Recently in Social 2.0 Category

It is still very much in the alpha version, but take a peek at the sidebar of any page of my blog under the heading of My Plurkmates. You will see the early version of my PlurkBuds widget for Movable Type 4.

At the moment, a cron-driven process, written in perl, creates the included module once every 30 minutes. I still have to manually rebuild the pages. The next version will pull the data on the fly. I am still fussing with format and other stuff. Click the picture and be transported to that person's timeline on Plurk.

More about it and future plans soon!

It must have been all the talk about Bush and Sasquatch and such!

 

More about this new invention later... now for the music!

I noticed a Plurk about blog badges for Plurk and several links were mentioned. Not liking any that I saw and since I was already in Photoshop, I doodled a couple. Feel free to use, but please, copy them somewhere and do not hotlink to them here. A nice mention in your blog with a link back to here would be appreciated, too.

If you have any suggestions, ideas, whatever, please let me know!

  

One blog I have started following in my quest for wrangling social networking is Social Web Tools. She covers a wide range of tools and, in particular, Twitter and its analogs. Even with this post, I suggest it as a good read.

A recent article, Promote Your Site The Smart Way With BookmarkingDemon, just plain rubbed me the wrong way. In a nutshell, the tool she is describing provides a means to send out links to your entries, web pages, whatever, automatically to a variety of social bookmarking web sites. Automatically. Daily. While it is termed as an SEO tool, it sounds in the same category as the blog / web site / comment / search engine spamming engines we all dread. I get 5000+ worthless spam pings a day. While they never see the light of day, it still degrades my web site response and chews up traffic.

Rather than rant on again, let me just clip the comment I left on the post, just in case it gets lost in moderation:

"It can be such a tedious pain though, to manually submit your URLs to all those social bookmarking sites on a daily basis." "...many features such as ... automated account creation."

Last time I looked, the definition of "social" has an intimate connection to the word "human" as in a person. Call me old fashioned, but I thought social networking was to be... um... socialable. I really enjoy reading your blog, but this post resembles promotion of a spam tool (I know... it is an "SEO tool"). You may not be promoting Viagra or whatever, but it is no different.

As far as automated postings, pings, and such, it is much easier (and free) to use one of any number of plug-ins that already do the same thing when you actually do make an update.

Just my $0.02, guess I am old-fashioned and already swamped going through all the repetitious links and spam out there.

To promote yourself, do it yourself. I have no problem with update pings when you make a change, either automated or manual. Using a tool that not only pings, but also creates additional accounts in social engines, is spamming. Sure, we all can have multiple personas on the Internet, but mechanical ones seems to defeat the purpose of social networking.

When I expressed my leeriness about using foreign-based social networking sites and applications, you may wonder why. Most, if not all of these web sites have privacy statements, some with great detail, some just "we protect your privacy" at the bottom of a page. Being in the US, my expectations are that my private data will be protected and that if for some reason it is lost, stolen, or misused, that I may have legal recourse. Okay, I know, fat chance, but at least there is a chance. Patriot Act and FISA courts not withstanding, for the most part, we do have protection.

The clause in most privacy statements that cause me the most heartburn is this one, taken from a unnamed social web site:

Disclosures Required by Law: We reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable information when we believe in good faith that an applicable law, regulation, or legal process requires it, or when we believe disclosure is necessary to protect or enforce our rights or the rights of another user.

Sounds fair, right? You would want to be protected from whatever. The phrase that concerns me is the applicable law, regulation, or legal process one. In the US, it would be state and/or federal law and the privacy statement would say what state has jurisdiction in its matters. And that is why I always check where the web site is hosted and the company is located.

The problem with this particular privacy statement is that the web site and its company are located in Mainland China. Yes, those friendly folks who brought you the Tiananmen Square massacre, harsh treatment of practitioners of feng shui, and persecution of the Tibetan followers of the Dalai Lama. So, you think that since they are hosting the Olympics that all is changed? No censorship? No theft of your personal data? In a perfect world, we wouldn't have to worry. Since we don't live in one, we even have to worry in the US.

For real! I am still constantly amazed at the width and breadth of the new frontiers that are being explored (and exploited) in Internet-aided social networking. Being the übergeek, I tend to get totally lost in what I term as link digression, the downward spiral of looking at references to other neat stuff found while looking for neat stuff. Strange way to express it, I know, but totally fits the activity.

You may have noticed a stub page here on the web site to try and connect the dots in my personal social network. It is hardly started because I find myself going deeper and deeper in the available tools. One site I made the mistake of going to is Mashable, self-termed as the #1 Social Networking and Social Media News Blog. I call it a place to get lost for hours, especially the get-an-invite section, to get an invitation to a newly released beta platform.

While it does provide for hours of entertainment, I do find that some of the social whatevers are simply repeats or wannabees or sad imitations. Also, I am leery at some of their intent in the area of th protection of your personal data. I make it a point to check the domain registration as well. Found one that looked very interesting, a just in time RSS aggregation tool that provides alerts via IM (yes, yet another one of those). The name sounded strange, foreign... did a quick whois and found that the owner and the hosting is located in China. Crossed that one off the list.

So as the adventure continues, I will get around to adding some notes and links and general impressions of these wide-ranging tools, both on the blog and in the Social section of the web site. Oh, and of note, I happened across the Webware 100 awards... like I needed another list of applications to look through...

Trying out SmugMug as an alternative to Flickr. Flickr has just plain got me mad at them, courtesy of Yahoo IDs and trying to combine accounts and frustrating me on both when they don't work. Trying to merge puts me in an endless loop of is this what you want to do and then not doing it. Since I was considering going pro, I might as well pay the money to a place that appears to have their collective act together and not be tied to one particular ID/email address system. Off to investigate their API's and such as well as upload a few pictures while I grab a shower (cleaning the pool is nasty smelling business).

Thinking about it, maybe I will post the SmugMug album covers on Flickr to get it noticed on all the feeds. Not a bad idea!

Lord, I just have to laugh... I read this article on Blorge about the UK social network called Faceparty - gee, wonder how they came up with that name? In the ever diligent Web 2.0 world to keep the predators away from the children (which is a good thing, don't get me wrong), they have decided that no one over the age of 35 can gain access/membership on Faceparty. Well, if you take a look at their log in to our network suggestion highlighted in the graphic at the right, who over the age of 8 would? Better yet, what parent would allow their child to do so?

Oops, I forgot - mom and dad just park their kids in front of the computer and trust them to make the right decision. Pardon me for being so stupid.

The reason I am pointing this article out is for the arbitrary age that was picked. They even admit it is arbitrary. Using Google, most sources state that the demographical profile of the typical sexual predator is difficult to define. Some say that there is a 95/5 percent male versus female, while others say it is closer to 75/25. The average age is anywhere from 30 to 45, depending upon the study. But, a more salient fact is one that you read far too often: Only a fraction of those who commit sexual assault are apprehended and convicted for their crimes. So, registration and the statistics and cross-reference databases yield are only a partial view of the predators that lurk on the Internet.

What is truly needed is for the public and those who use the social networks to wake up and realize that your privacy can be compromised and that you are the only one who is ultimately responsible for your safety. Not the service provider, not the government, not some idiot who uses a dartboard to determine a random number. You would no sooner publicize your personal telephone number or social security number on a road-side sign, so why do it on a network connected venue.

And, of course, someone had to buy a domain name to make light of Faceparty's decision.