• started this site from scratch
• moved in 6 inches of snow
• taken a new job in different aspect of web marketing
• begun training someone for my old job
• gone from silent backup on dozens of clients to being el numero uno
• overcome the flu
• risen over and above the loonacy of jury duty
• and just about 1million personal things that are none of your business

So yesterday when I was searching for some freeware I found an ad that peaked my curiousity, and forced me to remember that which I’d been neglecting.

For those of you not scavenging the net looking for the latest craze to hit the SMO world, I thought I’d do a little roundup, to show you what’s been up:

Firefox Social Plugin: The Coop

The Coop is a Firefox addon in development that will let users keep track of what their friends are doing online, and share new and interesting content with one or more of those friends. It will integrate with popular web services, using their existing data feeds as a transport mechanism.

Users will see their friends’ faces, and by clicking on them will be able to get a list of that person’s recently added Flickr photos, favourite YouTube videos, tagged websites, composed blog posts, updated Facebook status, etc. If a user wants to share something with a friend, they simply drag that thing onto their friend’s face. When they receive something from a friend, that friend’s face glows to get the user’s attention.

Danny Sullivan hates my opinion on Google’s Personalized Search

Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land wrote an article discussing what he feels are the ins and out of Google’s Personalized Search. Much against the SMO mashup opinion, he comes away loving it and probably should carry a towel before he sucks any more Google juice:

Don’t Fear The Personal Results!

The change is good news for searchers. It’s also good news for site owners with good content, who should get rewarded by visits. That’s especially so if you try these tips:

* Titles & Descriptions are crucial: You need the clickthrough more than ever. Clickthroughs get your site as seen as possibly important to a particular person’s profile.

* Get on the Google personalized homepages of searchers. That means offering them a feed or a gadget and encouraging take-up with an Add To Google buttons.

* Put Google Bookmark buttons on your site, such as the one offered by AddThis. Getting bookmarked also helps you be seen as important.

Google Notebook VS del.icio.us

Google Notebook is a Firefox extension that looks like it could be a del.icio.us killer. For as socially inclined as Google may be, they are pretty late into the social bookmarking game. However, they were late to the email table as well and look how well gMail has done so, late doesn’t mean out. We’ll see how it fairs however so stay tuned. Hotmail anyone? LOL.

You snooze? You lose.

A new study release by JupiterResearch called “Social Networking Sites: Defining Advertising Opportunities in a Competitive Landscape” finds that 48% of brand marketers plan to use social tactics in 2007. Jupiter defines social networking sites as websites designed for members to create and post content, usually in the form of profile pages, primarily in order to communicate with each other.

Although I think that Jupiter’s (and therefore 48% of all marketers) are defining it the wrong way, I can’t help but feel that their path is correct. Though it might be the long hard road out of hell and into Hades 2.0, fools and their money soon part and are greeted on the far side of the river by demons like me who can show them how to use it effectively.

and finally…

The latest numbers from Hitwise show that MySpace and Facebook continue their dominance of the social networking space.

Both of these 2 juggernauts combined equal over 91% of all social networking hits in the first quarter of 2007. The breakdown..

Top 20 Social Networking Sites, February 2007:

1. MySpace 81%
2. Facebook 10%
3. Bebo 1%
4. BlackPlanet 0.88%
5. Xanga 0.87%
6. iMeem 0.73%
7. Yahoo! 360 up 0.72%
8. Classmates up 0.72%
9. hi5 0.69%
10. Tagged 0.67%
11. LiveJournal 0.49%
12. Gaiaonline 0.48%
13. Friendster 0.34%
14. Orkut 0.26%
15. Live Spaces 0.18%
16. HoverSpot 0.18%
17. Buzznet 0.18%
18. Sconex 0.14%
19. MiGente.com 0.11%
20. myYearbook 0.11%

Bad Fucking Move. Thanks for trying to kill social media, and jack up the whole internet though. Couldn’t have done it better if I’d tried.

See, it’s oft thought that I have much love for the Big Wiki. However, I don’t. On many levels it goes more for the love of the concept of it. The concept that people could come together, share their knowledge on any given subject and the general consensus of whatever the topic is… is pretty much just that. It’s not an authority. It’s not the be all and end all, in-depth view of whatever. It’s much more of a gauge. A social gauge of opinion on something.

Let’s look at it like this:
Imagine 5000 reviews of 1 movie. You won’t read them all I guarantee it. But if all 5000 reviews could be rolled into 1 cohesive review.. then you would get the general sense of what the public opinion was of this. You would understand a bit of the history of the film, it’s players, it’s background, if it did well in the box office or whether it’s widely considered a joke. This culmination of opinions presented as fact is just about what every individual on the net is going for. It’s what the multi-billion dollar industries known as Google and Yahoo strive for every day. It, regardless of what what people say Web 1, 2, 3, 4, or 20-POINT-OH, stands for is really what it boils down to: People coming together and sharing of themselves.

It’s the struggle of humanity, personified on the web, and brought to you by decent, yet antiquated open source software. But whoa be to thee who is in charge of moderating humanity! Seriously, what a fucking jip being a moderator there must be. It’s like being a leased out whore of a god who considers himself ruler of it all, only to find out that there are countless other gods who are just as unaccountable and just as likely to flunk their junior year of high school if they “don’t stop screwing around and ‘get down to business, young man.” Seriously. What a racket.

Having this knowledge and knowing that you are reading this likely means that you’ve sought (in one form or another) to exploit the system. Welcome to the club. It’s humanity, remember. Any attempt not to force your opinion on someone else would lead you to not posting shite on the interwebs in the first place. So to you selfless folks I say: You are too noble.. go away now.

For the 99% of you still reading, pay attention.

Yesterday Wikipedia rolled out this:

Any URL on Wikipedia that points to a location other than it’s own site is now followed with the SEO’s evil stepchild, the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Meaning the Big Wiki won’t help bring any relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

I get it. I really do. From the viewpoint of 10,000 sixteen year-olds, the vantage point could be no clearer. People try to exploit the system. The devil tries to get into heaven. Rick Santorum tries to get elected again. I know it’s hard to moderate a wiki, ’cause I do it myself. But this is a move that creates a rift in the spirit of giving and getting that is supposed to be represented by the very essence of it all. In the eyes of a search engine, say Google, where relevancy and followed links allow the order of the interwebs to fall into a hierarchy, it places unequal weight on the back of a social media giant.

Lets say you work your ass off in a certain industry. For shits and giggles we’ll say it’s the world of web marketing. Let’s say, after years of labor, you get a heads up and you see something new. Let’s say you name it. Maybe you even name it: “Social Media Optimization”. You sit down, coin the phrase, explain your reasoning and come up with maybe, what.. 5 rules for this new frontier?

The next day, the Wikipedia contributors append the details of Social Media Optimization (your discovery, nomenclature, and set of rules) to a Wikipedia page on the subject. They do give your site props as a reference but search engines will never see that ascription or find any relevancy of what you’ve done through the Big Wiki because of the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

Since the Big Wiki enjoys a higher level of trust (hello Pagerank!), the Google will show the Wikipedia SMO page higher than yours in the SERP’s because the search engine spiders don’t know that the content on that page is actually based on yours. What? You don’t believe me? Now you get potentially far less traffic on your work than Wikipedia does and the weight of the internet shifts. The balance gets all out of whack. And something that is supposed to build on the backs of everyone to give to everyone evenly suddenly becomes the leech of the net, giving back less than what you put into it.

Penalizing the whole for the actions of the few. One step forward and two steps back.

Well my friends, the line has been crossed into the world of SMO and it will be interesting to watch the outcome, even if it does signify an un-official beginning of another hundred-year war.

The news is that Apple officially threw it’s hat into the smart phone arena with the announcement of the iPhone. The iPhone is a slick looking phone with DRM crippled media playback and a price tag that ensures only the coolest richest kids on the block will get one first.

This, as you might gather, comes straight out of the Marketing 101 playbook: Create and own the rights to a product or future product. Release the news. Create a buzz. Sell your stuff. Become rich(er).

It’s really no surprise or big deal. When someone as large as Apple releases some hot new designed tech gadget, it’s automatically going to create a stir and people will flock to see what all the fuss is about. The problem this time out is that they kinda decided to rush through the first step in the rules. While they have created the product, they don’t actually own the rights to use the product name: iPhone. Turns out that a little company(by the name of Cisco), who happens to be more entwined in the interwebs than Apple could ever be, actually owns the rights to that name with a trademark that reaches back to the mid ’90’s.

Still, you say, what has this to do with Social Media Optimization? So there’s a trademark dispute going on between two heavyweights in the tech industry. Who cares? As it turns out, you do. Or maybe not you, but people like you. As a company in a Web 2.0 environment, the end consumer can have a weight that you might not be ready for. You can’t expect that what you do will just create positive hype. That’s all Web 0.4 and old school media (like TV/radio) in which you’d get either:

• a nod from the media or influenced hype to help you sell whatever
• a media thrashing (usually if you screwed the pooch or sold OJ the knife under the table)

In 2007, with Web 2.0 and social media, you have to expect the people you are subtly trying to screw over to use the medium against you. They have a voice. They have an opinion. They have a place to get their voice to the masses. Enter Cisco, who have recently learned the importance of paying whatever PR company they pay to maintain their blog.

The fact that a company who is so behind the infrastructure of the net that you are probably using something of theirs to read this, would have a blog which allows comments in the first place is a sign that people who aren’t hip to social media are way behind the times. The fact that this company would use this medium to strike out and make their say on important legal matters to the public, is a testament of the power of social mediums in today’s marketplace. The fact that they have received hundreds of comments that have been unmoderated and actually shown they are listening to or at least reading these comments only speaks to the future of social media optimization.

As you may have guessed, as a rebuttal to Apple’s press release and trademark infringement, Cisco replied with a blog post declaring the illegal nature of the venture and their displeasure at such. Be sure and read the umpteen hundred comments following the post too.
What interests me in all of this is not whether Apple succeeds with the iPhone or not. It’s more along the lines of whether the concept behind socialized media wins or not.

You see, beyond a feud that includes 2 companies that couldn’t give a toss about me, lies a paradigm of questions regarding the philosophy of the age of Social Media.

For decades, we the public have been spoon-fed news, opinions, and ideas. For decades we have lapped it up like a thirsty dog shown a bowl of fresh water. The problem is that a dog will drink a dish of muddy nastiness if it’s parched enough. It’s been shown that we are not much different, save the fact that we have to be told when we’re thirsty. My hope, and probably a false one, is that with a new medium.. a new level playing field.. people will not only piss in the bowl of muddy slop they are presented, but on the very concept of their thirst.

I know it won’t happen. At root, I’m an idealist, but I can’t help myself from getting a bit excited when a company who has been feeding a bit of flashy crap to the masses gets served a piece of the pie they’ve created.

Thanks to Rohit for the heads up on this story.

Think for a moment. Think back to the middle of December. You’re visiting your parents house wondering what on earth you’d get these strangers for Christmas when – wait – what’s that you see? Yes. There across the living room, under the library edition of the latest Dean Koontz novel.. Is that a monitor you see? Is that “You” written in Arial 2.0 on the monitor? Is that a chubby in your pants?

Well if you got a semi in front of your aging rents over the honor, imagine how surprised I was when I found out I’d been named Time’s Person of the Year. Hold up, you don’t have to imagine it, ’cause you were too, remember? You’re riding the Internets. You blog. You MySpace. You… Tube. And as a result, the fine people of Time Magazine, who weren’t fucking slacking off or trying to reach any sort of deadline in the least, have decided that each and every one of us is equivalent to Stalin, Newt Gingrich, or 50% of George W. Bush.

Any which way you slice that turns out as pretty fucking insulting to everyone involved.Well, for this year, the collective pronoun for the second person gets the randomly odd nod for embracing the true nature of the Internet: filming yourself getting hit in the nuts and then employing a subsidiary of Google to let your bestest friends see it 24/7. I don’t know about you but I’ll proudly display my certificate on my wall. We’re all getting certificates, right? I realize it’s January but I figured the holidays had slowed the Postal Service down a bunch. If that doesn’t pan out I’m sure Time will at least give us a link to a PDF we can print out? Right?

Stop the press! It doesn’t matter. Because I regret to inform Time Magazine that I must decline their honor. I know. I know. The accolades. The media fanfare. But I digress, as it just wouldn’t be right accepting an award based entirely around a concept that I find morally abhorrent. Now I know how Yasser Arafat must have felt when he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Of course, he kept the money, the selfish bastard.

But I’m afraid that I can’t accept any award given out for… well… here… let Time stand at the podium:

“It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.”

Oh, fuck the fuck off. This same shit has been here for years. Before Wikipedia, if you wanted to know the names of all of the games in the Ultima series, all you had to do was search Altavista, find the Ultima WebRing, and click through them until you found some nerd that had listed them all off, from “The First Age of Darkness” to “The Silver Seed, pt 2″. But you know what? Someone always had. All Wikipedia does is keep the these bringers of dorkiness from having to find a host or possess some rudimentary knowledge of HTML.*

And what about “the many wresting power from the few?” Is that really what’s happening? Is that really the catchphrase you want attached to America circa 2006? At a time when all the money is moving from the hands of the many to the greedy paws of the few. When the executive branch of our elected government is consolidating power from the many to the one. However, thanks to the great leveller, MySpace, the poetry of 14 year-old girls is being set to music and distributed on a global scale instead of staying in glittery pink notebooks in bedroom drawers. I’m so glad Time recognizes this for the monumental achievement for mankind that it is.

Perhaps, Rubel would like to explain how we’re all best buds now. But in truth, the worst part of all this is that they know the “many” are a bunch of fucking morons, and they just don’t care.

“Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred. But that’s what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail.”

I love the fact that they admit they’re romanticizing this, but only as much as is strictly necessary. Ri-i-i-ght. Strictly necessary to make a deadline and not piss off your average reader with a politically divisive choice. The greatest thing about this year’s pick is it will piss everyone off in a nice, friendly, generic way. Except me, of course, who’s been a firm believer since before day 1 of Web2.0, that just because you have a camera or 200 ‘friends’ doesn’t mean your voice is worth listening to. Time magazine, however, wants to tell me that not only am I part of this problem, but that I should be happy about it. Oh joy of all joys.

*RIP Geoshitties.