douglasgresham.co.uk

Killing In The Name Of is the UK’s Christmas number 1, taking the usual X-Factor mediocrity down a peg, at least temporarily.  It ended up with just over 500k sales to win by 50k, and is the first single to claim the top spot through downloads only.  It’s not a revolution on either point, though; what’s far more interesting is the nature of the Facebook (and later Twitter) campaign that got it there.

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Looking for a way to get shared items from Google Reader into Twitter, I came across a service caller TwitterFeed, which periodically queries an RSS or Atom feed and tweets any new posts – useful for automatically tweeting your blog, for instance.  Well, Reader’s shared items are publicly accessible as an Atom feed (choose Your Stuff->Shared Items, there’s a link to it in your shared items in the blue box, and on that page there’s an Atom feed link).  Bingo!  Except not quite, because those items are kind of verbose for a tweet – if you’ve set a note, it starts “Shared by Douglas” (if you’re called Douglas, which handily I am).  That’s a whole extra 17 characters!  Plus, after the note, the actual content of the article starts, and it’s not clear which bit I wrote.

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