Jennyfer, I Won’t Follow You! Ever.

I’m a moderate Twitter user. A couple of tweets a day, sometimes announcing new blog posts, sometimes engaging in conversations. This evening I managed to finally get some free time to enjoy my Twitter account.

The minute I started tweeting, in other words became active, I received 3 fried request. 2 out of these 3 requests were made by new accounts under the name “Jennyfer”, following about 2000 users.

Every account like this has one or two tweets maximum and all sound like this:

• I’ve made $6000 last night with ‘Some name’;
• $15.000 overnight. Click here to find out how.

It’s easy to see that these are spam accounts, and yet they average about 10 followers.

So, when I get a request from one of these accounts, what are my choices? Let’s see:

1. Ignore the request;
2. Block the user.

But what about my desire to actively fight spam accounts? What if I don’t want to “block” the user and protect myself? What if I want to report the user and protect everyone else?

I really think that Twitter needs a “Report spam” button and some text filters as most of the phrases these spam accounts use are standard presets.

So, Twitter, will you help the community actively defend itself?

Update: Until such options will be – if they will ever be – integrated, the one alternative is to follow Twitter’s spam dedicated account @spam, and report spam to them.

Top 5 Reasons Why Blogging Rocked Our World

Have you ever wondered what was it that made blogging turn into such a mass phenomenon, with billions of bloggers and readers spread all over the world? What’s behind the huge mass appeal? Sure, in the beginning it was a simple and accessible way to maintain an online diary, but that’s definitely not a powerful enough factor to affect the shaping of the future of the online environment.

The more I though about it, five reasons began shaping in my mind, strong enough to set things in motion and to rock our world. Read on and find out what these reasons are and don’t forget to share your opinion with me after you finish reading.

Blogging gave us back “reading”

In a world ran by television shows, Hollywood movies, adverts, gaming and cheap entertainment, blogging gave back “reading” to people.

Sure, some of us never gave up on reading. Some of us still devour literature, but I’m sure you’ll agree that less and less people still do that. Most reading we do these days is magazines and newspapers, and even those are affected by the low interest in the actual concept of reading.

Even so, blogging stepped in at the right moment, offering a wide range of topics, opinions and voices. Nowadays, we follow hundreds of blogs daily, read enormous amounts of text blocks and continue to train our reading skills. Ain’t that wonderful?

Blogging gave us back “writing”

Most of us gave up creative writing back when we finished school, no matter how far we went. With blogging, we (re)discovered skills and interests long forgotten. First, a bit shy, but more concise, meaningful and powerful with each post published.

Sure, we can’t compare to Tolstoy, Voltaire or even modern authors like Stephen King, but we do it. We do our best and try to improve our skills.
Click here to read the full blog post!