Not more than two days ago a friend lost his 5 year young son in a pool accident.
Today, after I was at the funeral of a friend and colleague yesterday, my feed reader was full of supportive entries for Dawg and his family.

Within 2 hours after NYCWatchdog had blogged about the cruel event, a friend, Avitable, had set up a donation entry and pledges started to roll in. As I am writing this 114 bloggers have already donated in little more than 24 hours.
Technorati lists 64 links to that post. I have followed the evolution of the donation entry with interest and wondered if a personal blog could make it into the popular news section at Technorati.

64 Links would be a Top 10 ranking at this moment, but obviously TC doesn’t care about blogs, blogs written by non-paid bloggers. Bloggers who love to share their life.

Does Technorati really care about blogs or rather only about it’s own pagerank?
Where would Technorati have been today if no blogger was narcissistic enough to check his/her own link popularity?

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Some days ago I noticed Chris Garrett link to Blogg-Buzz, a Digg for bloggers. Of course I signed up, claimed my favourite Franky nick and submitted some entries.

Only some days later I wonder

Why, oh why did I claim a new nick and one became member of one more service?

A digg for bloggers surely sounds interesting and the Blogg-Buzz platform is a perfect copy of Digg cool platform already, although still in Apha stage.
Alpha, coming with all its own problems, such as few members, total self-whoring and little traffic. Right at the moment my biggest gripe towards Blogg-Buzz is that there’s no one and submissions hardly get buzzed and bring little traffic. No, I’m lying. My biggest gripe is that everyone submits his own crap!

And that I have one more profile to maintain. I’ve never subscribed to that many services as since I started blogging! We, bloggers are sheep. And SEO nerds. But we are social media!
No new service rises or we have to belong to it, try it out and pimp it! We live the social dream!

Well, I’m sick of it. Got enough of all those new platforms. I won’t subscribe anymore to any new service. I will only continue to maintain my 24 26 profiles I have all over the intarwebs and that’s it from now on!

NO NEW SERVICES/PROFILES FOR ME ANYMORE!

How does my Sunday evening look? I am going to visit all the profiles I have and try to do something useful with every profile today! One of my browser home tabs is My last.fm profile. I actually actively use last.fm. That means I scrobble all music I hear to last.fm. It serves me great to keep my network, my bandwith active. Otherwise… no damn usage. Oh, I forgot another usage of last.fm : help me monthly to get rid of $3 as subscriber.
Afterwards I am going to watch mug shots at MyBlogLog. We all like it graphic don’t we? Then of course I need to go submit some stuff to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Blogg-Buzz. After having read an overdose of nerd comments at those services, I need a break!
What would be better than go stalk my flickr stats and notice that 2 more people have found the way to my pictures. Sigh, I feel happy! After 2 hours of flickr stumbling, I’ll have a mosaic of pictures in front of my eyes and need to read something again! No better place than go stalk all my friends at twitter and facebook. STFU, I have no MySpace! At least not that I’d admit!
Of course I shouldn’t neglect my Jaiku and Wordie profiles either! They are valuable for traffic and user profiles are good for SEO! And to make myself important, everywhere I have to leave nice and insightful comments, so everyone sees I have been there and they’ll visit me my profile.

Luckily today is a great day. Zooomr is still offline, so I can’t loose any time there, but the name Zooomr alone reminds me of my UStream broadcast.
Sigh, webcam. When was the last time I logged in to Stickam and whored myself out there. I’m sure they all have forgotten me.

Screw it all, I’m not participating to all this anymore! No.way!
I feel old. I’m retiring. Come find me at My 9rules and Virb from now on.

Once social, always social!

You may now continue your regular scheduled capslock program. And prepare yourself for more entries from me, unless capslock kicks me out here!

Muhammad Saleem posts over at 901am about a university in India restricting Internet access because social media apps are making students anti-social.

Indian Institute of Technology, one of India’s elite engineering schools has restricted internet access in its dormitories, citing concerns that social activities like blogging and gaming were not only affecting students’ performance but was making them reclusive and even suicidal.

More from CNN, which says stop surfing and start making friends instead.

Muhammad does have a point in saying that the point of social media is interaction among people online, and that people do tend to interact and even get to personally know people through blogs, social networks and other social applications.

While face-to-face social interactions between students within the dormitory may have decreased, it is unfair and narrow-minded to discount time spent online as not being a social activity.

For example, on 901am alone, I have met Matt, David, and Thord through blogging.

Yes, it is narrow-minded to consider online time as a non-social time. However, considering the extremes, I would say it’s also narrow-minded not to be worried about the negative effects of social media.

For one, only a handful of people do really get to personally socialize as a result of activities online. In my personal experience, most people I know whose work or business involves being online all day and using social media apps tend to stay at their homes or offices all day surfing, emailing and IM’ing. Rarely do they go out and actually meet people.

Okay, same goes with me. I’m usually stuck here talking to people through the keyboard. And I remember my gaming days of old. I would keep to myself in my room for days on end, even skipping classes, meals and sleep. Okay, that’s probably extreme, but that’s just to illustrate how gripping these things can be.

I have actually personally met people who have become my friends and even clients through social media apps. But that’s not always the case with other people. And I do tend to lose track of my old friends who aren’t into getting connected online.

Sometimes I even wonder if I’m still articulate with talking to people face to face or even on the phone.

My point is that when you have tools that are as enjoyable to use as MySpace, Friendster, DIGG, and even your own blog, and tools that make life more convenient, such as email, IM, and even text messaging, you will tend to use them and you will tend to minimize actual personal interaction and other physical activity outside of necessity.

The Indian Institute of Technology is right to be worried about this. However, totally restricting use of social media apps is, indeed, quite a drastic measure. And it doesn’t address the problem at the source, but is rather something that would likely breed contempt among the affected students. Banning social media apps from dorms/hostels won’t make people want to go out and play under the sun! Why not think of more creative solutions, such as setting up social events like parties or concerts?

The other day I gave a talk at a forum hosted by a nearby university’s Mass Communications department. It was about social news, and how it’s changing the media landscape. At the start of the talk, I was asking who had been using social news sites such as DIGG and the like. I was a bit surprised to learn that out of the dozens who attended, only a couple were familiar with DIGG. Of course, most were familiar with social networking sites such as Friendster (which was part of the discussion, actually).

So this gets me thinking. Is social news ever going to become popular here in my country? I would say there are structural and cultural reasons that keep social media from being popular here. For one, the strong presence of the mainstream media would probably be one big hindrance to that. We are a country with two dominant players in the broadcast industry, and they span various media–from television, to cable, to radio. And we are a country with a relatively low Internet penetration rate. Most of those who have Internet access usually have to do so using public terminals, at ‘net cafes and libraries.

So how could people give a damn about social news, if they don’t feel the need to be part of the new media landscape? Social news is about the users being prosumers of information, after all (that is Toffler-speak for being a producer and consumer at the same time). But without the infrastructure, how could people contribute, then? And if you cannot expect your audience to be able to access your contributions to the big picture, then what’s the point?

I would not lose hope, though. Social news, after all, is only beginning to transform how information is shared and consumed around the world. And while I will probably be unable to influence my compatriots to suddenly adopt social media rather than stick to the old media, I would say we can still consider social news very useful. Our audience, after all, transcends geography and even culture. While social news is about the society, the Web has broken down the barriers set by geographic distance. My contributions can be consumed from faraway lands. My audience is not limited to whom I am physically close.

Is social news meant for the masses? Perhaps not today. But that’s not really a problem, is it?

Being blogically correct is a tricky thing. The MS Scandal is still fresh and although I respect the opinions from many A-Listers, I don’t want to condemn any blogger/community leader who decided to keep his laptop.

From the earliest days of the (public) internet its users have been trend setters. Trend setters in new technology, but also trend setters in mentality.
The internet was a place to help people. The USENet was a huge helping domain. The interenet has grown to become THE place to ask/search for advice, help in no matter what topic.
The users have made out of the internet a helping community. eBusiness only came later.

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It is surprising to see how much todays blogging culture has changed the way people analyze things. Maybe I immediately have to include the mention that I am 100% pro disclosure and pro critical minds.

But sometimes people’s opinions just hit me. Hit me too hard. We judge differently. We get judged differently.
Because bloggers (try to) preach disclosure, they get judged differently. No matter if they disclose or not.
Companies get judged differently.

Lets take a look at this weeks Microsoft scandal . It has been all over the place already. A typical blogosphere scandal.
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Seeing the video of Saddam Hussein’s execution uncut (contains graphic content) I wonder where we have arrived and if the Internet (and the sites hosting this video) really needs to be censored.

Surely the internet houses many illegal activities, but most of them are rather underground.
In the case of Saddam’s hanging video there were other things to consider : the Iraqi government had decided not to broadcast the hanging because of human rights.

Two of the major social news sites (also submitted to Digg) now host the video and … don’t react.

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This month has proven how easily bloggers become the victim of the tactics of old media.
While trying to be informative and critical it is very easy to grab all the nice pieces of bait the old media use. There have been several examples of journalists playing with the blogosphere.
Surely there were the more positive ones such as TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year, NY Times embracing social bookmarking and more recently the John Edwards Youtube case. But more traditional media have not hesitated to hit either. The WSJ attack on blogs was the most recently hyped anti-blog story.

And there was quite some truth in it.
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Many bloggers have celebrated the election to Person of The Year 2006, each in their own style. But does it really matter? Has the Digital Information highway really changed? Forget it!

This was nothing more than a brilliant piece of marketing by TIME Magazine. ProBlogger Darren Rowse called it linkbaiting, but there is more behind this.

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Dearest reader and fellow blogger,

TIME Magazine has elected You person of the Year for your continuous efforts to change people’s mentality by helping them online with your knowledge, to control the Digital Information over the Internet. More →