This led me to think about using game mechanics for evil, rather than good, and I wondered about using some of the methods involved to gain access for less than reputable reasons. One captivating thought was: what if a terrorist organisation, like Al-Qaeda, started using some of the methods without our knowledge? This led me to further contemplate: what if Al-Qaeda secretly ran foursquare? They could use the massive amount of data about the movements of a large community to get an understanding of the best places to attack.

An extreme thought I know. But it does get you thinking about some alternative goals for data mining.

Today I’ve started the process of removing the term social media from my bios. It’s now plainly obvious that the title Social Media Specialist means nothing.

Social media specialists are more common than seagulls at a beach picnic. Every day I look at someone’s twitter bio, or I see an event with a bunch of people calling themselves social media experts. And I’ve never heard of these people before – which in itself might not be amazing, but in a city as small as Perth it’s ridiculous to have not met someone who “specialises” in the field I’ve been involved in for 15 years.

That leads me to believe one of two things: that social media is so easy that we don’t need specialists anymore. Or that there are a bunch of virtual snake oil salespeople selling social media specialism to the world. Either way, the title is now sullied.

So, until I find a better title, I’m relabelling myself an Internet Specialist.

However, this article annoyed me for two reasons: firstly, because it suggested that you have more influence on Twitter by having a higher follower count, and secondly because it also seemed to suggest that spamming people is ok.

The article used a very cool Australian web metrics site, BuzzElection, to discover that according to its numbers, a local grandmother had the second most influence on Twitter regarding the upcoming election. Buzz Election uses a very basic algorithm to determine this “influence” score: it multiplies the number of tweets a person sends with the hashtag #ausvotes by their follower count. A basic algorithm like that provides a fun top 100, but not something you’d take seriously.

Using this metric suggests that the more people you have following you, the better you are. Simply not true on Twitter.

What’s worse is that many people use morally questionable tactics to get as many followers as they can, because many people falsely assume that the more followers you have, the more important you are (or really, the more traffic you can drive to certain sites for commercial reasons).

So follower count means nothing, because many of the followers gained using these techniques aren’t really listening to you at all. They’re only there to try and boost their own follow count (and traffic). It’s like filling a small room with narcissistic sales people and giving them all loud speakers. This makes the follow count a useless measure of influence.

(For those who don’t know how people gain massive follow counts, this video gives you an example of how they do it while not caring about their followers in the process: How to Get 8300 Twitter Followers in 3 Weeks – I’ll Show You How)

The second thing that annoyed me about the article was the way this person was using Twitter. By their own admission they were essentially spamming their followers. “I tweeted about that 50 times in one day,” they claimed.

Now I do remember one of the many times they’ve done this, because earlier in the year I blocked this person for spam. They sent an @ message to me, about marine sanctuaries, with a link and asked me to reweet it. At the time I found the request strange because I’ve never expressed an interest in that topic. I had to question why someone would specifically target me with a link, and ask me to RT. So I checked their account to find they’d tweeted the exact same message dozens of times, to dozens of other people in the last hour.

It’s an admirable cause (I guess, but I’ve never really looked into marine sanctuaries), but it’s still spam.

Twitter’s own rules define varieties of spam, including, “If you send large numbers of duplicate @replies.” Or, to quote an e-book I recently stumbled across, “duplicate messages posted too quickly, one after the other, are regarded as spam.”

That means, if you send a large number of the same message to a bunch of people, you’re spamming Twitter!

Is this spamming Twitter?

So, at the time, I reported this person for spam, and it automatically blocked them. But, within months this same person was now being touted as one of Australia’s most influential people on Twitter. Why? Because they racked up a large follower count in only a few months, and then spammed them.

Is that social media? It doesn’t sound social to me.

Now, I’m a realist. I know this is going to go on forever. Where ever there is money to be made, people are going to try and abuse a system to make a fast buck. Just don’t expect us to be quiet about it. Especially when we now have the Internet and the ability to voice our own opinions.

So, I ask that when any of you find someone abusing a system like Twitter, you use the right methods to disarm them. The more of us that take action against the people taking advantage of the rest of us, the less likely it will continue. In Twitter’s case, please report them for spam!

You can find a scanned copy of the letter in my Flickr stream: Reply from Senator the Hon Stephen Conroy.

Cybersafety and internet service provider filtering

Thank you for your recent correspondence to the Minister for Broadband, Communications, and the Digital Economy, Senator the Hon Stephen Conroy, concerning cybersafety and internet service provider (ISP) filtering.

Due to the announcement that there will be a Federal Election on 21 August 2010, the Australian Governrnent is now subject to the caretaker conventions and your correspondence has been forwarded to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy for response regarding factual matters.

Information on the current Governrnent’s cybersafety plan, including the ISP-level filtering policy, can be found on the Department’s website at www.dbcde.gov.aulcybersafetyplan. To view the Minister’s latest media release on ISP filtering please go to www.minister.dbcde.gov.aulmedialmediaJeleases.

As your letter raises policy issues these should be raised with the incoming government following the election.

I trust this information will be of assistance.

Yours sincerely

Lachlann Paterson
Assistant Secretary
Content Programs

Your proposed Internet filter will not work. It is technically unfeasible.

The filter will cost tax payers millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars and will be ineffective in realising your goals to protect children.

The aim of the filter is to “combat online risks and help parents and educators protect children from inappropriate material.”

Some of the online risks you’d like to protect children from are:
• cyber bullying,
• cyber predators,
• child pornography,
• digital reputation,
• restricted content.

You’re proposing a mandatory ISP based filter to combat only one of these. In fact, it will only combat a small percentage of these due to the massive amount of content, and the complexity in determining and filtering it. You, and the report, have also stated that it will not combat content on instant messaging, peer-to-peer, email, and many other Internet tools.

For these reasons, the filter will only block a very minute percentage of web sites that contain restricted content.

The trial that was recently conducted listed 1000 web sites. A search for the term “child porn” in Google currently shows about 28,000,000 results. In 2004, “there were 372 million pornographic Web pages…100 thousand Web sites offering illegal child pornography.” ^1

The report also states, “One hundred percent accuracy using these commercial lists is unlikely to be achieved as the content on different commercial lists varies and there is a high rate at which new content is created on the internet.”

How can your filter determine what is restricted content with that number of sites, and how can it keep up with the rapid daily increase?

The report states that there are ways to increase the percentage of coverage, however, “stronger circumvention prevention measures can result in greater degradation of internet performance.”

You’ve recently sited Thailand and China as examples of Internet filtering. Firstly, why do they use filtering? To suppress civil liberties and freedoms. Secondly, how do they accomplish the filtering? According to China Central Television (CCTV), up to 2002, the preliminary work of the Golden Shield Project cost US$800 million. ^2 For a Government to suppress civil liberties, this is probably a reasonable cost. However, it is not a reasonable cost to block a very marginal amount of inappropriate websites.

You’ve also recently mentioned that to filter sites such as YouTube for RC content, that it “would not make it [the filter] a practical solution.” Which again highlights that the filter will only work for a very small fraction of restricted content online.

The report also says that a “technically competent user could, if they wished, circumvent the filtering technology.” Many people acknowledge that children are technically competent users of technology. People determined to get RC content in the hands of children are also likely to be technically competent, making the filter ineffective.

In summary, your proposed Internet filter will not realise the Government’s goal to protect children. It is technically inefficient in filtering the millions of websites that you’d need to include. As such it is only possible to filter a very small percentage of the websites currently containing restricted content, and will not keep up with the rapid growth and change. It will also have no effect on the many other online threats to children.

For this reason I would like you to publicly answer these questions:

• How do you propose the filter will keep up with the rapid increase in restricted content websites?
• What percentage of restricted content do you expect the filter to stop?
• How much will the Internet filter cost to implement, and run?
• Who will bear these costs?
• What alternatives are there to the mandatory filter?
• How many sites will be listed in the blocked list?

Yours faithfully
Richard Giles

^1. http://www.icarecoalition.org/stat.asp
(Internet Pornography Statistics – Internet Filter Review, 2004)
^2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People’s_Republic_of_China

* Letter also emailed to the Hon. Senator Stephen Conroy.

Maybe it had something to do with those limitations, but innovation abounded.

For many years I’ve said that the Commodore 64 was the best personal computer, ever. I firmly believed this, because the good old C64 was pushed well beyond its limits. Hackers every where did things to that tiny machine that no one would have thought possible.

But I think I’ve found it’s match: the Apple iPad. Call it a gut feel, but I think people are going to push this platform to its limit and beyond. Not only will people find innovative ways to use the iPad that just haven’t been considered, but I think we’ll see an amazing array of applications developed.

Sure, the iPad has it’s limitations, but that might just make developers push the boundaries just that little bit more.

I think the second Internet has finally arrived.

Through two Internet booms (or bubbles), we’ve learnt that monetising the digital world isn’t simple. The Internet is based on freedom, and trying to cash in on that type of model presents a whole range of problems. For that reason the Internet hasn’t really flourished like it can.

Don’t get me wrong. The Internet is amazing, and has come a long way, but most people can’t afford to dedicate time to something that isn’t likely to put food on the table. There are plenty of people that do, and places like Wikipedia and Flickr have grown because people make a hobby out of them. But people need to eat.

That’s why, love it or hate it, iTunes App Store could be the new model for the Internet. Thousands of people have started to create things on the Internet, and are making money. I’m sure most people won’t make a lot of money from their apps, but the business model is a lot more solid than expecting to make money from advertising.

The other reason I’m suggesting this is a new form of the Internet, is because when we use apps we’re at another level of abstraction away from the Internet. Sure, we’re using the same protocols, but we need to think less of the mechanisms, and just use the functions. Soon we won’t even need to worry about a web address.

Now I know this could be a worry, because we really don’t want to be locked in to a single vendor to use the Internet. Many have expressed their concern that using devices like the iPhone or iPad gives Apple far too much control. Perhaps it does. If everyone moved to these platforms for their use of the Internet, then it would give Apple unprecedented control over what we can see and do online. But that’s a whole other blog post.

In reality, what the app store has done, is change people’s expectations. Several years ago people wouldn’t pay to use an online service. They figured they’d find something else that was just as good and free. But today, people will pay a little for the convenience, and experience. People are more willing to pay to use something that provides them with what they want.

So although it’s not a perfect world, and we should all be cautious about vendor lock in, I think it’s a positive step forward. I hope it means that a raft of new Internet entrepreneurs and innovators make their mark on the new Internet.

Firstly, I love Twitter. I post pretty much daily, and enjoy reading and chatting to a bunch of people I’d never have met otherwise (hell, would I even know my sweatheart @lu_lu if it weren’t for Twitter).

But Twitter’s new annotations has me thinking (see Techcrunch’s An Early Look At Twitter Annotations Or, “Twannotations”).

I love the idea of annotations. I love data. The more the merrier. We can do so much more with Twitter when they add a feature that allows anyone to add extra metadata to a tweet.

The beauty of annotations is that Twitter opens itself up to becoming a protocol for all sorts of applications and devices. Imagine a TV with built in twitter to send a tweet with information about the show you’re watching. The annotation means the TV, or other applications, can show you what other people said about that television show, and could even display it across your television screen in real time.

Sounds cool. Well, I think so.

I love the idea of this. However, I worry that what Twitter is doing is trying to become an essential Internet Protocol. Just like the protocols that run email, or the web. The only difference is that Twitter owns the protocol. They can change it when they want. They see all of the data flowing in and out. And all this means we’ll rely on them, more and more, as more and more applications or devices build Twitter in.

I know a lot of people have been suggesting a decentralised version of Twitter for years. Darcy Laycock even wrote a great Twitter like application that worked on top of IRC (Kookaburra). I wonder if this might be a better way for us all to go.

I also wonder when we’ll all realised we’re locked in, and Twitter owns a large slab of the Internet.

Luis, the love of my life, being a very intelligent woman, loves haikus. And so I’ve spent a lot more time noticing them. I also noticed that people love writing haikus on Twitter.

So the idea of a simple webpage that shows the latest Haiku, and nothing more, bubbled up to the top of my brain.

However, this meant I needed a sweet domain name. I couldn’t have an über cool site without one. Surprisingly I found one really quickly: www.haikuiz.com.

So, several months later I found some time to have a play with the Twitter API, and build the first rev of the site (should I call it a beta?).

I’m pretty excited by it, for a few of reasons: it’s a little artistic (or at least I hope so), it’s fun to sit and watch because there are some beauiful haikus, it’s allowing me to get my hands dirty with a bit of coding, I’m learning a few things, and I think it’s a little altruistic (at least I’m not planning on making money out of it).

Over the coming months I’m hoping on doing a fair bit more to Haikuz. So keep an eye on it. In the mean time, please let me know what you think. I’d love to know thoughts, ideas, suggestions.