• 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%

1. It is impossible to ever be finished getting ready for anything.
2. For a site that’s dedicated to the Web 2.0 world, it feels very 0.9
3. None of the SMO-esque sites I’d seen actually used any social bookmarks
4. Neither did mine

Well, regardless of my inherit unrest I totally didn’t feel like working on a new theme and the only thing I could think of was trying to hook up #4, which would then fix #3 and make a little bit of headway towards the first two concerns.

In no time at all I had come across not one but two different approaches to adding Social Bookmarks to a blog.

The first one is the one that I decided upon and is the wonderful Social Bookmark Links Wordpress Plugin from TwisterMC. Currently in version 0.5.1 it has options where you can pick and choose your favorite Social Sites to display with your post in text form or toss them all in a dropdown menu.

It’s super easy to install and looking at the PHP file it also appears very hackable so that given 15 minutes or so you should be able to add anything you feel the author might have overlooked. Though I would think from the 45+ choices he gives you, that’s probably not likely in the near future.

I would give this a 4.5/5 stars. For future versions I would like to see the ability to order the results in the text format instead of only being able to display them alphabetically. That plus a bit more control over the individual dividers. Other than those wishes for down the road, I highly recommend this for anyone looking to add the easy plugin functionality of Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, etc to their Wordpress setup.

The 2nd option that I found was an online Social Bookmarking creator by iFeedreaders that lets you choose from essentially the same options as the plugin and when you are done it spits out a clean bit of HTML code that you can drop right into your blog or static page to achieve a similar effect as an actual plugin.

This worked well and fast and would serve the purpose if nothing better was available for your particular setup (*cough* Postnuke *cough* Static Page *cough*). But since just about everyone who would be interested in this sort of feature probably isn’t using something dated I can’t think of what purpose this would serve on a regular basis. Still handy to have around I suppose so we’ll give 4/5 stars for doing what it’s supposed to do.