Until a month ago Twitter was the existential online tool – if you were online in any kind of way, you had to be on Twitter. Now? Not so much..

Ireland based Tweetrush, a Twitter analytics service, launched just hours ago and one of the stats it churned out was that Twitter usage is down. Reports suggest that (based on amount of Tweets per day) that usage has gone down from over 3 million per day in April, to around 850,000 per day.

However, that figure seems awfully low to me, so expect the last figure to be rounded up – considerably.

The ‘I Am Rich’ application for the iPhone proves that people will buy anything these days. If you weren’t stupid enough to actually buy the $900 app, then the walk-through below should be all you need to know.

Like any good citizen of the web, I did my fair share and downloaded Firefox 3. Seriously, it couldn’t come soon enough. I was tired that most of my add-ons did not work with the release candidates. I participated ‘officially’ and registered my intent with Mozilla.

My reward came in the form of an email today that told me I was part of a world record, along with eight million two-thousand and twenty-nine others. Woo-hoo – now I really feel special. I even received a self-personalised Download Day certificate!

Our job now is to convince millions of other web users that Firefox kicks arse.

On Thursday and Friday I had to take off work – my temperature was at a steady 100.5 all day. Apparently if it reaches any more than that I should start to get worried. I’ve had on and off shivers, with serious sniffles, a headache, and sneezing just a few of the niceties. I’ve spent the past three days in bed. Since the common cold stems from a virus (I found that out when searching for a cure so I could get back to work), there’s nothing I can do but ride it out and take it like a man (if you include the whining, complaining and generally being in a bad mood, which I’m sure my wife is tired of already).

During my search, I visited several health websites – some of them were good, some of them, not so much. Here’s some of the better ones:

• WebMD
• The National Institutes of Health
• Health Square
• Healthline

I will now resume with blowing my nose and hacking up stuff the colour of mushy peas.

Like Monty Python, “I don’t like spam!”

It’s the bane of internet users every where. I would hate to add up all the time I spent deleting spam emails, spam in my letterbox, spam stuck on my door – I’m just plain sick of it.

I recently submitted this blog to ‘dofollow’ blog directories. For the uninitiated, or those that just don’t give a monkey’s about search engines, a ‘dofollow’ link means that a website linking to another with the ‘dofollow’ attribute intact, passes on link-love. I believe that commenters who leave relevant comments on this site deserve to have some link-love passed on to them. It’s a small way of saying thanks for leaving something worthwhile.

Spammers however, don’t care. They’ll leave their comments anywhere that will take them – like this blog. Since submitting to ‘dofollow’ blogs my spam comments have been on the increase but so have the worthwhile comments, it’s a price I’m willing to pay. This weekend I received a comment on one of my blog posts with a generic comment like “Thanks! Found this really useful. Bookmarked it!” The comment then had the authors name with a link to an MP3 site. Now who in their right mind is going to approve a crappy comment like that? Certainly not me…

Fast forward a couple of hours and I received an email notification about another blog comment. This time it was the Raven SEO blog I contribute to at work. Lo and behold, it was the same spammer with the same comment, same name and same link to the crappy MP3 site!

So my spammer friends, let’s establish some groundwork to guarantee that our spam is 100% spamalicious:

• Leave original and specific comments.
• Linking to a crappy MP3 site makes you stand out like a sore thumb. At least link to a good musician with a decent site!
• If you’re going to comment on blogs that are authored by the same user, it would be wise to use different information.
• Contributing something to the post sees your comment (and link) have way more chance of being approved.