malcolm coles

Twitter seems to be adding an explanation to some trends, sourced from whatthetrend.com. Here’s an example for a search on John Terry today.

Seems a good innovation to me. Should help with some of the more mysterious trends that only carry on as people ask why is X trending.

John Terry’s been “nobbing” Wayne Bridge’s girlfriend as one of the edits on Wikipedia puts it. Terry got a superinjunction forbidding publication of this story – and of the fact that there was an injunction. This all fell apart on Friday. The case raises some interesting issues:

Despite the superinjunction, you could find out about the [...]

I pointed out this morning that the Express was talking utter rubbish claiming that the BBC was keeping up twitter accounts with 0 or 2 followers. The real numbers were in the 000s.

It appears the Express has confused following and follower numbers. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Dear the Express. Please look at the right twitter a/cs when discussing the BBC’s followers. That is all.

UK national newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow – but the rate is getting slower and slower, according to the latest figures for the 129 accounts I’m tracking. November to December growth was just 6.6%, down from 17% earlier in the year.

I’ve really begun to loathe Twitter’s new retweet function. Here’s why:
Pictures of people I don’t follow, unclear menu options and not being able to see who is retweeting stuff.

On top of the new Twitter retweet feature, I also seem to have got the new web-based method for alerts about new new tweets from people you follow. These changes are all bringing the functionality of the web interface for Twitter closer to the various desktop clients.

Despite having to wait ages for lists and Google wave, I seem to have Twitter RTs early. I haven’t actually seen a live one yet … And I don’t really like the sound of them as I like to comment on RTs. But maybe that’s just me.

Newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow – but at an ever slower rate, according to the latest figures for the 130 accounts I’m tracking. October to November growth was just 8.3%.

Want to get your Twitter page doing better in Google for a search on your name? Here’s a way to get a link off the BBC to your Twitter URL.

It was oneletteroffmovies day on Twitter on Saturday – turning Top Gun into Top Gum, and Pirates of the Caribbean into Pilates of the Caribbean etc. My contribution was “BT – one alien’s struggle to get broadband so he can email home”. And then BT started to tweet me …

Is Google using signals from Twitteras part of its ranking decisions. You could see why it want to – seeing which pages people are passing around on Twitter would help it work out which pages are relevant for ‘newsy’ search terms (those where there is a big surge in searches for particular keywords).
The evidence

Testing such a thing would be a nightmare – how could you set up 2 different, but similar, pages and get loads of people to tweet one and not the other? I managed to set up this test by accident – here are the results.

Update According to Google, at 2.45pm, Jan Moir is the 42nd most popular search in the last hour. The Mail must be loving the traffic they are getting. So, why don’t you try contacting the advertisers on that page to let them know what you think of their brand sitting alongside the story? Try retweeting [...]

National UK newspapers had 1,665,202 followers of their Twitter accounts at the start of October – an increase of 193,266 on September 1st (when they had 1,471,936).

The rate of growth has slowed, however. This is a monthly increase of 13.1%, compared with 17% from August 1 to September 1, and also from July 1 to August 1.

National UK newspaper accounts had 1,471,936 followers at the start of September, an increase of 213,892 or 17% on August 1 (when they had 1,258,044 followers).

You can see the September figures in the table.

Adding a related-posts plugin can reduce your bounce rate by around 3% if my site is anything to go by.
In the two months before I installed the Yet Another Related Posts plugin my bounce rate was 84.3%. In the two months since then, my bounce rate has averaged 81.6% – a drop of 3.25%.

Search for cottage hire birmingham, and Google shows you a map of bethlehem in pennsylvania. Huh?

Twitter appears to be down. How do we tell people? Maybe it’s just me. Here are some ways to find / work out what to do:

Short and to the point. But @guardiantech reached 1 million followers early this morning.
It benefits massively from being on Twitter’s suggested users list. But impressive nonetheless. You can see more UK newspaper twitter numbers here.

If you liked the list of user-experience twitterers that Done Bright put together, you may have wished, like me, that you could see the bios / description of each account. Well, I’ve played around with the Twitter API, and now you can!