Twitter: no privacy, choked with spam

Largely because I've come across a number of links suggesting how Twitter could be used in education (see below), I've been having another play with it -- and frankly I'm not impressed.

Unless I've missed something, there seems to be a major privacy issue. Either spammers are forcing me to "follow" them or else Twitter itself has decided that I've got to follow a certain number of people, whether I'm interested in what they're twittering about or not. Within 24 hours, I found myself "following" (that is, receiving updates from) 24 people, only 3 of whom I'd actually chosen to follow, all of them with over 500,000 "followers".

The result? That when I log in, I am first forced to read the equivalent of junk email, and worse, have to choose to stop following each of the spammers individually, before I start to see the updates from people like Lance Armstrong (1.6m followers) that I am interested in.

>> Twitter in education:

• 25 ways to teach with Twitter (TechLearning.com)
• Nik Peachy on Twitter
  
• Twitter for Academia
  
• Twitter education groups ("twibes")
  

>> Previous Twitter posts:

• Twittering in ELT
• Twitter
  

The worst thing that could happen to a blog

What's the worst thing that could happen to a blog -- or anything else that you were doing with learners and technology?

The worst that I can think of is for the work done all to be lost, perhaps through some failure of the (often free) Web 2.0 service you might be using.

On the Blogs and Blogging course I was teaching in July, I thought that had happened as (right in the middle of the course!) Blogger's automated spam filters suddenly decided to block access to the blog we were using, deciding that we were spammers, possibly (and it's the only reason I can think of) because of the high incidence of the word "blogs". Fortunately, access was restored to it very quickly (though the same thing has since happened to another blog I was using on another course).

One of the problems with free web services (especially small companies) is that they get bought out, or go under, and there is a risk of the worst happening: your students work being lost. Even with services that do survive, things can go wrong (I had a major problem with Podomatic "losing" a lot of audio archives my students had created, a couple of years ago now).

Whatever you do with technology, make back-ups!