300 - that's my self-imposed limit for the number of people I follow on twitter. There are some social media "authorities" who recommend capping the number at 150. I find that 300 is very manage-able (for me) considering the mix of people whose tweets I care about.

Michael Fortin has addressed a couple of my pet net peeves: #1 is
Fake networking on twitter and facebook :::

Just like Twitter said when they dumped auto-follow from their native application:

“It is unlikely that any one can actu ally read tweets from thou sands of accounts which makes this activ ity disingenuous.”

Even Seth Godin calls mass-friending as “fake networking.” This applies to Facebook as much as it does to Twitter — or to any other social media application, for that matter.

...#2 MF tackles the band of self-proclaimed Internet Marketing Gurus who want to sell you stuff like blogging advice, a pdf, an eBook - whatever means they can employ to seperate you from your money!

A recent blog post has stirred quite a lot of controversy. It specifically made some stark accusations about a certain number of marketers who appear to be colluding...(Let’s call them “musical-chair product launches.” Oh, and let’s not forget the once pricey product you paid a marketer just a few weeks ago now being given away for free as a bonus to buying from their affiliate link during someone else’s product launch.)

Fortin takes on "#3" in going after the fakers who have latched onto this thing they call "The Secret" - the only secret here is that (JUST LIKE THE BLOGGING GURUS) they want your money too!

...the real secret behind the law of attraction. (via Michael Fortin - click on the links to read his complete articles)

Here’s the problem with the way this law has been abused of late. People who are vulnerable, gullible, and desperate are seeking a magic pill. A quick-fix solution.

So their mindset is now focused on getting help. They are thinking about getting rid of their financial pains. Once they see a course, program, training, or seminar that purports to teach them on how to cure their money ills, they jump on it like bees to honey.

(Or better said, like flies to excrement.)

Greedy new-wage gurus know this all too well. So they package their rehashed, embellished version of the secret, overprice it, and sell it to the unsuspecting masses.

And guess what? Most of the people who will buy it are those very people who don’t need it. These naive hopefuls will spend the remaining cash in their bank accounts just for some magic pill — and the gurus walk away with their money.

Fake Networking, Fake Gurus

Hocus Pocus, things are not in focus!

Jinn (Arabic: جن jinn, singular جني jinnī; variant spelling djinn) or genies are supernatural creatures in Arab folklore and Islamic teachings which occupy a parallel world to that of mankind. Together, jinn, humans and angels make up the three sentient creations of Allah. ~ Wikipedia

Modern day dictators can be rather colourful characters. Characters who sometimes become caricatures of themselves, like M. Khadafy, for one. Then there's Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who tells us the planet Mars probably once was home to a thriving civilization, doomed after all its resources were consumed; poisoned by the excesses of Capitalism.

I'm not sure if Chavez keeps a blog (I do follow him on twitter). However, I do know that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad loves to blog. He's also being scrutinized a la 15th century-style as word spreads there may be magic in his mitts! Can't you just imagine him now, watching "Charmed" and "Merlin" on the telly?

Ahmadinejad Allies Charged with 'Sorcery'...

Top aides arrested for being 'magicians' and invoking genies...

Haha, I like this quote from Jewlicious "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Dreams of Genie? Well, I don't really know what he dreams of other than a world map without Israel on it..."

The Wizard of Iran

Catching up on my print reading! One of may favourite magazines is aperture. The Spring 2011 edition (no. 202) contains an awesome article (page 40) about photography's "secret life as a creative medium" circa 1860. You must see the stunning black-and-white photography by Camille Silvy. Think of Silvy as the Civil War-era version of Andy Warhol. He was an artist who enhanced his works much the same way modern digital photographers enhance theirs with tools like Photoshop. Silvy produced over a million prints between 1859 and 1868.

More B&W ::: Award-winning freelance photog and UAlbany alumni Teru Kuwayama documents history in some of the most dangerous places on the planet. [UAlbany Magazine, Spring 2011, Volume 20, Number 1] Kuwayama arrived in Albany with no career goals "at all," joined the Student Photo Service despite a lack of interest in photography (and initially no intention of joining the group!). Says he: "A year later, I ran the place." Kuwayama's shots are amazing! See them here. You may also check out his Fall 2010 project, Basetrack (on facebook).

The pictures taken by Kuwayama and Silvy capture time in the analog world. And it looks like the lack of our understanding of the digital world may be our undoing.

Get you 2012 thinking cap on now, as you recall Stephen Hawking's waning about broadcasting our presence to outer space? Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved. Turn to Page 6 of Scientific American [May 2011] and read the appearing dead center of the page. To summarize, gently: for years we've been employing tools like radiotelescopes and SETI to search for life in the stars by trying to intercept what we would define as communication waves or frequencies, but all we have ever "heard" is noise.

Did you know that digital data compression, when transmitted - is NOISE. NOISE, unless you happen to know the codec or can solve the algorithm needed to decipher it. So all that NOISE scientists are picking up with their equipment may very very very well be embedded with alien transmissions! (Hopefully those on other worlds long abandoned the analog technology required to discover US.) Let's hope they did forget - for, if not, perhaps some alien scientist "fooling around" with old analog equipment will turn the tables and find us before we find him... could that be the danger that awaits us as "The end of the world" in 2012?






Tags: analog photography, Civil War era photography



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In an unguarded moment, their eyes opened...