One can be stalked by opportunistic voyeurs and internet marketers on twitter and other social media and social networking sites, where I have been compelled to spend time every day deleting the armies of bots that were auto-added as my “followers” overnight. That’s not to mention the time I spend deleting invitations to join the bot army generating brigade and even make money from tweeting.
Meanwhile, the A List blog gurus are lecturing us not to use sites like twitter only to post links to our articles. Well, that’s the reason I have these accounts and I limit my social networking time so I can still have a real life offline. But apparently we bloggers are now expected to rise to the challenge of “providing value” in 140 character tweets, and be eager to enter pseudo relationships with those we did not want to communicate with in the first place.
Read even more tweets and find that the same A list blog gurus are now differentiating between readers and customers by viewing conversion rate metrics. Converts are those who buy what you are selling and apparently everybody with a blog is selling something now.
According to Terry O’Reilly on CBC radio “The age of persuasion has become the age of invasion”, and who doubts that?
Wednesday, February 17: Millions of Canadians tune in each week to hear Terry O’Reilly’s hugely engaging take on advertising on CBC Radio’s award-winning The Age of Persuasion. He’s our very own Mad Man – an advertising guru and industry pioneer who’s co-written his first book, The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate our Culture. Terry O’Reilly will be our guest, and you can tell him which ads have had the strongest effect on you.
Websites are stand alone islands lacking discussion opportunities and RSS feeds. Websites don’t achieve PageRanks but blogs have them all so the blogosphere has been invaded by opportunists and changed its nature. It’s now a huge cyberspace shopping mall, and I’m among those who aren’t buying the change. I can locate local sources of goods and services without the help of Google, thanks.
Google Local Business Center Introduction
Big Brother Google Knows all and sees all
Now we also have geotagging just in case the same opportunistic voyeurs and peddlars stalking us online can’t find our doorstep, Big Brother Google can even provide photos of what that doorstep looks like and who’s coming and going in and out the door. In addition Google’s lending a hand when it comes to customer profiling — How Google tells you what men and women want.
The age of Big Brother is here and we are being pandered with platitudes about “usefulness” while our personal information and location data is flowing out into the hands of identity thieves. Worse still, most folks don’t realize just how much personal data Google has simply because they voluntarily provided it.
The Social Media Reality Show
Everyone who I want to find me already knows how to do that. The ptibulls won’t take them down unless I command them to. Both barrels on my shotgun are fully loaded with rock salt to spray the backsides of creepy crawlers as they flee at top speed in the opposite direction. lol :D (Just joking … of course.)
encrerouge
February 9, 2010
Hi timethief! I really enjoyed your article, thanks a lot for writing! I’ve been skimming through your blog and it’s great.
While doing this, I saw your feature at the bottom of your entries with the different icons (ex. facebook, Digg, Technocrati etc.) . It’s a great feature that I would love to implement on my blog, could you please tell me how to do this?
Thanks a lot in advance (and for writing!)
encrerouge
timethief
February 9, 2010
@encrerouge
I appreciate the positive feedback. The bookmarks I use are specially designed for wordpress.com blogs and if you use them you will find that your twitter account will be automatically updated shortly after you publish a post.
(1) You compose the entire post first and preview it and when it’s perfect you open another tab or window.
(2) Then you go here http://getsociallive.com and create your bookmarks by entering the title and the URL. Then you click “getsocial!” and a box will appear with the code in it that will already be on your clipboard.
(3) You return to your post and then click HTML to change the editor from visual to HTML mode and paste the code in (Ctrl V) and click “publish”. That’s it. :)
P.S. You must do this with every post as there is no way we can use to embed the bookmarks into the theme.
Habibillah Faqih Arif
February 12, 2010
Great blog.. I must Study with u.,
timethief
February 13, 2010
Welcome and thanks for the kinds words. :)
paulyeo11
February 16, 2010
Wow you know a lot thing in Internet . Can share with us yr sercert of success ?
timethief
February 16, 2010
My secret is that I actually read lots of material every day. :)
Dave Doolin
March 4, 2010
Interesting comment about twitter, and the probloggers opinions.
I know a couple of newish bloggers that are *relentlessly* promoting on twitter, and they are being rewarded with massive traffic and fanatical audiences.
Go figure.
Songs for Clarion
May 26, 2010
How exactly does Twitter manage to do that? From what I understand… it’s this place… you post in brief messages (a bit like FB’s status updates perhaps?) and people that are already following you get updated.
So, here’s where I fall off the turnip truck… if people have to follow my twitter account, wouldn’t that be exactly the same as following my blog’s RSS feed? Only less efficient because I’m invariably too lazy to post/update twitter, post/update twitter, etc. Not to mention I’d be a bit embarrassed.
How does it generate massive traffic that you wouldn’t already have? The only thing I can think of for it to make sense is that people are more inclined to follow you on twitter than they are to subscribe to your feed.
timethief
May 26, 2010
I don’t know what to say? It’s a cyber space wherein you can broadcast 140 characters messages and sometimes connect with others you don’t not know. SHRUG I publish. It’s autotweeted.
Songs for Clarion
May 27, 2010
One of these days, I will plumb the mysteries of the internets. Which gives me a nifty idea for a SF story.