Dear readers,

The word of the day today is “Phishing”. It’s sounds like fishing, but instead of using bait to catch smelly swimming fish, you cast your lines (links) and try to catch unsuspecting half-awake people or moms trying to use the computer.

I noticed my email inbox was full of messages from Twitter. Tons of news direct messages, but they looked like they were from robots so I saved it for later. Then I found this being reported on Mashable this morning.

We have received multiple reports that a new, convincing, and dangerous worm and phishing scam is making the rounds on Twitter. Hacked accounts are sending DMs to users and stealing their login information. In fact, one of our own has received one of these direct messages.

Unsuspecting users are receiving DMs with the following text:

If you get this DM, DO NOT VISIT THE LINK. It takes you to a replica of the Twitter login page where the hackers will steal your account and use it to send out more infected DMs to your friends.

If you’re one of the unlucky ones to be fooled by this worm, make sure you change your password. Also delete any tweets or DMs that have the link. If you can’t log into your account, reset the password and contact Twitter Support.

This is not the first worm to hit Twitter, but this one is especially dangerous because the login page is convincing and it is spreading via DMs from friends you trust.

Make sure you guys never click on links you don’t trust and never give out your password. Just in case you need a refresher. You can update your computer security with these free programs.

Techcrunch is reporting that twitter has been down for about 40 minutes now (since about 6 am California time), and counting. No word on their status blog about the outage at all (Update: they now say “Site is down – We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.”). See additional updates below.

Since most of you spend your entire work day screwing around on Twitter (luckily I actually get paid to do this), you may be left wondering what to do now. No worries, we have a list. Meanwhile, I can’t Tweet (TM) that it’s raining here in Palo Alto, or go on a 140 character rage over PG&E shutting off my electricity for no reason at all yesterday, forcing me to come into the office at 4 am this morning.
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From time to time there are those whose sufferings can be taken no longer. For these people they resort to a new form of digital revolution, the “Social Network Call to Arms”. The past few months I’ve witnessed countless instances of people using their network connections to accomplish many tasks. Take this story by New York Times Technology Blogger, David Poque.

He could no longer suffer the injustice of having to wait for the mandatory 15-second voicemail instructions messages that play before each persons voicemail. Poque claims that the customers are paying for it.

These little 15-second waits add up–bigtime. If Verizon’s 70 million customers leave or check messages twice a weekday, Verizon rakes in about $620 million a year. That’s your money. And your time: three hours of your time a year, just sitting there listening to the same message over and over again every year.
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Today at Zero 2 Hero we celebrate the 15 day anniversary, since this blog is fairly new I have the advantage of testing many different methods of traffic generation and reporting how well each one works.

So today I wanted to share with you my progress and what has worked best after 15 days since my beginning. Lets take a look at 2 ways that I was able to get more traffic and improve my page rank, and 1 way that has not worked well so far.

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Yesterday The Consumerist wrote an article titled “No you can’t get rich via twitter.” Seems like lately there are twittertisements around every corner. However I’m pretty sure that some of those people are actually making the money they say they are. Probably just not they way they make it look.

If you want to know how people really get rich using twitter, just send me your credit card number and sign up for the email list FREE TODAY ONLY. Don’t miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity.

Have any of you had luck making money using twitter?? Let us know in the comments.

Today we are going through a media revolution. Anyone who has a message that they want to spread can, using today technology and social media.

The phone gave us the ‘one to one’ communication

The tv and radio gave us the ‘one to many’ communication

The internet has given us the ability to communicate from ‘many to many’

As recently as last decade the majority of all media was produced by professionals, those days are over now never to return.

Click through to watch the video

If you’ve ever tried using twitter to build traffic for you blog or website, then you know that there are tons of people out there who have the policy “If you follow me I’ll follow you back”, but what good does this really do for you. It has some people asking the question “even with 1000 followers on Twitter why are there probably less than 10 that are reading my tweets and fewer than that clicking on my links. Perhaps its time for a new Policy.

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Video Runtime: 50:52

Successful Blogger and Author of “Four Hour Work Week” delivers an incredibly informative talk at the last San Francisco WordCamp, titled “How to Blog without Killing Yourself”. More than 700 people from 32 countries were in attendance

Topics Include:

- How I blog and select best practices
- Frequency and tools — best times and days to post
- Blogging myths and how to harness data for better results
- Testing design and surprising findings that can be copied
- How I address comments and community building
- How I write and research for good social media response
- 20 minutes of audience Q&A on Twitter, branding, outsourcing, and much more

For more about Tim you can visit his blog at

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog