Twitter/Blog

Rules of the Blog

There aren’t any really. Be nice. The odd swear is fine  just try not to do it too much. There is no reason to post as ‘Anonymous’. (If you get two people called ‘Anonymous’, nobody knows who is saying what.) Everyone can think up an alter-ego if they don’t want their own name out there. That’s it really.

This is intended as a place for well-reasoned discussion and sharing of opinions, and also to try and show people that the racing is often just as good outside their comfort zone, if they would just spend 10 minutes learning the drivers and teams.

Guest contributions are welcome. Email or tweet me.

Twitter Account

Somehow I’ve accumulated a lot of followers on Twitter (er, thanks), so I thought I’d share how I approach using it.

I use Twitter to follow people who talk about racing. If you don’t talk about racing, or spend most of your time talking about other stuff, I may unfollow you without saying so. I may follow you back later though, especially if you focus on one main racing event per year, I’m quite fickle. If you don’t like me I fully expect you to unfollow me without saying so!

By the same token I don’t do “followbacks” (where you start following me and you think that means I’ll just follow you in return) unless I already know you. For one thing, I don’t really pay attention to my follow counts. For another, I’ve had people unfollow me specifically because I didn’t follow back! Unreal. If you want me to follow you, firstly talk about racing and secondly talk to me so I know who you are. (And thirdly, be at least mildly interesting.)

I try and keep it loosely family-friendly but a few swears creep in, I’m not really hung up about it. I don’t actively try to swear to look cool.

I’m not a journalist or a reporter, however I follow a lot of people who are and I like to retweet their work. Better to acknowledge the work of real reporters than syndicated news feeds posting press releases. They can add things which are much more insightful than anything I can add so I just hit RT.
Likewise I follow people who themselves forward links/news via retweets, which I’m happy to pass on. Sometimes people say funny things. Sometimes it means I do a lot of retweets in one go, that’s just the way it falls.

I like to live-tweet F1, IndyCar and a few other things. I try not to flood your stream but because I can type quite quickly it is very easy to get carried away! This’ll be much more noticeable if you follow under 100 people. I am trying to move away from telling you what you’ve already seen on TV, that’s a bad habit.

Anybody who continually begs for retweets or comments will end up receiving neither. I don’t like attention-seekers. It doesn’t matter how good the link is, if you continually nag and bug people about it I’ll just ignore you. The odd repeated plug is fine, different people are on at different times, but don’t take the Mickey.

I’m not interested in follower counts or “follow/RT me so I can break x followers!”. It isn’t a competition. I don’t care how many followers you have. I don’t expect you to care how many I have. I do with others as I expect them to do with me, which means following or RTing if you say or do things I find interesting and I happen to be around at the time.

By the way, just because I can type quickly and tweet a lot doesn’t mean I’m very sociable in real life..

Personal Twitter Account

This is where I talk about things away from racing. I don’t use my personal account anything like as much as the racing one, but when I do that’s where you’ll find off-topic stuff. Sometimes I’ll put it on both because I think my racing fan buddies might like it too.

When it comes to the personal account, my thoughts are my thoughts as if I were talking aloud with my friends, and that might includes swears and forthright opinions which are probably wrong. If you follow this account I expect you to be able to handle that. This does NOT mean I go out of my way to swear for the sake of it. Yes there is sometimes swearing and yes there is sometimes personal opinion. I don’t expect any grief over it, if you can’t handle it move on.

I’m more choosy who I follow here because it is ‘my’ account and not the one for the blog. Nothing personal.

Important Tip

I’m amazed how many people still don’t know this:

If you start a message with “@name”, that’s a reply and is exactly the same as pressing the Reply button*. Only followers of both of you will see the message. If you want all of your followers to see it you have to move the mention later into the message. If I still want to start with a name, I prefix the message with a ‘.’ or a ‘-’.

*There is a small difference nowadays and that’s if you press Reply, Twitter can track the conversation thread.