Tag Archives: Twitter

Latest Gmail Phishing Very Tough To Spot – Watch Out

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If Phishing is a new term to you then please read this post. Wikipedia will tell you that “phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.” Often it may look like a message from your bank, or it could be Paypal or eBay. The phisher does not know whether you really have an account, but tries everyone in the hope that some may fall from it.

Here is one of the best phishing exploits I have seen. I have now twice received a message apparently from Google within the past three days that read as follows:

phishing Gmail message

When you click on the link, then you see the familiar Google Gmail Welcome page. 

Phishing Gmail Welcome Page

Except that this is not the regular Google page.  If you look up at the address field, you will find the URL is on the domain, Phishing website .

Checking WhoIs for this page you will find that the administrative contact is the following person.

Phishing Administrative Contact

Undoubtedly if I had keyed in my Gmail username and password, that gentleman would have had access to my Gmail account and could do whatever he wished with it.  Needless to say I immediately changed the password, in case he had already been there.

This is a particularly difficult one to spot, so it is important to be extra vigilant.  Google has some good information about Messages asking for personal information.  It also provides more detailed information about Suspicious results and strange behavior: Phishing attacks in other words.

You can forward such phishing Gmail messages to phishing@google.com and can send the Phishing URL to the Google Phishing team using their Phishing Report.  Google also provides a link to Stopbadware.org, where you can learn more about malware that can infect your computer.

Some phishing attacks are not too difficult to spot, often including spelling mistakes and somewhat curious links.  This particular current Gmail phishing incident is highly professional and the only clue is that URL address when you click on the apparent Google link. 

Please spread the word rapidly.  If you are on Twitter, then please ReTweet the message below.

Pl.RT: Important Alert: Latest Gmail phishing exploit is very tough to spot: http://su.pr/5SFqGS : pass it on.

Undoubtedly many people will be taken in.

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A URL Shortener For Maximum RTs (ReTweets)

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If terms like URL shortener or RT are unclear to you, then you may be missing the next major trend in social media.  The last major trend which is still active is Twitter where, as Collective Thoughts suggested you can create your own Social Bites – (which are) Like Sound Bites But Different

We are all used to “Sound Bites” – a short few seconds of words which are normally taken out of context to create sensational headlines. Few people realise that speech writers have for years worked on developing speeches to include a couple of perfect “sound bites” for use by others. Of course while some social media is audio based we are much more likely to rely on humble text to create a “social bite”.

What Is A Social Bite? – A social bite is a short piece of text to describe an article, post or idea which is easy to understand and easy to distribute through viral networks. A social bite must still carry the post’s message and goal but in a way that quickly impacts with users. The Perfect Social Bite has two parts, the hook and the line.

The hook are the words within the message – the thing to grab attention. This is doubly important as the hook will have no context once it has left the site. For example a hook is unlikely to reference the site so must be compelling, so that someone would visit the page without knowing where they were going.  The line is simply the url, sometimes this will be the page url but more likely to conserve space a url shortening service would be used. This compounds the need for a good hook as the only other potential reference to the site will be hidden.

Done well, social bites can be very effective, so the Twitter stream now seems to have more social bites than mere status messages as in  ( … off to feed the dog. :) )

If you are unaware of ReTweeting, then this is the next big buzz item in the Twitter world.

A ReTweet is based upon the word Tweet.  Tweet is slang used in Twitter that means whatever message you post up on Twitter is considered a Tweet.  Hence a ReTweet is a Tweet that is re-copied that begins with either a RT or ReTweet.

Techchrunch wrote a post on how ReTweets are viewed as a proxy for Authority in the Twitter world.  This means that the more Retweets you gain from other Twitter users based on the article you have written or have found and submitted to the Twitter world, will prove that you are an Authoritative expert in Twitter.

Your tweeting efforts therefore should be focused on creating social bites that will receive the maximum retreats.  That is where the choice of URL shortening can be important..  Lee Odden did a fine survey and review of URL shorteners and covered the following URL shorteners:

  • cli.gs
  • budurl.com
  • tinyurl.com
  • zi.ma
  • bit.ly
  • twurl.nl (aka tweetburner)
  • is.gd
  • snipurl.com (aka Snurl Snipr Sn.im)
  • poprl.com
  • ad.vu (aka adjix)
  • tr.im

He found that cli.gs was the most used and certainly it has many fine features including powerful analytics.  One of its most useful features is that it can be used in a plugin by Joe Dolson (WP to Twitter) that automatically creates a tweet when a WordPress post is published.

One URL shortener that was not included was that created by Digg.  It has received some adverse reactions since it puts the original post within an iFrame that is part of the Digg online presence.

Another one that is just now in beta might appear to be similar in ‘framing’ the original post.  However I go along with Pallab in saying that su.pr from StumbleUpon is Awesome.

Like Digg, su.pr also frames the contents of the target webpage and displays floating toolbars which is what make su.pr so awesome. The sidebar automatically highlights other popular content from your website(s) and encourages the reader to further explore. Not only that, su.pr also provides the option to retweet your message, and share the link on Facebook. Other options include the standard thumbs up and thumbs down buttons and option to stumble through the URL submitter’s favourites.

That ReTweet (RT) option is highly visible in the top right corner and should maximize the chances of getting even more RTs.  If you want to see what it looks like just check out the URL in the following social bite.

Pl. RT – “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” is very customer-centric : http://su.pr/1vH8BI  #customerservice

StumbleUpon is one of the more effective social media in bringing website visitor traffic, so this URL shortener should be a most useful complement.

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Are You On Google?

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What sort of question is that?  Isn’t everyone on Google to a certain extent?  However you probably do not believe it is something you join like Facebook or Twitter.

Well that has changed although you may have missed the memo.  As MG Siegler has pointed out, Google Profiles Is Taking An Important Social Step With Vanity URLs.

The problem with Google’s movement towards becoming more of a social entity is that it lacks one cohesive place to tie everything together. Google lacks a singular area – like a Facebook profile page – where all that Google knows about you can reside and be easily seen. Actually there is such an area, Google Profiles and Google is now making it quite a bit easier to find.

So are you on Google?  You can check this out with the following search for your name on Google Profiles.

google logo

If you already have a Google Account and have a Gmail address, then you are well along in joining this new potential social network.

Mike Elgan believes this will be Google’s ‘Facebook Killer’.  He feels that Google is just one acquisition away from offering a social network that does everything Facebook does, minus all the things everybody hates about Facebook.  That acquisition he is pushing for is that Google should buy Twitter.

The end result of this integration would be a social network far better than Facebook.  Rather than being a link dead-end like Facebook, Profiles would be a launching pad of discoverability for everything you want to promote. It would be cleaner, faster and easier to use than Facebook. And it would be a one-stop shop for both social networking and Twitter.

I believe he is over-valuing what Twitter would bring to such an acquisition.  Twitter has relatively rudimentary features and undoubtedly the Twitter owners will put far too high a price on their social network.  If Google was of a mind to add the social media trappings to Google Profiles, it would not be rocket science to do so.  The Google name would ensure people would flock to it.  Indeed how many of you reading this have already claimed your Google Profile once you heard about it.

All the concept needs is a little marketing.  Google Profiles is clearly a no-no. Thinking over possible names and remembering the precedent of the Google Chrome browser, one name jumps out.

Google Glitter!  The name would almost market itself.  The related concepts are multitudinous.  Status reports would be glints of course.  Perhaps if some related helpful ideas come to mind for Google, you could add them in the comments.   It undoubtedly would be much cheaper to buy the appropriate domain(s) and/or trademark(s) to allow the concept to shine than it would to buy that tottering whale.

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Zoomit For Proud Canadians

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You may know that you can vote for websites you find appealing at a number of websites and thus make others aware of your finds.  They carry names like StumbleUpon, diggit and reddit to name but three.  A new one has now appeared on the scene called Zoomit  .. and this is a site for proud Canadians.

That’s not just for the Proud Canadians Top Ten but for everyone who is a Canadian and proud of it. 

You may wish to consult a good review of Zoomit, which gives more details. As it mentions this is a Canadian social bookmarking website that features Canada’s News chosen by patriotic Canadians

David Leonhardt, the founder of Zoomit.ca says, “We have created a free place where Canadians can have their say on Canadian stories about politics, sports, entertainment and other topics. Mr. Leonhardt saw a need for social bookmarking with “Canadian-only” content because Canadian stories can get somewhat buried in the  U.S.-based sites mentioned above.

David Leonhardt asked me via Twitter whether I had any Canadian suggestions, for those who might be made aware of this great review of Zoomit.

Some Twitter Contacts

Since the question came via Twitter, my mind turned naturally to Twitter for the answer since this service seems to be growing by leaps and bounds.  Increasingly people are using Twitter to inform their friends about interesting websites.  It seemed a natural fit.  How could I develop a list of Twitter members that could receive the good news.

Unfortunately Twitter is a very rudimentary service.  Although you can find your friends by name fairly easily, there is no easy way to identify which are Canadians. Some names came quickly to mind and here is a short list of their Twitter identities.

I have undoubtedly offended many others who might assume that I would not forget them.  I will prepare a more complete list in another post and encourage any other proud Canadians who wish to be mentioned to follow the steps outlined at the end of this post.

Twitter Contacts Google Knows

Although Google seems to be having a difficult time indexing the Twitter output, I decided to use a Google search to try to find more proud Canadians.  The following seems to include more agencies than individuals, but who knows, perhaps they would wish to be using the Zoomit service too.

How To Get On The List Of Proud Canadians

For those proud Canadians who would like to be included in the list, I would encourage them to do the following:

  1. Make sure your Twitter profile identifies you as a Canadian in some way
  2. Tweet the Zoomit Review Article
  3. Add a comment to this post, including your Twitter identity.

I then undertake to cover the Twitter identities of at least the first 100 Proud Canadians in a subsequent post.  Even if you do not wish to be so identified, why not make Zoomit part of your world and help Canadian news get the visibility it deserves.

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Since Google Is In Mountain View, CA, Is It A Guru?

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That may seem like a cheap shot and I have the greatest respect for much that Google offers.  However I am bemused by the current interactions of Google and Twitter.  .. and this morning, there is an excellent article on the Times Online entitled, Goodbye to glib gurus and their gobbledegook

It is well worth reading.  It points out that the credit crunch is showing management theory for the hollow, jargon-filled sham it always was. But at last the tide is turning. As the gurus simplistic theories are discredited because they don’t work in a reliable and ongoing way for a majority of the applications, people are turning back to the essential values.

People really have enormous talents and strengths.  Given the goals to be achieved, they will usually figure it out.  Don’t over-control from the top with compliance procedures.  The message that comes from that is that people are cogs and they should perform within stated tolerances.  If you treat people like cogs, then they behave like cogs.

The alternative is to respect what each and everyone has to offer and rely on grass roots leadership to get the job done.  In a funny way, it parallels the struggle now going on between Google and Twitter.  It is perhaps symbolic that Google sits up there in Mountain View, California.  Sounds like guru territory to me.

Annex

Not least of the attractions of the article is a final listing of all those guru techniques.  We add them here for your entertainment and for future reference.  If all else fails, ..

Management by numbers – The gurus know how to count…

  • Michael Porter’s Five Forces
  • Kenichi Ohmae’s 3 Cs – Commitment, Creativity, Competition
  • Peter Senge’s Five Disciplines
  • W. Edwards Deming’s Fourteen Points
  • David Kolb’s Four Factors
  • Rensis Likert’s System 4

Management by acronym – They also like to spell things out…

  • AVA = Activity Value Analysis
  • BPR = Business Process Re-engineering
  • CBA = Cost-Benefit Analysis
  • TQM = Total Quality Management

Management by cliché – But best of all they like a snappy phrase…

  • Management by Walking About  (Tom Peters)
  • Who Moved My Cheese?  (Spencer Johnson)
  • Theory X and Theory Y  (Douglas McGregor)
  • The Managerial Grid  (Robert Blake and Jane Mouton)
  • In Search of Excellence  (Peters again)
  • If it ain’t broke… break it!  (Robert J. Kriegel)
  • The Pursuit of Wow!  (Is there no end to Peters’s phrase-making?)
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Google Is Killing Its Golden Goose

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Since this blog post is somewhat long and controversial, we offer the highlights of the arguments in this summary below.

Executive Summary

1.  The Internet is about two-way communication (Clue-Train Manifesto, etc.)
2.  Blogging is a perfect vehicle to support that communication.
3.  To support its PageRank-based algorithm given spamming, Google insists blog comments must only have ‘no-followed’ URLs.
4.  This removes incentive for people to add comments to blogs
5.  Twitter (micro-blogging) gives more immediate communication gratification.
6.  Blogging, a major profit-generator for Google, is thus throttled

Background

Internet Evolution has an interesting thread by Andrew Keen asking Did I Just See Eric Schmidt Blink?   Schmidt was asked a question about Twitter’s usefulness. Here’s how he answered:

Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man’s email systems. In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don’t have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?

That may be the technocrat’s putdown of a competitor, but Twitter is more about sociology than about technology. Twitter has created a form of social interaction that clearly is extremely well received by a majority of Internet habitués.

Back in 1999, the Cluetrain Manifesto prophetically suggested this was the strength of the Internet.  Twitter is leveraging that strength.  Google is not on the same playing field.

The nearest Google has got to this is its support of the blogosphere.  Google’s Blogsearch attempts to help bloggers find others  they may be interested in, although of late it has operated somewhat weakly.  That may be because Google now integrates blog posts with all other web pages in its main Web search.  However bloggers usually wish to communicate with their readers as we will show in the next two sections.  Google is less helpful here.

Bloggers want comments

Effective blogs encourage dialogue. Here are some relevant posts that discuss that topic.

No Comment – Chris Brogan
If your blog gets no comments, or only a few from time to time, I know how that feels. It’s hard to keep writing when you feel like no one’s watching, or that they’re not engaged. There are lots of blogs that deserve much more attention. Comment elsewhere to build relationships. And don’t give up. Blogging is more fun when there are comments, but your ideas are still just as valuable just being out there.
Measuring Student Blog Success – Shelby Thayer
The goal for most blogs is interaction (on every single page, usually) – not so with traditional websites like your university website (again, usually). Most blogs (whether they’re student blogs or not) want engagement … interaction … discussions.
Enrich the web with comments – Ross Bruniges
To ensure that the good stuff gets the credit and exposure that it deserves and likewise so that the bad stuff gets highlighted as bad I believe that we must all comment on the bad that we see so that less experienced people don’t just blindly copy, paste and use it in their projects. This is even more of a necessity if the article is being promoted as a good one to read either through a good Google ranking or being linked to from a large magazine site or mailing list.
Rewarding Blog Commenters – Charles
Comments add a huge amount to articles and help to differentiate blogs from normal websites. The comments section is the place that you look to first for a second opinion or confirmation about whether what you’ve read also works for others.  This feedback is helpful, interesting and this interaction really helps to engage your audience. People don’t want to feel that they’re alone… comments help to build a buzzing community around your blog.

If you need any confirmation, just look at the statistics on that most successful blogger, Darren Rowse.   Here are the comment counts for the Best Problogger posts.

Best of Problogger
How to Write Your “About Me” Page
How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs
What is a Blog?
Blogging Tips for Beginners
Free Blogger Templates 
Introduction to Trackbacks 
How I Make Money Blogging 
Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days
Choosing a Blog Platform 
Adsense Tips for Bloggers 1
How to Get Guest Blogging Jobs 		120 comments
712 comments
322 comments
328 comments
150 comments
98 comments
250 comments
383 comments
 
205 comments
282 comments
30 comments

Newspapers want comments

The same theme is now being taken up by the professional journalists who are active on the blogosphere.  Here is how Mathew Ingram sees it in his piece on Fred Wilson and the power of comments.

Comments are an integral part of a fully-functioning blog.  I’ve been encouraging writers at the newspaper to not just read the comments but also respond to them. It helps to improve the tone of the comments, since it helps to make it obvious that a) someone is reading them and b) someone actually cares what is being said.

Comments can help to trigger not just an interesting conversation, but one that actually expands and advances the issue in question. Fred Wilson’s blog post on the future of newspapers is an excellent example.  It’s actually a follow-up to a previous post about his use of media, but it has sparked a fascinating debate about the efficacy of blogs as a reporting medium, the utility of editors, and many other topics. And Fred is right there, as he always is, responding and interjecting alongside them.

What finer explanation could you have for the power of comments on blogs.  Which raises the question, Should comments be the key blog post quality metric? Just check out the UK Guardian’s section, Comment Is Free, and look at the numbers of comments.  Here is what it shows at the time of writing.

Comments

  1. How we all lost when Thatcher won (463)
  2. The return of morality (321)
  3. Never mind the evidence – a drug-free world is nigh (256)
  4. We do things differently in Norfolk (460)
  5. Climate change creationists (232)
  6. Crank up the presses (170)
  7. Opening eyes in Israel (289)
  8. The greening of Mandelson (150)
  9. A vicious reflection of society (149)
  10. Let’s wipe out toilet paper (352)

Google wants comments ‘no-followed

Despite this natural dynamic of blogs and conversations with their readers, Google has taken a different stance.  It is partially forced on them by the nature of their search algorithms and the continuing insistence that PageRank (the number of inlinks to a web page) is an important factor in determining relevance.  Google suggests that the fail-safe approach is to apply the ‘nofollow’ tag to all comments.

A few bloggers disregard this

If you are willing to exercise human discretion in reviewing all blog comments and rooting out those that are clearly spam links, then Google would accept that comment links need not be ‘nofollowed’.  Some brave bloggers are taking Google at its word.  That is the way all SMM blogs are being managed.

Another high profile example is Daily SEO Tip with posts such as 7 Ways to Turn Your Site into a Link Magnet.  This allows links to commenters’ blogs and they do not carry the ‘nofollow’ tag.

Twitter beats out blogs

Twitter is currently adopting a ‘nofollow’ policy on all links added to Tweets.  This should be a policy that Google could hardly object to.  However if Google really is following the dictates of the tag it has recommended, then a large part of the Web activity is not being crawled by Google.  Since Google has set as its mission to catalogue all information accessible via the Web, they are now on the horns of a dilemma.

Will Google Blink?

Marketing Pilgrim has correctly posed the question that Google, or is it Twitter, should resolve.

Google and/or Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes! 

Which will it be?

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The NOW Web From An Even Higher Place

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It was a post from Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP, Product Management, Google entitled From the height of this place that triggered this particular post. It contained a great deal of almost mind-boggling wonder and information:

All the world’s information will be accessible from the palm of every person
Today, over 1.4 billion people, nearly a quarter of the world’s population, use the Internet, with more than 200 million new people coming online every year. This is the fastest growing communications medium in history.
…
In many parts of the world people access the Internet via their mobile phones, and the numbers there are even more impressive. More than three billion people have mobile phones, with 1.2 billion new phones expected to be sold this year. More Internet-enabled phones will be sold and activated in 2009 than personal computers. China is a prime example of where these trends are coming together. It has more Internet users than any other country, at nearly 300 million, and more than 600 million mobile users — 600 million!

This means that every fellow citizen of the world will have in his or her pocket the ability to access the world’s information. As this happens, search will remain the killer application. For most people, it is the reason they access the Internet: to find answers and solve real problems.

As it happens, within minutes I was reading another mind-boggling post by Mathew Ingram on Social Atoms and the Twitter Ecosystem.  It was almost like one of those zooming-in shots where you get to see the ultra-microscopic detail of the universe.

What Twitter did was strip away all the clutter found on so many social networks and pare things down to their essence. A tweet is like the smallest possible unit of online interaction — the atom of social media (an idea I wish I could claim, but one that appears to have occurred to others as well).

By using those atoms as building blocks, other services have built larger structures. While many Twitter users might be happy to just post random “tweets” (a term that users came up with themselves, according to Twitter co-founder Evan Williams), eventually some of them are probably going to want to track some of their followers in groups using a “dashboard” type of app such as Tweetdeck, or export their messages using Tweetake, or track the most popular tweets through something like Tweetmeme or Retweet. They might want to filter messages using “hashtags” or keywords, using something like Tweetgrid. And then there’s the universe of URL-shortening services like Bit.ly (which has some interesting tracking features) and TinyURL, which got a huge boost from Twitter.

Atoms is fine as a metaphor for something you can build bigger structures with and so you end up with the information web pages that Google can eventually do their searching on.  Except I don’t think that really explains how this cyberspace is functioning.

We all seem to be relating to the World Wide Web as developed by the World Wide Web Consortium.  Following the One Web Principle, every web page or file on the Web has its own URI (Uniform Resource Identifier).  Knowing that URI, you can find everything that is on the World Wide Web.

Where Twitter confuses this simple picture is that you can send an instant text message via your cell phone to update your status.  There is even more traffic moving around among all the cell phones that is not really on the Internet, yet looks very similar to those tweets that are flying around. It struck me that a better word is really needed for all these little packets of information that are moving around, like the tweet.  In places like Twitter and Facebook, it originally used to be called your Status.  Atom has too many other connotations, so I suggest that Instant may be a better word to capture what is involved.  Instant has some interesting meanings:

  • instantaneous: occurring with no delay
  • blink of an eye: a very short time
  • moment: a particular point in time
  • clamant: demanding attention

.. and of course we now have Instant Messaging (IM), which is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text.

Twitter could then be viewed as a place where you can see the Instants of the people you are following.  Time is a fast-flowing river that is constantly changing as the ancient Greek, Heraclitus, suggested.  Twitter like the photo-finish camera at a horse race allows you to see all the Instants that are passing the post that is labeled NOW. There may be all kinds of Instants that you are aware of.  Some might even come via a program like Google Chat. Others might be like those that appear in say Microsoft Messenger indicating which of your friends are online.

Taking an even bigger picture view than Jonathan Rosenberg was seeing from Mountain View, CA, how can you best describe this even bigger space of communications of which the traditional World Wide Web is only a part.  I am not sure what the best word might be to describe the totality but the most interesting part is the slice that is now currently available. Instants in the past that did not get into persistent web pages are not easily retrievable.  An obvious name for this is the NOW Web.

Interestingly this is a concept that Vaibhav Domkundwar wrote about recently.

The NOW web is not just on twitter. In fact there is a much much larger NOW web happening on millions of forums, email lists, blog comments and message boards around the web. They are as active as twitter and have a wealth of information being added every minute, similar to twitter.

I know that from a recent example where I found out about the US Air plane landing in the Hudson river on twitter, while my wife found out about it on a baby forum that she reads regularly and she may have found out only a few hours after me, or perhaps sooner. These are real time conversations happening NOW which are not on twitter. So I believe the NOW web is much larger than just twitter and in fact it may take a really long time for the rest of the NOW web to discover and adopt/switch to twitter, if at all they do.

I am proposing that the NOW Web descriptor should even notionally include Instants (packets of information) that are moving around on telephone circuits as well as on the Internet.  This does of course mean that many instants do not have URIs.  So they are not yet in a format where search engines can handle them.  However they are the stuff that people want to know about.  Twitter has been one small example of what can happen to meet people’s needs.

Needless to say this NOW Web definition is controversial.  Is it a concept that you find useful?  Is there a flaw in the reasoning?  Add your comments and let others know how you think.

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Internet Transparency

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The Internet encourages and indeed almost compels transparency.  There is a high-level example of that that has played out in the last 48 hours.

A Newsweek article (All the President’s Tweets) reminds us that President Obama pushed hard to plug Americans into the White House.

During the 2008 presidential race, one of the oft-cited feathers in the Obama campaign’s cap was its Internet arm. From his unexpected win at the Iowa caucuses to his unprecedented field operation, the heart of the new president’s machine was MyBarackObama.com.  … By the time Election Day rolled around, more than a million people had signed up at MyBarackObama.com, and nearly half of the record-breaking contributions to the campaign were donated in discrete amounts of $200 or less.

It was very natural then that CNN’s Campbell Brown should pose the question, Transparency in Obama administration?  She suggested that:

The President might start by looking at his own Cabinet picks since both Tim Geithner and Tom Daschle were delinquent in back taxes.

I wonder how many Americans would avoid paying a six-figure tax bill until they were up for a new job? For that matter, how many people have owed more than $100,000 dollars without the IRS coming to haul off anything that wasn’t bolted down — like the car and driver Daschle forgot to pay for.

Needless to say that was quickly picked up on Twitter as can be seen in the torrent of searches that were done on TwitScoop for Daschle.

So within hours CNN comes up with the follow-up story, Daschle withdraws as HHS nominee.

Former Sen. Tom Daschle has withdrawn his nomination to head the Department of Health and Human Services, according to a statement Tuesday from the White House.  He apologized for making mistakes on his tax records.

Daschle recently filed amended tax returns and paid more than $140,000 in back taxes and interest for 2005-2007.   Daschle’s resignation came hours after Nancy Killefer’s withdrawal as Obama’s chief performance officer, a new post in the administration.  Apparently the reason for Killefer’s withdrawal was unspecified tax issues.

Internet transparency goes both ways.  It’s a tough standard but when we all get used to this new visibility, perhaps we will have a much more honest society.

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Tweet News

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First a disclaimer.  This is not Tweet-News, your online source for R&B singer, songwriter, musician and producer, Tweet. The other Tweet-News.com provides fans with the latest news and information on Tweet, as well as an extensive biography, discography, and media section. There is also a huge picture gallery!!

Rather this is news about Tweets, whereof the BBC declared there was a Tweet smell of success over Digg.

Use of Twitter, the mobile phone-based micro-blogging service, rocketed nearly 1,000% in the UK over the past year, according to industry analysts HitWise.  For the first time, the site has seen more visits than “social bookmarking” site Digg, which allows users to share links to sites.

Now the journalists and politicians are beginning to ask To tweet, or not to tweet?  Apparently almost anything goes on Twitter.

What are socially acceptable rules for when — or when not — to use Twitter at all?

Case in point: President Obama met in a “closed door” session with House Republicans this week. The press was not invited in order to allow the president and congressmen to have a frank conversation outside the glare of media scrutiny. But Republican U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra twittered his impressions of the president’s presentation in real time.  Was that OK?

Let’s be clear this is not a fringe activity. According to Mathew Ingram, The Reuters editor-in-chief now Twitters.

David Schlesinger, Reuters News, has a fascinating post up at his blog, Full Disclosure — a fitting title, given the topic of the post. Schlesinger writes about how he has been Twittering from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and how his Twitter messages (or “tweets,” as people insist on calling them) actually beat his own wire service, as described in a post at Silicon Alley Insider. The news? That billionaire financier George Soros believes the current economic downturn could be worse than the Great Depression, and that as much as $15-trillion might be needed to save the banking system.

If it is good enough for Reuters, then why should the rest of us stand back.  If you would like to be in touch with a friendly face, why not follow me on Twitter. Or perhaps you would like to check out some books on Twitter.

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Make That Elevator Speech A Twitter Intro

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Nailing Your Elevator Speech Is Crucial according to Rick Spence in the Financial Post this week:

The first rule of networking is to express what you do clearly and concisely.  … Yep, this is the dreaded elevator speech – your introductory line that encapsulates what you do and what benefits you create for your customers – in 15 seconds or less.  …  It’s the basic tool of networking, but it’s the one most abused.

You will find lots of help on Elevator Speech Do’s and Don’ts.  However it is really a somewhat archaic expression.  I would think the percentage of elevator speeches that are used in elevators is miniscule.  Many more networking opportunities now take place online.

Perhaps the place where most online meetings are taking place is now Twitter.  So you no longer have 15 seconds to make your pitch. It is 140 characters and spaces, that is all you have got.  It may seem short but it is long by the standards of Guy Kawasaki with his Mantra. 

Creating a powerful twitter intro is a major challenge but it will produce something that is more relevant to today’s world than the elevator speech.  Why not try it?  You may find you learn something by the exercise.

Rick Spence’s other message was that International Networking Day is Feb. 3. 

International Networking Day was founded by Business Network International, the company that runs networking groups across North America with the motto “Givers Gain.” In his book Endless Referrals, Bob Burg (who will be headlining the International Networking Day event in Pittsburgh), admits putting other people’s needs first can be frustrating early on.

But the best way to network is to help others first. If someone you meet asks for a referral, give it serious thought. Most business people want to be known as professionals who help others, so live your reputation.  Maybe you can provide a referral, or you know other people who can help this person– say, an understanding accountant or an affordable Web designer.

You have almost a month to get your Twitter Intro right.  Why not start today?

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