Cody Taylor

Everybody’s doing it. Even YouTube has succumbed to Twitter mania.

After complaints from the City of Austin and the Texas attorney general’s office, the social networking site Twitter has shut down a fake account that pretended to issue Austin Police Department bulletins with official-sounding messages that included “warming up my radar gun for SXSWi.”

An anonymous reader writes “Who needs crusty old rubbish like the Victorian era or World War II? Instead, an Ofsted report leaked to The Guardian details proposals to teach UK primary school children how to use Wikipedia, Twitter, podcasts and blogs. Presumably they’re already au fait with b3ta and 4chan. And you already can’t get the kids off Bebo without a crowbar.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

‘They’ have thousands of followers, they adorn themselves with Bio’s which are occasionally obscure but often that of a self proclaimed Guru …and of course you’ve never heard of them before. Should you follow them?

narramissic writes “In a paper set to be delivered at an upcoming security conference, University of Texas at Austin researchers showed how they were able to identify people who were on public social networks such as Twitter and Flickr by mapping out the connections surrounding their network of friends. From the ITworld article: ‘Web site operators often share data about users with partners and advertisers after stripping it of any personally identifiable information such as names, addresses or birth dates. Arvind Narayanan and fellow researcher Vitaly Shmatikov found that by analyzing these ‘anonymized’ data sets, they could identify Flickr users who were also on Twitter about two-thirds of the time, depending on how much information they have to work with.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the San Francisco start-up is watching the outside initiatives closely as it prepares to launch its own fee-based services this year, but doesn’t view them as competition. “We want to work with those companies that are already making an effort,” he says.

Notice that title tag for my Twitter profile page? It reads Robin Wauters (robinwauters) on Twitter where it used to say Twitter / …

BountyX writes “First and foremost, wikileaks.org is back up after downtime due to server load; however, the German government wants to keep the site down. According to their twitter page, police have raided the home of Wikileaks.de domain owner Theodor Reppe (PDF) over internet censorship lists that were leaked two weeks ago. What the Australian government’s secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist has to do with Germany is a mystery. This case is a prime example of multiple governments collaborating in support of censorship.” Reader iter8 provides a link to coverage on Wikileaks itself, which says that police searched Reppe’s homes in both Dresden and Jena, and adds: “According to police, the reason for the search was ‘distribution of pornographic material’ and ‘discovery of evidence.’ Wikileaks has published censorship lists for Australia, Thailand, Denmark and other countries. Included on the lists are references to sites alleged to contain pornography, including child pornography. Wikileaks has not published any images from the sites.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Esteemed online voices @LeoLaporte and @DaveWiner are sounding the alarm about Twitter’s increasing platform dominance. “It’s a very dangerous network because it’s all centralized,” Winer said. Both critics have installed their own smaller, open-source micro-messaging systems outside of Twitter’s domain, i.e., Evan Prodromou’s Laconica

It’s 2009. Every business needs a corporate blog to accompany their corporate website, and every individual needs a personal blog to share their thoughts – or portfolio – with the world. I am unabashedly partial towards WordPress. Just as Twitter is an incredibly simple platform made rich and complex via its API that opens the door to 3rd party…