These are my notes from the first meeting of the Cross Party Digital Group. Check out my earlier post for what this was all about, and you can also check the Twitter hashtag #digitalwales for some other backchannel chatter.

Turnout was rather good, filling the medium-sized conference room with suits. Rory Cellan Jones kept everything on target, with only a few sidelines into the news of Rupert Murdoch's plans to remove his content from search engines, and another chap who for a moment I honestly thought was going to ask the Google lady why his site wasn't ranking well.

The key nuggets to take away were:

1. Everyone on the web is equal. The voice of one blogger can be as loud as yours. You're going to have to come to terms with that. Resisting or denying it will get you nowhere.
2. Release your data so others can use it. (I was disappointed there wasn't more said about this - hopefully it will be a bigger theme for the next group meeting)
3. Go where people already are. The platforms are there. People are already using them. Join them.

Some other points I especially liked, and a few thoughts of my own:

• Karina Brisby suggested that the Assembly should "Embrace the crazy". She said that you can always defer issues, promise to give answers later, but that you should be prepared to take anything on board. (I wonder if she knows how crazy some locals are).
• Run regular blogger briefings. Bloggers are not as high-impact as the mainstream media, but what they write often has much greater value to a smaller audience. They are serving an important long tail.
• According to Jag Singh "Wales has the lowest takeup of social networks". He was the most pessimistic/realistic of the panel in this regard.
• Work with people with what interests them. Give people a hook, something to get them using the technology. Great example: Pigeon fanciers who needed to use the internet to share their stats.
• What is really so important about new media and technology, and how can you convey that?
• The need to tell a story to make it relevant.

There was one rather strange question from Dave Jones who asked how all this digital technology could help end poverty, like if it couldn't accomplish that, then why even bother? Maybe he was driving at something I'm missing.

Anyway, I don't draw any particular conclusions from this evening. I turned up with no real questions and no particular expectations. Hopefully future sessions will focus on the importance of making data avaliable for all to access and use however they like.

NOTE: Carl Morris has posted a much more thoughtful reaction. (11.11.2009)

   

Click here to download:

Notes_from_the_Cross_Party_Dig.zip (155 KB)

Pictured: Rory Cellan Jones, Karina Brisby(Oxfam), Sarah Hunter (Google), Jah Singh (MessageSpace).

Interesting footnote: There was no real information on the web about this Digital Group evening, so when Rory mentioned it on Twitter beforehand, he linked to my blog post. Go figure! 

It's not that hard frankly! I've attached a graph showing the last three months of followers and following for the @web_cardiff account, and you can see the pattern clearly: The green line is the bot. It follows a bunch, waits a few days and unfollows those who didn't follow back. Repeat. (My graph isn't 100% accurate, but you can see the numbers for yourself: followers / 'friends'.)

What do you think? Is this bad practice? In this case, the information isn't bad - a few links go to the owner's site, but most point to genuinely useful resources. Friendly spam or useful resource worth promoting in this way?

So it turns out that making Twitter lists is really boring. Still, if it means an end to the noise that was #followfriday, then it's worth a bit of effort up front. My lists are (and will forever be) a work in progress. I have made five groups so far, and in each I have included mostly those who I personally get a lot of value out of. I've tended to leave out the big celebs who already get too much exposure, but the likes of Stephen Fry and Simon Pegg do still appear.

My lists so far:

• South Wales types
• Quality geeks
• Creative types
• Entertainers
• Newsy

@SarahNicholas/imaginary-ppl, @worldofoddy/funny-and-or-interesting, @dsml/smarterthanyouravebear, and of course, @JohnGreenaway/occasional-hat-wearer

A simple mashup of the Twitter cartoon bird identity and 'Y Ddraig Goch' that appears on the Welsh flag. It's not finalised yet, but it's nearly there. When I look at it again in a few day, I'll probably spot exactly what needs to be tweaked to make it just right. Of course, feedback at this stage is often useful too. :)

I'm thinking about putting him on a grassy backdrop, to imitate the Welsh flag even more.

Foomen against Twibbons

Ironically, now I want to create more ironic Twibbons! :)

The idea is simple:

1. Send out a tweet like '#blockparty for Sarah Palin' and encourage your friends to get on board.
2. Twitter search for something like sarah palin i'm OR im OR fan OR supporter  -not :), and then block all the deranged Sarah Palin fans you can find.
3. Visit @AKGOVSarahPalin and block lots of her followers.
4. Pick another target on another boring day, and do it all again.
   

There are many things Twitter could do to encourage the use of favourites more. I like the idea of putting a users last favoured tweet right on their profile, something like I've mocked up here.

Here's an innocent link being shared on Twitter:

Free Font FP Head Pro by Fontpartners http://post.ly/T7r Font72

I don't want to pick on @imjustcreative, but this is a complete link fail. It could only be worse if it used a framing short URL.

When you click on the link you get taken to Graham's Posterous blog, then to fontsquirrel. They appear to be the vendor, but confusingly their download button takes you offsite and dumps you on fontpartners.com. You have finally arrived at your destination, but now you have to remember what the font you wanted was called and find it yourself.

This is the link you needed in the first place: http://fontpartners.com/fpHead_pro.html

Spot anything wrong? Yup, that's right, no 'free download' link. Just the option to buy at the top.

In the time it has taken me to compose this, @imjustcreative replied to my moan on Twitter:

@Foomandoonian now ur just being lazy and whingy, just be thankful you have a link at all :)

Yeah, thanks buddy.

About a year ago I gave up caring who started following me on Twitter, largely because of the proliferation of blatant spammers. I put up a note on my bio saying that if people really wanted me to reciprocate, the should send me a message, and I would certainly follow back if they were an interesting real person, and not some spam account (or worse). This still seems perfectly reasonable to me.

More recently though I decided I should take a more active interest in those who choose to follow me. I started using the excellent Topify, which makes it easy to identify spammers and I check out anyone who seems interesting.

Consequently, I've spotted an annoying trend.

There are many, many users who follow about 200 more people than follow them back. They are taking advantage of the fact that about half of the people that they follow, will follow them back! For whatever reason a large number of people feel it is the done thing to just blindly follow back anyone who follows them, however spammy, offensive or bizarre the new follower is! Personally, I don't understand this behaviour in the slightest: I don't want spam in my Twitter stream - so I don't follow spammers. It's simple.

Nonetheless, if you want to steadily grow your follower base, add 100 new people a day. Then, after you've been doing this for a few days, go back and unfollow all those who didn't follow you in return, while continuing to follow new people. This way your ratio will always be near enough 1:1, making you look legitimate and popular. Eventually, when you reach an acceptable target (say, 10,000 followers) you can have a big purge and get rid of a lot of the mindless sheep you have accumulated. Say, 20-30% of them. Now it looks like you are a power user. Any new visitors to your profile will assume that you are hugely important and that maybe they should listen to you too.

So there you go, now you can claim to be an SEO-demigod, and have huge numbers of low-quality followers seeming to back it up.

Or you could just use Twitter like a normal person.