Scoble is Right and Arrington, and Loic are wrong about "authority"?

This weekend the blogosphere flared up over twitter having "authority" search functions.  I say this is totally not going to work because some factors.  I am not saying they have the right idea but I do see a really major downfall.   Loic wants to be able to search for content that has more "authority" and because he is looking for good content.   I understand where he is coming from because he wants to look for content for his Seesmic Company.   I can see he wants to find the best videos to offer to his users for his company.  I totally understand and really appreciate that he wants to work for his company.

[ad#cricket-1-1]Now being that Arrington talked about this on Techcrunch, and agreeing with Loic over this.  I have to wonder why he wants to agree.  You see he is also into content and understand that if the "authority" for searches in twitter from his blog post means people will flock to his site and he gets more pageviews.  I say this is the wrong for him to agree because there is nothing going to stop people finding his content.   Also that would mean his blog post would have more "authority" then the common person who might not like this blog post and you wouldn't see that until you get to the next page or even a few pages back.   So we have these two wanting more "authority" and more content.

Then we have Scoble and his blog post.  Now let's talk about this from where scoble says it's a bad idea.  Scoble talks about gaming the system, and if you think back to Digg killing all the high number of members because they were using scripts.  Here we are again with regards to twitter.  Now if we have authority people are going to game the system because no matter how hard we try it will be a competition.

We have botnets and we have bots on twitter.  It really isn't hard to have a bot on twitter, and that is where we have a problem.  You see if we have "authority" and we want to game the system.  We just have bots with authority and by having other bots subscribe to each other.  There lies the problem.  People will easily be able to game te system and create even more trouble finding the content they are so dearly looking for.   Now I don't usually get into the whole "he's right and he wrong" disputes but this one has to be brought to people attentions.

I say this when did "Authority" stop people from talking about the really important stuff happening in the world.   We have people from Friendfeed talking about this and we have people from twitter talking about this als.  Loic and Arrington need to learn content isn't hard to find, it will always be there.  You just have to open your eyes to see.   The way I see it, we have a coin and we have the good and bad.  We should just keep the bad out of there and keep the good stuff we already have.   This goes in the bad idea bin for the time.

Stop botnets in its tracks With a Firewall!

According to PC World and I'll quote:

According to FireEye chief scientist Stuart Staniford, detection rates are so poor that, on average, only around 40 percent of security software can detect binaries during the period of greatest infectivity and danger, namely the first few days after a particular variant starts being used by botnet builders.

[via PC World]

[ad#ad2-left]Now let's talk about this, having been seeing recent surges of people getting infected.  I've come to the conclusion that companies like AVG and other Anti-Virus companies are keeping up.   Now true if all you have is an Anti-virus and nothing else that greatly increases your likely hood of getting a virus.

In a recent virus storm, We have people finding my site because of a Good Firewall.   No if he didn't have anything but Windows firewall then it would of gotten through and you would not of known about it.  So let's talk about how to prevent botnet attacks.   This is relatively easy and if you follow some common rules.   You to could be less likely to be infected.  I will say this most people don't do these common tips and they should do them.

[ad#digg-right]So what should you do to help prevent from getting a Virus or Malware.  This is really simple, you want to find an Anti-virus Software that you like, and Firewall that you like also.  You'll also want to download the tools to better help you in case you do get infected.  Some of these tools I recommend are Hijackthis, Spybot Search and Destroy, Hitman Pro, and Ad-aware 2007 Edition (FREE).  Then Go buy a Sandisk USB memory Stick and put those on there for later use!!  You will always want to keep a backup of those just in case you get infected.

[ad#ad2-right]Make sure you update Windows regularly.  Having seen this time and time again, if you don't keep windows updated then you lose the battle.  If you have a system that needs updating, I suggest downloading the Clone to Autopatcher.  This little program will download the files needed to update your system without having to be online.  Although, you can have windows update automatically every month but that might not update the recommended updates only the ones that are hot.  It doesn't matter which way you prefer to update, as long as you do to update regularly, Like every 2nd Tuesday of the Month.

One last tip you should also keep your Firewall and Anti-virus updated.  There is a little program that will do that, it's call AppSnap.  If you follow all these recommendations you will greatly reduce your chances of getting a virus on your system.

Comfirmed: DHL to Lays off 10,000 workers!!

[ad#ad2-left-1][COMFIRMED]

According to The Press-Enterprise has announced all 18 U.S. Hubs will close and that means 10,000 workers will be out of a job.  They will keep 3,000 for international business.   I wanted to tell everyone about this as soon as I found out.

There is a rumor that DHL might layoff some of it's employees. About 8,000 Jobs will be announced to tomorrow when they release the earnings report. Now I know very little about this parent company but they have 475,100 employees and that would mean 1.6% of the people would be laid off!!

According to Business Week there Volume have been going down this year.

(CNN) -- A southern Ohio community is bracing for possible layoffs as DHL Express -- the largest employer in the area -- planned to announce its quarterly earnings report and restructuring details. [Via CNN]

[ad#ad2-right]

From what I can tell this will affect the Eastern part of the US. I've done a little digging for everyone to see just why they would want to layoff so many people. They have to reduce there spending because there Volume isn't as it should. This will also effect delivery of packages, and might end up slowing the delivery of Christmas packages.  So pack those presents early and ship them off early, to make sure they get delivered before Christmas!!  To see other layoffs this year just click this LINK.  It will show you all of the layoffs that have/are/or might happen in the near future.

Can you DIGG me?

I don't know how many people would where this shirt!!

It's good to be: MrBabyMan

Below is a humorous video account of a 'day in the life' of MrBabyMan (Andrew Sorcini), who is ranked as the number one digger overall.

Sorcini works by day as a film editor, and has recently been helping Disney with animated programming for television and features. He worked on the Goofy and Tigger movies. Capitalizing on his tremendous Digg success, he also co-host's a podcast on emerging issues in technology and the internet - The Drill Down, with top diggers msaleem (Muhammed Saleem) and Zaibatsu (Reg).

Sorcini says his online handle, MrBabyMan, is a reference to his “arrested development,” since he loves to play games and have fun. His daughter, who appears in the video below, loves to watch herself on the small screen.

I want to post this because it made me laugh!! ;)

Digg exchange gang busted !

I was just surfing the DigitalPoint Forums today as usual when i saw something going on there. Some people starting frequent threads with titles similar to “Selling DiggBoss Points”, “DiggBoss Invites for free”. Find all of them here . I had a quick look at it what is this DiggBoss actually ? I took a invite from a guy there who sent me a link through PM to a site with URL http://www.diggboss.com. I was confused initially, but after I registered and logged in there, i was shocked to see whats happening. So many people, almost 100+ trading diggs and stumbles there. All they do is, look at the stories listed there and digg them. It works in this way - when a person diggs one story he gets one diggpoint. He can increase his diggPoints this way. When he has enough diggpoints, he can submit his own story and it will be listed there to be dugg by the other members. The system was working perfectly for both digg and stumbles. Not only this, i also find many people collecting diggpoints and selling them there for prices like 5$ for 30 DiggPoints. I thought of giving it a try to see whether it really works or not. I made a sample story and submitted it to digg. Find it by clicking here. purchased around 100 digg points from a guy there. I then added this story to the diggboss campaign, and the system showed they will trade me 50 diggs for 100 diggpoints. I submitted and waited for a few hours. WoW ! 50 diggs and it got the ball rolling. One after the other, it broke around 121 diggs and made to homepage for a few mins (the story was a bit funny, so it gots some natural diggs later). It made me around 1200 unique hits to my site.

But i was really shocked to see how these social networking sites are exploited. Not only this, i can also see people exchanging diggs openly on webmaster forums like DigitalPoint. See the following link -

Check this google search results

Its really disappointing to see exploitation of such social networks!. I guess digg must take serious action to stop this stuff.

Perhaps digg could easily see the above story and ban all those who dugg it, But the big problem is that, the gang was only used to get the ball rolling !.

I knew digg has it's flaws but that shows you how many flaws they actually do have! : ( I wonder how many are actually done by those people!!

DiggKiller

If you like web games like I do, Go check out:

http://www.kurtmargenau.com/diggkiller/

It's a derivative of the API http://www.digg.com and is quite fun.