Author Archives: Maggie de Barra

“You Should Follow Me On Twitter Here.”

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Marching to the drum of Dustin Curtis.

Last night I came across this post by Dustin Curtis about Twitter and click-through rates. Curtis studied the click-through rates based on different prompts to readers, urging them to follow him on Twitter.

“Follow me on twitter” is the phrase I usually use. Curtis discovered that he got a 7.31 per cent click-through rate with this prompt. “You should follow me on twitter here” raised the click-through rate to 12.81 per cent. This is an impressive increase.

According to professor Wikipedia: click-through rates are calculated by taking the number of times a person clicks on a link or ad and dividing that by the number of times that the link was available for viewing. For example, if my About Me page was viewed one hundred times, and five people clicked the link to my Twitter page, then I could have a click-through rate of 5 per cent.

There are a couple of cool things about this study:

  • Curtis uses a lower-case t in twitter instead of a capital T in Twitter. This is something new to me. I think it works because it slips in the command seamlessly. It doesn’t interrupt the flow of the sentence by having Capital Letters throwing off your GROOVE. Also having a capital Twitter just seems a bit overpowering, while lower-case twitter seems nice and friendly.
  •  The command is a bit stern: You should follow me on twitter here. It just sounds so tough. But, if you think about it, a lot of people may have no idea what Twitter is or what you do on Twitter. If you sound like you have authority in this area, the herds may be more willing to follow you. It’s 10 per cent what you say, and 90 per cent how you type it.

I’m going to follow his lead, and I am already following him on Twitter (@dcurtis). I’ve put that command in my About page and I look forward to seeing if there is any change in my click-through rates. One more thing:

You should follow me on

twitter here.

The Farley Mowat Fence

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Snow. Owls in the Family. Exams.

I took these on the way to my (FIRST and ONLY) winter exam! I’m kind of amazed at all the snow in Ottawa. Toronto is severly lacking. I hope it looks like this in Toronto for Christmas.

One more take-home exam to finish up tomorrow and then I’m home free for Christmas break.

(Don’t know if I’m feeling these grey scale pictures but there’s a first time for everything!)

Christmas Carols

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This is what I’ll be listening to until December 26th.

Last Christmas, This Christmas, Blue Christmas, White Christmas, Home for Christmas, Christmas Bells are Ringing, Oh Christmas Tree, Chrismas Canon in D!!!

 

Schmap Cambridge Guide

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Great success.

Almost a month ago I mentioned that one of my photos was nominated to be included in an online guide to Cambridge. Very happy to say this arrived in my inbox over the weekend:

Hi Maggie,
I am delighted to let you know that your submitted photo
has been selected for inclusion in the newly released ninth
edition of our Schmap Cambridge Guide

You can see it live on the guide right here, and you can also see it featured on their iPod app here.

Class of 2010

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This is what I did on Friday.

gradapp2

True Patriot Love

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Remembrance Day 2009 in the nation’s capital.

This year I spent Remembrance Day at the War Memorial in downtown Ottawa. Prince Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, were in attendance, along with the Prime Minister and the Governor General. Prince Charles and Michaelle Jean were both wearing stunning green* military uniforms. I was incredibly excited to see all these important people at the same time, on such an important day, at such a beautiful place, in our nation’s capital.

11/11/09

While Remembrance Day is an extremely emotional day, it is a mixture of sadness and happiness for me. On November 11, I am overwhelmed with patriotism. Half of me feels sad when remembering fallen soldiers, and half of me is happy because today Canadians are united in a great love for our country, all the amazing aspects and beautiful opportunities we have and everything that we can look forward to in the future.

11/11/09

The 21 gun salute, the jets that flew overhead, the veteran’s parade and seeing so many Canadians united together made my little heart feel like it would burst with pride and patriotism. Standing in a crowd of hundreds of shivering, poppy-wearing Canadians singing along together to O Canada was overwhelming. It was a beautiful moment, and I will never forget.

11/11/09

Update 11/13/09:
* Accoriding to this picture, and this picture, the uniforms appear to be black. They looked green from where I was standing.

 

Schmap Cambridge Guide Short-List

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What a beauty.

Pretty cool email this morning:

Hi Maggie,
I am writing to let you know that one of your photos has
been short-listed for inclusion in the ninth edition of our
Schmap Cambridge Guide, to be published late November 2009.

River Cam

I’ve never heard of this guide, but they want to use my photo and that’s pretty sweet. As long as they give me credit, I say go for it.

Update 11/15/09:
My photo was picked! See it here.

NaNoWriMo

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I should be doing homework.

NaNoWriMoI just signed up to take part in National Novel Writing Month. Basically you have 30 days to write a 50,000 word novel. Nobody has to see it, nobody has to read it, you just have to write it!

I remember hearing about this in highschool, and now I’m finally going to do it. Now I just have to figure out how to schedule in an extra 1,500+ words everyday for the next month, on top of school stuff and real life.

Update 12/19/09:
What a failure. I wrote 1,228 words. And they were not very good words at that. Between my feature articles and essays due in November, this project was doomed from the start. Poor thing. Not a problem though. There is always next year. There is always any time of the day for writing, now that I think about it. I’m not confined to an online competition. Here’s to another 1,228+ words.

New Maclean’s OnCampus Post

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A text message that could save your life.

I just hit publish on a new Maclean’s OnCampus blog post about my school’s new Emergency Notificaiton System. Check it out here.

Big Thoughts Hurt My Brain

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When Free Association meets Stream of Consciousness.

I was lying in bed last night and I had one of those moments when you start thinking something simple like “I wonder if there are any good movies playing this weekend.” and it mutates into “I wonder if I should buy my own website domain.” 

My mind just started to wander through all the things I have to do and things I want to do and two hours later I was still thinking. What kind of leaders will my generation be when we are all grown up? We live our lives on Facebook and YouTube and have no concept of privacy but a great understanding of popularity and the power of view counts. What will we do in 30 years when somebody pulls out a cached store of Facebook photos of the next Prime Minister? What is wrong with us? I could go on. Uhh the internet. It freaks me out sometimes.

Things I was thinking about last night that I still remembered when I woke up this morning:

  1. I sold a textbook at Haven!! I was cleaning my room earlier this spring and I was just transfering my big textbooks from my side table to my bookshelf to my desk to the floor. After a while you just have to be honest with yourself and admit that as much as you loved your Intro to Archaeology class there is no way that you will ever pick up that thousand-page book for a little light reading any time soon. So I put them all up for sale and now when I get back to Ottawa I will have a little surprise waiting for me in the form of a cheque. Money in the bank.
  2. I want to start a podcast. I get about this far into starting in and then I get distracted. I won’t think about that now. I’ll think about that tomorrow.
  3. I want to try Tumblr. They say it’s “the easiest way to blog.” And they give you 21 reasons why you will love it. They make a convincing argument, but then again, I am easily impressed. What is up with Tumblr and Flickr and why don’t they want to buy a vowel? Ahh! Ok I just did it. I feel like I am spreading myself too thin. I would rather be really good at a few things than mediocre at a lot of things. I am going to justify this venture by saying that I want to try out a new blogging platform.  (I’m sorry WordPress. Don’t cast me out just yet. This is field research. Archaeology remember?)