Waaa I Can’t Follow More Than 2,000 People

Earlier this morning, Twitter was buzzing due to the fact that it had been discovered that Twitter had limited accounts to only 2,000 followers. According to Mashable, Pownce has filed suit by also limiting accounts to only 2,000 followers.

While A-listers also known as early adopters could be held responsible for providing these new social tools some momentum, I don’t think they single handedly provided these services their success. Although Mark’s article goes into detail in regards to spam accounts on Twitter and their changing methodologies, what is the big deal in terms of being limited to 2,000 people? Can you honestly tell me that your human mind would be able to comprehend the conversations between all 2,000 people?

I hope you said no or else I’ll have to consider you to be something other than human. Now I know Robert Scoble and a select few like him can read 700 news items in Google Reader in a day but come on, he is the exception and not the rule. While I think Twitter should make exceptions to their evangelist users, I think everyone else needs to calm down.

For mere mortals, though, we have other stuff to do, and by and large we prefer to have a few dozen relationships we can truly engage in rather than 9,000+ that we once a month may shoot off a message to.

Well said Mark.

Waaa I Can't Follow More Than 2,000 People

Earlier this morning, Twitter was buzzing due to the fact that it had been discovered that Twitter had limited accounts to only 2,000 followers. According to Mashable, Pownce has filed suit by also limiting accounts to only 2,000 followers.

While A-listers also known as early adopters could be held responsible for providing these new social tools some momentum, I don’t think they single handedly provided these services their success. Although Mark’s article goes into detail in regards to spam accounts on Twitter and their changing methodologies, what is the big deal in terms of being limited to 2,000 people? Can you honestly tell me that your human mind would be able to comprehend the conversations between all 2,000 people?

I hope you said no or else I’ll have to consider you to be something other than human. Now I know Robert Scoble and a select few like him can read 700 news items in Google Reader in a day but come on, he is the exception and not the rule. While I think Twitter should make exceptions to their evangelist users, I think everyone else needs to calm down.

For mere mortals, though, we have other stuff to do, and by and large we prefer to have a few dozen relationships we can truly engage in rather than 9,000+ that we once a month may shoot off a message to.

Well said Mark.

Categories Deleted – Content Moved Around

In my effort to re work this site from the ground up, I have moved all of the content that was within the Jokes and Personal categories to my personal blog, Jeffc.Me/blog. I have also gone through all of my content categories and have rearranged them, consolidated them and then deleted the ones which had 0 posts. This will help me regain focus instead of having a thousand different categories with less than 10 posts each.

I’m not sure how many links I have broken due to these moves so if you come across one, please let me know. I am now ready to begin working on the redesign of this site that I hope I’ll be able to publish before the end of this week.

DivitoDesign Interviews Me

DivitoDesign.com Logo

Stefan Vervoort was kind enough to make me feel special by conducting an interview with me. The interview discusses my job at Performancing.com, managing time while blogging, Jeffro2pt0.com, jeffc.me, my goals with each site I am operating and more. I may have gone overboard with the time management question but I’ve been waiting for an excuse to tell someone what it’s like in my shoes for a day. I seriously need to find a way to manage my time better.

Please check out the interview and then come back here so we can talk about it. Thanks again Stefan for the interview opportunity.

Woopra 1.2 Has Me Wooping For Joy

If you haven’t opened up your copy of Woopra yet, do so soon as they have released version 1.2 of their analytics client. This new version has finally fixed a long standing problem I’ve had with Woopra since the release of 1.1 and that is the referral com null redirection error. I’m happy to say, that feature works properly now.

After installing and running Woopra 1.2 for the first time, there are two things that you should notice right off the bat. The first, Woopra now has a new desktop shortcut icon.

New Woopra Desktop Shortcut Icon

Although the icon is not a drastic change, it has a slicker appearance than the other one.

The second thing you’ll notice is that Woopra now has a dashboard area or a homepage. I call it a dashboard because its purpose reminds of me of the WordPress dashboard. This is where news from the Woopra site is displayed along with advertisements on the right hand side. The advertisements are not that distracting and I feel this is one of the ways Woopra will be able to provide a tiered (paid for / free) service.


Click on the image to see the full size

The dashboard also provides at a glance information for each site you have configured to use Woopra. The dashboard contains information such as the live visitors, pageviews, and visits along with a mini bar graph for visual stats.

Other things that are new with Woopra:

  • Support for Machines Running Java 1.5
  • Map Customization
  • Color-coded Visitor Map
  • Analytics Filtering Improvements
  • File Menu Standardization
  • Live Visitor Counts on the Website Tabs
  • New Login System
  • Highlighted Tabs During Site Visits
  • Significant Memory Handling Improvements
  • Database Improvements Resulting in Multiple Speed Enhancements
  • Changes Implemented For Future Updates

So far, I’ve been pretty happy with this new release. If you have upgraded to Woopra 1.2, let me know what you like most about the new version. If you would like to read more about the features in Woopra 1.2, be sure to read the official blog post which goes into more detail.

Incredible Lightning Video

While uploading the rest of my footage from the hail storm that hit northern Ohio on August 7th, I came across a featured video on YouTube of a lightning bolt. This was no ordinary lightning footage though as you can actually see all of the feeders traveling to the ground. Once one of the feeder bolts touches the ground, you can see the bolt light up with electricity. This is one of the best videos I have ever seen which clearly illustrates how lightning is formed.

Is this video a fake? Personally, I don’t think so. I think this video was taken with one of those super cameras which can take thousands of frames per second. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out this post I did on a camera which shoots 5,400 FPS.

Back To The Beginning – Then And Now

Then And NowLife sucks without the Internet. So to kill time, I’ve been going through my backup files to figure out which ones I feel I can definitely live without. While organizing my backup files, I came across a text file which contains all of my posts from my blogging venture over at EFx2.com. What an interesting read. What I call my very first blog post in 2004 contained an abundant amount of typos with no regard to grammar. As a trip back in time and for archival purposes, here is what my very first blog post looked like.

General: Something Fresh
Wednesday, November 17, 2004 05:52 PM

Well I’m pretty new to the blog scene when it comes to having my own. I have read over the years about blogging, and I have seen many many weblogs that just end because well I guess they get boring and people don’t want to update them anymore.

I will try not to let that happen here. I am currently pretty involved with Photoshop and graphics design. Recently I have developed some skills related to Cinema4d, a 3D rendering program. Using this program allows me to create some cool renders that I have been using for some of my abstract wallpapers.

I hope to see you around and go ahead and leave a comment in the shoutbox. I will be at work turning this blogging site into a spiffy graphical wonder in the next few weeks or at least see where my limits are with this system.

General is the category while Something Fresh was the name of the post. You know, I think I remember that day in November when I hit the publish button for the first time. So what have I learned since then?

  • Spell checking is a godsend.
  • I’m a much better writer, now that I have blogged for such a long period of time. I’m getting better with each post.
  • Blogging is still fun when you write about the things that interest you.
  • Comments are still one of the best things I love about blogging.
  • The friendships I have made over the years through blogging have been wonderful.

Back in 2004, there was no Web 2.0. It seemed like blogging was much simpler just four years ago. Now a days, you have videos, screencasts, podcasts, audio posts, images, galleries, massive interaction, and everywhere you look, there is something embeddable. I may sound like an old fart reminiscing the good ole days, but I’m simply comparing two different time periods of blogging. I’m sure those who started blogging back in 2000 have much more to say in regards to then and now.

What I’m interested in, is hearing your history of blogging. Create a blog post and link back to this one if you must or simply leave a comment. When did you start blogging? What changes have you noticed between then and now? If you feel a little daring, you can also share your thoughts on the future of blogging.

This Phish Isn’t Biting

As I checked my email inbox this afternoon, I discovered an email which was supposedly sent from CNN. The subject line was CNN Alerts: My Custom Alert. The problem is, I’ve never configured custom alerts on the CNN webpage. However, The email looks very legitimate and I almost clicked on the links until I noticed that the FULL STORY link points to a site other than CNN. Check out this screenshot.

I’ve never received a phishing email which has appeared to originate from CNN. I’ve received similar looking emails from Paypal, Ebay, Chase bank, Bank Of America, etc. They almost fooled me on this attempt.

The funny thing is, when I typed in the URL of the full story link into Google, I checked out the search result for the McAfee Site Advisor and according to them, the site is just fine, no significant problems found.

Here is what I find disturbing. How many people do you think may have been as careful as I was with this link and checked out the site advisor page only to see that there was not any problems associated with the site thus, they went ahead and clicked on the link? Thankfully, the comments section of the McAfee post filled me in on the details:

“…didn’t find any significant problems.” Better look harder!!!
CNN.com Daily Top 10 spam has disguised links to <http://www.blackhawkk9.com/cnntop.html&gt; concerning which:
DANGEROUS: LinkScanner Online has found [Trojan Fake Codec]
Yeah, as well as clicking the fake link of your choice they want you to download a trojan loader, submit your machine to a botnet and further their aims to rule the observable universe (nice work if you can get it).

Name: blackhawkk9.com
Address: 68.178.211.52
(Owned by GoDaddy.com Inc)
Nameservers:
ns17.domaincontrol.com 64.202.165
ns18.domaincontrol.com 208.109.255.9

Registrar: GoDaddy.com Inc

Also, I sent word about this email on Twitter and many other people have reported receiving the same thing.

Word of warning, do not click on the links within this email. Immediately send it to the trash bin or your spam folder or simply delete it. Although this email smelled phishy, this phish almost took the bait.

This Phish Isn't Biting

As I checked my email inbox this afternoon, I discovered an email which was supposedly sent from CNN. The subject line was CNN Alerts: My Custom Alert. The problem is, I’ve never configured custom alerts on the CNN webpage. However, The email looks very legitimate and I almost clicked on the links until I noticed that the FULL STORY link points to a site other than CNN. Check out this screenshot.

I’ve never received a phishing email which has appeared to originate from CNN. I’ve received similar looking emails from Paypal, Ebay, Chase bank, Bank Of America, etc. They almost fooled me on this attempt.

The funny thing is, when I typed in the URL of the full story link into Google, I checked out the search result for the McAfee Site Advisor and according to them, the site is just fine, no significant problems found.

Here is what I find disturbing. How many people do you think may have been as careful as I was with this link and checked out the site advisor page only to see that there was not any problems associated with the site thus, they went ahead and clicked on the link? Thankfully, the comments section of the McAfee post filled me in on the details:

“…didn’t find any significant problems.” Better look harder!!!
CNN.com Daily Top 10 spam has disguised links to <http://www.blackhawkk9.com/cnntop.html&gt; concerning which:
DANGEROUS: LinkScanner Online has found [Trojan Fake Codec]
Yeah, as well as clicking the fake link of your choice they want you to download a trojan loader, submit your machine to a botnet and further their aims to rule the observable universe (nice work if you can get it).

Name: blackhawkk9.com
Address: 68.178.211.52
(Owned by GoDaddy.com Inc)
Nameservers:
ns17.domaincontrol.com 64.202.165
ns18.domaincontrol.com 208.109.255.9

Registrar: GoDaddy.com Inc

Also, I sent word about this email on Twitter and many other people have reported receiving the same thing.

Word of warning, do not click on the links within this email. Immediately send it to the trash bin or your spam folder or simply delete it. Although this email smelled phishy, this phish almost took the bait.