Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Why should you Re-tweet my content by Tony Green

Should I Re-tweet this post?

I normally use my Google Reader to read the latest postings from the blogs I subscribe to.  The newest postings show the title and the first sentence with a TweetMeMe icon referring to how many times a blog had been re-tweeted.

Many of the people I follow receive many re-tweets. This is in stark contrast to my posts which hardly get re-tweeted.  The fact led me to inquire as to what makes a posting or tweet worthy of being chosen to be passed along to their followers.

I reached out to a few of the people who maintain some high quality blogs and posed the question of what made some posts worthy of re-tweeting. To my surprise, they were kind enough to provide feedback to my question.

In short, it comes down to remarkable content and an audience who appreciates the content enough to take action.  Remarkable content meaning the message provides value to your audience and someone feels what you wrote is of high enough quality to endorse it with their followers as materials worthy of reading. A receptive audience is one who is open to posting interesting and thought provoking content.  Finally, reading and approving is not enough but next step, clicking the re-tweet button must occur. Now things were beginning to get clearer.

Perhaps if I learn my audience, and write content that resonates with them I will have a better chance to get my content re-tweeted. Maybe I should for the moment stop reading my feeds and open up my Microsoft Word program. I have a lot of work to do.  Remarkable content does not create itself.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Softwarear.com, how dare you hijack my computer! by Tony Green

Anyone who uses a computer or laptop with any kind of regularity is familiar with the annoying pop-ups can be quite annoying. Moreover, it seems like there is always someone attempting to scare you to purchase anti-virus protection even if a reputable provider is in place and your machine is clean. In those cases at least an option exists to ignore the ads.

A few days  ago I came across a program which downloads and installs itself on your PC without your knowledge the proceeds to block access to the Internet and every other application leaving you with the solitary option of purchasing their software in order to “protect” your computer.  More ever the malware prohibits from using the anti-virus software you may have purchased to eliminate any rogue software.
Now I was annoyed. After checking the website I found a customer service phone number which I called to see if I could get some answer as to who had trying to extort money from me. Not surprisingly the number transferred you to one of those 1 800 singles chat rooms. Now my curiosity was peaked in addition to being annoyed. I checked the website which generated the software which turned out to be softwarear.com.  The first three pages of Google search results verified the existence of many annoyed folks like me who were dealing with the malicious code.

The easiest solution, in the short term other, than paying something else to provide software to remove the particular code so is to restore the configuration of your system to a time before the application installed itself.
More research yielded the program works through the Internet Explorer browser.  Therefore in order to save yourself the aggravation of re-infecting your system after you removing this malware I recommend the use of another browser for example Apple’s Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox or Google’s Chrome.

At this point with any luck the PC or laptop in question should be functioning properly. But the does not address what I think should be the real question: Isn’t against to the law to take control of someone property without their permission. One example which comes to mind is the CAN-SPAM law which prevents people from sending unsolicited messages.  Think of it this way, if you were driving you car what would you thinking if someone remotely took control of your vehicle and directed to toward the nearest auto mechanic for bogus repairs?

Can anyone tell me who provides the function of the Better Business Bureau for the Internet? The time has arrived to give them a call……