I’ve “Always Never” Followed Rock Bands – Until Now!

I’ve never been much of a fan of rock music – I prefer the music of the 1940s big bands to that of present-day rock bands. However, I’ve started to realize that my nephew Matt Lockyer has become a seriously good musician – he is even taking a music course  at college. His band “Always Never” regularly plays gigs locally here in Tiverton and attracts quite a following. A recent press report in the Mid Devon Gazette described Always Never as “Four hoodies with more chops than the meat counter at Morrison’s” who play “a seriously good set of grungy metally stuff that manages to be aggressive and progressive at the same time”.

But don’t just take my word for it! Visit Always Never’s MySpace page and sample their music for yourself. You’ll be pleasantly surprised – I certainly was!

Aargh! Twitter is Taking Over my Life!

I’ve recently started using Twitter to promote my business and to network with other business people after being introduced to it by Thomas Power  and Mark Shaw at Ecademy. I’ve found it a very useful tool, so much so that I’ve effectively stopped using Facebook. But I found Twitter  so addictive that there was a danger that it would take over my life. However, there are plenty of tools and advice available to help prevent this from happening.

For example, Tim Ferriss has written a post on his blog in which gives you five tips on “How to Use Twitter Without Twitter Owning You”. His first tip is not to post and read tweets at the same time. I’ve followed this and his other advice and found that I don’t waste valuable time using Twitter.

Here is some advice of my own. On Twitter, it seems that it is very important to get as many followers as possible. To do this manually is very time-consuming, even if I use a “personal assistant” such as Mr Tweet. However, Gary McCaffrey has developed Tweetergetter, which automates this task so efficiently that every day I am notified (by Twitter) of about half a dozen (or more) new followers, without any effort on my part.

The problem then is to respond to these people to welcome them and thank them for following me. Luckily, there is another tool, called TweetLater, which allows me to automatically send a welcome message to all my new followers and to automatically follow anybody who follows me.

Another trick is to choose just one application to send, view and manage all your tweets – and stick with it. I started using Tweetfox, which is a plug-in for the  Firefox browser and which regularly notifies you of any incoming tweets (and allows you to post tweets) while you are using Firefox. However, I sometimes found it unnecessarily obtrusive and even more annoyingly it used up too much memory or bandwidth that it prevented me from viewing Google images and video selections on YouTube. It even prevented me from accessing my own blog here on WordPress. So I uninstalled it and now use Tweetdeck which in its latest version has the added advantage of allowing me to update my status on Facebook at the same time as I post a tweet.

There are dozens of other Twitter applications to explore and over the next few months I shall probably be trying some of them out. When I do, I will endeavour to give my opinion of them in another post.