This morning I found a spammer who I actually have a grudging admiration for. They’ve been a little more creative than posting a headless picture of a young (hot) girl or mass following anyone who mentions whatever they’re pushing in the hope they follow them back. Check them out: http://twitter.com/SkiClubs At the moment of writing […]
I spend a lot of time thinking about Spam. It may be an inherent danger of being a Programmer. Even though I take care of my email address not being posted around the internet I get junk mail. Some of it is quite funny, although I hear some people fall for the bank with unclaimed […]
I’m writing this from beyond the Great Firewall of China. Twitter went down two weeks ago. Facebook went down a couple of days later. There’s rioting going on and the irony is – if I didn’t want to know why Facebook and Twitter were down I probably never would have known anything about it. It’s […]
Saw this video the other day – Google in New York asking people if they know what a browser is. Most people didn’t. Or rather – they essentially think the browser is Google. Is the browser so pervasive that people don’t register that it’s a distinct “thing”? Or does the average user basically just not […]
Earlier, I was trying to work out why “Amedisys” was trending (job postings! Crikey), and then people including it in their posts just to get their posts showing up on that trend. Does that work? Do people really follow people who just tweet all the currently trending topics periodically? One guy was trying to pimp […]
The US State Department confirmed that it intervened to keep Twitter going and downtime was recheduled to take place in the middle of the night in Iran, not in the US. The #IranElection hastag has been trending for days. See: I saw this, and thought – wow. This is big big news on Twitter. Right […]
There’s a large Persian population in Ottawa, especially in Computer Science. So, a lot of my friends are from Iran and I follow the international news so I’ve been watching the election results with interest. One of my friends wasn’t going to vote, so the other day I was embroiled in an argument about that […]
I came across this yesterday. “Hope not Hate”, in response to the BNP getting two seats in the EU elections. I loathe the BNP, I do. They’re racist and offensive. But – this is a democracy, and even stupid and racist people get to vote. They exercised their right to vote in electing in the […]
At the moment, I’m reading The Wisdom of Crowds. It’s a really interesting book, all about how crowds can organize themselves to achieve great things… and how sometimes they organize themselves in such a way that things go horrifyingly wrong. I picked this book to read next in part because of an experience I had […]
This week I’m at another conference, this one put on by FOSSLC. It’s an Open Source conference, which isn’t strictly related to what I’m doing but it’s good to get out there and meet people, and hear about what people in industry are saying. I’ve had a few conversations about Twitter… of course. I’m really […]