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.

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]

Franky says Truemors was stillborn—dead even before launch. Imagine, a web app supposed to have been in the likeness of Digg, user-submission, voting and all. Truemors was heavily hyped up before launch, and then suddenly, the bubble bursts (and quite prematurely, I would say).

I’m one to follow the comings and goings of web applications. There are web apps that look promising. And there are those that would then disappoint. Then again, there are web apps that fly under my radar, and then rise into popularity all of a sudden. Truemors is not one of them.

I’m not much of a Digg fan, but Digg does have its merits. For one, it’s niche-based. It started off focusing only on tech-related topics. So tech geeks of all kinds found a great community with which to share their passions. But Truemors doesn’t have such a focus. Rumors? Anyone can be fond of rumors. You’ve got a very broad audience. So how will your marketing be done? Who will your audience be (in terms of advertisers, this can be very important).

Also, one thing I dislike about Truemors is that you don’t need an account to submit item, nor to vote. Just key in a “truemor” and let people vote it up or down. And you don’t even need an account to vote items up or down. Just click your preference (up if you like the rumor, down if you don’t) and the system will count your vote. This makes truemors very prone to gaming. You don’t have the usual safeguards of limiting voting rights only to registered users. And you cannot track and monitor trends and activity in terms of submission and voting. So it’s very easy to cheat.

To me, Truemors looks like half-baked. It’s been in beta for a while before the guys behind the site launched it. A little more effort, guys (actually, Guy, since Guy Kawasaki is behind Truemors), and maybe you’ll get it right.

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).

I’ve read about the pitfalls of Twitter’s being used as a public chatroom. People are likening Twitter to CB radio , which was popular from the 1960’s to the 80’s*. While Twitter’s primary purpose is for people to answer the question what are you doing right now? a lot of people are publicly sending messages to each other, responding to one another’s tweets.

And you know what, I think you can’t blame them (actually, us since I’m fond of chatting via Twitter, too). Twitter is essentially a social network, but it lacks most of the sophisticated features that other social networks have, like the actual network of friends (being friends in twitter is just one level deep: your friends and your followers, and no concept of friend-of-a-friend).

And unlike a blogging service, readers cannot comment on tweets posted by twitter users. So what if you wanted to respond to a post? Just tweet yourself!

Hence it’s common to see Twitter updates bearing names of other Twitter members, which means that particular update is intended for the other person. So a typical thread would look like so:

Bob: Having Lunch in a while. 5 minutes ago
Jim: @Bob What’s for lunch? 4 minutes ago
Bob: @Jim Steak and pasta. Yum! 3 minutes ago
Jim: @Bob Enjoy! 3 minutes ago

... and so forth.

What’s wrong with that? Well, it’s just like sending instant messages that are readable by the public. And that could have privacy implications, especially if you’re haphazard with what you tweet about. So you’d better not chat on Twitter about things you’d rather keep to yourself, or a select group of people. Even if your Twitter updates are restricted to friends only, that still means that all of your friends can read whatever you’re writing, even if it’s intended for one of them only.

I think chatting via Twitter is all right if you’re fully aware that tweets are intended to be public in the first place. So Twitter should not just be about what you’re doing right now, but also what you want to say right now.

*Essentially because CB comprised of non-secure public broadcasts, so everyone can listen in to conversations.

Last time I raved about Twitter, the latest hot thing in the Web 2.0 world (okay, it’s been up for quite a while now, but it’s only now that its popularity is taking off). But not everyone is happy with Twitter. And they do have their reasons. One such person is Abe Olandres, erstwhile editor of the Blog Herald, and my problogger compatriot. He cites five reasons why we won’t see him on Twitter.

1. It’s so like blogging in 1999 all over again.
2. I’m always invisible (or offline) in all my Instant Messengers. Why would I want to be visible on Twitter?
3. I don’t like to be watched.
4. I don’t have enough time.
5. Imagine Twittering on your phone. It could get really expensive.
   

I’m aware Abe is usually busy with a lot of business and personal undertakings, and being on Twitter is just like telling everyone you’re open to chat. But I think he misses the point when it comes to the microblogging aspect of Twitter. Sure, it’s like 1999 all over again, with micro updates and super-short entries. But then for me, Twitter isn’t meant to replace my regular blog/s. Twitter is meant to compliment my regular blogs, where I would rather post meatier and more substantial material.

Twitter is not for everyone, especially those who value their privacy much (to the point of being paranoid?). But for me, you don’t necessarily have to answer the question what are you doing right now (in 140 characters or less). Some use Twitter as a CB radio of sorts—to broadcast messages to their network of friends (and the public as well, whomever might be listening in).

If you’re not much for Twitter, what are your reasons?