There’s no comeback from that. I considered telling him what a great job they were doing, like how he’s out here every day in the shit and the folks back home have no idea what it’s really like. Just – thanks, man.

But no, I said “Single to Paddington”, followed by “Oh, sorry.” and shot a studied look at my iPod like it just swore before walking off in search of singles.

While I’m on the subject, a word in defense of my American cousins. London ticketing staff should probably know by now what tourists want when they ask for a “round trip”. But they still a lot of them give it the “innit” and act like idiots.

“Ere, Mugsy. This Yank came up the other day, asked for a round trip, ‘e bleedin’ did. I only told him to get on the Circle Line. You toilet.”

By the way, I literally have American cousins, so I’m speaking figuratively. You probably didn’t know that, so this recent confusion, despite being of all my own making, should now be clear. Nor am I offering to literally defend my actual American cousins or suggest that they need my help, as they have guns and can probably look after themselves. I apologise for bringing this to light.

The greatest strength of the microblogging site is that there are few rules beyond that of the 140 character limit, leaving editors to use Twitter however they choose.

Take National Public Radio as a recent example. The American public service radio news broadcaster, like many US news outlets, has several personality-led programmes. It’s one of the big differences between American and British current affairs programming. CNN has Larry King Live, Anderson Cooper 360, The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, while the BBC News has Click, Hard Talk, Fast Track, World News America.

In the same way, NPR has many personal Twitter accounts, and in the wake of the earthquake and amidst tsunami warnings, its journalists put out the following alerts via their own user names:

NPR Twitter list to monitor tweets of possible interest re: Chile quake & tsunami: http://bit.ly/cweJfw
RT @acarvin: Got around 50 people on the NPR #chile #quake #pacific #tsunami Twitter list, more to come: http://bit.ly/cweJfw
RT @acarvin: Volunteers needed to find+add emergency resources to CrisisWiki for Chile, HI, NZ, etc. Instructions: http://crisiswiki.org

These are fine examples of solid, public service tweeting in the form of action-oriented updates which don’t cross over into its core coverage. In addition, however, the following updates from NPR appeared over a two hour period:

Rescuers Struggle To Save Lives After Chile Quake http://su.pr/1d5YhB
Chile Struck By One Of Strongest Earthquakes Ever http://su.pr/1d5YhB
Huge Quake Hits Chile; Tsunami Threatens Pacific http://su.pr/1d5YhB
Hawaii, Pacific Under Alert For Post-Quake Tsunami http://su.pr/2jUoS9
Chile Struck By 8.8-Magnitude Earthquake http://su.pr/9c3CO3
8.8-Magnitude Earthquake Hits Central Chile http://su.pr/1d5YhB

Four of these links go to the same story, one is about the rescue operation and four are about the earthquake itself.

NPR used Twitter as a kind of rolling news ticker, pounding out the same story to the same audience different URLs, sometimes with a similar headline, sometimes completely different headlines but to the same URL.

If users wanted to find out which was the main story, they would have to click the link on each update. Alternatively, they could wait half hour for the next tweet with the expectation that it might be the latest version of the story, or it could turn out to be a background piece and the updated article would be at the original URL which was sent when the story first broke.

Would the main story be the original one or the latest one? Maybe the user should just visit their NPR homepage and find the main story that way, which would involve visiting its Twitter profile page and clicking on the link in the biography.

It’s a confusing way of presenting the news, a bad user experience and one at odds with how ordinary people (and it’s still a social network) use Twitter.

If this was a deliberate strategy on the day of the earthquake, it could be due to NPR’s editors hearing the increasing number of audience members who say: “I don’t visit news websites. If it’s important, the news will find me.”

This comes up increasingly in user research and it means: “I spend a lot of time on Twitter and Facebook and my friends will let me know if something happens.”

Despite many people heard about Michael Jackson’s death and the Hudson river crash from friends on the web, news organisations don’t act like our friends.

For a start, your friend wouldn’t say every fifteen minutes: “There’s been an earthquake here’s the story.” “There’s been an earthquake here’s the story.” “There’s been an earthquake here’s the story.” “There’s been an earthquake here’s the story.”

In contrast, here’s how Reuters covered the story (in reverse chronological order)

Hawaii prepares evacuations ahead of tsunami http://bit.ly/dxZdxN 5:09 PM Feb 27th
Factbox: Chile has history of big earthquakes http://bit.ly/b2zzn3 5:07 PM Feb 27th
Massive earthquake strikes Chile, 122 dead http://bit.ly/9WkWL0 5:07 PM Feb 27th

And that’s it. One main story, one fact box (presumably a box with which to fact me up) and a sidebar. Three stories in quick succession. There were tsunami angles a couple of hours later, but the main story went out once.

Note to editors: don’t repeat yourself on Twitter. Leave the retweeting to the audience – your followers already know what you’re saying.

News organisations have a great opportunity shape how companies use Twitter, but if they want be in the spaces where people are, they need to join them not beat them.

Last night me and Mrs. This were sitting down on the couch. I’d said all week I was going to watch the hockey final, because it would contain awesome.

At sometime Pacific Time

Me: Do you mind if I watch the hockey?

Wife: No, do you mind if I read my new Twilight book?

Me: Yes, it might disturb my hockey game.

I was joking, reader. It’s just my way.

Wife: It might be really bloody and gruesome, though.

Me: No, see, this is Olympic hockey. It’s goes against the whole um, ethos, of the games. It would be frowned upon. There would be repercussions. Besides, it’s just not sporting. It’s like – it’s like, ok, Olympic boxing. There they wear padding and their objective is to sc-

Wife: I meant my book.

Me: Oh.

—

There’s me trying to hold court, if not interest. Perhaps not presiding but grant me diverting, if nothing else. And we’re having a conversation about two different things, but it doesn’t matter. Maybe it matters more than if we were talking about the same thing, otherwise I wouldn’t have written this.

I get the vampire thing by the way. Vampire fiction, yes, very good. Well get this: vampire pugs.

Yeah? See, always thinking.

Vampire pugs, reader.

Lake Flaccid.

BOOM. Ain’t never lost it. So here’s a song for the hockey fan in all of us. Canada face the USA in the final on Sunday and it’s a big deal. Here to play us out are sardonic beat hosers The Tragically Hip.

The story behind the song is a good one and shows that sport goes further than teams or anything I can explain.

Go, eh?

Listen – Fifty Mission Cap

Archive of Weekend Songs

Who’s your oldest friend?

Oldest as in the person I’ve known the longest would be my friend Len, who I’ve known since I was five when I moved to the US and he lived down the road.

We lost touch after I moved away and didn’t talk for about 15 years, then when I was 29 I looked him up in the phone book out of the blue when I went to New York on holiday. I didn’t even know if he lived in New York, I just figured he might end up there and I would be out there. He has a pretty distinctive name and called him up and announced that I was going to be in town. Luckily he humoured me and we’re close friends to this day.

Here’s a pic of that house. I helped my dad plant that tree out the front. If I were more organised I would put up a pic of me as a kid outside that house in the summer of 1976, wearing tube socks and a Superman t-shirt with CLIFFORD emblazoned across the chest.

Blogging will be so much easier for our kids when everything is digital. I say “our kids” purely as a  figure of speech. Although that might not be  bad competition prize for the fifth anniversary. No. Nobody wants my bloglets. That was wrong and I’m sorry. I don’t have children with any of this blog’s readers.

My wife read this site once, but as she delicately puts it: “I listen to his views all day, why would I want to read them as well?”

It’s a fair point.

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Super_tramp: It’s raining again

Super_tramp: Right, you’re bloody well right. You know you got a right to say

Super_tramp: When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, a miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical

Super_tramp: @Rudy’s on a train to nowhere, halfway down the line

Super_tramp: @Dreamer – you know you are a dreamer. Well can you put your hands in your head, ONOZ!

Seriously, though. I am going to Norfolk and will be gone for a short while. I can keep an eye on the house, though, because my the guy over the road has a webcam trained on my front door. Not for any great reason, and he doesn’t know I know this, but I found his Twitter feed a few weeks back when I was looking for snow tweets for my post code and I recognised him from his profile picture.

From that there was a link to his blog and – long story short – there’s a webcam pointing out of his window at my front door.

This worries me, because I have to read his blog to see how loose he is with information. All he has to do is take a few flickr pics (and there are lots of his house), geotag the odd tweet; I casually I mention that I’m going away for a few days, then whoever watches the webcam can see exactly when I leave the house.

I’m pretty careful about my personal stuff on here, but as more people have blogs, it has reached the point where I’m having to check what information they give out.

So now there’s going to be this whole to-do where I have to tell him not to point a webcam at my house, and that isn’t a conversation I want to have. Jeez. These fucking days.

I may not even mention it. I might just keep reading his blog until it gets to the point where I have leave the comment: “Before you tell people where you live, do you think you could you turn off the webcam pointed at my house?”

But thanks to everyone for the questions. Here’s the lastest and by all means please keep asking.

What’s your favourite film and why?

Can I have two? One of my favourites is Fandango. There are lots of coming of age films, but this one is bittersweet, as the passing of youth is. It’s a tender film that ticks a lot of my boxes: funny, heartfelt, road movie, not too much “acting”.

It’s a close tie between that and Hannah And Her Sisters, which is a totally different kind of film. The dialogue is brilliant, the characters are amazing, and the film is a piece of genius.

If I had to think about what they have in common, I’d say they are comedies (but not blatent comedies) about the flaws and frailties within us all.

Other favourites are Spinal Tap for being the funniest film I’ve ever seen. I love Apocalypse Now. I LOVE The Big Lebowski. I also like Field Of Dreams. I liked Crash. High Fidelity I could watch over and over. Also Duck Soup. And Goodfellas, Star Wars and Shawshank,obviously.

What kind of people are bloggers?

If you’d asked me that four years ago, I could have given you a straight answer, but people have blogs now for so many reasons, that as long are there are a hundred different types of blog, there are a thousand different kinds of bloggers. I’m still happy to be one of them, so I can only speak for myself.

Where do you get inspiration from for your blog?

You, partly. It’s as much about the reader as real life. And me in third. It used to be a lot more about me, which comes under the catch-all term of life. Like, the other day I saw a woman giving directions to a blind person and she was using hand signals. I love stuff like that and it’s important to mention those things.

You see ten green bottles standing on a wall. How do you feel?

I’d imagine that one green bottle would “accidentally” fall.

If you could kill someone and absolutely get away with it, would you?

No. I wouldn’t get away with it because I’d have to live with it. No way. Absolutely not.

Unless – it was someone who I knew was going to kill innocent people, like Martin Sheen in Dead Zone, and they wouldn’t be missed, then I’m Christopher Walken, baby.

Should I kill again?

No, you shouldn’t kill again. Next.

What do you get out of blogging? I’m sure there’s a better way to phrase that.

It’s a release, it’s a practice, a discipline, a social opportunity, a creative outlet, a way of making people laugh and think – so it’s a rewarding activity, it’s a pass time, it’s a way of putting my best foot forward but more importantly encouraging the other one to follow. Nice question. I’m just glad you didn’t ask “How do you get out of blogging?”

Do you wish (or have you ever wished) that you’d been an anonymous blogger?

Yes, a lot lately, because everyone’s online now, and peoples’ projected personae, in my line at least, seem to be extensions of the professional selves. What I do on line is really far from what I do for a living, expecially as I work in the online world.

Also, there are a lot of things going on right now that I’d like to share, but don’t feel comfortable with because it would sound a bit worrying. And I guess if I did share everything anonymously it would seem less personal somehow, so it’s swings and roundabouts.

But yes, I feel a bit limited now blogging as myself, however the multimedia content I’m presenting means it’s harder to remain anonymous, so I’m comfortable with having held some stuff back, lest it be discovered later that I was THAT guy.

It’s not a huge worry, because I’m not famous or anything – great question, again.

If you were a biscuit, what biscuit would you be?

Probably a Pepperidge Farm Milano. Available everywhere but still likes to think of itself as classy and exclusive. It’s the Nora Jones of biscuits.

I think I’m a lesbian. Should I come out or should I keep it a secret? And should I expect ridicule because I’m a man?

You’d probably get a lot of funny looks, seeing as you’re coming out as a male lesbian. But Eddie Izzard describes himself as a male lesbian, so why not. He makes a living out of getting funny looks, though.

Lady GaGa. Would you?

Not with yours.

Tell us a secret about yourself…

Who wants to know? After five years of blogging, anything I haven’t said about myself is something I’m not going to share. I don’t think I’ve ever said I have a broken nose.

If you had to…Mr Angry or Ben?

Oh god – I nearly done a sick then. Angry, but purely on the basis on anonymity. But for the record, I’d rather be circumcised at Anfield.

Please can you go back and change your answer to Ben – otherwise I’m not sure I will ever be able to look you in eye again.

Yes, OK. I mean Ben.