Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Culling the Spammers from My Twitter Followers: TwitBlock.org Rocks!

Screen shot 2009-08-24 at 3.55.45 PM

From a high of 7,093 I have agressively BLOCKED spammy followers using TwitBlock.org, my new favorite tool. [I'm not sure how I got spam listed by 9 twitblock users, but I have some suspicions. Oh well. If you're in the neighborhood and would like to "whitelist me" as not spam I'd appreciate it.]

Well, my aggressive unspam blocking has resulted in a drop in my follower count to 6,870. Seems like the Tweespammers are agressive about unfollowing unfollowers. I say if you're gonna blast crap quote spam, MLM marketing messages and sexcam soliciations I think you should be blocked. Perhaps those folks can figure out who blocked them and block back?

Screen shot 2009-08-24 at 4.20.56 PM

No worries. Seems like the value of a tweet just got a little more easy to spot with Twitblocker.

Two great things about this tool.

1. It shows all your spammy followers on one screen allowing your to unfollow a lot of people at once. And the spammers are easy to spot, believe me. Especially when they are all lined up together like a police lineup.

2. As the tool gets more users and more accounts are rated as spam, the ratings will get better and the tool will be better at pulling spammers out of your flow.

Here's a sample output as TwitBlock began scanning my followers:

Screen shot 2009-08-24 at 4.41.10 PM

You can see I have not blocked sxpanel, but I am about to block Schwartz632. It's easy to spot the spammers, but TwitBlock makes it really easy to find them all in one place.

What we need perhaps is a kick ass Tweeter list. I've been wanting to build a matrix of folks I follow in different fields. Like a verification or a seal of approval for some folks I think are awesome. Starting with my very few #FF #followfriday nominations and Mr. Tweet recomendations, I'm sure I could produce a shortlist of recommendations. That will be my next task.

In the mean time keep it clean and add your account to Twitblock.org and get blocking. The twittersphere will thank you and together we can reduce the noise.

@jmacofearth
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/twitblock-inaction

NOTE: If you think I'm spammy please let me know. I'd be happy to understand how I can provide more value for you. My motto is WIIFY (what's in it for you).

And an ON NO: In unfollowing so many peeps I just upset my follow/follower ratio and I can follow no more people. Gotta get out the wackin tool again. ARRRGGH!

See also The Twitter Way, the collected posts about Twitter and Doing Twitter Right A funny post from Mashable on the Top 25 most spammy Twitter Avatar images.

Latest Twitter Posts

My favorite twittertools:

Posted via web from jmacofearth's posterous

Culling the Spammers from My Twitter Followers: TwitBlock.org Rocks!

Screen shot 2009-08-24 at 3.55.45 PM

From a high of 7,093 I have agressively BLOCKED spammy followers using TwitBlock.org, my new favorite tool. [I'm not sure how I got spam listed by 9 twitblock users, but I have some suspicions. Oh well. If you're in the neighborhood and would like to "whitelist me" as not spam I'd appreciate it.]

Well, my aggressive unspam blocking has resulted in a drop in my follower count to 6,870. Seems like the Tweespammers are agressive about unfollowing unfollowers. I say if you're gonna blast crap quote spam, MLM marketing messages and sexcam soliciations I think you should be blocked. Perhaps those folks can figure out who blocked them and block back?

Screen shot 2009-08-24 at 4.20.56 PM

No worries. Seems like the value of a tweet just got a little more easy to spot with Twitblocker.

Two great things about this tool.

1. It shows all your spammy followers on one screen allowing your to unfollow a lot of people at once. And the spammers are easy to spot, believe me. Especially when they are all lined up together like a police lineup.

2. As the tool gets more users and more accounts are rated as spam, the ratings will get better and the tool will be better at pulling spammers out of your flow.

Here's a sample output as TwitBlock began scanning my followers:

Screen shot 2009-08-24 at 4.41.10 PM

You can see I have not blocked sxpanel, but I am about to block Schwartz632. It's easy to spot the spammers, but TwitBlock makes it really easy to find them all in one place.

What we need perhaps is a kick ass Tweeter list. I've been wanting to build a matrix of folks I follow in different fields. Like a verification or a seal of approval for some folks I think are awesome. Starting with my very few #FF #followfriday nominations and Mr. Tweet recomendations, I'm sure I could produce a shortlist of recommendations. That will be my next task.

In the mean time keep it clean and add your account to Twitblock.org and get blocking. The twittersphere will thank you and together we can reduce the noise.

@jmacofearth
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/twitblock-inaction

NOTE: If you think I'm spammy please let me know. I'd be happy to understand how I can provide more value for you. My motto is WIIFY (what's in it for you).

And an ON NO: In unfollowing so many peeps I just upset my follow/follower ratio and I can follow no more people. Gotta get out the wackin tool again. ARRRGGH!

See also The Twitter Way, the collected posts about Twitter and Doing Twitter Right A funny post from Mashable on the Top 25 most spammy Twitter Avatar images.

Latest Twitter Posts

My favorite twittertools:

Posted via web from jmacofearth's posterous

Sunday, August 16, 2009

How To Recognize the Scammers on Twitter: You've Been TweeSpammed!

Everyone is new on Twitter. Everything changes and everything stays the same.

On thing that doesn't change is the flood of scammer twitter artists leaching on to your account. Here's what they look like and here's what they do.

This is a collection of TwitterSpammers I BLOCKED from following me today:

Picture 25

Notice the last tweet was 2 days ago! For a tweeting tips service, you'd think they'd update at least hourly if not daily. Maybe they just don't have many good ideas yet. Notice the tweet is also nothing but a quote. [NOTE: QuoteSpam is alive and well on Twitter as well. After a while you tire of the people who think it is a good use of their time to cut and paste famous quotes into their Tweetstream. Well, it DOES up their tweet count, but the value of an Einstein quote to my daily interests is quite low. And if the quote is from Oprah... well, I think she stopped tweeting a while back.]

Picture 24

Let's see two biggies: 1. no avatar; 2. random letters for name. Only tweet starts with "Make Money..." If someone would build an app that immediately unfollows and reports all tweets that begin with "Make Money..."

Picture 23

Bad Twitter ID. Contains "f" and "_" to snag a real sounding name. But there's that first tweet again, with these magic words "internet marketers." And she's got "make money" in there too. Poor woman in the picture is probably a real estate agent and has nothing to do with this account. And lastly the last tweet was 21 hours ago. [Hey Twitter, could you give us a way to filter followers by "last tweeted?"]

Picture 22

And the "making money" with "sexy torso" approach. This one adds "get paid" as a nice come on. So let's see, we've got SEX, HEALTH and MAKE MONEY. It's the San Diego address that really sets off the alarm bells though... (just kidding on that one)

So there are two reasons these type of scammers join Twitter and follow everyone.

1. Just like spam, they believe that they can drive traffic to that "make money" or "teeth whitening" or "get out of debt now" link if you just click on it.

2. And they follow you in hopes that you will follow them back. [There's a funny consequence of Mr. 50k and his auto-follow auto-bot tool. He follows all the pornsters too. And he's SOOOO busy he doesn't even have time to look over his follower list.] And even if you don't follow them back, and I would suggest you don't unless you want a lot of their friends dropping by, they are hoping that visitors looking over your "followers" list and see their ID.

You can report these abusive accounts by forwarding the tweet onto the @spam account. Apparently someone at Twitter takes that responsibility seriously.

But please do BLOCK the scammers and save others from accidentally following them when they look over your stream of "followers." It may take you a bit longer to get to 100 or 1,000 followers if you are editing and blocking the scammers, but it goes with the territory. And until Twitter adds a BLOCK and REPORT AS SPAM function we'll just have to do it the old fashioned way. One follower at a time.

UPDATE 8-15-09: I think my very mention of MLM in my post about TweeSpammers got me a lot of MLM related crappo followers. I woke up this morning with this smiling face along with about 15 new scammers trailing my tweets.

Picture 27

In discussions with @michaelpearsun last night we were wondering, if Twitter and Co. are touting their phenominal growth curve, what would be their incentive to block people from creating multiple and bogus accounts? To Twitter's stats it's merely another user. As Michael said, "If you have 28 million users with a lot of spammers vs. 2 million users of very clean users the proposition is very different." So Twitter says, "Gosh look at our amazing growth. Yes, we know there are some people gaming the system, but look at the growth rate on our monthly page views."

And did you notice that to "manage" your twitter account you are forced to weed through users 20 IDs at a time. Now I'm thinking there are much better and more efficient ways of managing my users, BUT... for Twitter it's a ton of page views every time I go in, even just to clean out the spammers, Twitter racks up the stats. And what can we do about it, but comply and complain. Or not complain at all.

I prefer at least giving a little bit of feedback. (grin)

@jmacofearth
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/twitter-spammed

See also The Twitter Way, the collected posts about Twitter and Doing Twitter Right

Latest Twitter Posts

Posted via web from jmacofearth's posterous

How To Recognize the Scammers on Twitter: You've Been TweeSpammed!

Everyone is new on Twitter. Everything changes and everything stays the same.

On thing that doesn't change is the flood of scammer twitter artists leaching on to your account. Here's what they look like and here's what they do.

This is a collection of TwitterSpammers I BLOCKED from following me today:

Picture 25

Notice the last tweet was 2 days ago! For a tweeting tips service, you'd think they'd update at least hourly if not daily. Maybe they just don't have many good ideas yet. Notice the tweet is also nothing but a quote. [NOTE: QuoteSpam is alive and well on Twitter as well. After a while you tire of the people who think it is a good use of their time to cut and paste famous quotes into their Tweetstream. Well, it DOES up their tweet count, but the value of an Einstein quote to my daily interests is quite low. And if the quote is from Oprah... well, I think she stopped tweeting a while back.]

Picture 24

Let's see two biggies: 1. no avatar; 2. random letters for name. Only tweet starts with "Make Money..." If someone would build an app that immediately unfollows and reports all tweets that begin with "Make Money..."

Picture 23

Bad Twitter ID. Contains "f" and "_" to snag a real sounding name. But there's that first tweet again, with these magic words "internet marketers." And she's got "make money" in there too. Poor woman in the picture is probably a real estate agent and has nothing to do with this account. And lastly the last tweet was 21 hours ago. [Hey Twitter, could you give us a way to filter followers by "last tweeted?"]

Picture 22

And the "making money" with "sexy torso" approach. This one adds "get paid" as a nice come on. So let's see, we've got SEX, HEALTH and MAKE MONEY. It's the San Diego address that really sets off the alarm bells though... (just kidding on that one)

So there are two reasons these type of scammers join Twitter and follow everyone.

1. Just like spam, they believe that they can drive traffic to that "make money" or "teeth whitening" or "get out of debt now" link if you just click on it.

2. And they follow you in hopes that you will follow them back. [There's a funny consequence of Mr. 50k and his auto-follow auto-bot tool. He follows all the pornsters too. And he's SOOOO busy he doesn't even have time to look over his follower list.] And even if you don't follow them back, and I would suggest you don't unless you want a lot of their friends dropping by, they are hoping that visitors looking over your "followers" list and see their ID.

You can report these abusive accounts by forwarding the tweet onto the @spam account. Apparently someone at Twitter takes that responsibility seriously.

But please do BLOCK the scammers and save others from accidentally following them when they look over your stream of "followers." It may take you a bit longer to get to 100 or 1,000 followers if you are editing and blocking the scammers, but it goes with the territory. And until Twitter adds a BLOCK and REPORT AS SPAM function we'll just have to do it the old fashioned way. One follower at a time.

UPDATE 8-15-09: I think my very mention of MLM in my post about TweeSpammers got me a lot of MLM related crappo followers. I woke up this morning with this smiling face along with about 15 new scammers trailing my tweets.

Picture 27

In discussions with @michaelpearsun last night we were wondering, if Twitter and Co. are touting their phenominal growth curve, what would be their incentive to block people from creating multiple and bogus accounts? To Twitter's stats it's merely another user. As Michael said, "If you have 28 million users with a lot of spammers vs. 2 million users of very clean users the proposition is very different." So Twitter says, "Gosh look at our amazing growth. Yes, we know there are some people gaming the system, but look at the growth rate on our monthly page views."

And did you notice that to "manage" your twitter account you are forced to weed through users 20 IDs at a time. Now I'm thinking there are much better and more efficient ways of managing my users, BUT... for Twitter it's a ton of page views every time I go in, even just to clean out the spammers, Twitter racks up the stats. And what can we do about it, but comply and complain. Or not complain at all.

I prefer at least giving a little bit of feedback. (grin)

@jmacofearth
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/twitter-spammed

See also The Twitter Way, the collected posts about Twitter and Doing Twitter Right

Latest Twitter Posts

Posted via web from jmacofearth's posterous

Thursday, August 6, 2009

The LAST Netbook Back-to-school Promotion EVER! (Dell's 10v Netbook Revisited)

Well you can’t fault Dell for putting their heart into the netbook fiasco.

A quick check of Dell.com still reveals no fewer than 5 Netbooks in the Dell line.

  1. Mini 12
  2. Mini 10
  3. Mini 10v.
  4. Vostro A90 (the Mini 9 in disguise, perhaps they still had more to unload)
  5. Latitude 2100 Netbook (a new low for Latitude branding)

Not sure how the Mini 10 is “New” but okay.

The problem is this…

The LOWEST POSSIBLE PRICE on a netbook from Dell is $299 for a Mini 10v. Here’s the scoop on that underwhelming package.

  • 10.1″ screen
  • 1 gig of ram
  • 1.6 GHz Atom processor (designed for smart phones and that’s about the performance to expect)
  • Ubuntu (okay, but Dell has done something wonky to it so you can’t update it like a normal Ubuntu load)
  • 8 gig Solid State Drive (wow, I think an MS Office is bigger than that by itself)
  • 3-cell battery (you could add a 6-cell battery for $35, but who knows what that means?)
  • 1.3 mp webcam (my Blackberry Curve has a much better camera)
  • 802.11g wireless networking

That’s hardly a computer. I know it’s a NET-book, but that’s about it. You can see from all manufactuer’s “netbook” ads that they are not hyping the performance of these barely-usable devices.

The back of Fry’s newspaper ad yesterday has a REAL notebook, a Toshiba with an AMD Athlon processor for $379. Let’s see what you get for the extra $79 bucks. It’s definitely a hard time to be a computer manufacturer with a back stock of laptops.

  • 15.4″ screen
  • 2 gigs of ram
  • Athlon dual-core processor (a real processor designed to run Windows!)
  • Windows Vista Home (I’d rather have the “downgrade to xp, but okay)
  • 160 gig hd
  • DVD recordable drive
  • 802.11 b/g wireless

I’d say that’s a hard sell on the Dell-io. And if you are a parent planning on buying a Netbook for your student, STOP!

The cost savings are not worth it! Buy a real computer. Leave the netbooks for exotics who already have a real machine and want something bigger (not necessarily faster) than their mobile phones to carry around. The idea of syncing a laptop and a netbook has seemed like a problem from the start for me, but I’m not the target market. And I won’t be… Until…

Here’s what’s going to put the netbooks and the Kindle DX down for the count.

Picture 24

Apple’s iTablet. And it’s not a fantasy any more. Expected before the end of September, Apple’s entry into the lower-cost mobile computing market is too late to compete with the back-to-school promotions offered by Best Buy, Dell, HP, Fry’s and such. But mark my words. The Netbook mistake will be done by this time next year. If in 2010 we are still hearing about Atom-powered sub-compact netbooks will be gone, I’ll jump in the lake with my MacBook Pro in my hands. Even Android won’t be trying to deliver it’s magic on a “netbook.” Perhaps a “phone-book” or a “thin-book” but the dog days of sub-computing computing are done.

Happy computing.

@jmacofearth
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/last-netbook

More fun with Dell:

Posted via web from jmacofearth's posterous

The LAST Netbook Back-to-school Promotion EVER! (Dell's 10v Netbook Revisited)

Well you can’t fault Dell for putting their heart into the netbook fiasco.

A quick check of Dell.com still reveals no fewer than 5 Netbooks in the Dell line.

  1. Mini 12
  2. Mini 10
  3. Mini 10v.
  4. Vostro A90 (the Mini 9 in disguise, perhaps they still had more to unload)
  5. Latitude 2100 Netbook (a new low for Latitude branding)

Not sure how the Mini 10 is “New” but okay.

The problem is this…

The LOWEST POSSIBLE PRICE on a netbook from Dell is $299 for a Mini 10v. Here’s the scoop on that underwhelming package.

  • 10.1″ screen
  • 1 gig of ram
  • 1.6 GHz Atom processor (designed for smart phones and that’s about the performance to expect)
  • Ubuntu (okay, but Dell has done something wonky to it so you can’t update it like a normal Ubuntu load)
  • 8 gig Solid State Drive (wow, I think an MS Office is bigger than that by itself)
  • 3-cell battery (you could add a 6-cell battery for $35, but who knows what that means?)
  • 1.3 mp webcam (my Blackberry Curve has a much better camera)
  • 802.11g wireless networking

That’s hardly a computer. I know it’s a NET-book, but that’s about it. You can see from all manufactuer’s “netbook” ads that they are not hyping the performance of these barely-usable devices.

The back of Fry’s newspaper ad yesterday has a REAL notebook, a Toshiba with an AMD Athlon processor for $379. Let’s see what you get for the extra $79 bucks. It’s definitely a hard time to be a computer manufacturer with a back stock of laptops.

  • 15.4″ screen
  • 2 gigs of ram
  • Athlon dual-core processor (a real processor designed to run Windows!)
  • Windows Vista Home (I’d rather have the “downgrade to xp, but okay)
  • 160 gig hd
  • DVD recordable drive
  • 802.11 b/g wireless

I’d say that’s a hard sell on the Dell-io. And if you are a parent planning on buying a Netbook for your student, STOP!

The cost savings are not worth it! Buy a real computer. Leave the netbooks for exotics who already have a real machine and want something bigger (not necessarily faster) than their mobile phones to carry around. The idea of syncing a laptop and a netbook has seemed like a problem from the start for me, but I’m not the target market. And I won’t be… Until…

Here’s what’s going to put the netbooks and the Kindle DX down for the count.

Picture 24

Apple’s iTablet. And it’s not a fantasy any more. Expected before the end of September, Apple’s entry into the lower-cost mobile computing market is too late to compete with the back-to-school promotions offered by Best Buy, Dell, HP, Fry’s and such. But mark my words. The Netbook mistake will be done by this time next year. If in 2010 we are still hearing about Atom-powered sub-compact netbooks will be gone, I’ll jump in the lake with my MacBook Pro in my hands. Even Android won’t be trying to deliver it’s magic on a “netbook.” Perhaps a “phone-book” or a “thin-book” but the dog days of sub-computing computing are done.

Happy computing.

@jmacofearth
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/last-netbook

More fun with Dell:

Posted via web from jmacofearth's posterous

Sunday, August 2, 2009

My Musical Passion Catches Fire: Buzzie Live at the IPO Festival in CA

My son Jason shot some video of our show at the Orange County Fair. He wasn't so focused on the show but was making some great comments along the way. I don't know if he was going for an art piece, but he sure got one. This was shot on a Flip video camera and edited with iMovie. Click on the image below to watch the video on YouTube.

Picture 2

The Buzzie musicians are:
John McElhenney: vocals and guitar
Robbie Rist: guitar and vocals
Derrick Anderson: bass
Marc Joseph: drums

The song "Just Another Day" was written and performed by John McElhenney.
©2009 All Rights Reserved, Happy Mac Tunes (ascap).

Many thanks to David Bash and the entire staff of International Pop Overthrow.

The video is also available on

Vimeo
Yahoo
MySpace
Blip.tv

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/buzzie-live

The photostream is also available on Flickr.

And now by popular request is the raw footage of She's Gone, the song behind the video, un-edited and narrated by Jason.

Vimeo
YouTube
Blip.tv
MySpace

Posted via web from music as fuel