Jack of All Blogs always thought it were our task to keep you informed about what is going on in the blogosphere. After our first 140 characters (or less) version some days ago it seems that the Twitterification of novel entries might become tradition here at JOAB.

‘Blogging is not a spectator sport’ evangelist Duncan Riley recently had several blogging gigs going for the Inquisitr. Duncan, known in the blogosphere as a very helpful guy, followed up with some wise advice for applicants. The entry itself wasn’t too long but was a follow up on previous advice.
Many, many words to read, but the advice for applicants can easily be Twitterified in 140 characters or less:

RTFM!

How’s that? 5 characters! Read the frakkin’ manual and apply what the hiring person tells you to do.
As usual our pleasure to be of service to you.

Techcrunch went ahead this morning and published an epic 3789 words novel about what happened during Twittergate, how the hacker gained access all the accounts and files. Before the whole Gawker remake, Paul Boutin had created the very useful 100-word version of journalistic novels. To stay in the Twittergate spirit, we will resume Techcrunch’s novel in 140 characters or less for you:

Chose passwords carefully, change them often. Do not use the same password for every online account. Chose difficult security questions.

Glad to have been of service to you.

Jack of All Blogs favourite Michael Arrington has been at it once more. A supposedly French hacker forwarded several stolen/found Twitter documents to the Techcrunch staff and other online publications. They were obtained by guessing or recovering the password of both a Twitter employee and Twitter’s co-founder Evan Williams’s wife. Twitter uses Google Apps for domains and apparently Google has a simple password recovery method.

Although I missed the memo, it is an acceptable journalistic strategy to blame ‘Do no evil Google’ and get away with any moral issues. Moral issues about posting stolen documents and company secrets. Moral issues about posting these documents and at the same time knowing everyone who works at Twitter.

It’s not our fault that Google has a ridiculously easy way to get access to accounts via their password recovery question. It’s not our fault that Twitter stored all of these documents and sensitive information in the cloud and had easy-to-guess passwords and recovery questions.

Although Arrington a ruthless, self-centric, machine is, he does not seem to have enough of gut to blame people for being dumb and use simple passwords in the first place.

Here at Jack of All Blogs we already established that Techcrunch is broken but things seem to get worse and worse every day for the once so popular Tech/Web2.0 blog.

For months TC has been adding authors and quantity to it’s arsenal, but sadly no quality. One could argue that former blogging Guru and TC full-time contributor Duncan Riley was not the best author either, but at least he knew how to stir some controversy. Ever since DR left TC has gone downhill.

Last week (community) blog Mashable passed TC to become the new #1 tech blog. But things do not only seem to be bad on the quality front, especially the financial department seems to have suffered.

Since weeks, TC has had several adblocks in its feeds. Ads in feeds are nothing new and several bigger blogs do have several ads in their feed. But today TC updated the feed and now comes with not 1, not 2, not even 3 but 5 (FIVE!) ads in the footer.

A whopping 720px*425px of ad space in your feedreader!

The English language continues to progress and evolve, but sadly in a not too great way. After the addition of the term Web.2.0 we really have to wonder what will happen to the language once mastered by the great Shakespeare. Maybe I’m just an old and boring sod, but can someone please explain me what numbers do in words? Since when are digits dictionary worthy?

What will next be added to the English dictionary? Will we see a new landrush for words in the dictionary just like we saw for the Facebook username? Will we see people starting cyberwars to have their nickname recognized as an official word? Can you imagine aplusk become a real word?
Or will the new fashion be abbreviated, short term, text speak words? Punk’d?

In the latter case I will gladly make the best web app ever my homepage.

Social Media and Social Marketing Guru par excellence Trent Reznor, from NIN fame and more even of free music fame, has had enough of it and quits Twitter and co for a while.

The reason: the haters online. Never mind that Ashton Kutcher much more boring and annoying is online and no respect at all deserves for his tweeting efforts. Respect which Reznor has earned over the years. That much even that Jack of All Blogs never had a go at him. How have we been that silly. One celebrity decides to have a break from the intarwebz even though we never bashed him. I feel as if we just failed.

Here at JOAB we have to wonder what else we will have to do now. How can we improve again and make sure we will not be not guilty when the next star quits. I think we should put Scobleizer back on the agenda. On top of our agenda, because don’t you think that it has gone quiet around our formerly most beloved online ‘guru’/'pundit’?

Every year again, in the second week of June, the Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference (WWDC for intimates) takes place and year after year again it does not only excite all Apple and tech pundits, but also incites them to publish their predictions. Most of them usually being wrong, but they always serve as awesome linkbait and keep the conversation among A-listers going.
Every year again you can also find bingo cards to print out and keep your no-life nerdism excited. What could be better than sitting on the edge of your chair, reading a live blog of the conference and wait until Apple has uploaded the conference video. Surely not pr0n!

Of course here at JOAB we do not want to miss out and also want to share our predictions.

• iPhone 3GMYM: A new iPhone will be announced and will be named GMYM. GMYM stands for Give Me Your Money
• At least 3 bloggers will run out of battery power
• Many pictures will be uploaded during the event, just as many photos will be hotlinked on other sites
• During the event Duncan Riley will make more stupid LOLcat pictures only to complain publicly after the event that the release of the iPhone 3GMYM will take months longer in Australia than in the US
• After the event, Gruber, of Daring Fireball fame, will post ‘Told you all!’
• Apple will not announce a tablet
• Apple will obviously bump the speeds of the slower unibody MacBook. We actually are surprised it took the wannabe pundits more than a week to discover that the almost 7% CPU bump for the White MacBook resulted in a faster machine
• Many people will be present at the Moscone center
• There will be spotlights

All in all, the event will be disappointing. No announcement of new Apple powered NASA capsules or satellites will be made. Apple will not solve global warming or make the UK dryer for that matter. War on earth will continue. Poverty will not be solved and Steve Jobs will not announce a cure for cancer. There won’t be any bacon either.

If you’re still trying to work out that bloggers union deal, especially the ‘work from home work out’ $tarbuck$ part of the contract, and finances are rather limited and you don’t manage it to squat days long that posh franchise with the thousands varieties of coffee-imitations… fear not.
Especially not if you’re UK based.

McDonalds comes to your rescue. Starting today.

With the launch of free Wi-Fi access in McDonald’s restaurants from Monday, we can provide the ultimate work break for UK employees to conveniently access the worldwide web. From the comfort of our restaurants, Brits will be able to come out of hiding and surf freely, for free.
[emphasis: waldorf]

I can perfectly imagine how it will feel to blog from home, sat on a hard wooden bench with a clinical table, fries and a tray in front of me. Not to mention the oh so del.icio.us iceberg salad and in ketchup drenched cucumbers falling on my keyboard. No, I don’t want my menu to be maximized, but do you have a power outlet where I can plug in? And maybe a cushion too, because those benches are so comfortable.

Soon coming near to you, 4 Dell equipped bloggers, hosted on blogspot, downloading their free music thanks to McDonalds FreeFi and Ronald ‘Beta’ McDonald 2.0.

Little by little I noticed that the once so-popular and hyped Facebook platform has turned in to a perfect spam box, spam with friendly greetings of… your friends.

Day after day my mailbox is flooded with spam messages, clickthrough messages, every time requiring me to visit the FB website. Sometimes just to read a message or discover that someone has added a picture. Basically the same thing I would have discovered anyway, when trying to follow my friend. That is whenever I log in. Daily actually.

And when I log in… then I am greeted by another spam box, the requests.
A little more than 24 hours of facebox absence generated this nice list, as seen in the screenshot at the right. This list obliging me to go on and on with my rant, because the screenshot is more than 700 pixel high. 700+ Pixels of useless spam, cyberwaste waiting to be added to the list of 32 applications I already have installed. And don’t use except for 4 or 5.

A never-ending list of applications, because most of time someone has been flirting cybervirtually flirting, more than just poke, and I HAVE TO add the application to see what they gossiped about me or check if they gave me a slippery banana or a wet nipple growing in my garden to produce endless bread for the rest of my life as a pirate bitten by zombies who lost the battle against the ninjas.

Not to forget the many notifications landing in my so conventional mailbox, because XXX wants me to add a slideshow to my facebox profile… just because she is too damn lazy to click the link to my flickr account in my facebook profile. *sigh*

Luckily facebox can be rather satisfying, ego-galaxy-stroking even, too… because right now I am… see the second screenshot.
If only they would have spammed me to let me know that!

Facebook, I’m done with you… you’re nothing more than a better looking, but worse, MySpace.

Disclosure always has been the horse to beat to death among bloggers. Bloggers, especially probloggers (whatever that is), are supposed to be honest, beg and warn you every time they want to make some money on your back that they actually could make money if you are no greedy all for free internaut.

Finally, I’ll come clear with things here and agree with the Master, Shoemoney.

You should assume everything written on this blog is a lie. You should assume I have motivation for linking to everything on this page and will benefit from it somehow.

To be entirely honest honest with you…

I assume you know that I everything I write on this page, I will benefit from it somehow.

Yup, that is correct. I can already see those $ signs in your eyes, but forget it! Being a Jack has some advantages! See, I’m a muppet, I can write what I want here. I can rant & rave. Even at your expense.

As long as I disclose. And I think disclosure doesn’t go far enough yet. Also Jacks and Muppets should disclose [their relations]. And best thing to do that, is the lovely XFN code.

XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a ‘rel’ attribute to their <a href> tags

On a side note, XFN also is the perfect way to get screwed in your search engine rankings, but I digress.
To be entirely honest, I think XFN is for netiquette wussies. Those who believe that the web only consists of hugging cybergenes and cuddling cyberDNAstrings. But one of the best things online always were the flames. What is funnier than sit back and enjoy a great flame war and Wikipedia or Usenet.

But what about disclosure?

From now one, every flamer should disclose and use the XFN model to do so. Following attributes are imaginable:

• rel=”useless”
• rel=”wannabe”
• rel=”whiner”
• rel=”wussy”

Of course no limitations are set, but when disclosing… better do it consequently.