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Author: Mark Cahill

Twitter, Hashtags, Baseball and a Dose of Spam

Twitter, Hashtags, Baseball and a Dose of Spam

For about a year, I’ve been using twitter and hashtags to tweet with fellow Red Sox fans about our favorite topic, the Red Sox.  Over that time, I’ve seen a big change how it works. First, a definition from Twitter Wiki: Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. When…

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Personal Branding Reviled…Oops…Revisited

Personal Branding Reviled…Oops…Revisited

The rumination du jour on the Twitterverse is Personal Branding.  Endless links to blog posts about how to pimp your personal brand, monetize it or sell it to the highest bidder seem to appear by the minute.  Today, I tweet: Personal Branding is an artificial edifice that is antithetical to the transparency and authenticity expected in Social Media Marketing. That’s it.  You pimp the brand you, and you’re going against all that we seem to say is important in Social…

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Reel-Time.com Updated

Reel-Time.com Updated

Over the past couple months, I’ve been working nights and weekends to get Reel-time.com updated and running on WordPress.  The project, while far from complete, reached critical mass this week and I was able to go live Tuesday night. This site has been around since 1995, and frankly, if you knew where to look, it was showing it’s age.  The homepage was left justified, which is something designers haven’t been doing since around 2001. There were a lot of challenges. …

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Something Wonderful is About to Happen…

Something Wonderful is About to Happen…

Okay, maybe not wonderful.  But did want to post and explain that I’ve been too busy to post for the past week, and later today, you’ll probably see why.  If I can get the stuff I need to do done, if nothing else breaks, if the creek don’t rise…etc.  Your mileage may vary, not available in all shapes and colors.

A Sustainable Botnet?

A Sustainable Botnet?

Gizmodo has published an interesting article entitled “How the Conficker Problem Just Got Much Worse” and I’ve got to say that I’m generally concerned. …and here’s why that is deeply, deeply scary. As we explained, Conficker has built a zombie botnet infrastructure by registering hundreds of spam DNS names (askcw.com.ru, and the like), which it then links up and uses as nodes for infected machines to contact for instructions. In its earlier forms, Conficker attempted to register 250 such DNS names…

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Conficker Worm

Conficker Worm

Yeah, the Conficker worm is supposed to update on April 1. Stick to standard protocols, use Windows Update if you aren’t already doing it automatically, run a thorourgh virus scan with your favorite anti-virus, give the machine a quick check with something like Lavasoft Adaware, and TURN YOUR MACHINE OFF IF YOU AREN’T USING IT.

The (Malevolent) Genius of Google Adsense

The (Malevolent) Genius of Google Adsense

When I started blogging at this site, I threw in a Google Adsense ad basically to fill up a column.  That was a year ago.  Today, on a whim, I decided to check out my earnings.  As you’d probably expect, I have about enough in the account to buy an 18 pack of domestic beer.   Luckily, I like domestic beer. So I figured, I might as well take the payout.  Why leave it with Google? They had an answer…

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WordPress Revision History to the Rescue

WordPress Revision History to the Rescue

(Uh, Jeff, Kelly, move on, nothing to read here.  Nothing of interest to you at all…really…) I had one of those moments today.  Mistakes were made.  Bad mistakes.  The “oh crap, I’m editing on the production site, not the qa or dev server” type of mistakes that immediately have you picturing your career dissipation light suddenly burning bright. So I noticed after working on this highly important site that I’d accidently overwritten something on the live site.  Yech. Luckily, as…

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Whither Investigative Journalism?

Whither Investigative Journalism?

The “Special Sauce” for news media has always been investigative journalism, ala Woodward and Bernstein.  It’s what made myself and an entire generation of young writers want to get into journalism back in the 1970’s, each of us aching to bring the mighty low, to shine lights into dark places and in the process, make our names, too, household words. Today, investigative journalism is a dying craft.  Dying not because there aren’t reporters willing to ask the tough questions, but…

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