Blog Tips

Who needs G8 meetings when they have Facebook

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Illustration courtesy The Atlantic

In case you still needed convincing social media is not a trend, but a revolution:

• There are over 200,000,000 blogs in the world and 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
• It took Radio 38 years to reach 50 million users. TV did better: 13 years, the Internet 4 Years and iPod 3 Years. Facebook on the other hand added 100 million users in less than 9 months.

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The more critical, visible or popular a website, the more prone they become to hacker attacks. Social media giants Twitter and Facebook experienced this today.

Both sites came under – probably related – hacker attacks today, bringing Twitter down, and Facebook onto its knees. The attacks were of a basic DoS (Denial of Service) types where, for malicious intents, a high volume of network traffic or network requests are sent to a server, tying up its resources up to the point where ‘legitimate’ users can no longer connect.

DoS attacks are pretty easy to orchestrate and often used to attack government sites, payment services and the like.

More sophisticated hacks targeting Twitter in the past months broke into several user accounts, posting fake messages.

Even at the moment of writing this post, Twitter is still down. The social media community is in mourning.

Iran held their presidential elections on Friday June 12. Late that evening, the current President Ahmadinejad was declared the winner. His rival Mousavi called the results a “charade” and on June 13, thousands of protesters took to the street.

That Saturday June 13, I was sitting in Rome, Italy. Thousands of miles away from Tehran. I was writing an article about social media, when I saw tweets coming in from people in Tehran. At first, they twittered simple messages as “It looks like people are coming onto the streets, protesting”. Soon, they tweeted links to YouTube videos they took with their mobile phones.
I scanned the mainstream media. CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera,.. I did Google News searches for “Iran Protests”… No reports.

By noon time, there were that many tweets coming in from Iran, the “#iranelection” tag shot to Twitter’s hall of fame. Still nothing on CNN, BBC,… I started a new post. The first line read “Something’s brewing in Iran and people are reporting”.

Here is a slightly edited version of my original post, written on the first day of the protests. I repost it on BlogTips as it shows the power of social media.

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click for a high res view.

In a previous post I explained in laymen’s terms what RSS feeds are, and what they can do for you as a reader, and as a blogger.

A more technical post, described some of the technical tools I use to “transform” RSS feeds to different platforms.

As my “network” grew to 20+ blogs and aggregation sites, 40+ bookmarking sites and link collectors, I lost track, and it was time to map it all out.

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