That’s all for this week on Plugin Picks. See you on Monday!

Join us Wednesday for the next edition of Plugin Picks!

February 1 – 5, 2010

WordPress Hack Cloakes Itself to All But Search Engines

Automattic Hires Theme Developer Ian Stewart, Forms “Theme Team”

Donate to Your Favorite WordPress Project: Support a WordPress Developer Day

Learn to Write WordPress Plugins in 20 Minutes (video)

Around the WordPress Community: Dynamic Copyrights, Moving WordPress, Microformats, and Twitter to Blog

WordCast Conversations 7: WordPress and Blogging for Musicians and Bands

Our newest show, Plugin Picks premiered this week with Plugin Picks 1: Audio Player and Plugin Picks 2: Google Analyticator

Got comments, questions, ideas or suggestions? We live off your feedback. Call us up at 1-888-525-BLOG or send an email over to mail@wordcastnet.com. You can also chime in on our Twitter, @WordCast, or in the WordCast Forums.

Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday!

U.K. energy minister Ed Miliband

Ed Miliband, the U.K. secretary of state for energy’s Twitter account posted up a little message to some of his 6,000+ followers today to inform them of the following:

“Hhey, i’ve been having better sex and longer with this here”

The tweet was accompanied by a link to a site reportedly selling sexual stimulants. He soon followed up with an apology, noting that he had evidently fallen victim to one of many Twitter phishing scams going around these days.

The Twitter API makes it incredibly easy for web applications to take all sorts of actions on your account. Following users, unfollowing others, posting tweets and sending direct messages, these apps can be quite useful and innovative, but often, as in this case, quite malicious.

Scams like the “This you?” direct messages that went around last week link users to a fake Twitter login page, which, upon receiving their login details, proceeds to use the account for their own marketing purposes through typ0-rific testimonials like Miliband’s.

These scams are all too common around the Twittersphere these days. Even Twitter’s oldest  user, 104-year-old Ivy Bean has reportedly been mixed up in things at some point. I have received multiple messages from 30-something looking men telling me they’re “24, female and horny”, and that I should add them on their Windows Live account so we can “cam.” (I haven’t been sending notes of my own… at least not yet.)

If you’re a Twitter user, keep your eye out for these scams, and, for the love of Mr. Tweet, if you come across one of these posts, don’t click the link.

Ed Miliband’s Twitter account hacked, sends rude tweets [Techeye]

Episode 6

Guest: David Bullock of Barack 2.0, co-author of the book highlighting the ways social media impacted Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign

• Barack Obama used Twitter, Facebook, and other social media services in his campaign and it was a major key to success. David tells us how and why.
• The story behind Barack 2.0
• Why are Twitter and Facebook so powerful?
• Barack 2.0 was published through Lulu – David explains why a traditional publisher was not needed.

David also took some time to explain what the future of social media will be inside and outside of politics, and detailed how Barack Obama’s social media strategies can be applied to your own business, brand, or organization.

We also talked with David about his own experiences and his personal story throughout all of his work. High points, low points, experiences that taught him lessons both good and bad, and what we can expect from him in the future.

It appears users will soon be flocking to Twitter, trying to claim that unique name they’ve been pining for. TheNextWeb is reporting that Twitter is going to be opening up all the inactive handles that users registered back in the early days and are no longer using, and many of them are, obviously, going to be in very high demand.

Though this could very well change, Twitter’s current policy for such matters defines an inactive account as one that “ hasn’t been logged into or updated in over 6 months.” This puts accounts all the way into the middle of 2009 up for grabs if users don’t get back in and tweet for their life (or, rather, their username).

A date for the madness has not yet been set, and Twitter has stated that it will release more details and instructions on claiming names as they get closer to that time. Even so, if you have an account in danger of being “put up for adoption”, make sure that you’re tweeting now! And, if you’ve got your eye on a username, you had better be ready to jump on it, because the whole internet will be. too. We’ve already got @WordCast, though, so we’re happy

Let’s break those numbers down a bit: 100,000 followers in 8 hours breaks down to about 12,500 follows per hour, which is over 200 every minute. Followers were increasing at the rate of three per second.

This isn’t the first time celebs have had momentum on Twitter. Britney Spears, Oprah, and Ellen DeGeneres all saw similar responses. Apparently Bill Gates is just as popular (plus, and he didn’t kick off his tweet-stream in caps lock – HI TWITTERS!). We’re also assuming that Bill Gates is, in fact, Twittering for himself, unlike Barack Obama (as we learned yesterday).

Bill Gates Surpasses 100,000 Twitter Followers in 8 Hours [Mashable]

During Obama’s election campaign his Twitter account was regularly updated with voting reminders and instructions on campaign progress effectively disseminating information to a massively growing technologically savvy audience that integrated both the online and offline world.

However, recently, Obama personally revealed to Chinese students in Shanghai:

“Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.”

Delegating the task of updating Twitter accounts to staff isn’t an unknown practice. One only needs to look at Britney Spears’ Twitter account to see a working example of an entire organization using one Twitter account – in this example Ms. Spears and her management team.

President Obama made his own personal Twitter account history by sending his first tweet on behalf of the American Red Cross who have been working with the disaster recovery efforts in Haiti, a country recently ravaged by earthquakes.

Obama’s First Real Tweet! [via Mashable]

Fans have rallied together on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook in a grassroots movement to support O’Brien. One supporter has started a I’m With COCO campaign, asking users to change their avatars to a portrait (shown at right), sporting the phrase “I’m with COCO!”

The I’m with Coco fan page on Facebook has 76,140 fans at the time of writing and hundreds of comments are being posted daily, ranging from supporting Conan to bashing Jay. “Conan” is still a trending topic on Twitter, while the #teamjay hashtag has had a fairly dismal response. In general, the net seems to be in favor of Conan keeping his spot, and they’re making it known.

At this point, it’s being reported that NBC is allowing Conan to host on other networks, and has not backed down in their decision to move “The Tonight Show”. The amount of effect that the noise on the ‘net had on these developments is unknown.

Have you seen the effects of the movement on Twitter, Facebook, or a similar site? Have you participated, or would consider participating, in such a campaign? We’d love to hear your thoughts, either in the comments or the WordCast Forums.

Image courtesy TweetCraft

Long known as one of the most addicting games ever to hit computer screens, World of Warcraft has captured the minds (and hours and hours of time) of gamers everywhere. But what about the gamers with Twitter accounts? What if they need to tweet while caught in the middle of a quest, or maybe they just can’t tear themselves away from battling for a single second? What then?

While my thoughts on the matter would likely be: “Hey, you obsessive gameaholics! If you can’t break away from your online fantasy world for two minutes to tweet something then whatever it is probably isn’t worth tweeting! Get a life, get a job, do something!!!” …one company has a different idea.

TweetCraft hooks into one’s WOW and allows users to use Twitter while gaming, with functions including:

• Sending and receiving tweets while playing
• Posting screenshots of the game to with TwitPic
• Automatically tweet logins, achievements, etc.

Prepare to see Twitter flooded with WOW. Thanks, TweetCraft.

TweetCraft [via Crenk]