A View from the Isle

In 2005 it was live blogging, in 2009 it’s live tweeting, letting people know what is going on at a conference has changed a lot in a few years. Back in 2005, it was pretty easy to keep the back channel private and public discussions (relatively) on topic. Now because a conference hashtag can take off in less than an hour, back channel discussions suddenly become not only public, but uncontrollable.

I saw Sarah Perez’s write up on RWW this morning about a new service called ParaTweet which is trying to put some control on the discussion:

f you’ve ever been to a conference or some sort of large event, you’ve probably seen a live Twitter stream in action. Up on a big screen in a prominent place, often the stage itself, the live stream tracks the relevant hashtags or keywords about the event, be it a conference, a panel, a meetup, or some other sort of heavily-tweeted gathering. But sometimes there’s an issue with displaying the raw, unfiltered tweets in this way: they can be disruptive. All it takes is one Twitter user trying to be funny – or, worse, a troll saying something rude – to take the discussion off course.
link: A New Way to Mute the Backchannel: ParaTweet for Live Events

If I’m reading this right, what you’d do is make sure that only ParaTweet was displayed on conference monitors, etc instead of Twitter search or Twitterfall. While I this makes sense, the idea of “controlling the conversation” is a little overblown.

Of course the conference organizers can’t “control” the conversation, but what the can do is try to limit the public presentation of it. While this is a good idea, I think there is a huge potential to backfire. What if a controversial topic at the conference takes on a life of its own and the conference organizers don’t want it presented? You can imagine rogue TwitterFalls and searches appearing.

That said, I think for a conference environment it will be something to try, if nothing else to give a cohesive view of the conference. I’d pair ParaTweet with Twitterfall so folks can see the firehose and the filtered version.

Chirp, chirp.

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Remember cheating back in school? I do. I also remember getting caught too, so lesson learned. Now what about “open book” or “open note” tests? When I took AP European History in 12th grade our tests were “open book”. Why? Our teacher knew that a lot of tests in college were going to be like that. Not all, but lots. That wasn’t cheating, of course, because we were allow to do it, but kids are sneaking notes (and e-books if they’re smart) into tests–which is cheating. This begs the question, though…should times change?

As Peggy Sheehy, a library media specialist from Suffern, N.Y., put it: “We can’t teach 21st century literacy and assess with 19th century methodology. We have to look at what we really need students to be able to do when they leave us” and we must ask, “what is my student learning outside of school and how can I get them just as engaged?” Right now, it’s a valid point to say that letting kids access mobile devices may discriminate against those who can’t afford the phones or the service. Yet that will change, just as it did with electronic calculators, as these devices become even more affordable, especially if students can access free wireless networks at school. In the work force, what’s important in most situations is not so much the facts you can pull out of your head but your ability to acquire information when you need it and–most importantly–your ability to make sense of it. I’m not saying being able to recall facts from memory is never important. I have to do that nearly every day when I go on live radio. And I often use the Internet to acquire facts only moments before the broadcast and have occasionally had to look up a fact while taking on live radio. What’s most important is not my regurgitation of the facts but my interpretation. The ability to put things into context is hard to measure with the types of multiple choice tests that are commonly used in schools.
link: Kids cheating with tech but are schools cheating kids? | Larry Magid at Large – CNET News

This C|Net post points out the obvious, and why a lot of college exams are “open book”, often the true test is being able to sift through your masses of information to get the nuggets out. Sure just source material to double check a fact, but then take than information and distill it into knowledge.

Tests are supposed to ascertain whether the student has learned something or not. Granted, not every test can or should be open book. I wonder if a history test where part of the test is closed book (there are somethings you need to just know) and the remainder open would be effective?

Honestly I don’t know the answer, educational theorist I am not, but I do think that teaching kids how to rapidly find and process information is a good thing. Also, perhaps, if kids were able to use their notes during a test, they might learn to organize them in a different way.

One can only hope…

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At the price of sounding like a broken record, discussion about Twitter being “mission critical” or too important to have down time is a red herring. The fact is that what is really needed is for more Laconi.ca servers and connectors between them, Identi.ca, and Twitter. Email works because there are few single points of failure. Yes, those of us who primarily use gmail get grumpy when it goes down, but there are lots of alternatives.

So while Twitter made headlines this week because the U.S. State Department asked them to delay their downtime to help people posting news from Iran, this isn’t Twitter’s problem, it’s ours.

This all adds up to the Twitter Conundrum. The owners of Twitter and other social-networking sites aren’t likely to buy highly available, highly secure, redundant systems and storage of the type common to 24 by 7 production data centers. Their business models simply won’t support big enterprise gear. But does that stop the federal government from stepping in and saying “sorry, you can’t go down right now, not even for a few hours?” No. Twitter, YouTube, and FaceBook have created windows on the world, windows that could in fact change the world for the better. You can’t fail (whale). Here’s the conundrum: No one presently pays a fee for posting to these sites. You get what you pay for or, in this case, you don’t get what you don’t pay for. You don’t pay for and therefore don’t get guaranteed availability or data integrity. Is the federal government now willing to subsidize Twitter so that it can function like a production data center? Probably not. Are users willing to pay a fee to get a guaranteed level of service? Again, probably not, at least not in the near future. Owners of the social-networking sites have managed this conundrum by rolling their own. They get cheap, or even better, free infrastructure and make it work. The power implicit in what they do with the scarcest of resources is truly awesome. Now, as they’re sites become embedded in the fabric of society, can they keep that model going? Perhaps, but they will likely need our help. Remember, e-mail was once a frivolous application.
link: Is Twitter now a critical app? | Data-driven – CNET News

We’ve become addicted to single point source sites that are the be all and end all for a niche. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter…I know that I’m guilty of this as well, but we need to try to think bigger here. What I really want to know is how Twitter is going to maintain a system where lots of people want to join to at least try it out. Wouldn’t letting or building something more decentralized work better?

Maybe it would have been easier for Iranian protestors get out if they had a myriad of services to choose from and those all talked to each other.

The problem is of course is establishing/nominating a server as the “standard” and ensure that we all play nice with each other.

Gee that should be easy right?

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Yet another post about Twitter’s much studied demographics. Like most cool, new (or newly mainstream) things people want to define it. To study it. To dissect it like a hapless amphibian and figure out if by looking inside we can understand it as a whole.

We’ve heard about the 60% drop off rate (which means that a 40% stay, which is still pretty damn good and there is no metric for people who come back in a couple months) and now we’re hearing that the majority of people don’t tweet, but use Twitter as a source of information:

Although this may sound strange at first, Twitter really is more like Wikipedia than, say, Facebook. Twitter is not so much about connecting with your friends, it’s about broadcasting information. Although it doesn’t necessarily take much creativity to create a tweet, only the most creative users actually persist in tweeting every day over a longer time period. However, Twitter is also similar to a instant messaging tool, which should have a very different curve, with a larger proportion of users contributing to the number of overall tweets. It seems that Twitter’s micropublishing component is winning over its chatting component.
ink: Twitter is Not Your Average Social Network

Wow, you think? Twitter is one of those tools that is almost completely flexible. You can use it to gather info, send info, chat, read, discuss. There aren’t “rules”, per se, on how to get the most out of Twitter, but there are some tricks that help you get the most out of Twitter more quickly.

• Follow news feeds like CBC, BBC, CNN, ZDNet, etc. These tweet feeds give you great value with little effort. You’re not going to get a firehose of information, just a nice steady flow.
• Group the people you follow. Regardless of whether you use Nambu, TweetDeck, PeopleBrowsr, or Mixero you need to put people into bins in order manage the flow. I “follow” about 5700 people, but can only really track a fraction of them. I group friends, news feeds, colleagues, and TwitFic into separate groups. This gives things context and focus.
• Find your friends and affinity groups on Twitter. It’s a lot easier to use Twitter when you can “listen” to people you know. Most people I know who left Twitter and later came back, left because there was no one there and came back because their friends were there.

I flip through my Twitter channels to keep an eye on things. I add and remove people from groups to tune the info. Yes, I spend a lot of time with this, but you don’t have to. You aren’t likely to follow 5700 people, so your challenges won’t be like mine. Find the people than topics you’re interested in, read, listen, retweet, reply, then you’ll start to feel connected.

Twitter can be great or boring. Twitter really is what you make of it.

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Sometimes I wonder if the river of information we swam in during 2004, which became something more like a fire hose in the past couple years, has now become one of those super storms that people tell their grandchildren about (I remember the summer of 2009, when data moved faster than computers could store it in a cache…). Reflecting on how quickly something “made” the news back in 2004 (when both Steve Rubel & I started blogging), it might take a day before something reached critical mass. Today Twitter provides a multiplicative effect that truly makes my head spin. The difference now is that whereas in 2004 you had to write a post to build on the buzz, today you just retweet the original post (as I did with Louis’ post I’m citing here). This I think has made us pretty lazy really. Are we not writing? Are we not reading enough?

Or is it as Steve suggests, blogging is “slow”:

Meanwhile, Steve Rubel, author of MicroPersuasion, who has been blogging on that site since early 2004, said that to him, blogging seemed “slow”, when contrasted with the lightning fast communications seen from tools like FriendFeed and Twitter. He made the analogy that when you take the time to compose a blog post and you launch it over the wall, that readers have to look it over and make a choice as to whether they will respond, or if they will simply hit ‘J’ in their RSS reader and move along. In contrast, he said sending a note to Twitter was like introducing ants in someone’s house, making them immediately take action.

link: Today’s Real-Time Web Makes Blogging and RSS Seem “Too Slow” – louisgray.com

Looking at a screenshot from the hot Twitter client Mixero you can see in a glance the amount of information present. News, friends, replies (I hid DMs, sorry guys), all in one place I can skim, click, skim, RT in seconds:

I would wager that this isn’t always a good thing. I would wager that what we need is the web-equivalent of the “slow food” movement. Something where we take a few minutes to read a post, consider a post, then write our own opinions of the post in something greater than 140 characters.

I know that I’m fighting an uphill battle here. I know that even my own info gathering trends fly in the face of the “slow post” movement, however what if we paused and wrote more?

Naw, that won’t work, we might get more original ideas and lord knows that we don’t need anymore of those in this world !

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It’s been a long time since I was a “professional blogger”, I might have been one of the early pioneers, but I stepped back from it as the rest of my life got busier. So I was pretty intrigued when I got an email from Future Shop.

Future Shop was starting up blogs to go with their existing community forums and they were recruiting about six Canadian tech bloggers to write the blogs for them.

I was very interested in the opportunity. Why not, I do love writing about tech and helping people, Future Shop recognizes the value bloggers bring so this isn’t a volunteer thing, and, yeah, I thought it would be pretty damn cool to be one of the select few to be doing it.

All humility aside, I think it is a great honour to be considered and chosen. This isn’t something I’m taking lightly or as just a neat thing to do now and then. Not to mention, I’m in some pretty amazing company:

• Mathew Kumar
• Paul Hunter
• Buzz Bishop
• Brad Grier
• Klaus Boedker

Not too shabby. Pretty awesome group to be lumped in with, in my opinion at least. The Future Shop Tech blog officially launched today and I wrote the standard “Hi, I’m Tris, I’ll be your blogger this evening…” intro post last night to be ready for today.

I’ll be publishing 3-5 times a week on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays. My posts will be what you’re probably already used to: tech reviews, tips, advice, and photography. I also want to make two things very clear from the outset: yes I’m getting paid, no Future Shop is not muzzling any of us. We have some editorial guidelines, but none of those include “you can only say nice things about our key suppliers…”.

You should know by now that even if I’m given something, I don’t just give it a glowing review. I like to be balanced and fair. Nothing is ever perfect. Even my MacBook Pro is awesome as I think it is could be better (the keyboard is good, but not great I think).

I welcome feedback, story ideas, and all the rest.

So, let’s see what fun we can have now…

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In the beginning, there was email

Web-based collaboration tools and strategies has been one of my professional passions for a decade now. Beyond that I always thought it was cool, I started telecommuting in 2000, so needing easy and complete solutions was high on my priority list.

Over the years, I think I’ve tried nearly all the solutions around with varying degrees of success and failure. Almost always success or failure has been determined by either the willingness of the team to adapt and change or the ease of use of the tool. Even a tool that has the potential to save time, money, even your precious sanity will fail if it isn’t intuitive and easy to use.

Can blog engines provide a solution?

I had played with the original Prologue theme when it was launched about a year ago. It was pretty useful then, but I didn’t have something to apply it to (not that I didn’t try to use it). I had heard and seen demos of the successor P2 and thought that there was some potential, but I didn’t get it until I read Matt’s post about how Automattic uses P2 internally:  How P2 Changed Automattic — Matt Mullenweg

The part that brought it all home was the video:

Now that’s when the light came on. I saw a lot of potential there. It would be great to be able to have our team at M2O use it to update projects, scripts and ideas. The problem was that if I wanted it to be most useful it needed to be on the public Internet, but still private to just us. Being able to update/use it from iPhones and Blackberries would be important, and I wanted to add a little twist using Twitter. So here’s how I did it:

• Basic WP 2.7.1 install
• P2 theme
• Registered Users Only plugin
• WordTwit and WPTouch plugins from my friends at Brave New Code

That’s it. Okay there is one more thing. I set up a Twitter account with its updates protected to post updates to from the blog. This way the team can be updated via Twitter, but the tweets aren’t public.

Will it work?

I think P2 is about as easy as it can get. It even highlights for you the new items since your last visit. It can stand alone using Prism or Fluid to make it an “app”. What’s left? What’s missing? Getting the team to accept and use the tool. Since I think there is a lot of potential here for projects, classes, updates, and messaging I’m going to keep at it in hopes that I can get some momentum.

There are some special tweaks I’m going to look into, but that is another story.

Interested in my P2 collaboration solution? How would you improve on it? What’s missing? Would you use it? Ah so many questions, but that’s half the fun isn’t it?

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Oh Twitter. You can’t seem to catch a break can you?

Why aren’t you making money?

Why are you so unstable?

Why can’t you be like your older brother Facebook, he’s got a business model?

And now, why don’t users stick with you for more than a month?

When MySpace and Facebook were at the stage that Twitter is at today, their retention rates were, according to Nielsen, twice as high – and they’ve now stabilized at nearly 70 percent. Twitter’s high rate of churn will, if it continues, hamstring the service’s growth, says Nielsen’s David Martin: “A retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure … There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point. [Twitter] will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty.”
link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The fickle Twitterer

Yes, yes I know a large, stable, user base is key to a site’s/service’s success. That isn’t something I care to debate, per se. What I think is absolutely key here, and why Twitter is going to emerge on top in the end, is that Twitter isn’t just a service, it’s a game changing new way of messaging.

Facebook and MySpace weren’t extremely new, even for their time. You built a personal corner and then found friends to connect with. Not revolutionary, it was evolutionary no doubt, but not revolutionary.

Twitter on the other hand really has changed things. Something that isn’t email, isn’t SMS, isn’t IM. You still have friends you connect with, but it’s more about talking than staking a claim on the Internet.

So, fine, Twitter might lose people after a month. I think “losing” them is a little harsh. I’d call it “hiatus”, I have a feeling people will be back, just like unused and dormant AOL accounts, when Twitter hits the next big jump.

Twitter will become more and more central to rapid messaging and as such maybe “dormant” accounts might really just be places where people receive information, but don’t need to log into Twitter to get.

Let’s not cast Twitter in a dying phase just as it hits mainstream attention. Time will tell, and I’m thinking it will be told in 140 characters or fewer.

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We owe a huge debt to Johannes Gutenberg. Here’s a guy who just wanted to wrestle publication of The Bible out of the hands of The Church and monks and unwittingly (perhaps) set the stage for blogging.

The movable type printing press revolutionized how information was disseminated. If you wanted to rail against the government, printing up a broadsheet didn’t mean you and a bunch of folks hand copying your treatise, you wrote it, set the type (with the aid of your friendly neighbourhood printer), and just stay up running off copies. Labour intensive, sure, but nothing like hand copying.

So let’s flash forward a few hundred years (about 570 years, actually) at publishing is at a cross roads, bloggers, who are very much like the rabble rousers printing up newspapers in times of political change, are making the folks printing on dead trees shudder, quake and worry. In fifteen short years, people sitting at computers publishing short missives to websites has changed how we consume news, what makes news, and discuss news.

I think Gutenberg would be stoked.

Regardless, in about an hour from now a group of us are going to gather at The Shebeen Club and discuss what new media means for old media…

[From Facebook | Old Publishers Have New Think Coming]

Which, if you think about it, is pretty much the same way all revolutions got into swing, groups of liked minded folks gathering in pubs, bars, and coffee houses gathering to discuss what was going on (and then take those ideas to a printer to distribute in the morning).

I think tonight will be no different, with the exception that the world will know a lot faster.

So who’s with me in this new revolution?

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Beyond the post Oprah-on-Twitter hype, the majority of folks I know and chat with on a regular basis are tweeting business as usual. So while Ashton, CNN, and Oprah were getting headlines and new Mac Twitter app was being chatted about in my Twitter stream.

Tweetie for Mac is a desktop app brought to you by the same folks who brought us Tweetie the iPhone app. The first public beta dropped today, and despite my attempts to get it early, I had to wait until today to give it a try. I figure I’m not the only one since there was a good amount of “Tweetie for Mac” related chatter on Twitter. Not surprising after reading several pro-Tweetie posts: louisgray.com: Tweetie Desktop for Mac Is Clean, Simple and Robust-Tweetie’s Desktop App for Mac Has Potential, Integrates Conversation Tracking | SheGeeks-First Look: Tweetie for Mac | Take A Plunge

The first thing that I knew would be a problem is the lack of support for grouping people you follow. This was no surprise given an earlier post from the Tweetie developers-Twitter Groups-which douses some seriously cold (and snarky) water on using groups. Personally, “unfollow people” doesn’t cut it as an information management strategy. Even if I only followed 100 people, I’d still want to group my tweets into News (CNN, BNO, ZDNet, etc), Friends, and maybe one other category. This is just smart information management. Yeah I could have say four accounts to manage my info streams this way, but frankly that would be a royal PITA.

When I launched Tweetie for Mac this morning I tried it with one of my work accounts that I use to push posts out into Twitter. Few followers, few updates, so the info demands would be small.

I will say that Tweetie didn’t disappoint in terms of UI and slick style. It certainly looks great. As expected, no groups, but well I pretty much banked on that so okay. I ran into a show stopper when I tried to add my primary Twitter account. Yeah I guess it doesn’t like long, complex passwords. After making sure that I had the password right after the first authentication failure, I chalked this up to a first-release bug.

My verdict: I’m going to wait for the next release so I can give it a full-on test. So what about my other preferred desktop apps Nambu and TweetDeck? I’m flipping between the two of them right now. Both of them have a groups feature and are multi-column layout enabled which are two key things for me as a heavy Twitter user, the problem I’m having is that Nambu is still a might buggy and has a memory leak somewhere because when I leave it open for a while, it can gobble up a gig of ram after a few hours. TweetDeck has a similar problem, which has been squashed for the most part I’ve found.

As far as UI I like Nambu better. Even though I can’t move columns in Nambu like I can in TweetDeck I can set up a four column layout and use the pull-down menu to change what is displayed in each column. Verdict: too close to call.

For me the lack of groups is something that kills a Twitter app for me. I just need them to organize info. Does everyone need groups? Of course not, not everyone follows 4800+ people. At this point I don’t know how I could cull the list, short of using UnTweeps, with that many pages to go through.

[Took a break for a meeting]

By the time I got back to my desk there was Tweetie 1.0.1 and I could use it with my primary, and ginormous, account. Again, it looks lovely and is very responsive, but without groups it’s not the app for me.

The question then becomes, are Twitter groups in a client a must-have option for a Twitter app or just for the edge cases?

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So an actor named Ashton gets a million followers and a talk show host named Oprah joins Twitter and the world rejoices. Twitter has hit that magic point of becoming mainstream.

Of course, there isn’t universal cheering, but that is to be expected. I’m sure the academic community was aghast when AOL users could send and receive email from the Internet proper.

The questions on my mind were echoed by Fredric on RWW:

Can the Mainstream Handle Twitter?

On its own site, Twitter will also have to explain its utility better if it wants to draw in all the potential mainstream users who will hear about Twitter for the first time today. Twitter, after all, still asks you what you are doing, even though that is probably the least interesting way of using Twitter. It is also important to note that Twitter, being the small company that it is, barely has any tech support besides its Get Satisfaction page, so a befuddled new users doesn’t have any place to go to ask questions about how to use it.

Can Twitter Handle the Mainstream?

This sudden mainstreaming of Twitter, however, doesn’t mean that Twitter has finally jumped the shark. In the end, Twitter going mainstream will barely affect most current users. After all, once you manage to unfollow Ashton Kutcher again, most of us won’t have to deal with Oprah, Kutcher, or any other celebrity on the service, though, who knows, you might soon be getting DM’s from your mom…

[From Twitter's Big Day: Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher Bring Twitter to the Mainstream - ReadWriteWeb]

I feared that Twitter would tank today, which would be a bad, bad thing if you’re going to be on Oprah. Twitter, however, has stayed up and seems to be functioning as good as ever. The larger question is: what now? To which I answer: Open servers.

The reference above to AOL was a lead in to this. Long-time internet users will remember the days of having several email addresses because CompuServ, AOL, BITNET, and EDUNET couldn’t reliably communicate and send email back and forth. Not an efficient way to communicate, to say the least.

Then came standardized email gateways, POP, and SMTP and an AOL address was as good as a .edu and email exploded into the mainstream. Now it’s micromessaging’s turn.

Right now the leading contender is laconi.ca (aka Identi.ca) and what it will take is for the servers to have a protocol mapping so that trishussey@twitter.com connects to my Twitter account and have tris [at] media2o.com be able to be mapped to a laconi.ca install. Just like tris.hussey [at] gmail.com works for email and chat.

What’s it going to take to get it working? More laconi.ca servers and more people using them and more clients out there to connect up to. Then…

We have to use them.

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Getting new, fresh ideas for posts can be really hard. Honestly, now that I’m not pro-blogging anymore I just don’t seem to have the post output I used to have. There are hundreds of posts on how to get ideas for posts, but this post from the Reachd blog caught my eye:

Here are the steps that I would follow if I were to use keyword research to generate blogging ideas

1. Go to Google Keyword Tool

2. Enter a broad keyword in the box on that page

3. Sort the keywords by “Average search volume” by clicking on that particular column

4. Look for topics or searches with no less than 100 / month. It is difficult to decide what a perfect minimum number is because it varies by industry.

After I’ve got my topic or keyword phrase I would write a quick blog post about it.

[From Use Keyword Research to Get Blogging Ideas « Reachd Blog]

Hmm. Okay so you pick something like “blog”, see what’s popular, and then use that to inspire a post. Here are the results for “blog”:

From the looks of this chart then lots of people search for blog free (free blog then should work) and how to blog. Hey, great topics for a post. Choosing a free blog platform is something I’ve often talked with people about (I always recommend WordPress.com of course).

How to blog is something I’m writing a book about (I do talk about other stuff, don’t worry) so I know that’s pretty interesting to most folks. The question is then: are you getting ideas for things that people are interested in or are you pandering to SEO and Google?

My gut feeling is that it’s a little of both, but tipping a hair too far to the SEO side for a personal blog, however if you’re writing a business blog or are trying to increase your traffic it could be gold.

For example if I were still writing on my men’s grooming blog (it might still come back) and wanted to talk about beards:

So, do you think I’m being too hard on Reachd?

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All that is old is new again, or so we’ve been told. This weekend the Twitterverse has been slammed with a couple of bothersome worms that propagate rapidly using basic social engineering: we like to click links from friends.

Mashable [mikeyy: Second Twitter Worm on the Loose] and ReadWriteWeb [Twitter Worm Could Take Over Your Computer (in Theory) - ReadWriteWeb] covered this charming present from the Easter Virus Bunny over the weekend but it seems that most folks missed a basic point while pointing fingers at Twitter: we’ve seen this all before. Remember the early days of HTML email? Remember being told to just disable HTML email in Outlook Express and Outlook because just opening a bad email could infect you? Well those days are back, at least for the moment with this Twitter worm.

The “Mikeyy Worm” and others are so freakin’ clever you have to give them props. Basically you see a Tweet from a friend with a link to check out a site or later how to prevent infection and it goes to an infected Twitter profile with a charming piece of Javascript buried in it that infects your Twitter account as well.

Nope not your computer per se, but your Twitter account/profile. It propagates by putting the nasty code into your profile and sends out a tweet on your behalf to keep the whole cycle going.

Ah let’s virus like it’s 1999…

So is this Twitter’s fault? Of course it is.

Is this unexpected? Hell no.

Are we ever going to be rid of things like this? Also a resounding, hell no.

The problem is that most of these kinds of attacks use basic social engineering tools. Click on links from friends, click on links saying your account has been compromised, give “tech support” your username and password…they pray on trust and our assumptions of safety.

Yes, we all need to be careful and skeptical, but honestly not ever clicking on links from friends defeats the purpose of sharing through Twitter (and others) doesn’t it?

So we’ll all be more careful. We’ll make sure that we know how to quickly close off all Twitter related apps, blow out browser caches and cookies, and reset passwords. Man their could be a great AppleScript or Automator script in there…

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Are you not familiar with “The Queen of the Engines” (fine that’s a reference to The Difference Engine)? Ada Lovelace wasn’t just the first programmer, pushing Charles Babbage’s Difference and Analytical to beyond what Charles himself envisioned, I’d venture that Ada was the world’s first geek girl.

Here’s a women who bucked the Victorian trends of the day and did some kick ass stuff with “computers”, and we should all be grateful to her. Thus today, Ada Lovelace Day, a day to blog about women in tech you admire.

Honestly I had a really hard time picking someone to blog about, because I know a raft of amazing women in tech. So with no slight to any of my friends, I have chosen two women. I’ve chosen a woman of right now and a woman-to-be who I know will do some rockin’ tech things.

I’ve picked Justine (iJustine) Ezarik (now) and my daughter Aislinn (future).

Most of us have heard of Justine, and I think all too many people write her off or dismiss her off hand. You see a cute blond talking about tech and being a goof on camera and think, yeah whatever. Oh you are so wrong.

I first heard Justine speak at the first BlogWorldExpo with Leo Laporte, and in the misguided interest of getting the post out fast, I didn’t stay for her whole talk. What I did hear blew me away. She started her first website at twelve because a boy dissed her and she wanted revenge (the true mark of a geek, vengeance). She is smart, savvy and together.

Later I had the pleasure of being on a panel with her at Affiliate Summit West talking about social media and affiliate marketing. Again, amazed. Talking with her is fun, because she is smart, easy going, and really loves to geek out with the best of us.

Now, my second person, my daughter Aislinn.

Of course I’m a proud Dad. She wanted her own blog at 9 (yes, she has one but it’s private). She took up digital photography last year and is just gifted. She rocks Club Penguin and Webkinz online. She intuitively understands how the world of social media has changed the world. She just groks it. I know that she might not always be into tech, but any girl who could out tech support her teacher in Grade 1 and was asked to be on TV with Leo Laporte at 10 has it seriously going on.

I am so proud of her, l love her, and miss her dearly.

Who are your choices?

And not to slight the feelings of my son, he’s my choice for Charles Babbage Day is there is one.

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I’ve been a huge fan of Carbonite since they launched. That little, online, behind-the-scenes backup app has saved my tush on at least three occasions. (Disclosure: Because I was an early tester and reviewer I’ve been provided with subscriptions throughout this time). So when I got word that Carbonite was finally out for the Mac (thanks Tamar!), I downloaded that baby as soon as I could.

The release of Carbonite for Mac completes a long cycle for me. Back in 2005, one of the events that got Jeff and me to start Carbonite was my daughter’s hard drive crashing. As a Mac user, she’s been waiting a long time. I’ve been a Windows guy for years, but I now have both a Mac and Windows machine on my desk and I can understand why my kids have migrated to the Mac – it’s a great machine.

[From Finally, Carbonite for Mac is launched!]

Right now small portion of my drive is backed up (I’m notorious for having a lot on my drives), but that’s because I’ve been using my machine. I intend on letting it sit idle all night to complete (or make a serious dent in) the initial backup.

Oh, how does it work?

Transparently.

Essentially, you install it, create a profile for your disk tied to an online account, and pretty much forget it until you need it. Carbonite just securely uploads your files, and changes to files (when you have the bandwidth to spare). Now, when you need the files (on Windows) you just mount Carbonite as and external drive, find the file(s) you’re looking for, and put them back where you want them. It might take a while for large files, but they get there.

You can, obviously, restore a single file or the whole bloody drive (which I did no less than three times on various laptops).

Am I going to cough up the $60/yr for it? You bet I am. Just knowing that my stuff is backed up offsite is a huge relief. I’m not going to stop using Time Machine to backup my machine at home, but redundancy is the mother of reduced computer stress.

So, when was the last time you backed up your files? How about those digital pics?

Thought so. Carbonite.

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