I haven’t been here for quite some time, mainly because I’m still negotiating my network blogger deal, but today something horrible happened, and we should all forget the blogosphere for a second, a minute.

Angelo, who contributed often here at JOAB was struck by a family tragedy.
I still can’t find any words for what happened, but why don’t you just go over to his blog and join us in our prayers for Angelo and his family at this time.

Many thanks.

franky.

Steve Rubel, power marketer raises a good point in yesterday’s entry, Building an Online Identity Through Lifestreams.

Where I will publish in a year’s time is anyone’s guess. However, what you can bank on is that I will have even more community accounts than I do now.

Right now, just as most other bloggers, the number of online profiles I have reminds me of the early days of domaining. You never have enough of them and any semi interesting, or worse even hyped, platform soon has you as member too.

But what’s the point of all those profiles? Agreed, there’there’s Facebook, where one can add almost everything. Or just stick to a Facebook profile and MySpace-ify the formerly geek cyber space of students.
But does exclusive Facebook networking alone satisfy the blogger or does one have to jump the bandwagon and spend valuable time on every possible network? And how much time does all this cost?

But most of all, where will you blog next year? Will any of those profiles, or services such as tumblr, replace your blog?

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!

Before I start, I’ll immediately admit that I am a rather compulsive nickname and domain-claimer, so yes, of course did I claim not only my first name, but also my favorite nickname at the service that might be mentioned in this post.

One of the more hip [sic] things I never really understood was the need for a permanent broadcast. And I don’t mean a hyped gig like Justin.tv, but services like UStream, more specifically streams like Pirillo Live or Zooomr Live.

Where I can understand the intense desire of Kristopher Tate to be watched by other obsessive compulsive geeky dudes, I don’t understand the hype around Pirillo at all. And much less the need or desire to broadcast non-stop how fluently you can type, swear, curse and how little of your real screen estate you use. I just don’t get it. Unless it’s all about showing off your two nice monitors.
Maybe it’s because I’m no A-Lister and am a bad whore. My networking sucks and there’s no one to hype me either, but actually when I look at the chat in Pirillo’s live box, I can only be happy that there’s no hype around me anyway.

Although I plan using Ustream during the Blogathon, when I will cheer some Blogathoners, I just don’t get it. Can someone please explain me what the non-stop broadcast thing is and why I should reposition my webcam so you can try to understand how much I procastinate work?

Note: I have no problems with scheduled streams, offering some ‘focus’, topic, concept, but I highly doubt that anyone would be interested watching how much screen estate I have and actually actively use (note: the picture is not actual anymore, right now I have around 2000px more screen estate but I hardly doubt anyone is interested in an updated picture).

To everyone who felt the need to add something to Hugh McLeod’s whine about the A-List (link condom out of principle), let me tell you that the reason behind the entry not falling traffic was, but a blog eons old strategy. If twitter is so March 07, this strategy was so Fall 06. We call it linkbaiting.

When do you linkbait?
If you’re not as whorish as our bestest friend [tag]Scoble[/tag] and prefer not to loose time on every new network platform, gathering exactly the same list of friends you already have in your other 2 months old profile, or if you’re a member of … lets say a popular blog directory which has more than quadrupled the number of rulers. Add to that almost 20 times as much of members to the newest and designographically [sic] most elitist network and your shortage of time to write note after note in their community… then you whine linkbait.

And over the next days you admire the sudden flux of new readers. Readers who just discovered a graying A-Lister, a blogger trying to cope with the cruel reality of not being discovered anymore like in the old days, not having found a Blue Monster Sequel^TM and who’s still waiting for the next PR gig to go viral.

All those conditions combined, bring out the best blogging techniques in any A-Lister, and suddenly they remember that every columnist lurks.

Now Whine is the device!
Whine, sit back… and enjoy how everyone falls into the trap.

I guess exactly that is what makes an A-Lister. Knowing how to play the audience, the lurkers.
Well done, Hugh

When Nick Denton leaves Valleywag tomorrow, to focus on his forthcoming book I will miss one thing. Not that much Denton as Valleywag editor, but the hunt for Narcissus or all the pokery at Robert Scoble, the most overrated blogger around.

I just almost felt out of my comfy desk chair when Scoble’s most recent entry popped up in my Google reader.

Today at the party we’ll have a bunch of non cult members over (ie, those who think it’s idiotic to wait in line for two days to buy a device).

Did I miss a memo or did Scoble become an Apple fan boy over night, because he has just spent 34 hours outside under the burning Palo Alto sun, together with a bunch of other idiots he knows since years, waiting in line to be one of the first ones to have an iPhone. Actually Scoble even didn’t have the money to buy an iPhone for himself, but this narcissistic phenomena bought one for his wife and his son, Patrick, had more savings than his dad and also got himself an iPhone.

When did Narcissus become a Microsoft hater? Or is he just riding the waves of popularity.
IMNSHO, it is moronic to cue 36 hours outside, for an electronic gadget, especially if only some hours later you can just walk into the store and get one. Without having to stand in the line.

I wonder what Nick Denton Fake Steve Jobs thinks about Scoble declaring himself iCult. Without even owning an iPhone.

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?

Yesterday’s cat fight between Nick Denton and Robert Scoble seems to have deeper foundations. Although The Scobleizer denied that he’s looking for a new job, this seems to become the biggest public secret.
Why would anyone otherwise suddenly remind the whole blogosphere plus his wife of all the social networks he is present at? With a bonus mention to LinkedIn as well

No, I still don’t do LinkedIn or Plaxo and I rarely use Skype anymore. I’m going to Plaxo on Tuesday to look at a new version coming out. But LinkedIn is close to getting me back.

LinkedIn only because he really tries to ignore all those platforms???

Damn, it seems like everyone in the world wants me to join it. I try to ignore these things, I really do.

I guess the Zooomr flirt with Sun didn’t work out for Scoble and the team around Zoho are an experienced bunch and already have an evangelist.
Certainly no blogger who forgets his work in favor to read feeds. If only I could find that entry I read yesterday, where Scoble mentions he is addicted to feeds. 31000/month isn’t it, Robert?

It must be sad if you’ve already blogged for half the technical blogosphere, gotten presents from Intel (I still wonder what happened to disclosure and the Intel notebooks!) and your content really isn’t that compelling.
I wished I just knew as many people.

Nevertheless Robert, I’m sure you’ll find something appropriate for your needs and if not… there’s always PPP.

Sincerest,

Franky.

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!