Category Archives: Other Stories

When Twitter gets real

Friendship, LearnerBlogger, Other Stories, ,

I’ve noticed that something weird is happening recently. It’s the people in my phone. Turns out that I quite like some of them. And it turns out (MUPPET ALERT) that I don’t really like liking them.

I’ve always found a sort of freedom on Twitter, a confidence that I don’t have at the school gates or at social events. I’ve asked questions, engaged in debate, joined in with jokey chit chat about this and that. I don’t feel the pressure to be amusing that I feel when I’m feeling slightly out of my depth (as I feel slightly out of my depth about 99% of the time, and I am not remotely funny even when I try really REALLY hard, I suspect this is a trial for all around me). I’ve felt very free to come and go as I please with no strings attached – sometimes I drop in on Twitter for a chat a couple times a day, sometimes I don’t pick it up for a week or so – just depends how busy I am. But the great thing is when I do pick it up again, it’s all pretty much the same, and there’s no subtext or guilt for not having been around.

I’ve always regarded the people in my phone as being just that – people in my phone. People who I would never encounter in real life. And that makes them very easy to enjoy, because the whole anxiety thing about whether I’m funny enough, smart enough, a good enough parent, part of the gang or not – that whole ticker tape of stress that never, ever turns off in my day to day social interactions, is remarkable by its absence in my twitter life.

But over the last, I don’t know, the last few months, something has changed a bit. I have noticed now that if I don’t see someone in my feed for a while, especially if I know they are having a stressful time, I check in on their timeline to see if they’re around and ok. More often than not they are fine, and we’ve just been online at different times. But it’s nice to know that they’re ok. Sometimes they’re not – and in that case I’ll usually drop an @message or DM to let them know I am thinking of them. And to my utter amazement, this also happens the other way around too.

But that’s kind of nice, right? A bit of mutual looking out for each other is a GOOD THING, surely? Well, yes, of course it is…as long as it stops there. But it’s a slippery slope – one minute you’re checking on a twitter buddy and next thing you know they are becoming REAL PEOPLE with all the guff that entails…mostly, it must be said, my guff rather than theirs.

For example. Recently I read this post. It’s a very funny rant about shit writers (and there’s a lot more swearing where that came from, so Mother – don’t click that link. No really, DON’T). After I had spat my tea out laughing my way through it, I read it again, because it was funny, and true, and – then, a slowly rising tide of panic – OhmygodIknowshereadsmyblogwhatifsheisbloggingaboutMYSHITWRITING?  In the old days, I’d be all ‘oh well some random on Twitter thinks I’m a shit writer – meh’. Now, NOW, every time I sit down to write, the words SHIT WRITER flash up in front of my eyes like some sort of warning. Great.

Next thing,  a twitter buddy visited Cardiff with her kids for the day. She’s an anonymous blogger, so I don’t even know what she looks like, and I found myself thinking that we might have passed each other in the street and I’d never know. Then I found myself thinking oh god, what if we did, and she recognised me from my avi, and then I’d have had to be all funny and clever and stuff, or she’d have realised I’m an absolute bloody muppet. Or worse, what if we DID pass each other and she recognised me and RAN A MILE THE OTHER WAY so she didn’t have to meet me because she has already figured out the awful truth about my muppetry? Cue panic attack about someone who I have never met, and probably never will meet, who may or may not think I am a muppet.

See what happens when the people in my phone start being real? I start stressing about what they think. I start worrying that when they are talking about shit writers, they are talking about me. I start panicking that even though they are perfectly nice to me, they’re actually, inside, dying to get away. Clearly, as I said earlier, this is my guff rather than theirs. But still, I don’t need this! I LIKED it when the people in my phone were not real! I LIKED not being nervous and self conscious and having to pretend that my life is all under control and all that stuff that is so exhausting face to face. And now all that shit is coming to get me on twitter too…FFS. Is there NO escape?

Oops. I meant to write a funny post about twitter. It turns out I’ve written a horribly revealing post about social anxiety instead. And I STILL don’t know what to do about the people in my phone that I like that I don’t like liking. Except perhaps set up a new, amazingly funny and witty and totally non-anxious persona on twitter and find a whole load of new people to follow that I don’t like, yet.

The Commenting Conundrum

LearnerBlogger, Other Stories

OK. I’m just going to come out and say it.

My name’s Michelle and I’m a stataholic.

There.

I know what I’m meant to say is that I blog for myself, I don’t care who reads it (if anyone) and I never really bother checking my stats. If you’ve mentioned my blog to me out and about in  Real Life, this is more than likely the line I will have trotted out in a (possibly) convincing manner. On a good day, I’m so convincing that I even start to believe it myself, until a quick peek at my wordpress dashboard brings me down to earth with a crash.

This isn’t just about blogging – my obsession with measuring up to self imposed standards runs through all aspects of my life. Run around the block without collapsing? Start planning for a sub 4 hour marathon. Figure out how to make a link no-follow? Oh, yay, I’m going to learn to code and build my own website by the end of the month! Make the perfect fried-egg sandwich? MasterChef here I come!

But the difference is with having a blog is that it’s easy to measure your progress, or lack of. A quick flick around the analytics and you can see how many people read your posts. You can see where they are in the world, you can see how long they hang around reading your shizzle, you can see where they came to the site from (I imagine the person who ended up at LearnerMother because they were searching for ‘Teeny Dicks Tumblr’ was VERY disappointed).

Having this knowledge at my fingertips means I constantly have a stick to beat myself up with. I always want to come out ahead of last month, to reach the next milestone, to have the post that goes viral, to get that call from Lucy Mangan to say she’s up the duff again and could I just look after her Guardian column for a few months.

One accepted way to get more readers to a blog is to read and comment on blogs written by other people. I already do a lot of reading around but not so much commenting – if I like a post I’m much more likely to tweet the blogger to say so, and reshare it, rather than going in and commenting on the post itself. I feel like it’s  a much quicker way of showing my appreciation, and to be completely honest, it’s much easier than getting caught up with captchas, disqus, the weird and wonderful G+ comment system – all of those give me blood pressure!

However, in a quest to get my blog ‘out there’ a bit more, and also to find some new blogs to read and enjoy, I’ve recently made a concerted effort to go out there and comment on other people’s blogs via a couple of blogging groups on Facebook. This has been brilliant in some ways – I have discovered some amazing new blogs to read, my stats have improved, a couple of fun review opportunities have come my way, and my blog has become more ‘visible’ in the blogosphere – I’ve had a couple of shout outs from established and well respected bloggers recently, for which I am very grateful.

So where’s the problem, I hear you say, because there’s obviously a problem if she’s still wittering on about this after 558 words…well, you lovely folk, HERE is the problem.

It’s that I am very much a part time blogger. I try and post twice a week, plus a photo at the weekend. In a normal week, I can carve out two or sometimes three bloggy sessions of around 90 minutes, squeezed in before work, or during dead time waiting outside clubs, or the like. I try and limit all blog related activity to those sessions, whether it be writing, social media, tinkering with the layout, or mending my site when I’ve broken it (to be fair, it’s mostly the amazing Ryan from SW Broadband who does the mending).

Add commenting into that list and it dramatically reduces my time for actual writing. I try  to comment on a wide variety of blogs, and reply to all the comments people leave, even with just a brief ‘thank you’ – and of course I visit, read and leave a comment back on the blogs of people who’ve taken the time to visit mine. And I quite like doing this, to be honest – dipping into other blogs means I’m always learning something, or getting inspiration about something I could write about. But – and it’s a big but – I don’t have time to write! And when I do get something written and published, it tends to be rushed, unpolished and even, on occasion, have an auto-correct induced ROGUE APOSTROPHE  *shudders*.

Since one of the reasons I started this blog was because I wanted to write, I’m left in a bit of a commenting conundrum. Carry on with it, and reap the benefit in terms of my stats, Google page rank and Tots100 score – while knowing I am not writing as well as I could or should? Or give the commenting a rest, accept the inevitable drop in readers, but know that I have more time to write as well as I possibly can, every time?

I guess I know the answer, in my heart of hearts. It’s all very well using commenting as a way to chase the stats, but when I spend more time in a week commenting than writing, then it defeats the object of having a blog. So I’m going to pull back a bit from the quest for more readers and try and concentrate on just writing stuff, which is after all the bit I enjoy. And I’m going to take the inevitable hit on my stats and tell myself that it doesn’t matter. In a very convincing fashion. Hell, I might even disconnect Jetpack and Google Analytics…but then how will I know if anyone’s read this post?

*hits publish, runs to stats*

Why I need to follow the Daily Mail

Doing my bit, LearnerBlogger, Other Stories, , , ,

I love Twitter, for lots of different reasons.

I originally signed up back in 2008 because it seemed to take the bit I really liked about Facebook – the short status updates – and cut out the rest of the crap. Once I’d signed up I wasn’t really sure what to do – I only knew one other real life person on Twitter, so I followed them, and a couple of celebrities, and dipped in and out occasionally but didn’t really do much with it.  Six years later and things have changed – I spend a LOT of time on Twitter. I manage five accounts currently – three for work, one for the blog and one just for me.

Twitter is the place I go to for news, both mainstream and industry related; for something to read when I’m bored; to keep up with what’s going on in Cardiff, occasionally to have a rant; and often for a quick chat with a small bunch of folk who despite never having met, I quite like. It’s where I go to peek into the windows on different worlds that have always interested me – medicine, education, writing – as well as learn about stuff I’m interested in for work, or politically, or just because it takes my fancy at that moment. As such, I’d have said that using Twitter has made my world bigger rather than smaller – I get to listen in to, and take part in, conversations that I’d never be part of in my day to day life.

Because I generally filter work/blog people through to the relevant accounts, my personal timeline has become curated into a circle of people just like me.  Well, not *just* like me – that’d be a LOT of muppets. But people who have broadly the same outlook on life as me, or people with whom I’ve got something in common.

On my own timeline, I don’t tend to give people second chances – if someone tweets a racist comment once, they’re unfollowed. If someone advocates violence – unfollowed. Horribly sexist, or misogynistic? Unfollowed. Bully other people through twitter? Jump on the judging bandwagon about other people’s life choices? Behave in a generally ignorant way? Tweet something from the Daily Mail in a non-ironic or non-disgusted fashion? Unfollowed.

I get my current affairs fix from people who rail against injustice and stupidity. Polly Toynbee. Zoe Williams. Deborah Orr. George Monbiot. Owen Jones. Caitlin Moran. Fleet Street Fox. Jack Monroe. I follow people and organisations who are about making the world better – The Do Lectures. Nesta. The New Economics Foundation. UK Uncut. The World Development Movement. Fixers UK. UnLtd.

Well, this is all very lovely, isn’t it. My twitter timeline is like a lovely warm bath of me-ness.  And, relax.

But. BUT. I’ve only recently come to realise the problem with this. I have forgotten that once I get out of the bath of me-ness, there’s a whole other world out there. Because I follow the folk that are constantly raising awareness of how fucked up the UK is, I’m sort of of the opinion that there’s some hope. That, like me, everyone realises that the current political climate is about demonising the poor, about creating a subservient underclass, about creating myths to set the majority of us against one another, so we’re too busy scrapping to realise that our masters are rubbing their hands in glee at their ever increasing bank balances. Until recently, I genuinely believed that everyone knew and understood that, and I equally genuinely believed that because everyone knows that, our world would change for the better, and soon.

I had the shock of my life recently. I found myself idly wondering how badly UKIP were going to get trounced in the forthcoming elections, and how long it would be before they were a distant, slightly humorous memory. So I did some research, and whaddya know, they are actually on the up, and in a big and scary way. I mentioned this to the Husband, horrified, to be met with the reply ‘well, you spend all your time reading stuff, surely you KNOW that?’

No – I didn’t know that. I’m ashamed and a bit embarrassed to admit it, but I had no idea. My timeline is full of the Premier Inn YOU KIP poster, people tearing up UKIP flyers, and amusing and witty put downs of Nigel Farage. It’s full of people writing brilliant articles that have me nodding my head and make me furious along with the writer, and the mistake I’ve made is to assume that everyone else is nodding their head and is furious too.

I thought my timeline made my world bigger. In actual fact, I have made my world smaller.

I’m going to do some following this morning, of people that I would probably punch if I met them. Dishface. Farage. Littlejohn. The Daily Mail. I feel a bit ranty about adding to their so called standing in the world by following their gobshite, but if I don’t follow them, and people like them, then I’ll remain in my lovely bath of blissful ignorance, and that’s a bit too close to joining them rather than beating them.

Thanks for reading.