Cambridge is an old city and, like many others, has serious traffic and parking problems, not really helped by an apparently car unfriendly City Council.  Public transport is encouraged by very high parking fees and relentless traffic wardens that are collecting hefty fines around the historical centre.  That is not a solution to typical situations of people that, like me, need to go to different places in a single trip, carrying bags and luggage and need to park in between.

A very annoying thing that often happens to me is finding a parking area where you would easily fit, say, 5 cars but because of the way other careless drivers have decided to park you can merely fit 3 or 4 and you waste many minutes driving and polluting, looking for another parking.  Another typical example is when, like in these pictures, people arrive, see an empty space at the end of the lot and they park close to the next car, wasting precious space that becomes totally unusable (highlighted in red).  When this happens I am always asking to myself: is it possible that they just don’t get it?  Can’t they see that nobody, until they move, will be able to use this space?

Obviously the right way is to park closest to the edge, without wasting any space: there will be a large gap between your car and the next one  but when that moves it will allow other drivers to park properly, helping the whole community to save time, CO2, money and anger .

Posted under Cambridge, Traffic

The CB4 Village Meeting for February 2010 will be held at the Ranch, 100 Histon Road, CB4 3JP on Weds 10 February 2010.  We look forward to see many of you there.

Posted under CB4 Village

My experience with Twitter started in the wrong way: I created an account and followed a few celebrities, big names like CNN and some well known bloggers and… nothing happened so I left the account unattended for nearly a year assuming Twitter was not for me…

Then I read a number of articles and blog posts about what a powerful tool Twitter is and, intrigued, I decided to give it another go, looking for the right way to use this apparently amazing tool.  I am now I happy user of Twitter and it is brining me a good percentage of the total traffic for my blogs: this is all due to understanding my misconception: out there are many people looking forward to connecting with you.  These are those people that tend to have the number of people they are following very similar to the number of their followers.

People that are somehow important or famous in their own field naturally attract many followers: if you follow them it is likely they won’t follow you back.  One of (if not) the top UK twitterer is Stephen Fry with (as I am writing this) 1,247,743 followers and following 54210.  As famous people are on Twitter to market and communicate about themselves or their business and they are already  famous they don’t need to follow many people to have followers.

On the other hand if you are kind of normal person it is unlikely that at the beginning many people will naturally follow you: this is true as long as your number of follower is very small.  In my experience this all changed when I started, systematically, following people in my field and fields I was interested in.  These twitterers had a fairly high number of followers, in the thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, and they were following a similar number of people.  This started a great mechanism that added many followers to my main account @maxgaet that I use for business and personal blog: I am on the verge of 600 followers and growing at 15-20 per day.

To test this theory I just described I created, about a month ago, another account @carismauk that I use for my martial arts blogging: in a very short time, starting completely from scratch, I passed today 130 followers that is a good place to be.

So my basic misconception was that somebody with many followers will not follow somebody with very few: that is absolutely not true and if you follow them it is likely they will follow you back, attracting others and helping you to grow your followers.  Be nice to your followers and thank individually with a direct message every new follower and you’ll see your membership growing!

Posted under Social Networks

The CB4 Village Meeting for January 2010 will be held at the Ranch, 100 Histon Road, CB4 3JP on Weds 13 January 2010.  We look forward to see many of you there.

Posted under CB4 Village