Manipulating social networks is easier still. There are firms that manipulate which stories are posted and which blogs are linked to, and for years there are firms that have worked to manipulate which links come up higher on the search results as well. As these signposts become more, not less, important, there’s a significant market opportunity for someone who can, as Billboard did, clean up the charts and make the payola worthless or at least more transparent. In the meantime, be skeptical.

By design, I’m a cynic. It has taken me many years of practice and getting burned or watching my customers get burned by fly-by-night outfits or independent contractors that just don’t get it. And nothing gets me more riled up than people that take advantage of others because they do not know what to look for.

Sure, you could employ the services of a black hat SEO wizard to boost your google ranking, but does that really help you out? Sure, short term if you have a website covered in Google ads and your only goal is to get as many clicks as possible. But should you?

I don’t think so.

It’s not always about the quantity of traffic, but also about the quality. Covering your pages with ads creates a bad user experience and draws away from your content. Your audience see that you are nothing more than a money grubbing whore and might not come back. Or they will use some kind of ad-blocking technology or Readability which makes all of those ads useless.

Why not create something that your audience enjoys or finds relevant? Interact with your audience via Twitter, Facebook or email and get them to come back? Everyone calls this Social Media best practices, but I call it basic customer service. It’s not rocket science, it’s just plain common sense that gets lost in a flurry of buzz-words spouted by very nice fellows with very white teeth, square-tipped shoes and a leased BMW in the parking lot.

If you rush, you’ll get the traffic you want. But you might not get it back. Take your time, take care of your customers and keep them coming back. Google might bring them to you, but it is your job to keep them!

I’m a fan of Twitter. You guys know this already. I mean, I’ve been using it since it was an Odeo product about 5 years ago. You could say that with Twitter, I was a very early adopter.

Most of the time I find it helpful, entertaining and quite informative. The nice folks that I follow usually share quality items that interest me or say funny shit that makes me giggle.

That said, there are times when I absolutely fucking hate Twitter. Hate that burns with the heat of 1,000 suns friends. Hate that would turn the average person green with rage.

Yesterday (and I’m sure today) was one of those times.

You see, for those of you that are living under a rock on one of Saturn’s moons, the new Apple Telephone Device was being delivered yesterday. And all 408 of the people that follow me got one. And all 408 of the people that got one did nothing but fill my Twitter feed with post after post after post about the line, the phone, how great Apple is and how the device has changed their lives.

All day. Nothing but ATP posts.

Here’s the thing. While I’m sure the device is awesome and made from rainbows and pure unicorn fur, when all I have to read on Twitter is nerdgasm after god damned nerdgasm about it gets a little old. I even unfollowed a few people yesterday because of it.

I get your excited. Awesome! I get that you are in puffy pink heart love with the damned thing. Hooray! I get that you want to gay marry Steve Jobs and bare his puffy pink heart love child. I do, really. You are really excited. Good for you.

I, however, don’t care.

So, you can expect more Android news and retweets in my twitter feed. As long as you guys are going to do it to me, I’m just going to do it back.

And enough with the FourSquare. I don’t care where you are or how many others are there with you. If I did care, I would follow you within the FourSquare app (yes, I’m there, search for me). I for realz don’t want that crap in my stream any more.

As always, thank you for your time.

This is something that I’ve been thinking about for the past few months and I finally have enough of a thought about to put words to screen. Today, I would like to discuss with you, the fine donburnside.com readership, the like button.

The Like Button is what I’m going to call the process in which, at certain sites, you mark something in such a way to signify the fact that you appreciate it. The favorite star on Flickr, the pink heart on Tumblr, or the star on Twitter. Clicking that device tells the author that you liked it while at the same time acts as a bookmark for you, within that site, for the stuff that you really like. And that’s exactly how I use it. I like things because I think they are cool and I want to be able to go back to them at a later time for whatever reason.

Did you notice that I did not include the Facebook like function in the above paragraph? It’s because I think that feature is broken.

On Facebook, clicking like only lets the author of the post know that you like it and automatically subscribes you to updates on that post (if you have those settings enabled). That’s too bad.

There are posts all the time on Facebook that I wish I could revisit for many reasons. Funny posts, cool links or videos. But when I click the like button, the only thing that happens is I get bothered with updates and comments that I’m usually not interested in.

I don’t have a solution for this but really wish I did. I would be nice to have an archive of likes on Facebook, just like the other sites.

Maybe someday.

Does this feature exist? Do you have a good system? Let us know below! Comments are back open, go nuts!

I have decided to go back to the “I wonder who will find me” model of personal publishing, instead of forcing it onto your screens. I’ve been pushing stuff to Twitter long enough, so you know it’s all here. Now to see if you keep coming back.

To be a little more clear, anything that I post here, on dbmini, w(t)f, Vimeo or Viddler will no longer automatically get posted to Twitter, which also no longer automatically posts to Facebook.

I will be putting everything back into Friend Feed if you want a one-stop-shopping experience for everything I share online, but that’s as far as it goes.

If you are one of my Facebook or Twitter followers and want to be able to keep up with my shit, might I recommend taking the time now to discover the absolute brilliance that is RSS and Google Reader. Everything I do has an RSS feed and it’s a great way to keep up. Bonus is that there are a ton of sites out there that also have RSS feeds, so you can easily subscribe to them to get the latest updates.

If you are one of my Twitter or Facebook followers that is tired of reading duplicate posts or seeing links from me, you won’t any longer. You’re welcome.

Finally, I will be removing FB Connect from donburnside.com and reset the WordPress comment rules appropriately.

As always, thank you for your time.

Drama added for effect. Did it work? I’m guessing not, so let’s just get on with the story.

About 2 weeks ago my Blackberry Storm went caput. Well, not 100%, but the speaker and microphone quit working. Problematic to say the least, especially since it is the only device I have for voice communication. Prior to this happening, I was perfectly satisfied with the Storm, after I made a few updates and changes to the device based on information I gleaned from Crackberry.com and a few others.

Ok, phone caput. New one is sent and it works fine, kinda. While the microphone works, it sounds like I’m talking with a mouth full of marbles. Not the greatest. So, another call to 611, the tech agrees the call quality is poor and sends another phone.

That is sitting in the box on my desk.

Upon receiving phone numba 2, I decided that I would wait for Verizon to push out an update for this device, instead of downloading it from the intartubes again, thinking that it might have been a bad build or something that broke my phone. So, I have been running software that was released on or about December 8th of last year. And it sucks.

It’s version .75 of the Storm software and, if I’m honest, it’s horrible. Almost worse than v.65 that originally came with the phone. It’s completely unusable with this version. The buttons don’t press correctly, the accelerometer is painfully slow to adjust and doing almost anything causes the phone to stop responding for about 30 seconds before it starts going again. Not good, not good at all.

Finally, after spending the day staring into the 100+ degree ball of fire in the sky and having my phone not work the way it should 1 more time, in a fit of rage, I contacted support. But, I was nice. No, really, I was.

I asked if there was an update coming this week. He said no. I then asked if it was possible for me to exchange this device for something else. He explained a few things about that too. When he finished, he asked if he could make a suggestion and explain something.

me: Sure, go ahead

Tech: blah blah blah blah we don’t ask what version software you are running when you call blah blah blah blah.

So, in a very roundabout way, without telling me it was ok to upgrade the software on my phone, he told me to update the damned software on my phone!

Which I will be doing tonight with the unit that is in the box before I even activate it.

Follow along at Twitter and Facebook for the blow by blow, as it happens!

I use Twitter. I like Twitter. I think it’s handy to have around. But lately it seems that it is the only thing anyone can talk about.

For example, the word Twitter appears over 20 times on the front page of Mashable. I have unsubscribed.

In the last 2 episodes of TWiT, more than 50% of the stories were about Twitter. I have unsubscribed for the time being. Hopefully normal tech talk will resume soon.

Even on Twitter there is getting to be too much talk about Twitter. I just finished unfollowing about 5 of the worst offenders there.

It’s time to realize that there are more important things to discuss than how many people follow you on Twitter or what’s the best Twitter app to use or, or, or.

You people are like Pitbulls. You find something you like, get it stuck in your jaws and wave it around until it’s a bloody, limp mess that nobody wants anything to do with anymore. Time to find something else to talk about.

First one is I am going to attempt to do a Flickr 365. It’s perfect. I spend a little time thinking about the shot then take it. Bonus if I can do it with my phone, then I don’t have to offload photos from a memory stick everyday.

The ‘rents are out again (hi Mom!). That usually provides a pretty good level of distraction as well which I am welcoming this time around. Thursday night for example Mom showed me her photos and is bummed that she can’t upload all of them to her Flickr. Pro account for her birthday? I think so. Or Mother’s Day.

After that, I showed them the goodness that is Hulu.com. All of this happened after I gave them both a full tour of the new site I’m working on. Sorry, it still only lives on my computer, but you’ll hear about it as soon as it goes live.

Yet another distraction that I have right now is the gym. Getting there is a distraction that I’ve been missing this week and, as it turns out, scheduling time to get there is quite the distraction as well.

I’ve also been distracted by Apple stuff. Primarily the coolness that is the new iLife and the holy-shit-are-you-kidding-me pricing of the new 17″ MacBook Pro. I built one yesterday that came to almost $6,000! Big thanks to everyone for making fun of my toot typo/missed letter last week too. That was not nearly as awesome as you think it was. Really.

Speaking of, you might have noticed the toots have been a little light this week. Between being fairly busy and not really being able to fully appreciate the replies they have been getting either on Twitter or Facebook, I’ve slowed down a bit. Yet another distraction, this one very much unwanted.

Finally, I have 2 websites that I need to finish that aren’t work related and 1 that still needs the WP upgrade. So if I’m not around much for the next week or so, you’ll know why.

I was reading about the latest phishing scam on the Twitter blog. Out of curiosity, I thought I would see what that page looked like for myself. If it weren’t for that graphic above, it would have popped right open. As it worked out, I had to actually click through one more time to view the site. And they are bad bad people.

There is the Twitter phishing site, but if you go to the main root of that domain, they have an exact replica of Facebook as well. This site too was initially blocked by OpenDNS.

Let’s let this be a reminder to all of you out there to make the switch for you and your users. It’s quicker, it’s super reliable and safer. Bonus it’s free! You can sign-up for an account (which is also free) and get some pretty kick-ass controls if you want to do some serious site blocking. Super handy for you small-office-users-without-a-full-time-IT-guy.

Give it a go. I’m sure you’ll find your Internet experience to be greatly improved.

The Technology Challenge

You remember this from late ’07, right?

And, while you are making your new years resolutions this year, pick someone close to you and introduce them to something new to use the internet for. If they got a digital camera for Christmas, help them with a flickr account. Show them how RSS works and help them set up a Google account. Introduce them to Podcasting. Show them the wonders of Craiglist. Anything. Just pick one and try to make it happen. It’s time these people find out that the web is more than email and banking!

How’d you do?

Wait! Before you tell me how well you did, let’s see if you can beat me.

• Mom got a new digital camera (like mine) and flickr account. Ok, so there are only 2 photos, but it’s there and I will be getting her to use it more this coming year.
• Mom is an MMS sending fool. Sounds and photos from her camera to anyone in her contacts list on her phone. Oh, and she is even emailing them to herself on her phone.
• Grandad is now rockin’ a hot new computer with Office ’07 and Vista. Sure this counts. Have you seen the changes from XP to Vista? From Office 2K to ’07? From Outlook Express to Windows Live Mail? I totally get credit for this.
• I got Jeannie to turn her new laptop on!
• I got someone to switch from Windows to Mac. Verified.
• Fireball Tim started a blog.

So, I think I did pretty good.

I believe that 2009 is going to be the year for RSS for my users. I thought it might be the year of Twitter, but I think I’m going to continue to keep that to myself. Besides, Mom gets really frustrated when trying to send a text message.

Ok, your turn. Belly up. How did you get your users to use technology? Or did you fail? It’s ok, you can tell us, we are all friends here. Besides, someone might have a suggestion to get you started!

I did hear from the ‘rents and read on Twitter that Las Vegas was practically an island yesterday. The airport was closed. Interstate 15 between Stateline and Baker was closed. Interstate 95 was closed at Railroad Pass. If you were in Vegas, you were staying in Vegas.

Anyone else having wackier than normal weather?