Over the last couple of days I’ve been getting random you’re being followed notices so I click on the link. Half of them wound up being suspended accounts. The other half nearly every tweet of the follower contained a link! A few seemed to actually have some conversation going on I followed them back to get a feel for them for a few days.
If all you’re using Twitter for is to spit out self-promoting links every tweet please get a life and stop randomly following people to try and get your numbers up. What’s the point of having all those followers if no one is listening? Are you trying to make up for other inadequacies? You waste everyone’s time. Now don’t get me wrong self promotion is an obvious use of twitter and I’m okay with a link or two here and there but not every OR every other tweet.
Generally if I follow someone it’s because I’ve known them for quite a while online or their conversation stream looks interesting. People I’ve known for a while I generally want to see what they are up to. For people I don’t know if they’re conversation stream looks interesting I’ll follow them for a few days and see if they say anything useful, funny, or thought provoking.
Wake up folks Twitspam is just as annoying as email spam.
Ever since Obama stared running for office it’s been Obama mania out there. After Obama was finally elected the mania went into overdrive just about every news show has had puff pieces on almost daily. It’s just plain annoying!
Now don’t get me wrong, I do like Obama I really think he has admirable goals, whether or not he will be able to achieve them is another story. However foolish I think it is for Americans to think that one man can solve all our problems like some sort of super hero, I still like the message Obama brings to the table. Although I’m not too sure about the whole change media blitz. Change for the sake of change is pointless it has to be change for the better. I do really think Obama has our best interests at heart and is going to give it his best again whether or not it will work remains to be seen.
We have here our first rock star president. He has an awesome stage presence and gives great speeches but I hope there is substance here not just media polish. He is probably one the most active and full of life looking presidents we’ve had in a long time. Being 24 the only presidents I really remember are Bush senior, Clinton, and Bush junior so I guess that isn’t much experience. 
No matter how much I like Obama, I cannot help but be annoyed at the media fascination with him. I understand the first black president is a very big deal; perhaps because I’m not black I don’t understand the full significance of that but I know it’s a big deal.
I wholeheartedly believe the media fascination with Obama from the get-go helped him win from the beginning it’s been one puff piece after another. What if McCain or even Hillary had received the same amount of attention? I guess we will never know.
It would be nice if just for a wee bit the media would stop yammering about this guy. I’m hoping within the next month the frequency of Obama propaganda will trickle down to the normal frequency of presidental news.
I first signed up for a twitter account a few months ago, use it for a bit, got bored with Twitter, and discounted it as pretty much useless. On the urging of a couple of a pals and after seeing a few many write about their success with twitter I decided to give it another whirl. About two weeks later I grew tired of it again and I haven’t been on it in over a month.
Here are my thoughts: Twitter definitely has a place in today’s social web space, I cannot deny that, but exactly where it fits I still don’t know. News travels very fast on Twitter, sometimes faster than traditional news websites this is something that’s always touted as a big plus for Twitter. I don’t quite know why as for me a 5 minute delay in seeing a news story on Twitter vs. CNN has no effect.
The other positives of Twitter all seem to be touted by marketers who keep banging the same drum that Twitter is great for branding and networking while I don’t disagree it seems awful self serving. In a lot of cases it appears to be a case of follow me so I can send you links to my sites 10 times a day. My last comment on Twitter was “if I don’t have something to sell twitter is useless to me” and that’s what it seems like, if I don’t have links to plug it seems like a waste of time. Perhaps I am following the wrong people who only seem to want to put links in front of my eyes.
Ironically, I’m going to dive back into Twitter with a link to this post and see if I can get involved more and try to see what everyone else sees in Twitter. I’ll be writing follow up posts. 
If you haven’t noticed by now, I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus from blogging lately. For the past month or so I’ve been kinda bored with. I’m considering relauching BigDan.us with a new theme and new content. I’m not quiet sure what I’m going to do yet.
If any one has been following the Windows 7 development, even knows as per Steve Balmer’s keynote @ CES that Friday the Beta 1 of Windows was going to be released; which was great news, I had already run a copy and was quiet impressed but would always rather a legit copy. Here’s what went down first of all MS didn’t release in the morning like most releases do we had to wait until “the afternoon”. The best part is Microsoft said they would limit beta testers licenses to 2.5 million, which sounds like a lot but really isn’t considering how many people use Windows.
The cap of 2.5 million created a gold rush of sorts many people were pounding on the site all day which caused it time out and throw errors here and there. All the while Windows 7 main page said come back Friday afternoon. No updates no nothing. All the while people were getting some download links here and there, MS continually killed most download links posted. Wired posted that we should expect the download to actually open to the public around noon pacific time. There was some confusion and misinformation from Life Hacker with a Technet download of the beta that was released slightly early. Noon pacific time, nothing, nada, not a thing for Microsoft. At about 2 PM pacific time they put a statement up on main Windows 7 page saying they were surprised at the response and are adding more servers to handle it.
If this isn’t a sign that Microsoft just plain doesn’t know what it is doing with marketing, I don’t know what is! MS knows they jumped the shark with Vista (even though I like it very much), and have tried to build anticipation around Windows 7, which is a good thing. Yet they shot themselves in the foot before they even got out of the gate. Things like that just irk me. Ubuntu releases new version and BAM it’s up on a torrent for very fast downloard. Sure Ubuntu’s home page and mirrors get extremely slow but for the most part they stay up. Firefox releases a new version millions of downloads in one day, no site crashes, no I’m sorry we didn’t expect this kind of traffic. I don’t understand how a company with literately billions of dollars behind them can screw the pooch so bad and on the regular!
As for me, I’m one of the lucky ones I got a download but no license key. I’m typing this from Win 7 beta, I like it but am still unhappy with the way MS handled this. Really makes you wonder if they’re capable of doing anything right.
New Years 2009
Happy New Year everyone! From looking around this blog you wouldn’t know that the holidays just passed; I really didn’t post much in the month of December; I wasn’t all that busy just kind of disenfranchised with this whole blogging thing. I still plan on launching my other blog shortly.
For New years, I made my normal resolutions to quit smoking and loose weight. Well I’m still smoking but am cutting back as of today. My target quit date is a week from today Friday Jan. 9th. We’ll see how that goes. Since I finally got a set of long johns as a Christmas gift I’ve started walking again, even if it is still cold as a witch’s tit out there. I’m slowly working myself up to 2 miles a day. My hope is that by February I’ll be walking both in the morning and evening.
Aside from that every thing is the same old same old here.