As my brother, the famous XMPP and IMAP specialist Dave Cridland said recently, “I’ve no interest whatsoever in following James’s Twitter feed, and I’m his brother. Surely, it cannot possibly be more interesting for anyone else?”

Thankfully, that’s not the case for 202 people, who get my mostly inane “really tired tonight, big day yesterday” or “in the Crown and Sceptre if anyone fancied a beer” tweets with good grace and at least mild interest.

Dave popped up this morning via instant message to me, and asked the not unreasonable question:

I’m looking for a social website, but I can’t find one that fits what I want. I’m just looking for one where I can say “I’ve got/read this book, I thought it was good”. Nothing more than that, but all the book-related Web 2.0 things seem dedicated to my giving all my books away.

I had no idea, so I asked my Twitter followers:

jamescridland: is wondering if there’s a social website that does “I’ve got/read this book, I thought it was good” - anyone?

…and the answers came thick and fast…

andybee: @jamescridland Shelfari?
jjn1: there’s a Facebook app called Visual Bookshelf (or some such)…
fidothe: @jamescridland http://allconsuming.net/
billt: @jamescridland http://www.librarything.com/ - and you can get a cuecat scanner to enter your own library really fast
perreau: I have a feeling the people behind http://www.gurgle.com are building one. Not Mothercare, the development folks.
davebriggs: @jamescridland I run http://palimpsest.org.uk/forum which is old school but reasonably high minded
pete_bug: @jamescridland this one is pretty good: www.anobii.com
matstace: @jamescridland my wife uses “visual bookshelf” facebook app, not sure if there’s a stand-alone site for it though.
asimaythink: @jamescridland Maybe goodreads.com (untested)?
tristanf: @jamescridland LibraryThing
frankieroberto: @tristanf @jamescridland LibraryThing is great, but the problem is that we don’t consume books online, so it’s quite an effort to add them…
tristanf: @frankieroberto Which I guess is why I don’t use it
jamescridland is grateful for the book social media suggestions. I asked on behalf of my brother, who is now happily using librarything
billt: @jamescridland tell him to get http://www.librarything.com/cuecat - it’s brill (works on Mac too!)
mydogminton: @jamescridland Just as you mentioned www.librarything.com/ I had stumbled across webby nominee www.bookglutton.com
Nico_Macdonald: @jamescridland I use LibraryThing http://www.librarything.com/ but it hasn’t taken off yet in our world.
Nico_Macdonald: @jamescridland Goodreads http://www.goodreads.com/ is a little less rough feeling. On FB Virtual Bookshelf is good, and has social tools.

Who needs Google when you’ve got the wisdom of the Twitter crowd?

Photo: Nathan Makan. Used under licence.

As of the time of writing, my Twitter feed has 122 followers. 122 people get my updates. And I must confess to being rather perplexed as to why.

I mean - I try to keep the editorial standards of this blog at least slightly above rock-bottom, but the same certainly doesn’t go for my Twitter feed. Firstly, I phrase my ‘tweets’ slightly oddly so that they also work in Facebook (which I’ve set up to automatically get them); and secondly, because… well. Here’s the last 24 hours or so, and you can make your own mind up…

- is discovering that Google Apps For Your Domain’s start page strips out lots of HTML tags, irritatingly
- is astonished at the poor people-flow designed into Benugo at StPancras. But is enjoying sandwich.
- is amazingly untroubled by a hangover this morning.
- is hungry. Mmm, food.
- is enjoying beerage (Black Sheep Bitter) with a good friend. Would invite you. But I won’t.
- has just discovered that the Midas Touch has shut. Bugger.
- is eating a chilli-con-carne soup (for lunch. Yes. At 4pm) which is officially hotter than the sun.

Yes, this is not the work of an Pulitzer prize-winning journalist. This is, instead, the work of a hurried tapping into an iPhone keyboard or GTalk window. It’s got virtually nothing to do with my day job; indeed, nothing to do with, well, anything much.

So, why do people follow me? I’ve no idea. So I asked, on Twitter, naturally. Here are some of the replies…
- “because you’re a pal”
- “it’s good to keep up with one of the people I most respect in radio tech.. and it’s nice to hear how my pals are doing :)”
- “because I’m nosy, you’re an acknowledged new media guru expert and fellow new/old media colleague of sorts”
- “we shared emails re Media UK then much later met briefly at a podcast conference - Twitter is a useful way to keep in touch.”
…and what’s fascinating about the above is that I’ve not met one of those people, and can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve met the others. While they’re jolly nice people, they’re not what I would call close friends. Not yet.

It’s people who’ve never met me that I find confusing. Why on earth do they add me? I asked one such person this via email. She replied, in part, “I found you after doing a web search for twitter and BBC because I wanted to increase the number of people I was following on twitter so I could better understand what it’s for. That also turned up Jemima Kiss who writes for the Guardian. So, I’m randomly following four complete strangers (all of whom have public blogs though and invite new readers) but it’s good to see how people are using Twitter. I’m sold on the concept, but I agree it might be a bit odd to have strangers following you. I’d like to think it’s not stalking but then again maybe it’s not that clear cut.” (She’s clearly not seen my Friendfeed or my rather more hand-rolled and complete stalkerfeed.)

Of my met-many-times friends, of course, I got sarcastic comments like “it saves actually going to the effort of going to the pub with you”, which just goes to show that clearly NickJ needs to stop spending money on Apple kit, if he can’t afford the beer bill.

But perhaps Ian Fenn has it right. “Somehow these little snippets of others’ lives are reassuring”. I’d agree.

If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, either visit the Twitter website and register from there, or text “FOLLOW JAMESCRIDLAND” to 0762 4801423 (there are other numbers for the US, Canada and India). I just can’t promise that the updates you’ll get from me will be any good. Sorry.

My media website Media UK also provides a set of media news alerts via Twitter.

Photo: Niall Kennedy. Used under licence.

A view of a power plant in Houston, taken on February 20th. Photo: Louis Vest. Used under licence.

Google Calendar on your website using PHP and stuff
If you use my code for this, you might like to note that there are quite a few contributed bugfixes, which fix, er, some bugs.

Has digital radio had its day?
I'm quoted in this piece. Executive summary: "no".

The BBC iPlayer and buzz monitoring in action
Nixon McInnes decides that I might know what I'm doing, and that "the BBC still kick ass", which is very nice of him. Must get back to the kicking.

Is Radio Suffering From Too Little Research?
Self-serving post from Edison Media Research. Yes, research is good - but as Henry Ford said, "if I asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse".

Adrian Fitch's spring training
The Fitchster uses one of my photographs, and concerningly writes about 'going hard', but it turns out it's about cycling.

Another of my photos
… a rather old manual montage, originally shot on film would you believe, used in this blog posting

Intempo Rebel Kills Radio DJs (Gizmodo UK)
"A music sampling system that, once tuned into an FM station, records the 40 most played tracks and then edits out the DJ chatter and the ads." Nurse? The copyright!

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from February 15th to February 23rd. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.

Uploaded on 13 February 2008, this is a viewing platform in the war museum in Salford Quays. Photo by Mike Willshaw. Used under licence.

All this online sharing has to stop
It's ruining the motor mechanic industry. (No, really)

Flickr CC search
A quick page whipped up to help me find nice pictures for this blog - it searches all Flickr CC images together (which the Flickr UI won’t let me do).

Aussies Head to SXSW
A website using one of my photos, albeit only credited in the ALT tag (which isn’t cricket, by the way).

Oceanworld Manly
Another spotting of one of my photographs, complete with a link to my own website. How splendid.

Living on Earth: Swedish Body Heat
Sounds exciting, but actually it’s a radio feature about trains, aired on WBUR and other stations. They used one of my photographs to illustrate it on the web. Cool.

When statistics speak volumes
Good piece by Paul Smith on the press releases radio stations send out on figures day. Paul still owes me a fiver, by the way.

MMS For O2 iPhone
Just the thing I was looking for. Brilliant - now I can receive MMS on the iPhone. (Bizarre that it doesn’t support it…)

Twitter on the iPhone: Hahlo
While I’m on an iPhone theme, I use this for Twitter (it’s much prettier than it looks on this page). For this, and for the MMS thing, I’ve donated.

Keeping the conversation going
Nic Price activates a magic Wordpress plugin. So have I. Good idea.

Do We Have The Backup?
‘how it can be legitimate for a government to build roads but not to lay fibre is a mystery to me, and one that deserves to be questioned.’ Good point.

Big name #4
Hello, ladies. Contacting me has never been easier. Etc.

What HD-2s Don’t Stream And Should?
A rant about streaming. But included in this is interesting: WRXK’s HD2 channel (a new one only for HD radios) is entirely themed around their breakfast presenter. Neat idea. (Course, I was behind the ‘Virgin Radio Party Classics’ channel on Sky, voiced by Suggs.)

Interactivity: A lost opportunity for your station?
Some “isn’t the US behind the rest of us” type thoughts from Mark Ramsey; but some useful and interesting figures he quotes.

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from January 26th to February 14th. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.

If you connect to me on Google Talk, Jabber, or iChat - please note that my old @gmail.com address is deprecated for chatting over IM.

I’m now the eminently sensible (myfirstname) @ cridland.net, whether you’re using GTalk or MSN. Please do add me.

Further, http://james.cridland.net/contacting_me/ contains all my details, including Twitter (which I’m really very much back into these days).

(If you try sending me email to @gmail.com I’ll still get it, but you might get some moaning auto-reply at some point telling you to change over.)

Photo: Hajime Nakano. Used under licence

Photo uploaded today by Niek R. Used under licence.

Executive Producer Mobile, Audio & Music Interactive, BBC
A good-looking job within the BBC if you do mobile and you do radio. You do? Excellent. You’ve got just ten days to get your application in.

Digg: We’re Fixing The Annoying Ads
Digg removes auto-playing audio ads from their website. Another example why I think jackfm.co.uk shouldn’t auto-play on visiting their website… (though I guess it’s a little different)

Twitter killed the Status Star
The excellent Mike Butcher posts about Twitter. I think he won’t like my status updates then. Oh dear…

Twitter / jamescridland
It’s me, on Twitter. Suddenly really got into Twitter, since it’s updating my Facebook status automatically now, and also is full of surprisingly interesting people. If you’re on, please FOLLOW JAMESCRIDLAND, I’d like that

Why DAB Stations Closing Down is Good News
Core closing… Life closing… and OneWord closing. Anyone would think this is… good news? A cogent and quite splendid piece by Matt Deegan.

New Capital 95.8 Website
Another post from Matt Deegan, including the gem: “GCap have done a good job with the latest roll-out of sites … I think they they clearly lead radio’s online presence”. I think you’re talking bollocks there, Matt.

Listening to internet radio while on the move
“I’ve been taking advantage of my spiffy new EV-DO net connection.” Man (or woman) listens to radio via the internet in the car. Likes it.

Photo by Christian Guthier on Flickr; used under cc licence

A long and massively point-missing piece on Facebook this morning on BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House (available to listen-again).

In it was a “fat librarian boy” who was most upset to discover a Facebook group entitled “We hate the fat librarian boy”; and a couple who’d split up but are still being kept in touch with their exes by friends via Facebook. With any internet story, you need to ask the question whether the internet is to blame, or whether this kind of thing would have happened anyway without the internet. The answer’s clearly the latter, of course.

One bloke came on, a little concerned about the etiquette of refusing friend requests. The good news (and something Facebook should be clearer on) is that if you hit the ‘ignore’ button, nobody knows: it doesn’t send back any message to the person who asked. I use it all the time - having a “must have met at least twice” rule. Nobody knows you’ve refused the request. It works just fine.

Perhaps the most interesting part of all this was someone coming on at the end and saying that if you want something private, don’t stick it on the internet. At all. Ever.

In order to underline that point, I thought I’d go and look for how much updating information I could find on the internet about my activities online. And it turns out that there’s quite a lot. You can view my stalkerfeed, as I’ve christened it, on my website.

Through publicly-available RSS feeds, you appear to be able to view a large amount of information about me. This kind of information is available for many of us; if we use last.fm, or Facebook, or Twitter, or many other systems, it’s quite possible to piece a ton of information together about us all. Particularly if we use the same username on all of these systems.

When at Virgin, I had the real benefit of having student placements embedded in my department. The interesting thing is watching their normal internet use; because you learn a lot from it. My practice of using the same username on everything appears to be completely alien to ‘the youth of today’; not only do they use a dazzling amount of different usernames, they’re also using names that seemingly don’t tie back at all to their identities, or are suffixed with seemingly random numbers. I don’t know enough about whether they do this on purpose, but the net result is that you cannot easily do the same ’stalkerfeed’ exercise on them. My enjoyment on getting my ‘real name’ on Gmail, for example, clearly isn’t shared by them - apparently preferring random and weird names on their own Gmail accounts, for example, instead of their own names - even when their names are still available.

Those concerned about internet privacy should perhaps learn something from those students; where you don’t want to leave a trail of data, don’t use the same username on everything. Simple, innit? (If only we all thought that way…)