Tag: cix | David Coveney

Something odd has started to happen on Twitter for me, and it’s cutting my usage of it down quite dramatically. Why? It’s because it seems the spammers are winning…

https://twitter.com/nrhansonp/status/318959016602660864

https://twitter.com/fierofan11q/status/318758157247709184

https://twitter.com/DavidThiebaudc/status/318665593605738497

https://twitter.com/catazettler3/status/318327663506890752

https://twitter.com/clintonxbaurer/status/318093880182591488

Every. Single. Day. I get lots of these. Some disappear into the ether, others remain on the Interactions tab on Twitter. Given that these tweets outnumber genuine interactions there’s a problem, because whenever any service starts to get more than about 50% spam its usefulness drops off. Email has that, and email has suffered, but commercial spam filtering is so good that most of us have a provider that makes it continue to be useful.

What happens is that I’m powerless to stop this Twitter spam. It’s not like I can install something in my Twitter client. Marking content as spam is astonishingly clunky in Twitter.

I’ve made some great friends on Twitter, but I’m fed up of seeing the alert pop-ups on my phone, so that’ll be the first place I disconnect it from. And then it gets that little bit less useful… I’ll start to forget to check-in. Suddenly, a few days will pass when I don’t look on Twitter.

I doubt this will affect everybody, but it could be enough to mark the end of Twitter as a global and egalitarian short-form publishing platform. I remember when CIX died for me – there it wasn’t the spam, but the number of grumpy nutters with too much time on their hands driving out the useful but quiet individuals.

I know I’m using Twitter less these days, but the general level activity amongst the older Twitter community really appears to be dying down. Celebrities and the media are still busy, but they alone can’t sustain the system – it needs the grass roots using it to keep it relevant.

I hope Twitter can fix this, or soon I’ll just give up. What do you think? Are you being spammed to death on Twitter? Are you using it less and less?

So… I’ve always meant to be a bit more active within the geek community. I tried a spell in the late eighties/early nineties with the British Computer Society, CompuServe and CIX but sometimes found it all a bit tiresome. There were too many who’d earned their stripes in the seventies on heavy iron and, I felt, even at that time were being left behind. Of course, I must say that that doesn’t apply to all or even a majority of the people back then. But there wasn’t much of a sense of fun. It was all a bit… serious.

Barcamp Liverpool 2008 Official Logo

But you know, technology is cool. Especially today when almost everyone seems to be a geek these days. So after a successful trip to Birmingham for the first WordCamp UK I thought it was time to get geeking up in my home town! Barcamp Liverpool beckoned…

And it was worthwhile. Sadly I’d been up at 3am in the morning in order to take Romana to the airport, so I was a bit out of it. But that didn’t prevent me doing a few things anyway…

WordPress for News Sites

I was asked if I wanted to do a presentation on WordPress by one guy. And I thought… why the heck not. Now, I know a lot of people at Barcamp know WordPress, so I felt the best approach was to be a little more specific. So… I decided to talk casually in the Café about how WordPress can be used for the purpose of building a news site. I covered the basics before showing off the Caribou demo. To be honest, it wasn’t a perfect talk – I’d had half an hour to prepare and most of that was spent getting the latest WP Trunk installed on my laptop, with everything configured and ready to roll, plus a quick list of key points. If I hadn’t had a client meeting for half the morning I might have done better. But still, at one point there seemed to be about 20 people paying good attention. Frankly I was surprised – I rambled and soon realised that the best approach was to get folk asking questions. I think people enjoyed it!

Video Interviews

I ended up giving a couple. I rambled. I was tired. Lack of sleep doesn’t help me. I kept my glasses on so as to disguise the bags under my eyes.

1 Minute Pitch

Instead of pitching something we’re doing I decided to pitch a new concept we’ve been floating around the office. I was nervous, shakey and tired. I can’t even remember much about it all to be honest. The other guys did better. They had stuff like preparation – I’d had about thirty seconds to think about mine! But it’s good to practice public speaking, so why not? It was a good crowd.

But Hey…

I had a good time. But overslept dramatically as I recovered from Saturday, so didn’t make the Sunday. I hope everyone had a great time!