An Eclectic Mind

A blog post should be more than just screenshots of what other people Tweeted.

This morning, as I sat drinking my coffee, I began my usual ritual of checking out some of the links tweeted overnight by the people I follow. One of them was about the iPad. Interested in the iPad as my future ebook reader, I followed the link.

I wound up on a blog post that consisted primarily of screenshots of Twitter. The blogger had posted a question on Twitter about the iPad and then sat back and captured screenshots of the responses as they were tweeted.

I call that lazy blogging.

It was also extremely tedious to read. So tedious, in fact, that I stopped reading after the first scroll down. I did continue scrolling to see if there was some content added by the blogger, but there was so little of it that I wound up simply closing the browser window and getting on with my day.

And then I realized how much it bugged me that there was someone out there passing off screenshots of Twitter responses as a blog “post.”

There is so much crap on the Internet today. Huge quantities of it. I don’t “surf” the net. My Web activity is limited to looking up things I need to know about and following what appears to be interesting links that I receive from friends and business associates verbally, via e-mail, and via Twitter. I don’t want to spend my day wading through the crap online. I want the good stuff.

A blogger should not simply regurgitate what’s readily available on the Web. If I wanted to know what Twitter users thought of the iPad, I’d use Twitter’s built-in search feature — which is also part of Nambu, my preferred Twitter client — and set up a search. I’d then read the results myself. I don’t need to go to a blog to read the same stuff. As screenshots, for Pete’s sake! Hell, if I were at home with my miserably slow Internet connection, the damn page would have taken five minutes to load!

A blogger’s job is to both inform and provide analysis. A summary sentence at the top of 20 screenshots that simply says, “Many people think lack of multi-tasking is a deal breaker,” doesn’t do much for me. And I certainly don’t need to see those 20 screenshots. I get it. You’re not making this up. All these Twitter users said it. I guess it must be true.

And it’s immensely ironic that this post was retweeted. As if it had value. WTF?

My point: if you call yourself a blogger and want to add something of value to the Web, dust off your keyboard and use it.

On Blogging, Social Networking blogging, iPad, irony, Twitter, writing

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please comment on it or share a little link love:
 Add to Del.icio.us     Technorati This     Digg This     Stumble it!     Tweet This

And why this ruins things for the rest of us.

This morning, I got a junk e-mail message from a blogger I’d met on Twitter. And I’m pissed off about it.

How I Was Violated and What I Did about It

I followed this guy on Twitter for a short time and wound up on his blog, where I posted a comment. As anyone who comments on blogs knows, an e-mail address is required to comment, so I entered mine, as I’ve been doing without problems (or spam) for the past five or so years.

This blogger, however, was different. He evidently harvests the e-mail addresses from blog comments and uses it to feed his self-promotional e-mail list. The spam e-mail message from him arrived this morning when I collected my e-mail.

To say I was furious is an understatement. In my opinion, this blogger has violated my trust — and likely the trust of all other commenters on his blog. He’s used my e-mail address without my permission in a way that’s unacceptable. He’s a spammer, pure and simple, and should be subject to the same penalties as any other spammer.

(As if anyone’s actually enforcing the new anti-spam laws.)

Here’s the message he sent; I XXXed out the identifying information so I don’t send any customers his way:

Did you enjoy the free video on the 6 ways to make money on the internet?

How would you like to win the entire XXX System absolutely free?

All you have to do is recommend the system to a friend via a twitter to enter.

We will be giving away 20 full XXX system accounts between now and January 20th.

Click here to enter!

XXX Media Group | XXX | Lincoln, NE 68516 | US
Unsubscribe from future marketing messages from XXX Media Group

Call me an idiot, but I clicked the unsubscribe link. (They say that doing that often just confirms your address and spreads it.) The link sent me to the Bronto Web site, which is evidently the software this jerk uses to send his spam. It supposedly unsubscribed me. But it went a step further — it offered a complaint link. So I clicked that and filled out the form.

I also forwarded the message to spam@uce.gov, which is something I’ll be doing with ALL spam I receive from now on.

Then I went to Twitter and reported the jerk as a spammer there.

Why This Hurts Legitimate Bloggers

I’ve been blogging since October 2003. That’s six years now. My blog has accumulated thousands of comments from readers. All of them entered what looks like legitimate e-mail addresses. Are they? I don’t know. Other than a few notable exceptions when I wanted to network with a specific person — Miraz Jordan, who wound up co-authoring a book with me, comes to mind — I haven’t tried using them.

I don’t spam my commenters. I appreciate their input; they make my blog better. Why would I violate their trust and start spamming them via e-mail? Why would I make them less likely to contribute their comments to my blog?

So you can get an idea of how annoyed I am about this asshole.

Imagine a first-time commenter who happens to comment on this jerk’s blog. He feels good about adding to the conversation and is ready to do it again elsewhere. But then he gets spam from this jerk. He realizes that putting his e-mail address out there on the Internet can get him all kinds of spam. So he doesn’t do it. Maybe he starts putting fake e-mail addresses in his comments — making him impossible to contact if the blogger wants to for a legitimate, non-spam reason. Or maybe he simply stops commenting at all.

All because one jerk is harvesting commenter e-mail for spam purposes.

What You Can Do about It

The best thing anyone can do about spam is to report it to the authorities.

If you receive spam on Twitter, use the Report For Spam link on the user’s profile page. Do it every time you receive Twitter spam.

If you receive e-mail spam, forward it to spam@uce.gov. You can also visit the FTC’s Spam Site to learn more about how you can reduce the amount of spam you get. And while you’re surfing out on Government sites, visit OnGuard Online for real information about how to protect yourself and your computer from Internet fraud.

But whatever you do, don’t stop commenting on blogs. Most bloggers appreciate your contributions and won’t betray your trust.

Social Networking blogging, comments, e-mail, spam, Twitter

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please comment on it or share a little link love:
 Add to Del.icio.us     Technorati This     Digg This     Stumble it!     Tweet This

I follow the folks who interact with me, but can’t tolerate stalkers.

My opinion on the follower contest that seems to go at Twitter is well documented here. People follow other people so they get followed back. Some people have the whole process automated. They follow based on key words and reciprocate follows they get. If they begin to follow someone and that person doesn’t follow back, they stop following — just so they’re not tagged as spammers.

It’s a lot of bullsh*t, if you ask me.

I follow people I find interesting. A while back, I’d look for interesting people on Twitter by reading tweets in the public timeline or for search results timelines. I don’t do that much anymore. Now I find them two ways:

• People I follow retweet content posted by people they follow. If that content interests me, I’ll likely check out its source and perhaps start following.
• People who follow me interact with me by replying to my tweets. If enough interesting conversations develop, I’ll likely begin following that person.

Interacting means a two-way exchange of tweets. I say something, someone responds, I respond back, etc. It’s a conversation that moves in one direction or another.

Interacting doesn’t mean indiscriminately retweeting what I say or link to. Bots can do that. I block bots.

Interacting doesn’t mean replying with simple “LOL” retweets. If I LOLed at everything I read on Twitter that I thought was funny, I’d be doing it all day.

Interacting doesn’t mean spending 30 minutes a day retweeting and LOLing half of the tweets I’ve posted in the previous 12 hours. That’s more like stalking, which I blogged about last year. I don’t follow stalkers. I’d like to block them, but I’ve discovered that when I ignore them, they do go away. [Hint: if you repeatedly try to interact with me and you get no response, I'm likely ignoring you. Stop stalking.]

If you’re interested, here are some other reasons I won’t follow people on Twitter.

I’m always interested in following intelligent, witty, and well-informed people who tweet about topics that interest me — the same topics I often tweet about. These are the people I think I can connect with. The people I can learn from. The people who can enrich my life.

And perhaps I can do the same for them.

Social Networking Twitter

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please comment on it or share a little link love:
 Add to Del.icio.us     Technorati This     Digg This     Stumble it!     Tweet This

An analysis of two kinds of Twitter accounts.

I’ll admit it: I have two Twitter accounts.

One account, mlanger, is the account I opened in March or April of 2007 and have maintained meticulously in the 2+ years since then. I’ve carefully chosen the 100-110 people I follow, adding new ones and trimming away old ones to maintain a total count that never exceeds 120 people. In the meantime, I’ve been followed by over 1,000 people throughout the years — but more about that number in a moment.

The other account, flyingmair, is the one I created when I recorded my Twitter course for Lynda.com. It was a test account, never intended for anything more. A bunch of people who agreed to be in the course followed me and I followed them back. When my work on the course was finished, I allowed it to languish. Later, I set up an TwitterFeed to automatically post news and special offers for helicopter flights from Flying M Air’s Web site to that account. It’s not much — maybe 2 tweets a month. I turned off follower notifications so I wouldn’t be bothered by bots. But more recently, I decided to use that account to experiment with TweetLater, another third party Twitter service. One of the features it offers is auto-follow, where your account will automatically follow anyone who follows you.

On Auto-follows

Now I need to be clear on something here: I don’t believe in automatically following anyone. This has to do with my personal philosophy of what Twitter is: a social networking tool. What’s social about automation?

I also don’t believe in following everyone who follows me. Twitter is being destroyed by “follower collectors” — people who participate in Twitter solely to build follower count. They’re sucking bandwidth and resources that could be better used to maintain the system for people interested in content. I’m interested in content.

So I would never use an auto-follow tool to follow new followers on my main Twitter account. I keep my follower count to just over 100 because I’ve realized that that’s about all I can follow. I read all the tweets of the people I follow and I interact with them. I build relationships. I learn things. I get links to great content on the Web. Sure, some of the people I follow link to crap and have stupid tweets. But not all the time. And don’t we all?

But the follower collectors don’t care about content. All they care about is building follower count. They do this primarily through automated tools — automatically following people based on keywords or just hits, hoping those people will follow them back — automatically or manually. To avoid their accounts being flagged by Twitter’s monitoring tools, they also automatically unfollow people who don’t reciprocate the follows.

I moment ago, I reported that I’d been followed by over 1,000 people in 2+ years on Twitter. Yet my follower count is under 800. The reason is the automation tools used by the follower collectors. They automatically follow me but I don’t follow back, so they automatically unfollow me. Some of these people have followed me more than once — I reward them for their efforts by blocking them.

Content Is King

So now I’ve got these two accounts:

• The one I monitor, maintain, and interact with daily. The one I enjoy. The one I joined Twitter for.
• The one I allow to languish with occasional automated tweets for my business. The one I reciprocate follows for.

And here’s the difference between them.

The one I maintain has good content. Not perfect, not always crap-free, but good. It has interactions between intelligent, interesting people who link to interesting things on the Web, share good photos, and provide answers to “lazyweb” questions. This Twitter account is the “water cooler” I’ve blogged about so many times. The break from my work, the “friends” who aren’t really close but who know me at least as well as I know them.

The one I’ve fully automated is mostly full of crap. All of the people that account follows are people who followed that account. More than half of the people who follow that account, automatically followed that account. In other words, those accounts may or may not care about interaction. At least 10 of the accounts there release an endless stream of links to content on the Web via RSS feed. They’re just regurgitating links to dozens of new blog posts on other sites — some of which may not even be topic-specific. There are a few accounts there that are connected to real people who are genuinely interesting; I follow some of them on my main account. But, for the most part, the unmaintained, automated account is a gateway into a total waste of bandwidth.

Which would you rather have on your Twitter Home page?

What Would Happen If All the Crap Went Away?

Imagine a Twitter where most of the tweets were interesting or useful or made you think. Imagine it being populated by people who actually cared about the people they followed and interacted with them regularly.

Imagine a Twitter where people didn’t game the trending topics, using all those popular terms in tweets to get their accounts noticed. Imagine automated tools for following, unfollowing, and tweeting vanishing into thin air, requiring people to actually type in the content they want to appear.

You’ve just imagined the Twitter I joined 2+ years ago.

Social Networking Twitter

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please comment on it or share a little link love:
 Add to Del.icio.us     Technorati This     Digg This     Stumble it!     Tweet This

I am a stranger.

This morning, as part of my e-mail routine, I checked the list of new Twitter followers. As I’ve said here and elsewhere, I don’t follow many people on Twitter, but I do check out all the new followers I get. Although most are spam these days, occasionally I find one interesting enough to reciprocate the follow.

Today’s batch included one that made me stop and think. About 75% of this person’s recent tweets were about the deteriorating health of her mom. Heart failure, lung problems, pneumonia. She was tweeting from the hospital, she was tweeting after discussions with doctors. She was keeping her followers apprised of what certainly seemed like the impending death of her mother, right down to details about how her father was taking it.

There are a few things that struck me about this.

Should strangers be expected to care?

First, I find it hard to believe that a good percentage of her 1,000+ followers really care enough about her and her life to want to read the grim details of the family health problem unfolding for her and being broadcast on Twitter.

Sure, if my mom went into the hospital, I’d likely mention it once or twice on Twitter. But if she got really sick and I was spending a bunch of time at the hospital as she lived her last days, I don’t think you’d find many blow-by-blow tweets about it. In fact, I don’t think you’d find many tweets from me at all. I’m not very close to my family, but I’m close enough to spend important time with them and to keep it mostly private. I have 700+ followers on Twitter and I’m positive that very few of them need (or want) to know about the things in my life that are real downers.

On the other side of the coin, I’ve followed folks on Twitter who have tweeted about their health problems or the health problems of family members. That’s normal; health problems are a part of life. But if any of them became absolutely consumed with the problem and tweeted mostly about that, I had to take a hard look at the situation. How well do I know this person? What can I do to make it better? How do I feel reading about this day after day, alongside tweets with links to yodeling cats, health care reform analysis, and cartoons? If the person was a stranger and I’d already said the comforting things I could and the tweets were making me feel like shit every day, I’d stop following. I’d have to. I cannot allow my emotional well being to be dragged down by the misfortunes of strangers who, for some reason, need to make their physical or emotional pain a part of other people’s lives.

So no, I’m not saying I stop following people who complain about a bad back or tweet briefly to mention a loved one with a health problem. But if I don’t know you and that’s just about all you tweet about, please don’t blame me for turning off the volume and getting on with my life.

I guess my point is, there’s just some things you shouldn’t expect strangers to deal with.

Can a person’s priorities be this fucked up?

The other thing that struck me is that this person was going through an ordeal with doctors and hospitals and family members, yet she still found time to follow me on Twitter. Are her priorities fucked up or what?

Now you might suggest that she followed me using some kind of automated tool. Lots of people do that for reasons that are not always in the best of interest of the Twitter community. (I don’t think she is a spammer, though.)

When I checked the time-stamp on the follow notification, I saw that she began following me at 5:47 AM today. My last tweet last night was before 10 PM and my first tweet this morning was after 6 AM. So I hadn’t tweeted anything that could trigger an automatic follow at that time of day.

So that leads me to believe that she’s surfing the Web, reading tweets, and interacting on the Internet. She’s somehow found my Twitter address and has decided to follow me.

Now.

While her mother is potentially on her deathbed.

Or is the whole family thing exaggerated? Just a story to make her sound more interesting to people who like to read that sort of thing?

I really don’t know what to think.

I’m not knocking anyone…Just trying to understand.

Please understand that I’m not writing this to knock a specific person dealing with a family problem. I’m just floored by the whole situation, trying to understand how someone’s take on “social networking” can be so incredibly different from mine.

And I’m wondering how off-base my thoughts on this matter are. How do you feel about strangers you meet on social networking sites detailing the sad parts of their lives? What is it that you want from your social networking activities?

Deep Thoughts, Social Networking health, privacy, Twitter

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please comment on it or share a little link love:
 Add to Del.icio.us     Technorati This     Digg This     Stumble it!     Tweet This