First up is Rickrollshaw, a blog tracking three competitors in the Malabar Rampage Rickshaw Challenge, which they call ’2800 kilometres around India in the world’s most unwieldy vehicle’ – an autorickshaw. It’s alternatively known as ‘an amazing race for the clinically insane’.

The Rickrollshaw under repair

The site is worth visiting just for the photos, let alone the stories from the race. I’ll also add fortylove.tv to this suggestion as well, another travel-related site from one of the Rickrollshaw-ers. It hasn’t been updated for a while, but the idea is great and some of the short videos are quite interesting, although I think her best travel writing has been about Yemen on her personal site.

Sana'a, Yemen (from skinnylatte's Flickr photostream)

Staying with a photography theme, but remaining a little closer to home, Michael Blamey’s photos of Melbourne at Melbourne Today have been really good recently. I’ve subscribed to the feed in Google Reader and having a photo come up every now and then is really nice. I’m sure that there have been occasions where I’ve missed him in the street by mere minutes!

Looking at Autumn Colours on St Kilda Beach - Michael Blamey

Gouds United continues to do well in the AFL SuperCoach competition, breaking in to the top 500 scores last round. Round 6 looks like it could be a different story though, with too many players out for my liking.

Not much else happening really – most of my time out of the office is being taken up by spending far too much effort on EVE Online these days! I do have travel for work coming up soon to Christchurch and Shanghai, so if anyone has any suggestions on what I should be doing while I’m there, I’d love to hear them.

Nothing too flash, just a proof of concept to play around with. I have no idea how this will look in any browser, so let me know how it looks to you. If you have an account, join the conversation!

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Whoa, looks like Twitter is exploding at the moment. The above is a graph from ComScore (via TechCrunch) for unique visitors per month and it looks like March was a very good month for Twitter. As in +131% to just under 10 million good.

Surely a buyout is just days away at this rate. Hopefully it will be to someone who doesn’t suck (I’m looking at you, Yahoo!…)

If you’re not already following me on Twitter, you can find me at @simongoudie.

*edit* However, these numbers may not have captured the true story, as they appear to only have used the US twitterers using the website, not third-party apps. This is a pretty small sample compared to the full range of Twitter users. More at: Computerworld

Yarra River, Melbourne

Stuart Highway

I could spend hours ‘driving’ around the country, and probably will over the next few days! I’m also sure that there’ll be plenty of interesting images that will be dug up. Anyone found any yet?

Having to log back in and reread items is frustrating and a waste of time. This was the reason I ditched iGoogle for Netvibes and it’s making me think of going back to Bloglines. Most other sites seem to be fine, but for some reason, Google keeps turfing me out.

Anyone have any ideas on staying logged in?

I’m a big fan of their overall new look. Ever since the first beta of Digital Editions, I’ve been hoping that they keep moving in the slick black and grey direction and it Connlooks like they have been. The great new apps being created for Adobe AIR, together with Windows Vista, the Fluency Admin for WordPress and Office 2007 in black, the desktop is starting to take on a whole new sophisticated and cool look, one that’s very much to my liking.

Go and check out Acrobat.com – it doesn’t cost anything and it could give you an insight on what to expect from Adobe in future, particularly with CS4, Acrobat 9 and more from them on the horizon. Adobe could just be the most improved of the 2008/2009 season, just quietly.

Even with the problems of false-positives being accidentally shutdown, this is definitely the way to go. By making it frustrating for spammers to use the service, hopefully they’ll turn elsewhere. It shouldn’t be too hard to spot the spammers either, just look for the unbalanced ‘following’/'followers’ ratio and the trail of ‘blocks’ and that should point you in the right direction.

Here’s hoping for a cleaner Twitter!

To my mind, the gins and sitcoms of the world act as champagne corks – they keep everything bottled up, building pressure (Shirkey’s cognitive surplus) until they are thrown off and there’s a release and a flurry of activity. Then, before too long, the cork gets put back in the bottle for the pressure to build again. Just as Shirkey says that gin stifled the creative actions at the start of the Industrial age in the article, television and other one-way media has been stifling creative energies in recent decades. It is becoming clear that the outpouring of creativity in our information age, the release of the cork, is two-way and user-created media: blogs, podcasts, YouTube and Facebook, just to name a few.

More and more, people are looking at television, looking at radio, looking at news reports and, in Shirkey’s words, ‘looking for the mouse’. They want to feedback, to reply, to create and challenge. That’s why I’m excited about the future – I want to hear what these people have to say when they get off the couch and do something.

photo credit: woodleywonderworks
thanks to @owenhodda for the link

Update: Here’s a video of the presentation the original post was derived from. Well worth spending a few minutes watching.

]]> http://simongoudie.com/blog/2008/05/07/how-gin-and-sitcoms-shape-society/feed/ 0 http://simongoudie.com/blog/2008/04/06/twitters-spam-problem/ http://simongoudie.com/blog/2008/04/06/twitters-spam-problem/#comments Sun, 06 Apr 2008 01:22:20 +0000 Simon Goudie http://raduza.com/?p=561 I’ve been using Twitter for a while now. I mainly keep to myself, following a few other Melbourne people and a few other bloggers and personalities I’m interesting in hearing from. You can find my Twitter page here, if you’re interested. However, recently, there has been a growing problem, one that seems to infect each new web service in one way or another: SPAM.

Twitter spam is becoming a real problem these days. On average, I have 2-3 new follower notification emails a day for Twitter accounts that are obviously auto-following everyone they can and contain little more than a couple of links that there’s no way I’m going to click on. By my definition this is spam and abuse of the system, but not everyone seems to agree: this conversation at Mashable is interesting, as there seems to be a meeting of people who use Twitter quite differently, with not everyone deciding that these accounts are spam.

So what’s the answer?

I’m sick to death of receiving these emails and having to vet each request when I know that 95% of them will be rubbish. However, I don’t want to miss out on being notified when I have a legitimate new follower, so turning off notifications altogether is out.

One of the giveaways of a spam account is the high number of followings and the lopsided following/follower ratio, such as in the image here. I doubt this can be used as a blanket rule though, as there are legitimate users with huge numbers of each (Scoble, as usual, is through the roof). Although I personally question the utility of following so many people, it can be a legimate use of Twitter, so blocking users based on followings or ratios is out too.

Perhaps the easiest way to block a lot of automated following is to implement a CAPTCHA-style check when following someone. This should knock out a lot of the automated following while leaving the human followers only slightly inconvenienced. This isn’t without its issues either, though. For example, one of Twitter’s biggest features is how easy it is to use via mobile phone. Simply sending ‘Follow John’ to Twitter via SMS is all you need to start following someone. Implementing a CAPTCHA system here simply won’t work, unless you want to start using MMS which seems like a very bad idea.

Twitter is great. Its ambiguous nature means that it can be a lot of different things to a lot of different people. However, the ease of use that comes with this also means that it would be difficult to police and to implement any kind of filtering system that will block spammers. I can’t see a clear way of securing the service against these users without negatively impacting on users doing the right thing. I guess I’ll keep on deleting notification emails and ignoring spammers manually. Hopefully, Twitter will one day hit on a solution that keeps everyone happy, except the spammers.