Twitter Spammers Make me Want to Gauge Out my Eyes with Teaspoons

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Stacey

I like Twitter. That’s for a few reasons really – networking, finding out news about the Digital Marketing Industry (ok, ok, I’m a geek) and, I confess, finding out what certain celebrities are up to.

But I do not like spammers. No sooner does something become popular than a host of people set on ruining it for the rest of the world turn up plastering their spammy links offering cheap prescription anti depressants, viagra or adult services all over the place. And it seems they are no longer content at just posting these links on their own Twitter profiles. Oh no. Now they’re @ mentioning everyone who mentions certain keywords. Unfortunately those keywords aren’t just restricted to words that you might prefer to avoid anyway. Example…. ‘iPhone,’ is now a word where, every single time I mention it, I am quickly offered ‘free iPhone 4s’ by people calling me ‘sexy.’ The same people are posting shortened URLs (that I no longer ever click on) that I am sure probably go to a site that would make my browser declare that I am in imminent danger and should leave immediately.

Let me give you an example. Tonight I posted a complaint (for a change) about websites that look like crap on my iPhone. It was literally just a minute before I had a response:

So apparently the scantily clad Karlyn thinks I’m sexy – so sexy in fact that she wants me to have a free iPhone 4.

I have two issues with this.

1 – I already have an iPhone and am about as likely to click on that link as I am to go on holiday to Libya this week.

2 – I can’t help but think the scantily clad Karlyn might not be who (s)he wants people to think (s)he is.

And just in case I was remotely at risk of thinking I was special and that Karl(yn) really did think I was sexy and wanted me to have a free iPhone 4, I double checked his/her Twitter page.

Sniffle. It seems I am not the only one.

No. I’m not the only one. In fact, neither is her boyfriend. She’s quite proud of the fact that she has a different one in every country. How many countries are there again? That seems like a lot of boyfriends.

Anyway, this is one of a dozen or so of this type of @ mention this week. Of course, you ca spot them a mile off so you do just ignore them. But I have push notifications on my iPhone for mentions on Twitter and it’s very disappointing to hear my little iPhone telling me I have notifications and then discovering they’re spam.

Don’t these people have something (ANYTHING) better to do?!

/rant over.

Posted in Twitter | Leave a comment

I (Not So) Secretly Love Post Secret

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Stacey

I came across Post Secret a year or so ago and didn’t pay much attention to it. My cynical view was that it would be cheesy one liners from people with nothing better to do than to anonymously share the names of people whose husbands they wanted to sleep with.

And, ok, you do get that. But since the app found its ways into the Apple App Store charts, I’ve become a little more intrigued and decided to download it.

Incidentally, here’s the Youtube promo vid for that app.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I like it. Quite a lot. Yes, of course you get a bit of spam (perhaps less because it’s a paid app) and you get crap too…and yes there are some of the EMO ‘omg like I am totally in love with my best friend’s neighbour’s cousin’s ex girlfriend’s best friend’s Uncle’s colleague’s sister’s husband.’ And there are so many spelling mistakes that I almost want to hate the concept for that reason alone. But let’s cast aside the word snobbery for a moment.

In amongst the stuff referred to above what you can find are really quite artistic little insights or digital post it notes of a sort. It’s quite intriguing to read things that people will only say because they know that they are anonymous.

I’m not about to start sharing my own secrets on Post Secret. But I like to read.

Posted in Mobile, Random Thoughts | Leave a comment

10 Online Treats for Your Inner Geek!

Posted on July 13, 2011 by Stacey

1. Legend of the Red Dragon

http://lord.stabs.org/

If you want to go “old school” gaming, you’re not going to have to include the game Legend of the Red Dragon on the list. This game first arrived in the 80’s on BBS systems, and was a massive hit with nerds all around the globe. The days of the BBS may be over, but you can still “flirt with the barmaid” on lord.stabs.org.

2. Fantastic Contraption

http://fantasticcontraption.com/

Fantastic Contraption is a game where you have to build various “contraptions” in order to move the level’s “goal object” into a certain area. You’ll build things using rods, wheels, and other parts in order to achieve your goals. There have been a lot of copycat games over the years, but the original is still the best.

3. Star Asciimation Wars

http://www.asciimation.co.nz/

If you’re a Star Wars fan like most of us, you’ll definitely love Star Asciimation Wars. What is it you ask? It’s Star Wars done up in uber-geeky ASCII style! Very cool if you’ve never checked it out and something any true Star Wars geek will get a kick out of.

4. The Geek Test

http://www.innergeek.us/geek-test.html

Think you’re a true geek? Do you know more about geeky things than anyone else you know? Have you ever programmed a calculator in Math Class or look forward to doing your taxes? If so, you are probably a geek. If you’re not sure, there’s any easy way to find out with the Geek Test from Inner Geek. There are tons of questions about what you watch, what you own, and the things you collect. Check out the test, and see just how geeky you truly are.

5. LightBot

http://www.addictinggames.com/puzzle-games/lightbot.jsp

Lightbot is a fun little puzzle game that lets you control a Robot. You’ll use simple command icons like forward, turn, and jump to move your little Robot around the level. You’ll need to light up all the blue tiles in the factory by commanding your robot. A fun little time waster, especially if you dig robots & programming.

6. Magic Pen

http://jayisgames.com/games/magic-pen/

Magic Pen is one of my personal favorite online flash games, and its great fun. You’ll use a “Magic Pen” to draw objects, and you’ll need to use those objects to push a little red ball around. You can draw hinges, balls, boxes, and even connect things with pins. The graphics are “doodly” but fit the game perfectly. Magic Pen is a great game for any geek, no matter your age.

7. World of Warcraft

http://us.battle.net/wow/

You’re not going to get much geekier than this folks. World of Warcraft or WOW as it’s called is the most popular online RPG to ever grace our computer monitors. It’s caused arguments and break-ups, but has formed some great nerdy friendships over the years. It’s a true geek game in every sense of the word, and it gave us those great commercials with Mr. T as the Night Elf Mohawk!

8. URL Hunter

http://probablyinteractive.com/url-hunter

This little game drives me completely crazy, but in a totally fun way. URL Hunter is played totally in the “URL bar” at the top of your browser which is very unique and totally geeky. You play an “O” that’s trying to kill a’s as they move back and forth quickly. It’s very addictive, and the controls are about as simple as you can get. Who ever knew killing the a’s would turn out to be so much fun?

9. Slave Hack

http://www.slavehack.com/

Slave Hack is a great web based hacking game you can play from the comfort of your home, without getting arrested. You’ll have to protect your own virtual PC from getting hacked while trying to take down as many systems as you can. I’ve been playing this one for a while now, and it’s a lot of fun. If you like games about hacking, it’s one you should definitely check out.

10. Doodle God

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/540083

This fun flash game puts you in charge of using the 4 basic elements: Fire, Water, Earth & Wind to make different creations. You can create everything from armies to glass, and you’ll have a lot of fun doing it. There are over 300 combinations you can make, and some are pretty funny. Each new item you unlock can be combined with other items as well, so this is one game that will definitely keep you busy for a while.

This post was contributed by Daniel Butler, posting on behalf of prezzybox! If there is a geek in your life with a birthday coming up soon, check out Prezzybox’s birthday gifts for some great ideas.

Posted in gadgets | Tagged gadgets, gifts for geeks | 16 Comments

A Morning in the Life of a Social Media Addict

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Stacey

Disclaimer: It’s hypothetical. I’m not really this bad. Yet….

6:15am: Turn alarm off. Yawn. Roll over and hide my head under my pillow. Tell myself it will only be for ‘ten more minutes.’

6:45am: Get up. Curse the fact that ‘ten more minutes’ became thirty. Take the time to tell Facebook that I slept in. Tell Twitter that I’m tired. Tell Google+ that it’s raining outside.

6:50am: Shower.

7:00am: Tell Facebook that I’m not having breakfast because I forgot to get milk and I can’t have Cornflakes. Tell Twitter I need a #coffee. Tell Google+ I need a coffee too. Read response from someone on Google+ who sends me a link to something funny about caffeine addiction. Share funny coffee link on StumbleUpon. Digg it. Get it on Trunk.ly.

7:10am: Dry hair.

7:30am: Remember that I didn’t share funny coffee link with people on Twitter. Do they feel left out? Do they hate me? Do they think I hate them? Share link on Twitter.

7:40am: Straighten hair. Take photo of hideous grey clouds outside. Share photo on Facebook. Share photo on Twitter. Consider sharing it on Google+ but remember they don’t have an iPhone app yet and decide to abort Google+ sharing plan.

7:45am: Set off for work equipped with Spotify and headphones.

7:50am: Tell Facebook that I’m walking to work. Tell Twitter that I’m walking to work and it’s still raining. Tell Google+ that I’m walking to work, that it’s raining and that I wanted to share a picture but they don’t have an iPhone app yet.

7:55pm: Respond to comments on Facebook from people who are telling me they don’t care that I am walking to work. Respond to @ mentions on Twitter from people telling me it’s lovely and sunny where they are. Respond to comments from Android fanboys on Google+ who are telling me to ditch Steve Jobs and join the dark side.

8:10am: Arrive at work. Check in at Tecmark on Facebook. Tell Twitter I’m @tecmark. Tell Google+ I would have liked to check in there too but there’s no app on iPhone and I don’t believe you can even check in yet on the Android version.

8:15am: Get coffee. Tell Facebook I finally have coffee. Tell Twitter that I am enjoying #coffee. Tell Google+ that coffee tastes better when you can Tweet about it from an iPhone.

8:20am: Turn computer on. Check email. Respond to emails.

8:30am: Check SEO blogs, Google blogs and other random social media blogs to make sure I am not missing anything terribly important.

8:40am: Realise it has been at least 20 minutes since I Tweeted. Get the shakes. Go on Twitter and find out what twenty or so people I have never met are having for breakfast. Shakes are cured. I feel better.

8:45am: Check work related Facebook pages. Accidentally notice my news feed. Someone has shared a funny video. ‘Like’ video, share video with my Facebook friends. Tweet video link. Tell Google+ that I will share the video with them too. But only because I am on a computer. Were I mobile I would be unable to share the link conveniently because Google+ does not have an iPhone app.

8:50am: Remove from Circles the people who are calling my iPhone mean names.

9:00am: Day may commence.

Posted in Digg, Facebook, Google+, StumbleUpon, Twitter | Tagged dig, facebook, google plus, google+, social media, stumbleupon, trunk.ly, twitter | 3 Comments

5 of my Favourite Photo Blogs

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Stacey

I like words. So there aren’t all that many photo based blogs on my favourites lists. But here are 5 I do really love.

Dear Photograph

Dear Photograph is a user generated content blog. People take pictures of themselves holding up a photo from the past in the present and accompany this with a short message. It’s a unique idea and some of the contributions are simply beautiful.

Czermak Photography

Czermak Photography is a blog I have a particular interest in as it is that of my 14 year old cousin, Christopher. Christopher doesn’t update it anywhere near as often as he should, but he’s a young man with a very keen interest in photography and a natural ability to capture beauty with a camera.

Angry People in Local Newspapers

APILN is brilliant!! This blog celebrates the ‘art’ of local newspaper photography and is just hilarious. If you’ve ever enjoyed overly posed photographs of people infuriated by dogs pooing in parks, then this is for you.

Damn You Autocorrect

Not photography in its traditional form, granted. Damn You Autocorrect is a series of screenshots of text iPhone text messages gone wrong as a result of the in built autocorrect feature. Brilliantly funny.

Manchester Daily Photo

As a resident of Manchester, I’m always fascinated by how other people see the city I know so well. Manchester Daily Photo is, as you might imagine, a daily photo of Manchester! It’s one I go and check every couple of days and I reckon you should do the same.

Posted in Blogging | Tagged blogs, photos | Leave a comment

That’s It – I’m Leaving Facebook!

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Stacey

No, I’m not personally leaving Facebook. In fact, I unashamedly LOVE it. I love sharing photos when I’m out and about, reading what my friends are up to, checking in at various locations and sharing status updates.

I’m not embarrassed to admit that I love it.

But I know more and more people who are becoming somewhat disenchanted with it for whatever reason (privacy concerns, boredom or simply trying to be a little bit different). And you know what? You want to leave Facebook, that’s absolutely fine! What really irritates me is when people make a huge drama out of it.

You know the sort. They post status updates declaring their intention to leave in a style reminiscent of a suicide note.

“Friends, loved ones, family members and randomers who added me and who I felt too bad not to accept. It is with regret that I must inform you of my decision to leave Facebook. I just no longer feel as though I can go on. It’s just too hard logging in each morning, too difficult to read what you’re all having for breakfast and too heart breaking to see photos of you all enjoying yourselves. Alas, goodbye cruel world social media platform. PS you can now find me on Twitter.”

Cue a host of responses from concerned friends:

“OMG WTF NO WAY! Are you ok? Are you alright? Talk to us!!”

“Noooooooooooo, don’t jump delete it.”

“I’m absolutely devastated to read this. You don’t have to do this. There are other ways out. Talk to me. I’m reaching out to you.”

Comments ignored, then they delete their profile… or rather deactivate it and abandon ship for a while. Then they come back when they realise that they are missing far too much gossip.

The purpose of this post? A rant. And a request to people who are planning to leave Facebook to please, please, please just go quietly. Just log out, walk away and tiptoe towards Twitter. You don’t need to announce it to the world.

/end rant.

Posted in Facebook | 3 Comments

7 Ways to Get FREE Images for Blogs

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Stacey

A Picture Says 1000 Words

A picture says 1000 words. Or so they say. But whether you believe the clichés or not, there’s no denying the fact that images make a blog post (particularly a long one like this) look friendlier, easier to read and are just generally pleasant on the eye.

But let’s assume that you:-

Don’t want to/have the time or equipment to take photos to match every single blog post.

Don’t want to get into trouble for reusing images you don’t have the right permission to use.

Don’t want to spend a lot of money acquiring images to use.

How do you get free images for your blog?

There are a host different ways you can acquire free images for your blog. Let’s have a look at seven of them…

Google Images – Filtered by License

Let’s start with the most obvious one. Google Images is fantastic. Most of you will have come across it before and many of you will have used it. What is less known though is that you can search images by license, so can filter results in order that you only see the ones you have permission to reuse on your blog.

Google Image Search

Google Image Search Permissions

The biggest advantage here is the sheer quantity of images available and the fact that you can search them by theme. However, the chances are that you’ve probably seen a lot of them before, thus they’re not particularly unique or original.

Graphs

Granted, graphs aren’t pictures in the traditional sense and I’m pretty sure that neither Monet, Picasso nor Van Gogh specialised in the art of pretty line graphs. But they do add a visual dimension to a blog post. Create them in Excel and save as images or even use a graph generator such as this one.

Particularly when you’re posting an informative post with a lot of numbers to crunch, graphs are great.

Did I really just say ‘graphs are great?’ My old school Maths teacher used to say that as I sniggered.

Wordle

If you can’t think of a particular image that works with your post but you just want one to break up the text, then try Wordle. This great tool lets you create ‘word images,’ either from a URL or from a chunk of text you paste in. Either ‘randomise,’ or play specifically with layout, fonts and background. As an example of what you can come up with, I just pasted all the text of this post in and generated the following image on a ‘randomise.’

wordle images for blogs

Strip Generator

Everyone loves a comic strip and they’re great in almost any sort of light hearted blog post. Strip Generator lets you generate your own comic strip quickly and easily – much like the one above I just generated.

This is definitely one of my personal favourite ways to generate free images for blogs.

OpenClipArt

Ever since there was Microsoft Office I have had a bit of a soft spot for clip art. OpenClipArt is a resource for finding (and sharing any you create yourself) free-to-use clip art.

Here’s one such fine example.

OpenClipArt Images for Blogs

The Newspaper Clipping Generator

I love this Newspaper Clipping Generator.

Newspaper Clipping Generator Free Images for Blogs

You could of course argue that an image with quite so many words on it isn’t really an image at all. But I argue again that this does offer a visual depth to a blog post… and can be used as a bit of fun if nothing else!

There are other generators on that site too, including a cigarette packet generator and clapper board generator.

Redkid Image Generators

At Redkid Image Generators there is a lot of choice! There are dozens of different generators to choose from… my personal probably being the London Underground one below.

image generators free images for blogs

To name but a few there’s a Paris Metro sign, iPad, Blackberry, a billboard and a car bumper sticker.

Any I’ve Missed?

These are just 7 of my favourite but I’m sure there’s loads I’ve missed. Feel free to share other ways of getting free images for blogs in the comments

Posted in Blogging | 4 Comments

How Many Active Users on Facebook??

Posted on May 7, 2011 by Stacey

One of the things I love so much about Facebook is the fact that it is so open (compared with other platforms) about its numbers.

This page on the Facebook website gives you figures relating to user numbers, time spent on the site, what users are doing and a host of other things too. That’s all awesome for the number crunchers and those who have a secret obsession with website facts and figures. I’m talking about myself.

Number of Active Facebook Users

Facebook cites this figure as being over 500 million. As “over” could mean anything, let’s take it as a standard 500 million. That still astounds me.

In real terms that means:-

There are over 7 times more active Facebook users globally than there are people in the UK
There are 60% more active global Facebook users than there are people in the USA!
There are 16 times as many global active Facebook users than there are cars on the roads of the UK

Let’s have a look at a fuller picture…

So when you look at it like that, you realise just how big that number actually is. It’s like everyone in the UK having at least 7 accounts each! Absolutely every single one of us…

Impressive stuff. So whether you love it or hate it, whether you embrace Farmville or you want to kill all of the pretend farmyard animals in an evil virtual attack, whether you enjoy sharing with the world what you had for breakfast or not… you can’t deny that what Facebook has done is out of this world.

And for some more crazy numbers concerning everything social media, check out the widely viewed Socialnomics video, Social Media Revolution 2.

Posted in Facebook | 1 Comment

Social Media and the Death of Bin Laden

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Stacey

You can’t miss the news today – Ding Dong, the witch Bin Laden is dead. It seems to counter human nature to celebrate someone dying, yet I’d imagine most of us are united in thinking “about time,” this dude was done in.

Anyway, I’m not turning this into a political or ethical rant or debate. What is interesting, though, is that the raid that resulted was Tweeted LIVE…. albeit that the Tweeter was, at the time, unaware of the significance.

The BBC reports that Sohaib Athar, who lives near to the compound where Bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, Tweeted about the helicopter hovering above the compound. You can read the BBC story on this here.

Since confirmation of Bin Laden’s death, there have been 150,000 likes on a “Bin Laden is dead,” Facebook page and, as you would expect “osama,” and “obl” are trending globally on Twitter.

In fact, I personally heard about this through Twitter first! I read something and verified it on the BBC. I’m sure I’m not alone.

Social media is fast becoming the primary source of news and a platform on which people can share reactions to it. That was illustrated perfectly with the death of Bin Laden today.

Posted in Facebook, Random Thoughts, Twitter | Leave a comment

I Sort of Changed my Mind About the iPad

Posted on May 1, 2011 by Stacey

I might have said, upon the launch of the iPad 2, that I definitely didn’t want. Like, ever. Under any circumstances.

Well, ahem… I might be indulging in a little humble pie this afternoon as I sort of, maybe… well… changed my mind.

I want one. Like really want one. But mostly just because of GarageBand which has this amazing ability to keep me quiet for hours.

Yes, yes, I am now one of the millions willingly selling their soul to Steve Jobs.

Mr Jobs, I love you.

Posted in iPad | Leave a comment

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