SideWiki, WAVE and the Future of the Web; Is Google a Trusted Partner?
If you missed SideWiki like I have it might be, like me, you don't use the Google Toolbar in your browser. Well, thanks to buddy Michael Brito who published this link to is self-sidewikied entry to is own facebook page, I am now a SWiki-er. I've been a wiki fan for a while, but this takes things to a new level of content tagging and yet another disruptive technology from Google.
So as we are moving forward we can tag, comment and post content about the page that we are viewing. This in and of itself is not new, but that Google has added this function rather than some "untrusted" third party. [I imagine your groans, but pause for a second. If you think Google doesn't already have all the information on you to make a VERY LARGE file, then you probably delete your cookies each time you quit FF. I have resigned myself to using Google Analytics, with Info Sharing turned on, Google Voice, iGoogle as my RSS reader of choice. Anyway, to me, Google already has the links on me so adding more info to my file is not a concern of mine. The "toolbar" on the other hand takes up a lot of screen real estate and I'm not a fan of toolbars, regardless of how innovative and useful they are.] Here are a few questions I have about SideWiki and how we, the browsing public [not the browsing marketers], might use SideWiki to enrich our browsing experience. So for now, I have the Google Toolbar enabled [wondering if there is a different SideWiki option] and I will add a few SideWiki entries as I go around. But I bet ya, within 24 hours I've hidden the Google Toolbar again and SideWiki will fall to the bottom of my internet toolbox. Until I NEED it. [Kinda like Google WAVE, IMHO, it will be neat when I NEED it. Right now I don't need it. I don't even really understand it, but I'm sure I will at some point.] So are you SideWiki savvy? If not, you might get on and check it out. Even if it's just to imagine how Google might use SideWiki content to influence search results. Go figure! @jmacofearth permalink: http://bit.ly/sidewiki-g Kudos to britopian for his new gig: 


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.
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..."
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?"]
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.
In discussions with @
It's only through TRUST is the team willing to have CONFLICT. And without the ability to disagree the TEAM cannot work through difficult tasks.







I sat in on this years SXSW Interactive panel on the Death of MSM. There seemed to be three camps within the panelists and in the audience asking questions.



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