Twitter gets hacked by Iranian Cyber Army and Google gets it all on cache

December 18, 2009

A short time ago Twitter went offline following reports that the site had been hacked by a group posting under the name Iranian Cyber Army. If you're quick you can head over to Google and get a cached copy of the page minus the graphics. This screenshot came from Google's cache a short time ago.

This may be one of the first times such a high-profile hacking incident was caught, nearly in real time, by Googlebot. Read more about Twitter gets hacked by Iranian Cyber Army and Google gets it all on cache

Getting started with Twitter

March 21, 2009

Everywhere you look people are tweeting or twittering. If you can find a newspaper it would almost certainly contain a story about Twitter. Many interesting conversations and exchanges happen on Twitter each day.

This brief introduction, however, looks at another use for Twitter. Perhaps you're not yet ready to take the leap to spending your free time telling everybody around the globe what is happening all the time. That's just fine. We'll look at setting up a Twitter account and how it can be used to track a special event such as a family reunion.

To get started head to Twitter.com. Once there look for the large green button that says "Get Started".

Get Started link on Twitter.com Read more about Getting started with Twitter

Twitter and reputation management

November 30, 2008

The customer is always right. OK well not always but we already knew that.

Earlier today I was looking at a company's Twitter feed and shaking my head. The feed read like an organization that wanted to use Twitter but was failing miserably. I should blog that crossed my mind but there was "work" to be done. Then getting ready to take a break this afternoon I read a case study on Comcast reps on Twitter. Long post made short Comcast has some great customer service people on Twitter.

Back then to the company I was looking at this morning. Well call them X because I don't know that much about them or how good or bad their offerings are (although I am nominally a paying customer I just don't use their product much). What struck me in reading the X tweets is just how blatantly they communicated that the policy handbook, profitability and self-interest come first and the customer is a distant thought. Read more about Twitter and reputation management

How not to cover a fire... the KTVB example

August 26, 2008

Boise had a devastating fire on Monday evening. When all is said and done a woman died, ten houses were destroyed and many more damaged. The Idaho Statesman has very good coverage. This post is not, however, about the fire but is about the coverage of the fire. Lacking a TiVo in our current setup I wasn't able to do a comparison between the different networks. As such this is then a critique of the coverage done by KTVB. One word sums it up.

Terrible.

However stopping there wouldn't do this story justice. At the same time KTVB is producing content that is embarrassingly bad they are bragging about it not just on the air but on Twitter as well. More about that in a bit.

Breaking News?

Let us start at the beginning, just after the fire raced into a southwest Boise subdivision. Within an hour of the fire hitting the houses KTVB broke into regular programming with the breaking news. I watched the next hour or so of coverage. In that time viewers learned: Read more about How not to cover a fire... the KTVB example

Search Twitter feeds

May 3, 2008

A Drupal Planet post pointed me towards Sumarize.com which makes easy work of searching Twitter. Though it still doesn't make Twitter a really useful tool in most cases it is rather fun to use it to search "follower whores". Now what is a follower whore? It is somebody who wants to crank up their followers so they make their updates "private" and then allow anybody who will "follow" them to see the updates. With the search engine you can't see their feeds but you can see the responses to them and get a pretty good idea what they're saying.

And you can use their tool for sentiment analysis. Though to be honest when I use it and then look at the resulting posts it's a really weak analysis with really tenuous scoring. But tenuous doesn't prevent it being fun.