Terry Pearson’s Blog

Twitter Pollution

Excessive targeted marketing using a social network’s status updates.

Most people have at least heard of Twitter by now. The mini social network seemed like a great idea when it was born out of Odeo (a podcasting company). It can be highly addictive, and can even save you money on your text messaging bill.

Twitter does have a major problem. The biggest of these is money. As of this writing, Twitter still has not found a way to generate income. If Twitter does find a way to generate advertising revenue, will it’s users continue to embrace the service?

But an even bigger problem looms for the messaging site. Twitter has opened the floodgates of a very open protocal. Marketing companies, universities, and even politicians are utilizing the networking site to flood users with advertising. As twitter grows more popular, more companies and organizations will get on board.

Unless something drastically changes, Twitter will likely see it’s peak within one to two years. Afterwards, it is quite possible that user-ship will decrease as as rapidly as advertising (from inside and outside) increases.

The biggest problem with advertisements on Twitter is that there are no “banners”. Banners were designed to take a portion of the message on a website and turn it into revenue.

With only 140 characters per message, there is no way to insert advertising into these messages. Therefore, advertisers are forced to send separate messages for advertisements. This is the equivilent of a website sending popup messages throughout the day because you accessed the website at some point. Nobody would agree to such a proposition.

This advertising can be seen as “Twitter Pollution.” Unfortunately, Twitter itself may be the final casualty of Twitter pollution.

I was just looking at RobsNotebook.com and came across a really good solution to a common problem with Wordpress.

Lately, I have been getting a lot of error messages on my blog that said “MySQL server has gone away.” I looked through the Godaddy support forums hoping to find a solution. Unfortunately, I did not.

But then I found RobsNotebook.com and they had a page dedicated to this problem. It turns out that it is caused by the SQL connection being open for too long. Essentially, Wordpress does not close the connection every time.

Godaddy’s (or insert your own host here) configuration of MySQL tells it to time out after a certain period, and that can happen in the middle of your call to the database.

RobsNotebook.com has provided a php file that you use in wordpress and just replace your existing file. He made it so easy that it takes only about 5 minutes to put in the solution.

P.S. I verified that the php page was correctly coded and had no “funny business” on it, but as the file could change at any time, it is always good to look through it for yourself whenever you download and use PHP from the net.

You probably think I am crazy if you read the title of this article. Right now, I bet you are saying “Of course the subject of politics is online. Just ask John Kerry or Dan Rather what a bunch of bloggers equipped with your dirty secrets can do. Or look how much influence the fascist run move-on.org has on politics.”

But I am referring to the main political candidates and politicians. I recently moved to Inver Grove Heights, MN and I had the hardest time finding out about the local political scene in the area. In fact, my congressional district is different depending on if I look at Congress.org or House.gov. It is strange that it is so hard to find who your representative is.

Politicians are even harder to find. Yes, big name candidates have websites, but even those are sometimes hard to navigate and void of real meaning. But try searching for a candidate’s personal campaign site. It is almost non existent.

Going even further down the line, look for your local BPOU (Basic Political Organization Unit for those of you that don’t speak politic). Type your county followed by a political party and “BPOU” in Google. You will likely find at best an outdated site from a few years ago, announcing that they are excited to start the 2004 campaign season. Usually all the contact info is out of date, and there is no detailed information on party platforms. Worse yet, they do not even say a good way to get involved.

I know there are exceptions (if you know of exceptions to this, post a comment and let me know), but the vast majority of sites are useless. I think that politicians underestimate the power of the web and search engine optimization. Candidates have a great opportunity to sell their ideas to an audience. Candidates also have a powerful recruiting tool.

It is time that candidates and BPOUs realize the power of social networking, forums, blogs, online advertising, and a good website. I believe that websites may play a major role in the 2008 elections. Whoever can capitalize on this market, will likely gain an easy 5 to 10 percentage points in the election.

I’ve always had the best success with good content. Some of my most successful weeks (in number of hits to my website) were do to some popular original articles.

However, sometimes it helps to boost your ratings and get your site out there. Especially when it is new.  There are several good link exchange products out there. Most of the time, you spend time surfing on their linked sites in return for them sending traffic your way. I have compiled a list below:

•  Traffic Swarm
• Blog Village
• Blog Soldiers
• Blog Advance
• Blog Mad
• Blog Explosion

These may be an option for some, but it is not a cure all. You may not necessarily generate the “best” traffic for your site. Dean Phillips suggests that traffic exchanges do little good, other than add “clicks” to your statistics. Of course your site may look catchy enough to get people to stay.

Keep in mind that these can be good for getting your name out there, but also keep in mind that good content, trackbacks, and putting your web address in your email and forum signatures can be even more successful in the long run.