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Delete Your Friends in Social Networks

Paulius Sluškonis — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:23:03 +0000

1. Delete Your Friends in Social Networks is a new social action hosted by Cometos.

2. It is dedicated to the dehumanizing process propagated by social networks.

3. Large numbers of friends which everybody seeks to gain are targeted to break real social relation among people.

4. The true act of communication is possible only between small groups of people, communicating in immediate way.

5. Social networks could be used just for exchanging blank information among family members, true friends in real life and for business purposes.

6. Social networking is more like playing with people than relating with them. Social networking is sharing, downloading, uploading, resharing, commenting, reacting (it is better to react inadequately – simulating your real opinion in the direction of “everything is ok” and “I like it”), acting, writing, posting etc. Real relations are first of all LISTENING and then STATING your OPINION. And, of course, the true social contact must be audible, visible, touchable, smellable and sensible in any sense in both directions (between two communicating sides) at same time and in short distance.

7. Social networking unifies all people. They become nano elements of global network of one relation.

8. “One relation” means, that communication process has no moments of crisis or flashes of rise. It is superficial, irresponsible, artificial, fragile and blank.

9. Social networking is oriented to one direction. A man is like transmitter constantly and unstoppably posting blank messages about himself. He does not make distinction between valuable information and invaluable.

10. A social networker does not realize that only one type of information is important:

a) information, which is announced and produced by one or a few people;

b) information, which is presented after some time of working on it;

c) information, which is offered for the audience after analytical, deductional, inductive or after any other method of thinking about some kind of material.

11. Social networking takes much time. Sending and responding to the blank information is a long and troublesome work.

12. For social networking it is very important to take part in different affairs as often as you can and to respond to different types of information as often as possible. It shows the level of your social networking abilities.

My Sky Status by Lufthansa

Paulius Sluškonis — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:24:24 +0000

MySkyStatus service by Lufthansa was created for constant auto-update of your Twitter and Facebook accounts about traveling position with Lufthansa flights.

I can name this service like this: “How can I generate more content, when I do not have possibilities to do it or when I am tired to do it?” Lufthansa comes to help you! At least when you are traveling and can not tweet something by yourself.

Again, it is the question about the amount of content needed to be exposed about you and your business for better status of social networking and for better acceptance for the search engines. The web is organized not in the direction of quality but in the direction of quantity.

Lufthansa sends one message per hour. Try to imagine: you get for example ten almost identical messages from your friend who has a flight for about 10 hours. What is the quality and sense of this kind of message? Lets go forward. It is completely possible to attach sensors to all things in your room: to the bed (when you sit or get up it sends a message), to the table (it sends messages about when and what you are eating / drinking), to the ground (information about your movements in the room) etc. Only when you sit by your computer, you may do UPDATES by yourself. All other time it is done for you by tens of sensors. What is this information about? The most important message could be, that someone became dead on the bed. But will somebody notice this update among millions of tweets like “I moved from kitchen to bathroom.” ?

Well, I would really like this service by Lufthansa in the case it was created to make a fun about the concept of frequently updated content. But in fact it just helps people to “communicate” without making a break. The content which Lufthansa sends in stead of us becomes colourless and unnecessary.

For example, I have only 10 my best friends. Everyone is at home. Each of them has just three sensors in the room sending a short post every half of an hour. How much messages I’ll be recieving in one hour?60. And per day? Or if I have 100 (it’s a very small number for the real social networker) friends?

Recalling Burger King’s “Whopper Sacrifice”

Paulius Sluškonis — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:58:47 +0000

Well, it was one of the best social actions directed to social networks. I just wanted to recall it. Some time ago Burger King offered for Facebook users to delete 10 friends and get a free Whopper sandwich. The reaction of Facebook was not very social:

“Facebook® has disabled WHOPPER® Sacrifice after your love for the WHOPPER® Sandwich proved to be stronger than 233,906 friendships.” Here is the link.

As I mentioned, Facebook acted not socially. On the other hand Burger King showed the real foundation in social networking relations: THERE ARE NO RELATIONS. People responded really normally: they freely deleted their friends for the sandwich. Oh my God!

It is not social to forbid to break relations. The democracy in social field means being free in both: accepting and ending of friendship. The sandwich is just a cause to act socially: to filter and to clean up your cupboard of friends. I do not feel a difference between 50 or 10 000 friends. I can not be nor PRACTICALY neither INTIMATELLY closely related to 50 or to 10 000 of them.

So, social networking reminds me Google’s attention to fresh content. It is a field of global involvement of people into space of vacuous spending of time. The time which is spent with 100 000 of friends. Can it be really good time?

But the most important thing is that people subconsciously feel it. They are completely involved but at the same time they can delete friends without a worry. Whopper sandwich is more real than bunch of virtual friends. Isn’t it true?

Google’s Categories For Blog Stories

Paulius Sluškonis — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:45:56 +0000

I have already described my opinion about constantly updated content and its impact for the search engines. Lets move a step forward. I mean, Google moves even forward with this idea. Take a look at the simple picture below, which you have already seen probably thousands of times:

Everything’s all right? Sure, I didn’t make any changes with Photoshop except cropping it. There are categories for sorting of blogs’ stories in it, offered by Google. When you search for the blog post you see it on the left side of the window. Google created a habit which didn’t rise any doubts in our brains. What is more important personally for me: a really fresh content (the best if written 10 seconds ago) or a content that is created by smart and clever people, who have an outstanding knowledge of the thing, exceptional analytical capabilities, proximate sources of verfication about what they are saying and so on? I would choose the latter arguments.

What is a fresh content by default? It is an accidental, poetical, unjustified, meaningless, ephemeral kind of information. Does it have any sense?

But, as you see in the picture, Google pays much attention to it. The worst thing if you post something “anytime”. The less worse is if you updated your website once in a month. A little bit better if you write every week. It’s completely normal to create a post each day. It quite a good result to make something fresh every 12 hours. And the best what you can do, is sitting by your PC all day and updating website hour by hour. Or to say in simple words: the heavenly thing is to write as often as you can.

For me it is not important at all if the post was written an hour ago or a week ago. It has to be inspirational, revealing and inproving my intelligence. Everthing else does not matter.

Google goes in reverse way. People have to write anything and as often as they can. There is no place for other categories in Google’s quick or advanced search of blogs.

WordPress – A Success Of SEO

Paulius Sluškonis — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:20:37 +0000

Matt Cuts says that “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)” in the 12th slide of this presentation.

I want to argue a little bit: 100 % of websites, that I read and check usualy are based on WordPress platform. So, the question remains the same: what are the real rules to make site visible in the internet?

WordPress – as you know well – is a CMS created mostly for constantly updated content. Frequency, variety, diversity of tags and content are the anchors of the success of SEO.

The motto of Google’s conception could be “Lets make people working horses”. Join the space of the most frequently updated content and you’ll be the winner. Lets work if you think that it is possible to say something everyday and to stay interesting. I do not think so.

Fresh Content Idea In Search Engines’ Algorithms

Paulius Sluškonis — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:05:35 +0000

There is a well known fact probably for all SEO strategists: adding fresh content to a website frequently feeds search engines, which are constantly looking for new content and indexing it. What does this concept of ranking pages mean?

1. It is more sociological (philosophical) than a technical question. To say in few words: Google programmers thought one day, that a fresh content could be one of the most important things for their search engine to choose how to value websites. And they gave to this rule quite a high percent in a whole indexing algorithm.

2. It is a question about organizing human life. Soon people noted this feature and had begun working on it. Well, hard to find the right words. It is not like “hard working”, but they brought their life from reality to the internet, because just try to imagine – it is like someone being sentenced to work daily with a computer writing senseless, endless and content-wide articles, posts, opinions, letters, dreams, discussions etc. More you write, more you get (traffic).

3. The principle is simple: you know the rules of search engines, you are a businessman, you want traffic (to attract more visitors and costumers), so you sit and write. And you get to the point if you are quite a patient guy, having good writing skills. You haven’t any other alternative.

4. What do you think about this offer – how to be popular on the internet – made by the greatest search engines? It recalls me playing an interesting historical spectacle. There was opened a possibility starting with an era of internet to grab creativity of all people and to force them (by their own will) expose potency for the same thing. You won’t do this, you’ll be nothing.

5. That’s why my last post was dedicated for the real value of content, which could be called a nowadays dragon from the most horrible fairy-tail of all times.

The True Value Of A Blog

Paulius Sluškonis — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:57:52 +0000

The first thing you do when you are in social marketing business – you seek to be updated with a fresh information each day. So, you read a lot of blogs related with your working field. The blogs which are written by the stars and professionals in IT, PR, SEO and social marketing industry.

So, first of all I want to present my conclusion of what I get in these popular and the most popular blogs: and what I think about them: complete fake (noise) of information and waste of time. It is time to prove it. Lets talk a little bit about latest posts of well known blogs.

1. To be fair and honest 100 % I can tell, that my Cometos blog is completely worthless till the post of 20th of September, 2009. It was made just to keep it alive, embeding kind of funny stuff and “hot” IT facts, recalling more illusion of a importance than a really significant event. But one day I somehow got up from this strange dream and have tried to look at things differently. The thing I discovered was: THERE ARE NO REALLY IMPORTANT NEWS IN BLOGS.

2. Lets start. I wasted the first 15 minutes of my beautiful morning for Dan Zarella’s latest post called “Designing for Contagiousness”. The author counts 7 points how to make your site or blog viral. That was done 100 millions times in other 100 million blogs already. According to Dan the main things are: urgency, social proof, authority… Haven’t you heard already these things somewhere? The most interesting point is novelty, described as “People don’t spread content they’ve seen or heard a million times before.” Is Dan doing himself to prove this rule? Or he just didn’t get deeper in, writing it and freely passed it?

3. The next 15 minutes of wasted time: Jacob Morgan’s post “Social Media for Recruiting”. The same story again. I mean, many “important” boiling points about recruitment process using social media: you may know practically everything about the candidates: “their key areas of expertise, where they currently work, where they have worked previously, where they are located, what they are looking for in a new job, and that’s just the beginning”. Isn’t it clear and so simple by default? People open their personalities and they are narcissists on the social networks, so you may find anything about them without a trouble. Couldn’t that be said in one simple sentence without making a fake post dividing information in unnecessary and complicated structure?

4. Lets move farward. Brian Solis’s post “Group Mentality: Twitter to Debut Lists”. I can not understand at all these types of posts. There you can find only a short announce, that Twitter is working on PeopleBrowsr and a link to Twitter’s blog. There you may find no analysis, no subjective opinion, nothing.

5. Patrick O’Keefe wastes your time writing that he will not be possibly writing, because he goes to the IZEAFest. Read his incredible post called I’m at IZEAFest in Orlando, Florida!.

6. One more. Sure, we can talk about the time waster number one. It is, of course, Mashable. Many posts come every day in this website and maybe just 1 % of them are really useful and interesting. THE MORE CONTENT WE GOT, THE LESS IMPORTANT IT BECOMES. It is a fundamental conclusion about the internet content talking about web information, blogs or even news services.

7. So, I spend half a day trying to get some really important news. But my head was not informed by any serious events or facts. Even worse: I spend my time without a sense. And this happens day by day. Why to talk and to write something, when you do not have what to say? Isn’t it better to stay in silence?

When Social Networking Becomes A Dangerous Illness

Paulius Sluškonis — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:21:32 +0000

Sometimes addiction to social networking and mobile technologies becomes a dangerous illness, which shows itself in mysterious ways. It is hard to predict exact consequences, but the facts are quite negatively impressive.

I like Scoblizer or Robert Scoble a lot for interesting interpretations of nowadays media tendencies. But his real-time baby birth ceremony was something I can not appreciate nor logicaly neither spiritualy. He continuously transmitted various facts from the birth process of his child. Try to feel his emotions of a “real father”:

1. At first he wrote an email to the members of the family and to friends, calling to watch Twitter updates.

2. Then he checked in on Google Latitude, Gowalla, and FourSquare “so that people would know we were at the hospital.”

3. Twitter and FriendFeed were constantly updated.

4. “I also let my Facebook friends know that a baby was on the way. That made sure I got as many people to know something was about to happen as possible.”

5. Finally an iPhone is used to capture an image and to post it across all possible platforms. The screen was monitoring reactions from all over the world. (You are checking reactions, not your baby?..)

6. SLR and 5D MKII were used also.

7. Back to the iPhone and here he made a first image of newly born kid.

8. Flickr was involved immediately for uploading fresh photos.

9. And the finish: audio recording feature on iPhone captured the first cry of the baby and then it was uploaded via email to FriendFeed.

10. Thats all. Sorry, I can not analyse this social networking ceremony. I leave it just as it is. Make your own conclusions.

Even this odd action of Robert Scoble has some good insights about absorbing information in various types of social media. Explore them.

5D MKII

Stone Age Of SEO: E-mail Spam In Lithuania

Paulius Sluškonis — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:00:08 +0000

A very simple story happened to me. But I have thought, I had to present it in this blog. You’ll learn how some people imagine SEO and how do they sell their products. Sometimes you can feel like a fellow of the stone age. And Lithuania is not an exception.

1. My hobby is video and audio technologies and I belong to a community called “Elektrik Sketches”. And I have a mailbox associated with this brand name.

2. Yesterday I got an email (spam) to my Elektrik Sketches box directly oriented for video pros. It was in Lithuanian, but I will translate it in English. I tried to preserve style of language and punctuation. The text of the message was:

“Good afternoon,

we can offer new lamps for video camcorders for professional work, for good quality of video, for shooting in bad conditions. We want to offer new lamps BESCOR-PRO with autonomic batteries.

Versions of power 35w, 50w and 100w
Are you interested?

Sincerely
Vaizdo technika
Tel. 8645 33998″

And there was a photo attached:

3. How do you like the photo?

4. After a few minutes passed I got following email with a text:

“Standard – 5Lt
3ccd professional – 15Lt”

Tel. 864533998″

and a photo:

5. I want just to express a bunch of smiles, but I can’t. What is “standard”? What is “3ccd professional”?

6. I became sad a little bit for these guys. It is not funny for me. They should start from the first class, from the beginning how to talk and communicate politely with people. There is nothing to say about advertising or spamming.

Archiving of Online Content

Paulius Sluškonis — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:13 +0000

1. Our common life (not in electronic space) ir passing by insensibly.

2. Our life on internet is just passing by.

3. What am I talking about? The question is about archiving of online content. Do you save constantly your comments, your tweets, your wall’s posts, your blog’s posts which you write unnumebered times every day? What about uploaded photos, audio and video files?

4. I’m sure you know, that different internet services are suspectable to dissapear one day. Even Twitter, which still is growing and is one of the most popular social networks today, does not allow to find your earlier tweets, especially those, which are behind the curtain of 3000.

5. So what? Will you have something to leave for your children in the future, talking about the history of your family, recalling the moments of growing kids, remembering your habits and hobbies? Everything is stored on the web nowadays. Do you have any video tapes with original video, which you uploaded for the web the passed few years? For example there was a service called “Twittergram” some time ago. Now it’s gone with all links to the files in its server.

6. It is impossible to archive everything you leave on the net. There is a lot of stuff, and this job requires quite much time! The other thing, that not all services are friendly for saving content, unless you order special subsriptions etc. It won’t be easy just to give passwords for your grandchildren for saving photos. Some services are quite large and not flexible for browsing of your own content! Just do not forget this.

7. All these ideas about online content mean simple thing: everything, what you are doing every minute online, is worth just for the moment of the blink. It ruins in speed of geometrical progression with every next day.

8. The process of sharing is more important than content in itself. If you still differentiate which material is really important for you, try to make a copy. The best advice: make a harware copy. If you want to save a text, make a paper copy. If you want to save photos, make a photo copy. If you want to save video, record it to the tape. And so on.

9. Life on the internet just passes by. It does not have memories or as we call “material”. It has only fleeting amounts of content.

Interesting interpretation of the problem discussed in Robert Scoble’s article “Our online lives slowly leak away”.