Posts Tagged Twitter

Once upon a time, when the internet was just beginning to be available to the masses, the internet was fenced in. If you dialed into the internet with AOL, you could only visit AOL hosted sites. The same with CompuServe and any number of other major providers.  Eventually, thanks to the demands of the customers, those walls were torn down. Now, they’re in danger of being put back up.

Many of the current ubiquitous features of the internet – websites that millions of people visit multiple times every day – could not exist in that fenced in world.  Facebook was created by a college student. Twitter by a few folks with a simple idea. The end of net neutrality would destroy that sort of invention. It would take innovation out of the hands of the individual and ensure that only mega-corporations could afford a place on the internet. Only they would be able to avoid the fees necessary to ensure that their content was accessible by the end-user, because the end-user would only be able to visit websites inside the fence that their ISP puts around the internet.

Now, this wouldn’t just affect internet startups and entrepreneurs.  There are real implications for creative professionals.  Independent musicians, artists, and writers would lose their ability to get their creative work out to the masses, without the benefit of having a major publisher backing them to pay those fees.  Likewise, the ISPs could potentially block websites they simply didn’t agree with – effectively applying censors to anyone with differing opinions or working with controversial subjects. They would be kicked outside the fence, their work left in the black hole of an internet unreachable by anyone.

This, along with certain legislation directed toward the Wikileaks scandal but with wide-ranging implications for freedom of speech for everyone, means that our first amendment rights are being beset on all sides. On one side, we have the greed of the internet providers looking for another way to make money, on the other we have politicians looking to destroy safe political dissent by removing the anonymity of the internet.

More and more, the internet is a place where even those from countries where freedom of speech is not guaranteed can have a voice.  The two things that make this possible are anonymity and the ability for almost anyone, regardless of the money in their pocket, to make a website. Take those two things away, and not only is the internet destroyed, but it will take one of our most fundamental rights with it. And let’s face it, that right is already tattered enough.

Let’s not go building those fences again.

Related articles

• Most don’t want the FCC to regulate the Internet (news.cnet.com)
• Apple the No. 1 Danger To Net Freedom (apple.slashdot.org)
• Net Neutrality Explained for Writers and Artists (craphound.com)

I’m a twitter addict.  I use it for a variety of things. Conversation with my friends. Keeping up with the news on subjects I care about. Networking with other writers through awesome twitter chats like #amwriting and #scifichat.  I get real encouragement from other working writers, including successful authors that I respect, such as @gailcarriger and @kenyonsherrilyn (sparking an occasional fangirl “SQUEE OMG THEY’RE ACTUALLY TALKING TO MEEE! on the occasions they have tweeted back to me.)

Twitter is great for networking and chatting and general info-gathering. What is not great about it is the inevitable spammers and scammers.  To be fair, Twitter’s spam reporting system has cut down on the spam a great deal (I now get one or two a day instead of fifty) but there are some scams out there targeting writers that, on the surface, look at least legitimate enough to make you consider clicking their link. They seem to be targeting writers in the more highly populated writing chats (like #amwriting) and those with the word “writer” in their bios.

The latest have already been profiled on Writer Beware, but I did want to make a note of it here for my writer tweeps who do not regularly follow the Writer Beware blog.  The spams appear to be looking for freelance writers, and a click through their link takes you to “Real Writing Jobs.com”  (I will not link them here, because this is a warning, and I’m not going to help their pagerank with a link) – where you are told that they only have some-number-less-than-15 jobs left if you want to apply, and pay their application fee while doing so.

Now, while the tweets looked semi-legitimate, the website is very clearly a scam. First of all, any writer should be wary of a publisher or agent that charges an up-front fee to even look at your work (or in this case, for the “application”). There are so many out there, especially agents, that a newbie writer could almost be fooled into thinking that charging for the first read was a standard practice.

So, don’t click those links in your twitter message box. Instead, report them and block them, so maybe Twitter can get a handle on them and they’ll disappear just like the other spammers inevitably do.

If you ever want to publish your work in the mainstream publishing industry, I would highly suggest keeping Writer Beware on your newsreader. You’d be surprised at how many scams there are out there targeting writers – and how easy it could be to fall for them.

Related articles

• Fancy the writing life? Get real… (davidhewson.com)
• How to Build a Writer Platform on The Internet (webupon.com)
• Avoid being scammed this holiday season (abclocal.go.com)

It looks like we’re going to be shorthanded at work this week, as this little office really needs two people to keep it running smoothly, and one-half of that equation is out sick with the flu.

I suppose I’m the lucky one. No flu, but I get to try to do the job of two people, so I’m scurrying around at work, and worn out and brain-fried when I get home.  I’ll try to get some content up, but most of it will probably be links and Neat Things I Found When I Got a Breather.

For that first neat thing, in the bitty bits of space I’ve gotten between phone calls and craziness, I’ve been participating in BBC Audio’s little twitter experiment, writing a crowd-sourced audiobook begun by Neil Gaiman, and finished by his loyal tweeps.  Scene One and Two are finished so far, and I actually got one of my tweets in on Scene One (I’m @meadhbh).  It’s a really fun experiment, and I’ve been having fun trying to keep up with what’s going on in the story, when I’ve been able to check it.  When the story is finished, it’ll be put into an audiobook format read by Neil Gaiman himself!

Yes, so I know it’s silly to be so excited that one sentence I wrote (and not even a particularly good sentence) is going to be read by Neil Gaiman…but…WHEEEE!

There. Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system….(*wheeeeeeee*)…ahem… I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep to my usual posting schedule this week (I’ve already slipped off of it somewhat, since this is gong out Tuesday instead of Monday).  I’ll be trying to keep from getting the flu, writing tweet-novels with Neil Gaiman, and trying to come up with a price list for my baked goods. So I can bake things. And, you know, sell them.

Also, it’s a bit late, but I hope everyone had an excellent Coming Out Day yesterday, and I’d still like to encourage everyone to get the word out and send out your letters regarding the injustice done to poor Jonathan Escobar.

Related Articles:

• With Twitter, You Can Write A Book with Neil Gaiman (smartbitchestrashybooks.com)
• Ready, Set, Tweet a story with Neil Gaiman (definitiveink.typepad.com)
• Neil Gaiman and Twittersphere to Collaborate on Audiobook (mediabistro.com)

When the usual sites I check every morning were down the first time I checked them Thursday morning, I shrugged, thinking that the storm the night before had somehow messed up the DSL connection at the office, as bad storms occasionally did.

Then I noticed that those same sites weren’t pulling up on my blackberry and that other sites were operating just fine, though, with a few exceptions, the sites affected seemed entirely unrelated.

Turns out there was a pretty wide-spread DDoS attack (that is, Denial-of-Service Attack) that seemed to be specifically targetting social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, and successfully took down Facebook for a short while during the morning and Twitter for most of the day. Unfortunately, the general overloading of networks was enough to cause difficulties on some completely unrelated sites.

That’s fine, I can do without Twitter for a day, and I don’t bother with Facebook, but it is worrying.  If an attack is able to do this to big-name but relatively unimportant sites like Facebook and Twitter, what’s to keep them from targeting financial websites and banking institutions? The network infrastructure of the US was, for the most part, built to withstand traffic that is less than a tenth of what it now is forced to support, and while banks and high security networks are built to withstand hacking attempts and attacks intended to steal information, most are not equipped to deal with the pure server overload that is the typical DDoS attack.

If someone can shut down Facebook and Twitter so successfully and for so long just by over-loading their servers with traffic, how long will it be before they can shut down something much more important?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Twitter hit by DDoS Attack
• Twitter Down Due to Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) (mashable.com)
• Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal Down at the Same Time! (Update) (readwriteweb.com)

There’s just something about fire that is utterly fascinating.

That said, when a boy decides to play with firecrackers on a windy New Years Day and sets the back yard on fire…less with the fascination and more with the panic. Said boy would be my little cousin. He was appropriately horrified and embarrassed, and fortunately we were able to at least slow the progression of the flames that it didn’t reach the tree-line before the fire department arrived.

My throat’s raw and I’m congested from helping to fight the fire, but other than a huge patch of black, burnt grass, there was no real damage done.

On another note, I’ve trying out Twitter. In general, I despise the world of netspeak that was encouraged by such things as limited-character cell phone text messaging and Twitter. However, as my beloved Strunk and White preach concise writing, and because I’ve found several writing Twitterers who post links to interesting information via Twitter, I thought I’d try it out myself.

My initial uses of it were entirely for advertising my blog updates, but lately I’ve embraced the “microblogging” aspects of it, and you will see my latest Tweets on this page. It seems to be a good way to quickly jot down new ideas in a place that is easily accessible.