snowgoose

Ever since that fateful day in 2004, when South Africa heard that we were to host the FIFA World Cup^TM, 2010 was always going to be a big year. As a nation, we’ve been waiting for this year for what feels like eternity, speaking about it in hushed tones, the word “2010″ enough to convey promise, nation-building, riches beyond our wildest dreams…
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I am deepy, deeply ashamed, I am such a useless excuse for a blogger. Recently I have met quite a few people who have said they read my blog. My first thought is always “Well, thats 3 minutes of your life you will never get back!”. I honestly think what I write here is the biggest load of fluff and marvel that people actually want to read it. I use that to justify not making the effort to blog regularly – “My blog has nothing valuable to add so it doesn’t matter when I write”… right?

Wrong! This week I realised that as much as I blog for myself, I actually do have readers and its really unfair of me to not give a crap. If consumate bloggers like @Exmi & @Shebeegee actually make an effort to read this blog, If my sister Ilse, who doesn’t read any other blogs, comes here regularly to check if I have updated, If my new and old colleagues are able to take time out of their insanely busy days to mosey on through here – who the hell am I to neglect it?

And, if this wasn’t enough to make me hang my head in shame, the overwhelming sense of guilt I have for having worked at Quirk for 2 months and not blogged once on GottaQuirk (Quirk’s blog)  should do the trick. I have a feeling that Kat, the awesome QuirkStar who looks after GottaQuirk, was pretty darn excited when I joined, as I’m a blogger already so I’m sure she envisaged a flood of great articles from me. I am such a chop, I’ve let her down too.

Oh well, enough feeling sorry for myself. I’m not going to promise anything, except to say I’m going to try my best to write here and on GottaQuirk more often. So, if you like reading my blog – that’s good news. If you dont like it? Well… that was 3 minutes of your life you’ll never get back!

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I know I have been totally useless for the past few weeks. When I started this blog I promised myself I’d post at least once a week… another one bites the dust then.

In my defence, they have been the busiest 2 weeks in a long time. 5 other QuirkStars and I prepared frantically for and travelled down to INDABA in Durban, the biggest Tourism show in Africa, to cover the event for a Quirk client; South African Tourism. Despite little sleep (or maybe because of it), our team managed to record over 6 hours of footage, took 73 photos, tweeted 56 times and wrote close to 3 000 words on the INDABA blog. But just as awesome was the time I spent getting to know my fellow QuirkStars. Radness abounds here – and so does madness.

From a daily diet of 5 bar-ones to the infamous shared towel, we ensured we kept true to the mild insanity our company name suggests. I learned that Jamie has never eaten anything interesting in his whole life, If you ask Daniel to start talking about music you’d better be sitting comfortably and Asher is a complete germ-a-phobe. Rob and Mary are both nuts in their own way, but that just adds to their awesomeness. (Oh, if you are a nervous passenger, I would not suggest you drive with Rob!). I’m sure they also think I am completely nuts (rightly so) but I don’t think they care if the look on their faces when I presented a cooked breakfast as they woke up on Sunday morning is anything to go by.

After the excitement of INDABA, this week could have been very dull if not for the birth of my Ginger Collection and The First Baby To Trend On Twitter Before He Was 4 Hours Old. If that sentence makes no sense to you, you’re obviously not following me on twitter, so let me elaborate:

I recently realised I know quite a few Gingers. Definitely more than the average person, I would say. My boyfriend (and favourite ginger), his older brother, my boss – Rob Stokes, 2 of my colleagues and 1 of my friends have red hair and freckles (in varying degrees of intensity). Now having dubbed myself a ‘Polyester Ginger’ (natural blonde, dyes hair red), I am pretty chuffed by this. So chuffed,that I decided on Wednesday to start a Ginger collection. I’d call myself “Snowgoose and the Seven Gingers”. I was so stoked when after I tried to recruit my 2 outstanding gingers, I got more than 5 Gingers volunteer to be in my collection! (even some girl gingers!). I have decided to expand my collection and start a Ginger Political party, with the goal of winning one seat in parliament in 2014. Laugh now, but you’ll be voting for us soon!

My weird fascination with red hair was interrupted by history being made on Friday, as Tertia Albertyn’s new-born son, Max, became the first South African baby to feature on TwitterTrends before, during and just after his birth. On Friday morning, Cath Jenkin & Exmi decided we to dedicate a hashtag to his birthday and get it trending on twitter.

They succeeded. With the help of just 170-odd of the 10 000 South African twitter users who put the tag: #MaxDay in their tweets, they got Tertia’s baby onto the number 3 spot on Twitter’s Home page, ahead of Star Trek and Swine Flu.   This means that #MaxDay was the third most important topic on twitter in the world, and with an audience of over 7 million – that is no mean feat. Max Albertyn made history and gave all us twitter weirdos something to do for a few hours. Thanks little Dude.

So now you know why I haven’t blogged in a while. Forgive me yet? No?

Ah, bah humbug!

It’s the last ThurFriday for a while today. From next week onwards, we Saffers are back to 5 day weeks. So to relax you in anticipation of your long weekend, I have for you: a Twitter Cartoon!

I’ve been fighting with LinkedIn and it’s stupid crap for the past 2 weeks so this cartoon made me laugh out loud (not LOL, actually laugh, out loud.):

But wait! That’s not all! In light of the recent NerdMag article by my friend Exmi and the storm of commentary that followed it, I’d like to add another twitter one. This one’s for you”Anonymoron”:

hehe…

After the runaway success of the article @Shebeegee very kindly allowed me to write for NerdMag, I thought I’d put it up here, so if you haven’t already read it, enjoy. (Please keep in mind that this was written as a cheeky humuorous article and should not be taken too seriously – a bit like me )

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Since the advent of Twitter, and more recently, Qwitter, we have all been able to feed our strange compulsion to know exactly how popular we all are. The race to see who can gain more followers has consumed some South African Twitter users way beyond what can be considered healthy. And Qwitter makes it worse. Now we also know when people un-follow us and what tweet caused them to take such serious action.

We have all read about strategies to get you followed on Twitter, but what about those that get you unfollowed? I’ve compiled a list of 10 things that are guaranteed to shed you some followers, gleaned both from my experience of people unfollowing me and from people I’ve had to stop following to prevent me from killing them. So if you’re brave (or stupid) enough, why don’t you try a few of them?

1.    Tweet about how many followers you have
No matter how excited you are that you just got to 250 followers, nobody else gives a damn. It also feeds our sick need to steal others’ thunder by unfollowing someone when they crow about their milestone.
“Oh, really? You have 300 followers? No you don’t, you have 299! Ha!”

2.    Constantly retweet someone who has the same followers as you
We heard what they said the first time – they have over 1000 followers, what are the chances we’re not following them? There is nothing more annoying than hearing the same thing twice, apart from maybe those delightful souls who retweet themselves. Um… Okaaaaay then weirdo.

3.    “@” someone to tell them you have sent them an email or DM
The great thing about email is that it lets you know when “You got mail” and if you have email alerts enabled it even lets you know when you have a DM. You do not need to “@” someone to tell them this. Not only does it make the recipient of the message feel patronised but it makes the rest of us feel jealous and left out. What are you guys talking about that is so private that you can’t discuss it in front of everyone but not private enough that you have to broadcast that you said it?

4.    Swear on Twitter
With the notable exceptions of people like @Exmi & @Tertia, swearing in tweets will get you dropped faster than you can say “Fu…” you get the picture. It is the SA twittersphere’s pet hate. I find it amusing as we all swear when we see each other “in real life” but it seems dirty (not in a good way) and disrespectful when done on Twitter.

5.    Tweet & retweet links with no context
Clicking on links in Twitter is great. You get to see what other people are thinking/doing and you get to learn a lot. But no matter how useful your links are, if you constantly tweet things like “This is interesting: http://tinyurl.com/dgj8g2” with absolutely no indication of what your link is about, I will eventually unfollow you. You have at least another 80 characters left – could you at least give us a clue!?

6.    Spam us with 20 tweets a day asking us to Digg your latest blog post
If the content is good, we’ll Digg it. You sound needy & desperate. Please stop.

7.    Write long essays that span over 3 or more tweets
140 characters. It’s a limit, not a guideline. We have all struggled with keeping our posts within this range but we manage, why cant you?

8.    Tweet more than 50 times a day
I don’t know about you, but it frustrates the hell outta me when I grab a few minutes to check my Twitter stream, only to find that someone has filled up the first 2 screens. It doesn’t matter how much I like you or how valuable the content, when you are so prolific that I can draw your profile pic from memory, my mouse starts moving uncontrollably toward the Unfollow button. Unless you are live tweeting an event, space them tweets out OK?

9.    Tweet nothing else but what song you are listening to
We can’t actually hear the music so we don’t care what you are listening to. It’s as simple as that.

10.    And finally, do all of the above combined.

Can you imagine someone who swears in 200 tweets a day which ask for Digg love in a series of “continued…” tweets with unexplained links? That person would be dropped like a bad habit before you could say “RT: @me @you Hey, I’ve sent you a DM telling you what song I’m listening to. & guess what? I have 300 followers, oh no, make that 299, 298…”