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Over the last week, many people have fallen foul of the latest phishing scam to do the rounds of Twitter. And an unusual number of high profile individuals have been included in the list of users affected, including the Press Complaints Commission, BBC correspondent Nick Higham, the Guardian’s Head of Audio Matt Wells, bank First Direct, and environment minister Ed Milliband.

Environment Minister Ed Milliband caught by phishing scam

Phishing scams have long been endured by most internet users – the traditional mechanism has been via email, but as social networks have becoming hugely popular, they’ve become the vector of choice. And Twitter is particularly attractive as the speed with which messages can spread is combined with the use of short urls, which help to mask the malevolence of the message.

While this is just another example of the huge amount of phishing attempts which exist, the higher profile of these attacks as they affect prominent politicians will hopefully lead to a better awareness and response by governments.

It’s probably a forlorn hope, but for example, here are some things which might change:

• More education about phishing and spam to the ‘general public’ – how about a public awareness campaign?
• More understanding about how normal users can have accounts compromised very easily – for instance, with ‘Three Strikes Rules’.
• More people using offline backups of any content that is valuable or useful to them
• More of a move towards data privacy, and Vendor Relationship Management, to allow users to only share the information they choose with any service provider under strict controls.
• A rethink of the UK Identity Card scheme which includes private businesses taking fingerprint and photos.

Importantly, it should place the risks of Social Engineering alongside those of teenage cyberwarfare specialists taking down defence satellites from their bedroom. If a private company was, for example, storing fingerprint data, you wouldn’t need to target their infrastructure (Although I’m not sure most chemists have a particularly high level of internet security) – you’d use social engineering on their employees via Facebook, Twitter, or offline in person to gain information and access.

Of course, technology can play a part, and I’m sure Twitter will increase their response to phishers in future, particularly as a high profile attack via any platform is never good for PR. But any measures will always be part of a never-ending arms race, and only when every individual is educated enough will there be any noticeable difference…

If you’re looking for an example of a significant financial return on Twitter, then Dell has long been used as an example – and you can expect it to be quoted even more often after revealing revenues have now risen to $6.5 million globally via Twitter.

Of course that requires almost 1.5 million followers for their main @DellOutlet account, Dell Canada, the $800,000 from @DellnoBrasil and over $150,000 from @DellHomeSalesCA , but it’s still a mightily impressive amount.

Key points for the future from Dell Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca?

• Streamline our presence in social media networks, create meaningful content for customers and continue to increase our connections with them in those places
• Focus on building a tighter integration between Dell.com, Support.Dell.com, our Dell Community sites with our presence in social networks
• Continue our focus on scaling support of social media initiatives into the Dell business units

There’s a few more bits on the Dell post worth reading.

In this recent age of the social network explosion, myself and others have identified the need to work to amalgate your activities to one central location to be able to maintain your internet identity namely, your own website.

It is the job of this personal website to act as a central repository for all you social networks and external websites so you aren’t lost over a million, slightly overlapping networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk and so on.

I am just in the process of moving my currently Wordpress powered website over to Tumblr for a few significant (to me) reasons:

• Firstly, it occurred to me that if I ever blogged anything of interest which hit a nerve ‘out there’ then a decent amount of sudden traffic would clean out my bank because of the hosting charges.
• I’m a fan of Wordpress and am always a bit of a control freak and felt inadequate if I didn’t host and fully run my own website. I’ve gotten over this a bit and feel that in this day and age, such website pride not needed. Also noting that plenty of web guru’s don’t host their own sites helped.
• Wordpress updates always give me chills and they are needed airly often. I have had upgrades go BADLY wrong before, with all posts having to be manually re-entered.
• Like moving to Mac, I wanted to have my blog just work and remove some of the temptation to fiddle with it all the time.
• I wanted something more streamline and neat.

And then there’s my main reasons..

I’ve had my Tumblr account for some time and wasn’t quite sure about the concept. It provides micro-blogging, of a sort, but where post types are defined into text, photo, link, quote, chat, audio, video. Each of these types has a pre-defined style applied to it meaning it makes it easy to quickly post different types of content that looks nice and the main template can be fully customised with HTML.

Tumblr can seem a bit backwards on first glance, especially when coming from a full blogging platform like Wordpress. There are no categories as such, no ‘pages’ (static posts outside of the blog/date system) and the only real navigation comes as PREV and NEXT pagination. But a system as Tumblr shines when you embrace the format – it’s meant a blog – a date ordered, ongoing series of updates from a personal point of view. The one-page, single list layout that is Tumblr gives a great blog format. It means, like a blog, the main emphasis is about what it going on now and the Tumblr ‘dashboard’ gives you the means to quickly post content with little other thought.

Tumblr also provides domain customising so that you CAN have the Tumblr blog using your own mydomain.com address.

Archiving on Tumblr is handled in a unique way. Posts are date organised on a page in a grid layout with actual post thumbnails of the posts you have made.

Tags have recently been introduced but unlike Wordpress, there aren’t any functions to have all those tags listed in a sidebar or anything. BUT apply a tag to a post automatically makes a url of it, so that a posts tagged personal, can then be accessed in date order via yourname.tumblr.com/tagged/personal meaning you could manually add a tag list if, like me, you have a fixed tag list, defined in advance.

But still the main reason to switch a whole website to something like Tumblr is that rather than your main website being a hub for other networks you use, it means that your website IS one of those networks. It means your website ITSELF can be added as a friend rather than giving someone your username for a particular social network and having the friend have to go off to that other site and add you.

This is technically where MySpace was so far ahead but most of us didn’t realise because it was/is so poorly implemented.

Having this setup means that the potential for self-promotion is greatly increased as your website is inside a network.

If only Twitter gave this functionality – image it: your twitter profile page WAS your website with custom HTML etc..?