You see the WTFMO widget on the side of my blog. It’s a scam. For a while there I was signing up for everything like a maniac. Not that that is a bad thing. It is good to stake your claim on a few social networks. In fact, I have heard it said you should, before an imposter pops in and claims your username before you can get it. Not that anyone would want to impersonate me, but it’s a nice pipe dream.

But it got to a point that there was just no way in hell that I could ever be active at every one of these sites, so eventually I had to pick some winners. And don’t get me wrong, these are temporary winners. I am very fickle when it comes to social sites and this list may be different a few months from now.

First I had to figure out what my purpose was in visiting and using these sites. I like the reciprocal effect. I like utility. And I like reading stories that aren’t the same stories I read a few days ago with a few points switched around. I also like new software and concepts of all types.

Digg, for the most part, just pisses me off. By the time you have 25 friends, your inbox is full daily. It is very impersonal. For the most part, here’s the game: Get as many friends as you can. Digg all of their stuff. Then call in your favors when you have your own stuff. It’s a lot of damn work and most of the categories are very vertical. The same type of stories rise to the top all the time despite the new categories. So Digg is kind of on my bad side right now.

I actually came back to Facebook after calling it a spam machine. I just learned to use it more effectively. So I make minor appearances there with some friends who only use it and of course, I find friends from other networks.

Mixx I am kind of checking out. I don’t get it yet and will have to spend some quality time there before I have an opinion.

Now for the networks I really use

Delicious

If you really want to know what I am researching and even get the gist of upcoming posts before I write them, this is where you will find the most information. I use it as a research archive. When I went from browser bookmarks to delicious, it took a while for me to use tags rather than folders, but I never went back.

Twitter

Of course. I made fun of this one to. “What are you doing?” “Typing an update.” For the most part, you just have to jump in, follow some people, and just go with the flow. You will get it eventually.

It is were I vent, ask questions that get a quicker response than a forum or even a search at times and notify my followers of the cool things. I also learn a lot from the people I follow. It is like a web shaped forum with post limits.

StumbleUpon

No friend spammer here. If you want to send something to someone else, you have to pick and choose. More real and less face in the crowd than Digg. And reciprocal stumbles happen a lot if you are in the right place at the right time.

FriendFeed

I have heard a lot of people say that they like Twitter better or they like Friendfeed better. Apples and oranges people.

If you have someone whose opinion you respect, there is no better place to follow them than on Friendfeed because you get everything. Their tweets. Their stumbles. Their blog posts. Their diggs. All in a river format. It is faster and easier than a feed reader and it doesn’t slow down my computer like a feed reader can with a few hundred feeds.

And you can comment on or “like” any one of the items that happen to be in your river and join into conversations with other Friendfeed users. Like Twitter, it will take a while before you will “get it”.

Social Median

I like this one and am not sure why. Maybe because it is new. Maybe just because I like it. One of the features I do like is the fact it does a pretty good job of categorizing your “clips” without you having to add tags or categories. And it pulls unclipped stories out of blue and brings those to you too based on your interests, giving you the chance to be first and lazy at the same time.

Twine

A lot of the users here are way above my head. This is where you will find science, web 3.0, philosophy, and a lot of other topics that it takes a few brain cells to understand. And some of the stories I have to read really slow just to barely scratch the surface of the new knowledge. But I like that. It is like a drug at times.

Ping.fm

Okay, not a network but a way to send updates to many of the networks I don’t frequent that often. It can be abused. There is no point in spewing everything out over various networks. But I use it every now and then and actually check those various networks to see who bites and if I can get a conversation going.

The Tools

I wrote a post on tools a while back and have narrowed those down a bit too. The shiny, flashy ones for the most part only covered 1-4 networks at the most, but I still use a lot of the tools listed there. But for the most part I use two, that are very simple.

One is SocialAddict which is just a custom browser with links to most of the networks I visit. The other is a userscript that you can add to your Firefox or Flock browser. It is called FFWorkSpace and it loads other social sites inside of Friendfeed as shown below.

An awesome userscript.

So that’s where I’m at for now. Hope to see you there too.

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A short post for the weekend, but with lists, you can usually leave them short. This is a list of feeds that I have gathered over the last few months. They are the rss feeds of the hot and upcoming story section of various bookmark and social news sites. And I choose a few new ones in last week out of the following sites:

This is a incomplete, random list of tools I use with social networks. Not that I know what I am doing quite yet with social networks. It will take a while. I am just an app, software, and addon junky. So I look for software all the time and usually find something. Be sure and add your own in comments. I will probably try all of them.

First, I would like to invite all of you to Social Median, a different sort of network. It works like Digg, because stories can be "clipped" and commented on. It works like FriendFeed because you follow other "News Makers" and has groups. And it’s new and for some reason I can’t stay away.

Keeping Your Social Profiles Current

• Atomkeep – Yesterday I wrote a post about this one. I really like this service. Keep your profile details in one place and update your social networks and resumes from there. It saves time and helps you avoid multiple personality disorder. I still need to fill out my profile though. Anyone who signs up for the beta gets to keep their account for free.

Streaming Your Social Activities

• Friendfeed – The most popular.
• Profilactic – The most adaptible.
• Swurl – Archive and search your activities.
• OnASwarm – Find friends automatically
• Second Brain – Browse through your content with ease.

What’s News

Sometimes news just does not get around that quick. A story may be popular on a niche social site and may have not made it to StumbleUpon or Digg yet. Most social sites have a an upcoming or new submission page and sometimes this page has feeds. If you are in the right place at the right time, you may spot a story. Sometimes, the daily digests from social networks have stories that you can submit to other networks even a day later. What benefit do you get from this? Possible reciprocation. Getting known as a person who finds great stories and more subscribers to your blog.

Firefox Social Tools

• Shareaholic – Choose from multiple sites to submit to.
• StumbleUpon Toolbar – Self explanatory. One of my favorite sites. So I have a dedicated addon.
• TwitterFox – Not as obtrusive as other addons I have tried.
• ShareThis – Another addon that submits to multiple sites.
• Delicious Bookmarks – A necessity. I only use local bookmarks for logins and the like.
• MySocial 24×7 – For FriendFeed. I wish it would autorefresh
• GreaseMonkey Scripts – Only found these less than a year ago. Look around and search. There are a lot there. You will need this addon to use them.
• The sidebar trick – Screw addons. Do it yourself. The example is for the mobile version of Twitter, but this works for a lot of mobile web sites.
• Bookmarklets – No link. I just add all bookmarklets not covered by one of the tools above into one folder on my bookmark toolbar called "Link". This also has the bookmarklets for posting to my blogs and adding links to their blogrolls.

WordPress Social Tools

• Alinks – Install this plugin and link all your references to social networks to your profiles in every post so your readers can find you elsewhere.
• Disqus Comment System – Comment in the network
• FriendFeed Widget – A lifestream widget.
• Sezwho – Another commenting network.
• Twitter Tools – Notify your followers about new posts among other things.
• Profilactic Widget – I added mine manually, but here is a plugin.
• FriendFeed Plugin - Allows reader to comment on your post via FriendFeed.
• ShareThis – Allows readers to social bookmark your posts at multiple sites without cluttering your site up with button.

Desktop Social Tools

• Twirl – I like the ability to tweek the interface for FriendFeed and Twitter.
• TweetDeck - The ultimate Twitter listening tool with panels.
• Alert Thingy – Detects duplicates from Twitter and FriendFeed and gives you one.
• FeedDemon – A feed reader, but throw your network feeds into one folder to see them all at once

Online Social Tools

• HelloTxt – Notify multiple sites from one spot
• SocialPoster – Bookmark at multiple sites and choose dofollow sites, if you want.
• Ping.fm – Update all of your social networks at once.

Your Social Inbox

I have yet to move everything to Gmail. I still use Thunderbird. I learned about filters long ago. With filters, I find all the comments from my blog, all my friend requests, and my daily digests into one folder. In Thunderbird, go to Tools->Message Filters. Instead of typing an example out, I made a screenshot of my filters. I keep coming up with new ones as I go, so it is not complete.

Not Done Yet

Like I said, an incomplete list. What are your favorite tools?

I sign up for about everything just to see what it’s like, which is why you might see me in a lot of different places. I like playing with concepts and new things. So if you messaged me or friended me and I haven’t done it yet, I will eventually. All of these type email notices get filtered into one email folder called "Friends" and then I go through and reciprocate a few times a week.

I signed up for Twitter and it took me forever to find the people I wanted to follow. I knew them on other networks but my mind went blank when I got there, so for the first two weeks, I followed less than 20 people. The same thing happened when I signed up for FriendFeed. And I don’t get the random friender’s. With these services, I follow for following. People post some cool stuff before it even gets around the net. You just have to find the right people and cut down the noise. If you want noise, just follow everyone on Twitter. You will get some noise.

Then again at MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Stumbleupon and the like, I can afford to throw a little friendship around. I don’t use these services for following people. A friend will not be hand delivering spam to my inbox.

Today I checked out Swurl. Once I added my services, I went to the friends page and all my friends were set up. It recognized friends I had from other services and added them as my friend at Swurl. Not only that, it listed all my friends accounts at other services. Now I can check out Andy Beard’s bookmarks, Danny Sullivan’s YouTube account or Chris Garrett’s Flickr account. Not that I wouldn’t have eventually run into these as I went along but it is kind of nice to see everyone’s account laid out like that. A perfect way to connect to old friends in new neighborhoods.

I wrote the title to this post shortly after finding this out as well as all the proceeding paragraphs and then I found out that this lifestream service does more than just the last little trick. When I navigated to the timeline page, I saw tabs for 2008, 2007, and 2006. Interesting. So I clicked on 2006 and there were items there. Amazing. It not only grabs the current feeds but imports everything from services that will allow it. I have been using Twitter randomly to store ideas. Now I know that I can find these when I want to without depending on Twitter. So maybe this is more like a "lifebank" than a lifestream.

And then I went to the front page again and found out that the page scrolls infinitely. As soon as you get to the bottom, it loads more items.

Swurl doesn’t cover the massive amount of services Profilactic does but it does have commenting like Friendfeed and SecondBrain. As far as new concepts go, this service does a lot more than other ones I have seen, so don’t let the plain exterior fool you.

Eristoddle.com is the third domain I’ve owned. My first was Profit-ware.com which was banned by Google for years and now has a Pagerank of 4. I have found a use for that site and will be moving forward on it soon. My second was ClickbankEbook.com which now redirects to Digital Products Review.

It began as an internet marketing site running on PHPnuke. PHPnuke was the first CMS I played around with and the reason why I started learning to code in PHP.

Shortly after that I found StumbleUpon which sparked a lot of old interests in writing and art. I had a Stumbleupon account before it was even considered a tool for marketers. I just thought it was a way to find cool sites. Plus I like to show off with the 2000 some bookmarks I had collected and horded since I first got on the internet. I was a top stumbler a lot, hitting the top spot a few times. Another top stumbler with similar interests became a best friend and is now my wife. During this time Stumbleupon was dofollow. Yes, my sites benefitted but mainly indirectly through the links to my sites in my profile.

So I turned Eristoddle.com into a writing resources directory to consolidate some of the writing links I had collected along with the new ones I had found. The fact that I had met my soul mate by tapping into my lifelong interest in writing had a little to do with it too. It even had a forum for a while and stayed pretty busy with other top stumblers coming by. It still ran on Nuke.

I have been through a few hosting providers with the site and have managed to keep the link database backed up through each change. This time I decided to move to a WordPress installation with the Link Exchange Manager plugin. I converted the database tables and it was up and running within a couple of hours.

It’s a little rough around the edges and is bound to stay that way for a while, knowing me. The directory listings could use some styling. But it’s at an automated stage now which is good. It will grow in size on it’s own. It will collect PageRank on its own. I just have to moderated submissions which can be a hassle but worth the time. You never have a clue how much spam you can get until you open a directory.

Ware23.com is a shareware site I started with a similar goal in mind. It’s the only site I wrote from the ground up because I didn’t like the open source pad directory software that was available. It gets about 15 software submissions a day with a grand total of over 24,000 software titles. It could use a little revisiting also but it’s good to know the show goes on without me involved.

Bloglot.com was once a bookmarking site that crashed because it couldn’t handle the load one too many times. The main cause of the crashes was spam. I think I am going to throw a Drupal installation up and make it a blog directory. I am going to run WordPress blogs on the subdomains to test a few plugins I am writing and having written for me, which I may just beta test by having a few people sign up for blogs. The goal of the plugins are to take manual crosslinking, affiliate program selection, related content choices out of the equation. What if your sidebar widgets worked like the ones the Squidoo lens builder?

I originally planned to build a site in each category of my lists. They would all run 95% unattended and build pagerank and age while I figured out a system to monetize them. "Adsense !", everyone says. I say, "Google gets a cut, the affiliate who bought the ad gets a cut, and the retailer gets a cut." You lose a lot of profit through ease of use. Jobs once outsourced to companies now cost must less through the use of smarter software. At least telling myself that is what keeps me on this crazy trail.

Those are weekend projects along with my ongoing one of building a system to save time when running multiple blogs which I hope will converge with at least an alpha version of my WordPress plugin. At that time, I will convert all of my other PageRank banks into WordPress blogs. And I start writing about more than internet marketing and regurgitate some of the words I packed into my head through constant reading because the framework will be in place.

And that’s how you learn seo, the internet, programming, and marketing to support yourself as a writer. The switch from starving fiction writer to nonfiction writer helped. And guess what, fiction writers don’t have a trademark on passion.

This post is for my wife who married a construction worker making $24,000 a year and never thought I was crazy. I love you baby.

Caroline is currently  #12 on the top 100 make money online blog list, so she does have something to say about traffic. Well, you can get her course on StumbleUpon traffic for free. There are ten free copies up for grabs. But you will have to work for it. You have to hunt for easter eggs. Go get your free Stumbleupon course.

I recently downloaded RapidReader to test out how fast I could read some PDF files lying around on my desktop. One of the files I happened to choose was Web Traffic Orgasm, a book by Dean Hunt about getting stories on the front page of Digg.

I don’t use Digg that much, yet, but this PDF does have some good details about getting any post ranked higher on any type of page ranking system. I mention all of this because I think I absorbed the book by osmosis. I didn’t set out to get one of my pages stumbled, didn’t use this book as a guideline, but somehow I used a few of its tips without thinking about it or I just stumbled upon something.

A couple of days ago, I put together a list of bookmarking sites that do not use nofollow. I posted that list here. I also posted the exact same list with another headline over at Digital Products Review.

In Web Traffic Orgasm, one of the points that Dean Hunt makes is that you must package your potential post for global appeal and use terms that others would use. Obviously, people understand "link love" more than "do not use nofollow".

I also submitted the post to BloggingZoom. My first test of this system. Whether or not the stumble came via a visitor from BloggingZoom, I do not know. 

By far, this stumble has given more hits to one page on one of my sites than any other. The next day I was greeted to being on the business buzz page of SU.

And I guess all the traffic from SU isn’t wasted. My subscriber count went from 29 to 55 that day. And I guess I will have to say I have been bitten by a new bug. Time to study this process more in depth

According to ReadWriteWeb, they didn’t even make it to #6. But, of course, bookmarking is so last year. Delicious is #1, of course. And Magnolia is #2. Just interesting.

$75 million was a cheap price tag compared to what has lately been paid for social websites. Not sure what this exactly means for either one, but Ebay’s stock went thorugh the roof, leaving we wishing I had some.

An Introduction to Social Media Strategy and Socially Driven Content – eMoms at Home – Blogging and Internet Marketing for Home Based Entrepreneurs

This is a great article on getting traffic from social networks. Enough said. Read the rest there.