I’d like to introduce you guys to someone: Ike Pigott. He’s a local blogger that I ran across on Twitter some time ago. I’ve been following his blog, Occam’s RazR, for a while now. He works for Red Cross and has an extensive background in communications.

He’s recently set himself upon a personal quest to utilize the online tools and social media for disaster relief and aid. He’s created the Red Cross Online Disaster Portal and opened the Red Cross Twitter Channel.

The idea is that people in evacuation zones could “follow” the Red Cross Twitter feed from their cell phones, and find out about shelter locations and service delivery sites.

I think it’s a great idea, and I’m personally excited to be able to see first-hand the mediums that we have available to us today being put to use for such a great cause. This will be especially handy for us locally with hurricane season coming up, as well as tornado season!

If you are interested in helping out or would like more information, please contact Ike. I’m sure that he’d love to hear from you and could use any and all help sent his way!

As much as I avoided most of the social networking type sites when they began gaining in popularity (i.e. MySpace, Facebook, etc.), I found myself eventually dragged into them in order to keep up with loved ones. For instance, I originally joined MySpace so I could keep up with my brother and help out with his campaign last year. Since then, I have been discovered by more people from high school and college than those I had previously connected with via Classmates.com and Reunion.com. (Funny how that is!) I’ve since in started getting back in touch with old acquaintances via MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook (a LOT of my former co-workers are on the latter two!), MeetUp, Virb, Jaiku, … heck, even one of my Twitter friends recognized me in a restaurant a week or so ago!

Cool how that is.

In fact, a friend of mine from college now surfs — well, he surfed during college, but now he does it for a living. Funniest looking thing he was back then: tall, skinny, long blond curly hair that he usually teased up into a ‘fro. Sweet guy though, I heard he married a girl from Vestavia. He now goes all over the world. He had emailed me a schedule of places he’s going: Southern CA, Outer Banks NC, Hawaii, Costa Rica, Japan! (I never knew surfing was big there?)

Another friend I ran across on MySpace — he was one of my best friends in high school. He graduated 2 years ahead of me and went into the Navy. He now lives in Nevada and bounces between there and Japan and works for the gaming industry.

(Color me green with envy on that one! )

Anyways, it’s just neat how people you know are everywhere and can be found literally anywhere.

Don’tcha think?

Mama always said, “Keep your words soft and sweet, in case you’ll have to eat them later.” I guess this isn’t exactly what she had in mind, but it’s possible that a recent Twitter glitch made lead to some eating their words, or having words of their own.

Twitter glitch leaves ‘private’ users exposed to the world

“Twitter, the popular messaging site which has gained traction among the Technorati, has come in for plenty of criticism for downtime, bugs and trouble keeping up with the volume of users signing up.

But its latest problem takes things beyond the merely irritating and into the realm of dangerous - by undermining user privacy.” (via The Guardian)

Due to some unforeseen quirk of the Twitter API, certain things that are protected within the virtual walls of the Twitter.com realm were available for the whole world to see via Twittervision, regardless of the user’s selected privacy preferences. That means that whatever someone was twittering away privately was actually visible to the whole freakin’ world!

A few hours ago the hole was plugged, but what most users may not have realized yet is that since it was obviously open for a good long while, those tweets may linger on via the many available search engine cache sites.

*ahem* Google, anyone?

Twitter seems to be a very jumpy cat this morning. I installed Twitbin only to find out that it kept rejecting my password because Twitter.com was down. (perfect ;P)

I received a notice last night that WordPress 2.2 has been released. However, considering the amount of trouble Jim had upgrading his site last night, I think I’m going to wait a few days and watch the Support forums before jumping on this one. Besides, I’m eagerly awaiting 2.3 for those nifty tagging features they keep promising!

Had an uber-busy weekend. For those who observed it, I hope everyone had a good Easter. Jim’s brother and his family are in town, so we spent most of the weekend with them.

I didn’t get to spend a whole lot of time on the pc, so I’m just now catching up. Posted a lot of things to BYKYC that I’ve missed over the weekend. I had originally resigned to sit and go through my Twitter updates, but let’s face it — I got WAY too may Friends listed, and I’m not keen on pouring through 25 pages of one-liners, LOL!

I did read today’s though! hehe

I have run across a nice site for keeping up-to-date on new Twitter gadgets and various Twitter-related news: Twitter Hacks. They featured a piece on there today on how easy it is to spoof someone on Twitter:

Twitter Vulnerable to Spoofing?

Can someone pose as you on Twitter? With a very simple trick, yes they can.

Both Twitter and Jott authenticate users by their phone number. Twitter does this by validating users based upon the source of SMS messages sent to the phone number 40404 (US), and Jott does this by trusting the incoming Caller ID when someone calls 877-568-848. From a security perspective this means the following:

* Anyone who knows your phone number can update your Twitter page by spoofing a SMS message, i.e. post a Twitter entry as you.
* Anyone who knows your phone number can spoof his or her caller ID to send a Jott message as you.

Read Twitter and Jott Vulnerable to SMS and Caller ID Spoofing by Nitesh Dhanjani for the full details. Needless to say I hope they are able to fix this. I don’t know much about the SMS world but hopefully they’ll be able to block these fake sender services. The problem is new ones will fill up all the time. Does this mean Twitter and similar services need another layer of authentication? I know a lot of people on Twitter publish their cell phone numbers on their web sites so this could get ugly kinda quick like.

I guess lucky for me I don’t have a cellphone, so the above wouldn’t apply to me; but anyone who does, it would be easy to spoof an account and send an unGodly amount of spam — say, messages advertising that Phentermine stuff? Anyone with a blog has seen those! That’d likely piss off people on your friends list, easily having your account terminated, and worse: labeling you as a spammer.