Isn’t social networking just contact hording?

There is a lot of hype today about Social Networking. Wikipedia defines a Social Network as

A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of relations, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes.

Huh? That sounds like psycho babel. Here is an image of a social network



So basically, the idea is to create an extended network of like minded people for the betterment of the network.

But as I look at the hundreds of "Social Networks" today, all I see are people trying to accumulate the most number of links, emails, track backs, nodes, what ever. I see little networking and trying to build something. I only see contact hording.

For good or for bad, Facebook is a great example of a "Social Network". It encourages its members to create groups, join groups, upload videos and pictures, tell everyone what books you're reading and what music you're listening too. MySpace also encourages its members to link together, post about each others MySpace site, change the look and feel, share music you like, pictures, and now video.

But with all this sharing, we still don't feel each other. Now I'm not trying to get all sappy on you, but its true. If you never actually talk to or see a person live its hard to establish a lasting relationship. That's why mail order brides have never really caught on.

Some folks are taking their Social Networking to the next step which is having local meet-ups, and getting to know each other for real. Chris Brogan does this. Jim Long does this. I'm sure there are many many more that do this too. We have even tried it in Salt Lake City, Utah, with some success, and are trying harder to make it happen more often. With the creation of PodCamps, FooCamps, BarCamps, XCamp and YCamp, people are actually building off-line relationships that strengthen their online relationships.

I encourage you to take your relationships off-line when possible. Start your own PodCamp, BarCamp or SocialCamp. Do it. You'll be surprised. If you can't start one, then go to one. Go to many. Heck make a career out of building and strengthening the Social Networks which already exist. Chris does this.

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Delta Flight 6499 From Hell

If I were on this flight, the FBI would have had to come and get me off. This is so unacceptable. Especially the part about Food. I hope Delta loses Millions in lawsuits and that everyone, from the flight crew to the terminal personnel lose their jobs.

Watch the video.

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del.icio.us hosting account suspended?

I was trying to save a link to my del.icio.us account and I kept getting this error message each time, several times. Even as I write this I still get the error message. That has to suck for them, and for me.



So that lead me to wonder if Web2.0 and New Media companies have fail over, disaster recovery or load balance plans in place? I have committed all my links to del.icio.us, and if for some reason they were to go down I would be really pissed that I lost all my bookmarks. This is a wakeup call to make back ups of data you have stored on web servers. Looks like another piece of data to keep on my S3 account.

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If you ask me for my birth date I’ll lie

I was signing up for a free service yesterday on the web, not even sure what it was, and the required fields they wanted were my birth date, gender, and phone. So, as usual, I made up a birth date, the same made up birth date I always give. I always put that I'm female, even though I'm not, and I give them some phone number in Sand Diego that I used to have in the mid 1980's. Those poor people may have been getting calls because of me for years now.

But seriously, what value does a website get out of that. How many people do they actually think will give them their *real* birth date? Gender, well maybe. Phone, probably not. And what do they do with it? People are getting more savvy with their online identity. Unless you win the Ethiopian National Lottery of $250,000,000 , in which case people still fall for the "it will only cost you $2000 to get it" scam. Good thing the Powerball Lottery only costs us $1 to play :) Please don't give these sites your information. And if you absolutely need to create an account, make it up. That's what I say. How will they ever know?

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My blog is 4 years old this month

Well, it's half way through June 2007 and I realized that I've been blogging for over 4 years (not including the BBS posts I wrote in the late eighties early nineties). I actually started blogging in February 2003 on blog-city.com. I've tried to get the blog posts from back then but I wasn't able too. The best I have starts around 2004 somewhere. Anyway, I guess it's been some time, but nothing has been as consistent as this blog. I've branched out to others (here, here, and here) as I'm trying to figure out whats fun and whats business.

Now that I'm getting into other media types like podcasting and videocasting, blogging for me has become than just writing, it's performing.

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