editorialgirl

I’m not happy about the new Twitter retweeting system. I’m blogging about it now in the hope that in a couple of weeks I’ll look back and think “what was I moaning about?” It takes time to get used to anything new, so I’m hoping that’s what will happen here.

Up until now, Twitter has watched and understood its user activity, then implemented new features based on that user activity. For example, the evolution of @ replies. Twitter noticed that people were interacting by putting an @ symbol before a username, and built on it to create the replies feature that we know today. However, the new way of retweeting doesn’t actually replicate or build on what users had been doing.

How it used to work

Retweeting had evolved to work like this: you copied and pasted the tweet, including the originator’s username, into your update box. Then you added RT at the beginning (eg “RT @username1: Have a look at this funny thing!”).

It had its flaws, of course. Often, including the RT and the originator’s username would take the character limit beyond 140 and you’d have to edit the original tweet down (sometimes this was done badly). Then there was the problem of retweeting something someone’s already retweeted. Do you include both usernames (eg “RT @username2 RT username1: Have a look at this funny thing!”) or just the originator’s username? Or just the most recent retweeter’s name? Or scrap all of that and reword it, adding a “via” at the end?

But, despite its flaws, lots of clients (including Dabr, the client I use on my phone) and add-ons (including the greasemonkey script I use on the web) include a retweet feature that works in this way. It puts the whole tweet, including “RT @username” at the beginning, into your update box – you then edit it where necessary, and update. And these client ways of retweeting work well, in my opinion.

How it works now

But the new “retweet” doesn’t work like that. Now you press “retweet” and it posts the original tweet, wholesale, into your followers streams. It has the originator’s name at the beginning with a small symbol to show that it’s a retweet, and it shows your name underneath, in small letters: “retweeted by @username”.

I don’t like it! I know they had a big job on their hands trying to come up with something that took into account the flaws with the old system, but I don’t believe it works. Here’s why:

• No ability to add context. This is my biggest gripe. Under the new system, you can’t add anything to the message you’re retweeting. What if I wanted to retweet an opinion that I found, say, distasteful – but also wanted to point out that I didn’t agree with it? What if I’m retweeting something as part of a bigger conversation I’m having with a group of users, and wanted to add a message about how it might be useful to that conversation? On Friday, one person I follow wrote “any scriptwriters on here?” I wanted to retweet her message, but to direct it to a couple of people I know who are scriptwriters, by adding their @usernames in brackets at the end. Instead, I had to just retweet the message and hope that my scriptwriter buddies might spot my retweet in their stream, instead of having the insurance of it appearing in their @replies. Not having the ability to add to a retweet is going to have to change the way I tweet, which is a shame.
• No way to judge context. When my eyes scan the stream and see a (new style) retweet, I find I need to know who is retweeting it before I can fully understand the message. I’m thinking “who wants to show me this?” I find I need to see my friend’s name first – that’s what tells me why I’m seeing it. “This is going to be funny”, “this is going to be serious”, “this one is interesting to photographers”, “this one is political”. I find myself looking for the “retweeted by…” first, before I read the tweet.

  Perhaps it’s something I’ll get used to, but this lack of context means I’m finding it more difficult to scan my stream. It’s like following someone new, but all the time! When I follow someone new, it always takes time to get used to seeing their name in my stream. For a while I am thrown and, on seeing their tweets, have to give myself a moment to remember who the person is and how come I’m following them. Now I find I’m having to do the same for retweets. It’s an extra “think-layer” that I wasn’t expecting to have to go through.

• No quick way to see how many of your friends retweeted something. When it says “retweeted by [your friend] and 4 others”, why can’t I click to see who those others are? Using the “old method” I could gauge a tweet’s popularity within my social circle. I would see the same message three or four times in my stream – which, yes, could be seen as a flaw, but also served as a popularity-meter for the tweet. Now I get it once (which makes sense) but I don’t immediately get to see how many other friends wanted me to see it (which removes a level of context). Yes, I can go to the “retweeted by others” link to find this out, but again, it’s an extra click and an extra “think-layer”.
• Your retweets don’t appear in your own stream. It’s as if they’re not real tweets. Using the old method, you are effectively saying “I want my followers to see this message” and your followers are treating the message in the same way that they treat other messages from you. Now the message bypasses you and just appears in your followers’ stream. Yes, it means that tweets can’t get mis-attributed, but now your followers not only have to judge the context for themselve, but they can’t reply to your retweets. I guess this is a combination of the first two problems in that I can’t use someone else’s tweet to begin a conversation or make a point.
• Tweets of yours that have been retweeted don’t appear in your @replies. Looking at your @replies is a quick way of seeing what sort of feedback you’re getting, both via people replying to your tweets, and people passing on your tweets – but now, the two forms of feedback are separated by two or three clicks. To see who’s retweeting you, you have to go to “retweets”, then click on “your tweets, retweeted”. Not intuitive and not part of your overall Twitter conversation.

I guess I could sum up my discomfort thus: I feel that, rather than build retweets into the loop (as users did, then Twitter clients built upon), Twitter has taken them out of the loop. Now, you’re simply pushing other people’s content to your followers. Twitter is a conversation – but retweets aren’t part of that conversation any more.

You might have noticed the whole NaBloWriMo writing-a-blog-post-every-day thing has fallen by the wayside somewhat. Well, I’ve decided to take some advice from every mother ever: “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. Writing every day would be good, but if it means personal posts every day, then I’d just rather give it a miss.

Back in 2005 and 2006, this blog was more of a journal. The first post was about a disastrous holiday I’d just returned from, where my then-boyfriend and I spent most of the week arguing and the Spanish police carried out a terrifying raid on the next door apartment, involving guns and smoke bombs.

That was about as upbeat as the blog ever got.

Over the next thirty or so posts, I covered my struggle with a ten year marijuana habit that had turned into an addiction, my unhappiness with my job, the breakdown of my relationship, the deterioration of my uncle’s health and then his death, my dad’s heart attack and finally, the death of my beloved Nanna.

It wasn’t very chirpy.

Worse than that, though, it wasn’t helping. In hindsight, it was a cry for help at probably my lowest ever point in life – but hardly anyone read it and those that did couldn’t help me. Yup – only I could do that. Eventually I realised this and, against every instinct in my then-addled brain, started leaving the house again, forcing myself to be sociable, finding “hobbies” (hello, flickr chums!) and giving up the weed.

The last entry in my old blog, before I deleted it in January 2007, read:

It’s said that you should dress for the job you want, not the job you’ve got; wear a managerial suit and you’ll soon be the boss. If I’m going to show a face online, it should be the face of the person I want to be, not the person I am at the moment. If editorialgirl’s going to be online, she might as well be someone who inspires me.

Everything changes and I need to learn to live with that. Life is all about grief and how we handle it. And you don’t handle it by moaning to strangers.

So this is the (cliche and metaphor ladened) end of editorialgirl as you know her. No more “ooh, get me, I’ve given up weed”, no more “boo hoo, everyone dies”; just a CV, an eye on the web and some photos. From now on, editorialgirl is fucking ACE.

See you in my future.

And so here I am, in my future. Hello! It is no exaggeration to say that today (three years almost to the day since I last needed a smoke, by the way) I’m a completely new person. And I’m happy to announce that I don’t need a journal any more. I mean, I’ve got a handwritten diary for those moments where things go a bit wonky – we all need to “let it all out” occasionally – but I don’t write about it online any more.

This blog is still for me, but it’s for things I want to be pleased to look back on. Posts with a point.

Ooh, lasagne!

Well, not quite. Okay, so it’s only day five and I haven’t actually got anything to blog about… already.

I had great plans for this evening. I was going to get home from work and have a bite to eat, then my Flickr friend Steve was going to pick me up, to go to the Lickey hills and take some firework photos. Then I was going to come home and blog about it.

It didn’t really work out that way. Despite blue skies all day, as soon as it got dark (just after four o’clock) it started pissing down with rain. So after a brief text conversation with Steve we decided to knock it on the head and save the night shoot for another (drier) evening.

Instead, I got a bus from work straight to the pub. After downing a couple of pints, we went for tapas and vino.

I’ve got this far, so I might as well let you know what we had:

• peppers stuffed with couscous and feta
• pork in Malaga sauce (ie sherry) with pine nuts
• manchego cheese with quince jelly
• paella valencia
• quesadilla (cheesy flatbread)
• pork with garlic and paprika
• calamari
• aubergine in vinegar (tastier than it sounds)
• chorizo in wine
• a duck dish that never arrived, so doesn’t count

and of course, olives, bread and two lots of pathathath bravath.

So, um, there you go.

Tomorrow we’re off to Eastbourne for the weekend to see the inlaws, so my blogging will be brief for the next few days. Yay, seaside!

This photo is of my great grandfather, Ernest, with his sister Jessie and his brothers Frank, Sid and little Freddie. Of the older boys, I’m not sure which one’s which, but my guess is that Ernest is second from left.

There are eight years between little Fred and Jessie, the oldest - so if he’s about six and she’s about 14 in this photo, that would date it at 1897.*

I don’t know where it was taken, but all of these children were born in Birmingham, as were their parents. This branch of my family – my dad’s mum’s dad’s side – is listed on censuses over the years at addresses around the Bordesley area – Deritend, Small Heath, Hay Mills – including, in the 1881 census, an address at Muntz Street, then the home of Birmingham City FC.

By the 1901 census, the boys and their parents had moved to Crayford in Kent, where Ernest met his future wife – my great grandmother – Rosina, before bringing her back to Birmingham with him to start a family. Jessie stayed in Birmingham, working as a tailor.

I have a tangible connection with Jessie; I wear her ring on my right hand. She left the ring to her favourite niece – my Nanna – Ernest and Rosina’s daughter. And Nanna left it to me.

Intriguingly, someone has been snipped out of this photograph. You can see the line where it’s been cut, between the boy on the far left and the others, leaving only a bit of spooky trouser leg.

*EDIT: I saw my dad at the weekend and he showed me the original photograph – here’s what was written on the back:
Frank Herbert 9 yrs / Ernest John 10 yrs / Jessie May 11 yrs / Sydney Charles 8 yrs / Frederick Clifford 3 yrs
This would date the photo at 1894.

Dad hadn’t noticed that someone had been cut out of the photograph – he couldn’t explain it either…! He did tell me about two more brothers, who wouldn’t have been born when this photograph was taken: Reginald Joseph, who was born in 1897 and died in a POW camp in 1918; and Horace Richard (Dick) born in 1901.

Dad has an amazing scrapbook full of pictures like this, with captions explaining who everyone is. I spent a long time poring over the photos and watching these children growing up, having children and grandchildren of their own and getting old.

I’m getting married next year. It’s all been going swimmingly so far – we’ve booked a venue and a registrar, we have a vague idea of numbers; we’ve even booked the cake (hi, Jenny!). But the one thing that we haven’t been able to have a proper conversation about without big frowns, waving of hands (and even, dare I say, a bit of going all silent) is the music.

It’s weird. We both really like music. We even have a big crossover of tastes – there are loads of bands and styles of music that we both listen to and enjoy. So surely it should be easy to make a list of music we want at our wedding…? But no.

For some reason, whatever I suggest “isn’t weddingy enough”. Yes, my husband to be, who has the biggest CD collection of anyone I’ve ever met, who buys at least three new albums a week; who goes into the record shop to “look for things I’ve never heard of”… seems to think that because it’s a wedding, things have to be done a certain way.

He wants us to have a cheesy DJ at our wedding, playing fucking Abba.

I know what you’re saying. “But everyone likes Abba!” I don’t. If there’s one band I will never, ever listen to, it’s fucking Abba. I hate them. I’ve got nothing against the band themselves (or even the songs, when it comes down to it – there’s no denying they were extremely cleverly written perfect pop songs) but whoah, I just hate the Abba sound, and what it represents. I only have to hear the first note of Mamma Mia or Waterloo – god! I’m having trouble even writing this, for fear I’ll get something stuck in my head! – to feel a deep, visceral STABBINESS.

Oh, okay. I do have my reasons.

I hadn’t even really thought about Abba until the mid 90s, when they suddenly seemed to be just everywhere. It was weird, frankly. A whole bunch of films were released with Abba music as the soundtrack. People who’d never mentioned them before suddenly professed to be their biggest fans. Every pop singer in the world seemed to be doing covers of their songs. And everyone seemed to be hailing them as a genius band. Why now? It got on my nerves a bit and seemed to go on for years. They seemed to become a byword for ironic campness. Everyone liked Abba – and even now, it feels almost sacreligious to admit you’re not that keen.

But it’s worse than that. There are three main events over the last ten years that have sealed my opinion of Abba and turned my meh-ness into a near-phobia.

Reason one: Hyperactive Flatmate

When I shared a flat with my friend, back in the late 90s/early 00s, we had a brilliant time. There’s so much about that era that I remember with fondness, this almost seems rude (if you’re reading this, ex flatmate, I don’t mean it to be rude). But I don’t think it’s possible to live with anyone without at least one thing getting right up your nose. Dear reader, that one thing was Abba. Whenever my flatmate was feeling hyperactive – which could mean deliriously happy, grumpily angry, gleeful about boys or cross about work – she would go on a cleaning trip and the Abba would go on full blast. There’s nothing like walking home from work and hearing the dulcet tones of Bjorn and Urethra (or whatever they’re called) coming from two streets away, and knowing that instead of a cup of tea and cosy chat on the sofa, you’re going to open the door to a whirlwind with a can of Pledge, slamming doors and hoover dancing.

Reason two: A Funeral

In 2001 an acquaintance of mine committed suicide. A tragic, unexpected, awful thing. This person – whom I won’t name here – was only young and had a lot of friends. At the packed crematorium, it transpired that he’d in fact spent two years planning his own death, including full details of the funeral. So, after marking his life with readings, poems and words from friends and family, what poignant song had he requested to play the guests out of the chapel?

That’s right: Dancing Queen. Yes, it was poignant the first time, as the tearful congregation turned to one another to smile at the dark humour and incongruity of the music. By the fourth time, ten minutes later, as everyone was still filing out, it was more of a torture. It was on a loop, but as those of us remaining – wide-eyed in the queue for the door – knew, it would have been disrespectful to turn it off. That person, his sad life and death, and the tragi-comic ending to his funeral are still the first things that come to mind when I hear the opening notes to Dancing Queen. Even now, nearly ten years on.

Reason three: National Express Christmas Parties

Yeah, I used to work for National Express. Yeah, it was all right. After refusing, hermit-like, to go to the company-wide Christmas party for a couple of years, I finally decided to bite the bullet and join in, because there were rumours that 2006 would be the last one and, as such, might include a special guest or two.

I don’t know if it was their last party, but it was certainly mine. Yes, there was plenty of free booze, but for a start, there was also the dreaded talky DJ. You know the sort: “Let’s take it… dowwwwn a notch now, ladies and gentlemen… do you remember Last Christmas? I do. And so does [pause while he finds the right button]… so does George Michael, ladies and gentlemen, yes… this one’s for all you lovers out there…”

And okay, it was actually rather fun for a while. Until he said the dreaded words. “Ladies and gentlemen we’ve got a great surprise lined up for you tonight. This band have come all the way from… Acocks Green [laughter] to play for you tonight. We sent out an SOS [pause] and paid them some Money, Money, Money [another pause... there was no need, they were half way onto the stage] ladies and gentlemen, it’s ABBA!” It wasn’t Abba. It was someone’s brother in law and his missus and their friends, dressed in those Marilyn Monroe wigs you get from Partyland, and singing really, really out of tune.

In hindsight it’s surprising I didn’t run screaming from the ICC. Instead, I made a mental note that this was the final straw; that from now on, I would avoid any situations where Abba, or Abba-related “tribute” acts, could possibly get to me.

And that includes my own wedding.

Just to reiterate: if ANY Abba is played ANYWHERE NEAR my wedding, I will PUKE.

I’ve explained all this to my fiancé but I’m not sure how seriously he’s taken it.

After all, everyone likes Abba, don’t they?

Argh! Due to Other Important Writing Commitments it’s got really late, so I’m ashamed to say that, on only the second day of NaBloWriMo, this is me publishing some nonsense that I really only wrote for myself, and didn’t intend to use, in the rush to get something out before midnight. So please forgive me for the ramble you’re about to read.

Who is editorialgirl?

I know this isn’t really what Jenny had in mind when she asked me about “the journey to editorial girl” in a comment on previous blog post (and I do hope to write about that “journey” a little bit over the next month), but this is about the name editorialgirl.

With apologies to my parents, I have a rather boring real name. It’s… common. My first name – whilst pretty, I guess – is currently the most popular girls’ name in the US and has always been in the top 20 in the UK. My last name – according to Wikipedia, at least – is the second most numerous surname in the UK and I’m pretty sure that’s been the case for about a hundred years. So, yeah, Emma Jones is a common name. There were at least two of us in my school (and it wasn’t a large school).

On the internet, a common, boring name is both a blessing and a curse. It means I can be as anonymous as I like (you’d have a job finding me via google if you only knew my name… which is fine by me) but it also means I can’t use my real name as a username anywhere on the web. And as for domain names – forget it. The journalist, the “it girl”, the poet and the “home business expert” have always got there first.

So – once I decided I needed one – I had a bit of a quest to find a usable username.

At first it was a variation of my first name. Emma is a short name and it’s how I prefer to be addressed if you don’t know me. If you do know me, I don’t mind you calling me Em, or even EJ, but not Emmy and definitely not Ems or Emsy. At one point in my mid twenties, however, Emma took a rather unexpected turn; from Emma to Em, to Embob. Embob was shortened to Bob and for some reason, I was Bob for ages. Some people were introduced to me as Bob and never knew what my real name was. One group of friends went the other way and took the name Embob to new extremes; it became Embobina and eventually Embolinajolie, which is, frankly, embarrassing when it’s used in public. …I’m digressing. For a while, my online username was Embob.

It was only as I turned thirty and started to need to use my online identity for work-related stuff that Embob started to seem a little… silly. Not only had my circle of friends changed, but I was starting to realise that my web skills could get me work, and that the best way of promoting my web skills was… well, on the web. I couldn’t use my real name, but I couldn’t seriously put a portfolio online under the name Embob, especially since no-one even called me that any more. I needed something more relevant.

I decided to go with something wordy. I’ve been an editor of sorts since the 90s and by now I was specialising in online editing. Whilst I was playing around with words including “web”, “web writer”, “web editor” and “web editorial” – searching for usernames that hadn’t already been taken – I found that something strange had happened. A song had stuck in my head. Like it or not, I was humming Madonna. It took me a good five minutes to realise why; to realise that my mind’s eye (ear?) had read “editorial” and mashed it into a song I used to dance around my bedroom to when I was ten. “For we are living / in editorial world…”

Yes, it seemed that my subconscious had chosen the name editorialgirl for me. Every time I read it, the song would start up in my brain again. Although I hadn’t planned to use the word “girl” in a username, the whole concept tickled me so much that I tried it out on a few websites (this was pre-Twitter, so I think I was looking for a Blogger ID). It was available everywhere I looked. I’d found my new name.

These days, I identify with the name editorialgirl (all one word, please, and all lower case) as much as my given name. I might even prefer it a little, since it’s virtually unique. I feel complete ownership over it. It’s my name on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Identi.ca and b3ta (to name a few) and if ever I find someone else using it – and there have been a couple – I feel absolutely indignant. I love editorialgirl.

And the downside? Well, of course, there’s the whole “girl” thing. Yes, for a while I worried that – even before I’d really started using it – I wasn’t a girl any more and that if I was still using this name in my old age, I would look like the virtual equivalent of mutton dressed as lamb.

But then I remembered Madonna in that leotard… and figured things didn’t seem so bad.

Last night saw yet another debate on Twitter that the news outlets, unbelievably, deemed worthy of report. For example, these two articles from BBC News:
18:10 GMT, Saturday, 31 October 2009: Fry ponders leaving Twitter site
09:55 GMT, Sunday, 1 November 2009: Fry ends row with Twitter critic

In summary, the “news” is that Twitter user @brumplum said that he sometimes finds Stephen Fry’s tweets “a bit… boring (sorry Stephen)” and Stephen, who admitted he was feeling “low and depressed”, decided that now might be a good time to take a break from Twitter.

Big wows.

Having been an admin for various internet groups (not always successfully, I might add), I can tell you that this sort of thing happens all the time in online communities, especially once the community has started to “bed down”. It certainly did on our old Yahoo group, Moseley Free, where a deliberate lack of moderation meant that every disagreement and misconception caused days of jaw-grinding discussion. What happened on Twitter last night has been happening for years.

The difficulties of online conversation are well known: it’s easy to make a comment in haste and then to have to repent in leisure, as it stays on the web, cached for eternity. It’s also easy to misinterpret a comment when there’s no body language, facial expression or tone of voice to accompany it. So it’s no surprise that misunderstandings and bickering are starting to happen on Twitter, especially now that its honeymoon period (perhaps even the “enthusiasm”, “evangelism” and “growth” phases in the classic life cycle of mailing lists) is over.

The difference with Twitter, of course, is that most of the “evangelists” of this community are well known names. That’s why it’s got so big, so fast. And its unprecedented size is why the sort of comments that would have caused days of debate and side-taking on our little Yahoo group five or ten years ago causes mass hysteria in a much shorter space of time on Twitter now. Within an hour, Stephen Fry’s fans were not only tweeting to ask him to stay, but sending some really quite vicious comments BrumPlum’s way.

This heady mix of celebrity and mob mentality is why, to the journalists from every single news outlet that I’ve looked at this morning – including the Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mail, Sky News and BBC News – Twitter must seem like a godsend. When someone like @stephenfry takes issue with a posting from someone, this gives an insight into a celebrity’s personality that is at least as newsworthy as, say, what Cheryl wore on X Factor this week. It also gives rise to a large number of people taking sides and giving their point of view. It may not have mattered if it had happened anywhere else on the web, but on here, the biggest online community anyone’s ever known, it’s news.

A cynical question, though: are these reporters and news agencies really just lazy, or do the pound signs light up in their eyes when they see anything remotely controversial happen on Twitter? After all, commercial websites – including online news – are all about the hits. The more traffic, the more their advertising space is worth. Even if that goes slightly wrong (cf the Jan Moir incident, where advertisers asked to be pulled from a Daily Mail feature), the numbers are still way up and the stats look great on the books. The “Fry ends row with Twitter critic” feature has been on BBC News’ “most read” list all day today. News outlets are getting more hits than ever, simply by running features about Twitter, knowing that people love to read about themselves. Is that a deliberate ploy?

Finally, the biggest surprise to me during last night’s debate was Alan Davies‘ contribution (left, now deleted from his stream). Within about half an hour, he’d replied to every user he could find who’d dared suggest that Stephen Fry might have been over-reacting, calling them tossers, pricks, prats, halfwits, morons, dickheads and idiots. I’m all for free speech (and I’m aware that he might have been may have been rather “tired and emotional” after celebrating the Arsenal win earlier), but, especially given that the last time he was in the news was for biting a tramp, I think his agent might want to have a word.