Category: Twitter

Music in the age of Coronavirus

One of the last social things I did before lockdown was the 6 Music Festival (and an excellent non-festival Jehnny Beth concert that is probably the musical highlight of my year so far). I’ve been trying to do more live music (combined with cycling adventures) and this sort of event really works for me as it takes me to a different city and builds in enough time to properly explore.

Obviously more adventures of this type are not possible now, but over the last week I’ve been participating in Tim Burgess’ Twitter listening parties where people all listen to the same record at the same time, and the people who made the record in the first place commentate. I’ve never consumed music in quite this way before, but I now think it’s something I’d like to continue doing after lockdown. I’ve rediscovered some old music that required hunting down CDs and MP3 backups, connected with people who share my love of some of my current favourites, and generally added a bit of structure to my evenings.

This is my calendar for this week. I’ve been off work so I’ve had a lot of free time, but even next week I think I’ll tune in for a few as well as nothing actually eats into work time.

My new social life

I know this is making things easier for a lot of people, and also that this is introducing people to new music that they can buy, and thus support the artists who are really struggling right now without the revenue from gigs. It’s a good thing, and I’m glad I’m part of it.

Social media notifications

I thought it might be useful to mention that I turned off all email notifications on social media sites a few months ago. I do still get banner notifications on my phone, but I found myself ignoring the emails on the whole, and thought I’d remove a bit of noise from my inbox. I still regard myself as active on (in this order) Twitter, G+, Facebook and LinkedIn, but I also still very much regard email as my primary method of contact for anything urgent/important, be it personal or professional.

I suppose it’s also useful to mention that I’ve started scheduling a few posts, both to my blog and to my social networks. I very much try and keep content relevant to my (perceived) audience, but if you do see me posting things when you know I’m at work or in a meeting with you, then scheduling is probably the answer (I use Buffer for scheduling, and may write more about this soon).

Social networking workflow

This is how it works…..

I post anything under 140 characters to identi.ca using the Ubiquity extension for Firefox. This then posts them to Twitter and Facebook, and adds them to the right hand menu of this blog using the Twitter Tools plugin. Then, once a day, they all get spliced together by Loudtwitter and posted to my Live Journal.

I also add posts to my LJ using the Deepest Sender plugin for Firefox. I only post there if I need to lock things down to custom groups of people (or if what I write cannot be in the public domain for whatever reason).

Everything else gets posted here. Also via Deepest Sender.

Additionally, everything I listen to all all my computers and my iPod is sent to Last.fm, which then adds the last 10 songs to the right hand menu of this blog.

I think that is pretty much everything.

Using Ubiquity as a Twitter client

I’ve been experimenting with Mozilla’s new (very much still in development) Ubiquity tool, which does a lot of what Quicksilver and Gnome-do can do, but is also expandable to an almost unlimited degree.

I was going to write a tutorial on how to use Ubiquity to post to Twitter, but it’s really as simple as starting Ubiquity and typing one line as seen below:

twitter Type your status here

Hit enter, and your post appears on Twitter. It’s really that simple.