Sonnett III

By on July 10, 2011 in Poetry

One day, when I had been away from you,
I knew what I had been too scared to think.
My days are filled no longer with just you,
And willingly I will return a wink.
It took some time, but distance dulled the thoughts
Which scribbled me through high school every day.
My stomach now no longer ties in knots
And “cross his path” games I no longer play.
We’ve grown apart, that I can’t deny;
I want to miss your dimples and your walk.
And oh, I wish I knew the reason why
I never even tremor when you talk.
     For all the times I was, to you, a bore,
     It hurts that I don’t love you anymore.

March, 1980

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Tune Up Your Twitter Feed

By on July 8, 2011 in Life Online

If you’ve been on Twitter for any length of time, you’re probably following a fair number of accounts (for those who have the opposite issue, I’ll post soon about how to find good accounts to follow). If you follow many more than a few hundred your stream can become unruly, if not entirely unmanageable.

You can handle this in a few ways:

  • Do nothing.
  • Use Twitter lists and apps (e.g. TweetDeck, HootSuite) to prioritize feeds into lists, groups or columns.
  • Pare down the number of accounts you follow.

It’s the last option I’ll address here. I use a combination of techniques to regularly manage the accounts I follow, and I use several different services to accomplish them.

1. I unfollow accounts that no longer add value to my feed. To help assess this I use a service called TwitCleaner. TwitCleaner doesn’t charge for its services. It analyzes all the accounts you follow, and lets you know which ones it thinks you might want to unfollow. You’ll get a DM with a link to your report page once TwitCleaner finishes its analysis. It will display its findings, in summary and in detail.

Here’s what the categories mean:

  • Potentially dodgy behavior (nothing but links, consistently repeating the same URL)
  • Other dodgy behavior, now absent (exhibited the behavior above but hasn’t posted anything for a while)
  • No activity in over a month
  • Not much interaction (fewer than 10 tweets, bots that pump out RSS feeds, hardly follow anyone,)
  • All talk, all the time (average over 24 tweets/day in addition to @replies)
  • Little original content (most of what they tweet is RTs of others)
  • Not so interesting (they talk about themselves more than half of the time, or a very low percentage of the accounts they follow follow them back)

You decide, on an account by account basis, whether to unfollow any of the accounts it suggests as candidates. For example: News feeds and celebrity accounts tend to follow few accounts back; it doesn’t mean you should stop following if you’re interested in what they have to say.

On the other hand, you’ll probably find at least a few accounts to unfollow, for one reason or another. You can also ask TwitCleaner to tell you how your account looks to others who use their service. The results may surprise you!

2. I get a daily report of accounts that have unfollowed me from SocialGrapple. (A link to the report comes via email, which is super handy, although I could generate the same information by visiting the website.) If I was only following any of those accounts as a courtesy, or for a specific time-limited reason like a trip or an online promotion that is over, I’ll likely unfollow back. SocialGrapple will also help you decide whether to check out any of your newest followers more carefully by letting you know if they’re new, have no avatar, a bad ratio of followers to following, etc.

It also shows if you if you’re now “stalking” an account that’s unfollowed you (meaning you’re still following that account). Note: If I remain interested in what that person or feed has to say, I continue to follow even though they’ve unfollowed me. I believe in asynchronous following. I don’t follow people just because they follow me; I follow them because I’m interested in what they’re saying. If someone doesn’t feel the same way about what I’m saying, for whatever reason, c’est la vie.

SocialGrapple isn’t free, but has options ranging from $14 to $125 per month. Each permits up to a certain number s of accounts and keywords to be followed. It’s a really useful service if you’re managing more than one account or if your own account is fairly active. It offers timeline analytics and you can analyze current and potential feeds you’re following by keyword.

3. For an alternate look at accounts to consider unfollowing, I use commun.it. Currently in beta, this service is about building and managing online relationships. With its suggestions for accounts to unfollow, it looks at accounts that have low engagement with you and prioritizes them in terms of relevance and their own influence. That makes sense; a highly influential account is likely to have many followers, which could explains their lower engagement level with any given follower (i.e you).

 

One final note:  Online reputation measurers (e.g. Klout, PeerIndex) base their estimate of your influence on factors including how engaged your followers are with you (meaning the percentage of your followers who mention, reply and retweet you). If you’re following a bunch of bots or inactive accounts, your scores may suffer because of it. If increasing your Klout score is important to you, that’s another reason to make sure you’re only following accounts that matter to you.

What tools or services do you use to manage your Twitter feed? Please have at it in the comments.

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Hydrangeas on the front patio

By on June 29, 2011 in Photos

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Hotel Keppler, Paris

By on June 23, 2011 in Travel

Last month we spent a wonderful – and all-too-brief – night at the lovely Hotel Keppler in Paris. It is exactly the kind of place we love: small, discreet, chic. We made the booking through Tablet Hotels (I’m a member of their Tablet Plus program). The hotel is located in the fashion district, a block and a half from the Champs-Elysees, a walk from L’Arc de Triomphe, The Grand Palais, and dozens of restaurants and designer boutiques.

One of the reasons we selected the Keppler is because they have rooms that can sleep three adults (our college-age son was with us).

Upon our arrival, the Tablet Plus program kicked in: we were given a welcome glass of Champagne, guaranteed late checkout, free wireless for all our devices and – best of all – an upgrade to the Penthouse Suite, pictured below. Such bliss: two full bedrooms, two full bathrooms, and a living room with a proper desk, a well-stocked fridge, a Nespresso machine AND a view of La Tour Eiffel.

This is the Penthouse suite in which we stayed.

 

We slept in and so were unable to take advantage of our complimentary (again thanks to Tablet Plus) breakfast in their charming dining room, or to use the fitness room. However, we very much look forward to going back as soon as we can and rectifying that!

Hotel Keppler
12, Rue Keppler
75116 Paris, France
+33 01 47 20 65 05

http://www.keppler.fr/

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On Fame

By on May 31, 2011 in Privacy

In his new autobiography Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Rob Lowe explains fame from the famous person’s point of view. It’s something I’d never considered before, and yet it makes blinding sense. In this case, the reference is to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Lowe once praised the film to Coppola, who replied

You know, Rob, to me The Godfather is like that lamp, he says, pointing. It exists. It’s right there. People have opinions about it. The real Godfather, for me, is the experience I had making it.

It took Lowe years, he says, to fully comprehend the remark. Here’s his explanation:

“If you are fortunate enough to be part of a hit, particularly a transcendent one, all emotional ownership [of it] is transferred from you to the audience. They judge it and embrace it; project their own hopes, dreams and fears onto it; take their personal meaning from its themes, and with these investments it becomes theirs. The significance of your participation pales in comparison to the significance the project has on their imaginations. And so, you are left outside of the phenomenon. Just as Paul McCartney can never experience The Beatles, Francis Ford Coppola can never experience The Godfather. It becomes a lamp.”

The book, by the way, has loads of dishy tales about Lowe’s family, friends and films. It’s a quick, entertaining and occasionally illuminating read.

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