Way too often lately have I read pro blogs. Blogs trying to teach me what to do and how to behave. But wasn’t blogging all about getting rif of my monthly male PMS cramps and telling people what I really think about them?

I really thought that was what blogging was about. And luckily, bad ass par excellence, Loren Feldman, AKA vlogging sell out #1, proved my right.

Take those wise words from the guy who endorsed a struggling and controversial multimedia network, only on the promise he’ld earn more than he did in the old YouTube days.
So, how come, his excellence, hasn’t called out struggling popularity h0 [tag]Scoble[/tag] yet?

Scoble, the grey corporate blogging Eminence, nowadays publicly hunting for a job at Facebook. Or if that would fail a job as public facebook apps sell out.

Loren, if somehow you care about what blogging is about, calling out people, you have to be consequent. And call out [tag]Scoble[/tag], even if only for his inconsistency in his statements.

I got enough of it. I’ve just lost it. Cut it. It’s boring, it’s annoying and it’s nothing more than backlink, social bookmarking and search engine driven. It’s all about getting on top in SERPs and not about the reader.

Lists.
Lists published at a high pace.

Everyone loves lists. Lists can be very useful. Lists and speedlinking. They can improve my productivity. But please… I can only digest so many platforms, applications and blog entries.
Last weeks I’ve seen an increase in the number of lists in my feed reader. And not just lists, but lists aimed at being complete, leaving little to add. Lists consisting of more than 30 items, links, platforms, whatevers.

How will I digest all this information? How long do you think it takes me to visit and check out 30 comment plugins for WP, 20 code beautifiers and formatters, learn 200+ hotkeys and test 40 PDF tools? Do you think I really have no life? Do you think all I have to do s check your lists?

Have you decided I shouldn’t keep up with your content anymore?
No????

Well trust me, I CAN’T keep up with all your lists! I am still working my way through that list you published 3 weeks ago. And what awaits me??? 540 more tips, all nicely made up as lists.

And what about the blogging part? Where has that gone? Did a memo not reach me, but have you all commonly decided to ditch sharing opinions?
I get it, I get it! Your lists are your opinions… it are THE best tools according to you!

My list? It’s a new one. Actually, it’s my wife’s list. She noticed how much lists interest me and just shove me a list under my nose. She actually send me an email. An email about lists.

Subject: You should check out this TOTALLY AWESOME list!

I’m a sucker. A sucker for lists. Big was my surprise when I read following items.

• Take the garbage out
• Fold the laundry
• Take the dog to the vet
• Clean the aquarium
• Buy new socks
• Pick up the kids from school
• Do the dishes
• Put the kids to bed
• Have fun with me

I put that list at the end of the list ‘lists to check out’. I wonder if it will increase my producitivity!

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!

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!

One of my fellow editors here at JOAB is quite fond of Twitter. Frankly, I don’t quite give a damn about Twitter. It’s just one of those new annoying nuisances that have become a craze in the online community. I once signed up for the service, added friends, and activated IM notifications, and I was blasted with all sorts of junk a dozen times a minute. I turned it off, since then, not seeing the point why I’d like to be updated whenever a friend of mine passes gas at 3 in the morning, or when someone eats chocolate cake (like what I’m actually doing right now).

Of course, I thought this about blogging too, when it first came into popular use. So does this mean Twitter will fly like blogging did? We have yet to see.

But I’ve always thought that Twitter, like any other “personal publishing” platform will soon claim its casualties, in particular when it comes to the foot-in-mouth syndrome everyone is vulnerable to. First to fall was Steve Rubel (or at least first known person), in that dreadful I-probably-shouldn’t-have-said-that moment. And here’s what he said.

PC Mag is another. I have a free sub but it goes in the trash,

Thing is, Steve is a top exec at top PR firm Edelman (the same Edelman of the Windows Vista/Acer Ferrari Notebook infamy). He handles lots of accounts in the tech industry, and these mostly benefit from advertisements, product placements, and reviews on PC Magazine and its affiliate publications. PC Mag, in turn, thought of boycotting all of Edelman’s clients.

Damn, that must have caused Steve to resort to a lot of forehead slapping. Here’s his letter of apology, which I think is quite sincere (yeah, basically saying it was easy to take things out of context and all that).

In a world where it’s already easy enough to steal your identity or personal information via online means, and where social engineering is key to this being successfully perpetrated, why the heck would I actively give out this stalkee information to potential evildoers? I also risk divulging too much in those fits of carelessness, drunkenness, or simple loose-lippedness.

I just finished eating chocolate cake. Moving on to blueberry cheesecake.

(Is that 140 characters already?)

By the way, my copy of PC Mag came in the mail today—it just went straight to the trash.

Oh, NY Times has an article on Twitter due out tomorrow. Got that link from Steve Rubel’s twitter. And no, I didn’t get it via IM (I actually went to his status page).

Surprising news via cellphone9. Apple has filed a patent for the lanyard.

Apple is starting it. They filed a patent for the oh so typical lanyard you string around your neck to hang the iPod to make it do more things. Like flash lights to the beat of your heart when jogging or interface with other wireless devices. The future of the lanyard is now!

Okay, I guess it’s not really your typical lanyard that just serves the sole function of letting you strap your phone to your wrist or hang it around your neck. It’s more of the high-tech lanyard gadgetry, wherein you can plug in accessories and other peripherals. In short, the lanyard is a peripheral in itself—something that adds connectivity features to your device.

MacNN says it’s more than your regular strap.

Apple’s patent generally relates to lanyards for handheld electronic devices and more particularly, lanyards that incorporate electronic circuitry. Apple’s next generation of lanyards discussed in the patent go far beyond today’s designs to accommodate their upcoming iPhone and other future iterations of the iPod. In some cases, the lanyard itself will add functionality beyond those of the attached devices, such as adding telephony to any iPod, lighting effects that relate to heart rates for joggers and additional input facilitators such as buttons, touch pads or sliders.

But this is the kind of news that tends to make me critical of how far companies will go to grab the rights to a simple technology. Sure, you have to specify what exactly a technology should be and do, to qualify as a patent holder. Then if someone else wants to do something exactly like how you do it, he must pay royalties.

Of course, there are arguments for and against patenting technologies. And this pretty much centers on innovation. Some would say that patents are stifling to innovation since it becomes costly to develop products based on another entity’s patents, since you have to pay licensing fees or royalties. Others say that patents encourage innovation, since an inventor can potentially earn from whatever new technology he invents or designs.

It’s the same double-edged sword for consumers. We’re happy because companies like Apple can invent the iPod, the Mac and the iPhone—all based on several technologies that they own the rights to, or have paid licensing fees for. But then the other side of the coin is that we consumers also have to shoulder part of the cost of licensing technologies, as part of the retail price.

So Apple reinvented

the wheel

The term metrosexual was dubbed word of the year for 2003.

Metrosexuality is the trait of an urbane man who has a strong aesthetic sense and spends a substantial amount of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle. Though the term has undergone a transformation from its original meaning (a heterosexual man who appeared or acted as if he were homosexual), current trends have seen the metrosexual label placed upon masculinity’s embracing of practices usually perceived to be feminine, rather than those specifically associated with the homosexual. Debate surrounds the term’s use as a theoretical signifier of gender deconstruction and its associations with consumerism. Current gender scholars view metrosexuality as representative of the embracing of relational understanding in addition to its lifestyle and aesthetic implications.

Frankly, I think this is bollocks—just some excuse for men to justify wearing makeup and getting pedicures, and crying out their eyes in public. But then society has changed, hasn’t it? And so has the view of masculinity as having to be about gruff, strong-egoed individuals.

Now the term technosexual is coming into fashion. Oh, please. I think I’m seeing a trend here. Next time, (insert favorite word here)-sexual will be in fashion.

They’re more of a marketing term rather than something that really reflects something prevalent in society. So what if men have been touching on their emotional sides and trying to keep a bit neater in appearance? It happens, but you don’t necessarily have to give it a name!

But then if there’s money being made from such marketing hype, then these people must be serious. For one, Calvin Klein is heavily banking on the techosexual for marketing its latest fragrance line, the in2u. From Valleywag:

In 2008, the marketing campaign for the fashion label’s new scent, CK in2u, borrows the language of bloggers, teen texters and Myspace exhibitionists. What better metaphor for the evolution of blogging: first, an exercise in self-mockery; then, irresistible media catnip; and, within a decade, inevitably, a zeitgeist to be bottled, literally, and marketed to the masses.

(I’m not one to rely on Valleywag for useful information, but then who does?)

Even the New York Times featured commentary on the CK ads (via complex.com)

A typical line from the press materials for CK in2u goes like this: “She likes how he blogs, her texts turn him on. It’s intense. For right now.”

So if you’re a blogger, or really into other things technology, you’re a target for marketeers. They know technology excites you, and that includes gadgets, electronics, autos, and even apparel and accessories. But then again, this kind of marketing is more of hype rather than lasting buzz. What happens when bloggin and tech are no longer in the limelight?

Image: Jason Kottke posing in front of a CK one ad, circa 1998

Looks like Google AdSense has its ad targeting all wrong. I often get these when I visit blogs.

These are ads for online matrimonial site Jeevan Sathi.

Okay, I’m not in India, for one. And I’m not looking for a mate. Of course, if I were, I would stop blogging immediately and get out and have a social life. A real one (not the social media kind, duh!).

Maybe Jeevan Sathi forgot to use the AdWords country targeting feature.

Then again, there are probably a lot of people outside of the Indian subcontinent who are looking for prospective spouses online. But still I would rather go to a simple social networking site, where people don’t explicitly say they’re looking for spouses online, to make friends and go the usual courtship, engagement, and marriage route. Okay, the concepts of arranged marriages and browsing classifieds for prospective brides/grooms just comes as such a culture shock for me.

Hey, I’m usually logged into my Gmail account. Maybe Google can use that for customer preference tracking. If Google was so good at what it does, then they should track user searches and monitor email correspondence so it really knows what stuff I’m looking to buy or do online. Maybe AdWords users would find that really cool.

I’m not giving Google an evil idea, am I?

So Wired bought DIGGs (the votes, not the site itself, dummy). TechCrunch says DIGG should sue Wired because of vested interests. And Valleywag says screw all of ‘em. The rest of the blogosphere nods in unison.

I say so what?

Everyone’s tried to game DIGG one way or another. Not everyone has been successful at bringing DIGG down, but I reckon some of these attempts to game the system have actually met some success. There’s the DIGG army. And there’s the burying army. And there’s the digging for DIGG conspiracies. I’ve been part of these in my time, and I can say it was fun while it lasted. Now everytime I read about someone successfully gaming DIGG, it just sounds so old.

It’s like reading about how someone’s blog had been recently DUGG, and now he’s already giving tips on how to get dugg. Come on, it’s not as if you’re the only person who has been DUGG.

And as for the “I gamed DIGG” crowd, this happens all the time. It’s not as if you’re the only person who has successfully gamed DIGG.

Oh, and what great DIGG-bait your articles and counter-articles are!

Time and again, we seen blog posts alleging that DIGG’s algorithm is bent against catching the “gamers” or those who try to manipulate the system by DIGGing (or voting) stories en masse. Here comes the question, should DIGG count DIGGs for a friend’s story less than DIGGs by strangers? Or alternatively, if a group is always DIGGing the same stories, should their votes count less?

I would say that this goes against the very concept of having “friends” on DIGG. I would say this even goes against the concept of social news itself. Social news, after all, relies on people deciding what they think is important enough to merit being a headline, or on front-page. And social news is also about communities and friends influencing other friends—whether explicitly or not—on what they think is important.

So does the inherent “social”-ness of a system also mean that it is easy to corrupt? I’ve always thought that one of the problems of social media is that it’s social. So whatever problems society has would also reflect in social media, such as social news sites. In real life, friends have preferences and collude (a.k.a. “cooperate” or “conspire”) to achieve whatever goals they have. Same with social news. Friends can work together to arrive at their own headlines.

Of course, no one except the powers that be knows exactly how the DIGG algorithm works, and how it treats votes by friends, or even non-friends who constantly DIGG the same items. For one, even if people aren’t explicitly connected as friends, they can have similar interests and inevitably get to vote on the same things one way or another.

My concern here would be if DIGG is indeed actively downgrading the value of DIGGs by friends or non-friends who vote on the same stories. Same goes wtih other social news sites. Granted, there’s always the issue of collusion or vote-buying like this hilarious antic a Wired editor recently did. But if such controls are in place, then that dilutes the social value of such a supposedly social web application.