Just this morning I have a new follower with 25,000 followers. She’s been on Twitter for two months.

(By the way, if you want to know a lot about a Twitter follower, go to http://www.twitterholic.com and put in their Twitter handle. Her real name is not given and she has no link to a web site or blog. She’s clearly found some sort of auto-follow program).

Cindy and Ivana, I met Ellen on Twitter, back when I could distinguish the real followers from the fake ones. Today, I have 20 fake followers for every 1 real follower – and I simply no longer have the time to look through them all in order to find people who are real.

And, darn, Ellen, I’m not sure I have the time or energy to write any more articles about cleaning up a neighborhood that has already gone to pot.

And, one more thought about plagiarism. During the Chris Anderson debate about his outright copying of information from Wikipedia for his book, Free, many people said, “What’s the big deal – we live in a copy and paste world.” Clearly, it’s not just Twitter where the neighborhood is going to pot.

“The Twitter neighborhood that was once so verdant and green is increasingly being invaded by pimps and the pushers. Cathy brings up a great question – do we have a responsibility to our own neighborhood?”

If I were to include those words in my blog, wouldn’t that be an open and shut case of plagiarism? Yes. And that’s what people are doing on twitter when they copy without giving retweet credit. Maybe we need to educate people to that?

You also raise an apt metaphor — that of a neighborhood. How do we protect what’s good in it?

Ava, you point out something that is really disturbing to us. It’s taking more and more time just to sift through the masses of “fake” followers. Even less than a year ago, most people who followed us on Twitter were real people who were trying out a fairly cool new technology. Now, unfortunately, scads of unsavory types fill my follow list. It’s getting almost like spotting a needle in a haystack to find someone worth following back anymore.

Which leads to Cathy’s point and suggestion to help the misguided. That seems like such a herculean task, Cathy, but we’d love to know more. We’ve suggested in this blog that “Discussions” in LinkedIn Groups be real discussions, not sales pitches – and even challenged a few of the folks posting outright spam or sales messages in those groups, but we’ve hesitated to engage people directly. You might just give us the “kick in the pants” to do more.

Curious to know if you’ve written about how reaching out to newbies is going – the successes and the challenges of it – in your blog?

Thanks to both of you – the Twitter neighborhood that was once so verdant and green is increasingly being invaded by pimps and the pushers. Cathy brings up a great question – do we have a responsibility to our own neighborhood?

The worst part about, it in some ways, is when someone new to twitter gets sucked in by one of these folks , or buys an ebook or a program that tells them to use auto direct messages and that that is THE way to get followers & make money. Or signs up with a program to get x number of followers everyday, d the program retwets that spammy message once every x # of tweets.

People – if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is. But if you find you’ve been caught up in it early on, you can recover, just go into settings and deny the program access to your twitter account. Start over, building followers one tweet at a time.

Many people automatically block someone who sends a “get x #of followers a day,” auto DM. I try and reach out to newbies who have been conned into these programs and suggest it might not make the best first impression. I ask for a real DM, or @reply – sometimes I get a real response, sometimes it’s never responded, sometimes they are rude in their reply. The 1st ones I follow back and reply to, the 2nd I do not follow back, the 3rd set I block.

In recent months the phrase “keepin it real” has a whole new meaning for me.

I’m finding that I’m being followed by fewer of those, and more spammers, porn purveyors, and sell-sell-sellers.

Yet, the relationships I’m developing with cool, knowledgeable tweeps makes the investment worth it.

You may also have noticed a number of Twitter links that bring you to a page that clearly is being tracked. I don’t like to be tracked, thank you very much. We could devote a whole blog just to Twitter deceit.

Michael and Sheryl- keeping the world safe for twitterers everywhere!

Megan, Mike is from Minneapolis, which is one of the few locations on the planet where they take such terms to the next level. Consider, if you will, that there is still no decision in last year’s race for that second Minnesota senate seat.

One place, however, you will not find any “BS’ery” is on the blog Mike writes for called The Same Rowdy Crowd – http://thesamerowdycrowd.wordpress.com/author/mjkeliher/