Josh Russell

I was at Interesting 2008 earlier this year where we had a sneaky look at the redesigned coins, presented by their designer, along with the story of how they came to be. As the name of the event suggests, it was really interesting!

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What I didn’t notice at the time, is a design flaw that I’m amazed was allowed to happen.

Take a look at the coins, do you see it?

Read about the new coins at the Royal Mint

There are no numbers. Meaning that if you can’t read, or just can’t read English, you’re at an immediate disadvantage.

This is such an obvious omission! How did this happen! Are they assuming that people will know what the coins are based on the previous coins? It might be the first time some people see our currency, they will be clueless.

Now maybe the transition will help, for a while there will be both the old and the new coins in circulation. This will probably solve the problem through comparison and thus familiarity. But how long are these coins going to be around, and how long until the old one disappear? I assume that banks will be collecting the old ones for several years to come, but one day the new ones will be the only ones. People think very short term don’t they.

Also…. coins? really? We don’t need them anymore. This is 2008 after-all, it’s the future! How much is this costing? I’m willing to bet that the cost is somewhere close to what the cost of transitioning away from coins to a newer technology would be..

And I completely agree.

When I was a chef several years ago, I learned so much (ask me next time we bump into each other). How to cook was only part of it. Long story short, I eventually realised that I’d stopped caring about the food, and that it had become just a job. As soon as you realise that, you can no-longer do the job the same way. You need to give a shit. You need to be part of what you’re doing, and it will be part of you too. So I gave it up. Luckily I soon started to work at Comic Relief.. and during my time in the kitchen I started Loose Connection too.

The reason I started working in the kitchen in the first place was because I wasn’t enjoying the web any more, and I got out of that for the same reason!

Needless to say, I’ve learned a lot from the experiences of all those paths, and am happy to be back in the web/digital industry. I have focus, purpose, experience and (almost most importantly) community.

Now watch this, he says it better than me.

So, the points to remember: (and this is not exclusive to building things online)

• love it, or stop
• live it, you’ll be working *all the time*
• don’t just listen, take part
• be prepared to fail for your love, don’t compromise your ideals (that’s the hippy bit apparently)
• do something you’re actually into, it’ll show if you’re not, and you’ll lose interest
• and more… you can work it out

And go find him on Twitter, he’s worth listening in on.

For some more technical stuff about building things online, here’s my list of what it takes to build the perfect webapp.

Update: Oh I forgot, remember to be happy. That’s the foundation for being successful. In both life and business.

You do not need to be spending £20 to get a return ticket to London from Brighton! A day trip to the capital can cost you just £13.50, this is how..

Disclaimer - there are no tricks, slight of hand, illegal activity or rail discount cards used in this hack.

As an ongoing promotion to get more people visiting London, “British Rail” offer a ticket called the Super Off-Peak Day Return (previously known as the Price Buster!!1!one!). This ticket can only be purchased in Brighton, as it’s designed to get people to travel to London to presumably spend money on touristy things. Traveling to Brighton as a tourist, well that’s of course, unheard of! (duh)

However, it’s possible to get this same ticket in London, for the purposes of traveling to Brighton. Let me explain.

Traveling from Brighton to London to Brighton (a day return)

1. Use a “quick ticket” machine, this is important, the staff on the counter will try to up-sell you other versions
2. Select “find station” or “station a-z” and explicitly type in “London V”, this is because you’re going to London Victoria, not “London Terminals” which is pretty much everywhere (and becomes important later in the story *)
3. Select the only station you’re presented with in the results, which will be London Victoria
4. Now, on the right hand side list, select the Super Off-Peak Day Return, it’ll be £13.50
5. Done. Now of course, this can only be used off-peak, so that’s after 10am on the way out, and not between 4pm and 6pm on the way back. (or something like that, you work it out)

What’s important to remember is that the train companies, and in fact their business models, are profiting through obscurity. By this I mean that they take advantage of us by providing an awful user experience that ends up in us spending the most money. The first options we see are the most expensive, not the most economical. This is bad for several reasons, but mainly (for me, personally), is that if the trains *were* cheaper, or more people knew how to get cheap fares, then we would use the trains more, and thus not our cars. Big picture, joined up thinking guys! Come on!

Traveling the other way, London to Brighton to London (also a day return)

Now this is the fun bit. (if you enjoy watching confused people trying to work out what you’re up to)

1. This time, queue up at the counter. Yes you’re going to have to try to have a conversation with one of these people. They (usually) don’t want to help you, be prepared for questions.
2. When it’s your turn, which it will be eventually, trust me, ask the nice person for a Super Off-Peak Day Return from *Brighton* to *London. Yes, from *Brighton* to *London*.
3. Answer their questions with “yes, I know it sounds weird, and yes I know I’m already in London, I know what I’m doing. Kthx.”
4. Hopefully you’ll then be able to pay them £13.50 for your ticket, which will be a return, from Brighton to London and back to Brighton. (bear with me)
5. If you’re not now paying for your ticket right now, that may be because they’ve claimed that it’s not possible to sell you a ticket from a station that you are not at. This is not true. They can sell you a ticket from *anywhere to anywhere*.
6. To prove this, use this logic: ask them to try, if the computer doesn’t let them, then it’s not possible, and they will be proven correct! However, if it works, you get your ticket.
7. And here’s the clever bit, you’re now going to use the return half of your ticket for your outgoing journey to Brighton. And then your outgoing half of your ticket for your journey back to London. This is the bit that confuses them, they don’t life hack. What you’re essentially buying is two one-way tickets, it doesn’t matter which order you use them in.

It’s important to stand your ground, you are in the right in this situation. They just have a failure to understand the logic. What you need to impress upon them is that that is not important! Their job is to sell you a ticket.

Of course there would be no need for this hack if they played nice. Old (business 1.0, ack) school businesses need to understand that, long term, being nice is better. Simple as that. Make it obvious that the cheap tickets exist, or better still, reward us for wanting to use the train at all!

* London Victoria isn’t the same as London Terminals. If you try to buy a ticket from the ticket machines in London Victoria, they don’t allow you choose where you’re traveling from, and default to London Terminals. Clearly you are standing in London Victoria. This is why you have to queue up and explicitly ask for the ticket you want.

(alternative title - How to use social media such as twitter to be nice)

Just a very quick list of tips for those of you that are new to using Twitter.

But first, Lisa Nova, who I think shows how bad the Twitter addiction can get.

1. Put your real name in the name field when you sign up.
   If you follow people then they will know who you are. If you have nothing in your profile but your chosen username/handle/nickname then you risk not being followed back purely because you’re effectively anonymous.
2. Put a link to a website that has more info about you or what you do in the website field
   If there is no link for people to follow if they’re interested in knowing more, then again, you risk not being followed back. And even worse, if you represent a brand or have an interesting project you’re working on then nobody will know!
3. Introduce yourself when you follow someone
   As you’ll discover yourself, it’s really hard to know where someone might have found you, and why they’re following you. If somewhere in your recent tweets there’s a message saying hi and who you are, or where you met, then it’s instantly easy to know how that connection is made.
4. Use @replies (what are @replies) at the beginning of your tweet rather than half way through (if the context works)
   Replies to people using the @joshr method only appear in the replies tab on Twitter’s own site if the @reply was at the beginning of your tweet. If the @joshr is in the middle of your tweet then Twitter treats this as a mention, rather than a reply. This is ok as well, as they can be found (and in fact explicitly searched for) in the Twitter search, but that’s not so obvious
5. When posting links, say something about what that link is to
   This may sound obvious, but it’s very common for links to be posted with no explanation whatsoever about what might be on the page linked to. Why should people follow it? Give context to your link and get the traffic. Quite often the good links float to the top on Twitter, as people consciously choose to post them, it’s not a constant river of links like in your RSS reader. (That deserves it’s own post, I’ve almost stopped using my RSS reader thanks to Twitter being my filter)
6. Your photo (avatar) should be of you, more specifically of your face
   You know, so we can see you. People are visual creatures, if you’ve met someone you want to follow then they’re more likely to remember your face than remember your name. Of course changing your avatar occasionally for fun and memes is ok too :)
7. Don’t post nothing
   If you don’t post anything, then you’re missing the point of half of Twitter. The other half is to listen and read what your friends are up to. But not saying anything yourself can at worst be seen as creepy, and at best lurking or stalking. This is a 2-way medium, you never know, you might find some interesting people following you because of what you wrote.
8. Don’t post too much
   If you post all day about that link you found or how cute your cat is, and i mean an excessive amount (more than 50 times a day maybe?), then your signal to noise ratio won’t be great. This may be a reason you’ll lose followers, or not gain them in the first place. There may be a chance you’ll get mistaken for spam too, this is also not good. (by the way, spam doesn’t work on Twitter, we just block and don’t follow, there-fore we’re not hearing you OK?!)
9. Be aware of timezones
   If there is someone you really want to get noticed by, it’s worth tweeting at a time when they’re awake. So if they’re on the other side of the world, you might be pulling some late nights.
10. If you’re a brand, pay attention to what people are saying about you
    Again, this might sound obvious, but doing this is not always easy. Use the Twitter search to search for you brand, remember to try other iterations of the name (hyphens, numbers, acronyms), and then feel free to respond or reply to people talking about your stuff. This shows that you are a human and that you care. There is nothing like a personal touch when it comes to business, got it! :) There’s a lot to take advantage of when creating content online or interacting with customers and users online. It should be part of your communication strategy to blog, Twitter, and generally get involved. Play with your users in their playground, but play nice.
11. The Internet never forgets
    I can’t impress this one on you enough, be careful what you say online (not just on Twitter, but everywhere else too). If you ever want to delete what you’ve written somewhere, you can do that. Twitter has a delete button next to every tweet you write. But your tweets are archived elsewhere and are findable in Google. Even the Twitter search database is different, your tweets are not removed from there. In fact look at it this way, when you delete a tweet, you’re only deleting it from your timeline, nowhere else. Welcome to the world of caching, that’s something you should look up and understand.

I’m on Twitter as joshr, I’m sure I break the rules all the time, but it’s always on my mind. Remember the value of the relationships, and remember who’s following you, they’re potentially listening to everything you say, good or bad!

There are loads of technical tips too (things like not posting two links next to each other because only one of them will be clickable..) but that’s been covered a lot, and most of those tips will probably become deprecated as they get fixed or as user’s behaviours change to adapt to them.

If you have more tips please post them in the comments, or better still blog your list and trackback :)

Some useful references:
Twitter fan wiki, loads of hack, tips, tricks and plugins or apps for Twitter
Twitter Search, searches not for friends, but for things people have said (We made something that lets you add a search box to your Twitter page)