The first thing i do every morning is roll over to my left hand side, switch off the alarm on my iPhone with the top button (without opening my eyes) and then go back to sleep. I do this about 10 times within 20 minutes until it gets to the stage where i’m awake and waiting for the next alarm to go off. At that stage i know i’m 100% alert and ready to go. Up until that point, i live in hope that i’ve accidentally set my alarm to go off early. That could happen once, unlikely to happen 10 times…
At one stage i had over 70 domains names registered. These days i’ve cut back a good bit and it’s down to about 20 but ever since i first registered domains, i’ve been getting these spammy letters from Domain Renewal Group. I know i’m not alone in getting these spam letters but i thought their stupidity was worth at least one blog post…
One of the biggest changes facebook made the other day with their new profile design was the introduction of tagged photos to the top of a users profile page. This is a very smart move by facebook but it’s also something users need to be aware of and careful with…
iwantideas.com has been live now for over a year and consistently rakes in about 600 visits per month. High quality, all organic traffic. It’s not much but i’ve done nothing with the site since i set it up. The ‘problem’ with it for me, is that it’s using pligg. In short, the site has been spammed so much it’s forced me in to switching platform completely.
One of the main reasons i use twitter is to keep an eye on breaking news or search for news i know is breaking. That can be hugely valuable. Knowledge is power as they say and knowing something first or before other people, gives you power. Twitter offers every single one of us the chance to break news as it’s happenening.
photo credit: johnmeyer.me
It can be used to place bets, gain contacts, gain respect… it’s a currency in it’s own right. You will all have people you follow that submit ‘quality’ tweets. I know i follow several designers for example who will often post useful links and tools (useful to me of course!).
But recently, twitter has been poisoned by spam. It’s increasing too… i’ve noticed it and so have others. Spammers can look at breaking news, see what’s hot and then comment on that news and chuck a sly link in to a completely unrelated website promoting some pyramid scheme or offering you a free dental whitening kit.
Spam has been around from day one on twitter and like a lot of communication mediums, twitter will have to find a way of dealing with it better. Gmail ended spam emails as we used to know them… it could be said Firefox ended popups as we knew them…
The twitter spammer or spam bot is a much more complicated beast to get rid of and at the minute they’re succeeding in getting traffic and fooling people. I’ve no doubt there are people online milking twitter for everything it’s worth. And that’s a problem because they’ll keep doing it until they’re stopped or can’t make more money.
How can twitter solve it? Don’t know. It’s a tough one. Community moderation works, but due to the ‘live’ nature of twitter, it’s too slow.
