My old blog at Wordpress.com has a bunch of incoming links from various places from over the years, providing lots of lovely Google Juice. Obviously the new site doesn’t (yet). I can’t do any automatic redirecting from Wordpress.com because it’s hosted there and they don’t allow it (for free… there may be a paid option, not sure). So I’ve just put a big fat ‘This blog has moved to bethgranter.com’ message in the navigation and on the homepage.

However, when people go direct to a specific article, which they normally do, via Google searches or inbound links, they still get the content they wanted, so have no reason to go through to my new site. If I were to delete all my old posts, people coming via referring links to posts would be faced with a ‘page not found’ message (albeit provided in a friendly Wordpress tone of voice) with the ‘this blog has moved to bethgranter.com’ message in the header and sidebar.  And Google would recognise the bethgranter.com content as the priority. Although without those inbound links those good (moved) posts would have no Google Juice, so I’d get less traffic. Today so far my blog at Wordpress.com had 68 visitors. This one at Bethgranter.com had 17, of which 5 were from the old blog. I guess that’s not bad considering I only put the blog on Bethgranter.com 48 hours ago. So yeah, the question is:

Should I delete my old juiced up blog posts from Wordpress.com now they are on Bethgranter.com?!

Here's a cool looking kid who doesn't know what to do either. Photo by yamagatacamille.

I’m writing on behalf of the RSPCA, raising awareness of its urgent campaign to protect the welfare of UK meat chickens.

Right now, the government is considering new EU legislation that may increase the number of chickens allowed in rearing sheds. Even at current minimum standards, each bird is given less space than a sheet of A4. It’s hard to walk or even flap their wings. But this legislation would allow yet more birds to be squashed in, cutting that space by almost a quarter.

see larger video

sourced by bethgranter

The RSPCA are asking people to petition Jim Fitzpatrick, Minister for Animal welfare, to make the right choice for UK chickens and quash the squash, by sending an email via the Quash the Squash website. Mr Fitzpatrick’s decision is imminent and we want 15,000 letters to be sent before he makes his decision.

The RSPCA have also created a short film called Irritating Chicken to highlight the plight of broiler (meat) chickens’ if EU legislation on living conditions is brought into force in the UK. The purpose of the stunt was to invade people’s personal space to make them feel what is like being squashed into a chicken shed.

If anyone wonders what people in their 60s do online, here’s my folk’s online activity:

Last week my Dad joined Facebook. My Mum has been on Facebook for around a year. Now when you’re new to Facebook, you get a progress bar to encourage you to come back and do more:

• Dad does social bookmarking, once Furl now Diigo, as well as being an active member of MyLibraryThing. I tried to get him to use del.icio.us but I think he’s sticking to Diigo.
• My mum uses MSN but my Dad doesn’t. If I don’t respond immediately she thinks I’m ignoring her.
• My Dad is a Flickr Pro but my Mum isn’t. I bought him his first Flickr pro account because he was getting into photography and I was sick of getting huge images filling up my inbox all the time! Dad uploads photos that Mum takes too.
• My Mum started a blog recently, about living with Rheumatoid Arthritis, an Aspergic husband, and politics.
• My Dad prefers to microblog on Twitter, is on Last.FM and uses Spotify.

There must be something to the fact that each of them has favoured such different social channels through which to connect. Not sure how much is to do with gender and how much to do with their individual personalities, but Mum’s seem much more to do with communication (Facebook, blogging and MSN) whereas Dad’s seem more hobby specific and functional (Flickr, Diigo, MyLibraryThing, Last.FM).

TEST RABBIT WANTED!
Some fun for a volunteer helping to run public tests of FLIRTMAN in U.K. this summer

CONCEPT:
A free game for mobile phones, which turns people into social viruses with unpredictable behavior. The computer game taken out of the box and placed back into the reality. A hired actor equipped with a hidden mobile phone is walking around and anybody can control him by mobile phone using it as remote control. People can control his movement and send him simple commands, like kneel down, hug, kiss etc… When the actor hears these commands, he has to do them, but still act natural. You can imagine how it affects social games…

It similar to these works
Project website (in progress)

WHAT IS REQUIRED:
A volunteer actor – to be controlled remotely (kind of “live avatar”), approximately 2 hours. A “hidden theatre” experience.
Needed skills: brave heart, a bit social behavior.

REWARD:
30 per session (approximately 2 hours) (I assume that’s £ pounds)

WHEN:
Glasgow: 15.8. / afternoon and/or evening
Edinburgh: 16.8, 17.8. / afternoon and/or evening
London: 19.8., 20.8., 21.8., / afternoon and/or evening
Manchester: 22.8. / afternoon

CONTACT:
Test rabbits can contact Petr Svarovsky via email: petrsvar@khio.no or SMS: +47 928 13 858

[vimeo 1618417]

But in the meantime… I’m gonna be playing it. On Team Russia of course!

Whose side are you on?

p.s. if you want a spymaster invite, you don’t actually need one, you can just sign in with your Twitter username and password. I did and it worked. Also, it’s weird, when you send an invite to someone, they get a DM with the spymaster website address, but no invite code or anything, so it’s not even doing anything that clever in that instance.

As of tomorrow, it will be possible to create engagement adverts using the self serve tool. This means that you can promote business profiles and events on Facebook using the run-of-site (ASU) adverts and encourage users to become a fan of that page or RSVP to an event invitation directly from the ad space, as the (very basic!) examples below show:

New Facebook Ads - examples from Facebook - meat not my choice!

This is replacing the ‘social actions’ feature which allowed ads to link to a page but didn’t let users fan the page from the ad itself. This is potentially huge for brands/businesses with profiles (create a profile here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php) as it means you can pay on a CPC basis to generate fans. This used to be only available on the homepage on a CPM model.

With business profiles becoming much more like a personal profile, they are a great way for brands to communicate with their customers on a more personal level, with status updates, videos, competitions and so forth, e.g. http://www.facebook.com/adidasoriginals The ability to run targeted ads driving traffic to those business profiles means that users can interact with their favourite brands with just one click whilst browsing Facebook. the average CPC on the self-serve tool (http://www.facebook.com/advertising) is currently around $0.25, so effectively, a brand/advertiser can gain an engaged user/consumer for about $0.25.

I’ve just emailed back with the following questions so I’ll let you know what the answers are when I get them:

1. if someone clicks ‘become a fan’ on the ad, do they still get taken to the Fan Page or do they just become fans and not move pages?
2. can someone click the ad and go to the fan page but not click ‘become a fan’?
3. can you now only pay when they become a fan and not when they click through to the Fan Page but don’t become fans?
4. can you still get ‘endorsed’ by existing fans when the ad is shown to friends of fans by having their friend’s name and picture accompany the ad? AKA ‘Social Actions’?

You can watch the Kavinsky video here and the La Roux video here

One feature which is apparrently going to be exclusive to 3 when it launches is the Facebook Application on the phone. The phone’s screensaver shows all of your Facebook Friend’s current profile picture alongside their current status. You can skip forward and back between them too. It tells you when they updated it, but I discovered that this isn’t always correct even when you’ve just refreshed the data, so don’t trust it if it tells you that 3 minutes ago your friend said they were in such and such a venue. Also it would be nice if you could click on them and it would take you to their profile but it just takes you to the Facebook Application Home page, which is a basic text only news feed of all of your friends’ Facebook Activity. Clicking anything on that takes you to the standard Facebook Mobile website in the phone’s browser.   I do really like the screensaver of status’ though.

When trying to take pictures it was really frustrating because it refused to zoom at all. This may have been because it was supplied without any memory card. This may also be why videos were limited to about 20 seconds. It also only has a 3.2 megapixel camera which seems a bit out of date when so many phones are 5 megapixels these days. However it does have face recognition technology which is awesome. My favourite thing is to try and draw a face realistic enough to make the phone think it’s a real face. Or find things in nature which look like faces and see if the phone agrees.

The handset is really skinny though – the skinniest handset I’ve ever owned for sure.

As to 3’s signal/reception, in my house in Bethnal Green I either have one bar or no bars and reception is generally terrible in comparison to my own phone which is on O2, which always has 4 or 5. However, at the boyfriend’s house it’s the opposite. So basically I need a 3 phone for when I’m at the boyfriend’s and an O2 phone for my house.

Despite that, it really came in handy when I was being corralled for 5 and a half hours by police when I’d stopped by the G20 protest to have a look on my way home from work. I was able to quickly and easily upload videos live from the scene to YouTube. That’s when I wasn’t being slammed into a lamp post by police (completely unprovoked – I was just waiting to be allowed to go home). Unfortunately when I saw a man being attacked by 3 police dogs I passed my housemate the phone to film it (he was closer) and he couldn’t work it out quick enough and just took a bunch of completely blurred photos. Luckily the bitten man saw my other videos and contacted me about it, so we’ll see what happens there.

Anyway, my free month of the phone was up the other day, but 3mobilebuzz promised me the phone for another two weeks in return for me and a friend doing another thing – “We’d like you both to use the phone to document a ‘Day in Your Life’, capturing a 24 hour period in 20 photos”. Fair enough, sounds good to me. So I agreed to that and now it has been called a ‘challenge’ and I’ve been sent a bunch of playing cards and a red ribbon through the post. Very mysterious. I only hope it doesn’t involve any trekking about or solving riddles!

Also, great timing or what, my other phone (also a Sony Ericsson) just broke today. Dear 3mobilebuzz, please can I keep the phone longer, or forever? I might be moving house soon so maybe the reception will be better there

p.s. all my phone pictures and videos including the 3mobilebuzz challenge and the G20 protest stuff is in a set on my Flickr.

http://www.yestosafesex.com/

A pretty nice looking website which was obviously expensive… and a nice blog… but…

• They’ve got a link to del.icio.us and Facebook (but they’re not  ’share’ links, they just go to the main websites)
• A Facebook causes link (but no Fan page)
• A Flickr group link with no branding and hardly any content and the admin account is empty!
• A MySpace page link but the page looks terrible
• The website copy is repetitive and there’s too many scroll bars

Seems like one side of this project did really well (i.e. the website and blog designer) but the rest is poorly executed. What do you think of it?

Hypotheis and Method: If I set up a test account (@autofollowbk), and follow a load of people, where the test account provides no value to be followed by a real person, we’ll get some stats.  Depends who the test account follows though – certain users are more likely to follow back automatically than others.  So, to test a specific account (e.g. @bethgranter), I followed everyone who is following that account (I didn’t actually use the bethgranter account because I don’t have 1000 followers – I chose a sample organisation’s account which shall remain nameless), i.e. a certain type of person.

Twitter has a limit to how many people you can follow in one day.  I wasn’t sure what that limit was so I limited myself to 500 people per day.  In one fell swoop I followed about 480 people. Another 480 were followed the next day and the remaining 40 a couple of days later.

Screenshot from just after I wrote up results - so one or two differences!

The results: I noticed within ten minutes of following the first 480 people, @autofollowbk had about 50 followers.  These people were either trying to ruin my day, or were automatically following everyone that followed them.  Nothing innately wrong with that – lots of people find it polite to reciprocate.  The numbers of follow backs gradually increased over the next few hours, I assume because some auto follow back systems are on a cycle and don’t react instantly to an account being followed.

What was strange though, is the number of people choosing to follow @autofollowbk without @autofollowbk even following them in the first place!  The only reason I can imagine is that those people were taking an individual, call them A, who had been followed by @autofollowbk, and following everyone who was following A, one being @autofollowbk, irrelevant of what @autofollowbk was saying.  This might be reasonable if the topic that the follower was talking about was similar to the topic that A was talking about, so they therefore thought that anyone following A would be interested in following them, so they followed A’s followers in order to make them aware of their account.  That seems quite reasonable to me, but I guess it could be construed as misusing the medium – you’re not strictly supposed to follow someone on Twitter just to get their attention – you’re supposed to follow them because you want to listen to them.  But anyway, rights and wrongs and misuse aside, it’s reasonable that if you follow a similar user’s followers, some of them are likely to find you interesting too.  As long as you are interesting and useful in what you tweet that is.  The other possibility is that they’re using some bot thingy to randomly follow people, or a bot to automatically follow people following certain accounts.

Anyway, down to the stats:

I’ve used Lessfriends.com to count how many people followed @autofollowbk without being followed in the first place and how many people followed it after being followed first. @autofollowbk followed 1000 users over 3 days.  At the end of 3 days,

84 people had chosen to follow @autofollowbk without being followed first = 8% of the total number of people followed by the account

271 people followed @autofollowbk back after being followed first = 27%

That’s an overall rate of 35% disinterested / auto followers, from the total number followed (not the total number following).

154 direct messages were received, all of them clearly automated. That’s 15% using auto DM.

The good news is that 729 people who @autofollowbk followed did not follow back.  That’s 73% non auto rate.  That drops to 65% when you include the spontaneous disinterested 84 followers. The number of spontaneous disinterested followers will probably go up over time too, bringing the non auto rate down further. So, say we have the original account that the 1000 followers were chosen from.  If that account initially followed 2000 people, we’ll assume that 35% of its followers 2000, i.e. 700, are auto followers of one kind or another.  So if we got 1,200 followers, and a possible total of 700 are not interested in what we say, then 500 of them are, because 500 of them didn’t automatically follow us back, they actually chose to follow us because they liked what we had to say.

The test account which the 1000 followers were chosen from to follow by @autofollowbk, a total 2000 people were initially followed in the first place, who were all followed due to their apparent interest in a relevant topic, either by tweeting about a subject, by talking about it in their bio, or because they were following a related twitter account.  The goal on that account was not only to raise awareness of the account but also to receive a stream of topical conversation from people we followed.  Initially all followers were also automatically followed back to be polite, but this has now been turned off in order to reduce the amount of spam in the feed.  Some pruning is going to be necessary to weed out the spam, and the @autofollowbk experiment will hopefully help that.

The plan now is to firstly unfollow anyone who was inadvertently followed back who is clearly not interested, i.e. anyone who spontaneously followed @autofollowbk.  Then, the plan is to check over all of the mutual followers of @autofollowbk, and if it is not obvious why we would want to follow them, to unfollow them too.

On the subject of auto DMs (automatic direct messages sent in response to being followed), I still haven’t decided.  I know in the last few weeks they’ve been getting a lot of criticism as they are commonplace and obviously robotic.  However, I think that if worded correctly they don’t constitute spam, since they’re only sent in response to someone signifying their interest in you in the first place.  And most of them just say thanks for the follow anyway, which I still think, even if it is an obvious robot, provides a bit of feel-good-factor above not saying anything.

I’ll update this if the figures on the @autofollowbk account change significantly, or do so yourselves in the comments if you notice first.

Also, it’s worth mentioning again that these statistics can’t really be applied too generally, because the group of 1000 users that were chosen were not chosen randomly, but as a selection of a group of people following a specific account.