin for me – which I am now sharing with you.

John Blackbourn came highly recommended by both Conor O’Neill of LouderVoice and Damien Mulley, and I can now also highly recommend him.

I think this simple little plugin will be especially handy to people like me who develop sites entirely in WordPress for small businesses and monitor the Analytics.

Please check out the ‘Remove Link to Current Page’ plugin page for more details.