Yes, yes, yes. I am a BAD PERSON.

I promised that there would be goodies and there will be but so far there have not been. Now…

First things first. Luke Coughlan, you frustrate me with your lack of a contact address. How can I respond to your shamelessness if you do not give me a way to reach you? Dude. Schoolboy error… :)

Rachel and Jordan both get goodies for being awesomely helpful beyond the call of awesome.

Leaving the person I have randomly selected by sneezing violently at my pile of paper while I was trying to figure out how to select someone randomly: Tara.

That’s all for now. I have developed a vile hacking cough and a sore throat, possibly for World Goth Day. More likely because it’s the first nice day of the year and I’m being punished for something.

[/self pity]

Cheerio. I’m off to make Mrs H take care of me. She loves that.

A while ago, I wrote a Twitter Quickstart Guide.

It’s a little out of date now and it’s a sort of Aston Martin quickstart. It’s a bit elegant and roomy. I realise that many people would prefer a Caterham-style guide, with no fluff and plenty of vroom.

So the first section of this post will get you up and running in a few seconds.

Just do it. Right here, right now.

If you decide you don’t want to use Twitter, you’ve lost less time than you spend deciding whether to have a Bourbon or a digestive.

So, right click (or command-click) >>>>here<<<< and open the link in a new pane so you can keep reading my helpful advice while you begin your Twitter journey. I’m going to assume you’ll do that every time I ask you to click on something, because otherwise you’re going to spend a lot of time re-opening this page…

Okay, if you’re dithering about your screen name, stop. You can change it later if you want to. In the meantime, if you’re in doubt, may I suggest you prefix your own first name with something. Be MassmarketBob or LiteraryLinda, or go with something goofier like KnittingJenny.

You’ve signed up? Great. Good work. Now click here or type twitter.com/harkaway into your browser. Click the button to follow me, then go to the lists (right hand side of the page) and click ‘view all’, then select the Book Trade list. Or you can be lazy and click here. Follow the list. There are at present just over 300 people on it, and you probably know some of them. Click on their names and follow a few of them. Now click here and follow some of the nice people on the Bookseller lists. You know you want to. And then you may as well let the Bookseller know you’re now on Twitter, too. [N.B. Recently I have noticed that people who do no, in fact, work in the book trade have been using this guide. Since I follow a wide and ridiculous cross-section of the world, you can skip the Booktrade list and the Booktrade II list and look at some of the others for inspiration. Or follow a bunch of writers and publishers and agents if you want, it's a free country...]

See? You’re done. What’s going to happen now is this: your own Twitter feed is going to show a bunch of people you know talking about things you know about. If you look on the right of your own page, you’ll find my Book Trade list. You can read that, too. Don’t hang around. You can break your duck by sending me a message, if you want: go to the input box and type:

@Harkaway Hi! I signed up. My technophobia is melting even as we speak. I am swimming the cloud! Yay, me!

In case you’re wondering, you can say quite a lot in the allotted space. For example:

This message is long & unwieldy – a little contrived, even – but it serves a purpose. It is precisely one hundred and forty characters long.

Now, here’s the second bit of the guide, which I have culled from two previous posts on this topic I wrote on this site. If you’re curious, try searching in the box in the top right for “quickstart” – you should get the original post and another called “you have to be there” which is the presentation I did for the London Book Fair a while ago.

1. Twitter is NOT a broadcast medium.

The word ‘microblog’ suggests that it’s about minuting your day. “I’m brushing my teeth.” “I’ve dropped the soap.”

Please. Don’t go there. Twitter is a conversation, a rolling babble of ideas, alarm, comment. At the risk of sounding like a lunatic: Twitter is the zeitgeist in 140 character fragments. Some of it is trivial, some of it is not, but it’s unlikely that anyone will want to know about the soap situation.

More than that, though, tweets which are basically plugs for product, or references to another site, will probably fall flat. Twitter is above all about relationships and communication. It is a multidirectional flow of information and opinion. Respect that, enjoy it, and you’ll be fine. Ignore it, and Twitter will probably return the favour. You need to get to know people, respond to them. Don’t worry, they’ll respond to you, too. But this is a level playing field. It’s not like putting stuff on a billboard or advertising on TV. It’s like going to lunch with a lot of people you’ve never met before in a very nice, chatty pub.

2. Hashtags

You’ll see tweets like this:

Cameron & Clegg: marvellous. Now I can hate all three parties in #UKpolitics.

That # is a signal for Twitter; it lets the system know there’s a tag there. Click the word with the tag, you’ll get taken through to a search for all uses of it. You can see what else people are saying on that topic. The search will also find uses which are not tagged. NB you can’t use punctuation or spaces in a tag. So #michelle’s wedding will find all instances of “michelle”. The rest of the term is inert. On the other hand, you can tag something with #michelleswedding and that will work so long as everyone else uses the same tag. Anyone can make up a tag.

3. Apps & Phones

In the end, to get the most out of Twitter, you need to be using it from a smartphone as well as from your desk. The immediacy of it, and the sense of participation, is part of the thing itself. And also, you want to be able to use the backchannel which is Twitter to find out and share stuff on the go. The London Book Fair is a different animal with Twitter. So is an evening on the town. If you’ve got this far, you won’t find it hard to get hold of an app for iPhone, Blackberry, or Android to make that happen. I use Twittelator, for no better reason than that this really cool guy told me to and I’ve never found a reason to change.

Similarly, Twitter apps for your desktop can make the whole experience a bit more powerful. I use TweetDeck, but there are plenty. And of course, the best place to get advice on either of these is… Twitter. You’ve probably got used to Googling things. It’s entirely possible that many of those things you can now ask your group on Twitter instead. Google certainly thinks so; they’ve been chasing live search for months, lest they lose out…

And that’s about it for getting started. The key thing is to follow people who are interesting, pass on interesting information and links, and remember that Twitter is democratic and populist. It doesn’t respond to instructions, but it will walk across coals for something intriguing.

Not that you have to be intriguing all the time. Just be you – not your job or your sales targets. It’s a long, slow party.

Come mingle.

[Edited 25th May 2011 for sense and so on. Not that I got all the errors and anachronisms. I'm sure I didn't. Life's rich and splendid that way.]

[Image by Paul Kehrer under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic]

Two or three months ago, if you’d told me Nick Clegg would be deputy Prime Minister in a Con/Lib coalition, I’d have invited you to pull the other one.

This is a spectacular result for a party whose distributed support around Britain means that they have on average to achieve three times as many votes as Labour and the Conservatives do to get a single seat in parliament. In February I would have put money on a Conservative PM with a decent majority. It seems churlish to be disappointed in the Lib Dem position now.

I am disappointed by Labour, though.

If this morning’s Guardian story is accurate, Labour chose the security of opposition – and the knowledge that the coming years will make government a very unpleasant place to be – over the opportunity, however unpopular and slender, to form a rainbow coalition and push ahead with an agenda of progressive democratisation. Reportedly, the things which stuck in their throat were: moving towards PR, abandoning ID cards & the third runway at Heathrow, and increasing Britain’s renewable energy generation.

I’m a floating centre-left voter. I look at that list and I see either a party which believes in paternalism, surveillance, and pollution, or a party which chooses political security over its belief that the fiscal policies of the opposing party will destroy our economy. So, fine. I didn’t vote for Labour in this election, but I might have voted for them at the next one, especially if it comes in the next few months as a consequence of the collapse of this coalition, which remains a possibility.

But not if that’s what Labour are at the moment: snooping and cravenly unable to face the economic challenges of global warming, and determined to cling to the artificial polling advantage afforded to them by manipulation of the First Past The Post voting system. Perhaps they really do need a spell in opposition to rediscover their identity.

So what about Nick and Dave?

Or I should probably say “Dave and Nick”.

Well, they’ve really been handed a poisoned chalice. Bonne chance, boys. This will, in many ways, suck.

That aside, though, I understand that the coalition agreement will be released later today. It is absolutely vital that it be released in full. There must be no tacit pledges, no private clauses. All and any commitments the parties have made to one another in order to become our government must absolutely be public. The British power structure has an addiction to secrecy. If this really is to be a new day, the basis of it must be open to scrutiny. What have the Lib Dems traded for those cabinet posts? And what have the Conservatives given in exchange? We need to know. Apart from anything else, when all this comes tumbling down – and it probably will; historically, coalition government isn’t stable here – we need to know who wasn’t able to stick to his word.

[UPDATE: the agreement has now been released, and it's, er, exhaustively sketchy. Obviously it was never going to look like a legal contract as such, with clear, stated definitions, but there's wiggle room hither and yon, and there will be some tense moments when the cloudy bits are brought into focus. The precise contents of the Great Repeal Bill, for example, may be a flashpoint - the name, to my linguistic delight, already sounds more William Pitt and less Campaign For Plain English - but it'll need close watching to make sure it doesn't neglect any important areas now that its proponents are in government. The other thing I'd really like to know is what the agreement doesn't say; what areas did they not dare get into with one another?And what tacit assumptions have they left vague? What deals have been done by omission? On Europe, for example, I heard a couple of self-described 'inner circle' Tories - no one I'd ever heard of, but hey, I wouldn't have - who believed in the EU, agonising over the possibility that David Cameron's aggressive stance on various bits of legislation was intended to provoke a crisis with the EU which would inevitably lead to our withdrawal from it. Rough stuff, politics...]