Bnpositives Blog

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The Art of Spam and Blacklisting

I’m not sure what gave me the idea to do this but it was interesting the way it turned out. I’ve been tweaking our spam filtering settings for our domains for work and was a bit in awe of the collection of blacklisted words we had collected for our spam traps.

wordle-spam-art

My first thought was to share my list of blocked words with everyone, but I wasn’t sure the best way to share it, so I have the way I’ve embedded it below as code will allow you to hopefully cut and paste it into your own filters. This will let you hit the ground running with some spam traps.

Then I had the idea to paste all the words into Wordle and see what the look of spam words came across as on their site. You see the word art from Wordle above.

Just continue reading to see the code to let you copy and paste the word list. I’m hoping it doesn’t get the page or site blocked because of all the spam words that are in the text. I’m hoping embedding it into the code like this will help. Careful some of the words included are pretty coarse. If you’re not interested don’t click through the read more link.

Image: Picture from Wordle.net

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Pong Shots at Olivet Nazarene University

What do you do when you’re a college student and have too much free time on your hands. It’s probably not studying. More than likely you end up doing something entertaining with some of your closest friends. That’s exactly what these guys did at Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, IL.

David Anderson, Matt Compton, Steve Olson and Michael Schimp put together the video and hoped to get 10,000 views on YouTube. They’ve received many more than that as well as some national media exposure.

After watching the video you may question if it was edited at all. I mean some of these shots were amazing!

"I’ve found a good way to silence some critics is to tell them to click on HQ on the video and watch it in full screen – then it’s tough to deny that it’s real," says Olson.

Pretty cool.

I’ve got a bit of a connection with Olivet. May father attended there, along with my wife and both of her sisters and a number of other friends. I attended Mount Vernon Nazarene University in Ohio, which is a sister school. Cool to see some viral video exposure for the campus, which is also home to the Chicago Bears training camp.

Source: Kings of Pong: Olivet students become Internet sensations

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Social Media Is NOT The Answer

social-media-icons

There’s been a thread of thought bouncing back and forth in my head lately. It stems from some conversations with a few different people as well as hearing the response from other individuals as they speak of and refer to a variety of social media platforms.

Many of my friends are aware that I’m active on Facebook, flickr, blogging, StumbleUpon, twitter, BrightKite, YouTube, Vimeo and a variety of other social sites. Many of those same friends don’t "get" some of them, while others they can see the value.

Most of the time people don’t get twitter. They think it’s only about updating everyone on the fact you’re waking up, eating a meal or going back to bed. If you’ve been using twitter for very long, you probably know it’s useful for so much more than that. I’ve already written about how it’s been useful for me (although I can’t seem to find the link to that post now).

Here’s the deal though, if you’re the type of person that’s not really interested in having a conversation with someone offline (aka the "real" world), then communicating with people via social media isn’t going to make much sense to you either. Even if you understand the potential, if it’s not your personality, I doubt you’re going to be active. For that reason alone, Social Media will NOT be the answer you’re probably looking for in business or even your own personal endeavors.

Don’t waste your time and ours by setting up accounts that will grow dusty with unuse and being ignored.

Similarly anyone can setup a blog, but not everyone will have the discipline to be a writer and keep that blog updated. It’s really no fault of your own, you’re just not interested in writing and you’re not interested in your voice being heard. I believe you can show someone how to write and what to write, but you can’t make them a writer.