I've Been Thinking About This…

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I blogged about the Obama/McCain twitters last November, about how Obama’s team really understood the concept early on, but McCain’s team just didn’t get it until very late in the play. Now I’m seeing something else about Twitter for President-elect Obama – according to TwitterCounter.com, on January 1 he had 152,041 followers; by Jan 2 another 1,130, the next day an additional 546, then 757, then an incredible 7,949 (8,000 new followers in a day!), then 2,913. Yesterday a mere 78 new followers picked him up.

Past Month's Obama Twitter Followers

Past Week's Obama Twitter Followers

Now it’s true that Twitter has had its problems, and it could be that the enormous number might be simply a reload of a number of followers who were deleted earlier (there was a massive drop from Dec 31 to Jan 1 of 5,757 followers – running a trend line over the previous points of the graph would suggest they didn’t actually stop following him, and it does seem unlikely for such a mass migration in a single day).

Nevertheless, the point is clear – his last Twitter was on November 5, when he had 117,021 followers. In the 2 months since then, 48,393 people have added themselves as followers to a feed that has sent nothing – a rate of 768 per day! And why? In order to add yourself as a follower, you usually go to the person’s main twitter page, where you would see that nothing has been sent out since the election ended.

More significantly, as President, and by extension as President-elect, anything he puts onto Twitter becomes instant public knowledge that cannot be pulled back (rather like the Presidential Records Act on steroids). There’s no way anyone with a brain would add that risk to all the others that go with the job already. Keeping the account clean and untouched since the end of the elections is much smarter.

So why, in the face of overwhelming evidence that the account has been dormant for 2 months and that it is unlikely to be used going forward, are people piling onto it at such a rate? I suppose the logic is ‘just in case’ and ‘if he doesn’t send anything it won’t matter anyway’. One sad possibility – he’s following 5,000 more people than are following him, which suggests an automatic response to the follow request; I suppose there could be twitterers who want to boost their ‘twitter grade’ by following him – although that would be taking the picayune to a whole new level.

I tell you this, though: with this many followers, if he does post anything, it may bring Twitter to its knees!

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Upgraded the blog to WordPress version 2.7 today.

I checked for auto-updaters, in the hope that this would be a no-brainer. Version 2.7 apparently now has one built in, but I had to get to that version first. There is an automatic upgrader plugin (‘wpau’) that is now retired. It officially supported versions from 1.5.2 up to 2.6.1; it unofficially supports through 2.7 … sometimes. Of the 16 comments I looked at: 7 people loved the wpau (although one of them subsequently failed when using 2.7’s updater, and another succeeded by skipping the backup step). 8 people failed with wpau and one person said to do the upgrade manually. It’s hard to see the group being more evenly split!

In the end, I took the painful safe route – I backed up the DB, then the other files, and then followed the steps in the detailed documentation. One minor note: The list of compatible plugins is a long way short of complete. This wasn’t a problem though; I turned on all the other plugins one by one and they all worked fine. I came out all right in the end, with one minor problem: There are three new security variables to be placed in the config file. Installing these meant that I couldn’t log on as the admin, even when I deleted my cookies. So I took the variables back out and everything was OK. There are no instructions for how to get around this issue; stay tuned for the resolution.

Running a quick cross-platform test, I also noticed that Outbrain doesn’t work in Opera, although it is fine in Firefox 3.0 and IE7. Running the error console on Opera showed a lot of width, height and null errors from the page, 3 or 4 of which were from Outbrain (and another 3 or 4 from Amazon) and none of which looked significant. (Interestingly, turning on the FF error console showed a completely different set of errors.)

So: not too bad a trip; nothing major encountered, and the blog is up and running on the latest platform version. And henceforth – automatic updates.

[Update Jan 12, 2009: Found out that Twitter Updater doesn't work anymore, so I have to put out the Twitters by hand. On the good side, I've successfully followed the instructions to set up threaded comments - not that I have that many comments to begin with...]

[Update Jan 13, 2009: Bumped into TwitterPress which supposedly does the auto-notification thingy, so I was going to try that with the next post. However, when I saved this comment, it sent out a tweet. Turns out it works by sending out a Twitter not for the initial publishing of a post but for any update, as long as it hasn't twittered about the post before. So if I update a post (like this one), it Twitters about it (once). Also, although it says it will put out the permalink, it actually puts out the deprecated post ID. So that had to go. I've installed Birdfeeder instead - that seems to be working properly.]

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I’ve just installed the new version of Xobni – 1.6.3 – for Outlook. Xobni sits inside Outlook and acts as a helper, reading emails, indexing the content for searches and putting info about your contacts into a sidebar. I’ve used it quite a bit, although I have to say it puts a load on the system at Outlook startup time. Anyway, here are my thoughts on the new release:

• The download required me to uninstall the old version before I could install the new one. Not the best of approaches, but I did that. Then it re-indexed my email – again, not the most convenient approach.
• The new version links into Facebook to get certain pieces of information. I like the feature up to a point – problem is, a lot of my contacts have fairly common names, so I have to select the person I’m connecting to from a list – and there’s very little info about them, so often it’s just not possible to determine who this is. Not everyone on Facebook has a photo. When I do get a positive hit, though, it’s a winner.
• The LinkedIn connection from the previous incarnation is still there, and that’s a winner too. This time they’ve added Hoovers, which will go over ‘big’ with business-oriented users, and Skype contact support, which will go over big with a mostly different audience.
• There are some nice feature tweaks from the old version that I appreciate – the drop-down menu approach to the LinkedIn, Facebook & Hoover buttons; the new ‘Start over’ button (needed that!). I also like the more detailed aproach to the profile editing. The ability to pull info into the profile from verious sources available – photo from Outlook, LinkedIn, Facebook or Xobni; position & company info from Outlook, LinkedIn or Xobni – these are good additions. Behind the scenes there seem to have been a few adjustments – a little faster, I think, and the logic is definitely improved – it no longer confuses me with another Steve when it begins to build the indexes (it used to take about 30 minutes to figure out my correct name).
• Ranking still seems to be wrong based on the numbers – someone with 365 emails total is being ranked higher than someone with 366, and one friend with 3 total is ranked at 10, while another with 110 is ranked at 12! I don’t get that, but it’s not keeping me up at night.

At this point, the only confusion I have is – how do I merge profiles? It used to be that by giving 2 email addresses the same name, the profiles were merged. Now this doesn’t seem to happen. I liked the old approach, because it meant that I had all their current (and past) emails in one place (and it also merged their ranks); now if I click on someone I may not get the email I want.

My wishlist – include Twitter addresses, and allow me to send/receive my Twitters through the Xobni addon. I’m already using OutTwit for this – it has a few flaws, but combining products would be sweet. You could write the Twitter in the area currently used as the drop-down menu (hint, hint).

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Can’t believe I’m writing this! I’m no political analyst. But something I’ve just seen has struck me – and it looks so obvious in retrospect that I’m writing this, my first ever (and probably last) political commentary.

I’m not a particularly savvy person, but I noticed that both Obama and McCain used Twitter in their campaigns. I went to their Twitter pages to see their connections and such. Here’s what I found, looking only at the top page of each (the top page shows the latest 20 Twitter messages -

here’s McCain’s (click to enlarge)

and here’s Obama’s ).

Obama was communicating about 3 times as frequently as McCain

McCain stopped broadcasting on October 24 (11 days before the election) – his last 20 Twitters cover Sept 27 through October 24 … 28 days, or an average of about 0.7 Twitters per day. On the other hand, Obama stopped broadcasting on November 5 (the day after the election) – his last 20 Twitters cover October 27 through November 5 … 10 days, or an average of 2 Twitters per day.

The content is decidedly different

These last 20 Twitters break down as follows:

McCain: campaign info: 9; attack: 9; complaints: 2; references to opponents: 6.

Obama: campaign info: 16; attack: 0; complaints: 0; references to opponents: 0; 4 appeals, mostly to vote; 1 “thank you” at the end.

Across the whole campaign, Obama was Twittering 12 times as long as McCain and at about the same rate overall

McCain started using Twitter: Sept 19 … 46 days before the election, while Obama started using Twitter on April 29, 2007 … 555 days before the election!

Total Twitters throughout McCain’s campaign: 25, compared to 263 total Twitters throughout Obama’s campaign.

Obama built up a following more than 25 times the size of McCain’s

People following McCain: 4,863 – while a massive 130,340 people followed Obama.

My rough interpretation

1. Obama’s team understood the value of this technology early on in the run-up; McCain’s team did not. They both have nice web sites, but having a good web site was the “we’re impressive” thing to do back in 1996 – it’s de rigueur now. One of the ‘in’ technologies in the past couple of years has been Twitter. Obama’s team recognized it very early on; McCain’s team took nearly 17 months to catch on.
2. Cost of reaction vs action: time spent telling people how bad your opponent is is time and opportunity lost telling them how good you are. In a race that focuses so much on personality, it’s rarely useful to point to the other person for any reason.
3. Recall that toward the end of the 1996 election, Dole finally gave in to his advisors who had been recommending that he attack Clinton on character. It was a significant (and very noticed) volte-face. On the other hand, Clinton stopped most attacks, and came off looking like the gentleman politician. The impact was that the attacks hurt Dole a great deal more than Clinton. The public gets very tired of constant mud-slinging and wingeing. McCain’s team did not seem to have learnt this lesson. Again, toward the end, Obama’s team stayed relatively clean here, and he came across as the ‘bigger man’. Perception and name retention are everything in trying to sway voters at this late point in a campaign, so McCain’s team were in effect campaigning for Obama at this point.

The above clearly isn’t the single determining factor – or even necessarily a main reason – of who won and who lost. But it might well be symptomatic.

</politics>!

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I’ve been looking at blog maps for one that does what I want. It doesn’t seem to be too much to ask…

1. Free!
2. Shows the visits on the map
3. Tracks visits for at least a month
4. Counts the total visits
5. Zooms in or identifies towns clearly
6. Widget thumbnail image scales well in the sidebar
7. Doesn’t distract the user from the blog post

(more…)

• Approximate (very gross!) number of atoms in the human DNA –

10,000,000,000.

• Approximate number of atoms in all DNA molecules in a human being –

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

• Approximate number of atoms in all DNA molecules in all human beings –

6,700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

• Exact number of Beings who know about every atom –

1.

• Level of difficulty God has in managing all this –

0.

• Level of difficulty God has in managing me –

Really, really high.

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