How To Successfully Manage Your Twitter Followers

All right, I’ll admit it: when it comes to Twitter I am absolutely a selfish beast. Whew! I’m glad that I got that off of my chest.

Seriously, when it comes to social media, the usefulness of most sites is determined by reader experience, particularly what you can get out of it. Sure, there is a certain amount of sharing involved (discovering pages, stumbling, shouting, digging, etc.), but how many of us would spend our time doing all of things for no reason? Not me.

Two Twitter Accounts At The Moment

I’ve mentioned several times previously that I avoided Twitter for ages, signing up in 2007, but not making good use of this microblogging site for the next year and one half. Since January 2009 I’ve been twittering away and now have two accounts – mattkeegan and theautowriter – from which I operate. Side note – the first one is my general Twitter account while the second one represents my online face to the car industry.

But one of the downsides to Twitter is their follow system. I find it to be a bit of a pain in the neck to manage and, yes, I sometimes am annoyed when I exchange follows with someone who then proceeds to unfollow me. A closer look at the way that this type of Twitter user operates reveals that they do this with other users – just check their profile and you’ll find that they have hundreds if not thousands of more people following them then the number of people they follow.

Then again, it could be that someone just doesn’t like my tweets. I’m simply heartbroken.

Your Twitter Karma

Thanks to Dossy, who wrote the script behind Your Twitter Karma, finding out who follows you and who you follow is easy to do. No messing around with that awful page on Twitter trying to find that answer. You can’t.

With Your Twitter Karma you can enter your Twitter user name and password to find that answer. This tool looks at everyone who is following you (red arrow) and everyone you’re following (green arrow) to show your status with them. Then, if you do as I do, you can bulk unfollow people who have dropped you or bulk follow people you want to add. Of course, you can leave a box unchecked by the user’s name and no change will be made. Or, you can simply do nothing and move on.

Oh, and let me say this – I find it annoying when people constantly tweet messages commenting when people have decided to drop them. Please keep your big, fat ego off of Twitter or at least have the decency to no longer follow me!

Scraper Websites Remain An Internet Scourge

Last Saturday morning I logged onto my main email account and discovered a highly unusual number of messages, particularly for a weekend morning. A quick survey of what had come in were notifications from my two main automotive blogs – The Auto Writer and Auto Trends – that comments were awaiting my approval.

It didn’t take me long to realize that these comments were pingbacks from articles I had written for the two blogs, information that was scraped from both these sites with links intact to other articles. Moreover, each photograph I included was also snagged, meaning that the pictures were hot-linked to my website, a further drain on my resources.

Admittedly, I have let some scrapers slide, figuring it wasn’t worth the hassle of hunting down and finding them in order to register a complaint. However, this time I was furious and decided enough was enough.

Hunting Down Website Scrapers

To find a website scraper, I’ll plug in the URL for that website to Domain Tools at www.domaintools.com to see what comes up. Sometimes personal information is blocked as the owner hides behind a domain proxy. Other times, a person’s name isn’t listed, but a contact email is given. If you’re lucky, you may even find the person’s name, phone number, email address, etc. In this situation, all I had available to me was the person’s email address, but that was enough for me to fire off the following email:

It has come to my attention that the owner of scrapersite.com is taking articles from sites that I own and posting these articles to his site. Since the email address yourname@yourmail.com is listed as the contact for the site, you are being contacted.

Please remove at once every article you have taken from http://www.autotrends.org (Auto Trends) and http://www.thearticlewriter.com/autowriter (The Auto Writer). What you have done is illegal and violates international copyright law.

(I then listed examples of articles that had been culled from my sites and concluded my email with the following statement):

You do not have my permission to use my personal material, therefore I expect you to remove the articles in question at once.

I concluded my message with my name and repeated the URLs to my two automotive sites.

I Get A Response

I wasn’t expecting a response, figuring that if this person cared that he scraped articles from my site he’d remove the information and that would be that. Or, if he had no plans to take down my information, then he wouldn’t respond.

I was wrong on both counts.

Turns out I got a reply within the hour of sending off my notice which was as follows:

Hello, this site is only collecting RSS Feed. You know? Mybloglog, Zimbio, Yahoo, blogcatalog do same, they collecting RSS feed. Also, this site give you linkback, not claimed as my article, so its not illegal. But, since u mind, I will remove your feed as soon possible.

Yes I mind! So much so I replied:

It is illegal. You posted each one of my articles on your site in full. The other sites that you mentioned include a snippet, not the entire work. Just because you can read my works with an RSS reader doesn’t mean you can use it on your own site.

Please read up on what constitutes copyright and what constitutes fair use:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

In addition your country, Pakistan, is a signatory to the Berne Convention which protects people like me from getting their intellectual property taken without their knowledge:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works

If you remove all of the material (taken) from my two sites I will let this matter go. If not, I’ll be forced to contact the Berne Convention office in Karachi to file a complaint.

I doubt that there is a Berne office in Karachi or anywhere else for that matter. But, I wanted to put a little teeth in my reply to encourage him to follow through. He sent a follow up reply doubting that I would make good on my threats, reiterating that he posted “automatic content” which gave him, in his eyes, the right to republish. I decided to let him have the last word.

Wrapping It Up

In the end my articles were removed so I no longer have an issue with this person. I am glad that I followed through and that he took the proper action. My time was taken up with having to do something I really didn’t want to do, but I needed to protect my intellectual property even if someone else doesn’t understand what that means.

Article scraping remains an internet scourge, but with some diligence on our part we can limit its effect one scraper at a time.