Rules to be obeyed:
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 I started about a year ago, there were a handful of folks that were tweeting with the #redsox hashtag during the games. DougH, AdamCohen, AaronStrout and Fairminder would pretty much be the list. Most of them aren’t really seen tweeting about the games anymore, and it doesn’t surprise me.
Early adopters really hate a crowd, deep down, and the numbers of folks that use the hashtag now have soared. Even Jerry Remy (and his assistant John) are using the hashtag to tweet during games. However, with the popularity, there are problems:
1. Spamming – I’m now seeing people using the hashtag to advertise stuff that has nothing to do with the Red Sox. Last night DaveAndelmann tweeted an ad for his Phantom Gourmet tv show which would air after the game. Boo hiss, Dave! If everyone does this, it becomes unuseable. The problem is that everyone seems to think that Twitter is their own private advertising medium. Really, c’mon, admit it…
2. ReTweetBots – I really hate seeing accounts (not really people) like Redsoxgame or Yankeesgame or RedSoxTweets mindlessly retweeting scores and articles with the #redsox tag. The problem is, if the original was already tagged, we’ve seen it before. With these retweetbots, we’re destined to see each article about 6 times. Stupid…
3. Red Sox Tweets Turn Off My Other Followers – Yup, not everyone wants to hear it. Since I’ve tagged my tweets, you can filter them in Tweetdeck, (go to the bottom of your friends column and find the filter icon – then select text – #redsox and they’ll be gone. But most people won’t take the time to do this.
Either we find fixes for these problems, or the noble effort that was live game tweeting will crash and burn. I predict unregulated this will go the way of Usenet possibly by the All Star break but certainly by September.
I suspect in the long term, the real solution is that live game microblogging needs to be done under the auspices of a website where someone can actually police things help maintain a quality experience. Perhaps if Jerry Remy were to put a Laconica install on his site, that’d be the place. Or perhaps the crew at SurvivingGrady.com could upgrade from their current comments system…
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 Media Marketing. Phil Sheard presciently asked what my thoughts were on where the line really is (understanding that deep down, I don’t think all personal branding is bad…). My answer:
As Popeye said, “I ams who I ams…” I’d draw the line at trying to create a persona that isn’t genuine for financial gain.
I’m a New England Yankee. That means I expect to be able to take people at face value. It also means that I realize that for the most part, I’m going to be disappointed. So perhaps I tend to draw the line a little too far to the conservative side.
Okay, I’ll admit it. We don’t need full “transparency” into your life. I don’t need to see pics on your blog of you doing body shots off an asian hooker in Vegas right next to your latest masceration on marketing. By the same token, it is unrealistic to be using all possible avenues simply to tell the world you’re the greatest.
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. First off, a lot of the content was gnarly hand-coded html of varying quality, which for the most part has had to be moved by hand. That task will no doubt continue for a while. Secondly, I didn’t have call on a designer. As such, what design work had to be done, was done by me…and if you could see how I dress, you’d understand humor in that. A few of the high points:
I still have a lot of stuff to do. If you read this blog closely, you’ll know that I had a quandry about what to do with our fishing reports section. I think I have a solution to that, which I’ll be working on next. Also on my list:
Remember, one of the salient points here is that this was a nights and weekends project, only a 2 days of actual “work” time went into it. Also, the an important round of thanks to the moderators for the site, Bob Parsons, Sam Riley, Ray Avitable and Shaun Ruge who were of immense assistance in the planning and as always, in providing a firm sounding board for potential ideas. Without them, the site, I fear, would crumble to dust.
Okay, there was one other MAJOR change and no one has commented on it. Can you?
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.
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 per day. But with the third version of the software, the Conficker.c variant which has been floating around for the last month or so, the number of spam DNS takeovers was boosted to 50,000 per day—a number security pros can no longer keep up with.
Now, that is bad enough. But they’ve missed something VERY important. Just in the past week, Register.com, a primary registrar and DNS source has experienced a sustained DDoS attack by a Botnet of undetermined origin. Similarly last month, GoDaddy.com was hit hard. Now I have anecdotal evidence of several other DNS providers having come under attack this week. Are the two the same issue?
It’s hard to tell. When companies come under attack, they generally keep their mouths shut. I believe we’ll see that changing very soon…
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.
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 for that question: we do not pay out until you have earned over $100.00. That is exactly where the genius of this program lies…how many people end up providing free advertising to them because they never manage to cross the payout threshold?
You see, Google has it all figured. They think about Adsense (and probably everything) with a very simple premise: Take lots of pennies everywhere and it will add up to something big. Hence the payout threshold is higher than with similar products, and the cpc rates are a little lower.
Am I shocked? No. I’ve heard grumbling for years. Google Adsense is the bottom rung for web advertising, with virtually no barrier to entry.
So after a year, no payout for me. Google you owe me a beer…actually an 18 pack.
Wrap your heads around this little bit, folks.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUqyzY6GoLQ[/youtube]
Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medeski_Martin_&_Wood
(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 of version 2.6, WordPress now has Revision History. I’ve only used the feature a few times before, and then, only when I’d gotten to an unrecoverable point on a qa server. So in I went, and there it was…the content I’d overwritten, waiting for me, like a girlfriend I’d done wrong…
Saved. Career dissipation light dims to nothing.
Thank you WordPress…without that my next stop was going to be the Internet Archive…