What Happens When A Post Gets Shared By It's Subject

If I'm talking frankly, I would say that my target audience would fall under at least one of these categories.

• My Twitter followers
• People who have nothing better to do
• Those playing click lottery

A good week generally translates into page stats like these.

Then I posted this. My review of Frightened Rabbit's gig at Cabaret Voltaire.

Then this happened:

...and in turn, this happened:

I guess over 800 people reading something I wrote was the whole point of writing a blog but it's left me confused.

Obviously the success was down to the fact that the band retweeted me, meaning that it went to their 24,000 followers, anyone visiting their website that afternoon could see the RT. The Pop Cop linked to it from the goss box (Jan 20), and a few other random people appear to have stuck it on twitter or facebook in some form or other.

It's making me wonder if I'll realistically ever be able to repeat this feat. Despite all these page views, not one comment was posted (have I somehow restricted these?) and nobody new followed the blog. It looks like a few people have read other posts, but that's about it. This really highlights the fact that if this ever does happen again, I'll need the assistance of a RT. Next time, perhaps by someone with 25000 followers!

What does it take to get retweeted? The tweet announcing my blog post didn't contain their handle, "@FRabbits", just "Frightened Rabbit" so I'm guessing they have a search on twitter for their own name. Mine was one of about half a dozen retweets or replies about the gig. It was among quite a few positive ones but many many more negative ones. It's certainly possibly that they took a cursory glance through mentions of their name and chose a few people who were taking their side to RT.

I only decided I was going to blog about the gig about 2 songs in, taking notes on my phone about what was said and what was played. (I didn't really have much else to do- I couldn't move!), then I stayed up writing the post in my frinds flat 'til it was finished (3:45am). I'm thinking the promptness of the post played a major part in it's success. I slept in past noon the next day, by  which time it had already been retweeted and was well on it's way to becoming old news.

My conclusion really has to be that I'd provided the first coherent report on their a messy night, and that's why the band chose to share it. With their seal of approval in place, the page views steadily came in.


If I get the chance to ask, I probably will.

Keyboard Shortcut of the Day: Ctrl-L

Back when I was in better habits, I wrote a post when I'd discovered a new shortcut, shift-ctrl-t which would reopen the last closed tab. Basically I posted it because I'd only just learned about it.

I probably shouldn't admit how amazed I was that I'd managed to live up to that point without it, though I guess I have now.

Anyway, here's the first of two shortcuts I've learned since then, which (if I can remember them at the appropriate time) will save more precious seconds!

It's Ctrl-L today and it quite simply selects the address bar and highlights its contents!

I think before this, I'd probably have clicked on it then hit ctrl-a. That's a whole step, gone before your very eyes!

Huzzah!

Frightened Rabbit at Cab Vol, "Sick Note" 19 January 2012

This show was only announced 6 days in advance, which is never a promising start. Tickets were initially to be on the door but confusingly, a ticketweb link followed 3 days later. There was a lot of mucking about with tickets for the Glasgow show, where people were frantically clicking for hours and the site wouldn't play ball. Thankfully I managed to bag myself a ticket for the Edinburgh show without too much trouble. Bargain at £4!

I got there at about 11 (doors were 10) and spotted the queue. It stretched right down to the Cowgate and round the corner! Thankfully, I could skip it since I already had my tickets. The room gradually filled up until midnight (supposed stage time) by which time it was a towards being uncomfortably busy. It was another half hour til they came on. I've since found out they were outside doing a few songs for the people who'd waited out in the cold for hours and didn't get in. Nice guys really, but let down tonight by some god awful management at Cab Vol.

Even though I'd gone outside to smoke as late as 11:45, I still managed to get a space downstairs, albeit further back. I and the other 199 people that fit in the part of the building that was supposed to usually filled for gigs had a great night, but the other 250-400 distributed through the rest of the place probably weren't impressed.

Anyway, here's the setlist with a few notes, followed by some of Scott's banter I was able to note down

New: Holy (didn't note anything down about it, sorry)
Nothing Like You
New: Dead Now "something wrong with me"
Old Old Fashioned
New: Boxing Night
Snake
New: Backyard Skulls (On the surface reads like a song bt Fred west )
The Modern Leper
Swim Until you Can't See Land
New: Oil Slick "took a walk" "Misery loves you" "disarterous times"
My Backwards Walk (done the new way with delay on the first verse then with the steady beat)
New: State Hospital "magpies handbags" "heart beats like a breeze block falling down the stairs" "bloods thicker than concrete"
Good Arms (didnt skip last line, like he's done for as long as I remember!)
Living on colour
Loneliness (Then with the crowd still singing back the "oh" straight into...)
Square Nine

Encore: Keep Yourself Warm (With Twilight Sad's "The Room" as an outro)
             "You're the grandsons
               Just the grandsons toy in the corner
               don't tell anyone else
               You were seen in the cherry tree
               Look what you have done"

After the first song, Scott gave a bit of an apology. He'd been told there were to be 200 tickets sold online, and 200 on the door. "Well, one of those things were true!"  It was in fact 400 online and 200 on the door. This in a venue I'd expect to have around people comfortably.  The rest, he remarked were invited to sit upstairs and watch the show on a couple of tellys! "You could go on youtube at home and do that for free- at least then there'd be no other cunts getting in the way and no waiting in the cold!

@FRabbits tweets tell a similar story, but that they only let a total of 450 people in, although lots more had paid!

Scott assured the crowd that "Bands might throw this around a bit but we can definitely say we're not coming back here!"

After "Swim" he had a bit of a spiel about the new album being depressing. He mentioned his girlfriend at the time being a little confused about it despite him being generally happy. He said "It turned out to be nice... I think"

"if you like the songs, make sure and fill out a feedback form, that's why we're doing these wee shows!"

After backwards he talked more about the new songs "You get to the point where we can play all the songs with backwards, with our closed eyes and in our sleep. Then someone comes along and says you have to wrote a new album... Fuck off... Dad!"

Great show for me, although I was 3/4 of the way back on the floor. I can assure you that anyone who liked the band would have loved the show had they been where I was or better. It's just unfortunate that that only really covers one third of the attendees. Less if you count those outside.

Kudos to Frightened Rabbit; Paper bags filled with dog shit to Cabaret Voltaire.

Why your internet isnt' as good as you think it is.

I saw a post on the twitter of the Magazine New Scientist about a 12MB/s satellite ISP, which I saw and immediately thought wow! Only when I got halfway down the page did I realize that they'd made a typo, and it was in fact only 12Mb/s.

A little underwhelmed, I posted this slightly cynical reply

Then about 10 minutes later...

Trying to avoid being cocky over this admittedly minor victory I began to wonder how many people really know what they're paying for when they subscribe with an ISP.

For the mostpart, when you see or hear an ad for an ISP, you'll find they quote the bandwidth as something along the lines of "up to 20 megabit". As I see it, they're doing it wrong on two counts. The whole business of "up to" is a complaint all in itself, but using megabits is misleading.

What's most likely to make sense to the average internet user is the download speed. If you're downloading something, the speed (transfer rate) is usually quoted in KB/s or MB/s.

When I first began to use the internet in the late 90's, nearly everyone was using a 56Kbps modem over a phone line.

That's K, as in kilo, as in 1000 (or 1024)
and ps (or "/s") simply meaning "per second"
The B or b is the part which makes the crucial difference.

A lower case b means bits, and a capital B means bytes, and the case of that letter makes an eightfold difference! 1 byte is equal to 8 bits, therefore what might be called a megabit line only allows a transfer rate of 128 kilobytes per second.

Add this to the "up to" and you're not really getting as much as the ad might make you think!

Where I live, the telephone exchanges are really quite dated. This means that the "up to" in the ad really begins to come into play! While someone connected to a brand new exchange might actually get the quoted speed, I would be doing well to get a quarter of that!

Luckily, that only goes for internet through the phone line, and since I go through cable, these same problems don't apply. What's quoted as a 30 megabit connection will (more often than not) allow for downloads of over 3MB/s (30Mb/s speed would be 3.75MB/s). it does however tend to cost a bit more.

There's are websites around (like uswitch) which tell you the capabilities of the local exchange, and tell you what other providers are available. For some reason, people seem to think that different providers will get different speeds, but most of them are about the same!

The only noticeable difference packages would be if they actually used different mediums to connect. BT, Sky, talktalk and all that all use the phone line! Cable is completely seperate.

Mobile broadband, is again of course different, but it's less likely to be better than the phone line. It's possible, don't get me wrong, but you'd have to be far enough away from a phone exchange, but still within good 3G mobile phone coverage. That's could be set to improve when 4G comes around but that's not a sure thing. Mobile coverage is only any good if there aren't a lot of people using it at once! 4G will of course be an improvement when it comes, but there's a limit to it's capacity. We'll have to wait til the end of this year at the earliest to find out. It's using some of the airspace freed up by converting TV to digital.

I've probably rambled on for longer than most of my "readership" 's attention span now.
Thank you, and goodnight

Stupidware

--- This is maybe a bit dated now, since it seems I half-wrote this months ago and I've had it saved as a draft since but I'm sure there'll be another bane of the internet around the corner that these sentiments will be just as applicable to ---

Altogether too much of the internet is garbage. The same content dug up and repackaged in the vain hope that it's sell-by-date can be extended In the case of so called "content farms," they can be devoid of useful content entirely. It's often down to bots, which have been set up to create pages to bring in traffic and gain revenue from advertising. But far too much of what I see is the produce of very real (and unfortunately very human) idiots.

They fall prey to some rouse or other and give it that all-important click. The rubbish then fulfils it's purpose in life and reproduces by sharing itself with all of those who that idiot has deemed their friends.

What inspired me to begin this post was the trend of  rubbish facebook pages demanding that people like them in order to gain access to something that promises to be amazing. It's all too tempting to just click the button and see what it is but in most cases I'm sure the prey are disappointed. Much like these content farms, the page just turns out to be something that was originally posted far enough into the past so that it's probably been forgotten about.

The whole scheme is that by the time you inevitably decide that it wasn't worth liking, you aleady have. This post is paraded in front of your friends with your seal of approval, this completely goes against the whole dynamic of the likeable page where the user should be able to decide based on the content whether this is something worth a 'like'. This has forced them to take that step prematurely.

Occasionally, curiosity will get the better of us, so if you do "like before you leap" only to discover it's shit, all I ask is that you cover your tracks. Just look to the bottom left of the page, and voila:

Seal of approval revoked.

The page will then disappear from your page and only the eagle eyed among your friends will have caught any glimpse of your atrocity! Thank you and goodnight.

Getting a handle on things

While signing up for the newly launched Netflix on Monday I realised something horrible.
I've been using the same username for about 8 years.
I use it for everything, Twitter, Facebook, last.fm, xbox live and now of course Netflix.

As far as I remember thought it up while joining a forum. This was the first time I didn't want to use my real name for some reason. Anyway, I must've thought this handle was hilarious or something because I immediately stopped using my [firstinitial][surname][integer]@[isp].co.uk (freeserve dialup at the time, I believe) address and migrated everything to my brand spanking new lendafender@hotmail.com.

Let's make this clear - I HATE IT!

Wondering what it means? So am I!. 

Was I making some kind of joke about borrowing a guitar? Did I play guitar in 2004? Is it something about a fender bender, like a car crash? I just don't know.

On more than one occasion, I've gone part-way through the process of changing it on some sites, only to rage close the tab thinking the same thing each time Can I really be sure that I won't hate this new username in 6 months time? 

That's the only thing that's stopped me from moving to anything new.

I guess I'm stuck with it. When it comes down to it, I think I'd rather stick to the login I hate than become one of those bastards that changes their handle as often than their underwear.