DISQUS

It had been driving me nuts how to change what you showed in #1. Thanks, Matt!

As for the TweetMeme plugin vs custom function, is there any benefit to not using a plugin? Decreased load time?

<abbr>Ari Herzog’s last blog post..Blogging for Authenticity</abbr>

Do you mind entertaining a few questions, Chris?

1. I'm confused by the process you illustrated above, primarily as I'm new to Skype. I did notice some edited frames. So, this wasn't filmed live but was filmed over Skype and played back as he asked questions based on your conversation?

2. What was the process to talk with him? Who pitched who?

3. Since you speak about social media a lot, you obviously didn't pre-write any potential answers, or did you? I loved the British verbiage, e.g. Waterstone's and pub. Was that intentional? Did any of the questions stump you? It sounded like the Web 2.0 loyalty one did though you handled it great.

And, I enjoyed hearing your bullhorn-party hat analogy. Very nice!

Rahaf, you claim you "need a brand that...will last."

What better brand than your name? Nobody can take that from you.

Not proven? Of course the notion of "social shopping" is proven: Have you never done anything because your friend(s) suggested it? Have you never eaten at a restaurant solely because someone you trust told you it serves the best burger? What about reading a book or visiting a website or trying on a mink coat because of a certain friend's or family member's recommendation?

You can even look at sites like amazon.com and cnet.com, and if you see enough favorable reviews for X product even if you don't know that person you are very likely to buy the product.

No?

Some of my friends love eating tomatoes and dislike ketchup. Others enjoy ketchup but not the tomatoes.

For the longest time, I swore by Yahoo Mail and Internet Explorer; before that, Hotmail and Netscape. Now, it's GMail and Firefox.

Be thankful, Chris, you're not exposed to the internet behind an iron curtain of governmental control. You're allowed to make your own decisions and display your thoughts. Everyone won't agree with you but that's their right, too.

I tried Plurk and didn't like it, either. Maybe I'll like it in the future. Or not. Time, as cliche as it is, will tell.

What is the value of having a blog in lieu of a quote-unquote Web 1.0 website, per #3 above? Shouldn't firms have both to both display non-changing data but also interact with people about the static list? Moreover, there will always be associated costs, e.g. owning a custom domain for your blog and not associating your business with company.wordpress.com; not to mention some firms may want to host their blogs on their own servers so they own the content.

It's not always about technology, Robert. Sometimes economy and lack of resources is a reason for the influx of "non-passionates." And a lot of the time, people would be passionate if they knew what the heck the internet is.

And let’s not forget the fact that of the six to seven billion people in the world only about a billion even have a computer in the first place. So, that means that five to six billion people really don’t care about Windows or OSX or all that.

Your analogy is poor, pun not intended, because a lack of infrastructure and/or government empowerment is the usual reason for the approximate 5 billion Planet Earth citizens for not having computers or not being jacked in.

Surely, Robert, you are not comparing a Silicon Valley family with a rural Parisian family to a western China family? And guess which of the three has more people?

Echoing George, I'd like to not just read you write about a topic but watch you speak about one. Your choice whether a pre-recorded video speaking directly into my computer screen or a real-time "life cast" like the folks on justin.tv.

Everything above my comment focuses on products as things. What about product placements of people, people who are so well known that even if you've never met the person you know something about him or her? Such as Madonna, Britney, Cher, Elvis, Beckham, McEnroe. People who are known by one-word names may as well be indifferent to Xerox, Microsoft, and McDonalds.

Where do we draw the line? And how?

I am fascinated by this (and many other threads like this) topic, going back and forth on bloggers vs journalists.

What of those people who are both, e.g. 90% of the links off the Drudge Report? The Huffington Post and Wonkette are blogs, but when people can and do write comments at the NY Times, CNN, and ESPN.com, what does that say about the gap between blogger and journalist? Perhaps both terms need to be universally defined.

I thought it humorous last week when I attended a public affairs meeting, stood up near the end to raise a technology/social media question and mentioned I write a blog. Before answering my question, the woman at the microphone thanked me for saying I was a blogger because the subject matter was "off the record." Maybe she thought I was a journalist.

There is a difference between asking someone to evaluate a product or flat-out giving someone a product to evaluate.

I question whether the Nikon camera, for instance, that supposedly Nikon loaned you occurred after an initial ask or if you merely received it with a note.

Newspaper travel sections, for instance, typically comprise stories written by staffers or freelancers who either pitch or are assigned the content therein.

Sometimes, writers are approached by travel agencies or hotels or the like with freebies or press junket tours in exchange for criticism in the form of published reviews. This practice, however "word of mouth marketing" it may be, is frowned upon by many newspaper and magazine editors as breaking ethical standards in accurate reporting.

Does this help answer your question?

I don't have business cards.

I have contact cards that are simple yet elegant: a deep blue foreground with four lines. The top line, centered, has my name. The next line, centered, has my web address. And two left-aligned lines carry my cell number and email address.

These are cards I mainly give to friends, networking contacts, and the like.

I've yet to receive negative feedback.

Google for "contact cards" or "personal contact cards" and you'll see other examples and best practices.

I find it curious, Chris, that in your list of social media sites, aka strip mall stores, you belong to, you fail to mention your blog at chrisbrogan.com.

Unless if you are different than, say, Dan Schawbel and Penelope Trunk, you also engage with people on Twitter, Facebook, and their ilk for the sole purpose of ultimately drawing friends and strangers to your blog, no?

So why not list your blog in the list of social sites?

Two other questions...

Josh Klein: Focusing on just StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us, do you use the sites for your own benefit or for other people to see your ratings and bookmarks?

Amy Lenzo: If you don't want to market yourself, why are you posting a comment on someone else's blog and moreover with your real name and not something like SweetCheeks25? Of course, you're marketing yourself.

Shashi, the very fact your photos are on Flickr and not KodakGallery.com, for instance, is indicative to me that you want to share your photography and the subjects therein. So by not tagging the photos, how would anyone they are there?

Interesting concept, Chris. I use Flickr for uploading photos for sharing with friends and others, entering thematic photo challenges, etc. Never thought about taking single headshots of people.

Of course, the background behind your concept is that the person you're taking a photo of either gave you permission to shoot them (and upload their image for the world to see) or they were in a public setting where such photos would be fair game.

I'd hate to be in the situation where someone's angry I photographed them but then it's too late as the web caches all.

Even worse than Geneva Convention breaches, consider that the United States is the only country in the world that has no intention of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol.

Couldn't the federal government have at least taken the moral road of Afghanistan, Chad, Zimbabwe, and other nations that have not expressed an opinion on ratification? Why flat out refuse to sign? Even Kazakhstan signed it.

Chris, why do you feel the need for people in your Facebook or LinkedIn profiles to be in both, but also to follow your blog, interact with you on Digg, Stumbleupon, and Twitter? By engaging the same people in all of the above, where is the unique if everything is the same?

Penelope Trunk recently blogged about the many social media sites and how it's silly to connect with the same people about the same topics on all of them.

It’s clear to me that blogging is best for expressing big ideas. If you can’t convey new ideas on your blog, then you probably won’t get a lot of traffic. And most blogs that do well have a single theme and the audience can depend on the theme dictating the content of the blog. But Twitter is not good for fleshed-out ideas. I see people using Twitter for a lot of stuff, but not for fleshed-out ideas. And Flickr is good for expressing passion. Way better than, say, Twitter.

It’s acceptable to have different places in your life for different aspects of your personality. So don’t flatten yourself by presenting only perfect consistency across Twitter and LinkedIn and blogs and Facebook.

I'm curious: What kind of groups are you creating or joining in Yahoo/Google that you can't accomplish with proven social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn?

Good suggestion Mike. I've been yelping for a year now. I'm curious by your definition of it as a Web 2.0 site, as it's existed for several years. Would you call the IMDb a Web 2.0 site too, as the two are not very unlike?