Colin Mercer On The Inter - Web » twitter

The Broken Interweb

Colin — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:10:17 +0000

What an exciting afternoon, with Twitter down, Facebook struggling and Flickr hiccupping. Turns out that Twitter was being DDos’ed… no idea on Facebook or Flickr.

What more could you want from a day? Begs the question why the hell I’m writing about this…

Some Twitter coverage here on their blog, their status blog and on Wired. Facebook stuff can be read about on Mashable and I think I made up the rest.

Ciao.

The Ashes First Test Tweets

Colin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:32:42 +0000

As you know, I am a huge cricket fan, therefore The Ashes is a very exciting time for me. I can’t think of much interesting stuff to do relating to it at the moment so I will start off by aggregating my tweets for each test.

So here is the first test from Cardiff:

colinmercer: Finally there is an atmosphere again. We have got to get in their faces, as they have done to use for the last 20 yrs. #ashes

colinmercer: Top notch Freddie, thats who! Great catch #ashes

colinmercer: @pingudownunder we’ve been doing that for a while already, rain dance worked well yesterday #ashes

colinmercer: Katich should have gone, tough call for the umpire, Strauss / Swann would have referred that… #ashes #bringonreferralsystem

colinmercer: Monty appealing already #ashes

colinmercer: RT @trevslibrary: It’s Monty time! #ashes

colinmercer: @nickobeano convict colony is one of the better songs yes #ashes #barmyarmy

colinmercer: What is the song the army are singing? sounds like “i shagged matilda”, anyone? #ashes #barmyarmy

colinmercer: 10p to everyone following me if Pontings gets a golden #ashes

colinmercer: Has @Aggerscricket not seen @GeoffreyBoycott? I guess it might not be him… #ashes

colinmercer: @ElwoodGooner england are 46-1 #ashes

colinmercer: @thealanmercer what a surprise! ive taken the whole week off

colinmercer: Bopara off the mark in traditional fashion… #ashes

colinmercer: Simon Jones you have a very attractive lady friend… no wonder you’ve been ‘injured’ #ashes

colinmercer: Just heard about @bumblecricket – excited!

colinmercer: @nickobeano lots of work to go yet, wickets which have fallen have been soft #ashes

colinmercer: Fed up of Sky’s coverage of #ashes already, every 5 minutes there are adverts.

colinmercer: How can i listen to TMS when the only bands my radio has is FM and MW? #ashes

colinmercer: Great shot handsome broad #ashes

colinmercer: @ceejay2222 hehe, it would be cool to have #tdf on the laptop and cricket on tellly

colinmercer: Another wicket which can be accounted for by the thigh pad. a redesign is needed? #ashes

colinmercer: @Aggerscricket is that chappell or bruce forsyth?

colinmercer: @davidgryguc the guy chucking the red round thing at 94mph, who just dropped katich #ashes

colinmercer: Dear Australia, meet Freddie! #ashes

colinmercer: @BumbleCricket Cairns Fudge umpiring situation, OCA legislation is wrong. Give Wantage CC a shout out too, we need umpires!

colinmercer: RT @trevslibrary: It’s Monty time! #ashes

colinmercer: @nickobeano is all about waltzing matilda, thanks to @davetaprobane

colinmercer: RT @ECB_cricket: does anyone actually enjoy watching Katich bat? <– Lol at the comment and Lol at the source

Fun hey?

Follow me on Twitter for all the latest and greatest on The Ashes here.

Daddy Needs A New Toy

Colin — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:11:58 +0000

I need a new toy, and I think I have decided what it will be…

Have you seen the Asus 1008HA Seashell? Looks mighty nice to me, and it looks like it works, yes of course looks can be deceiving, will play before I buy.

Slashgear have my favourite picture so far:

I wonder why?

Slimline and mobile, will easily fit into a bag and holds a 160gb HD, wifi, 1.66GHZ processor with 1GB RAM, all in the 1 inch thick design. That’s 1 inch at it’s thickest…

The more I read the more I like it, but I know that the second I meet one I wont like it and I will talk myself out of it again. As I have been doing for a rather long time now.

Engadget got hands on here, and Laptop Mag here.

The official link goes to all the competitions and what not they are running around launch. Still chance to win through Twitter if you start following them @asusuk, a random follower will be selected each week to win. I don’t recommend you start following @asusuk because the more that follow them the less chance I have of winning.

So – who thinks I should buy one?

Where Do You Comment?

Colin — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:00:50 +0000

Have been thinking about this for a few days, with the ways my content is cross pollinated across a number of different sites there are a number of ways readers can comment.

The most obvious one is on the article itself, here’s an example post which got some comments:

There is of course Twitter, where you can @reply a comment on articles because whenever I post an article, a Tweet is created to alert my followers that I have posted a new article. Here’s a comment I got recently:

Next is Facebook, as I mentioned above, when I publish an article I Tweet saying so, these Tweets feed into my Facebook status which again alerts my friends that I have posted. And the way Facebook now works you can comment on people’s status, here’s a couple I got on a recent article:

There is also Friendfeed, but I don’t use that much at all so I doubt I have had comments there.

I may put some more thoughts to this and try and explain why / who comments through which media, for now, which is your preference?

The Anatomy Of A Facebook Meme

Colin — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:30:56 +0000

This is definitely the worst thing I have ever read on Mashable! Ok maybe worst is a little harsh. I am a big fan of Mashable and think that a lot of the insight there is great and of huge use to the readers. However this isn’t the case for this article, I have read some of Dan Zarrella’s other stuff and I thought it was good, but this piece co-authored by Alison Driscoll is weak.

I will keep the rant brief, but this is the first thing that literally made me spit beer out…

“Alison is an interactive copywriter and social media consultant who specializes in Facebook marketing.”

It is difficult to express how ridiculous that sounds, reading through the list of things which they recommend doing there is nothing on there which is more than what every 13 yr old Facebooker knows and already does.

So I thought it might be nice to have some Twitter fun on this, see what people thought of me becoming a Facebook marketing specialist, here’s my tweet followed by the replies I received:

Looks positive hey?

Personal Twitter Stats

Colin — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 08:51:54 +0000

There is nothing much wrong with being on Twitter anymore, I remember when I signed up back in ‘07 that there was a certain level of faux pas about being on there. Now, well you’re nobody if you’re not on Twitter (yeah yeah I know those lyrics are probably copywrited to Ben – I’m sure you don’t mind mate?).

This sparked me to think… what was my first tweet? I can proudly say it was total rubbish! I mean total rubbish! Check it out below or here.

Since then I have written 2,626 more tweets, some have been equally as rubbish, some have been less rubbish.

Mobile Bookmarks

Colin — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:37:51 +0000

I don’t suspect this is an even slightly original idea, but I thought I would do it anyway. What am I talking about? Take a screengrab of your top bookmarks on your mobile.

Mine is here:

Let me now explain what they are, most are very self explanatory…

1) Dabr – Best mobile Twitter client I have come across so far. Simple, works, and gives me everything I need. Easy to check updates, easy to post and easy to track searches/hashtags on the move.
2) Windows Live Hotmail – Hotmail email.
3) 1000heads – Work email.
4) Facebook – Obvious.
5) Google – I wonder?
6) National Rail – Cool wap service to check out train schedule, arrivals and departures.
7) BBC Mobile – Keep up with news and sport scores, not the most updated by the easiest to access.

So, how does yours look?

Oxford Twestival (#oxtwestival)

Colin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 18:43:16 +0000

I’m currently working on a couple of little side projects, the closest of which is Oxford Twestival on February 12th at the Cape of Good Hope in Oxford. I agreed to help organise this a little while ago now, and the date has flown up on us. By “us” I mean myself and my two accomplices: Jake and Sylwia. What is Twestival I hear you ask, well it’s basically an opportunity for people who know each other on Twitter to meetup in person and share a drink. Twestival is special because there are 175+ events being held simultaneously around the world all to raise money for the charity Water.

Why am I involved? Simply because I like to be involved in fun things like this, this is a great chance to meet more people in Oxford with similar interests and its of course all in aid of a good cause.

You can read more about what’s going on here: http://oxford.twestival.com
You can follow the latest updates on what’s going on here: http://www.twitter.com/oxtwestival
And most importantly buy tickets here: http://www.amiando.com/twestivaloxford.html

Hope to see you there, I’ll be the one in the hat.

Twitter Acquire Summize

Colin — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:13:18 +0000

Hey guys, so here’s something I covered a while ago. A new search tool for Twitter (my main addiction other than blogging) called Summize. Interesting Summize has already been rebranded as search.twitter.com.

Well it appears that Twitter have liked the look of it too, Techcrunch announce today that Twitter have acquired the much smaller company Summize. Of the 6 Summize staff, 5 will join the Twitter engineering team in California (I know exactly where it is as I’ve been there ). The Summize founder Jay Verdy has decided to move onto pastures new.

Check out the full article on TechCrunch here.

San Francisco Day 3

Colin — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:26:38 +0000

I shall skip the boring parts of day 3, breakfast and morning work were boring as you can expect. Lunch picked up, we went to meet up with Eddie from www.eddie.com, he’s one of the assistant directors of the Spike Lee collaboration film called Nokia Productions (good name hey?!?), and more importantly, he is a thoroughly nice chap. He’d recommended that we go to this little French bistro in South Park. And very nice it was too, I was still bulging from breakfast and the site of the massive baguette was exactly what I needed. As we left Eddie took us on a brief tour of the landmarks, the building opposite was the Twitter HQ. I resisted twittering saying I was outside (just), now I kinda wish I had photo’ed, but to be honest it would have been a boring picture. The office looks more like a little secluded house, there was no forms of branding etc. The next place on the web 2.0 tour was the Organic building, where Wired is/was based and where Yahoo do a load of stuff. Uber interesting to see how unglamorous these places are.

Hotel, work, boring, prep for the event in the evening. The event went really well and everyone seemed to have a good time. I wont go into detail.

Afterwards we popped for another drink with Eddie, I don’t know where this bar was because Eddie drove, all I remember is an extensive list of whiskeys/gins on a chalk board. Sehr cool.

That’s day 3 done and dusted.