Verba @ McAWilliams.com

It aint gangsta speak or anything like that but a fantastic challenge I have heard about through reading a post over on Julie Matkins blog.

SoFoBoMo is short for Solo Photo Book Month where a bunch of photographers all make solo photo books start to finish, in 31 days. It’s modeled loosely on NaNoWriMo, where participating writers all write novels in a month, and NaSoAlMo, where musicians write and record solo albums in a month.

A book is something I have been meaning to do for quite some time now and this challenge has given me no excuse not to go for it. So between May 1st until June 30th I will be dedicating 31 days to get my 35 pictures together for a book.

If you feel up to the challenge check out the SoFoBoMo webpage to register

Stumble It! Digg this Del.icio.us Google Technorati Reddit

It’s Tuesday Twitter Question Time and todays question is all about public transport. What would you do to get rid of a very annoying person sitting beside you?

TheChrisD: Start playing my DS on maximum volume with the most irritating game possible

AdamMaguire: Put headphones in with the jack clearly unplugged and laugh manically every minute for exactly 3 secs, stopping dead each time. Or fart. Probably fart.

EmeraldDiscount: Pretend call to friend about doc’s diagnosis of contagious disease and just found out on way home to hibernate :))))

sintaxasn: Easy. Turn to them, looking demented (lazy eye etc) and say ‘Can I come home with you? Are you my mum?’. Even if it’s a bloke.

joescanlon: The cough from Little Britain “computer says no ” + * cough into face * http://bit.ly/LeWp

Mark_Coughlan: play the polyphonic version of Tragedy by Steps over’n'over accompanied by an understated (but mandatory) version of the dance

prendio2: tap them on the knee and then wink incessantly at them when they look over

omahonydonnelly: If u r male and female next to you: play with yourself; otherwise fart!

johnnycbad: Get up :p Go to the bathroom, out window, to costume shop, get stalin mask, return. If she cops it kill everyone in the room

francismahon: Farting (if you can manage it, on demand) is always pretty effective?

benkenealy: have abrakebabra for lunch :0

amylong: make a smelly fart? you could eat ur donor kebab with ur mouth open all noisy and slushy…or snort your nose and hock pleghm…I’d be gone!

PamJo: I was just gonna suggest something then my Mothers voiced appeared something about lavatorial humour showing ones intelligence

PixieVonDust: easy. When I play death metal at full volume on my iPod it tends to get people moving at the first opp! also maybe chuckling softly to yourself and rubbing your hands together might work, or whip out a cigarette and ask for a light. Tell her you were sure yours was in ur pocket beside your naggin of vodka.

stretchneil: mutter quietly *must not kill again, must not kill again….”

mitzs: hike your leg and let one rip?

icedcoffee: move? unless they are invading space/kicking seat - do the same back.

derryo: Scratch your head, make believe you’ve caught something, squash between finger nails, ask for cure for headlice and pick nose

ciaran_o_kelly: They never pressed charges. You can’t prove a thing. Besides, I WAS pleased to see them.

nmcgivney: to get rid of you? I’d prob punch you in the face lol, but only in a friendly way of course

bigstevie1275: fall asleep and cuddle up to them. Start talking to urself saying things like “what no I can’t hurt again” put ur hand down the front of ur trousers and scratch ur ball, pick ur nose and flick it at then LOL

susieqhw: ….sway back and forth with your headphones in and pretend you’re listening to hippy music !

Stumble It! Digg this Del.icio.us Google Technorati Reddit

Last night draw number 2 for some prizes donated were given out, this time the prizes came from Aj at lecraic who has kindly offered 5 mugs which will are personalised with the avatars of your followers! what a fantastic prize many many thanks AJ.

The winners were picked again by Kathryn in a similar way to Thursdays draw and the names are as follows

@headrambles, @forbairt, @micheleneylon, @gadgetrepublic and @stimpled0rf congrats to all of you if you get intouch with @lecraic he should hopefully be able to sort these out for you!

Thanks again AJ for a great prize.

I have 2 more things to give away and will hopefully do that tonight!

Stumble It! Digg this Del.icio.us Google Technorati Reddit

So I said I would do it and I am glad to say that tonight I gave something back to 4 lucky voters from the shortyawards voting campaign with the help of Joe Scanlon and Blacknight Solutions.

I had 2 4gig usb memory sticks to give away courtesy of Joe. The winners were picked by Kathryn Mason, who gave me 2 numbers from 1 to 372 which I matched up to my spreadsheet of voters.

The winners were @mikekellydottv and @bigstevie1275, congratulations to you both a memory key is winging its way to you.

The prize I had from Blacknight was 2 .eu domain names to give away, again Kathryn picked 2 numbers from France and the winners this time were @karenquinn and @missyu. Congrats ladies I do hope you enjoy the domains and look forward to seeing what you do with them!

Thanks again Joe and all the guys from Blacknight, and a big thanks to new twitterer Kathryn for helping with the draw.

I have a few more things to give away yet, unfortunately not 372 things, and will hopefully do so before the week ends!

Stumble It! Digg this Del.icio.us Google Technorati Reddit

So the post many have been waiting for, my feelings and opinions on my main rival in the shorty awards! As I say these are opinions only!

Well as I said in my previous post Arleen for me should not have been included in the personal category, she is a marketer and traffic specialist as she blatantly promotes on her bio and even in Tweets and as such had plenty of other categories to be nominated in. I personally believe though that she targeted this category because real personal users, who use twitter to chat, meet people with similar hobbies and have a laugh, will obviously only have a limited amount of followers compared to those who offer advise in business, tech, music.

It was a very clever thing for Arleen to do and in the end she got what she wanted to spread Aloha in New York City, whatever that means.

But how can someone who has only just begun using Twitter for the past 3 months have such a following? I have checked her blog and read her tweets it really confused me, I saw very little of interest to warrant such a following and obviously others were the same since so many times I have seen tweets like this coming from her, why does she need to explain herself so much? The answers began to arrive via direct messages in twitter by dozens of people who had seen what she was doing. According to many of these DM’s basically she follows people on the public timeline, at one point she added over 40 people in less then a minute claiming to have read each and everyone of their profiles, how? well looking at her tweets she reveals her secrets a bit. By using this tactic of following anybody, she gains a lot of followers back, because people will check and see she tweets, she is not selling stuff like the spammers on twitter do, they see that other people are following her so trust she is a legitimate person, and they are right, she is I suppose.

This has been done for her own good as a traffic specialist and marketer, but as you can see it would also have a great benefit for the shorty awards. Now there is nothing in the rules to say she was not allowed employ these tactics but at the same time it is wrong.

Looking at the Twitterhollic stats for all five finalists reveals a lot.

AlohaArleen

McAWilliams

sugarjones

JiMpiSh

And finally BadEvan

It was always going to be impossible to beat her in this category, 3 of us have less the 1000 followers! can you now understand what I am talking about.

A very good article from fanboy.com was brought to my attention in relation to people like Arleen and is well worth a read.

When you look at the end result after the audit last night, she had 463 votes with a following of 26,036 thus getting just 1.77% of her followers to vote whereas looking at my result of 338 votes with 878 followers I got 38.49% of people to vote for me, surely this is all wrong, yet as of this morning she has been made the winner.

It really has angered me that the organisers of the shorty awards allowed this happen, she is far from real, if anything she has shut up quite substantially since winning which says something. I am looking forward to looking at her twitterstream over the next few months when hopefully we can see the real Arleen or maybe not!

At the end of the day I am happy to see the back of this competition and the petttiness of quite a lot of folk in the finals, it is the shorty awards first year and I do hope that the organisers have also learnt a lot if they plan to do it again next year.

Stumble It! Digg this Del.icio.us Google Technorati Reddit

So the votes have been cast and the Shorty Awards have come to an end.

I have to say last Thursday and Friday were great craic but I want to let you all know what have I gained from this experience and what can the guys at Shorty Awards do to make it better, so lets start with @shortyawards themselves.

I think the idea of the awards themselves is an excellent idea but the system has a few flaws.

For starters the voting system should not be based on just being a popularity contest, this made it impossible for a lot of people to get noticed, I know that a few of the people in my category even do not have many followers, yet what they write IS personal and a lot of the time very interesting yet looking at the person who it seems has won the category she has very little to say except ALOHA quite a lot, she seems very friendly but I have to say looking at her twitterstream its quite mundane but with 26000 followers, she knew she had this wrapped up.

Secondly people nominate tweeters in what ever category they feel they should be in, for instance I was nominated in personal, egotistical, humor and people even made up categories like TTQT. This is all fine but I like others in the running asked my followers to nominate me for the personal category, which I felt summed me up perfectly as I am not on twitter as a business or as some sort of guru on everything. This was abused in my opinion by a few of the finalists, as I stated to Shorty Awards a while ago via email AlohaArleen is far from being a personal twitter user she says it in her bio even
“Create, write, design market campaigns w/ integrity & results. New marketing & sales speaker, trainer, coach, copywriter. SM/SEO traffic specialist”. She is quite obviously a business user who targetted the personal category knowing that personal users would not have the following behind them and thus stand no hope of winning, clever move on her part, but very unfair. If I had any sense I should have, as an irishman, put myself in the green category looking at how the votes ended there I would have cleaned up, but its wrong, and should be addressed. The nominations should have been vetted properly to find out if it fits into the category selected!

Lastly for me the whole idea of prepopulated tweets this where you can provide a simple url and it brings you to your twitter webpage and has a tweet pre-filled for you, all you need do is press the update button! It seemed to be happening in all categories but I was under the assumption that all reasons given had to be the voters own reason.

Since finding out that prepopulated tweets were allowed I decided to take advantage of it once I did I gained 200 votes in 2 days showing how much easier it is to entice folk to press a link without having to worry about thinking. This stinks!!! I prefered reading what people honestly felt about me, how can this be taken seriously once again it all playing into the elitists, twitter zombies hands with their thousands of followers.

Anyhow enough about what was wrong with the competition, I want to tell you what was right about it too!

As I said in my last post about shorty awards I began the nominated process with only 245 followers, I have now got 870 followers, many of whom have come directly from the awards site to see who the hell I am, why am I so popular and lastly what I noticed last week were spies in my stream. These people had loyalties set to my competition but followed me to find out what I may have been saying about the competition, my plans for gaining votes etc etc! I have to say that whole side of it made me laugh, and how weird that a good few of them left me as of 8am yesterday morning when voting ended!

But still my follower count has increased dramatically and many of these people have started to converse with me regularly and I know will become good friends!

The other great thing I witnessed about the whole event was the way it brought all my followers together, so many ideas got discussed, many got thrown out, but the main thing that happened was so many people got to know each other. I think everybodys twitter followership has increased a bit throughout the voting! This for me was the real highlight of the whole experiment.

But I have to say thank you to everyone for putting up with me and my campaiging especially the whole of the irish twitterverse who I still am dumbfounded by with the way they pushed and pushed me to strive to win.

I keep getting asked what could I have won, to be honest I have no idea, they kept going on about tweeting up your winning speech so that may be all there is, but for me the friends I have made throughout the competition has been the real prize for me!

I know everybody is waiting for me to talk about Arleen more but I do believe that is a post in itself and will come tomorrow. But lastly thank you again to everyone for your good wishes and blog posts, facebook groups etc. over the past few days, it means so much to me!

Here are just a few of those posts etc.

Nick Mc Givney, John Keyes, Joe Scanlon, Darragh Doyle, Spiller, icedcoffee, Le Craic,

Stumble It! Digg this Del.icio.us Google Technorati Reddit

Ok it’s Tuesday Twitter Question Time so what was on my mind last night well Twitter has gone much more mainstream lately, programs talk about it, Obama campaigned on it, and people now want to know more about Twitter how do you explain it to the interested? Try to use only 140 chars its quite hard!

Starrybluesky: -twitter gives you a window to the world

bdum_bdum: like facebooks status update thing, and nothing else

ellybabes: Like texting, except that ur message gets delivered to all of ur friends at once & your tweets and replies are stored online

aileenwilliams: the only way i can explain it is’ sometimes there is a topic u like and u can join in other times it’s not so interesting

Mike_Kiely: It’s a notice board for you, your friends and everybody else’s thoughts - and you can choose whose you see.

moonstruckmania: to me it is the perfect blend of chat, im and a news feed. Informative, personal and non personal and at times just plain silly

stimpled0rf: you could describe it as a continuous worldwide conversation - with the opportunity to dive in&out as it ‘twitters’ around you.

eolai: Twitter is conversation, with all its strengths & flaws, a real time equal interaction of the serious, the mundane, & resources

spiller2: ive given up! I just say its a forum with a140 character limit per post!

davidd: “It’s like Facebook messages and you see all the messages from your friends.”

bngr: I usually use my hand to gesture the stream of tweets & say it’s bit like FB statuses.I say its hard to get into & keep up with

icedcoffee: a) I don’t b) a social network for communicating with people, in 140 char.

anthonymcg: A mini-social network but with a better focus. Ideas, feedback and banter.

petertanham: It’s like subscribing to a feed of people’s Facebook statuses, but they don’t have to be your Facebook friends

s_ana: “If Facebook had a website dedicated solely to status updates, it would be Twitter.”

johnpeavoy: #ttqt Just show them Tweetdeck is my suggestion!

marramgrass: Badly Is it possible to get Twitter until you’ve used it, and used it for a while at that?

bigstevie1275: A Socal network where u just tweet what your doing,your thoughts,rant a question or something random. F/book without the shit

sarahphelan: ttqt “its like facebook status but more like a blog but its public so you can chat to/listen to anyone and share information”

Stumble It! Digg this Del.icio.us Google Technorati Reddit

Well as everyone on twitter is aware at this stage @mcawilliams made the shorty award finals for the best producers of short content in 2008, so many many thanks to all who nominated me! I am chuffed.

Many people have written blog posts asking for votes for me for the final round and again thank you to all of you aswell. But I do feel its about time I explained myself a bit more.

All through the process I have been telling people that this is a scientific experiment, ok maybe not scientific but it is an experiment in networking. When I first heard of the shorty awards from one of @problogger’s informative tweets I decided that I would give it a shot, (if you aint in you aint gonna win) but in the back of my mind I wondered if I could actually do well in it when I saw other people nominate me!

So the experiment began.

On twitter I bring nothing to the table, I rant, make noise, annoy, attempt to make people smile, am not famous, know damn all about social networking, am a guru in nothing and was up against the big boys such as @stephenfry, @guykawasaki, @breakingnews and loads of others. I pitched myself in the personal category because as I said above thats me on twitter, I would not put myself as a food/business/tech specialist unlike some of the other finalists who aimed at categories they should not have been near, mine included. I ended up out of everyone nominated, I mean EVERYONE as the 28th most nominated person, WTF!
It was you guys! you all responded to my calling better then I imagined!

Due to this I have made a lot of new friends on twitter since my followers have gone from 245 at the start of the process to 745 at the time of writing this!!! So I think I have proved even if it aint important to you, that a lot of these elitists who are in the finals, the sorts with 20,000 followers and 1000 following that respond to no one but their elite buddies, can actually feel the pressure come from a no one with fuck all followers, who will take time to reply to people, chat and make them feel as important as I feel on a daily basis when I see people still follow me, which surely is what twitter is about!

Over the process I have lost a few people too I would say 20 max, many of them who had just followed due to the shorty awards, but some were long time followers who may not have communicated much with me but them leaving me made me wonder if this was worth it! I decided whats the worst that could happen I loose everyone, it means I can finally leave this twitterland that has me so addicted, maybe it would be a blessing in disguise!

That in a nutshell was what I was at! putting forward someone who offers nothing for an award against big players and really putting it up to them thanks to you guys! Oh and to those that think I am doing this as an ego thing, I think you should unfollow from me now!!! because if you know me as you should from my twittering you would know this is not what I am about!

I have plenty more to write about the past few weeks doing this but will wait until the awards end to publish that post it will discuss all the other things I have learnt along my journey.

One last thing I would like to say is I have plans for after this all ends for all who voted for me which I shall reveal when I can! and if you have not voted but would like to please click this link which will open up twitter for you,all you need to do is login and the update box will be filled in just leave a short reason as to why I should win the personal category.

Thanks for bearing with me through this guys and thanks for all your help!

Stumble It! Digg this Del.icio.us Google Technorati Reddit

Last week I attempted to run TTQT on Tuesday and Thursday and on both occasions found it impossible to do so. You see last week Twitter had a bit of a bad time with lag sometimes of 2 hours or more. This obviously makes using twitter which should be instant micro blogging uneffective. My question which has been speculated for ages was that to improve twitters service and prevent this happening they may need to charge users, so would you pay or not, and why?

whitespider1066: depends on what u get extra, but usually I’m a tight git, it would have to be a cheap charge for that maybe £1 a month

LiliCosic: Depends on the amount of money, but thats not answering your question is it?:p hmmm I think twitter is a wonderful thing and would pay for it to prevent having adds like those on LJ,but reasonable price.So yes!

mdcurry: pay for Twinkle? maybe if they got rid of the creeps trying to get laid and such, sorty misunderstood. Id pay for a premium service.

moonstruckmania: Nope! I am cheap I don’t pay for any of the goodies I use. . I would miss all the lovely residents of twitterville :o( I could see paying NOT to have ads in your stream, w/ads 4 those who are cheap like me. I would wade through ads for my twits!

sineadcochrane: I would definitely pay. I always miss it so much when it’s down, I’d rather pay a small monthly fee than have that happen.

kenmcguire: if service assured and a first party API-limit-free app released from inhouse team.

prendio2: I would potentially pay but it would be the end of twitter were they to charge a subscription fee i’m surprised they haven’t yet turned to advertising to be honest… i think that’s where they’d go to generate income ads could be in the form of tweets fed into all users timelines and would be custom to the topics you tweet about… jees this is too good an idea, I hope they don’t feckin do it!!

enormous: now that I have built up a relationship with people using it I think I would pay 4 twitter. Maybe on a package basis like texts but only if you went over your subscription. Yes you are right you would be impoverished by your nosiness Although maybe they could do a reward scheme for twitter evangelists like you and me…

karenquinn: depends how much your talking about having to pay surely, but i probably would yeah.

jkeyes: Twitter is about the relationships not the service. If it’s pay to play, everyone (or most anyway) need to pay otherwise it’s lost what appeals to me.So if all the people I follow are still around in the pay world, I would pay too.

derryo: I would pay. I possibly wouldn’t have joined initially if there was a charge, so a free trial period for newbies recommended

spiller2: nope, im on minimum wage, i have no credit card and its a recession. I need my money!!!!

eolai: a year ago I definitely wouldn’t have paid but now I think I probably would. That said I’d really want every one else to also.

TrustTommy: Not a chance, But did that ever last very long? and anyway, if that’s the worst of the problems, don’t think we’re too bad

dermotcasey: pay assuming price is reasonable. No I haven’t defined reasonable but I pay for FlickrPro and am looking at PutPlace

joescanlon: John I found the question and YES i would pay (A LITTLE) for twitter - I don’t think I could live without it now.

icedcoffee: ah missed it. since you bring it up though, i might pay. it would would change a hell of a lot though would it not. would the community be the same as we know it today? would many not pay? but then it would be such a low cost anyway.

cloudsteph: I think it’s going to end up going down that road IMHO, how they’ll manage it Im not sure. I’d pay!

This morning I awoke to this reply from Oisin! wow how strange that it ends up been written about else where!!!

prendio2: bit late for TTQT replies I know but here’s an interesting new angle on what we were discussing yesterday

Stumble It! Digg this Del.icio.us Google Technorati Reddit

Yesterday I decided to restore my jailbroken iPhone back to normal and in doing so also updated to operating system 2.2, while the process was happening I wondered if I was using the phone to it’s full potential?

I realised very quickly there is more to the iPhone then just twinkle, there in front of me was the wordpress app which I had never configured or anything. This app males posting to any off your wordpress blogs whether on wordpress.com or on your own self hosted server a breeze while out and about.

So here I am, in a car going past naas, on my way to Kildare posting, mad ain’t it!

So if you have not downloaded the wordpress app I highly recommend you do and now I am off to see what else i’m missing out on!

Stumble It! Digg this Del.icio.us Google Technorati Reddit