Imagine you’re running social media for a public library service. You’ve got ten libraries in the service and you want to use Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

How many accounts do you need?

The simplest approach, for you, is just to have one account on each service. You might have a Twitter account that covers everything in the whole library service, a Facebook page which people can “fan” and get updates, and a Flickr account where you post all your photos.

With all these accounts, you’ll probably be doing a fair bit of cross-posting, too. Some of your photos — possibly all of them — will go on Facebook as well as Flickr. Twitter doesn’t handle photos very well so you might find yourself posting links to Flickr photo pages there. You can even automate this using an RSS to Twitter service like Twitterfeed.

This isn’t going to be much fun for your readers. People tend to be interested in one or maybe two local libraries, not the whole service. An event on the other side of the borough probably doesn’t interest them, let alone hearing about new titles in stock or changes to opening times there. So people get deluged with information that they have to skip past to get to the 10% that matters to them. Some people will unsubscribe, feeling your services don’t provide good value for their time. Others will just feel a bit ambivalent skipping past the noise every time they read your feed. It’s not a great approach for them.

Social networks make it easy for people to mash feeds of content together but very hard for them to filter them. I can mash by simply choosing what I subscribe to. And filtering is the same thing — choosing what I don’t subscribe to. Most social media tools make it difficult or impossible to filter within a feed. So you have to do this on behalf of the people who might read what you write: separate your content into as many distinct and separate feeds as necessary. For a library service, this might mean creating separate feeds for each library and possibly ones for subject areas or children and teens too. This is more work for writers, and rightly so. Managing several accounts is harder than just one. But the onus is on us to do the legwork so our readers don’t have to plough through mountains of irrelevant content to get to the good stuff. The reward is that our readers will care more about what we write and consequently we’ll probably have more of them too.

The closely related topic of recycling identical content across several media or social networks is skilfully dissected at Unlink Your Feeds.

You’re free to republish/copy this article under the Creative Commons Attribution licence provided you credit me (Adrian Short) and give a link back to the original article. Thanks.

This article is now available as audio in two parts on AudioBoo.

Ethical Consumer has a feature called Love this, ban that! which asks an assortment of the green and the good which saintly products they love and which evil ones they’d ban. Sadly, only Mayor Boris took the opportunity to challenge the premise that banning things is the best way to steer society down a more sustainable path and to allay the well-founded suspicion among many outside the green ghetto that environmentalists tend to be ban-happy authoritarians.

Inexplicably, Ethical Consumer didn’t contact me to take part in their survey but I’d like to nominate the bicycle as my favourite “ethical consumer product” and the cycle helmet for an immediate, total ban backed up with the full force and violence of the criminal justice system.

I hope that choosing the bicycle as my preferred product needs little explanation or justification but my proposed ban on cycle helmets might be a little more problematic. For a long time I’ve harboured the suspicion in my more paranoid moments that there’s some kind of collusion between the road/oil lobby and elements of the cycling fraternity to ensure that cycling in Britain remains a marginalised, unpleasant and largely despised activity.

For those of us looking to travel between around a mile and eight miles without an extreme amount of cargo, the bike should be the default choice. Done right, cycling is convenient, cheap, safe, accessible, fun and sustianable.

Done right.

It’s not possible to uninvent the bicycle but if Shadowy Forces wanted to minimise the number of people cycling so as to benefit their Evil Agenda they’d probably want to chip away at all the things that make cycling potentially great so as to diminish the whole experience. If you can’t ban it, knacker it.

Here’s how to do it:

Cycling is cheap? Can’t have that. Now, let’s see. Let’s start at the obvious place by making bikes more expensive. Load them with features that cost more to build (complex braking systems, gears, suspension) and require expensive expert maintenance rather than DIY. Turn the bike from an everyday utilitarian thing, a utensil, and make it a product. Desirable. Fashionable. Consumerable. There’s a lot of choice, so shop around. Read reviews. Get recommendations. Worry, because it matters. Who’d want to be seen riding a cheap bike? An unfashionable bike? A tatty bike? Now accessorise. That expensive bike needs an expensive lock — or two. Got to protect your investment. Buy insurance. (Shop around, shop around.) Compare the tensile strengths and style options and get a helmet. A bone dome. A skid lid. Don’t be cheap — your skull could depend on it. Get a hi-viz jacket that’s more breathable than a string vest and only fifty times the price. Padded shorts for that tiny, bony saddle. Special shoes to couple perfectly with your special pedals. A messenger bag from this week’s premium brand.

Here’s the safety strategy: Make it less safe and make it feel less safe. The best way to make cycling less safe is for cyclists to ride faster. Encourage this wherever possible. Forget ambling, casual, pedestrian images of cycling. Emphasise sport, fitness, competition. Measure speed. Sell speedometers and odometers. Get people to monitor their performance. Track their MPH, their heartrates, their calories, their carbon footprints. Compare with others. Compete. Idolise road racers, couriers, extreme mountain bikers, BMXers. Alleycatters. Lance Armstrong. Jump the red light. Race other cyclists. Race cars. Race the clock. Race, race. It’s not fun unless you’re taking risks. Life is one big risk, right? Cycling just got a whole lot more dangerous for the sake of a marginal shortening of the average journey. Ohh, wipeout. Nice one.

Now the perception of safety. Talk about safety, safety, safety so everyone thinks danger, danger, danger. Don’t show images of cyclists without helmets, especially not children. Never children. Sending your children out on bikes without helmets is tantamount to child abuse. Don’t you care? Don’t you care about the children? Would you send them out to their deaths? Photos of cyclists without helmets are like images of people with cigarettes. Historical documents. Anachronisms. Forbidden outside the intellectual safety of the academy. Be safe, be seen. Hi viz. Yellow jacket, yellow jersey. £100 lights that can dazzle shipping 20 miles off the coast. Lumens. Got to get more lumens. You need a bell? You need a foghorn. Radar. Missiles, if you could get them. And you need training, because it’s a war out there. Drivers hate you. Pedestrians hate you. Other cyclists hate you. The law is indifferent, the police don’t care. Every other road user will kill you if they get a chance. Unless you get trained. Unless you can stay one step ahead of them. Unless you can get them first. So you go to boot camp. You get trained. You are approved. You are a Cyclist. You feel a little bit safer in that dangerous place. Until you see the ghost bike. Don’t be a statistic like the pallid, mangled wreck chained to the lamppost at the roundabout. Don’t be a victim. Go faster. Be a winner. Beat them.

Do you smell? People shouldn’t smell. If you cycle, if you cycle fast, you’ll smell. You’ll need a shower. Does your workplace have showers? No? Don’t cycle. Does the pub have showers? No? Don’t cycle. Does the shopping centre have showers? No? Please, don’t cycle.

If you don’t mind smelling, you can’t cycle to work because they don’t have lockers. You need a locker for your helmet. Your jacket. Your padded shorts. Your special shoes that couple so, so perfectly with your special pedals. Your quick-release (eezy-steal) saddle. Your lights and all their lumens. Your handlebar computer with its data, its intimate knowledge of your body, your performance, your lifestyle. Your hydration system. Your lock. You worry about your lock. It cost more than your first bike. And the bike itself? That needs a CCTV-monitored, thumbprint-secured, climate-controlled vault. A lamppost won’t do because your bike takes a month’s work to buy but only a minute or two to steal.

Are you fat? Don’t cycle. You don’t, do you? Fit people cycle. Fat people do not cycle. (Fat people do not swim. Fat people do not run. Soon, fat people will not walk.) Cycling is about fitness. Fat people, un-fit people, do not cycle. Fat people look ridiculous on bikes. Fat people look crap in lycra. Fat people look even more fat in lycra, if such a tragically hilarious thing could be possible. Fat people can only go slowly but cyclists must go fast. They must race. They must perform. They must compete. Fat people are not fast off the lights. Fat people do not look like Lance Fuckingarmfuckingstrong. Fat people must enshroud themselves in cars as a prophylactic against polite society’s sight of their ungainly self-propelled movement. Fat people must squeeze themselves onto buses and trains and tubes with all the other huffers and puffers, the children and the old people, the timid and the nearly dead. They say obese but you read fat. People like you are an epidemic. You are contagious and the things you must do to make the rest of us safe you are not allowed to do. Fat is getting thinner all the time. If you are fat, don’t cycle. You don’t, do you?

Cycle helmets are the most visible and potent symbol of all that’s wrong with Britain’s (anti-)cycling culture. Cycle helmets say we cannot cycle without the right precautions, the right equipment, the right infrastructure, the right training. Cycle helmets say there must be more to cycling than a person, two wheels and the surface of the Earth. Cycle helmets say that cycling is more dangerous than not cycling. Let’s ban them now before it’s too late. Let’s lock up all the people who buy them, who sell them, who use them. Let’s drag them off to jail in handcuffs, in tears.

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House Rules for Anytown Chat

My aim is for Anytown Chat to be a place where everyone can feel comfortable debating both serious issues and the lighter side of life. In order for this to happen, there are a few House Rules which will be enforced sensibly.

By registering with this website you agree to follow these rules.

1. Be yourself

(Snip this clause if you’re happy to have pseudonymous members.)

Use your real name as your username when registering with Anytown Chat. Anytown is a real place full of real people, many of whom know each other in real life. Using real names rather than nicknames allows members to identify others that they already know and get to know people that they don’t. It also ensures that members are accountable for their words: If you wouldn’t put your own name to a comment, it probably doesn’t belong here anyway.

You are encouraged but not required to show your face by creating a profile picture of yourself.

2. No bad language

Most of us have a broad vocabulary of swear words but Anytown Chat is not the place to use them. Avoiding bad language helps to keep a civilised and intelligent tone to discussions. Use your imagination and where that fails, just restrain yourself.

3. No personal attacks

Anytown Chat is about sharing information, learning and debating. It’s not a place for personal disputes and vendettas. By all means strongly dispute others’ ideas and arguments but if you make it personal you’ll be asked to stop.

4. Respect others’ privacy

This is a public website and everything you write here can be viewed by anyone. Practically, things written here will be permanently available to the rest of the world. Do not disclose any private or personal information about other people, whether they are members here or not. This isn’t Facebook or your private email. The whole world can see what you’re writing.

5. Avoid discrimination

If you hold any unpleasant bigotries about people on the grounds of their sex, sexuality, age, nationality, ethnicity or (lack of) religion, this isn’t the place to express them. Get yourself a blog if you really must. These topics will inevitably come up in discussions but I hope that everyone is able to debate them without making the site uncomfortable for others to participate.

6. No porn

This is a site for adults, not an “adult site.” Don’t post porn, whether words, pictures, videos or links to any of these things.

7. Respect the law

Hate speech, libel, incitement, copyright infringement and obscenity are all forbidden here.

8. No spam

Don’t post just to advertise your website or business. If in doubt, please ask first [create a link here to your email address or contact page]. It’s fine to use your business or professional web address in your member profile.

These rules will be reviewed and changed if necessary in the light of experience.

Enjoy yourself

While it’s not a rule, I hope you enjoy chatting here and that these rules enhance rather than inhibit that enjoyment.

Francis Maude

Photo from Francis Maude, Creative Commons by-nc-nd UK licence.

As news reaches us that Gordon Brown has shut down his public email address, Conservative chairman Francis Maude goes on the offensive:

Gordon Brown is spending taxpayers’ money on the latest digital gimmicks, from Twitter to Flickr, but can’t be bothered to give out a simple email address.

The beleaguered Prime Minister is literally retreating to his Downing Street bunker, cutting himself off from an angry and disillusioned electorate.

Are Twitter and Flickr “digital gimmicks” that are beneath any self-respecting elected politician? Should government spend taxpayers’ money on such things? One could ask the same question about telephones, television, radio and the Internet more generally. They are communications media whose value for any particular purpose depends entirely what one does with them.

Barack Obama has amassed over 500,000 followers on Twitter and it doesn’t seem to have hurt his prospects much. (Shame he’s been too busy “leading” the “free world” to tweet lately.) Closer to home and somewhat more modestly, a man by the name of Johnson who seems to have found himself in charge of a large city happily Twitters away to a flock of 20,000 Londoners. If I remember correctly, the chap is the Conservatives’ most senior elected politician.

Further down the food chain, CllrTweeps has found 193 councillors from 129 councils on Twitter, including 54 Conservative authorities.

If social media networks are only used by politicans to broadcast top-down messages to a passive audience then they have little value beyond more traditional methods including conventional websites. But Gordon Brown’s Twitter has collected over 270,000 followers which his aides use to engage in an ongoing direct conversation with a substantial chunk of the public. If Mr Maude is right, presumably those 270,000 people — and all those thousands that follow councillors, MPs and aspiring politicians elsewhere — are wrong.

Do you think they vote, Mr Maude? Answers on a postcard (in 140 characters or fewer, please.)

Like this post? Follow me on Twitter.

Enjoy.

2 * 3

into the search box, you’ll get 6. Pretty handy, but nothing you couldn’t do easily with your desktop or computer calculator.

Where Google Calculator comes into its own is handling almost every conceivable unit of weight, volume, time and even computer storage. This is great if you need to estimate an upload or download time. Here’s how you do it.

My broadband uploads at a nominal 256 kilobits per second and downloads at 2 megabits per second. Bear in mind that these speeds are always theoretical maximums and you’ll never achieve exactly that in practice. There are plenty of online broadband speed calculators if you want to know what your real speeds are.

Google Calculator lets you use full names for units or abbreviations. It’ll take MB for megabytes, Mb for megabits, Kb for kilobits, etc. Make sure you know your bits from your bytes.

In fact, we can get Google Calculator to do this conversion for us if we’re not sure.

Type: 1 byte in bits

and you’ll get:

1 byte = 8 bits

Now, let’s estimate the time it’ll take to download a fat 70 megabyte podcast. I need to dash out the door in 5 minutes. Can I do it?

Type: 70 MB / 2 Mb / sec

That’s 70 megabytes at 2 megabits per second.

You’ll get the answer:

(70 MB) / (2 (Mb / sec)) = 4.66666667 minutes

So we can just do it. It’ll probably take a bit longer than five minutes but we’ve got an idea of roughly how long it’ll take.

It works the same for uploads. Say we’ve just shot a great video clip and we want to upload it to our favourite video sharing site.

The video file straight from the camera is a hefty 190 megabytes. How long will that take to upload?

Type: 190 MB / 256 Kb / sec

That’s 190 megabytes at 256 kilobits per second.

This gives the answer:

(190 MB) / (256 (Kb / sec)) = 1.68888889 hours

A hefty upload that’ll be. Perhaps it’d be best to use a conversion tool to reduce the size and quality of the video if that’s going to be a problem.

At least with Google Calculator we can make good estimates and use them to make good decisions.

So here’s a list of what my “simple” Nokia 1100 can do, and what I actually do with it.

Features that I have:

1. telephone
2. SMS
3. contacts
4. call register
5. choice of ring tones
6. profiles (stored sets of settings)
7. headset jack
8. torch
9. welcome note (customisable message when you switch on)
10. call diversion
11. automatic redialling
12. speed dialling
13. clock
14. alarms
15. reminders
16. games
17. calculator
18. stopwatch
19. countdown timer
20. ringtone composer
21. screensaver

1. telephone
2. SMS
3. contacts
4. call register
5. clock

You want to collect the dates of birth of a group of people so that you can analyse and segment the group by age, but asking for a date of birth isn’t necessary for any specific reason and many people in the group may balk at giving you this private information.

Discussion

It’s a common conceit among people designing forms and surveys that if you ask a question, you’ll get a useful answer, but when it comes to personal information the wise designer treads very carefully.

A general rule for form design is that every extra question reduces your response rate and diminishes the chances of the form being completed accurately. Every time you add something you take something away.

As people become more conscious of the real or imagined incidence of identity theft and the predations of overzealous marketers, they are increasingly reluctant to part with personal information even where they might otherwise be happy to provide information for a purpose with which they agree.

As consumers, we understand that there are times when our date of birth will be required for official purposes. We don’t expect to be able to open a bank account or obtain a passport without it. But when we’re completing a marketing survey or simply registering with an online shop it can often feel like too much information. I don’t get asked my date of birth when I shop on the high street — why would I need to disclose it just to use the online equivalent?

Having age information about a group of people is often useful or even necessary for researchers and marketers. They might want to produce an age breakdown of a group of people using their service or participating in their research, or validate that people in a group qualify to be there where there is an age restriction.

One solution to the problem is to ask respondents for their age group rather than their date of birth:

How old are you?

• under 18
• 18-25
• 26-39
• 40-49
• 50-64
• 65 and over

This is less intrusive for respondents and more likely to gain a response than asking for a date of birth. It allows a report to be produced grouping the respondents by frequency under these headings.

Unfortunately, this approach is very inflexible. Once the respondents are placed into these groups you cannot produce a different age segmentation. In the above example, if there were a subsequent requirement to count all the people aged under 30, you couldn’t.

This approach also fails if the data are to be used over time. The age segmentations will be correct at the time of data collection but will rapidly obsolesce after that. It works for a one-time snapshot such as a survey but doesn’t work for a group who will be participating over time such as members of an organisation or customers of a business.

Resolution

These issues can often be better resolved by asking respondents for their ages and then calculating an estimated date of birth for them which is then stored. Ages are less specific than precise dates of birth and asking for them is more likely to gain an accurate response.

How old are you? _____________ (write in your age; leave it blank if you’d rather not say)

If a person responds that they are 30 today, we cannot possibly know their birthday. It could be any day between today (they’ve just turned 30) up to a year’s time less a day.

So calulate the estimated date of birth to be:

today – respondent’s age in years – six months

While there is only a 1 in 365 (ish) chance of estimating the date of birth correctly for each individual, by assuming that each person is half way towards their next birthday you prevent skewing the overall age breakdown for the group either too low or too high.

Ensure that your database or spreadsheet column is called estimated date of birth to prevent subsequent users assuming that these DOBs are accurate.

Using these estimated dates of birth you can produce sufficiently accurate age segmentations at any time in the future regardless of how you define the segment boundaries.

As a caveat, be aware that while this technique allows you to estimate the number of people in the group, say, under 30, if there’s an absolutely specific reason to find the actual members that are under 30, you can’t. You’ll get a few false positives that you’re estimating to be under 30 even though they’ve already reached their 30th birthdays.