Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

The Twitter Black Market – Selling “Followers” on eBay

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According to a report from barracuda labs, there is an exploding underground economy for twitter users going on right now

Deal

The Market place is ebay and other websites. Right now there are 196 listing to buy twitter followers with prices starting at $15 per 20,000

So who buys twitter followers?  Commercial products, political campaigns or anyone wanting to look more popular

The irony, according to barracuda labs,  is a large number of these "followers" are actually fake accounts:

For the past 75 days, we have been investigating the business of trading Twitter followers on eBay and other websites searched from Google. As it turns out, this underground economy on Twitter is blooming! The results show that this Twitter business is growing very fast to form a series of underground markets.

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Hello Slopers – Let’s Talk Some Trash

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Hello everyone I'm KC Scott and I'd like to start by thanking Tim for allowing me to share my thoughts with you fine folks. I've followed Slope for quite a few years and am always impressed by the quality of the content and your responses. This is a very smart blog and I'm proud to contribute. (Editor's Note – I was also delighted to see Scott escaped the clutches of IBC to the gentle world of Slope; we welcome him heartily – Tim)

For my first post, I thought we would talk trash – and how it relates to US Economy

I just listened to an interview with Economist Michael McDonough from Bloomberg Briefs over at marketplace.org.  McDonough offered a theory regarding the correlation of the amount of Trash hauled via rail to the Health of the Economy. He also offered the accompanying chart which tracks how well his indicator has performed since 1994.

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