Stuff that occurs to me

The importance of good metadata / tagging...

2012-01-29T22:31:00.001Z

...can, I think, be summed up quite succinctly in this quote from Star Trek: The Next Generation. This is a nice example of considering how someone else might think about something.

Counselor Deanna Troi: We are stranded on a planet. We have no language in common, but I want to teach you mine.
[she holds up her tea glass]

Counselor Deanna Troi: S'smarith. What did I just say?
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Cup... Glass.
Counselor Deanna Troi: Are you sure? I may have meant liquid. Clear. Brown. Hot. We conceptualize the universe in relatively the same way.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Point taken.

I'm always pleased to see on Flickr when someone's tagged a photo with a less literal phrase in addition to any descriptive nouns. An example of 'interruption' is below which I used for our website at work to illustrate our cognitive research on task interruptions (and strategies for recovering from these).

Interruption by Sebastiano Pitruzzello on Flickr

Nice bit on falling asleep, in TH White's The Once and Future King

2012-01-28T13:33:00.003Z

I have vague memories of reading a book in this series as a child but I'm not sure if I've read the whole thing. There's a bit in Lorenzo's Oil where Lorenzo's mother is reading him children's stories and, it's a fairly pivotal point in the film, he blinks to let her know that he finds the story childish, while viewers understand that the intervention (a mixture of glycerol trioleate and trierucate) is working. Mum goes off to find something more age-appropriate and begins to read from TH White's The Once and Future King.

I've pasted some of the text below - I think it's a charming description of falling asleep.

"The boy slept well in the woodland nest where he had laid himself down. At first he only dipped below the surface of sleep, and skimmed along like a salmon in shallow water, so close to the surface that he fancied himself in the air. He thought himself awake when he was already asleep. He saw the stars above his face, whirling on their silent and sleepless axes, and the leaves of the trees rustling against them, and he heard small changes in the grass. These little noises of footsteps and soft-fringed wing-beats and stealthy bellies drawn over the grass blades or rattling against the bracken at first frightened or interested him, then soothed him, so that he no longer cared to see what they were but trusted them to be themselves, and finally left him altogether as he swam down deeper and deeper, nuzzling into the scented turf, into the warm ground, into the unending waters under the earth."

To get this text I had to sneak up on it a bit because Google / Google Books didn't furnish me with a page with the full text - I typed in a line, in quotes, to start the search process off and got one or two phrases. To get the next sentence I had to re-search but choose the second sentence (from the first search) in the hope that the results would have that sentence and the one that followed. Fiddly.

However since I did this I've found that someone's uploaded the entire book to Scribd and the text should actually be

"The boy slept well in the woodland nest where he had laid himself down, in that kind of thin but refreshing sleep which people have when they begin to lie out of doors. At first he only dipped below the surface of sleep, and skimmed along like a salmon in shallow water, so close to the surface that he fancied himself in air. He thought himself awake when he was already asleep. He saw the stars above his face, whirling on their silent and sleepless axis,and the leaves of the trees rustling against them, and he heard small changes in the grass. These little noises of footsteps and soft-fringed wing-beats and stealthy bellies drawn over the grass blades or rattling against the bracken at first frightened or interested him, so that he moved to see what they were (but never saw), then soothed him, so that he no longer cared to see what they were but trusted them to be themselves, and finally left him altogether as he swam down deeper and deeper, nuzzling into the scented turf, into the warm ground, into the unending waters under the earth."

Phen375 weight loss pills "reviewed"

2012-01-14T14:41:00.002Z

There are a quite a few websites that advertise Phen375 fat burning slimming pills. There are probably quite a few more of the websites that don't. At least not as obviously. Instead those websites review diet and weight loss pills, or tell you 'the truth' about them. Or at least they imply that they do.

If someone has just heard about some new weight loss pills they might not be quite convinced that the pills are the real deal so, when looking on Google, they might be tempted to add words like 'scam' or 'fake' to their search keywords to find wesites that are critical (and perhaps they'll be reassured by not finding any).
However anyone searching for these terms is still likely to be taken to review sites which will help visitors to buy the product.

I can't remember when I first noticed the rather clever use, by pill sellers, of words like scam in blogs (subtly embedded in the text or address) to bring in the punters - it's what people are searching for after all. Genius ;) It also presumably swamps any legitimate sites that are providing genuine information about complaints, forcing them off the front page of Google results.

Phen375 seems to be a popular weight loss pill which is sold, along with tens of others, by the MoreNiche affiliate people. The briefest of Google searches found a selection of sites, many of which contain the words 'scam' or 'fake' in the website itself or its web address. All the websites in the list below contain a code that ensures that any sale made (when visitors click through to the selling site) will pay a dividend to an affiliate from MoreNiche. Commission varies but might be around 30 per cent.

Some MoreNiche tracked sites for Phen375; they all point to http://phen375.com/ (1)

http://bestfatburnerguide.com/phen375-reviews
http://buyphen375.co.uk/
http://buyphentermine375hq.com/phen375/phen375-fake/ (2)
http://dietpillsbest.net/diet-pills-best-phen375
http://www.healthcaffe.com/phen375-reviews/
http://phen375reviewed.net/
http://phen375scam.blog.com/ (3)
http://phen375scam.info/
http://phen375truth.com/

As far as I can tell there are probably hundreds (thousands?) of these affiliate sites and I assume one affiliate might have more than one site.

(1) ...which doesn't have a particularly good rating on http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/phen375.com (nothing to do with me, I've not actually rated any MoreNiche merchant or affiliate sites but many of the ones I've come across have been downvoted). Commenters (actually they do cross a line I think, rather racist) on Complaintwire aren't too happy with the company either.

(2) Most affiliate sites seem to hide or obscure the tracking code (it doesn't always show up in the page's source code but I might be missing something) but the website listed at (2) points to a TinyURL address and, if you've got preview switched on, you can see that it's clearly redirecting to http://track.moreniche.com/hit.php?w=137484&s=157 which then redirects to the Phen375 website.

(3) The link in this one is http://track.moreniche.com/hit.php?w=149938&s=157

Noticing the s=157 (I presume this is a MoreNiche code for the product) I wondered if I could find any more. I may be quite wrong about some of these, they may not actually be the code for a product (they might just be found on the same website as the product's name).

s=24 appears to be Size Genetics (some sort of 'male enhancement')

s=156 might be Acai berry

s=157 is presumably Phen375

s=174 might be Tava Tea
s=178 might be Capsiplex

Searching for a few of these also brings up a lot of links to spam-tracking websites.

Goodness knows what phentemine actually is though. The main selling website spells it that way and also references phenteRmine which is definitely not recommended for weight loss according to the British National Formulary (BNF, the guidance that doctors and nurses use when prescribing legal medicines) as it has interactions with all sorts of other prescription medications and shouldn't be used by a whole bunch of poeple with various other conditions. If someone's going to buy unlicensed pills on the internet these aren't the ones I'd be recommending.

However according to the company's website the product doesn't contain phentermine at all - there's a list of ingredients and we're told what each does but (again, typically) no evidence is provided that the pills actually achieve any of this miraculous weight loss. There's reference to 'sympathomimetic amine' which is also named as norepinephrine (noradrenaline). Assuming this survives digestion that would presumably increase the heart rate... doesn't sound that much fun.

Yesterday I actually received email spam from someone selling Phen375. Unusually for spam this pleased me (I've been drafting this post on and off in spare moments for a couple of days so this is a nice finish for the post) and I've included a screenshot of it at the end. I think this might be the tracking code, but it's difficult to tell really, as I say they seem to be hidden and you have to 'triangulate' them a bit http://track.moreniche.com/hit.php?w=227379&s=157

Unless I'm mistaken this affiliate code w=227379 also appears to be involved in selling something called IntiVar Renewal gel... the green and red circles to the right of the green tick relate to the Web of Trust rating system which I have installed on Chrome:

How Twitter shared @tdecastella's story on "Five ways the digital camera changed us"

2012-01-12T23:41:00.002Z

The BBC published a lovely article today on the history of digital cameras and how their ubiquitousness (2.5 billion people have one apparently?!) has changed the way we think about images, let alone capture them. It's fascinating and I spotted a link to it in my Twitter stream this morning, clicked on it (right click, new tab) to read later after work then forgot who it was who'd posted it (I knew I'd RT it later and wanted to give them credit).

Searching for an URL in Twitter brings up every tweet that links to that page so, if something hasn't been tweeted too many times then you've a decent chance of finding it, and the person who sent it - however in this case it seems that it's been posted several hundred times. To handle larger amounts of tweets I tend to use Chirpstory because it lets you search back further in time than Twitter and it also lets you collect a bunch of tweets. So earlier this evening I copied, in under a minute, 600 tweets (12 pages of 50 tweets) stretching back a few hours, pruned out the duplicates and RTs and created a Chirpstory of them.

By this time I'd lost interest in finding out who sent the one I saw this morning and was enjoying the different ways in which people had referred to the same news story. For one thing I think it illustrates rather nicely some great ways of composing a good tweet (I wonder if people who compose tweets thoughtfully also compose good pictures...!).

The majority of the tweets and retweets which I pruned out just had he name of the article and the link, but the ones I kept all seem to have added a little something - and they're usually the sort I'd click on. I liked the way people took a particular sentence from the piece that amused or resonated with them (there were some great quotes in the story too and really interesting comments at the end) or just added their own thoughtful commentary. In the end I found that several of the people I follow on Twitter had tweeted or retweeted this link so I don't know whose tweet it was that I originally saw.

Despite the t.co shortened links being different in almost every tweet they all point to exactly the same page: Five ways the digital camera changed us (12 January 2012) BBC News Magazine by By Tom de Castella

Although I don't have any great interest in photography myself - beyond the random snaps I post to Flickr - there can't be many cameras that are more beautiful than this, from Rollei.

Picture credit: Rolleiflex 2.8F from Flickr user jaimekop

Twitter DM wrangling, how do you do this? - small post for @digitalmaverick

2012-01-11T22:04:00.002Z

With old Twitter you could easily scroll back for AGES to read your own tweets, @mentions or DMs. Although you can never scroll further back in time than 3,500 (them's the limits alas) you can sometimes find a random ancient tweet via one of the search tools - I think Topsy.com is the best.

However DMs are not available to any tools other than apps that you sign into by authorising it to use your Twitter account.

I've found with New Twitter (I don't yet have New New Twitter) that most of my DMs appear to have disappeared from view, but if someone sends me a new DM then I can see a very long conversation with them stretching back in time. It seems that you can see these tweets only when they are 'called up' in this way.

Incidentally I also rate Chirpstory and Storify for a quick way of grabbing a bunch of hashtagged tweets (Chirpstory wins it for me, the interface isn't quite as lovely as Storify but you can grab tweets by the page rather than individually and you can reorder them so they appear chronologically).

@digitalmaverick is trying to read some of his older DMs and I love a Twitter archive challenge but this one is likely to thwart me as I don't really know what to suggest. digitalmaverick I have failed you ;)

Snapbird.org has already been suggested (I'm reading @digitalmaverick's timeline!) and I managed to find a DM I'd sent from 18 July 2011 which isn't bad at all. Of course you have to have a particular search word in mind rather than being able to be reminded of what you wrote. For example I like reading my old sent emails and being reminded of something that I'd forgotten (which evidently I'd not be able to search for).

So my suggestion is either to switch on email notifications of DMs (and set up an email filter to whisk them straight into a folder that you can safely ignore but search or browse later) or get all your friends to send you DMs in the hope of calling up earlier ones.

What tools are there that can help with DMs? Any expertise I have is limited to hashtags I'm afraid... meanwhile there are umpteen Twitter tools I've collected here so that's a good place to start looking.

A list of tools for finding or capturing tweets (30 May 2011, updated 14 October 2011)

P.S. Also - the reason you can't spot your hashtagged tweet in a search might be answered by these Quora questions and answers.

Why don't my tweets show in hashtag feeds? - and see related questions in the panel to the right.

Advice to celebrities about Twitter

2012-01-08T18:51:00.002Z

Warning, this is a really long post. I don't recommend anyone reads it all in one go!

Preamble

The other day I spotted a question on Quora from someone who was trying to persuade an actor friend to join Twitter. I was a bit intrigued by this and followed it to come back to later, and maybe add a comment. While I don’t follow many celebrities on Twitter I do rather enjoy the ones that I do (Jonathan Ross who tweets as @Wossy is delightful and Wil Wheaton @wilw is very entertaining too and has a blog), and it’s always nice to get a sense of them via a medium that’s different from the one you might know them in.

For example while I've always enjoyed any film Hugh Grant's in he's recently escalated himself from ‘pleasant actor chap’ to ‘awesome’ when he appeared on BBC Question Time and when giving evidence at the Leveson Enquiry. I don’t think he tweets though, but if he did I might well follow him.

I’m not a celebrity and don’t know anything about being a celebrity so it’s quite reasonable to assume that I’ve got no business trying to offer advice to people who might be, but let’s charitably assume that after three and a half years of being on Twitter that I might have picked up something that might be useful.

To ensure I wasn’t reinventing the wheel I did google for advice celebrities Twitter and found this amusing little video from the BBC (you need to click a button to say you’re over 16 to watch it). It pretty much says everything that you’d expect it to, while slyly poking fun at the people who’ve made some amusing / schadenfreude-y errors on Twitter in the past. The majority of the other things I found was advice to 'normals' on which celebrities to follow, or pointing out stupid things celebs have done, or advice on how to become a celebrity via Twitter. I've posted a couple of articles / blog posts with relevant advice to famous people at the end (further reading).

But why might someone who’s already famous but not yet on Twitter want to go on Twitter? I’m not sure that they automatically would and hope that no-one’s being pressured into doing so from their publicists (or fans for that matter). It’s not for everyone and I can only imagine that how well someone takes to it depends in part on them and their personality (there are some other factors too).

But here are some thoughts...

Table of contents - some things to think about, with summaries and further details below.

The basics

Pic (avatar), bio, some basic proof that you're who you say you are

What sort of welcome will you receive?

Are you going to be spending all your time fending off rude comments...

Do you chat to your friends or strangers on the internet already?

Do you already use Facebook or other services, is Twitter likely to come naturally to you?...

What will you tweet about?

Is it going to be all 'me, me, me' promoting yourself or your stuff or will you interact with others...

Are you going to tweet or will it be your people?

Preferably it's you, but who has the keys to your account?

How will you format your replies to people?

How to avoid making a confusing mess with your tweeting...

Oops I shouldn't have tweeted that

How to make mistakes gracefully...

The basics

Pic (avatar), bio, some basic proof that you're who you say you are.

Make sure you have a picture and a brief bio. If you have a website link to it in your bio (or point to your MySpace or IMDB etc page) and make sure your own website points to your Twitter profile. This is often used as a proxy for verifying accounts while you're waiting for Twitter to do its formal verification (I've no idea how this process works). As there are a lot of spoof accounts on Twitter people might well ask how we can tell if it's you - cross-linking your account to and from your website can help, as can asking other well-known verified accounts to vouch for you. Stephen Fry did this for Hugh Bonneville, although as it happens I was already following him as he'd tweeted me in response to a (nice) comment I made about Downton Abbey and the account looked pretty genuine.

What sort of welcome will you receive?

People like to say really nice things about celebrities but they also like to say some pretty unkind things. If they say unkind things about you on the internet they'll do it on Twitter too.

Have a look at the comments about any well-known person on media sites like the Daily Mail (it’s often about how much weight they’ve gained or lost, or the dreadful events that will inevitably unfold because their dress is somehow ‘wrong’) or on YouTube or film review sites (including IMDB). Most people are probably politely indifferent to most famous people with a much smaller minority who are enthusiastic fans or haters, but unfortunately they’re usually the ones who pipe up.

So if people say mean things about you on the internet they’ll probably say it to you on Twitter as well – and the exchange is public (people can see the messages you send by looking at your Twitter profile and they can see the messages people send to you by searching for your @mentions). That shouldn’t necessarily stop someone from joining Twitter (people can write hurtful comments about you all over the internet whether or not you’re participating in the conversation) – in fact it might encourage you to join and let your good humoured wit shine through.

If someone says something unkind to you or about you on Twitter it’s probably best to ignore it, unless it’s threatening (Stan Collymore got rightly peeved with racist crap on Twitter) or libellous. Someone was recently (fairly mildly) rude about a celebrity and instead of ignoring or responding with an “oh well, never mind” reply* they asked their followers to gang up on the person. Not surprisingly this backfired. While some did send retaliatory messages quite a few expressed concern at what was almost celeb-sanctioned bullying. Fortunately before it turned into too much of a ‘thing’ the celeb apologised and everyone was soon best pals again.

*This would be visible to others who looked at the celeb’s profile, but unlikely to draw much attention.

Do you chat to your friends or strangers on the internet already?

If you've not done anything like this before then feel free to take your time and get used to how the medium works, and how people conduct themselves, first.

I’ve been blethering to friends and strangers on the internet for about 18 years and so feel pretty marinated in 'netiquette' so for me Twitter was a natural extension and I joined to chat to the friends who were already there (the same reason for joining Facebook). While on Twitter I’ve enjoyed chatting to strangers many of whom have become real-life friends too.

Not everyone feels comfortable chatting ambiently to strangers on the internet though. If you’re not used to it then my advice would be to do the old fashioned thing of following a few friends, other well-known people, news resources that you’re interested in etc and see how the land lies. Personally I think it’s better to jump straight in and get on with the tweeting but it’s entirely up to you how you use it.

I think everyone probably expects that you’ll just be chatting to your famous pals and everyone can watch the conversation unfold from the sidelines ;)

But it might be worth thinking how (or if) you’ll respond to people who send you comments and questions. Probably a good idea to pre-empt whining by being quite clear that you can’t reply to everyone.

What will you tweet about?

Obviously there will be a bit of self-promotion but if that's all there is then that might be a bit "yawn".

Item 6 in this ten point list suggests a mixture of broadcast-type tweets (where you just post something you're thinking about, perhaps with a link), replying to other tweets (by @mentions) and retweets (RTed tweets) as this is generally an indication that you're actually communicating with people rather than just tweeting at them.

Are you going to tweet or will it be your people?

Better if it's you, but if you tweet be prepared for people to tweet you back and quite possibly with expectations.

Some accounts are broadcast only (eg you might have a blog and use Twitter to feed notifications from your blog when a new post is available - this can be done using the autopost function available in any blog) and that's fine, because people know what to expect from that account.

I think the FT blog quote below makes an interesting point.

But [people] connect with celebrities for a different reason. Celebrity Twitter accounts provide a kind of intimacy with someone that would previously have been impossible. Whether that intimacy is real or not is irrelevant; the feeling of intimacy on the part of the follower is real. In this sense, celebrities have more to gain from Twitter than almost anyone because that sense of intimacy is not provided by conventional media. Ashton Kutcher and Alec Baldwin are both making mistakes. They probably will be able to recover from them – the half-life of these stories is short, after all – but in the short term, whether your fans feel close to you is still a big deal. Everyone is sharing one giant attention pie and anyone who abstains won’t be invited to the next party.Source: Should Twitter feeds be handled by PRs?

How will you format your replies to people?

People new to Twitter often make a bit of a pig's ear of replying to tweets because they include the original tweet and don't make it clear which text belongs to the original tweeter and which is their own response. Please get the syntax right :)

If you click 'reply' then you are responding to the person that sent the tweet, so type your response to them and press send. If you want to share the original tweet AND your response with ALL of your followers (that's fine) then you need to separate the two in some way, for example...

If someone sends you a tweet saying

nonfamoussomeone Hey @famousceleb I love your work please will you send me a birthday message?

Then you could reply with

"@nonfamoussomeone Hey @famousceleb I love your work please will you send me a birthday message?" Happy birthday :)

Happy birthday :) "@nonfamoussomeone Hey @famousceleb I love your work please will you send me a birthday message?"

In both cases the "..." makes it clear which is your message and which is the message that was sent to you. Putting any character before the @ means that all your followers can read it, if you only want to send it to one person make sure the @ is the first thing in the tweet (note that it is still possible for people to see this tweet if they visit your profile, the only secret tweets you can send need to start with the letter D for direct message). You can also use the term RT to highlight that you are ReTweeting that content, as in...

RT @nonfamoussomeone Hey @famousceleb I love your work please will you send me a birthday message? <-- Happy birthday :)

Happy birthday :) RT @nonfamoussomeone Hey @famousceleb I love your work please will you send me a birthday message?

In these cases the use of the RT makes the "..." redundant. You need to use something like <-- after the person's original tweet because if you just start typing your response then it's not clear who said what. You can also shorten the original tweet and, to make it clear that it's been changed, you can use MT for Modified Tweet/retweet, such as...

Happy birthday :) MT @nonfamoussomeone Hey @famousceleb please will you send me a birthday message?

@DrChristian uses CAPITALS to differentiate his response from other tweets and when he's just posting his own tweet he uses letters of regular case. I can't say I like using capitals in this way but it does make it clear what's going on..

Oops I shouldn't have tweeted that

Apologise quickly and try and move on is probably the best advice anyone can give I think.

I'm sure there are cases where even that won't work but deleting a tweet in the hope that people won't notice often fails. There are a number of tools that people can use to capture a tweet when it's visible or to extract it once it's recently deleted (eg Google cache) so assume that deletion alone won't work. If you delete a tweet and apologise for it the chances are that should be the end of it.

Further reading

Twitter Advice for Celebrities: 6 Tips for Improving Your Career (22 June 2011)

Emery Silva Strategies blog

"Here are a few tips on how Twitter will help entertainers fill their time and pockets"

Erin Andrews warns celebs: Tweet at your own risk (2 August 2011)

USA Today

Should Twitter feeds be handled by PRs? (14 December 2011) - referenced in the post above

FT.com

Advanced Health Ltd (makers of Nuratrim & Capsiplex Plus) already have an ASA adjudication

2012-01-02T14:02:00.000Z

Advanced Health Ltd are currently on my radar. Recently they have launched a couple of new weight loss products (Nuratrim and Capsiplex Plus) for which I have been trying to find the evidence that matches the PR (well for Nuratrim as there doesn't appear to have been any PR about C-Plus although I think it was expected yesterday). I heard about the products because I had a festive glance at the MoreNiche affiliates forum - the presence of new slimming pills at Christmas and New Year is of course an annual tradition.

According to Amazon "Advanced Health Ltd Store" the company is, or was at 1 January 2012, marketing the following products:

C-plex 60
Capsiplex
Capsiplex Appetite Suppressor
Eyelash Accelerator
Eye Secrets Collagen & Q10
Eye Secrets Q10 Collagen and Anti-Wrinkle Patches
FullFast Appetite Control Spray
Instant Eye Tightener
Magnaslim
Meratol
Nuratrim
Proactol Plus
Slendex
Slendex Carb Blocker
Upper Eyelid Lift

But looky here - ASA adjudication on Advanced Health Ltd from May 2011. It looks as if the Advertising Standards Authority put this complaint in themselves rather than one of the skeptic bloggers. I'm not certain if the Fishbarrel complaints would necessarily record the name of the manufacturer / distributor so probably wouldn't be able to use that to check for other (upheld or not upheld) complaints made against this distributor, I didn't find any others at the ASA's site (but of course they wouldn't mention any 'not upheld' complaints).

This complaint / adjudication was about Meratol for which several claims were made, the one which seems to have bothered the ASA was about being able to block carbohydrate intake / reduce absorption of carbs. Interestingly I have seen this type of claim about the glucomannan component of Nuratrim made on referring (affiliate) websites although not on the manufacturer's site.

I've amended my Polite suggestion to people writing about diet pills post to include info about how to check the ASA's site.

After discussions with the helpful and regulation-knowledgeable @jdc325 it's possible that the claims made for Capsiplex Plus might take it slightly into the area of borderline medical product but I won't know until I speak to the MHRA about it.

According to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) journal there was, in 2009, no good evidence linking the dietary intake of 5-hydroxytryptophan (5HTP) with improved mood. Despite this it seems to me that a direct link is made between the two is made on the Capsiplex Plus site. I've FreezePaged the site for now and will monitor the site for further evidence later - it may well be that the appropriate (new?) evidence just hasn't been posted yet.

The company's website is http://www.capsiplex.com/capsiplex-plus/

Further reading (the following posts are already linked / embedded in the text above as well)

Watch out for some PR about "Nuratrim" - wonder where the evidence is (21 December 2011)
Capsiplex Plus - yet more magic beans advertised in newspapers (31 December 2011)
Polite suggestion to people writing about diet pills, patches or other supplements (26 December 2011) - possibly the mildest examples of investigative journalism ever ;)

Capsiplex Plus - yet more magic beans advertised in newspapers

2011-12-31T11:34:00.001Z

Christmas and New Year means weight-loss-pill-season. It's the annual low-hanging fruit of evidence-based skepticism for stories in the news. Yawn :-) See "Watch out for some PR about Nuratrim"

The merchants who provide products for the MoreNiche affiliates tend to go into overdrive with new products or in this case new versions of older products and there's plenty of advertising PR in the newspapers and magazines. Over the last week we've had adverts for Nuratrim appearing in The Telegraph and the Daily Mail but there's a new thing for the New Year, of course.

Capsiplex Plus

Capsiplex has been around for a while I think but it has been upgraded to a more expensive version and the PR is apparently due to be published in the Daily Express (obviously I'd love it if they read this).

According to the company's website the newer product contains 5HTP (5 hydroxytryptophan). You can see here www.capsiplex.com/capsiplex-plus/ how it apparently contributes to the overall product (would something that increases metabolism and enhances mood need a marketing license from the MHRA?).

My favourite bit on that page is the apology to (I assume) Angelina Jolie but whoever the apology's intended recipient is she's referred to only as Ms Jolie... this clarification doesn't appear to have been transmitted to the sites who are marketing Capsiplex. Oops. I understand the PR is also going to mention that it contains 'bioperine' although the website doesn't say that yet, but it does mention piperine.

The company's website has a page called /clinical-trials which doesn't yet mention anything about Capsiplex Plus yet so perhaps some further information will be added. The evidence, as provided for the original product (Capsiplex) is a bit sparse though, in that there's nothing referenced specifically for Capsiplex at all. The page does mention four clinical trials of Capsiplex (although none had more than 14 participants) but of course this isn't actually published. There are some references included but they're for the individual ingredients (this seems to be a feature of these types of products).

More tomorrow when the Daily Express publishes it then...

1 January 2012 - as yet, nothing that I can see on the Express website about Capsiplex Plus athough there's somethng about Capsiplex from 2009. Anyway I've trapped copies of the manufacturer's claims as this seems more like something for the MHRA than the ASA.

Update: still nothing on Daily Express site, maybe tomorrow.

It occurred to me that one could create a website with links that go to the company's website and allow readers to buy the product directly, bypassing any affiliates. Alternatively since the affiliate track IDs are easily findable one might be extra kind and pick a few at random and give some of them a random boost. Of course this means that more of this product is sold despite the fact that I've not found much good evidence for it yet...

Update 2: just checked the blog stats and amusingly there are rather a lot of Google searches that contain Nuratrim or Capsiplex (not many for Capsiplex Plus though) in the incoming list...

2 January 2012 - still haven't spotted anything in the papers about this yet. Although I did check the Advertising Standards Authority pages and spotted that Advanced Health Ltd, who make / market Capsiplex Plus, did have an ASA adjudication upheld against them earlier this year for another of their products called Meratol (they also make Nuratrim).

Blog stats for this blog part two

2011-12-30T15:00:00.004Z

I wrote a post on the stats for this blog back in January 2011 and thought I'd update things. Despite a mild worry that it's a bit like saying "here's how much money I've got in the bank" I thought it might be of interest to others, and it will be of interest to me this time next year - I don't really know how my stats compare for an average blog.

As observed in the previous post I seem to get random hits mostly from Google and this appears to be 'long tail' stuff in that each post gets a gradual increase in the number of hits overall but there's nothing too dramatic, bar one or two popular posts. And of course Google's own spiders visit my blog and crawl everything so I suspect quite a lot of the hits are non-living readers.

The blog itself is a bit of a mish-mash and isn't really about anything in particular - I'm glad I gave it an appropriate title at least. I suppose overarching themes might include skepticism, jobs in science communication, Twitter tools, nerdy pursuits and cinema but there's some random stuff in there too. I think if you were trying to build an audience or a niche you might want a blog that is a bit more coherent but I like to think the internet has enough space for everyone.

The picture below shows the number of hits per month, I've added in the letters myself, but it doesn't appear to have any information about stats in 2010. I believe these are pageviews rather than visitors (individual people) but I haven't delved too much into it.

From my previous post on this it appears that this information started to become available from within Blogger (without having to visit Google Analytics) in July 2010 so I'm doubly surprised that 2010 info is absent, but each spot reads as follows.

May 2009 - 0 and A June 2009 - 0 - 2 posts

B July 2009 - 3,632 - 4 posts

C August 2009 - 3,236 - 6 posts

D September 2009 - 3,384 - 9 posts

E October 2009 - 3,369 - 14 posts

F November 2009 - 6,336 - 4 posts

G December 2009 - 3,394 - 6 posts

2010 - absent data (77 posts in total: 9,7,7,9[April]; 2,10,4,9[August]; 5,6,4,5[December])

H January 2011 - 3,938 - 5 posts

I February 2011 - 3,630 - 10 posts

J March 2011 - 5,532 - 6 posts

K April 2011 - 4,641 - 11 posts

L May 2011 - 4,584 - 3 posts

M June 2011 - 5,838 - 5 posts

N July 2011 - 4,120 - 5 posts

O August 2011 - 4,901 - 7 posts

P September 2011 - 6,766 - 3 posts

Q October 2011 - 6,813 - 6 posts

R November 2011 - 7,982 - 11 posts

S December 2011 - 4,899 so far (25 December 2011) - 14 posts (so far)

At the time of writing (30 December 2011) the December 2011 total has recently increased to 6795 and the number of blog posts written this month is at 16 (this will be the 17th). Much of this spike is due to a small prophecy coming true, about the PR for a product called Nuratrim ;)

Some of my posts I mention on Twitter a few times because I really want people to see them or know about something - eg my post on tools for Twitter, but with some others I don't bother as they might just be things I want to record for myself for later. In either case the majority of any hits come from Google keywords (as a librarian I suppose I am at least fairly good at titling and tagging my posts correctly, when I remember to do it that is) rather than from following a link on Twitter, however the blog post that indirectly led to the NerdyDayTrips.com map is an exception as it was tweeted by Ben G and so there are a couple of spikes there that relate to that. In short, for most of my posts tweeting about them doesn't make that much of an impact, but occasionally it does. All my blog posts are also fed into FriendFeed and I expect I will get around to migrating my Blogger profile to Google+ profile, although I don't really use G+ at the moment.

The most popular posts are below (Google Analytics suggests that the numbers are higher, in fact I'm not entirely sure how to marry up the disparity in figures between Blogger Analytics and Google Analytics (remembering that Blogger is owned by Google)) with their pageviews.

Abandoned Britain - half day nerd trips

24 Oct 2010, 7 comments

8,684 Pageviews

How to find old tweets

5 Jun 2010, 3 comments

8,575 Pageviews

Where London science communicators might work

24 Jul 2009, 8 comments

7,716 Pageviews

Open air cinema screens in London

11 Apr 2010, 4 comments

4,114 Pageviews

A list of tools for finding or capturing tweets

30 May 2011, 5 comments

3,992 Pageviews

Ironically I stopped promoting "How to find old tweets" (because it's out of date and superseded by "A list of tools..." however an awful lot of people seem to be searching in Google for that and so that's the one that brings them to the blog. See my earlier point on tagging.

Both my parents are ambidextrous, I'm not - why?

2011-12-29T00:41:00.000Z

My mother was actually left handed but was encouraged to write with her right hand as a child, but in adulthood her handwriting with either hand was excellent although she did use her right hand more often.

My dad's teacher was amused to see how he wrote things on the blackboard when asked - he'd start writing the sentence with his left hand and when he got to the middle would transfer the chalk to his right hand and continue until the end. This somehow seems easier to do on a blackboard than when writing on paper (I've tried this myself and it's not too bad).

But my handwriting with my left hand is pretty bad - why am I not ambidextrous? And can I improve my left hand writing with practice?

I've been remembering my non-impressive attempts to take up archery a year or two ago (fun, but don't rely on me for your dinner, I might hit the animal but unlikely to be a clean kill) and how being left-eyed and right-handed turned out not to be that brilliant a combination.

Polite suggestion to people writing about diet pills, patches or other supplements

2011-12-26T16:06:00.002Z

Please (please!) cross reference the name of the product from any press release that advertises some new diet pill, patch or supplement against the MoreNiche affiliate forum and others like it (edit: I also recommend checking the ASA's website too). Thank you :)

The simplest way to do this is to run a Google search that will pick out the product's name from the MN site, as in site:www.moreniche.com Nuratrim which will bring up this list of items. I'm sure there are other affiliate stables too.

This is a shortcut to using the advanced search function of Google, allowing you to search for a term within a website and can be quite useful. You can even find instances of your word of interest in PDFs, for example, by adding the file:pdf search string.

You can also find other sites that are flogging these products by using the following search string "track.moreniche.com" Nuratrim

It's also worth cross-checking against adjudications published on the ASA's (Advertising Standards Authority) website. Advanced Health Ltd who are the merchants / distributors for Nuratrim had a complaint against them upheld earlier this year for the marketing claims they made for another of their products, Meratol.

You can search on Google for the following search string:
site:http://www.asa.org.uk/ASA-action/Adjudications meratol
- the results will look like this

The Telegraph has published this today (no wish to pick on T'graph, just they provide a convenient examp) about a product called Nuratrim (here's what I wrote about it a few days ago) but as you can see from the search results above it's one of a suite of pills, patches and supplements flogged at fairly high cost. Evidence is a bit cherry-picked I think. The Daily Mail has also published the 'story'.

Further reading

You may also be interested in the article spinning / SEO techniques which affiliate marketers use (really, it's quite clever) to route Googling eyeballs to sites where money can be made. See the bit below the grey line in this post.

Idea - co-ordinating web hub thing for local highstreet shops

2011-12-25T10:50:00.004Z

A few weeks ago I received a survey from Boris Johnson, Mayor of London. I didn't fill it in because the small print creeped me out a bit (something about linking it to information about my religion, I don't have one but it's the principle of the thing) but one of the questions intrigued me. I think I've securely shredded the document itself but the question was along the lines of "what can the Mayor do to improve the health of highstreet shops?"

Here is my suggestion.

Community curated local shops website

It's now very, very easy for anyone to set up a free website* or a low cost one. My suggestion is that one or two of the nerdier people in a row of shops agrees to maintain a website for all the shops in that area on a particular site which is then publicised (eg in newsagents' windows and local newspapers for starters). There's a great precedent but it's run by a company.

Streetsensation - Google streetview for the posh or touristy shops of London

This is already done extremely effectively for some of the more touristy posh shops in London - for example Streetsensation is a company which has mapped the shops for places like Marylebone High Street and Oxford Street.

Recently I walked from Camden to Oxford Street intending to go to HMV and I couldn't remember, when I got to the bit where Regent Street and Oxford Street intersect, whether I should go left (yes) or right (no). I should have visited these pages beforehand - see the blue number [7] marked here. You can then click on the 7 and see all the shops, as they are when you're walking past them, that run from 178 to 136 (because the numbers get smaller in that direction I presume) on Oxford Street. Basically you can see exactly where each shop is and all their spatial arrangements.

Not only that but you get contact details for most of the shops, so you can ring them up and say "when do you close?" and most of them have a link that goes to their website. Annoyingly it's an affiliate link that pops up in a window where the URL is hidden (can't right click open in new tab either) but we can't have everything.

Could something like this be translated to local shops - all that's needed is a photo of each shop, their contact details (maybe even opening hours), a link to their shop and information about where they are in relation to the other shops (eg at the end of the row, next to the hairdressers - this can be obvious from a knitted together panoramic shot). Possibly local councils might get behind this too.

Have a play with Carnaby Street and imagine something more basic but conceptually similar for your local highstreet shops.

Why do I think this is beneficial?

It increases the amount of useful information about an area and makes it available to people both in and not in that area (visitors!). I hesitate to suggest that knowing what shops are in an area might make someone more likely to visit ("oh I didn't know there was a bookshop in X") but that would definitely work for me.

*For example I've set up numerous Google Sites sites which I use to organise my thoughts when I'm writing a long multi-part document (I use the sitemap functionality to organise the document, or site, into files and folders).

Thoughts on job vacancies pages part two

2011-12-24T20:32:00.000Z

I have a new plan. I am going to try and persuade all organisations to add a page - /jobs - to their website and for it to be the official page on which their jobs are posted. For some organisations new jobs will appear infrequently (some orgs are small and have a low turnover of staff) in which case it might say for several months in the year "there are no vacancies at present".

Not all organisations have a page like this, which would look something like http://website.org.uk/jobs or http://www.website.co.uk/jobs, presumably because they think it's pointless having a non-regularly updated page that doesn't have much on it.

I disagree.

1. If all organisations have such a page in existence (and we all agree to accept that some will be updated at slower rates than others) then it makes it an order of magnitude easier to find where that org keeps its jobs. Imagine if this was an industry standard. I've written about this before, sort of, in part one.

Also it would be very helpful if you could set your website search engine to point job, jobs, vacancy, vacancies, "work with us", "work for us", opportunities, recruitment, employment and any other synonyms you can think of to point to this /jobs page.

2. This adds an extra page to your website. By all means link it back to other pages in your site and do something clever with it for search engine optimisation.

3. You can add content about people you have working for you and what they do, thereby demonstrating that your organisation is a great place to work in.

4. Call me crazy but why not have some information about your jobs such as a few job descriptions, typical salaries and organisational structure, as well as copies of your application form and guidance on filling these in. I appreciate that job descriptions are very variable (as is organisational structure) but surely we can all agree that we won't hold it against you if you put this information there. Feel free to put a disclaimer.

5. If it's an organisation that is likely to employ science communicators then I'll list it on my great big list (two and a half years old and getting bigger) of 'places where science communicators might work'.

So, please add a page to your site and make it easier for people to bookmark / link to / look at when they want to come and work for you.

Thank you :)

Watch out for some PR about "Nuratrim" - wonder where the evidence is

2011-12-21T23:05:00.001Z

Edit 28 December 2011
I've decided to copy the rather good Storytracker idea from The Guardian (see below), but have called it Bloggytracker, to keep a track of new information.

Occasionally I take a look at the MoreNiche affiliate forum (see 'further reading' below) to see what new pills, potions or salves their members are flogging. Affiliates do this by setting up websites to promote a product and then linking these sites to a separate site that sells it. Each affiliate adds a piece of code to their promotional pages and if their site routes more customers to the selling site and secures a sale, then they receive a payment. Naturally people are trying ways of making their site more prominent so that people will find theirs and be routed through to the payment site.

Based on the evidence of last Christmas there seems to be a reasonably strong correlation between what's being discussed on the forums and what gets plugged in the Daily Mail post-Christmas relating to weight loss. The MoreNiche people don't deal just in weight loss pills, teas or patches though they also have stuff to flog for people with acne or erectile problems.

Something called Nuratrim has apparently joined the MoreNiche family and we're to expect some post-festive PR for it.

The affiliates have already registered some websites which will be used to promote it - I've tried to avoid giving them any Google juice by deliberately not making these active links.

buynuratrim.net

nuratrimreviews.com

nuratrimreview.net

nuratrimreview.org and others a bit like this

and the main website for the product is here http://www.nuratrim.com /

It seems to be a herbal supplement containing the usual suspects and there are some claims made on the "Why Nuratrim works" page that I think are quite amusing. For one it says that the product "contains a blend of leading edge scientifically proven weight loss ingredients" - oh no it doesn't. These ingredients have cropped up in plenty of other products so I think that's just flannel.

I'm really not sure about this "scientifically proven" bit - typically with these products a list of ingredients, and the evidence for them as individual ingredients, is given, rather than the evidence for the product. I don't know if anyone has done any testing on Nuratrim (a combination of four ingredients: glucomannan, licorice extract, green tea and capsicum extract) as a product rather than reporting information about the evidence for items individually.

Interestingly the information given for capsicum refers to 'capsiplex' which is also another MoreNiche product.

Anyway, no evidence is given for Nuratrim, only for individual ingredients and none of that seems unusually impressive - certainly not enough to pin the sale of a product to, it all looks more like pilot studies. No evidence at all offered for glucomannan, just information about what it is. Licorice extract is backed up with an 8 week study in 84 people - I'm not saying it's a bad study, more "steady on there, let's not sell products based on small short studies". There's actually a full reference given for the green coffee one (which looks interesting) so that might be worth looking at and finally I think there's enough information in the paragraphs on capsicum / capsiplex to find the study to which they refer, but again it seems like it might be a small study.

Last year the Mail was advertising products from Roduve (slimweight patch and Tava tea) but it looks like there were a lot of dissatisfied affiliates who didn't get payments in good time...

By the way, anyone can set up a website about this product ;-)

https://sites.google.com/site/nuratrimweightloss/

Bloggytracker (idea pinched from The Guardian's Storytracker)
26 December 2011: because of the publication (well, less 'publication', more 'blurting') of a press release about this product in a newspaper today I wrote a brief follow-up post appealing to anyone writing about diet pills and patches to check the name of the product against the MoreNiche affiliate site. I think it's a safe bet that if it features there then the evidence might still be *cough* being gathered...

28 December 2011: yesterday (27 December 2011) I saw that the Daily Mail had written about the story and also checked the whois information for nuratrim.com and didn't find much (because I think they've made it private, which is fair enough) but did spot that Newstel Media Ltd had a mention there and from that company's own website it's conceivable that they are behind the PR and / or providing the telephone answering service for people to ring in to buy the product.

According to the cached version of the 'terms and conditions' the page used to say "We accept Credit Card, Debit Card payments via our secure on-line payment processing system, provided by Sage Pay and supported by Newstel Media Ltd." and now says "We accept Credit Card, Debit Card payments via our secure on-line payment processing system, provided by Sage Pay and supported by Advanced Health Ltd.". Advanced Health Ltd also have an Amazon store where they offer quite a range of products including Meratol, Capsiplex and things to grow eyelashes (!)

I added this story to the PRlapses blog (News that isn't).
Today (28 Dec) I spotted that the MoreNiche forum posse have clocked my blog posts (and page three) about their activity and have now made some posts on the forum private, including the ones I mentioned here. I've linked to the cached version of the forum post and of course I have a permanent copy (the cache will eventually disappear). A couple of the affiliates are also selling on their Nuratrim sites.

29 December 2011
I re-read the Daily Mail article (Google suggests it was updated within the last 23 hours) and saw this line that I'd missed before, or it had been added. Quite cheering really "However, requests for the clinical evidence from the company has yet to be returned." The Daily Mail doesn't seem to be that amenable to checking the cached pages so it may have been there all along and I just missed it, or they've added it in. I also hadn't seen the name of the company - Nuropharm Ltd which is behind the product, that info is available at Nuratrim's site but I hadn't noticed it.

30 December 2011
I caught wind of a new product - Capsiplex Plus - which is going to be advertised in the Daily Express (or probably the Sunday Express) on New Year's Day. Yet again evidence is offered for the individual ingredients yet the tiny pilot studies of the combined / complete product are mentioned but I failed to spot any publication details for these.

31 December 2011
There's a member on the MoreNiche forum who seems to be of a skeptical mindset (no it's not me in disguise, honest!) and who has published several posts expressing concern about some of the marketing for Nuratrim (in particular the claims that it had been previously launched in the US). Today I spotted that he or she was concerned about fake nutritionists and doctors being used to lend credibility on websites, but according to the others commenting on his / her post they're real. No reason why they shouldn't be of course.

Results of a Google search for the text in bold

7 December 2012
After indirectly getting in touch with The Telegraph to ask them to sort out their unwitting advert for Nuratrim they've now removed it (although at the time of writing the URL still indicates what might have been there http://www.telegraph.co.uk/wirecopy/8977974/Weight-loss-pill-which-burns-calories-of-40-minute-jog-goes-on-sale.html). This isn't much of a victory in retrospect as the mere fact that it was published at all is what allows MoreNiche affiliates to write stuff like "The Telegraph is a reputable and popular media source and now it has published a full-fledged article on Nuratrim."

This was not a 'full-fledged' article by any stretch, it was 'wire copy' which is a press release sent by the company or its PR agency, ie written by someone who wants to sell a product in the hope that a newspaper will write about it. The MoreNiche affiliate's website implies a degree of journalistic appraisal rather than straightforward churnalism - hopefully all this sort of nonsense will be magically sorted out by the Leveson inquiry, one can hope ;)

You can easily tell if an "independent review site" really is by clicking on the 'buy' link which will undoubtedly be there. You'll have to keep your wits about you and also have View / Taskbar enabled but, if you don't blink, once you've clicked 'buy' and the company's page loads you should see the tell-tale sign of track.moreniche.com appearing in the taskbar, see pic below.

The taskbar usually appears in the left hand side of the window... sometimes on the right hand side ;)

16 January 2012
From the King's Fund weekly email alert on health policy...

Food supplements: guidanceand FAQs
The responsibility for legislation on food supplements in England transferredfrom the Food Standards Agency to the Department Health on 1 October2010. Guidance and summary documents have been updated to reflect thischange and update references.

19 January 2012
On further investigation it appears that Nuropharm formulate the pills and print labels for them "Nuropharm can handle basic design and vitamin label printing as well as more complicated requests" and may well distribute them as well. A commenter below has highlighted that Amazon has stopped selling Nuratrim - presumably that makes it a bit easier for the affiliates to do so instead.

Further reading

Do slimweight patches work? How? (2 January 2011)

I discovered the MoreNiche forum at the end of December 2010 and wrote about a particular product that had been promoted in the Daily Mail. There's also a lot of information in there on how they use various forms of search engine optimisation (SEO) to flood Google with pages that lead anyone looking for these products to affiliate sites first of all. It's here that I learned about article spinning sites - Google doesn't tend to index identical content so by changing a few words here and there you can turn one article into tens, hundreds and increase your indexing and page rankings (all the pages link back to each other).

Seeding articles of woo with sensible information - an experiment (18 June 2011)

I noticed that a photograph I'd taken of an advert in Holland & Barrett for a tea had been picked up and used in sites that were trying to sell it. I also noticed that the comments I'd left below the photo on my own Flickr page were also picked up. This gave me the idea that if I created free images and added comments to them then these might be picked up as well - in this way I hoped to Trojan horse my way into scam sites by linking to something sensible and pointing out that there's no evidence for the product. It's been only mildly successful (in terms of stuff getting picked up) but I've honestly no idea if anyone's decided against buying something because they've seen one of my images and comments).

Trying out the Twitter embed tweet option

2011-12-21T13:44:00.000Z

Came across this page from the Twitter development pages: Embedded Tweets

It says that the easiest way to create a bit of code to embed a tweet is to click on the Embed link in the tweet...

I can't see, when I look at a tweet's individual page, any mention of an embed link as they show in the example so I wonder what I'd have to do to make it appear..

At the bottom of the page there are two bits of code and this is one of them - it might embed a tweet, it might not, let's see

Search API will now always return "real" Twitter user IDs. The with_twitter_user_id parameter is no longer necessary. An era has ended. ^TS
— Twitter API (@twitterapi) November7, 2011

Testing out the Bettween widget for Twitter conversations

2011-12-18T15:42:00.000Z

This is a tool I've just heard about via a retweet of @latentexistence's tweet by @living_as_if, called Bettween.

It tracks a conversation between two people (a bit like the threading functionality that Echofon has on iPhone, which is rather good and can stretch back quite a few tweets. Also, if you click on a really old tweet it can pick up the tweet to which the person was replying [assuming the account is still active]) and you can apparently embed this in blogs.

From the little 'how to' video it looked as if this might be a thing which is 'live' and refreshes itself as new tweets come in. If so it won't be any use for me (my interest is largely in fossilising tweets. But I shall have to look back in a few months and see what it says.

It does say "Tweets from all time" in the widget below so possibly the tweets will persist - in which case I'll have to test this out by deleting one of the tweets I've sent. Tools like Storify and Chirpstory will trap a tweet properly once it's been recorded and if the original is deleted it won't disappear from the Sfy / Chy archive you've created.

Would film soundtracks be much different if we'd gone straight to talkies with no silent films?

2011-12-17T23:18:00.002Z

Films have always had music I think - in silent films there would have been someone playing in the theatre itself with music to fit the mood of the film. This provided a soundtrack to the audience and also helped to make it clear what was happening, where speech couldn't be used (obviously there were some text boards appearing too).

Other than that I don't think there's been much of a precedent to soundtrack things since real life lacks that (obviously!). There's an episode of Family Guy in which Peter Griffin has the opportunity to ask a genie for a wish and he asks to have his own soundtrack though which is quite fun.

There are musical interludes in plays (and I suppose there always have been, although I don't know if Shakespeare annotated his plays for dramatic violins for example!) and opera is music-based storytelling so the emphasis is less on music as an accent because it's central to the piece.

But I've been wondering how music might have been used in films if there hadn't been the history of using it, during the silent era, as an accent to what was going on on-screen...

Probably unanswerable :)

Howl's Moving Castle at Southwark Playhouse is lovely

2011-12-15T22:17:00.007Z

Prologue

London is a pretty magical city and the only reason I take such heroic commuting routes is so that I can drink more of it in (while avoiding the crowds). That's how I discovered the RV1 bus route (Riverside route) which runs from Covent Garden (fairly near Aldwych) all the way to Tower Gateway / Tower Hill station.

I took it tonight from Tower Hill to London Bridge. We passed the Tower of London and then went onto Tower Bridge before moving into Tooley Street, where the Southwark Playhouse is. I absolutely love this part of London, so many cool and interesting bits crammed into one place - Hay's Galleria is lovely, there's the More London bit (near the Mayor of London's offices) where there's open air cinema in summer at the Scoop amphitheatre. There's also my favourite journey home, via the ferry from London Bridge pier. So I'd already had a pretty lovely journey before I arrived at the theatre.

...logue

Tonight was my first visit to the Southwark Playhouse, which is on the corner of Tooley and Bermondsey Streets, and it is gorgeous. It looks like a proper night out sort of place (they were selling mulled wine and had the boardgame Frustration on the bookshelf!) and I wished I'd arrived earlier to see it without the hordes of people queueing to get into the theatre rooms.

Howl's Moving Castle takes place in a bit of the theatre called The Vault, which is a wonderful space to start off with - I think it's in the bowels of London Bridge station, there certainly seem to be the sounds of trains rumbling past in the near distance and it's basically a big brick arch. They'd set it up rather nicely as well with candle light flickering against the brick wall and as we found our seats there was pleasantly eerie music... and the smell is just wonderful. It put me in mind of a wine cellar (actually there's a bit in London Bridge station itself which has a similar musty smell, but not unpleasant at all).

As you're facing the stage at first all you see is this incredible castle which looks like it's made of paper or cardboard (I didn't have a closer look at it), with windows and crenellations (or whatever the wiggly bits at the tops of castles are called). But the castle is completely plain white to start off with but then, when things start... it's so beautifully done. A castle facade is projected onto it and this changes throughout the performance to take on different settings (inside the castle, outside it, as well as scenes taking place in Sophie's home).

Picture credit: @Dr_Black, used with kind permission (thank you!) - this shows the castle before it was fully illuminated.

The three actors are clearly having a fantastic time with it all and the story is cleverly narrated as well with a neat handover between the live action and what I assumed are pre-recorded bits. Great background music too although there were times when it was a bit loud to hear what was being said on stage (perhaps my fault for sitting at the back!). Very lively performances from everyone involved.

I heard about this because someone I've followed on Twitter pretty much since I joined it (@sizemore) mentioned that he'd been involved in its stage adaptation (his name's on the poster, which is gorgeous and there's an interview with him linked from his website ) - so I wanted to see what someone I (sort of) know had been up to :) And it's great!

Stops after 7 January 2012 though...

Here's another nice review that really captures the energy of the piece

http://shkspr.mobi/blog/index.php/2011/12/review-howls-moving-castle/

@Documentally (who I also know from Twitter) has done a couple of Audioboos:

Howl's Moving Castle & Steampunk Dr Who

http://audioboo.fm/boos/579015-howl-s-moving-castle-steampunk-dr-who

A nod to Hitchhikers with Susan Sheridan #howlscastle #nsfw <-- this means not safe for work, watch out for the swears :)

http://audioboo.fm/boos/579053-a-nod-to-hitchhikers-with-susan-sheridan-howlscastle-nsfw

Belated waves to @Dr_Black who I also know from Twitter but have never met... she was there tonight at the same time as me ;) We keep missing each other!

Do RTed @-mention tweets get seen by the people who are mentioned in them?

2011-12-15T11:19:00.003Z

This might be a question for Quora but I'll try here first. If I discover that Company X has done something dreadful I might tweet "I am appalled by the way @CompanyX has behaved in MatterY" and Company X will see this in their @mentions stream.

(a) If 100 people press the RT button I will see that my tweet has been retweeted 100 times, but what notification will @CompanyX get?
(b) If 100 people manually RT my tweet so that it looks like "RT @JoBrodie I am appalled..." then @CompanyX will see 100 of those.

When Tweetdeck for iPhone worked (used happily from June2008-Nov 2011) I had a column for jobrodie (in addition to my mentions). I had this column since ~2008 because I noticed that, at that time, some @mentions didn't get through and I didn't want to miss any. Once I created the column I also noticed that as an added bonus it let me see the (a) type of RT separately from the (b) type.

But this doesn't work anymore and I don't know what CompanyX would need to do in order to see this.

Perhaps I could investigate this on Tweetdeck for desktop computers - but even if that does let me see these 'missing' RTs, do companies know enough about the hidden tweets to be able to find this information?

Quite often there are Twitter campaigns to draw attention to some wrongdoing and these get hundreds of retweets. But does the company concerned get a sense of the strength of feeling if they only get a tip-of-iceberg view of tweets that include their @mention in a manual RT.

Two questions then:
1. Companies know about this problem, yes? (Assuming it is a general problem and not just some glitch I'm experiencing!)
2. What tool do they use to solve it?

It goes without saying that I really don't like the (to me, new) RT style and avoid using it when I can.

Edit: 26 December 2011
Further reading
h/t @EvidenceMatters who pointed me to this excellent post with which I entirely agree :)
Retweet the old fashioned way, using 'classic' or 'traditional' retweets only (7 December 2011) by Ray Beckerman

How to do Chirpstory

2011-12-13T23:29:00.006Z

I use Chirpstory to collect hundreds of tweets relatively quickly. I used to use WTHashtag and Twapperkeeper (both no longer with us - Twapperkeeper recently announced their service was ending). I still use SearchHash and Twilert to capture tweets (these do it automatically and Twilert sends you an email, with SearchHash you have to manually collect a bunch of tweets later). Chirpstory is similar to Storify but for me Chirp has the edge because it lets you collect tweets in pages rather than individually. Here's how I do it.

Summary

Log into http://chirpstory.com with your Twitter account
Collect a bunch of tweets, re-order chronologically (optional),
Delete RTs (optional)
Publish your collection
Embed the collection in a blog (optional)

This post assumes you want to collect a bunch of tweets from a hashtag or a user. The user can be you of course.

You can also collect tweets sent to you but don’t forget that because you’ll be logged in to your Twitter account, you’ll see all the tweets you normally see including those from anyone whose account is private / locked. So for this reason you might need to be a bit careful if you’re planning to publish your collected tweets somewhere else, eg by embedding in a blog. Don’t share tweets that aren’t public to everyone.

One really great thing about Chirpstory is that it lets you move a whole page of tweets at once (you don’t have to move them individually!) and a page is about 50 tweets. Generally you can go back about 16 pages (800 tweets) but it varies depending on the number of tweets sent and the time that’s passed – after a week it becomes a lot harder to capture the earlier ones, particularly if many were sent.

1. Go to http://chirpstory.com and log in with Twitter (using the authorisation system that magically works when you’re logged in to Twitter).

2. Once logged in, click on the blue Create Story on the top right hand of the page, shown below.

Click image to enlarge

3. Scroll down below the panel at the top and you’ll see the screen split in two. On the left are your source tweets (initially this is the timeline you’d see if you were logged in to Twitter) and on the right is the panel into which you’re going to put your tweets of interest (target panel).

The first thing to do – unless you want to save the tweets that you’re receiving – is clear your timeline from the source panel on the left, to do this, click on the Clear link highlighted with a dark pink circle in the next picture. You’ll be asked “Do you want to clear this timeline?” – OK it.

Click image to enlarge

4. You now have a blank slate in the source panel, and several options. You can choose to collect tweets relating to you (eg your replies or favourites), from someone else, or from a stream of hashtags.

In the picture above the links marked with a green oval are to do with you, from left:

User timeline = what you see in your timeline from everyone you follow
Replies = your @ mentions
Favorites = tweets you’ve starred.

Clicking any of these will bring up the relevant stream of tweets.

Below that is the search box and the link in the blue oval which relate to others’ tweets, from left:

Keyword = word, phrase or hashtag
User = a named person which could be you if you want to collect the tweets that you’ve sent
List = a Twitter list – you’ll need the full URL for this (eg http://twitter.com/jobrodie/diabetes).

To access these tweets you need to click on the button to the right of the search box which will say Keyword Search (if Keyword button is ticked), User Search (if User ticked) or Load List (if List is ticked).

5. I’m going to assume you want to trap hashtagged tweets. Click in the little radio button next to the Keyword link and then type in your #word of interest into the box, then click Keyword search.

A page of tweets will appear – click the ‘copy all’ button to move all of them (max 50 to a page) into the target panel. If you prefer you can click and drag individual tweets and move them around, you can also click on the X at the top right of any tweet to delete it from the stream.

6. Once you’ve moved all the tweets you want you can click on the ‘More’ link in the source panel (there’s a blue dividing line with white text that will also tell you which page you’re on).

7. Carry on clicking on the More and Copy all links (or transferring individual tweets) until you’ve got all the tweets you want, or no more tweets appear when you press More (this usually happens at about 16 pages which equates to 800 tweets I think).

8. If any tweets are missing (it sometimes happens) you can enter the individual URL for that tweet into the search box on the right hand side (that helpfully says “Enter individual tweet URL”) and then press the Load tweet button – it will appear automatically in the panel on the right. If you’re wondering “what’s the tweet URL?” then you can find this in the timestamp for any tweet, as in the picture below.

Click image to enlarge

All tweets have a timestamp (it might say “3a2 minutes ago” or “7 Dec” or something else but if you hover over it there’ll be a link to the individual tweet (shown at the top of the picture). In the image above first there’s the URL, then the tweet as it appears in the timeline and the lower bit of the image is the tweet as it appears on its own page (whose URL is the one listed at the top).

9. If you want to reorder the tweets so that the earliest appears at the top then click on the little up arrow next to the button marked duplicates. You can remove RTs by pressing the RT button and you’ve probably guesed what the Duplicates button does.

10. Once you’re ready to publish you need to click on the ‘Create Story’ at the bottom of the page and not the one at the top (which basically resets your page – my suggestion to Chirpstory might be to rename these as ‘Create story’ and ‘Publish story’ and also have a ‘Save as Draft’.

Quora questions I've answered about Twitter and hashtags

2011-12-11T20:39:00.003Z

I've joined Quora and have been answering questions. Others have answered them too and I've learned of new tools from these people.

When I stopped working as a scientist my first job in the world of science communication was ScienceLine/ ScienceNet where I got to find out answers to stuff and tell people about science. Awesome. This also features heavily in one of my current jobs too...

Quora lets me answer questions and read others' answers on train journeys and things and I can see why someone (probably an employee of Quora, but I still agree with them) has described it as the crack cocaine of the internet. I'm sure other things have also been described like that.

Anyway, as you may have picked up, I'm pretty interested in tools used to capture tweets. Increasingly this is because Twitter appears to be actively trying to stop me from doing this (it changed its terms of conditions earlier this year and lots of useful tools suddenly stopped working). Instead of just trying to capture stuff I'm also trying to get around this annoyance and generally find ways of thwarting Twitter.

Here are the questions relating to Twitter and hashtags to which I've contributed, with a very brief description of my stance on the topic. I've contributed to other questions too but these are just the Twittery ones.

Would writing a Twitter Bot get me banned? No / depends
Is there a reason to register a hashtag with a place like tagdef? Possibly not
How can I search for tweets that are older than what's archived on Twitter? Up to a point yes, but fiddly
Is there a way to archive tweets from a hashtag after a certain period of time? Up to a point yes, but fiddly
What is the etiquette on tagging things on Twitter? Freestyle
Did @mentions exist before Twitter? If so, how? Yes
Are there any tools/ services that provide a way to curate, select and publicly display / publish tweets with a specific hashtag? Yes
Why do people put a dot in front of tweets? Wider sharing
On Twitter, why do people put a # sign in front of a word? Tagging
What are the best tools for Twitter chat transcripts and why? Loads

How do you know if you're in danger of being sued?

2011-12-05T19:18:00.003Z

Following on from the recent Burzynski stuff, had I actually received* the emails that @lecanardnoir and @rhysmorgan have had recently I'd have initially been a bit anxious.

Probably after a while I'd have noticed the language wasn't quite right and that some things didn't add up but I suspect my first reaction would have been rising panic. I startle easy ;)

What to do? How do you know if someone sending you these emails is a credible threat and how should you respond (both in any actions you take and in your reply)?

Can anyone make a citizen's 'cease and desist' or must it come from a competent lawyer? Not everyone is allowed to prescribe medicine, for example.

Even if it's clear that the email is not from a lawyer what should you do?

Is there a defined procedure in place? For example can someone just sue me anyway or must they first tell me what they don't like and give me an opportunity to make amends?

Is there some 'guidance for dummies and skeptics'?

*well I might have done had Marc spelled my email address correctly!

All of my Sidewiki entries captured before the service was switched off

2011-12-03T23:52:00.003Z

All of my Sidewiki comments, many of the links will no longer work. Also Sidewiki itself will stop working as of Monday.

This is basically my "collected snark" from a variety of comments I've made, as a Sidewiki 'overlay', on websites where my content has been stolen or they've made some ridiculous claim about something, or failed to acknowledge some other important fact. The fact that Sidewiki is no more means I have to find other ways of making a nuisance of myself on your iffy website ;)

Roll on "Web of Trust"... I've written another post recently on the layered web.

-------

Jo's entries using Google Sidewiki

Interesting exchange on their selling homeopathy pills

Despite no evidence of efficacy for homeopathic remedies a number of supermarkets are still selling them. In the UK we've not had much success in persuading Boots to stop selling them (although there's been greater success with getting these pills off the NHS) but it's interesting to read about similar campaigns in other countries http://www.bayanimills.com/2011/07/03/coles-supermarkets-finally-responds/

5 months ago

- About Coles Supermarkets

- coles.com.au

Thanks for fixing

The content taken from my blog has now been removed and I'm happy to update my sidewiki comments to reflect that.

5 months ago

- About http://inflatablemoviescreen.com/inflatable-movie-screen-open-air-cinema...

Thanks for fixing

The content taken from my blog has now been removed and I'm happy to update my sidewiki comments to reflect that.

5 months ago

- About http://guerillacinema.org/inflatable-movie-screen-open-air-cinema-in-...

Thanks for fixing

My content has now been removed from these pages on my request (the site had used content from my blog without my permission) and I'm happy to update the sidewiki to reflect that.

5 months ago

- About http://inflatablemoviescreen.com/inflatable-movie-screen-open-air-cinema...

This content was stolen from my blog

Always a bit disappointed to find people stealing other people's content. This time it's mine - I originally posted this to my own blog in April 2010 and have significantly updated it since then - so not only is this content stolen, it's now irrelevant and out of date. You can find the latest information here http://brodiesnotes.blogspot.com/2010/04/open-air-cinema-screens-in-london.html The stolen content appears on an almost-identical page http://guerillacinema.org/inflatable-movie-screen-open-air-cinema-in-london/ and I have posted this notice there too.

5 months ago

- About http://inflatablemoviescreen.com/inflatable-movie-screen-open-air-cinema...

This content was stolen from my blog

5 months ago

- About http://guerillacinema.org/inflatable-movie-screen-open-air-cinema-in-...

The Alzheimer Test makes it to the BMJ

More information about the test and the results here http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d3732.full?keytype=ref&ijkey=jS44KG3X7VrksnM

5 months ago

- About Brain food to prevent Alzheimers - Food for the ...

- foodforthebrain.org

Bit surprised that this wasn't included in the research information sheet

Can't help thinking that in the absence of evidence a "Let people choose" website is somewhat shutting barn doors after horses have bolted. I was particularly interested in a review of the evidence by the Homeopathy Research Institute, whose conclusion was "Homeopaths often treat insomnia, however, there is currently a lack of high-quality sufficiently powered studies assessing the effectiveness of either homeopathic medicines or treatment by a homeopath for this condition. There is a need for further well-conducted clinical trials of treatment by a homeopath in order to examine fully the clinical and cost effectiveness of the therapeutic system of homeopathy in the management of insomnia. This evidence will enable patients, clinicians and healthcare commissioners/insurers to make informed decisions regarding the homeopathic treatment of insomnia." http://www.homeoinst.org/sites/default/files/newsletters/HRI_Newsletter_Issue09_Summer%202010.pdf (hat tip @lecanardnoir) Just checked and actually I can't access the Research information sheet either...

5 months ago

- About Homeopathy Awareness Week 14-21 June | The Society...

- homeopathy-soh.org

Unclear advice

As noted, chest pain can be caused by several things such as indigestion or something more serious. Homeopathy is of no use here and if someone is in doubt about the cause then they should get themselves to A&E / the emergency room. Happily, many people do not die from a heart attack but isn't there a danger of unnecessary damage to the heart if time is wasted choosing the right sugar pill instead of getting the patient to someone who can assess and treat them appropriately? I think this post should be much clearer in stating that as 'Some disorders are immediately life threatening' A&E should be the first port of call.

6 months ago

- About Chest Pain As An Acute Emergency - ...

- homeopathyworldcommunity.com

Whoops

http://charman-anderson.com/2011/04/27/zephoria-inc-about-to-find-out-how-social-media-really-works/comment-page-1/ http://www.betabeat.com/2011/04/27/tumblr-gave-danah-boyds-username-to-a-marketing-company/

7 months ago

- About Internet Marketing Consultants - Zephoria Inc.

- zephoria.com

Top internships auctioned for £3,000

"David Cameron was accused of 'gross insensitivity' last night after it was revealed that internships with City hedge funds were sold to wealthy Tories' children for thousands of pounds to raise cash for the party." http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/work/article.html?in_article_id=522795&in_page_id=53928.

9 months ago

- About www.bell-pottinger.co.uk - Home-www.bell-...

- bell-pottinger.co.uk

Oops

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=2&src=busln&pagewanted=all

9 months ago

- About SearchDex - Search Marketing Company - Software & Service

- searchdex.com

Where's the evidence?

I'm not aware of any good quality evidence that this diagnostic test can detect what it claims. While there's plenty of testimony from happy customers this doesn't constitute good evidence.

9 months ago

- About Live Blood Cell Analysis Testing by See My Cells

- seemycells.co.uk

Irrelevant evidence

Animal studies, or human studies using single ingredients in capsules tell you nothing about how a skin patch will work when loaded with several different ingredients. No information has been provided about how effective these patches when studied in human trials.

10 months ago

- About Weight Loss Patch Ingredient Clinical Studies - ...

- slimweightpatch.com

Unconvinced by these claims

The clinical studies tab contains irrelevant information. The trials listed are on individual ingredients (and not the full formulation) so it doesn't tell us anything about how the ingredients work when combined together. More problematic is that none of the trials have tested the patch - there are references to capsules (an oral route isn't the same as across the skin so these trials tell us nothing either) and some of the studies are on mice and so aren't necessarily relevant either.

10 months ago

- About The #1 Weight Loss Patch System - SlimWeight Patch™

- slimweightpatch.com

Unable to add this to comments...?

Thanks for your interesting post, which I've just read from following a link on Phil Bradley's post http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2011/01/no-google-i-know-best.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter Reading his post and yours made me reflect on my mild annoyances with Google recently - more along the lines of it clearing the search box when you discover it's set to 'Instant on' and switch it to off. I'd not really known that much about SEO etc (very little cause to) though was well aware of the 'judicious' use of keywords and whatnot. Recently, when trying to find out about the quality of evidence for claims about a weight loss supplement (advertiser now reported to the Advertising Standards Authority) I came across a forum for the people who create the scam sites - there were a couple of 'how to' posts too http://www.freezepage.com/1293992484HYABCLJDIJ and http://www.freezepage.com/1294067830IQSVXDGXTH - doesn't look like this is likely to go away soon! I also found, and was grudgingly impressed, that the scammers have even appropriated the word 'scam'. Pick any unevidenced nutritional supplement and add the word scam to the Google search to see what I mean ;) ---- This is the error message I received when trying to post this as a comment via the usual mechanism ---- You did not enter the correct string displayed in the spam-prevention image box. Please look at the image and enter the values displayed there. Your comment could not be added because comments for this entry have either been disabled, you entered invalid data, or your comment was caught by anti-spam measurements.

10 months ago

- About On the increasing uselessness of Google..... - broadstuff

- broadstuff.com

Where is the clinical evidence for Roduve Slimweight patch?

I have looked at several affiliate websites which sell this product and while a number of them have a page on 'clinical evidence' none of them actually contain the relevant evidence. The trials listed do not test the patch (trials done using capsules are irrelevant because that is a different way entirely of getting ingredients into the body), do not test the entire formulation (the trials listed are of individual ingredients which fails to take into account how the ingredients might act when combined) and refer to a mixture of human trials and animal studies. The skin is a very good barrier and has evolved to keep most stuff out. By contrast the gut lining is very good at absorbing things and so the oral route is often the quickest (short of injecting) That is why it is important to have trials indicating whether or not the formulation works (all the ingredients, being delivered by the patch). Trials on individual ingredients taken by capsules or pills are not that relevant. I am intrigued by the concept of these ezine articles, hadn't heard of them before reading this forum post on how to market a product successfully http://www.moreniche.com/forum/main-forum-affiliate-lounge/15098-pureacaiberry-max-why-you-should-promote.html

11 months ago

- About Roduve Slim Weight Patch Review - Does This ...

- ezinearticles.com

Clinical trials of product

I'm hoping to hear back from the makers of this product (Roduve Healthcare Solutions) regarding the clinical evidence for it. Although this website makes mention of trials the information contained within the page isn't much use to me because (a) they are trials of single ingredients (b) not all done in humans and (c) not testing the patch delivery method. I'm really interested in hearing about a clinical trial of the patch as it would be used by a consumer (with all the ingredients together, not individual ingredients). Given that the skin is an excellent barrier, and the difficulties in getting reasonably sized drug molecules* across the skin (at least two companies are working on trying to get insulin delivered transdermally and that's just a single molecule) I'd be interested to know which component molecules were chosen from each ingredient plant and what techniques are used to actually get them across the skin. *It's a bit more complicated than molecule size...

11 months ago

- About Slim Weight Patch Reviews - The #1 Weight Loss Patch

- slimweightpatch.org

Avoid the section on homeopathy

Homeopathy is of no help to people with diabetes.

11 months ago

- About Diabetes Care Tips | ...

- diabetescaretips.info

Parking my comment here as I can't add it

Hello again The president of NaturEra has contacted me with some comments about my blogpost (linked above, or http://brodiesnotes.blogspot.com/2010/09/not-really-enough-evidence-for.html) which I've now posted on my blog along with reflections from me. I suggested that they may also wish to post their comments here as well. As far as I can tell, it's difficult to draw much of a conclusion as the research is yet to be published and digested by other scientists. I'm delighted that they contacted me and answered my questions though. Jo

11 months ago

- About » One Natural Supplement with a Good Rep: Sugar ...

- diabetesmine.com

The mind boggles

I can only assume that this is an extremly creative spoof and that I have entirely missed the joke. If homeopaths are linking film characters to remedies then I think skeptics can pack up and go home, our work here is done.

Stuff that occurs to me

The importance of good metadata / tagging...

Nice bit on falling asleep, in TH White's The Once and Future King

Phen375 weight loss pills "reviewed"

How Twitter shared @tdecastella's story on "Five ways the digital camera changed us"

Twitter DM wrangling, how do you do this? - small post for @digitalmaverick

Advice to celebrities about Twitter

Advanced Health Ltd (makers of Nuratrim & Capsiplex Plus) already have an ASA adjudication

Capsiplex Plus - yet more magic beans advertised in newspapers

Blog stats for this blog part two

Both my parents are ambidextrous, I'm not - why?

Polite suggestion to people writing about diet pills, patches or other supplements

Idea - co-ordinating web hub thing for local highstreet shops

Thoughts on job vacancies pages part two

Watch out for some PR about "Nuratrim" - wonder where the evidence is

Trying out the Twitter embed tweet option

Testing out the Bettween widget for Twitter conversations

Would film soundtracks be much different if we'd gone straight to talkies with no silent films?

Howl's Moving Castle at Southwark Playhouse is lovely

Do RTed @-mention tweets get seen by the people who are mentioned in them?

How to do Chirpstory

Quora questions I've answered about Twitter and hashtags

How do you know if you're in danger of being sued?

All of my Sidewiki entries captured before the service was switched off

Interesting exchange on their selling homeopathy pills

Thanks for fixing

Thanks for fixing

Thanks for fixing

This content was stolen from my blog

This content was stolen from my blog

The Alzheimer Test makes it to the BMJ

Bit surprised that this wasn't included in the research information sheet

Unclear advice

Whoops

Top internships auctioned for £3,000

Oops

Where's the evidence?

Irrelevant evidence

Unconvinced by these claims

Unable to add this to comments...?

Where is the clinical evidence for Roduve Slimweight patch?

Clinical trials of product

Avoid the section on homeopathy

Parking my comment here as I can't add it

The mind boggles

Strange behaviour from Westfield security

A little more about 'Forsaken'

Spamming Twitter with this is pretty annoying

Utter nonsense

Not a tipping point for homeopathy, no

Content apparently stolen from...

Extremely dangerous advice

Interesting US experience of a Steiner school

Further info on FIH's closure from David Colquhoun's blog

I'm not surprised comments have been turned off

Oh good grief

I think some of the claims here are misleading

Claims about the Sanskrit word for measles

Serious dangers associated with chiropractic

Unusual use of microscopy...

Ethical remedies

Rentokil's misleading marketing is "brilliant"

Some of this falls short of being good advice

Generally I'd recommend linking to sources you cite

Campaign is not to do with disproving homeopathy

The campaign isn't really about disproving homeopathy

The Layered Web - partially hidden conversations

Burzynski Clinic tweets #burzynski

If you've ever heard this piece of music in a chainstore this is probably why

Questions of cost - eg diabetic complications

Wingardium Avios-a and other flying things

Film quiz - logos edition

Film quiz - logos edition with answers

The Burzynski clinic has ever so many trials

The links for retweets still work even though they seem hidden

Social media brand sentiment analytics for charities etc - free 4mth beta test via @cbanalytics

Rarely a fan of embedded links within low-information phrases

Google cache is still there, just a bit hidden

Errol Denton / Fitalifestyle: fourth ASA adjudication upheld

If you're using Storify for conference or event tweets you *might* be doing it a bit wrong-ish, suggest Chirpstory :)

If you're using Storify for conference or event tweets you might be doing it a bit wrong-ish, suggest Chirpstory :)