My news feeds on Twitter

I started with six Twitter accounts about tech companies I wanted to keep tabs on:

Apple News: @ap_today
Amazon News: @az_today
Facebook News: @fb_today
Google News: @gg_today
Twitter News: @tw_today
Microsoft News: @ms_today

This is what they used to look like:

After a bit of a redesign, this is what they look like now:

The new design is a relaunch of an experiment I began more than a year ago. Here, in reverse chronological order, are a few things I've written about what I've been up to: 

- Setting up local Twitter accounts, more promising than tech feeds? (5 June 2012)

- First year of the six tech accounts, with less than spectacular results (13 May 2012)

- Growth of my Twitter empire, a report seven weeks into the experiment (9 July 2011)

- First signs of slowing growth, three weeks in (17 June 2011)

- Heady results in the first week (6 June 2011)

- The experiment explained, a few days in (31 May 2011)

UPDATE: 

I've been playing with the logos and design, and have a new style that makes them a different shape from the default Twitter square with rounded edges. Now they look like this: 

Next job is to improve the feeds, so what the accounts actually tweet will be more worth having. 

LATEST UPDATE (Sept 2nd 2012): 

I use Twitterfeed to create the tweets, but am changing from an RSS from Yahoo News, to one from Google News. I have a feeling it produces more and better results. So far, I have made the change on the Amazon, Twitter and Google accounts, but will gradually get round to doing them all. For instance, the Google News RSS is this: 

https://news.google.com/news/feeds?hl=en&gl=uk&as_oq=sergey+brin,+larry+page,+maps,+gmail,+youtube,+eric+schmidt,+google+drive,+google+search,+page+rank&as_occt=any&as_qdr=a&authuser=0&q=google+sergey+OR+brin,+OR+larry+OR+page,+OR+maps,+OR+gmail,+OR+youtube,+OR+eric+OR+schmidt,+OR+google+OR+drive,+OR+google+OR+search,+OR+page+OR+rank&um=1&ie=UTF-8&output=rss

If you paste that into your browser, you can see the various 'ands' and 'ors' I have selected. It's a pretty arbitrary choice, but I think the results are pretty good.

I'm monitoring the effects on follower numbers. The redesign didn't seem to do much, but the improved feed shows signs of increasing numbers.  

Through Tolstoy's eyes

Some of the most beautiful colour pictures you'll ever see were taken by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, who developed colour photography. 

They were mostly taken in Russia over 100 years ago, though to look at them, you might think it was yesterday - apart from the clothes of course. If you look at the some of the pictures of peasants, it's almost as if Tolstoy had a camera.

There are also nice pictures of Italy and other European countries. 

I tried to find a book of his pictures, but they all seem to be out of print. 

There's a collection of some of the best on Flickr too (below): 

Does Tesco think we're stupid?

I really have nothing against Tesco. The people who deliver our online food shopping are cheerful beyond the call of duty.

But I'm not so keen on the 'offers' on the website. I mean, look at this:

Yes, the "Price Drop" brings the four tins of tuna down to the same price as the individual tins (above). But only if you buy them before July 3rd.

After that, you'll be giving Tesco an extra £2.99 for the privilege of buying four of them wrapped in a plastic wrapper with the words "Bigger Value" on it.

They didn't take any notice of my previous offering on this kind of thing either...