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Archive for April, 2008

Lost in McCainSpace

Published by William Beutler on April 4, 2008 in John McCain, Online Fundraising, Social Networking, Website Design, White House '08 and William Beutler. 3 Comments

A little over a year ago, I wrote a deservedly unkind and undeservedly lengthy post about John McCain’s social network-in-name-only. It was essentially just a personalized donation page, glorified by its socnet-ish name: McCainSpace. Or MyMcCain. That part hadn’t been sorted out by its launch.

In any case, that was then. I hadn’t been back since (who thought back then there would be a McCain campaign right now?) and recently decided that a follow-up might be in order. So what is it now?

It’s exactly the same. The McCain campaign website doesn’t seem to have much interest in making their website into a real destination. As I said then, a campaign does not need a social network of its own, but if you’re going to claim one, actually have one.

Actually, something has changed with the profile I used to illustrate the problem last year. It’s Debaser, the Un Chien Andalou/Black Francis-inspired username of Todd Zeigler at Bivings Group. Here’s the image I posted last year:

The page is unchanged, with one exception. Here’s the detail:

Debaser pulls in $100 for John McCain

Granted, $100 is not a lot, for a presidential campaign or the fourteen months between the first screen shot and the second. But for a website that’s essentially abandoned, it’s a fortune.

I asked Zeigler if he had donated, or knew who had. The first word of his reply: “Weird.” Zeigler logged in and found out that the donor hailed from the Delmarva Peninsula and was not known to him. In an e-mail reply he allowed me to share, Zeigler offered two possibilities:

(1) [Name Redacted] stumbled across my page (or blog post) and gave through it.
(2) Funny business.

I’m going with (1) but for Debaser to reach its assigned goal, (2) may have to get involved.

No Follow

Published by William Beutler on April 4, 2008 in E-mail, Spam, Twitter, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. Closed

Not to turn this into The Twitter Spam Post (besides, that’s Stop Twitter Spam) but I believe I’ve just discovered a new spammer technique.

At 3:42 a.m. last night, I received a notification that a Twitter user going by the name Cardiophile was following me. Twitter Spammer: CardiophileBut when I checked out the account this morning, the sidebar looked as it does in the graphic to the right of these words. For readers who don’t know me, I am not one of the 5 accounts being followed.

So, mark this as the logical next step in the growing sophistication of Twitter spammers. Aware that they’re being identified by the obvious disparity in their following/follower counts, they’re now following an account just long enough — seconds, maybe — to send a notification e-mail and then unfollowing, so there isn’t the dead giveaway. I caught on, but then there are 350-some Twitter users who followed it anyway.

Earlier this week, a Twitter friend suggested that I simply uncheck the e-mail notification option. True, this would keep me from being annoyed. But there are two problem here. First, I would prefer to avoid changing my behavior because of spammers. But more practically, I wouldn’t know about followers I do care anbout and would want to follow back. Follow me?

Update: Stop Twitter Spam has also noticed this new technique, and has posted on the same subject.

The Fall of the Report of Drudge

Published by William Beutler on April 3, 2008 in Charts and Graphs, Journalism, Metapost, Metrics, New Media Strategies, Online Campaigns, Site Traffic and William Beutler. 3 Comments

This morning I spoke to a group of journalism interns at the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism, along with David All. Now in its 19th year, the program run by Terry Michael is a special one for me: it’s what brought me to Washington in the first place. I’m not sure whether I’m a success story or a cautionary tale, as I’ve heard Terry ruefully note how many of his alumni eventually leave traditional journalism. Alas, I’m one of them.

In any case, it was a freewheeling discussion of digital politics, broadly defined. With a keyboard and projection screen at our disposal, we rambled from David’s YouTube projects for Rep. Jack Kingston to the website of my employer (and this site’s host) New Media Strategies. At one point, the question arose of Matt Drudge’s influence in the past compared to RealClearPolitics. We didn’t know the answer, so I went to Alexa (an imperfect tool, but more accurate the more traffic a site gets) to get an idea:

Alexa Traffic Ranking: Drudge Report vs. RealClearPolitics

Wow. Now that’s a mighty steep fall for a website that once almost brought down a president, yadda yadda yadda. Now, I’m sure his influence remains greater than his traffic; after all, Washington journalists are still reading his website out of sheer inertia. As recently as September 2006, “Gang of 500″ coiner Mark Halperin said “Drudge rules our world,” which pretty much sums it up. Meanwhile, RCP has had a strong 2008, even if their traffic only spikes around the elections (David noted the first, biggest spike was election night 2004 when the site was a destination for leaked exit polls).

Back in the office this afternoon, I decided to look up another site often compared to Drudge, especially at the outset in early 2005. This one surprised me even more:

Alexa Traffic Ranking: Drudge Report vs. Huffington Post

Surprising? Yes, at least if you remember how ubiquitious the Drudge Report once was. But let’s take a few things into consideration: for one, there is much, much more content on Huffington Post. The above chart is measured in page views, and every time someone clicks from the front page of HuffPo to Eat the Press or Nora Ephron’s latest Dear Jane letter to Hillary Clinton, that counts as another. Drudge meanwhile has just one page, and if my clicking habits are representative of others’, the tendency is to click on a story, hit the Back button, click again, go Back, etc. On many browsers, each subsequent view may draw upon the local cache and not register another hit for Drudge. Then again, he’s enabled that insidious technique known as auto-refresh, so if you accidentally leave his page open for any length of time, it will reload however often

    var timer = setInterval(”autoRefresh()”, 1000 * 60 * 3);
    function autoRefresh(){self.location.reload(true);}

is. Another thing to consider: Huffington’s numbers are nowhere near Drudge’s at the peak, and it’s highly unlikely she ever will — unless maybe she manages to bring down another President Clinton. (And I wouldn’t count on it.) Like M*A*S*H vs. American Idol or Star Wars Kid vs. Leave Britney Alone, there is too much competition for eyeballs, with the advent of cable television and YouTube respectively, for new programming to outperform the old.

And, clicking around a bit more, I realize I am not the first to note Arianna’s upset: Kara Swisher at All Things Digital first noted it about two weeks ago. But you know how it is. Too much demand on our attention to see everything we’d like.

P.S. Come on, Alexa. Why can’t I embed more than one of your charts on a page? The screen caps look terrible when I shrink them them to fit the column width.

Twitter Spam Gets Political

Published by William Beutler on April 1, 2008 in Hillary Clinton, Spam, Tech Blogosphere, Twitter, Web 2.0, White House '08 and William Beutler. 6 Comments

Last week, Mashable’s Adam Ostrow asked whether Twitter was facing a spam problem. I said it already does. Ostrow pointed to a Twitter account that seemed to be following far more people than anyone could know, and for purely promotional purposes.

As of today, that account follows (i.e. has friended) 13,000+ Twitterinos, only to tweet links to images of ho-hum abstract artwork. Amazingly, more than 800 people are still following this account. Shortly before reading his post, I found a teenager in Norway who seemed to be doing something similar. While he may in fact be using the service genuinely, he too was following thousands before he’d posted a single tweet. Today he’s following some 3,700+ others, but hasn’t updated for two days, when he was:

watching random crap on youtube :) — Flyaxe on Twitter

Now Twitter spam has taken a turn for the political. On Sunday, CQ’s Eric Pfeiffer told me that his account (which he updates only sporadically) had recently been followed by a horde of obviously fake accounts named for a current or former presidential candidate, plus a number. Most of the notification e-mails he had already deleted, but the others he forwarded to me. They are… interesting. For example, here’s the latest tweet from ChrisDodd53:

Twitter spammer rips off techPresident Daily Digest

I think we can safely assume there are not 52 other Chris Dodds on Twitter. But did you recognize the content of that tweet? I sure did: it was scraped from today’s techPresident Daily Digest. And this pattern is repeated across all the examples of spam accounts he sent my way.

Herewith, a list of these accounts, and a link to the blog whence its latest tweet was scraped:

You know, if these were simply attached to RSS feeds and genuine aggregators of political news, I wouldn’t mind so much. Yes, the aggressive, untargeted following is certainly annoying. But these accounts do not drive traffic to the sites where the words originated. This also makes the creator’s intent all the more inscrutable; they aren’t saying anything, they aren’t promoting anything, and they aren’t updated by hand. The only thing it’s good for, maybe, is souring users on Twitter. But I don’t believe Pownce or Google/Jaiku are really that underhanded. So I remain mystified.

Whatever the cause, this must stop. And it can. Unlike e-mail, which is traded from network to network across yon Internets around the globe, Twitter is administered entirely by Obvious, LLC. They have the same control over the Twitter network as Facebook has over its pages, and it’s within their power to stop it. I’ve previously suggested capping the number of users you can follow, relative to the number of users who are following you. Nothing too restrictive, but something flexible to keep Twitter accounts honest. Jack? Biz? Ev? Little help over here?

In the meantime, there is is already a website carrying the banner against this annoying menace. That’s Stop Twitter Spam, which is currently tracking complaints about spam on Twitter, including my post from last week. The site only barely gets into solutions, and mostly serves to highlight the problem. Most interesting of all is the Twitter Spammer List.

This list includes most of the candidate-based accounts I’ve noted here, and some others I hadn’t. It also mentions the examples from last week, but separates them into two apparent categories of problem Twitter accounts: outright spam and overactive followers. It also notes the number of follows vs. the number of followers and shows the difference as a ratio. The greatest disparity is HillaryClinton5. When the list was last updated, the account followed 2905 others, yet only 25 others followed “her” back. It’s not that HillaryClinton5 has friended the most people — that’s probably the design/art company mentioned above — but that she has the fewest followers. These numbers are a few days out of date, but still give a useful snapshot of the problem.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit nostalgic for the days when Brian Shaler was just following everybody in sight, like it was a game. But then, Shaler is an honest Twitterino. And almost everyone he follows also follows him back.