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 departments are popping up at companies across the globe, spreading faster than the Swine Flu ever could.

Many large businesses have already, at the very least, dipped their toes into the social media stream. Some run because the water is too cold and choppy. Others think the water is a mirage and refute its existence. But for those who have bought the hype (and it’s probably fair to say that it’s no longer hype, despite a lack of empirical ROI data), there have been many different strategies incorporated.

Over the past few weeks I have come across MANY examples of large companies – some mammoth in size – completely dropping the ball on their social media endeavors.

I understand that it’s not always easy for big and stuffy organizations to bust out of their brick and mortar shells, but just because they are attempting to reach a younger demographic, is no excuse for poorly implemented ideas and haphazard marketing strategies.

Share your examples of businesses who, in your opinion, are doing a poor (bordering on embarrassing) job with their social media entities.

We’ll get you started with this crappy mess. The Quiznos, 2 Girls, 1 Sandwich video. I mean, this is not Uncle Mike’s blog – this is Quiznos – a company that generates millions of dollars in sales. Not to mention, their franchises are owned by everyday, hard-working people. People who likely did not sign off on this horrendous social media foray. It’s one thing to try to cash in on new media, but that is not an excuse to throw social responsibility to the wind.

By the way, the Quiznos up the block just closed. Good.

I’m not really sure why you want to read my words or why on earth you’d care to follow me on Twitter. But you do; so thank you! There’s something I’m sure most people don’t care about, and that’s where I am. Whether I’m physically located in front of my computer, on a plane to Burkina Faso, or eating mom’s killer meatloaf, 99.9% of the time, it doesn’t matter.

Proponents of geotagging will tell you how it’s neat because you can find out when a buddy is nearby and meet up for drinks. I might not be a social butterfly, but if someone I actually want to meet is in the area, I’ll know about it.

The functionality is not totally pointless. I see where it could be kinda cool to plot an image on a map a la Google Maps, but the phenomenon might be overblown.

Not to get all Big Brother is watching on you, but as G-tagging becomes more transparent (built into all new camera models, cell phones, and so on) it will become important for people to understand what is being tracked and where the data is reported.

Yahoo’s new geo-location platform Fire Eagle, that gives developers the ability to include positional data in their applications sans headache, is now open to the public. That means users will be able to syndicate their positional data to hundreds – if not thousands of partner services in the near future.

If I’m wrong down the road, I’ll admit it. Now it’s your turn. Tell us why you’re so hot on geotagging.

P.S. This blog post was written from 40° 46′ N, 73° 54′ W.

I’m tired of Websites that rely on user-generated content, yet make the foolish decision to launch before they stock up.

You know the kind I’m talking about. They’re the ones that promise to show you what other people earn; what their house is worth; how clean restaurants are; how they feel about their boss, etc. You show up at the front door expecting to find a wealth of information waiting with open arms. Instead, you input your search criteria and are met with zip, zilch and their good friend zero.

That’s why this blog entry should serve as a reminder to anyone who is planning to launch a new Website. Cool your jets until you have the goods.

It’s not OK to launch thinking that you will grow content along the way. You only have one chance to impress your visitor. Blow that and you’ll likely never win them back. And why should they ever return? Far too many of these Websites are eventually abandonded by their owners, leaving limited data behind. With so much to do and see on the Web, you only have one chance. No content, no visitors.

I’m a busy guy. I don’t have time to waste on your incomplete repository of information. At the very least consider hanging a shingle for your front door alerting visitors that there’s a good chance that you will not find what you are looking for. Sure, they’ll probably still bail – but at least they won’t be as angry.

One of my few academic memories from junior high school is “Question Day.” This was a 45-minute period where our science teacher would permit the class to ask about anything. It was cool that we were able to go beyond since science, with his rationale being it all comes back to it anyway.

Back then, without the Internet, it was a great idea. Our question-asking options were limited. You simply couldn’t turn to mom or dad, an older sibling or the library for the “important” stuff. There’s nothing like knowledge imparted by strangers.

If information truly is power, we must all be superhuman at this point. The Q&A market is completely saturated.

Yahoo! Answers covers the bases, ChaCha helps you out on the go, and SocialThumbs makes sure we never have to make an independent decision again.

Is it possible that we are asking way too many questions and being barraged with too many answers. Always the analytical type, I’ve recently found myself bogged down with too much information. Decisions that were once made after a few minutes of thought now become a great big opus. I can barely move an inch without consulting with other people.

What has happened to me?

I need to Shut-up the strangers and put myself back on the road to self-reliance. Decisions about jobs and houses and kids and health – freom people who know nothing about me – mean nothing.

Do you feel the same way?

Jeez, another question! Make it stop!

According to TechCrunch, Google and Microsoft are front and center, ready to make a bid for Web 2.0 darling Digg. The site, which bloggers across the world aspire to make the homepage of, will likely sell for approximately $210 million.

The thing about it is, I could care less who buys Digg. I’m so over it. Here are the reasons why.

1) Algorithm, Shmalgorithm. I don’t care what anyone says, the voting system is terribly flawed – and has devolved over time. Since 2005 I have had my time wasted by crappier and crappier stories. In many cases they lack humor, facts and overall quality. Someone is gaming the system. Top Digg users still hold too much control, dictating the majority of homepage content.

2) E-mail Forwards. I’m tired of friends, family and co-workers spending a good part of their day scouring Digg for links. If I want to see what’s popular, I’ll visit the Website myself. I don’t need you as a human-edited RSS feed.

3) Downhill Spiral. Traffic and revenue aside, the Digg product has peaked – in a cultural sense. It’s already worked it’s way as America’s favorite cool verb to start the 21st century. All we need now is old school conglomerate money running the thing to help it sink faster.

4) Dad “Diggs.” Once my parents are registered for something, it’s usually time to move on.

Full disclosure: I’m about the same age as Kevin Rose and might just be insanely jealous.

Web Worker Daily today published a myth busting entry on home based web workers. Except… there’s nothing myth busting in the entry. Because all the myths are true.

Lets have a closer look at the myths and their reality.

1. You’re “working” at home…nudge nudge, wink wink.
Wink, wink… just don’t tell anyone, OK, but you’re right. All I do all day long is play Desktop Tower Defence and chat with my colleagues who also work from home. To be honest, I never get anything done. When I twitter that I have to run and do some shopping, actually it means that I’m heading to the nearest Starbucks to finally have some peace from my comfortable environment at home and get things done, because at home….
Aaarrrggh! Busted again at level 84!

2. You’re wearing pajamas, or are perhaps naked from the waist down.
Of course I am naked from the waist down. And also from the waist up. And you want to know why?
Working from home I don’t have to bother about shaving, showering or wearing a nice perfume. Actually everything here is perfumed: perfumed of days without showering, a full and overloaded ash tree, not washed plates all over the office and then, then there’s the need to be naked from the waist down. Because sometimes, sometimes I just itch. And isn’t the internet about accessibility? Nothing as accessible as being naked from the waist down. To scratch of course!

3. Home-based work is great because you get to spend more time with your family.
Yes! And I’m glad I took the decision to work from home and spend more time with my PMSing partner, my kids always running the office down and telling me how they just set a new family high score for Desktop Tower Defence. Finally I can share my wife’s hours of phone fun… with the neighbor’s wife! A dream come true, quality time with the family!

4. You must get so lonely.
I truly am. Really. If it weren’t for the quality time with my family and all my pets I would be close to a mental break down. I miss my always bitching, never satisfied and perpetually complaining assistant. I miss mthe constant shouting of my exes because I didn’t reach the target I set myself and defined best all-time performance. I miss having to fire people if they don’t hit an average 8% growth based target. I miss all those people around me. It drives me nuts not to be bitched at anymore!

5. You must be involved in some kind of bleeding edge technology work to be able to work from home.
YES! I am, I am mapping a technological revolution. A revolution for workers world wide!
I am creating a system that will allow anyone to work from home, totally naked only surrounded by an office squatting family, an über-performing youth and always gossiping wife, suffering the lonely environments and mental challenges a stupid but addictive flash game poses you and hankering to leave the home office for just half an hour to finally get things done and leave your super high tech environment!

Disclaimer: I have a full time job ‘out of the home’ and run a second shift home-based. And trust me if I tell you that the home-based job is much harder. Harder because of all the ‘networking noise’, required discipline not to ‘physically degrade’ or procastinate and to have a working discipline. Resumed: harder because all those myths are totally untrue. But the freedom is enjoyable. That enjoyable I’m considering going full time, home-based!

A problem with having your job/business involving writing about and reviewing web apps is that you tend to sign up for too many sites than you can handle. Worse is that you sometimes end up signing up for outright scams. And since you give some info to these people, you’re practically giving them the right to spam your email inbox with promotional material.

I recently got an invite (yet another one) into tagged.com, and I thought I might give it a try. I signed up and it seemed simple enough until I got to the screen prompting me to enter my Gmail password. I thought, WTF? What kind of phishing scheme is this? It doesn’t even give me an option to skip this step.

It asks innocently enough, which is in the guise of checking your address book for users already existing in the system. But what Tagged will really do is send email to everyone in your address book inviting them into the system and subjecting them to the very same process. It will not even ask you to choose which among your contacts they can spam.

I guess I was stupid enough to sign up for tagged.com. I’m not going to be stupid enough to enter my Gmail password. But what about 90+% of the population who are not as smart as I? They’re likely to just enter their passwords and end up spamming everyone on their address book. The cycle then continues. Lord knows how many email addresses and even passwords these guys have already harvested.

Tsk. This seemed like old news (horrors, even Wikipedia says so). Why, oh, why did I fall for this?

Stay away from tagged.com!

For a long time I just wanted to sit back and watch as some of the companies I hated became irrelevant. Sure enough after awhile Blog Networks became the fad that was passing and Web 2.0 over took with a firestorm. Then all the blog network watchers also became irrelevant. Thus the irony of the web going full circle.

Do you ever find yourself becoming irrelevant amidst all the noise on the internet? Is your company stagnant and overwhelmed by all the voices that feed it what you assume is relevant information? Don’t worry I quit checking my email in early 2004 so if you’ve tried to contact me since then it’s pretty much pointless.

A list of 7 companies/industires who I have yet to figure out their relevance.
1. Celebrity Bloggers
I seriously don’t understand the mainstream obsession with pop stars. Will someone please explain it for me? Especially the networks of celebrity blogs. Ugh. Why was I so stupid to try and create this jibberish at one time.
More →

We bashed Truemors earlier last month, but I was surprised to learn this from Guy Kawasaki himself: Truemors doesn’t even have a business model.

0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).

0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.

Sure, it’s okay for startups and Web 2.0 companies to run just because of raw passion for the medium and for the technology. But coming from a venture capitalist himself, it sounds like Truemors was one big (or small?) experiment. I would agree that if an entrepreneur presented a plan without a business model, then most likely Guy the VC would boot that guy out of his office.

And Guy even admitted that it was a stupid idea.

In total, I spent $12,107.09 to launch Truemors. During the dotcom days, entrepreneurs had to raise $5 million to try stupid ideas. Now I’ve proven that you can do it for $12,107.09.

Hey Guy, you can even do it for less!

But then it got me thinking, Guy’s an entrepreneur, and also a capitalist. He’s one of those people who can afford to lose money. As long as he learns from the experience, then he ends up richer in the long term (money and experience wise).

Here’s the bottom line: Whether Truemors succeeds or not, I learned a helluva lot. One thing is for sure: no entrepreneur can tell me that he needs $1 million, four programmers, and six months to launch this kind of company. With products like WordPress, MySQL, and Salesforce platform, things are a whole lot cheaper and easier these days.

Suddenly, Truemors doesn’t sound so silly to me.

[via Wired]