Sorry I’ve been quiet for a while. I had a run-in with twitter and the account was temporarily suspended (only a week to ten days while I appealed). This meant I couldn’t participate for a couple of weeks but had another, unexpected and unpleasant side effect. My creativity and enthusiasm evaporated. I was really enjoying this project and several new ideas a day but twitter’s intervention for “aggressive following” really took the shine off things and put a damper on my mood. Their rules are undoubtedly necessary to prevent advertisers jamming the whole thing up but whatever algorithm they use seems to miss the point. It appears to be based purely on the total number of people you follow with no reference to how many people follow you in return. This is a critical detail. If you’re doing something other people like (or, dare I say it selling something people want) they should leave well alone. Over 80% of the people I engaged with for SixWordIdeas have followed back and joined in with the spirit of things. To me that is an indication that we’re all enjoying the idea. I’ve bounced back now and will be tweeting blog entries like this again for the foreseeable future. Sorry to anyone who missed out on a re-tweet or a reply to a DM, I’ll try to go back over the backlog over the next couple of weeks.
Namaste, Chas.
