tdog.blog

You’ve seen these all over the place nowadays. They’re the funny little images right by a form submit button that ask you to identify the smudged up letters. Supposedly, these CAPTCHA devices prove my humanity (as opposed to my bot-ness). The goal is admirable: use a Turing test to keep evil spambots from polluting your blog comments and other database assets.

The problem is, most CAPTCHAs have been hacked in one way or another. Most CAPTCHAs are hard to use even if you have good vision, and to make them accessible to the blind, they require a voice component that is also easily hacked. What we need is some kind of Turing test that will easily tell humans and computers apart, and do so in a way that doesn’t involve math or computation (which by the way, is what computers are good at, duh!).

One of the best systems I’ve found is TextCAPTCHA.com which uses logic puzzles and other questions that confound computers but leave most humans unfazed. If you can answer the questions, you are free to submit your form. For example:

Two + 5 + one is ?

What word from “kidnapped, paws, garrulousness” begins with “k”?

The list ear, Wednesday, pink and John contains how many body parts?

What is seventy five thousand seven hundred and seventy three as a number?

What is John’s name?

So far, the site features 157 million different questions that you can access through a free Web Services API. You register for free, use the code he gives you to send in requests for questions and process responses, and there you have it: an accessible (it’s all plain text, no images) extremely hard-to-break CAPTCHA on your site. And since it’s a web service, you can use it on numerous sites if in fact you run a number of them.

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Twitalyzer.com offers a very interesting service: they rank your Twitter usage and tell you how well you’re doing in various areas:

• Influence, or how many followers you have
• Signal, represented by a signal-to-noise ratio
• Generosity, or how much you reference and retweet others
• Velocity, or how much you tweet over a rolling period
• Clout, or how much others reference you

Here is a screen shot I took on Friday February 27, 2009. The service is being upgraded right now, thanks to a jump in traffic that has made their hardware melt. So be patient if you go out there. I opted to delay this post just in case they needed more time!

As you can see from my chart:

• I have  a very low influence (I need more followers, so follow me @myerman)
• My signal-to-noise ratio is astonishingly high, which means 8 times out of 10 I will be providing you with a URL or retweeting others (ie, I won’t be wasting your life with useless tweets)
• My generosity is low (so I need to work on referencing others and retweeting them)
• My velocity is low (not enough tweets during the past week, but I feel like I’m right on target, really)
• My clout is super-low (I need to get more retweets and references)

Some Thoughts on Improving Your Use of Twitter

The key metric here is influence. How many people follow you, how many times are you retweeted, and how many times are you referenced. If these numbers go up, then everything else goes up. The key to gaining influence is making sure that your tweets have value to others. Try to include one (or more) of the following in your tweets:

• A URL to a resource
• A hashtag
• An @ reference to another user
• A retweet (RT) of another user’s tweet

Putting these kinds of things in your tweets will make them more useful. Another key to success is generosity. Reference other users and retweet what they say–this will open users to other networks, most of which they can’t access easily. Eventually, those you retweet will reciprocate by referencing and retweeting you! But of course, you’d better have something interesting to say….so this all kind of loops back on and reinforces itself.

At the end of the day, Twitter isn’t much different then other communication channels:

1. Know your audience.
2. Create content targeted to that audience.
3. Start conversations that drive deeper engagement.

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Trellian is now offering a free keyword/search term discovery tool over at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

All of you who were impossibly hooked on the now-defunct Overture keyword tool can now rejoice! Onward and upward!

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A while ago, I wrote a little WordPress plugin that lets you integrate your tagging efforts with Amazon’s SimpleDB. Why would anyone want to do that? Well, it turns out that if you’re running various blogs, SimpleDB provides a really easy way to organize the tags for all of them.

simpledb-tag (ZIP archive)

Here’s a PDF of the article I wrote for Amazon.

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Been working on something new–a 3-part audio program, on how to negotiate the hellacious process of becoming an author. If you’re at all interested in becoming a published author, then you need to check it out….it’s three hours of Thom Singer (also a published author) and me riffing on a whole bunch of topics:

• Researching your book’s topic
• Creating a hard-hitting proposal
• Setting up good working habits for writing a great book
• Working with a publisher
• Promoting your book
• Even becoming your own publisher if that’s what you want to do
• When to get an agent and why you should
• Why proposals are accepted…and rejected
• Why it’s important to negotiate important points with your publisher (such as cover art)
• Why having a set schedule is so important to you and those around you
• Why promoting a book is so much harder than writing a book (but so worth it!)
• Why talent isn’t the most important thing for success in publishing….and what is.

Check it out!

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