h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Perhaps an entry on Mammoth Bone Houses?

I'm working on an entry about the history of asbestos.

You should never use asbestos in your bone house. It makes it not up to code.

>>> I'd no idea that the announcement threads were tweeted. I do know there'd been some discussion about tweeting threads, but I didn't know that this was happening.

Links to the Announcements are tweeted out from the @h2g2c2 twitter account and posted to the h2g2c2 Facebook page for months now, as has been regularly reported during the volunteers' weekly meetings. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the fact that I'd reported such had even shown up in the minutes from time to time.


HN

Well, no excuses for me if it was mentioned in the two calls in November, but before that I was operating on a need-to-know basis.

I can't remember the last time I looked at twitter, probably June, and I've been on FB about twice per week since August or so.

(I will be incredibly pissed off if I don't get a stonkingly good mark for this thing, it has taken far too much of my life and messed around far too many other people).

(They'd better appreciate you, Ben. We do. )

I'm twitter-averse, myself, but perhaps this brings up a good point:

Let's not tweet links to conversations of any kind. Although the intent of the conversaion might be good, after all, you never know what 2legs is going to say next...

If we're worried about putting our best foot forward, let's tweet stuff that has been edited so we look good.

Not like we really are...

Thank you Dmitri.

I don't twit either, but am curious: is the point of h2g2 having a twitter feed to promote the site to people who don't really know it? Or is it to keep h2ers up to date with what's going on? How is the balance between those two things.

I haven't checked since the move but I assume that the Announcements are still going out on RSS. Is that a similar issue?

I still think there is a case to be made for keeping Announcement threads for the discussion of the Announcement and and questions that the community has as a result. That's a *really* important part of the community.

When the bbc closed Announcement threads, the important part of that isn't that the bbc did it, it's that there was a distinct reason for that action: the threads were getting too long for the Eds and researchers to keep up with and stuff was getting lost. Important stuff. I don't think the Announcement threads should be closed. I think that it would be nice for us to have a policy (formal or informal), that says "this is what Announcement threads are for".

That doesn't mean that there can't be any fun or silliness here (been there, done that myself ), but just that there is an awareness of the primary purpose of the thread, and not letting things get out of control. I was a bit grumpy at the size of the backlog, and I did skim it which meant that I missed the post from Richard entirely. When we have more researchers again this is likely to be more of an issue.

(I think there are also some issues with regards to the new boundaries we are all learning about between researchers and Volunteers).

So funny to see an Announcements thread going
so far off topic, but delighted to see that it can
now without being closed down like a rabid dog


But everyone seems to have caught themselves out like
Wile E Coyote running on air with conditioned reflexes
kicking in and gravity being restored.


So, if I may ask Dmitri about:
>> If we're worried about putting our best foot forward..<<

Should it not be our 'better' foot forward?
Unless of course you have more than two.



~jwf~

<rofl. How do you know how many feet I have?

~jwf~ I think that might be my favourite post of the morning

Look - I was really pleased about the popularity of the site increasing and people getting our research when querying on certain search engines.

But....

I've been quietly clearing up the poo for 5 years but now, well, I need a bigger shovel, in fact a one.

It's okay, the gnomes have said they'll help look after the mammoths to help make up for running amok yesterday.

Just be careful not to call them cute

>>after all, you never know what 2legs is going to say next...<<

Actually, 2legs has had a higher Klout score than any of our accounts (36) for some time now. Apparently, (and I'm not making this up), 2legs is a twitter influencer on the topics of Bacon, Kitchen and Marmite.

The gnomes or the mammoths?

Dmitri, according to Bit.Ly, tweets of our announcement threads get around 10 times the traffic of our regular tweeted entries. If those stats are even remotely accurate, it would be a bit of an own goal to stop sharing them.

I did experiment with tweeting some general conversation threads at one (very brief) point (the ones that appear on the front page under 'most popular conversations'), but I abandoned the idea because of threads drifting to non-related topics which made a nonsense of their promo links.

Kea, rightly or wrongly, I've always seen the primary purpose of the twitter feed as spreading word of our existence to a non-h2g2 crowd. It seems to be working, so I'll continue to plan the feed around that, until situations dictate otherwise.

Despite how long we've been on the web , we're still relative newcomers to the social networks as it's only since the move that we've really been using them properly (ie. with any sort of co-ordinated plan) and the BBC never understood how they worked, which is partly why they sold us off in the first place. Of course existing Researchers will follow the account too, and at the moment they make up the bulk of our followers, but over time we should attract more from the general twitterverse, particularly when it all starts coming together. Right now we're still finding what works and what doesn't.

thanks for explaining.