Merry Christmas! What did you get? I bought myself a present, a Canon 550d DSLR. I've always had a thing for photography and dabbled when I was younger via an Olympus OM10, a great piece of kit that I loved. I'm not sure what happened, but over the years my photography degraded in to a compact only (Digital could be to blame) zone and its fair to say I've forgotten the ins and outs of proper photography technique. Fast forward to Christmas 2011 and I've been snapping away, mainly at friends and family, but today I went out and took some shots of my home town, Edinburgh. See below for some of my early shots, I've been playing about with some of the manual settings, so far the camera has been amazing, but I've got a long way to go! I've set up a Flickr account too.

A typical 'close' off The Royal Mile, Edinburgh

St Giles Cathedral

Christmas tree decoration

I'm going to be a Dad. My wonderful wife is 16.5 weeks pregnant (that's a very important .5) and I could not be happier. A wondeful baby bump is starting to show and my good lady has regained some energy. I can't even begin to understand what her body is going through but she is dealing with it incredibly well. I'm helping as much as possible and am very very excited about the prospect of our little one arriving. People have been asking if I'm nervous, and I can honestly say that at the moment I am pretty relaxed. That may change at any time! I may well update my thoughts and feelings from time time on here. Hope that is ok. 

The Fringe is coming to a close and I thought it would be a good idea to try and get the local (and not-so-local!) Twitter community out for a beer or two. The venue will be the big-ass purple cow in Bristo Square, you can't really miss it! You can join the 25+ people that have signed up already by putting your name to the Twtvite here. 

There is no real plan for the night, it kicks off at 7pm. Just come along and have a laugh. Beer not compulsory.

There is a BBC comedy showcase on near-by at 11pm - if you want to go to that leave a note in the comments here and we can get tickets independantly. I'm game but don't want to go solo!

Meet under the Cow's head.

Till then!

Mike

Love this video from the College Humor guys. The start-up scene can be bewildering especially when painted in a flowery light by over-use of tech terms and general bulls**t. Watch and enjoy!

My colleague and fellow anti-auto DM campaigner, Allan Barr  perfectly summed up the scourge of the auto-DM in his post from March 18th, stating that an auto-DM is a particularly annoying form of spam. People all over the Twitter world bemoan the use of them, yet so many still seem to see some benefit of creating a terrible initial impression as soon as we have been nice enough to follow them back. Scarily the use of them has not dropped, but in my experience is on the rise. Auto-DMs come in many shapes and sizes, please read on for some examples...

The 'thanks for the follow, here's a random link' auto-DM

Why would I click that link? The only link I'm likely to click is the 'unfollow' link. Rubbish!

The 'list me I'll list you back' auto-DM

Putting someone on a list should be for the right reasons, maybe a little tip of the hat to their knowledge etc. It's not about a mutual ass slap arranged via auto-DM. 

The 'we've spammed you on Twitter, now let us spam you on other networks' auto-DM

No no no. My first impression of you is a stupid auto-DM on Twitter, why on earth would I let you in to my Facebook life?!?

The 'I'm so rubbish at Twittter that I can't even finish my auto-DM' auto-DM

Just no. Lame.

The 'I've made up a stupid barf-inducing name for being connected on Twitter' auto-DM

Please don't RT me. Ever.

The 'so dumb we do it twice' auto-DM

One is bad. Two should be punished with Justin Bieber music.

The 'yes I know auto-DMs suck but I'm sending them anyway' auto-DM

The fact you know you are being an idiot makes it worse!

So there you go folks, some examples of the itchy rash that is auto-DMing. If you want to thanks someone for connecting, why not send them an @ asking them how they are and making it personal? Simple right?

Do you have some great auto-DM examples? Share them in the comments below!

If you want to connect with me on Twitter you can get me on @mike_mcgrail 

 

This ad for Bacardi is intended to rouse us to spend time with friends over the weekend, having some fun, sharing funny tales etc etc. So why end it with a piece of mild racism? It adds nothing to the ad and is completely misguided. Their 'creative' agency no doubt told them to be 'daring' or even 'edgy'. A nice ad ruined by a daft & un-required ending. Did they have ads today in France poking fun at us Brits? Would that make it any better? Not convinced. 

A bit of fun or an insult? Share your thoughts below.

Popular Twitter management tool, Hootsuite (I would link to it, but the error message doesn't have the same effect) has been down since 9:40am BST leaving users with no option other than to use Twitter.com (shudder) or an alternative management tool such as Tweetdeck . This may not seem such a big deal at first, but look at the issue from an agency/business point of view. Many of these will use Hootsuite to carry-out some pretty full-on management of Twitter, whether that be for their own branded account or on behald of clients. What will have happened this morning when people were faced with this?

Probably blind panic! The lesson from this? Don't put all your eggs in one Owl's nest. Have other tools that you and your team are comfortable using and can easily access.  The lesson from this for Hootsuite? Don't rely on a cloud service to host your whole infrastructure. Many people pay them for their service and due to that should be able to expect better. For more info on the outage see here. Incidentally Quora and Reddit have been affected by the same issue. 

 

 

Love the concept of this ad, I expect further viral spread is imminent. Of course shaving can help stop some kinds of viral spread, but we don't wanna go there! Nice use of pointers to a game and Facebook at end too. Enjoy...

First and foremost, I love Twitter, it helps me so much in my life, both on a personal and business level and it's fair to say it has played a huge part in my career development. But something has bugged me for a while and it has to do with the Tweet volume of users. There are people out there who send in excess of 300 tweets per day, even though they are clearly employed either by a business or on the behalf of clients. How can any serious work really take place inbetween the creation and sending of said tweets? Of course, it's important to share information, give opinion and join in with discussions, but the level that some people operate at must have negative effects on their productivity and in-turn their value as a business asset. Before anyone jumps on me, I am aware that I have racked up a fairly high number of tweets (13,352 in 17 months - approx 26 per day) but not at a level that I feel interupts my working day (a lot of my Tweeting is carried out pre/post working hours or during breaks).

Put yourself in the shoes of a potential buyer of your service, lets say you are a consultant. They will research you online, it's a given in this day and age. What might Google (other search engines are available) spit back at them? A LinkedIn profile? Your blog? Sure as heck your Twitter profile. So they dig a little deeper and find that you are sending a tweet every 5-10 minutes, some of them they may find valuable, but there is only so much value to be had from sharing information. That potential client will want real value for money, they will not want to pay you to tweet (from your own account anyway!).

In this social web world we operate in, the impression you put across on any channel you use counts for so so much. Don't lose focus on the fact that you have a job to do, a job that provides you with the lifestyle you choose to lead. Twitter is a beautiful thing, don't let it turn ugly by overdoing it. I know someone who lost their job due to the employer being rather miffed at their Twitter use during working hours. Everything you do Twitter is out there for all to see, so you can have no excuse when the soup hits the fan. 

What do you think? Are you a high volume tweeter that maintains a strong work output? Are you a 'buyer' that would be put off by a consultant's level of tweets? 

I'm on Twitter here and blog about social media regularly over on The Social Penguin Blog

Read this great post from CS Penn - The Will to Focus

Some pretty amazing facts here, some very thought provoking...