Trending topics are something I like to look at on occasion, especially if the topics listed on Twitter are something that falls in to any of my interests. Of course, something I like to look for entertainment reasons. I am sure a lot of other people feel the same way.

However, I am finding there are a lot of people that just have no brains about what is trending. And example of this is the most recent trending topic fail labeled RIP Johnny Depp or just Johnny Depp. This could have been prevented if people did not give into the attention and never replied or used the keywords. Johnny Depp is not dead at all. He is very much alive.

Same goes with the Dfizzy (@dfizzy) incidents in 2009, especially the ones of him encouraging his followers to say Miley Cyrus was pregnant and get that trending to the very top. Of course, within hours, Twitter removed it, and apparently it pissed off some big names. That was not the only incident he encouraged, but it is nothing new for the attention wanting teen.

I love it that Twitter does not censor too many things, but I believe some juggling around trending topics might prove a better move for Twitter, especially on issues like this. Now, I am pretty sure Johnny Depp, as I have observed from his interviews on television, is laid back and will have a good laugh, but what if it were someone else? – someone else who is not so understanding?

I think that Twitter should decide what topics are trendworthy, rather than spamworthy.

Have you seen Twitter trending topic fails like this or something similar? What are your thoughts?

I saw through my Twitter stream someone using Gowalla, and was curious to what it was all about. Gowalla (@gowalla on Twitter) is a site made for people to share where they are in the world. Might sound a bit like telling too much or a way for people to become a bit stalker-ish, but those on the go and use to being social, this is a way to allow people who are interested to know more about you.

You can share if you had a beer or shopped at places like the Navy Pier in Chicago, Illinois. Or if you have been to a place that has not been covered, you can create a place, or as they say at Gowalla, ‘pin’ a place.

The site is really user-friendly and allows you the option of connecting your Gowalla account with your Twitter and Facebook accounts. The systems is even courteous enough to check through your followers to see if anyone is using the system, so you can friend them at Gowalla too!

Gowalla even has a couple phone apps for users to be able to check-in and automatically update on their profile.

Have you tried Gowalla? What do you think of it?

I admire Google for coming out with their own browser. I really do. I went from being a Yahoo! Internet search gal, to Google search years ago. I even prefer Firefox over Internet Explorer. I honestly tried to like Google Chrome.

They said it was fast. It was kind of fast. They said it was great. It was kind of. BUT… I still use Firefox, and even Opera too. I just have no stomach for Google Chrome. The browser is not as fast, and in fact, the first time I launched it… I got the blue screen of death. That really sucked! I felt like I had some kind of computer sacrilegious experience happen.

So… I am sorry Google. As much as I see your ads on Hulu and other places, I have to decline. Please focus on your search engine and stop trying to become the next Yahoo! I was a Yahoo! girl once… so much that I cofounded 3 of the top ten largest Yahoo! Clubs ever before 2001. I just see no point. And sadly, Google Wave is just as low on the totem pole of my list of places to log into because I tried it – AND IT SUCKS!!!

I am not going to totally brush Google products off, but I will say – try harder to impress this hot geeky girl.

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Have you used Google Chrome? What do you think of it?

So Google seems to be seriously looking into reasons why they should stay in or pull out of China. Whether it is the right thing for Google to pull out of China for business reasons as mentioned in TechCrunch, or for the greater good – the fact is that Google can do what they like.

Hacking happens all the time. Ten years ago, we were raving about Yahoo! getting hacked on New Year’s Eve. I remember that because I was online as it was happening and was in shock like the rest of the users on. I have nothing really against China. Their economy is growing and yeah, I wish the United States could be in the same situation, but for any of our home grown companies to venture to another country, it is not my problem to judge Google if they pull out of China.

While some would say that Google is not profiting well in China, and others argue it is stupid to pull out because the country has 1/6 of the world’s population – who cares. If Google pulls out, what can the common techy online do – NOTHING (but grouch about it.)

Perhaps as mentioned in the TechCrunch link above (and I will put a quote from it):

This may be the most shocking part: In retrospect Yahoo has played China far better than Google. It pulled out of the country years ago, knowing it wouldn’t win and owns nearly 40% of the Alibaba, a company that very definitely knows how to grow in China. Entrepreneur and angel investor in China Bill Bishop —who hasn’t always agreed with my China coverage in the past—pointed this out, adding “Not often Yahoo looks smarter than Google.”

Perhaps Google could learn from this and invest smartly in Chinese web companies as Yahoo! has.

What do you think?

Recently I came up with a dilemma with my own scripts PHPads and PHPurl. Because they have been so popular, and I have been hosting the zip files on my own server, it has been eating up my bandwidth. Believe me this year, the downloads for both have skyrocketed compared to last year. Link promotion from many websites have been awesome, BUT… I have only received $60 in donations last year. I am lucky to have received what I have and appreciative. That is just 3 hours of my time….or even for those who want another smaller comparison – at minimum wage, which covers 1- 8 hour day.

I had to take the files off my server and host them at a free host. I am hosting them at FileHosting.org. I also found a lot of people were going directly to the page and not enjoying the rest of my site, which has a lot of articles that are very useful.

So… in the near future, I am moving it to another page, and putting 125×125 banners on my sidebar. By the way, the site is about to go through a bit of an overhaul. Nothing too extravagant, but something I feel is needed. People who have linked to the scripts in their articles, I will be going through and asking that they either link the Hotscripts listings for each script or my main site.

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I know I am not the only web developer that has had issues. Some have removed their free versions and re-posted to charge a small fee. Some simply removed their script for good. Some could not keep their sites up because of bandwidth from the downloads. Some no longer bother to answer support emails, even if there is a FAQ. The script might be free, but let me ask: If it has helped you quite a bit and you have a few dollars, you might consider pitching in a few dollars. It is not much and it keeps future scripts coming in, and staying free.

It also helps for web developers with smaller websites who might need more bandwidth and space, or even database resources.

Other ways to appreciate your web developer is to either check out their sponsors, or possibly become an advertiser. That way, you still get something for your money. You can also visit other parts of their site. If they blog, perhaps they might be someone you might want to connect with, or find that they have a lot of great information.

Have you shown your appreciation to your favorite web developer lately?

Recently I read an article on TechCrunch called The 100 Millionth Deviation on DeviantART Is A Gay Sex Story, But I’m Going To Show You This Arctic Unicorn Instead. I would not tell them to retract their article, but I will say it was the dumbest thing next up to the other sites they have bagged on without looking at it from more perspectives. In fact, the last major act of idiocy was publishing that they had been privy to information that had been hacked from Twitter.

I do want to note that TechCrunch is not a site that is known to not be bias, so when you read what their writers have to say, you only get that one-sided feel. However, TechCrunch is a very informative site that tries to reveal the ins and outs of the tech world.

This time, TC decided to set its sights on DeviantART, a site for all types of artists can congregate. Yes – all walks, from barely novice, to artists so advanced, you see their work when you watch movies, peruse the game aisles for that perfect game, and much more. Yes, there are a lot of work done by amateurs, and there are art pieces that may push the link of taboo, but it is a community – a VERY successful community that has been around for almost 10 years.

I am not saying this because I have a premium membership, I am a beta tester, and have been a DeviantART member for over 5 years. I am saying this from experiencing communities that have strived and failed to produce what DeviantART has done. On a social media level, they have effectively branded themselves as a top art community. The staff interacts and there are many smaller communities within that are quite active. Recently, DeviantART opened a new section called Groups. In fact, I run a few myself. There are professional artists lending their spare time to help novices. Some people I have seen improve so drastically that they have become successful professionals themselves. I have seen some amazing concept art that has been used for past and upcoming movies, as well as for gaming. There are even manga artists too!

Are you a member of DeviantART? What are your thoughts about this?

Lately there have been a a lot of scam “fan” pages popping up that I have noticed, especially this holiday season. Of course, I have seen a few this past year, but in the past week alone, I have received quite a few invites to pages promising to give me a free item. Most of them have one several things in common:

- Offer to give a product for free for joining
- Ask that you invite all of your friends on Facebook
- Complete a Survey

Some of the offers include shirts or even laptops. As I have mentioned before – free is suppose to be without expecting anything in return in the first place. They are clearly scams to generate money from surveys. What you can do is not encourage behavior by not joining or filling out the surveys. You can also report the pages to Facebook for spam advertising. It is a waste of time for you as you will never receive what was promised, especially if you might take up an offer on the surveys that might be difficult to get out of without purchasing anything.

Have you seen these types of scams or others? What others have you seen?

Now, this post has been brewing for a while, but I was not sure how I wanted to go about addressing comment spam. First off, comment spam is what you would think it is. It is the unwanted, off topic comment of either a bot, a person hired by a company, or someone who dropped in and totally bypassed the post to comment instead of use the contact form.

Some people have friends who visit their blog and leave comments that may not relate to the post, and for some that is fine. However, this post is more directed toward spammers, both bots and actual people who are hired (or spamming for their own site/ company) by a company to post on your blog.

Why do they do this? Well, they want to attract your business and business from your visitors.

You can use Askimet, a Captcha (or Recaptcha) or any other plugin or script to combat / block spam, but the spam will come through and sometimes it may be from the simplest and somewhat harmless message at first glance.

Here are a few things to identify these comment spammers:
How did the reader fill out their name? Obviously if it looks a bit suspicious, you might want to delete it.
What is the URL that the person left?
What is the email address that was left? I tend to see a lot of spammers using .ru domain extension names in emails. Also, if the name and the email address are different – for example, a “Pat” left a comment and within their email address, it said “derrickwaters@——”, then that might be a bit questionable.
What did they leave as a comment? Some of the most recent ones I have seen:
- “You write well. Are you a professional writer?”
- “I did not understand at first, but after going through your post again, I understood well.”
- “Great post. I subscribed to your RSS feed.” (<– I have NEVER had a real person leave a comment like that and most have illegitimate addresses, names, and even the URL is suspicious.)
- “I’m going to go subscribe to your RSS feed.”

Of course, the other obvious are long comments with multiple links to different products. I am not going to copy and paste an example of that.

It might suck to take a little time to remove comment spam, but it is worth it. If you are lucky enough to be self-hosted and have IP deny, you can use the IPs that your blog records for each comment and block the spammers.

How do you identify and take care of tricky comment spammers?