Grand National latest betting

Paddy Rex 13/2 > 7/1

Citizen Sheep 9/1 > 8/1

Penguin Galaxy 9/1

Meganormal 10/1

Hot Patooties 12/1

Grief of Twats 14/1 > 12/1

The Big Yeti 16/1 > 14/1

Hot for Words 18/1 > 14/1

Coxar 16/1

Arcademus 18/1

Brum Plum 20/1 > 18/1

El Grande Melon 25/1 > 18/1

Glinner 16/1 > 20/1

Mushkush 20/1

Woodcut 20/1

Fyreflye 20/1

Godless Girl 20/1 > 25/1

Le Canard Noir 28/1 > 25/1

Chris the Neck 30/1 > 25/1

Darwin's Poodle 40/1 > 30/1

Little Atoms 28/1 > 33/1

Noodlemaz 33/1

Numerate 33/1

The Stirrer 40/1 > 33/1

This is Miss Jo 30/1 > 40/1

Jack of Kent 40/1

His Grace 50/1 > 40/1

Smokerette 33/1 > 50/1

Ten Twenty-three 50/1

Bennioj 50/1 > 60/1

A Thinking Man 66/1

Anonyma Legion 66/1

Wicked Librarian 66/1 > 75/1

Apophthegmist 75/1 > 90/1

Swoopy 100/1 > 90/1

Blue Wode 100/1

Constant Fury 150/1

Cockbongo 200/1

Non-runners: Wossy, Ahm No Here

sponsored by Skeptics in the Brum

I wonder how soon I'll tire of Twitter? It's a wonderful thing, but (a) for something so micro it still takes up a lot of time, and (b) something more interesting is bound to supersede it sooner rather than later. I'm following 170 people now, which equates to two pages of tweets to read every hour. One or two of the people I follow (e.g. the SEO guy) send out loads of messages that I don't bother to read, but if I'm away from the computer for a few hours I feel the need to catch up on the rest, which is interesting but time-consuming.

Twitter is definitely the net phenomenon of the moment, perhaps even more so in the UK than in the US. Look at what happened with Trafigura and Jan Moir, both of which I got wind of within about an hour of the initial tweets. Both spread like wildfire, something that is in the very nature of Twitter, so we can be sure that a lot more organisations and individuals will be twitted in the next few months. I wonder what role it will play during the General Election?

It's been noticeable that even though Stephen Fry was far from the first to be involved in the latest twittages, his support for these campaigns featured heavily in news articles about them. In the UK at least, he is Mr Twitter, and I've renamed the service Fritter in his honour.

As I write, the #beatcancer tweme (For every tweet with hashtag #beatcancer, eBay & Miller/Coors will donate .01$ to cancer research.) is trendingest. When I first saw this I was worried that it was a hoax: I couldn't find any mention of it on Coors' or eBay's websites, and Twitter is open to abuse in the same way that email always has been, but luckily it turns out it's true (with reservations). The campaign finished 3 hours ago but is still being RT'd at the rate of 1,000 a minute, so this particular fire will take a while to burn itself out.

Update 1: for another Twitter campaign supporting a cancer charity, see Drew From TV.

Update 2: Norfolk Blogger has 250 followers. As a little experiment, he just (Saturday 2130) tweeted: "Am out with friends who think twitter is shit. I have a challenge to see how many people respond to this tweet in 10 minutes. Come on" Total number of replies within:
5 minutes: 24
10 minutes: 47
15 minutes: 64