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Archive for September, 2009

Mosaic World

Mosaic World

A while ago I was approached by Ian Ma, a guy who found me through my blog, and was interested in interviewing me for a Machine Learning community about my Ph.D. work – a project called Mosaic World. I warned Ian: ask an Academic – even an ex-academic – about his work, and don’t be surprised if you’ll get a really long answer.

 
Since I’ve been asked by several people “really, what is it that you did during your studies?” I thought of combining both. Therefore, I wrote a (very) long post about what I’ve done, in layman’s terms, took bits of it for Ian’s interview and added some bits that were not in my original post (mainly technical aspects). I planned to publish it together with another post, preferably a humorous one, in case I scare some readers away.

 
After reading my answers, Ian decided to break up my interview to two parts and politely asked me if I could not to publish my post until he publishes both parts of the interview. I’m actually wondering whether I’ll post my version at all, since much of it is the same… perhaps I’ll just do it “for the record” so if anyone ever asks me what I’ve done, I’ll have somewhere to point him at. If I do that, I’ll also post some links to some online movies (some mine, some not) which I think are cool and will help convey the points I make.

 
Either way, if you’re interested in what I’ve done, my answers to Ian are not very technical (only slightly more than my original version). If there’s any chance that you won’t find this interesting, feel free to skip ahead.

 
Ian’s interview with me (Part I)

 
And now, I need to work on that humorous post 😉 (which I’ve actually been planning to do for 2 weeks now!)

 

Celebrity following

 

As you may know, the famous blogger, John Chow, has recently unfollowed almost all of his followers (~55,000) in a single day and left only a 100. I read his post about this and all the comments (there were a lot of those). I also read several of the posts other bloggers wrote following his decision, some with very harsh criticism. I’ve met John Chow in Affiliate Summit East and spoke to him on several occasions and think he’s a very nice guy. He unfollowed me too, but then again, I can’t say we are close, so I understand his decision, and certainly don’t take it personally.

 
But this post is not about John Chow’s decision. Plenty of words were written about that.

 
After reading all the mentioned posts it made me think: why do people follow celebrities? I don’t think John Chow is really a celebrity, but to a certain audience, he is. When I was an academic, certain people were celebrities in my field, but I assure you, they won’t get recognized on the street and you’ve never heard their names.

 
There are several reasons I can think of why people would follow a celebrity on Twitter (and note that this also applies to other social media sites such as Facebook):

  1. To get a reciprocal follow: meaning, if you follow John Chow, he might follow you in return. I believe that’s usually not the case when dealing with celebrities because there are several other million people you can follow who will follow you back, but I’m just listing it as a possible factor.

     

  2. Because you’re curious about their lives. Why do people follow Ashton Kutcher or Britney Spears? To see what they do in their day to day life. Hey, it’s all public, so why not? They invite this publicity.

     

  3. Because they provide interesting content. Some celebrities, such as Mashable, write excellent content. Really, almost every one of Mashable’s tweets is a winner – I could not unfollow him even if I wanted to because he’s simply too good a source to give up. It doesn’t matter at all that he doesn’t follow me back. The New York times doesn’t read my blog and I don’t stop reading it, do I?

     

  4. Because they want a chance to interact with them. If you follow someone, you can comment on something they do or they may follow you back… and then you may actually get to ‘talk’ to them. Touch the stars. Be a part of their lives. This goes back to one of my first posts which dealt with interaction.

     

I think for most people it’s usually (4), that is, the chance to interact with celebrities, and to a lesser extent, (2), that is, to simply follow their lives out of curiosity. However, let’s face it, the tweets of most celebrities are extremely boring. It’s like seeing the twitter account of your not so bright teenage next door neighbor. That being said, interacting with a celebrity means you get to say “Hey, I chatted with Britney today” even if all she responded to you was “thank you” – and you get to talk about this for years to come! So I think interaction is the main reason, even if it’s trivial interaction.

 
This reminds me of quick personal anecdote: should I be discussing this in a public forum? Never mind. In the mid 90s, a friend of mine used to be a secretary of a very famous Israeli general who – years later – was a candidate to be the head of the Israeli Mossad (he didn’t get the job by the way). You’d often read about him in the news at the time since he dealt with very sensitive issues. When she left her job, she had a small going-away party (for around 20 people), and he came too as her boss. She personally introduced everyone to everyone, so I was introduced to him as well. At some point someone was talking in the background while she was making a speech, effectively interrupting her (rather impolitely), so he shouted “Silence, Schlessinger!”. Clearly he confused that guy who was misbehaving with me (my friend quickly corrected him, “No no, that wasn’t Udi, he’s a good guy”). But for years later I used to say “You know, the potential head of the Israeli Mossad shouted at me in anger”. Silly, I know, but worthy of an anecdote even 15 years later. Don’t you think?

 
Anyway, my above conclusions made me examine my own list of people I follow. I follow very few celebrities, and most of them are in John Chow’s league (i.e. most people won’t know them). I asked myself: why do I follow William Shatner? I really liked him in Star Trek, but his Tweets are boring (no offense Bill if you’re reading this). I know why I follow Mashable (mentioned above). I started following Brent Spiner (Data from Star Trek) because – I guess – I was curious and wanted to interact with him, but now I follow him simply because he is a very interesting person. He’s extremely witty and funny, and provides one of the best sources of content on Twitter.

 
After this pondering I realized that very few of the celebrities I follow are really justified. Most are either boring (often very boring) and they most definitely don’t interact with me. So why should I follow them? Once I realized that, I unfollowed most (like all 6 of them 😉 ) and left those that either I really find interesting, or have interacted with in the past. Sorry Shatner, you had to go. Don’t take it personally, I still think you were awesome in Star Trek.

 
Just thought I’ll share this with you, my reader: if you follow some people (celebrity or otherwise) on Twitter, ask yourself, why do you do that? Do you really care about them? Do you just follow them because you want an extra follower? Do you find their tweets interesting? Thoughts worth thinking in my opinion.

 

me


In case you are not familiar with it, the Google Keyword tool is an excellent free keyword research tool. You type in a keyword or a phrase, and it shows you the search volume, cost for advertising, competition as well as associated words and phrases. A necessary tool for all affiliate marketers.

 
Some time ago, out of curiosity, I used it with my own name as the seed keyword. The result quite disturbed me. But that’s in the past. In fact, it made me reflect on my life and ponder who I am. Moreover, since today is Yom Kippur (the Jewish day of atonement) I figure it’s most appropriate that I post this now. Google was right and I was wrong. But let me explain what the search tool found:

 
First, apparently my name is associated with:
“Ten stupid things women do”
“Ten stupid things women do to mess up their lives”
“Care and feeding of husbands”

 
Huh. So accurate it’s uncanny. I’ve really underestimated Google. I didn’t realize the burden my wife carries. I hope she doesn’t read this!

 
Second, the tool even further speculates about my life and ties my name with:
“Bad childhood good life”

 
Like I said, at first I didn’t agree with this claim, but after going through all my repressed memories, I realized Google is in fact right. My childhood wasn’t as good as I remember it to be. It even rained the day I went to Disneyland, how unfair is that?? My childhood just sucked, and thanks to Google I see that now.

 
Perhaps they should rename it from “Google Keyword Tool” to “Google Psychic Tool”. Because it is! Google just reaches into an interdimensional database of facts and pulls out the nitty gritty stuff you won’t find elsewhere, in places such as Bing or Yahoo. And I won’t even mention Ask, not even as a joke. That’s why Google is #1. Because of this stuff.

 
Final conclusion: if an advertiser wants to bid on my name, he should consider the headline “Ten Stupid Things Women Do”. This is scientifically proven to work.

Unethical vendors

Up until now I assumed Paypal is kind of like a credit card company (in some ways). That is, if the seller doesn’t give you what you’ve purchased, they will refund you. Well, it turns out this only applies to physical products and not downloadable software. I’ve bought software using Paypal numerous times and never had any issues.

 
That is, until now: this week I purchased a product I saw advertised under the ’30 day money back guarantee’ (which is practically the standard these days). In my second day of usage I realized it’s an inferior product, so politely asked for a refund based on that statement. The manufacturer refused. I disputed the transaction with Paypal based on the above premise, and in response, the software company revoked my license to use their product (which, again, I already paid for). Based on this claim, I escalated things with Paypal and now demanded a refund (in their lingo: turned it from a dispute to a claim). Paypal refused on the grounds of “not offering this protection for downloadable software”. When I asked ‘then what are you good for?’ they answered ‘well, we do not give your bank details to the vendor’. True, but that’s not my problem at the moment. And I was always under the impression they do this, probably because they do extend this protection for everything else.

 
So you may have been aware of this, but I was not. Considering that a large portion of affiliate marketing software is purchased through Paypal, we all need to know this.

 
I’m still giving the software manufacturer some time to comply (hint: it’s a maker of one of the popular twitter applications), and that’s why I’m not saying who it is.

 
My conclusions:

  1. From now on I will make considerable effort to use a credit card instead of Paypal whenever I can, simply because when you need them – they are not there for you and 99% of all internet marketing products are software based (I’ve never bought one which wasn’t). This way, if a vendor cheats you, you have someone protecting your interests.

     

  2. If the software manufacturer does not comply (I won’t get a refund, but at least I want my license to use their inferior tool), I’ll start by advertising precisely who they are, and every single time I see a tweet on Twitter (which I see quite often), I’ll convince them to stay away from that piece of code. Hey, even if I convince one person not to buy it, I’m already successful – but I will be much more successful than that. Maybe I’ll use some of the other Twitter tools to automate that 😉

     

  3. I may sue them in a small court or something. It’s only $97 but it’s a matter of principle. And clearly the law is on my side.

This is one of the times I am happy I have a blog. Even if I don’t win this battle, I’ll definitely win the war.

I’ve been slow to update my blog lately. Lots of family issues to take care that have been distracting me, and worse, kind of prevent me from being able to write cheerful posts (which is what I intend to write next, hopefully today or tomorrow). But this is something I wanted to share first:

 
I always see people measuring their Twitter follower growth using TwitterCounter. In fact, I have done this too in a previous post.

 
That being said, I recently found out that the TwitterGrader has a much better growth chart. It appears to be virtually real time, much more accurate, and easier to access. Although I highly disagree with their grading algorithm (..which I mentioned here..), their charting method is top notch. In fact, here’s my chart.

 
Isn’t it interesting? You could tell I tried different approaches in my Twitter follower attraction by the various patterns.

 
But a picture is worth a thousand words. Just look at the differences between the two charting methods I mentioned:

 

Chart Using TwitterGrader

Chart Using TwitterGrader



 
Chart Using TwitterCounter

Chart Using TwitterCounter



 

the variety of spammers

when you have a couple of websites you begin noticing a predictable situation: you get spammers. Unless you use a plugin such as Akismet, these can make your life miserable. Note that Akismet can occasionally misclassify a valid comment as spam, so you should still monitor your spam queue periodically.

 
That being said, despite the fact spammers are pests, I’m beginning to find the amusing factor in them. In my book site (yes, I have one) I have a forum system that’s never been truly adopted by the users (unfortunately), and so, there were more spam comments than real comments. For a while I played a game with them: I’d edit their spam messages to meaningful text. For example:

 
“Buy Xenadroxalix for $50” would change to “I really liked the Time Traveler’s wife. It was both romantic as well as creative. Truly a book for everyone”.

 
“Enlarge your ears for $25 using Vibralis” would change to “Not sure I agree with the previous commenter, I think it wasn’t a very good book. It just doesn’t make sense scientifically”.

 
Sometimes I’d even take it a degree further and just really mess with the comment. For example:

 
“Go to Kasinos and win thousands of dollars would change to “hey i like youre website but its could use some more reviews of books like jon gricham and things like that you know what im taking about?”.

 
Recently I got fed up, the game stopped amusing me. I’m going to just shut down that forum system.

 
But anyway, I’ve had enough experience with spammers that in this post I’d like to classify them to five categories:

 

  1. The mass linker: I don’t know what this type of spammer is thinking, but he posts massive comments with dozens or even hundreds of links, usually involving some sort of sexual or psychiatric drugs. That’s the classic spammer. It goes on like this “Xenadrioxi for $50. Venogra $50. Kialikx $80” only a hundred times.

     

  2. The innocent commenter: this type of spammer usually leaves innocent looking , yet very generic spammy comments. For example: “Interesting post, look forward for more”. “Thanks for the article, would like you to focus on this subject again”. And sometimes even something “subtler” “I disagree with the approach you took, there are many complex points you are not addressing” (Yes, I got the exact same comment on several unrelated sites that are located on different hosting accounts).

     
    Sometimes it’s even clear the spammer doesn’t know English, as the sentence looks like one that was translated using Google Translate (or an equivalent tool). I don’t remember how it went exactly, but I got one that said something like “Very decent information. Honour you!” (clearly translated, no?)

     

  3. The weird commenter: One of my sites started getting a lot of those. Usually they leave a meaningless comment and signature (with a link) at the end. For example: “How do you spell your surname?” “On one hand…, on the other hand…” “Where are you going?” “When is the next bus to the airport?” “It’s early yet!”. These five comments are real spam comments I got today (in fact, this is what made me write this article. This is just funny!).

     

  4. The massive spammer: this type of spammer is the worst: he just sends one of the above in massive amounts. I used to (naively) think I could deal with all spam myself. But when one of my sites started getting thousands of comments I gave up. Did I mention I really like Akismet?

     

  5. The foreign spammer: this type of spammer couldn’t care less about being detected. He leaves comments in other languages. For example, the forum I mentioned above started getting a lot of Russian comments. I had no idea what they meant (that is, until I used Google Translate – I think they were about alternative healing), but they were clearly spam.

 
I’m sure if I spend more time I can come up with more. Have you got any interesting spam story you’d be willing to share?

 
Edit: since I’ve created this I’ve discovered yet another type. This one – I think – is the most sophisticated spammer. It displays a generic comment, usually – but not always – a question but one that may be legitimately asked, often flattering. For example: “what a good domain name, what made you pick this one?” or (this one is a real example): “Ooh oops i just typed a long comment and as soon as i hit post it came up blank! Please please tell me it worked right? “. Another real one: “I wrote a similar blog regarding this subject but your is better”. They’re usually not really relevant to the post, but innocent looking that many blog owners may approve them because they appear valid. So.. be warned.

iStethoscope


 
I thought I’ll share this story with my readers because I find it inspiring and because it happened to a good friend of mine.

 
My (ex) Ph.D. supervisor and friend, Peter Bentley, has an iPhone he really loves (I mean it, he really loves it). I became Peter’s student after I read one of his books – he’s published quite a number of academic texts and popular science books. Peter is a great writer, and I learned a lot from him (regardless of the fact I got a doctorate thanks to him!). Here’s Peter’s Wikipedia page (yes, I’m mentioned there too).

 
One day, purely for fun, Peter created an iPhone app: it was called iStethoscope and with it you could basically use your iPhone as a stethoscope: listen to your heartbeat, etc. Since he genuinely created it without any intentions of profit, he distributed it for free, and it became quite popular. I remember recommending it to a friend of mine who downloaded it and thought it was quite cool. I never used it myself since I don’t have an iPhone (or any other Smartphone), but that’s another story.

 
It turns out such an application has commercial usages. Peter was contacted by a cardiologist who was really interested in the application and suggested creating a commercial version: one which will allow people to record their heartbeats and send it to him to check for irregularities. Apparently this is much more powerful than many existing “real” medical applications. Moreover, people from all over the world can use it to get the services of a good cardiologist, as long as they have an iPhone and an internet connection. Peter naturally agreed, and the result is iStethoscope Pro, a commercial iPhone application that’s being now sold.

 
When he told me about this I thought it’s a really cool story: this truly demonstrates the strength of our present day society which is backed by modern technology, everything is so well connected that potentially someone in the other side of the world can utilize something you’ve created for yourself as long as you’ve shared it – or talked about it – online. Collaborations become easy, and as this story demonstrates, at times you don’t even need to seek them – they’ll come to you (though I assume usually that is not the case).

 
I like this kind of story, where someone does something for altruistic reasons and it results not only in helping people in a far greater extent than he anticipated, but he also ends up getting a reward for his efforts. In particular I like them when they happen to a friend of mine.

 
To read more about iStethoscope Pro, check out its page on Peter’s site.

 
I’m also going to share a number of videos Peter created to demonstrate how to use it which are useful.. but I also find them quite funny too since he doesn’t say a word in any of the videos! 🙂

How Accurate is Alexa?

Alexa is an internet service that by using a toolbar that is installed on a large number of people’s browsers, is able to collect a lot of information on internet sites. Since the claim is this statistical sample is large enough to make statistically significant statements, Alexa theoretically can be used to accurately measure traffic of most (if not all) internet websites.

 
The lower the traffic rank score, the more popular the site is and the more traffic it gets. For example, I just checked Google’s traffic rank and it is 1. I tend to believe this is accurate and Google is the most popular website in the world. Bing is ranked at 19. Of course, it can’t be 100% accurate since not all internet users in the world have Alexa installed, but the claim is that it’s accurate. And with a large enough base of users that accurately represent the collective behaviors of internet users (this is pretty important!) it should be true (this is the same problem faced by people who conduct polls – to get a sample that represents that the population demographics).

 
I noticed that with some of my sites, Alexa seems to estimate traffic pretty accurately However, with others, it is completely and utterly wrong. For example, my most popular site – quite a niche site admittedly – yet one that has been able to get a very decent daily number of visitors and two page 1 Google rankings, is assigned an extremely bad traffic rank of ~5,000,000! This is far from accurate. The mentioned site gets at least 3-5 times as much traffic as this blog, yet has a far, far worse rank. And this blog is barely a month and a half old.

 
The answer to this question is simple: the ‘average’ user does not visit my mentioned website as much. However, isn’t the claim that Alexa’s user base is large enough to be able to give a good indicator? And if that is not the case, how can we trust its rankings for anything except for the most popular/mainstream websites, really?

 
My goal in this post has not been to analyze the pros and cons of Alexa, but more to pose an open question to readers: How has been your experience with Alexa rankings? And if it’s been accurate (in your opinion), is your site big/small, on a popular subjects/niche topics, targeted to a specific demographic/worldwide? I am just curious in trying to get a better understanding for this.

Twitter tools and sites

Wow, again I write about Twitter. This is becoming a Twitter blog. Well, what can I say – I like Twitter, and spend a large portion of my time there – naturally it’s something I think a lot about. Next post won’t be about Twitter (my promise to myself).

 
Although I’ve seen articles that list useful Twitter sites (and/or tools), I find that many of them don’t have a lot of value. Consequently, I thought I’ll share my own list, which I’ve created for my own usage.

 

Tools:

I only use a single tool, TweetDeck, which is a fantastic tool that allows you to do everything the web interface allows you, but much much more. Phrased differently: the web interface is not really practical, you need something like TweetDeck to really be able to benefit from Twitter if you have more than a few dozen followers. What I particularly like is the ability to create ‘columns’ where only certain friends, or certain search terms appear – though you can still see the Twitter timeline if you want. As a result, it allows you to focus on what you find interesting, while still benefiting from the whole.

 
There are many free & paid Twitter tools, but I don’t find them useful (i.e. TwitterLocal, etc)

 

Sites:

 

  1. Search.Twitter.com: a must. Twitter’s internal search engine. Brings you discussions that occurred in the past few seconds. Hey Google, can you do that?

     

  2. Friend or follow: shows you the people you follow but haven’t returned your follow, and the opposite as well (the site refers to them as ‘fans’). Very useful if you like to get followed in return for following someone.

     

  3. Backupmy.net: one of my favorites. Twitter only backs up your last 3,000 tweets. However, if you write a lot of interesting tweets, have multiple conversations you’d like to keep, or just like having your tweets stored, this site allows you to do this for free. I downloaded all my tweets and it was pretty amusing to see my first tweet back in March… I was so young and naive.

     

  4. Twitter grader: I actually thought of dedicating an entire post to this site. This is a ‘grading site’ of sorts for Twitter users. Basically, based on certain factors (number of followers, number of tweets, number of retweets, number of recent tweets, etc) it assigns each user a score. Moreover, it allows you to see the global top users, top users in your country, state, and city. I think their algorithm is significantly flawed and has multiple problems. However, it seems to be popular, so I occasionally check myself as well. I didn’t write the post about this because I suspect this may be a post that only interests me (.. I am an ex-computer scientist after all, so algorithms still appeal to me). If there’s anyone interested, I’ll be more than happy to write why I think this site’s algorithm is so wrong. One day I’ll create a site that will really enable ‘measuring’ individual users.

     

  5. Twitoria: allows you to find users that haven’t updated their pages for a given amount of time. If they’re not your personal friends, you may want to remove them from your list.

     

  6. My Tweet Space: fantastic tool for creating Twitter backgrounds. Highly recommend, and many thanks for the good folks over there that allow us to use it for free.

     

  7. Twitterfeed: allows you to feed your blog directly into Twitter. Some WP plugins allow you to do that as well, but this is another way. Although I don’t currently use it, I intend to use it in the very near future.

     

  8. Future Tweets: allows you to schedule future tweets. I’ve only used it once and it seemed kind of cool, but didn’t really feel the need to use it since then. Maybe I’ll use it again in the future.

     

  9. Topsy: a search engine for tweets – allows you to find out how many times a tweet has been retweeted. Pretty cool.

     

  10. Stuff to Tweet: shows you the coolest tweets. Can’t say I’ve really used it, though at times it’s interesting to see what’s popular.

     

  11. Revtwt: Although I’ve not used this myself, I think it’s fair that I include it just because many people would find it interesting. In short, the site allows you to make money from your tweets. I don’t think a lot of money, but if you have many followers, this can accumulate to a respectable amount, I hear.

 
Please let me know if you think I’ve missed an important Twitter site or tool. There are several more in my list I don’t find that useful, but I discover new ones almost on a daily basis.

Twitter Followers

Although I am a big proponent of gaining Twitter followers naturally, through interaction, without using any tools (read my previous post on gaining Twitter followers for free), lately I feel I’ve stumbled into – how shall I call it – a barrier of sorts.

 
Up until now I have been heavily using Twitter (as those who follow me clearly know), and I would say gained roughly between 80-100 followers every day I spent on Twitter. Often I would refresh my screen, and within minutes 1 or 2 new followers would appear.

 
However, this changed once I passed 2,000 followers. I was doing my own thing (if anything, perhaps even used Twitter more heavily), but suddenly I was not gaining more than 25 followers per day. This has been going on for roughly a week. Although I wish I could explain it by the fact there’s a labor day weekend here in the US (and overall, I see a decreased number of visitors in many of my sites), this seems too sharp a transition to be a coincidence.

 
Perhaps I need to explain again my ‘strategy’ (if it can be called one) for gaining followers. I simply talk to people. I RT people. I send articles and links I find interesting. And people follow me. I am not doing the ‘other’ strategy, that is, follow 500 people, and weed out the 2/3 that haven’t followed me back, follow another 500 people, and repeat the process. I know this works, but – well, it just didn’t seem to be necessary. Of course I don’t mean to say I’m not following anyone on my own – that is far from the truth, but that number is pretty small (20 people a day?).

 
Since I am primarily relying on people following me, which is what I call interaction, and this interaction hasn’t changed, it appears to me that there is another factor involved here.

 
At the moment I’m not entirely sure what it is. I do have a guess though. I’ve been told by a source I consider reliable that once a user has 2,000 followers, he can only follow 10% of his number of followers per day (if you know for a fact this is incorrect, please let me know). Clearly, this would significantly impact people doing the ‘other’ strategy. However, I’ve never even gone close to this limit. That being said, I would not be surprised if some of the automation tools take this into consideration and bias their auto-follow algorithms towards people with fewer than 2,000 followers since they are more likely to follow back. In other words, if you follow someone with 1,000 followers, he is much more likely to auto-follow you back (because he’s not limited), however, if you follow someone with 2,001 followers, the chances of him following you back drop because he’s subject to the 10% limit.

 
Does this make sense? I cannot think of any other way to explain it (besides labor day). If this is true then it heavily weakens my theory of interaction being such an important key element of Twitter, but rather reduces it to being a weaker, secondary force that can “push” you to some degree, but by itself, is insufficient. If this is the case, then Twitter should re-engineer some of their algorithms (i.e. I don’t think it makes sense for someone without any tweets and a single follower to follow 1,000 people), as clearly that is not their goal.

 
If you have any opinion on what I wrote, by all means, please let me know.

 
p.s. I went through the ‘top Twitterers’ list (or whatever it’s called) in the US and was quite disturbed by the number of people there I believe are bots (or semi-bots – that is, bots that are occasionally controlled by a human). Clearly their strategy is extremely effective. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read my previous post. Just reinforces what I suspected before.

 
p.p.s. one question I’ve been asked online is “Why do you care about followers?”. Why? Well, it’s nice having a greater audience. More followers means more people noticing my blog. At the moment I would say 90% of the visitors to my blog come through Twitter – and my blog is one of my most popular websites! Therefore, it means more people reading what I write. Means more people responding and interacting with me. Means more friends I get to meet. Maybe if I had one million followers I would say “Jeez, I can’t handle this noise”, but at this point I’m nowhere even close to my limit in handling my list. There are about 40-50 people who I closely monitor, and whenever there’s a moment which these people aren’t writing anything (which is 95% of the time), I simply look into the Twitter Timeline and look for interesting tweets, or do a search for interesting tweets. I think that’s the entire point in being in Twitter.