Results tagged “twitter” from Birmingham Mail - Technobabble

West Midlands Police have announced they will be taking to the Twittersphere in their battle against crime.

Bobbies will be using all manner of new media including micro-blogs and Facebook in a bid to connect with communities.

Chief Insp Mark Payne, said: "Our research has shown that large groups of people are now using social media and not just the young.

"We will continue to communicate with the people we serve across the West Midlands in traditional way, but social media is another opportunity for us to listen and pass on information."

Some officers in the force are in the early stages of setting up blogs to 'talk' to the neighbourhoods where they work.

Chief Insp Payne said: "Twitter means we get can get short messages out to people quickly to let them know about initiatives we are carrying out in their area.

"We can use tweets as a way of directing people to more detailed information which may help prevent them becoming a victim of crime."

Let's take a look at what the police might say on twitter, given so much of that posted is either textspeak, what people had for breakfast and 'meaningful' observations on life:

@hungrybobby Receive intelligence local chippie @oceanbar is closing early proceed under blue lights to collect lunch for station

@Bluepatrol LO LO LO Whats going on ere thn?

@arrestingoffice @criminalelement UR ncked

@hungrybobby Member public takes picture of panda car in disabled bay outside @phillpotssandwiches arrest person for obstructing officer

Very rarely do I sign up to Twitter news feeds - mainly because they're so relentless.

You just get bombarded with update after update and everything else can get a bit swamped.

Naturally they are, of course, automatically generated.

And yesterday Sky News came a cropper after it updated twice within a two minute period.

Unfortunately that two minute period was the silence at 11am on November 11th, when the nation came to a halt to remember our war dead.

In apologising the news giant said: "We are sorry our automated feeds engine posted two updates during the Twitter silence for Armistice Day. They were promptly deleted."

Follow me on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/BenHurst

The High Court showed it was in step with the times when it granted an order which allowed service of an injunction via Twitter.

Solicitors Griffin Law, who dealt with the matter, dubbed it "Blaney's Blarney Order" after the subject matter - a blog called Blaney's Blarney (donalblaney.com).

It requires an unknown Twitter user anonymously posting under the same name, and thus breaching the copyright and intellectual property of the blog's owner, to stop posting and immediately identify themselves.

I suppose it's more of an up-to-date Oprah effect, or in the UK the Richard and Judy result.

In both cases authors who had their books featured on the respective shows saw sales rocket.

This time a similar happening took place on the micro blogging site twitter, after national treasure Stephen Fry endorsed a book of short stories about the afterlife.

Sales of David Eagleman's book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives soared by 6,000 per cent after Fry, who has more than 750,000 followers, tweeted that "You will not read a more dazzling book this year than David Eagleman's 'Sum'.

"If you read it and aren't enchanted I will eat 40 hats."

It rose from nowhere to number two, and has also been endorsed by former Roxy Music member Brian Eno and author Philip Pullman.

Now Stephen, if you'll just give the Birmingham Mail a plug...

It's worth pointing out that the twitterati aren't exactly queuing up to buy the great man's own works: For example Fry's Moab is My Washpot currently stands at 1,162 in the sales chart at amazon in books, and The Hippopotamus is at a somewhat less than stellar 23,000!

Social networking sites are like internet shopping for burglars with users revealing details about their home and whereabouts to complete strangers, an insurer warned today.

Users of sites such as Facebook and Twitter are putting themselves at risk of being burgled by revealing too much personal information, according to Legal & General.

Research found that 38% of users of social networking sites have posted updates about their holiday plans, while 33% have told people they are going away for the weekend.

Nearly a quarter of people have also discussed their travel plans 'wall-to-wall', meaning they have no control over who reads them.

I loved the description of the types of different postings on the micro-blogging site twitter which was part of a new study.

The report from market research firm Pear Analytics described 40 per cent of the messages sent as being "pointless babble." (an unfeasibly low proportion, I'd say).

The study found that only 8.7 per cent of messages could be said to have "value" as they passed along news of interest.

An attack on Twitter which prevented users from "tweeting" today could have been the work of a teenager in their bedroom, an expert said.

The micro-blogging site went down for several hours on Thursday afternoon after falling victim to a "denial of service" attack.

Colin Sweetman, who provides internet technology and digital media advice through his company E-Volutionary.net, said such attacks were very common.

A REPORT from a 15-year-old boy seems to have created quite a stir.

Finance giant Morgan Stanley took it upon themselves to publish as an 'authoritative piece of work' an article written by a lad they had in on work experience.

Matthew Robson, from London, was asked to describe how he and his friends used technology, and basically stated the obvious - although possibly not obvious to extremely well paid accountants who probably see their children once a week.

The findings of 'how teenagers consume media' included the shocking revelation that teenagers are "very reluctant" to pay to download music from the internet, most using illegal file sharing.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband fell victim to an internet spoof after Michael Jackson's death.

A Twitter account page set up in his name by a prankster carried a tribute to the singer, which was then picked up by media organisations.

A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: "This is an apposite moment for us to point out (as some commentators suspect) that the Foreign Secretary does not have a Twitter account.
"The FCO does, however, and you can find it here www.twitter.com/foreignoffice."

In case you were wondering, our banana loving Foreign Secretary didn't say on Twitter: "Never has one soared so high and yet dived so low. RIP Michael."

So there you go.

A council today banned staff and elected members from using the social networking website Twitter after complaints that abusive and inappropriate language were being used.

Plymouth City Council staff trying to access the site are now directed to the authority's home page.

The move came after the council received a number of complaints about content on the site, including the city's Labour group leader Tudor Evans, who was warned he could face disciplinary action for using insulting language about a BNP member and calling him a "Nazi".

A recent study found that less than ten per cent of twitter users are responsible for 90 per cent of the messages.

It also found that 55 per cent don't 'tweet' (send messages) at all.

And this website tweeting too hard reveals that a good proportion of those ten per cent who send virtually everything are, er, up themselves. (The website's tagline reads: " Where self-important tweets get the recognition they deserve.")

Yes the twittersphere is packed to capacity with self loving jerks sending self justifying messages, which have the basic purpose of driving home the undeniable truth of how wonderful they are.

In my own experience a whole bunch of messages on the site are aimed at driving traffic through to websites (people who do that - what jerks eh? ;)) and a lot are 'musings' on life in a philosophical kind of way.

To be fair what can you do with 140 characters apart from thoughtful haikus on life, or just report the banal what-I-had-for-breakfast kind of stuff?

I really enjoy the indiscreet 'tweets' from management meetings and have seen people get into trouble when someone sends the 'no-one understands what I'm trying to say and they're all gits' message, forgetting that the md is following them.

Anyway this selection from tweeting too hard randomly reveals the kind of jerks who inhabit the twittersphere, showing that they'll be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes:

"Really enjoy looking smug at the gym. Not going to lie."

"Shopkeep told me I was man of the world. Don't think it was sarcastic - I think it was the beads I was wearing and that I said "ciao"."

"Lovely day in Camden. Brought up that I'd been to India, home of tea, to a Starbucks girl. Think it intimidated her. Seemed to kill mojo."

"Need new ethnic beads. Mine are now a bit scummy. If Indians made their wooden beads from wipe-clean plastic they'd stay authentic longer."

"<--Has now been hit-on and asked out more times than she can count!"

Yes you could suggest that they were being ironic, pricking the balloon of their own pomposity, but I doubt it. And some were Americans (therefore incapable of irony) or 'new media' types (ditto).

Follow me on twitter (ha!) at http://twitter.com/BenHurst

Patrick Swayze's 'death' this week shows the dangers of taking the online micro-blogging site Twitter too seriously as a reliable source of news.

The controversy arose when Florida radio station Kiss FM posted a message saying the Point Break star had died.

As usually happens on Twitter the message was picked up and 'retweeted' by users everywhere - meaning what was an error of judgement by one quick fingered radio station news person, soon became common knowledge.

It was made all the more plausible by the fact that Swayze, pictured with Keanu Reeves in the surfing epic, is widely known to be suffering from pancreatic cancer at the moment.

In some ways Twitter is the ultimate version of Chinese whispers, and because in most cases it is just normal people using the service privately, rather than authoritative news organisations, no checks are made whatsoever before 'news' is passed on.

And the lesson is...be careful where you get your 'news' from.

Follow me on Twitter for updates at: http://twitter.com/BenHurst

A MIDLAND magistrate who resigned following a complaint about his use of the social networking site Twitter today said he had done nothing wrong.

Steve Molyneux, who had been a magistrate in Telford, Shropshire, for 16 years, came under fire after posting messages about a court case online.

The 54-year-old IT consultant said his "tweets" were designed to demonstrate that justice was being done and added that everything he wrote had been said in open court.

Mr Molyneux, a former IT lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton, chose to resign after a colleague lodged a complaint following a hearing about an alleged robbery.

Hollywood 'legend' Ashton Kutcher is the first person to break through the million barrier for followers on Twitter.

He was shortly followed by CCN's breaking newsfeed half an hour later.

So what, you might ask, has Mr Demi Moore got that is so much more interesting than all the other celebrities who are taking part in the micro-blogging phenomena.

I must, at this point, make a confession. I did myself start to follow Ashton (left) on twitter (his 'handle' is aplusk) purely for nasty journalistic reasons.

I wanted to do a blog on the pointlessness of so much which is posted on twitter (and let's be honest, posts of the 'just had toast for breakfast', 'I'm tired', and 'I'm in Tesco' variety assume a colossal level of interest on the part of your followers, and also, I hesitate to add, indicate a huge ego on the original poster), so I picked Ashton purely on the basis that he seemed such a pointless Hollywood actor that it was likely to be full of such air-headed nonsense that it would make for a top posting.

You'll also have noted that such a blog hasn't appeared, and I suppose, that also reveals the reasons behind his Twittering success.

The key, as Alistair Campbell might say (see blog below) is authenticity. He genuinely updates the posts himself, and conducts conversations various other stars, as well as his wife Demi, allowing any follower an insight into his life.

He hasn't fallen into the trap of getting one of his flunkeys to update it on his behalf, purely using it as a cold-eyed marketing tool.

Aussie actor Hugh Jackman (right) came a cropper when he posted: "Having lunch on the harbor across from the Opera Center. Loving life!"

The twitter community wondered at the use of the word "Center" instead of "House" in relation to Australia's most famous building, but also at the American-style spelling.

Turns out some underling in the US typed it in for the Wolverine star.

Similarly rapped 50 Cent and pop singer Britney Spears (as if anyone thought she did it herself...!) have been unmasked as having their accounts 'managed' by staff members.

So the lesson is - do it yourself and keep it real (kids).

Follow me on twitter for updates.

An investigation was under way today into how a computer 'worm' was able to strike the Twitter social network over the weekend, its co-founder Biz Stone said.

In his blog, Mr Stone said that Twitter had suffered four separate attacks from a program known as a worm starting on Saturday and ending early yesterday.

It was set up to promote an alternative social networking site, StalkDaily.com, and was designed to automatically reproduce itself once clicked on.

It displayed Twitter messages, known as "Tweets," on infected Twitter accounts, urging people to visit the website.

The Queen is blasting into the social media age by embracing the current rush to twitter.

It has been reported that Her Majesty the Queen has "taken a bold technological step by becoming the first member of the royal family to twitter".

The first exciting event to be covered will be the 60th anniversary Commonwealth Observance at Westminster Abbey.

Of course 'one' suspects that it won't be Her Majesty's pinkies in a blur over the keypad of her pay as you go mobile.

More likely it will be some flunkey from the Buckingham Palace press office bringing us the latest.

Presumably the utterances won't follow the normal twitter-centric banal normalities focussing on what 'one' had for breakfast, if one's waiting for the bus and how hung-over oneis.

It would be far more interesting, of course, if the Duke of Edinburgh was put in charge of the whole affair.

Instead of: "And the Archbishop of Canturbury is starting his sermon", we would get: "If this ruddy service goes on one second longer I'll explode".

Perhaps if there is a delegation from important trade partner China, we would get a variation on his classic: "If this service goes on much longer, we'll all be slitty-eyed".

Stephen Fry has been besieged by requests to use the online social networking site Twitter "for good and noble ends" after more than 250,000 users signed up to follow his updates.

The rapid expansion of Twitter, which enables users to send 140-character updates to their "followers", is the latest in a series of online social tools which are changing the way people communicate with the world.

Fry, who uses the site for everything from posting photos of him swimming with sea lions to letting fans know that he is stuck in a lift, is one of the stars of Twitter and faces constant requests to draw his followers' attentions to worthy causes.

The large number of requests, fuelled by the rapid rise in the site's popularity, led the comedian to devise his own method of randomly selecting one cause each week to highlight on Twitter.

"I have to be realistic about this," he wrote on his blog, which was linked to the latest update.

"It isn't vanity or braggadocio, but simply a melancholy facing of the fact that when I tweet a site that site will inevitably get stormed, stampeded and smashed into collapse.

"It has happened too often for me to doubt it, and after webmasters have sworn blind to me that their servers and hosts can easily shoulder the burden.

"It has happened to highly capitalised major servers that one really might have expected to be structurally sounder.

"The power of Twitter is only just being understood. The last thing I would want is to be responsible for slash-dotting worthy, important and useful services."

His solution is to randomly select one cause each week, "check the one I have chosen for server resilience, kosher qualities of worthiness and so on", then highlight the site in an update, called a "tweet", to his followers.

He said the new method was needed because, "with a quarter of a million followers isn't it my duty to use my captive twitter audience for good and noble ends?"

Spammers are increasingly targeting social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, computer experts warned today.

Growing numbers of cyber-criminals try to trick users into revealing passwords so they can hijack their personal profiles and send out messages promoting everything from pornography to medication.

New figures from IT security firm Sophos also reveal that the UK is now the world's 10th worst offender for relaying spam.

Some 2.7% of all junk e-mails came from compromised computers in Britain in the last three months of 2008 - up from 2.5% in the same period a year earlier.

The US retains its crown as global spam king, being responsible for relaying 19.8% of unwanted e-mails between October and December last year.