The Rise of Social Spam

I received my second piece of spam from LinkedIn today and dissected the features of new spamming practices on social networks. How can I tell it’s social spam?

1. I don’t know Gina.
2. Gina has a whole 5 connections and is the member of 1 group. This is very likely a fake account.
3. Gina has no reason to think I care about social media (my profile isn’t geared to social media particularly).
4. There is only 1 actionable item, clicking on the web site.  (Check out the site, it’s a good spam venue.)
5. I checked out the name placed on the “forward”  - also a fake account.
6. There is no webinar link or presentation.

And who really would buy this line? . “Yes, you can forward this to a few people, howver, please do not blast it to your whole network” If I were their social spam editor, I would have told them this was overkill.

There is an entry for Social Spam on Wikipedia. I just slightly modified it (mostly for lack of time to be thorough).

Visualizing HR Data Part 1: Testing Trend Compass

I just downloaded a trial of Trend Compass, which has created similar bubble charting software that Hans Rosling used on TED.com and similar to a Google gadget mentioned in this blog a couple of weeks ago. This is only test data! But I wanted to try it out. I’ve loaded a sample data set in here to see how we could tell the story of the recession by source of applicant and hires.  (If you happen to work for any of the companies in the bubble, again, not trying to assess anything about you, you’re a sample data point). If this becomes interesting enough, we’ll try this with some real data.

 

I don’t know how much the SW is yet, I’ve emailed them (that can’t be a good sign). However, the Google widget should work as well, maybe better, it just has less documentation.

Update: They emailed me back, $10,000 for the application I’m testing or $50 a pop on their site directly. The only advantage I see so far to it is that you can record a wav on top… but you can do that with any desktop tool, so it’s not hitting a homerun for me yet.