It’s Snowing On Twitter

It’s been snowing in London for about 5 minutes and Twitter’s gone crazy with excited reports from around town. Google is on the ball again and has picked up the trend already by showing a live feed on the SERPs. Simply search for “snow london” to check out the tweets galloping in (or see screenshot above.)

Notable tweets include ” As quickly as snow arrived, its stopped here. Snow in London is like BA Staff: wont be around much during Christmas” and the news story “London sacrifices virgins after centimetre of snow.”

Puppies Will Destroy The Earth

They will indeed, according to the authors of a new book called Time to Eat the Dog?. They’ve investigated various pets and their ecological pawprints and compared them to more traditional evils such as cars. It turns out that our furry friends, especially bigger dogs such as German Shepherds and Saint Bernards, can use up more resources than a big manly Toyota Land Cruiser. And a Volkswagen Golf is about as bad as a cat. It’s all in the graph above.

How do they know that? Well, the way an Ecological Footprint of say a hamster is measured is by looking at how much food it eats and estimating how much land you need to produce it, per year. The footprint units are therefore hectares. Similarly for a car, they work out the materials needed, the various bits of metal and plastic, plus an average annual fuel consumption, to find out an equivalent measure of land use. Put all these on a graph and pets look quite environmentally unfriendly.

I think it just goes to show that nearly everything you do is bad for the environment, unless you ride your Cocker Spaniel for the daily commute. In which case you should be reading this behind bars.

PS: I’ve looked at the same stats for people too, you can see the graph here. There is a huge variation between countries with the average Bangladeshi needing the same resources as a cat, a Bulgarian is equivalent to a Toyota-driving Doberman, while an American is all of those combined.

Quitting Things

Reading Paul Smith’s post on his (very foolish) idea not drink alcohol made me think. For me, Paul and a beer are two connected ends of the same thing, so it won’t be easy for him. Actually I wish him best of luck – he will of course lose many friends and business partners, but he will end up healthier. His post reminded me of my attempts to quit various habits and here’s the shortlist:

• Cigarettes. Quit for 6 months. After that I assumed I’ve proved my will power already and promptly started smoking again. In my defence I smoke a pack a week so it can’t be worse for me than London air.

• Alcohol. 40 days. It does feel interesting, this non-drinking business, because it prohibits one of my (and the nation’s) favourite past times. I did it just because, but I quickly got annoyed with everyone around me asking “what’s wrong with you?” or “come on, just have one!” On the 41st day I had the best beer ever!

• Meat. 40 days, as part of the alcohol-free scheme above. This one was easy and I found it quite interesting to come up with different vegetable dishes to have. Since then, and it has been two years, I’ve reduced my meat intake considerably as I do feel lighter and leaner when having veggies.

• Coffee. 2 years. I used to love coffee – especially espresso and turkish – but while drinking a cup one day I thought that this murky black stuff can’t be good for you. I wondered what would happen if I just don’t drink it. I did and surprisingly I haven’t gone mad or grown a third arm, so I’ve kept this one.

• Facebook. 2 years. On my birthday a couple of years ago I lost a bet and that involved deleting my Facebook account. Far from threatening my social life, it actually kept me away from the computer and freed up a lot of my time.

Other things to quit. Well, obviously work; or at least Fridays. I also heard that James Dyson wanted to ban emails in his company, which is an interesting thought. Travel is also good – the idea is that by not travelling, we’ll eliminate evils like commuting, traffic jams, pollution, and will live closer to our friends and family. In any case, I think that changing something in your life, especially something that you’re very comfortable with, can be an interesting experience. Change is always good, plus you can always go back!

Jack Daniel’s Photographer

If you’ve been in and around the London Underground then you surely must’ve noticed the Jack Daniels billboards that have been hanging around for the last year or so. They’re usually in black and white, and are usally showing us some wrinkley old chap smiling at us on top of an old 40 gallon whiskey barrel. The photographer behind these is Mark Tucker – head off to his website for a sample of his great work, there’s even a Jack Daniels section for more from the series.

PS: My only bit of criticisim is not aimed at Mark Tucker as a photographer, but as a web designer. He used to have a lovely HTML website with huge archives, lots of content and personal texts, before moving to the current Flashy version. This “Flashing up” is in fact a popular trend amongst many photographers, who are told that they need to display only their best dozen or so photos in the most “professional” manner possible, and forget the rest. You want clients to see only your pretty side, the logic goes. However, this annoys me as hell since I can’t dwell further into somebody’s work, so please stop it! Think of your fans as well, not just your clients. Most clients probably started as fans anyway.

Is This It For Twitter?

What a year it has been for Twitter and what stunning charts it has let us produce every step of the way! Growth was nothing short of explosive at the start of 2009, then boiling steadily throughout the year, but now it seems to have evaporated. Promptly, Hitwise produced some usage graphs and asked if it has twittered out? I wonder too, has it all gone twits up?

Well, there’s a debate. Some people say Hitwise graphs are misleading as going on Twitter.com itself is so January, now that we have TweetDecks and the like. Maybe, but the Google Insights graph above shows a decline in search volume that correlates strongly with Hitwise’s visitor stats. There is less interest in Twitter now, there’s no doubt about that.

I reckon it’s success that causes the failure. Twitter had so much buzz earlier in the year that most people that joined didn’t realise why. Now we’re at a stage when only users that genuinely see the platform as fun, cool or useful keep using it. The rest, not tempted by any new interesting developments, are leaving. And I imagine that this is the key for Twitter – if they produce something sexy with that $100m investment they have secured then they may take to the skies again. Whether that will happen we’re yet to see. Google Insights itself shows a pop up “Forecast is unavailable” and that is that.

A Long Weekend… Every Weekend!

This one is simple. Long weekends. We all love them, right? If you don’t please leave this blog now, you’re weird. For most people though it’s always cause for much excitement and barbecuing. These extra days here and there let us squeeze a little camping trip, a city break, or an extra night in the pub. So, I’m thinking, if long weekends are such a treat, why don’t we have more of them? Or have them all the time? Surely we can afford it, with the UK being one of the richest societies in the world?

Now before considering the merits of every weekend being a long weekend, or having a 4 day working week, let’s see where the current 5 day format comes from. After all, it wasn’t the norm a century ago. Some say (not the Stig) that it was powerful unions in the 1920s that were demanding more bearable conditions for the overworked post-Industrial Revolution factory worker. Another theory states that it was in fact the Great Depression that made employers cut working hours to reduce costs and pay, as opposed to just firing staff. This last bit makes sense on a macroeconomic level too - less hours means more work to go around and be shared between more people, in effect reducing unemployment.

The same logic still applies today so much so that several organisations are trying it out. Earlier this year recession-hit accountancy firm KPMG offered its 11,000 UK employees the option to work 4 days a week to save costs and jobs. The state of Utah meanwhile has proposed a “4/10″ scheme of having 4 working days that are 10 hours long, thus keeping the standard 40 hour week. Crucially, and unlike KPMG, Utah doesn’t plan to cut staff salaries. The benfits it actually sights are reduced office bills and a smaller carbon footprint. Similar schemes are running in Wisconsin, Arizona and Alabama.

Back to the UK . Would a 4/8 scheme with reduced salary work here? The answer is – it depends. If you’ve just bought a house, you’d probably want to work and get the money. If you’ve just had a kid, you may want to spend an extra day with the family. In any case, it would be very nice to choose.

My bet, however, is workers to embrace a 4/10 deal the most. After all, you get both a day off and full pay. On top of this, most people I know stay behind an hour or two in the office anyway so it would only be fair to be formally rewarded.. Now whoever is with me, put the beard on and let’s start a revolution!

In The Press…

I used to have a box with cut outs from the free London daily newspaper Metro with weird and wonderful stories on Bulgaria. I’m no longer in possession of this treasure, but Metro doesn’t dissappoint and continues to produce quality journalism day in, day out.. Here are three examples.

Bulgaria: A boy of 15 is being trained as a bus driver after he stole three in a month. Dimitar Grozev is obsessed with driving buses and the firm he stole from has agreed to pay for two years of training. “Nothing else works”, said police in Bourgas.

Bulgaria: A priest has been arrested for selling marijuana joints to parishioners. Father Kiril Papudov was caught by the drug squad, which said they found 3.6kg of high quality pot at his home. Father Papudov was said to be by far the most popular of the priests working in the north-eastern villages of Kladenci and Borovichene.

Bulgaria: A car thief with just one arm has been jailed for the seventeenth time in Bulgaria after he was spotted trying to force open a car door. Police in the Bulgarian capital Sofia say one-armed bandit Rumen Dimitrov, 50, is just not suited for crime, but can’t seem to give it up.

Bulgaria: A communist theme park that revives life behind the Iron Curtain is to be built with a £2million EU grant. The development in Dimitrovgrad will feature statues of toppled dictators, rifle ranges using Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles and authentically grim restaurants.

Rubber Neck

There was a huge bang! on my quiet street today and this is what I found by the time I got out of the house to have a peek. Despite the many police cars, the accident doesn’t seem too bad and I hope everyone is OK. Drive carefully people!

Top 3 Most Cunning Firefox Add-Ons

Way before the iPhone App was the Firefox Add-On, and the latter excelled in actually being time-saving and useful. Nobody is trying to turn add-ons into the latest viral or social campaign that will stun the board, which is a good thing (but also an idea I should write down..) As a result, there are thousands of helpful add-ons created by a caring community of boffins, all available to download for free. Below is my pick of the crop, and although I claim them to be the “top 3 most cunning” ones, they just happen to be the 3 I have installed on my ‘fox. Have a look:

1. SeoQuake – The must-have add-on. Everything an SEOer might need, including Google PageRank, Link Popularity and Whois, is crammed by SeoQuake in a neat line below each URL in the SERPs. Download.
2. Web Developer – This add-on adds a plethora of nifty web development tools. It just makes your life a lot easier, if your life is in HTML, CSS and AJAX. Download.
3. Easy YouTube Video Downloader – It’s all in the name. If you’ve ever wanted to save a particularly amusing YouTube video, that’s the way to do it. Download.

Text Visualisation With Wordle

Tag clouds were never my thing, but Jonathan Feinberg’s Wordle is a spectacular effort at making them look cool. Check it out at wordle.net - you can try inputting your RSS feed, CV, shopping list, love letter, anything will do! Here’s what this blog looks like so far: