Then my blog posts about Outcasts and its cancellation and the Apprentice came and I tripled the number of comments on my blog in a few months. And it wasn’t a problem, as for the most part people were quite  nice – venting mutually in their upset over the Outcasts cancellation or offering an opinion on Lord Sugar’s judgments, mostly ignoring what I’d written, often tacitly thinking or hoping the BBC would read their comment here (no evidence of this as yet) or whatever. Again, no issues.

But now I’ve written about Torchwood, a show that’s upset some people because of a number of (not particularly graphic) scenes of gay sex, arguably slow pacing and a distinct lack of a single dramatic monster-shaped climax each week (I’ll write a defense of the show soon, because I think its better than people are giving it credit for, but want to see it play out first).

But the comments situation has me scratching my head… a significant number of the comments are prefaced with "I’m not a homophobe, but…," a few are straight out "gay sex is wrong my kids can’t watch that" (despite Torchwood being a post-watershed adult-targeted programme). Do I let these comments through? Do I bin them? After all, even if some of these people are narrow-minded (IMHO) conservatives, they have a right to an opinion, don’t they? Then part of me thinks "this is my site, and I can control it all however I like. Bwahahahaha…"

Truth be told, I don’t have enough time to moderate these comments carefully enough, and the nuances of what constitutes hate speech are probably beyond the spare minute or two I have to go back through the comments and delete stuff. But for those uncertain, I’d like Currybet’s rule for news website commenting to apply here. The golden rule: “don’t be a dick.” This is a nice place, for nice people to have reasoned discussion. Follow Mr Bet’s helpful flowchart to check if you are being a dick, in case you’re not sure. A minority of you on the Torchwood posts? You’re definitely being dicks.

The heartening thing in all of this is that there are a number of stalwart defenders of the show and the choices its made calling people out for being narrow-minded et al. Hoorah for you, good people*. You’ve helped me maintain my faith in the Interwebs.

The ease of anonymity and the impersonal nature of website commenting still makes it too easy for people to Troll or vent in unpleasant ways they wouldn’t do in real life. I’m open to suggestions on how to make this harder on here… Facebook comments/true name policy only/non disposable identities only?

* I should flag: I am very happy for people to take any of my opinions and the show (or anything else I write about) to task; that’s why I enable comments. The world is made of differing opinions. But I don’t have time or the emotional energy to deal with people being dicks, so please abide by that rule if you can.

I’ve ‘unfriended’ about 20% of my list (I’d considered just moving them to a ‘limited view’ friend status but didn’t really see the point – the people I’ve unsubscribed have had very little interaction or conversation with me for some considerable time now), and we’ll see if anyone notices. I am hoping others fed up with me will unfriend me themselves – as my friends list crept upward I had a sneaking suspicion – which I’m sure will be justified by minimal re-adds – that I wasn’t as popular as Facebook was intimating.

Anyway, I sincerely hope I haven’t caused any offence and will happily get back in contact with people who so desire it!

To start with, as Patrick McKenzie pointed out in his blog last year (before all this blew up), programmers almost always get name handling wrong because there is no universal format for a human name.

Charlie goes on to point out a whole bunch of other reasons why this is a problem for Google and it’ll be interesting to see how they resolve it. The anti-cultural bias of the ‘True Name’ policy is very unlike Google, despite the (admirable?) goal of keeping the social network honest. But as Charlie points out:

Google are wrong about the root cause of online trolling and other forms of sociopathic behaviour. It’s nothing to do with anonymity. Rather, it’s to do with the evanescence of online identity. People who have long term online identities (regardless of whether they’re pseudonymous or not) tend to protect their reputations. Trolls, in contrast, use throw-away identities because it’s not a real identity to them: it’s a sock puppet they wave in the face of their victim to torment them.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out… although of course, I’m still not quite using Google+ yet. It needs events, and more people I actually know, as opposed to randoms with no profile adding me, possibly expecting reciprocity.

As an aside, I’m still reading Charlie’s Rule 34 – took a break from novels to catch up on some DCU comics – and it continues to be awesome. Charlie’s mentioned a few AR overlays, a lot of tablets, a few 3D ‘fabbers’,  but no social networks yet – maybe, in the near future, we all forget our logins…

I’m also more than open to offering people a guest blog spot, for what its worth, if they want to write about something that aligns in more or less anything I’m interested in, and as long as its not totally shameless self-promotion.

However, I have virtually no patience with people that don’t even slightly think through why they’re in touch with me, and, like the old Silicon.com/419 scam of old (h/t to Will S on that one) I’ve taking to taunting them.

Personal details redacted, but here’s this week’s fun:

@division6 morning :) was wondering if you’re still accepting guest posts on your blog at all?
@[redacted] depends who from, what for and what about!
@division6 it’ll be from me (my employer), on whatever you’d like it on. What for, you tell me :)
@[redacted] how about a comparative analysis between the undead universes of DC and Marvel comics? Marvel Zombies vs DCU ‘Black Lanterns’?
@division6 lol
@[redacted] No? Ok then.
@division6 don’t think I’ve ever, ever read a comic, nor seen a movie based on a comic.. Maybe The Crow, if that’s classed as one..

I’m hoping someone does take me up on that blog post request. I think a DCU/Marvel undead crossover (maybe with some Walking Dead zombies thrown in for good measure) could be ftw.

The real challenge is in driving adoption and the strategy this time around is to define where in the business it’d be useful before we roll it out. I’m exploring lots of different options, as well as working up a dev wish list of the nice people at Yammer (it’s not perfect; what tool is?). Oddly, having told people that its just in testing and not to worry about signing up, I’ve got half the company on there – which is a significantly greater impact than I had when I was trying to get a group of testers together three years go…

A few specific bugbears are beginning to emerge – "open" groups cannot be made private (I can understand why the reverse might be true, but no this), there’s no Tweetdeck integration, the Chrome extension is OK but made by a third party and requires you use a browser to actually view updates, and there’s limited built-in collaboration- you have to spin out to Google Apps or some other third party cloud collaboration tool… And it probably needs a bit more M’sft integrations (vcards, calendar invites).

Still, definitely having fun yammering away. See where it goes.

But rather than wholesale defriending people, I think I’ll go through a more Google-esque process, trying to align friends by how I know them (for the most part), restricting access to my updates to the people less likely to be interested in family pics, blog posts and the like. It’ll be a fairly tedious exercise but hopefully better for all involved.

If you’ve not been in regular contact but want to remain in an ‘open’ circle and see all my updates, do let me know…

New features keep launching though, so we’ll have to see.

I can’t help but think that this is where the closed nature of Facebook is quite nice – the option to ‘decline’ friend requests gives you a nice kind of control over who you share with. I suspect Google will have to give you an option to view the posts from a selection of circles so you can selectively ignore posts from circles like "Internet Randoms," and/or we’ll end up creating ‘supercircles’ for one click sharing – i.e. I want to share with everyone except the Internet Randoms.

And to the Internet Randoms that are following me (and everyone else) – stick a decent bio / about page in. If I have no way of knowing who you are and you have thousands of people in your circles, I will block you. Sad but true… I just don’t have the time to be interested in people’s thoughts when I have no way of establishing who they are.

Here’s why not:

1) No APIs yet, so no limited extensibility and hard to work into my social media syndication strategy – I can’t get my blog to cross post to G+, for example. The xhtml / rel=me thing should work but between my ineptitude at HTML and bugginess in Buzz, I can’t make it work.

2) Not enough people on there that I actually know – the only circles of mine where people are saying anything are “randoms,” “journalists” and “PRs” – which tells you a bit about the early adopters I know.

3) Too many randoms are adding me for no apparent reason – I can understand why some of the big hitters have stepped off the platform within days of joining

4) I don’t use enough of the other Google apps (Picasa etc) that would make it really useful. Maybe I should.

On Facebook at the moment I have one fundamental complaint:  the newsfeed’s selection of news stories is currently completely borked. I’m getting old stories from a very small set of my friend-network because Facebook is trying to guess which "circles" I want to hear from and excluding many of my friends.

Sort it out, the pair of you!

That said, Google is clearly iterating fast – the first bugfix release was out within 24 hours. And it has a nice, clean UI and a good touch interface. So we’ll see what happens.

Thanks to those who’ve got in touch offline too – via Facebook and email. Really interesting and entertaining to be able to flex my brain in different directions like this.

I’ve got a new blogging project in development, which will take some of the more technical content off this blog, which I think would be good for most regular readers.

More on this later…

That said, the fundamentals are really solid – working around circles of contacts so that privacy controls should be easier to maintain (not that I’ve found those yet).

More to follow, inevitable. Thanks @qwghlm for the invite.

My blogging toolkit

Evernote is my ultimate offline note-taker. The fact it syncs back into the web and maintains consistency across my many devices (3x personal PCs, 1x work PC, 1x personal Mac, iPhone & iPad) makes it persistently and pervasively useful. Most of my blog posts are drafted in Evernote on the train commute into the office.

Google Reader – is my RSS compendium. I share stories on here (which syndicate out to Twitter and Buzz) and read hundreds of stories a day without spending hundreds of hours a day browsing through multiple websites.

Flickr – for sharing and sourcing images. Enough said – love its embed capabilities.

Windows Live Writer – for editing, polishing and publishing the blog posts. One of the last vital bits of Microsoftware I use.

WordPress – what you see here. Love it – equipped especially with Jetpack, and backed up by Google Analytics, it lets me share, disqus, and keep tabs on what people are reading. Also use it for a number of clients.

I’m still in two minds about Tumblr.

My research tools

Quora is a remarkable resource for finding out expert insights into products, people or brands. There’s a fantastic amount of valuable content on there and its appeared remarkably quickly. I owe a h/t to Tim for pointing me at this earlier this year.

Google Realtime (alongside Google News, Trends, Blogsearch and beyond) are awesome for figuring what’s going on in the world and testing the validity of a perceived trend, finding out what people are talking about etc.

Oh, and Wikipedia, of course.

My comms and productivity portfolio

Google Docs – is my productivity and collaboration powerhouse. I love Apps too.

Chrome – my browsing masterpiece, complete with Tweetdeck (tying together Facebook, Buzz and Twitter)

Skype – the iPhone app is beautifully deployed, although the desktop app has become bloated

Dropbox – ultimate tool for sharing large files, collaborating on projects

Twitter – I struggle to find as much time as I did to keep up with people but dip in every now and then and use it to let people know when I’ve written about them elsewhere

Facebook - for all that people hate it, I do think its boss, and one of the most powerful tools for me to keep in touch with people. Emily’s life is catalogued in pictures on there, and I rely on its ‘closed’ nature to maintain a certain level of privacy (aware of the irony here).  I’m v. curious about Google+ though.

My health check

RunKeeper and DailyBurn are my apps of choice on this front, providing fitness monitoring and tracking and diet monitoring and tracking respectively. Now if only they talked to each other…

Mobile+

Camera+ fits into this thanks to its awesome sharing features. I use mobile apps for Evernote, Tweetdeck, WordPress, Skype and a few others, but this is the stand-out social app.

Right, phew, more than I thought. What do you use that I’m missing? What do I use that you think is rubbish?

How do you say Facebook and Twitter in French? You don’t – at least, not if you are on radio or television, where French officials have banned any mention of them unless they are specifically part of the story.

Conspiracy theorists springing up all over the place as to why they’ve done it; the rationale makes a kind of sense to me, however – it’s in the spirit of fairness, so as to not discriminate against other lesser, commercial social networks. Even if its total rubbish, I love that sentiment. There’s something very colonial about it, and I’m surprised the British (given the other strictures at the BBC about supporting commercial organisations) haven’t tried it ("that anti-competition stuff, old boy, it’s simply not cricket.")

At least, force broadcasters to mention (and have a presence on) every other social network in the spirit of fairness. It’d take a week…

Now I know that the media programmes will be inundated with mentions, and perhaps even Amazon might get more tweets than it could cope with, but Mini was the only company to get back to me. The theory of having a direct connection to a business is a good one but it seems that not everyone is coping as well with providing an outlet to direct interaction as you’d hope.

I think brands should stick a disclaimer up there if the account isn’t monitored, or if people don’t intend to respond. It’s only fair to set expectations…. You can understand why even slightly arbitrary studies like this one come to the conclusions that they do… Or maybe it’s that – as a mere customer and a PageRank 2 blog writer – I don’t merit their attention…