Twitter – Did you learn anything?

Annals of the robot Internet: Michael Sappir, Hamas copywriter

Michael — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 10:06:01 +0000

I woke up this morning to a very strange and unpleasant mention on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/usamasheriff/status/30143794527608832

Of course, it’s always possible the Israeli Right is, well, right, and that like all lefties I’m an unwitting copywriter for Hamas… But it’s unlikely, so I dilligently applied Occam’s Razor and concluded it must be a typo (okay, I mean I took a guess), and followed the link to see what it’s all about. It turned out to be an auto-generated newspaper-esque page of content — powered by paper.li — collected from tweets with the #Hamas hashtag, conveniently called “The #hamas Daily” — which is this case sounds like an official Hamas publication.

Since one of my posts yesterday was about topics related to Hamas and since I apply an excessive amount of tags, which Feedburner selectively-but-automatically turns into hashtags when tweeting my posts (see tweet below), I ended up being an unwitting copywriter for Hamas, who incidentally would like to kill almost everyone I love.

http://twitter.com/msappir/status/29931993890291713

I never used to believe it when they said machines will rise up to destroy us… But now I’m starting to see it… A conspiracy of half-intelligent automatons, interacting on the wild Internet, producing their own newspapers and slanderous tweets… They are the real enemy!!

Sharing links

Michael — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 15:30:50 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how, where, and with whom I share interesting links I find. I first realized that sharing mainly on Facebook doesn’t make so much sense, since things I share there only reach my relatively list of friends, and only some of them are interested in each of the different topics that interest me. I’ve also started realizing that sharing links on Google Reader (which I do a lot) has basically the same problem (except worse, since I have 40 instead of 400 followers.)

Many of the things I want to share I want to share because I want to help make them public and spread. Since I’ve started using Twitter a lot lately, I guess Twitter is a good venue for this; links reach more people and can spread through Twitter’s huge, globe-spanning network. Of course, like all things Twitter, they easily get drowned out in the never-ending feed.

Of course there’s this blog of mine right here, but it’s too much work to blog all those links. I have to explain what it is I’m posting and why, and I read more than I could do that for.

But I might set up a separate feed for links, using Tumblr or something. Would anyone reading this be interested in that? Would anyone follow it?

Any other ideas?

Blog on hiatus until mid-July

Michael — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:58:27 +0000

Hi readers,

I realize it’s been weeks since my last post, and this is when the next post’s text is written and only needs to be edited… I’ve been so overloaded with schoolwork, work and EUDEC business that I really have not had time to get much else done. So I’ll admit the obvious and put the blog on hiatus until the semester is over. My last exam (Russian) is on July 11, a few days of recovery later I should be back to posting, finishing the Kids Don’t “Need Structure” series.

Meanwhile, follow my daily adventures on Twitter (link), or read one of the blogs on the right-hand column – they’re good!