Monday, January 28, 2008

You, With the Blog: You Are Irrelevant. Also, Mahalo Multiprofiles and More

Surefire way to get buckets of virtual ink -- tell bloggers that they aren't worth the bother, just like Target did, following that silly little dust-up about the ad photo with the broad's crotch in the bulls-eye. (Oh, noes! The center of a splayed human figure is the naval/crotchal area! Why didn't someone tell us this before?! )

Of course, this is not to say that Target isn't being stupid and shortsighted here in its broad-brushed dismissal (almost typed "dismal," heh) of blogs. They are, and I sense a upcoming press release with a new social engagement strategy. But I always get amused at the self-interested, self-important, navel-gazing, breast-beating of the PR-o-sphere when someone does not chug the entire tub of social media kool aid. (Note: Other than a quick peek at TechMeme, I am just making assumptions based on past behaviors. Actual breast-beating content may vary.)

Can we fast-forward to social media as a mature technology already, so people can focus on doing stuff, instead of hearing people talk about it?

Actually, most people are already focusing on doing stuff, even if it's just adding annoying blinky sparkly things to their MySpace pages, so I wonder just who it is that the influencers are influencing.

Mahalo Social Multiprofiles: Possibly Un-useless?

Spiritually related to my previous post seeking a social profile status aggregator (at Greggie's suggestion, I'm trying TwitterSync, which addresses two of the bigger parts of the problem -- Facebook and Twitter), Jason Calacanis posts today about multiprofiles in Mahalo Social, which tries to aggregate the viewing and management of your many and evermultiplying social profiles and pages using proven Web 2.0 HTML 3.x technology: Frames.

Now, there are already profile mashup services out there -- I have a profile on Profilactic that pulls from my blog RSS, Flickr, and a few other sources. But this is a technology I can really understand. None of this mashed-up, APIed, Open this or that. Just... Frames. It's simple enough that it may actually work (barring any frame-breakout stuff, but what I've seen seems to work) -- I will have to give it a try.

(Also, I see that the blog's comments, which require an e-mail validation, appear to publish a placeholder comment ["An e-mail has been sent to confirm your e-mail address. Click on the link within the e-mail to activate your comment!"] to the comment thread, instead of just relying on a confirmation message. That's actually pretty clever, as a very visible way to get people to realize that they need to do one more thing -- it was a problem I saw in the AIM Social Media Blog, which was also powered by Blogsmith, but didn't have that feature at that time. Edit: Hrm, it may be an artifact created by wiseacre or idiot commenters -- I can't tell. It would still be a useful prompt if you require e-mail validation.)

Another Bloggy Bit

Brief blog bit in passing -- I cruise by the About.com DC page as part of my local links, mostly out of habit. I can't remember the last time I heard anyone talk about them, but their continued existence speaks to... continued existence.

Anyway, the DC page seems to be bloggier than it was before. I'm not sure if it's a recently updated design or something that's been around for a while that I never noticed. I didn't see any notes of it in the sparse comments or forum posts, so I will ping the maintainer, just to see if I am losing what remains of my mind.

Enough of all that Cal

Anyway, now, I should go deposit my final severance check (which is probably the most fruitful thing I will do all day), buy a vernier caliper, and get a cup of coffee. Then, bowling, which means I will miss Social Matchbox, though bowling in this league is another form of networking (no shit).

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