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.

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.

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.

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.

Because I was a bit curious about this, I did a little bit of research. Over the last 3 weeks I got 328 spam comments. 204 of them (62%) were on the aforementioned post. I think that’s a lot for a small post that consists of just 35 words. I’m guessing (and I’m in no way a SEO-guru) this is because it has the word puppies in it (because, let’s be honest, who doesn’t like puppies? (Well, maybe not this guy)) which according to a keyword tool gets about 5 million searches each month. I can understand that if you’re a spammer you want to put your “message” into a post or article that has keywords in it that have a high search rate. But why do it on a small personal blog like my own which, let’s be honest here, is not one of the high flying ones out there?

Spammers probably have a whole lot of their activities automated and probably aren’t even aware where their comments are posted, nor do they care as long as some of their links are clicked and they get paid. Here’s hoping you won’t have to encounter one of those links as long as you visit this blog.

First thing of course is the fact that it’s fun to know what your friends or just people you know are up to and what they find interesting enough to share (which I believe tells you more about a person than anything else). Then there’s the change to reconnect with people you fell a bit out of touch with, because despite the reasons on why that happened, it’s just sending a little friend request to get in touch again.

Then there’s the tech possibilities where you can use a whole lot of applications which makes the experience (I have to rely on what others told me on this) even more worth while. Also it integrates with the application I use for my Twitter account which, in theory, would make it easier for me to work with it.

The biggest drawback on starting to use Facebook on a regular basis is that it’s another potential big time waster. Even though I haven’t used it alot since getting those friends request, you quickly lose time by checking what people are up to and seeing what kind of fun things you can do. And that’s time you could use for doing other (maybe more useful) stuff.

I’m still on the limb when it comes to Facebook and haven’t decided yet if I’ll jump in full time. I do believe I can get some value out of it and understand the appeal, but I also think it can be a huge time waster. I’m planning to talk to some people who use it on a daily basis (for instance Graham is running sort of an experiment on it) and see if they get certain things out of it which I missed (which could be the case since I haven’t really gave it a shot). And I’m sure I’ll be checking out some things as well myself. But as said, I’m still not convinced to give it a real try.

To be honest though: I am intrigued by it.

Let’s say your a musician. Before yesterday Myspace Music was the best choice. Sure, they may have lost the battle with Facebook when it comes to total users, but when playing music was your job, they were a safe bet. But with the addition of Ping by Apple, which is tightly integrated with their iTunes business, you might want to jump into that as well. When you’re a multi-national having a presence on Facebook is never a bad idea. But what do you do with your customers in Brazil (where Orkut is the largest) or the Netherlands (where Hyves has the biggest presence)?

And it’s not just the number of social network/media sites you can choose from, it’s also a matter of whether your actions lead to generating leads or sales. Just getting into social media because “everybody is doing it” is not a sound business strategy. You want to reap the benefits of your efforts. So it’s no surprise that consultancy in social media is growing as a business.

Most businesses have realized that they should have a social presence but don’t know how to go about it. And with the ever growing aditions in social media, making the right decision isn’t getting any easier.

Here’s the idea: the most popular/professional blogs all have categories. Some of those categories appeal more to certain readers than others. But when it comes to feeds most of the time the only thing you can get is the full feed. My idea is that when you hit the “get updates through RSS”-button you’re directed to a web-page where you can select the updates on the categories you want to receive (of course the full feed is still an option) by just checking them off. After hitting a “Done”-button you’ll get a customized RSS-feed.

I came to this while visiting CHUD.com (a movie website I enjoy tremendously). They have what they call a Master RSS list where you can select the categories you want to receive updates from. But if say you want to follow the news, DVD and film reviews you have to c/p three feeds into you RSS reader. Wouldn’t it be more convenient to check of the categories you want in a sort of web form and have the feed created for you?

I think this sort of customization can come in real handy for readers, plus it makes it easier for content creators to serve readers with targeted ads per category. Here’s hoping that this can be turned into a standard. And if this really is a revolutionary, never before thought-up idea, any company interested (I’m looking at you Feedburner) will be happy to learn that my idea-fees are very reasonable! Because remember: you read it here first…or..I think/hope you did.

I also realized that I’ve become interested in the company itself. I read blogs that talk about the company and try to keep up with where it’s heading. Maybe the fact that the valuation of the company is so high, without them really having a source of monetization, is part of that lure too. People seem to be trusting that Twitter is the biggest thing on the web. They do they have a point with their 100 million plus users but Facebook (which I don’t use) is even bigger and some are talking about about a Twitter vs. Facebook showdown (on a side note: the tech industry seems to love these showdowns: Microsoft vs. Linux, Apple vs. Microsoft, Google vs. Yahoo, Google vs. Apple, Facebook vs. Myspace to name just a few from recent history). How it all plays out and what the future brings is still anybodies guess, fact is though that Twitter is a very interesting company and its management has a different outlook on business than many others. Maybe that’s why it’s so interesting to me because I love people/things that are somewhat different than usual.

I still believe that I don’t “get” Twitter like some others seem to do and am pretty sure there are many ways to get more out of it that I don’t know of. But I don’t care about that to be honest since I seem to be getting out of it what I want and enjoy it without it taking too much of my time. I’m guessing there will be many Twitter anniversaries in my future.

So I set myself to a limit of a total of 75 feeds.

In order to get there I didn’t want to weed out just the excess feeds all at once, but take a look at every feed and see how much value it provided me. The first hundred or so weren’t that difficult: those were the ones that were always late with news I got from other blogs or blogs that were virtual identical to others. But going down from say 120 to 75 proved to be more of a challenge. One of the last to go for instance was Engadget, a site I have been following for pretty much as long as I know there are blogs out there. Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with Engadget which is by far the best gadget blog out there. But I’m not interested in every trinket that comes out any longer but more on the big stuff (say the Nexus One or Apple iPad of late). Those are also covered by sites like Mashable and Techcrunch, who also provide news on social media and web related business, something that isn’t covered (much) by Engadget. So Engadget had to go.

That did feel a bit like saying goodbye to an old friend though.

But all in all I’m just happy I reached my goal. There are probably still some feeds that could go, but for now I’ll just keep it the way it is. What this exercise has taught me though is being more picky when it comes to subscribing or keeping feeds. That’s a good thing because I don’t want to waste my time on things that don’t hold any value to me.