Ylliks

This week I saw Anonymous. In it, it is suggested that an actor by the name of William Shakespeare got to take the credit for the writings of Edward de Vere, thus creating the illusion that it was him, and not De Vere, who wrote some of the greatest plays of our time. Historical accuracy aside, it was a perfect example of someone being comfortable with claiming credit for work that wasn’t his purely for financial gains.

In todays internet world this kind of behavior happens more than you could imagine. People like Chris Brogan and Tim Ferriss have used their Twitter accounts to point out people who have used their work and claimed it as their own in products or blogs. So I was aware this kind of thing happened, but never saw it up close. Until recently.

As I’ve mentioned before one of the people I follow on Twitter is Aaron Lee. Besides being a solid resource for social media news and information, he’s just a great and approachable guy. We’ve been having short conversations for a while now so I wasn’t exactly surprised when I saw (at least I thought) one of his tweets mention me. However, it was one that he send me a couple of days earlier. I hadn’t really paid attention to the Twitter handle because I recognized him from his picture, but then I saw that another name was mentioned. Since his name has become somewhat of a brand I found it strange that he would change it. So I took a look at the profile that send the tweet and I was stunned about what I saw.

Here was a profile with Aaron’s picture, his description and look and feel. It was the same but for a different name and (at that time) 3 tweets. I DM-ed Aaron to ask if he had seen it, but he was as surprised as I was and decided to take action against this. Luckily Twitter has a procedure in place for this kind of thing. In other instances you might not be so lucky.

When somebody copies your work on the web, there’s not much you can do. Of course you can go the legal way and send a seize and desist letter, but if they refuse and they’re in another country your options are limited. Because of this it’s easy for scammers to do this and ride the success of others.

I never understood why you would want to make money by copying what others have created. If you want to make money on the web there are numerous ways, but I’m guessing some just want to take the easy route. And it’s a shame there’s not much that can be done about it.

I haven’t jumped entirely on the social media bandwagon just yet. Sure, I have a Facebook and LinkedIn account, I StumbleUpon some interesting sites when I’m bored, I’m a pretty regular tweeter and of course there’s this blog. But it’s not that I’ve created or are willing to create a profile on every new site that pops up. Like many I find that social media takes away alot of your time (even though I use the excellent Hootsuite to manage most of my accounts) and it’s not always evident if spending all that time is worth your while. However my time spend on it has given me more insights in how to use it and how it can be usefull. Let me give you an example.

One of the people I follow on Twitter is Aaron Lee. In one of his tweets he asked if there were any questions about Twitter he could answer. I replied with a question and he was so kind to pick it up and answer it extensively in this blog post.

So here’s a guy that has around 150.000 followers, writes and shares great content about social media and just picks a (what I hope he thought was a good) question from some random guy and turns it into an informative piece of writing which answered my question. If you want to have an example of “the power of social media”, I think one like this is it. And this power is the main reason I start liking it more and more.

Recently I saw this article on Inhabitat about a house that generated more energy than it needed. Using solar and thermal technology the design is able to power everything in the house itself, but also enough to charge an electric car. With the end of creating energy with fossil fuels in sight, this is certainly a way that can be used to power tomorrows houses. And although this is a vision of the future you can do a whole lot of greening your house today with solar panels. However, I still feel they’ve just scratched the surface when it comes to ideas of green technology for your house, especially when you live in a part of the world where sunshine is a little hard to come by. But even then I still believe there are still a few ideas that (as far as I’m aware of) aren’t being explored.

I’m no engineer or scientist (far from it) but by just thinking about it for a couple of minutes I came up with a few ideas:

• Venetian blinds with solar panels: Venetian blinds main purpose is to be closed either when it’s dark or when the sun is shining too bright. So reason for their existence is to be exposed to direct sunlight. Why not take advantage of that?
• Vertical windmill on top of chimney. Most of todays houses still have chimneys. Put a small vertical windmill on top of it to make use of the somewhat higher winds and design it that it also turns when the fumes from the chimney exit.
• Solar panel strips on the side of office building glass. Many of todays office highrises have an abundance of glass surface. These window panes can be lined to the side with solar panels. This way there’s still a big area to see the outside world, but also a large area to use for energy creation.
• Small hydro electric dynamos in drain pipes. When you live in my knack of the woods you know you will get a high average each year of rainfall. All that water that falls on roofs is being transported using little more than gravity and drain pipes towards the ground. Building in small hydro electric dynamos in the drain pipes gives a little more use to the pipes than just as a transport vessel. This solution might not give you much in summer, but during spring, autumn and winter it will.
• Dynamos in home fitness equipment. Let’s just say you have a cross trainer at home. Why not use the energy you put in there to generate some energy yourself? (this could also work for a green fitness center)

These are just a few ideas which I came up with, but I think they merit a look. So if anyone who works in the green industry sees this and thinks these are some valid ideas: feel free to use them.

Twitter is one of the most popular and largest growing social networks in the world. It’s also the one I enjoy most, seeing what friends and others are up to, discover new or interesting things and share the links I find share-worthy. It presents an opportunity for brands and individuals to create a social presence and interact with followers, customers or prospects. But in order to do so you will need to make sure people know you’re there. You can do this by sharing great content and through word of mouth, RT’s and Follow Fridays grow your following. This tactic takes time and not all are willing to wait. This has lead to some questionable tactics.

The latest one I’ve seen was one I received at the beginning of this week. I received a mention from an account (it has since been removed for spam) which stated I should follow another account because it tweeted about one of my interests. When I looked at the mentioned account, there was not even a single tweet about that particular interest in the first 20 tweets I read. Then I took a look at the account that mentioned me and saw that all tweets were drafted the same:

@mentionedno.1, @mentionedno.2, @mentionedno.3, @mentionedno.4 : interested in travel? Follow @accountyouneedtofollow for the greatest travel tweets

The practice as I see it is pretty simple: go to one of the most popular twitter accounts and sent every one of their followers a message like above from a bot-account that mentions your account.

What I found most curious about it all is that the bot account had more than a thousand followers. Sure, this could be bots following each other, but I’m sure there were some that just followed the account for being mentioned. Maybe it’s me that takes a look first before following anyone, but what’s the value in following a bot account?

This is just one of the more innocent tactics to get more followers and unfortunately there are more that are more questionable. In order for Twitter to keep their users they should make dealing with spammers one of their top priority. Luckily Twitter has practices in place for removing spam-accounts in order to keep the experience as genuine and enjoyable as possible.