If you can’t think of any sites, have a perusal of the Atheist Blogroll, and if you really can’t find a website with the starting letter (gold star goes to anyone finding a website starting with X), choose an interesting word from the dictionary and list it with its definition. Try to be imaginative! Remember, this is a great chance to discover blogs you may have not heard of before, so don’t feel that you have to put blogs in the meme that you read regularly!

Finally, link back to the blog who sent you this meme, and tag 5 other blogs.

1. About Agnosticism / Atheism
2. Bay of Fundie
3. CyberLizard’s Collection
4. Deep Thoughts
5. ExChristian.net
6. Friendly Atheist
7. God is Pretend
8. Happy Jihad’s House of Pancakes
9. The Invisible Pink Unicorn
10. Jewish Atheist
11. Kill The Afterlife
12. Life Without Faith
13. Moiz Khan
14. nullifidian
15. Oz Atheist’s Weblog
16. Pharyngula
17. Quiet Atheist
18. Radical Atheist
19. Sean the Blogonaut
20. toomanytribbles
21. Unreasonable Faith
22. The View from the Pond
23. Why Don’t You Blog?
24. xylomancy – divination by means of pieces of burning wood (lol)
25. You Made Me Say It!
26. ZackFord Blogs

For tagging, I choose: Friendly Atheist, Unreasonable Faith, CyberLizard’s Collection, and before you think I’m just spelling out naughty words, Life Without Faith & Sean the Blogonaut

Possibly Related Posts:

• Carnival of the Godless #122
• Carnival of the Godless #121
• My Atheist Ranking System
• Your Top 5 Atheist Blogs
• Six Things Meme

Go check it out, and maybe you’ll submit something to the next carnival, or put your own blog forward for the prestigious job of hosting the carnival!

Possibly Related Posts:

• Carnival of the Godless #121
• Carnival of the Godless #124
• The Atheist Alphabet Meme
• Carnival of the Godless #120
• Carnival of the Godless #114

I’ve been using Twitter since August 25th, 2008, and it is a fantastic medium for promoting your ideas, discussing topics with like-minded (or non-like-minded) individuals, and getting all sorts of news and updates from various areas of life. Using a Twitter account, you send short 140 character messages to nobody in particular. People can find your “tweets” in searches, or choose to follow you, meaning that they get presented with a list of your tweets on their homepage.

I won’t pretend that getting as many followers as possible isn’t one of my aims, but I want to do so legitimately, and I want my followers to find my tweets both interesting and entertaining. Over the months I have changed my approach to Twitter many times, seeing what works and what doesn’t. I want to share my experiences of the last 11 months in the form of suggestions that I think will help those just starting out on Twitter to gain followers and enrich their Twitter experience. Since this is an atheist blog, some of my suggestions will be focused on the Twitter atheist community specifically, but they can be adapted to suit any person.

Write a decent description!

You can learn a surprising amount from the 140 character tweets that people send out, but it is a good idea to use the 160 character “One Line Bio” feature to explain your views in a more precise way.

This bio is displayed next to all your tweets on the main Twitter site, underneath your name. If you have a website or blog, make sure to include it in the “More Info URL” field, as it will also display (as a hyperlink) underneath your name. Given that 160 characters is still not much room, I suggest using single word descriptions as tags (comma separated). My bio reads:

Atheist, Blogger, Skeptic, Freethinker, Rationalist, Computer Programmer, Student, High Priest of the Church of the Smashing Orangey Bit ^[1].

Anyone now viewing my Twitter page can now see how I describe myself, and what groups I associate with. This description could mean the difference between a passer-by and a new follower, and a further advantage is the use of descriptions in third-party Twitter applications (which I will go into later).

Use a good Twitter client!

Whilst the web interface is fine for tweeting general messages, if you want to have a better experience, I would advise installing a Twitter client. The company behind Twitter have released an extensive API, meaning that clients can be made for all manner of devices; PCs, phones, iPods, etc.

The Twitter client I recommend is TweetDeck because it is very powerful and supported on all platforms (even iPhone/iPod). There are great features like url-shortening included, making sure your tweets are as content-filled as you can get them. TweetDeck allows you to view multiple columns of tweets, so you can see the people you follow, your mentions, direct messages, and even searches as they update.

Although TweetDeck is filled to the brim with features, there are other alternatives such as Seesmic Desktop which might be preferable. I suggest you take your time and pick out the client that suits your needs; there are certainly many to choose from. Remember, there is nothing stopping you from changing your choice at a later date either!

Say something interesting!

Twitter is a place for conversation, for spreading ideas, and for getting your voice heard. Yes, it can be used for status updates (“Just going to eat lunch”, “Night night Twitter *yawn*”), but people will respond to you more if you have something interesting to say.

Write questions to your followers, or ask them to comment on something. I asked my followers what they used Twitter for, and the response was unanimous: talking to other people (atheists) and sharing links. Don’t be afraid to post something controversial or ask questions. More importantly though, be yourself; if you find a video funny, post it; it you have a random thought, post it! Think of Twitter as a gateway into your mind more than a way for celebrities to talk to their fans.

Reply to tweets!

Once you have started following people, you will find them asking questions or asking for comments on certain things. Replying to them not only gives them feedback, but also makes them aware of your existence. A well thought out reply will always be appreciated, and they may follow you for it. Not everyone will follow someone for making a reply, but it is certainly a factor, and you have nothing to lose by doing it.

Don’t feel the need to respond to every tweet you see though, and certainly don’t just respond to somebody and say “I agree” or “lol”. A reply should add to the conversation, and if you mention something that prompts them to reply to you, well then all the better! Since all replies are public, the reply to your comment will be sent to everyone who follows them, and you may get even more followers from it.

Retweet!

Retweeting is a special kind of reply, where you literally send someone else’s tweet again from your account. Usually the tweet has the prefix “RT”, and I would advise always having the name of the person you are retweeting as well. Clients like TweetDeck do this automatically, but if you are using the web interface you will have to add them yourself. Retweets are generally used if someone says something that you find particularly funny, interesting, or thought-provoking. By sending the tweet onto your followers, you are spreading the message, and your retweet may even get retweeted itself!

By far the most popular things that are retweeted are links to various websites. News is spread this way over Twitter, as are popular YouTube videos, and just about anything with a http:// in front of it. Many people add a comment to the retweet message before sending, but you could always send a separate reply to the original tweeter. A problem with retweeting is that if the message is already near to 140 characters long, adding the name and “RT” will go over the limit. Most people get around this by either shortening words (through -> thru, are -> r, etc) or removing / rewording sections of the tweet.

Hashtagging!

Quite simply, this is the action of putting a tag onto the end (or wherever) of your tweet. Tags are called “hashtags” because it is standard to put a hash symbol (#) in front of the tag, so atheism becomes #atheism. Hashtags are interpreted by the Twitter website, and other clients, as links to the Twitter search. So if you wanted to see a load of tweets about atheism, you would search for #atheism in Twitter search, and find a load of hashtagged results!

Hashtagging is useful because you can subscribe to certain hashtags via several clients (or even the website), and have a constant real-time update of that specific tag. For instance, during the confusion over Michael Jackson’s supposed death, the hashtags #mj, #michael, and #michaeljackson were used to track updates sent around Twitter.

A lot of tweets are hashtagged these days, and you might find yourself asking, what on earth does #tcot mean? Luckily, a website has been set up that acts as a dictionary for hashtags, and a quick trip there will tell you that most people use it to mean “Top Conservatives On Twitter“. There are other definitions, but they are not as widely used.

Search for keywords!

Hashtags are useful for putting tweets into a category, but they are useless unless you actually use them to search for other people to follow. Since you only get updates from people you currently follow, finding new people can be difficult. Luckily, there are simple ways to find people who you can reply to or retweet.

TweetDeck has the ability to show search results that update every minute or so. The results include everyone who tweeted your search term, even if you do not follow them. The advantages of this should be pretty obvious, as you can search for things like the atheism hashtag (#atheism) and get a list of tweets tagged with it. You can create multiple searches, or combine search terms with the OR operator (make sure you use capital letters for the OR).

For example, I have a single search column set up in TweetDeck that gives me results for any tweet that contains the words (not just hashtags) “atheism”, “atheist”, “agnostic”, “freethinker”, “skeptic”, etc. I choose not to use hashtags because I wanted to start conversations with theists who talk about atheism (and who do not generally use the atheism hashtag). A search for “#atheism” will return only the hashtagged results, whilst a search for “atheism” will return both hashtagged results and just mentions of atheism.

If you are using the web interface, you can do the same thing, but you will have to open up a new tab at the Twitter search engine and enter your terms. You could create a bookmark to the search url in order to speed up this process. Remember to reload the tab to see new results!

Follow Friday!

Follow Friday is a Twitter meme that happens every Friday (duh!). On that day, you create a tweet containing the names of people you recommend following, and then tag the tweet with either #followfriday or #ff. People who follow you will now have your recommendations, and may start following them if they are not already doing so. Of course, what you are hoping is that other people are writing Follow Friday tweets with your name in them, and you can track this in TweetDeck by looking in the “Mentions” column. If you are using the web interface, you can do a search for your name and see what comes up.

If people do put you in a Follow Friday list, sending them a quick thank you is always a nice thing to do. The problem with Follow Friday is (like many problems in Twitter) related to the 140 character limit. After a while, you want to put more names in your Follow Friday tweet, but end up running out of room. There are several solutions; sending multiple tweets is one, but the solution I have recently started using is having a static page (http://atheistblogger.com/follow-friday) that I add names to.

With the page set up, I can list people I think are worthy of following, as well as a short description of why. I can update the list, and then every Friday I simply send out the url with the #followfriday hashtag. My list is incomplete; I still need to add more names and the descriptions, but it is a good example of how such pages work.

Mr. Tweet is your friend!

As I previously mentioned, the release of the Twitter API gave way to a large number of applications. Mr. Tweet is one of these applications, and it aims to suggest new people to follow based on the types of people you already follow. In other words, if you follow a lot of atheists, it will give you a load of other atheists as suggestions.

Mr. Tweet works by some clever analytical code, but also through users recommending others for following. Recommending someone is easy to do, and you can read more about the benefits of doing such recommendations on the Mr. Tweet page. Other than recommendations, Mr. Tweet checks your friend’s tweets and determines the users they respond to or mention. This is another great reason why you should reply and retweet people! Your efforts are being noticed by Mr. Tweet, and you will get suggested to people you probably have never even encountered.

Other applications include WeFollow, which tracks people according to three different categories they assign themselves under (mine are atheism, atheist, and blogger), and Twibes, which allows you to join specific groups in Twitter and post to them using hashtags. Be sure to join the Atheists Twibe and the JaffaCakes Twibe (because you know there is a God, and McVities be His name).

Sync your blog!

There are an awful lot of atheist blogs out there, and it would be a shame to use a micro-blogging service like Twitter without posting links to your own blog. If you are gaining followers on Twitter, why not gain readers of your blog at the same time? Luckily, you don’t have to remember to post links to your blog every time you make a post. With twitterfeed you can link your RSS feed to your Twitter account, so that when you post something new on your blog, twitterfeed will (depending on the update rate you set) post the link on your Twitter account for you.

Twitterfeed allows you to customize the tweet it sends, so you can add a prefix of something like “New Post:”, and suffix it with a hashtag (like #atheism). This will increase the chances of your post being picked up and retweeted by the Twitter community.

Start conversations!

140 characters doesn’t seem much, but you can make several points if you word them correctly. Twitter tracks conversations remarkably well, and applications like TweetDeck improve this process. Repeated responses to a single person is very noticeable in a Twitter feed, so you may get people joining the conversation, or starting a new one with you

Don’t go for people who have the same opinions as you, but instead seek out people who you can have a proper discussion with. Over the weeked, I started numerous conversations with a Christian concerning proof, knowledge, what would make me believe, etc. Yesterday evening, I challenged an astrologer who was mouthing off skeptics to prove astrology worked. After a bit of back and forth banter (the JREF and the $1,000,000 prize were mentioned on more than one occassion), he agreed to draw up a chart for me and see how accurate it was.

What is my point? Well, during these conversations, numerous people were reading them, sending me messages, etc. My follower count jumped repeatedly. Evidently, people were interested in what I had to say. I think that by using my above tips, you will be well on your way to gaining many followers, and a larger outreach in the atheist Twitter community.

If you enjoyed this post, please follow me (and say hello!) on Twitter: @ah8r

Possibly Related Posts:

• How Atheists Use Twitter
• Atheist Blogs
• What Turns Christians Into Atheists?
• Carnival Of The Godless #89
• The Atheist Blogger Forums

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• Carnival of the Godless #122
• Carnival of the Godless #124
• The Atheist Alphabet Meme
• Carnival of the Godless #120
• Carnival of the Godless #114

Carnivals are a great way of getting new people to visit your blog, which means the stuff you write is spread to even more people, some of whom may have not even heard about your blog before. It’s a win-win situation for both you and the people who read the carnival!

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• Carnival of the Godless #122
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Firstly, as has been mentioned many times before, this ranking system does not say which blogs are the “best”. It only ranks by popularity, and although generally speaking the more popular blogs tend to be of high quality, it isn’t always the case (just look at Ray Comfort’s blog). Some of the attributes measured will depend somewhat on the age of the blog. Older blogs tend to have more links to them, although this too isn’t always the case. The good thing about this system is that it updates every week, so as blogs get older, their rank should become more accurate.

The attributes which are calculated are:

• Google PageRank (The rank of the blog homepage as used by Google in search results)
• Google Backlinks (The number of pages Google can find that link back to the blog)
• Google Readers (The number of people who subscribe to the blog through Google Reader)
• Alexa Rank (The rank of the website as calculated by Alexa, which uses a toolbar installed on various web browsers to collect stats)
• Alexa Backlinks (Same as Google Backlinks, only calculated by Alexa)
• Alexa Reach (The rank of the website calculated by number of visits)
• Technorati Rank (The rank of the website a calculated by Technorati)
• Technorati Authority (How many websites actively link to the blog over a period of 3 months)
• Technorati Backlinks (The exact number of links coming back to the blog – no defined period)
• Yahoo Backlinks (The number of pages Yahoo can find that link back to the blog).

Of course these attributes will probably change down the line. Through doing some research for this system, I became aware that some things like Technorati ranks are calculated by using the Technorati authority and backlinks. Having all those attributes doesn’t really help with the ranking, but it might be useful to still display them. I made sure to use the word “prototype” very carefully on the rankings page, since although the system currently works, it is far from complete. A prototype should be a system that works but lacks certain features and is made up of code stubs.

An example of how the system is a prototype can be seen by looking at the database where all the values are stored. The database currently consists of only one table, which stores every single piece of information in it. A screenshot of part of this table can be seen below.

NOT the way to do it.

Database programmers out there will realise why this is such a bad way of doing it. It isn’t easy to maintain, and each time I want to add a new ranking attribute I have to change the entire table. Luckily, I already have a better database system outlined on my whiteboard at home, and it makes use of 4 distinct tables. The great thing about this new design is that it can be used to store a “history” of rankings. Whereas the above database overwrites all calculated values when it updates, the new system simply adds new rows with the updated information.

My current plans for the system are outlined below:

• Ranks atheist blogs by various attributes, and displays paginated lists of the top sites, 20 sites per page.
• Options to rank sites by different values (e.g. Google PageRank) instead of the default overall rank.
• View the history of individual sites by attributes. A graph will be generated to show how attributes have changed over time.
• Interactive “badges” will allow sites included in the rankings to display an image that tells the world about their rank.
• A submit form will enable people to add their own sites to the system (and hopefully cut down on the number of emails I get asking to be added :P)

Of course, I realise the irony of having an atheist ranking system on my own blog; it means that my blog will simply rise up the rankings as more people visit it. For this reason, the first released version of the system will have its own website, on a separate domain. I’ve also received some interest in this project generally, and so when I have a working system I will be releasing the source code so people can use it to rank other types of site (or build a competitor to mine).

Finally, if you have any questions, want to point out a mistake in my system plan, shout abuse at how ranking systems are evil, ask for your site to be added to the prototype, or generally have a chit chat, please leave a comment :D

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Atheist Alphabet Meme
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• Carnival of the Godless #121
• Your Top 5 Atheist Blogs
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Things you have done during your lifetime:
(X) Gone on a blind date
(X) Skipped school (many a time)
(X) Watched someone die (my gran)
(X) Been to Canada (when I was 1, but it counts dammit!)
( ) Been to Mexico
(X) Been to Florida
( ) Been to Hawaii
(X) Been on a plane (more times than I can remember)
(X) Been on a helicopter (once, and it was so noisy I don’t think I’d do it again)
(X) Been lost (all the time; it’s why I have GPS on my phone…)
( ) Gone to Washington, DC
(X) Swam in the ocean (Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian. Got Arctic and Antarctic left!…on second thoughts…perhaps not)
( ) Cried yourself to sleep
(X) Played cops and robbers
( ) Recently colored with crayons (I use board markers these days)
( ) Sang Karaoke
(X) Paid for a meal with coins only
( ) Been to the top of the St. Louis Arch
(X) Been to the top of the Empire State Building (froze my fingers as well)
(X) Done something you told yourself you wouldn’t. (whatever you do Adrian, don’t make an atheist blog…oh f*ck)
(X) Made prank phone calls
( ) Been down Bourbon Street in New Orleans
(X) Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose (annoyingly yes)
(X) Caught a snowflake on your tongue
( ) Danced in the rain-naked
(X) Gone skinny dipping
(X) Written a letter to Santa Claus (back when I was an irrational boy)
(X) Been kissed under the mistletoe
(X) Watched the sunrise with someone (watched it in Australia at the new millenium, so before most of the world!)
( ) Paid it forward
(X) Blown bubbles
(X) Gone ice-skating (didn’t do much skating. Falling?…plenty)
(X) Gone to the movies
( ) Been deep sea fishing
( ) Driven across the United States (want to though)
( ) Been in a hot air balloon
( ) Been sky diving
( ) Gone snowmobiling
( ) Lived in more than one country
(X) Lay down outside at night and admired the stars while listening to the crickets
(X) Seen a falling star and made a wish
( ) Enjoyed the beauty of Old Faithful Geyser
(X) Seen the Statue of Liberty
( ) Gone to the top of Seattle Space Needle
( ) Been on a cruise (going on a Nile cruise in August)
(X) Traveled by train
( ) Traveled by motorcycle
( ) Been horseback riding
( ) Ridden on a San Francisco CABLE CAR
(X) Been to Disneyland OR Disney World
(X) Been in a rain forest (another thing I did in Australia)
( ) Seen whales in the ocean
( ) Been to Niagara Falls
( ) Ridden on an elephant
(X) Ridden on a camel (Australia again…)
(X) Swam with dolphins (…and again)
( ) Been to the Olympics
( ) Walked on the Great Wall of China
( ) Saw and heard a glacier calf
( ) Been spinnaker flying
( ) Been water-skiing
(X) Been snow-skiing
(X) Been to Westminster Abbey
(X) Been to the Louvre
( ) Been to a bull fight in Spain (had the chance, outright refused to. Bloodsports are evil)
(X) Swam in the Mediterranean
( ) Been to a Major League Baseball game
( ) Been to a National Football League game
(X) Been moved to tears
(X) Done something to change someone else’s life

37 out of 70. Not bad for a 20 year old eh? I’m tagging everyone who reckons they can do better, and I want evidence people!

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• The Atheist Alphabet Meme
• I Have A Life! (Just)
• Strangely Ironic Book Meme
• Six Things Meme
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Unreasonable faith recently posted a list of the top 30 atheist / agnostic / skeptic blogs, with the top 5 being:

1. Pharyngula
2. Friendly Atheist
3. Cynical-C
4. Debunking Christianity
5. Atheist Media Blog

It’s a great idea, and there are certainly many blogs on the list that I subscribe to, and many that I have subscribed to since reading the article. I think my personal top 5 would be:

1. Pharyngula
2. Atheist Revolution
3. Friendly Atheist
4. RichardDawkins.net
5. Deep Thoughts

So what about you? What are your favourite blogs? Do you have a top 5, or a top 10 maybe? Let the mindless ranking begin!

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• My Atheist Ranking System
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Rules

1. Link to the person tagged you (Linked to both).
2. Post the rules on your blog (doing so now).
3. Write six random arbitrary things about yourself (that’s gonna take some thinking).
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them (hehehehehe).
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog (Geez…let me finish the meme first).
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up (in my todo list).

Six Random Arbitrary Things About Myself

1. My middle name is Michael (after my father). Not exactly a random thing but I doubt I’ve told anyone before on this blog.
2. I have a slightly crooked little finger on my right hand due to the fact that I broke it at school, and my mother refused to take me to hospital because she didn’t think anything was wrong with it. A few weeks later when it had swollen a bit she took me, and the doctor told us it had broken and fused in the wrong place. Of course, there is no point re-breaking and re-setting a little finger, so I still have the crooked thing to this day (although admittedly it isn’t as noticeable as before).
3. I have used the same small blue backpack for the last 10 years to carry stuff in. It might have a broken front pouch; its torn in places where it really shouldn’t be torn, and it probably needs another wash, but its my lucky pack dammit! (Not that I believe in luck of course, but “lucky pack” sounds cooler than anything else).
4. I installed putty on my Nokia E71 phone, just so I could log into my server from anywhere in the world. I then used putty to watch the first Star Wars movie in ascii-animation over a telnet connection whilst very bored in a Information Security lecture last week.
5. There are two distinct shelves on my bookcase. One for computing books:
   • Software Engineering 8
   • Using UML
   • 3 C++ books
   • 4 books on PHP, MySQL, and Apache
   • 2 books on CSS
   • Visual Basic 2005 (eurgh)
   • HTML 4 (awwww, so old…)
   • ASP.NET 2.0 (never touched, thank FSM)
   • Visual C# 2005
   • Database System Concepts
   • Big Java 3rd Edition
   • Design Patterns
   • 3 books on JavaScript
   • Ajax

   …and one for atheistic books:

   • The God Delusion x 2 (hardback, paperback)
   • 50 reasons people give for believing in a god
   • The Quotable Atheist
   • The End of Faith
   • Letter to a Christian Nation
   • Climbing Mount Improbable
   • The Selfish Gene
   • A Devil’s Chaplain
   • Freedom Evolves
   • The Demon Haunted World
   • Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
   • The Blind Watchmaker
   • The Jesus Puzzle
   • The Portable Atheist (not portable in any way, shape, or form)
   • God is not great
   • How to be a good atheist
   • I Sold My Soul on eBay
   • Imaginary Friend

   I am an atheist computer geek…and I love it.

6. I used to have 20:20 vision. Hours of staring at computer screens last year, coupled with horrible lighting effects used in a video game I made, finally wore my eyesight down to the point it is at today. If you work with computers, heed my words: When they tell you to take 20 minute breaks every 2 hours, do it.

My 6 victims targets choices

Friendly Atheist

The Atheist Jew

Moiz Khan

A Division By Zero

Splendid Elles

Chicken Girl

Right…now I’m off to tell people about this.

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• Carnival of the Godless #122
• How to Be a Successful Atheist on Twitter
• Carnival of the Godless #121
• Carnival of the Godless #120

So, please do add me.

I’d also like to thank everyone who reads the blog, especially those who comment and leave me feedback. It really makes a difference on how I view the blog as an aspect of my life, and it is nice to see an increase in subsribers despite the fact I’ve been away from blogging recently :P

Furthermore, I checked my WordPress “Incoming Links” recently and was surprised to see how many other blogs there are that keep me on their blogroll or “My Fave Blogs” lists. It’s a reminder that I’d better actually update my own sometime!

I guess I just felt I needed to say something! Coursework is more or less done, so I’ll be getting back to some kind of schedule very soon. Watch this space.

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