Here's the link to one of my favorite MySpace pages ... the Travelocity Roaming Gnome ... LOL

Facebook responded quickly to MySpace Data Availablity (partnering with Yahoo!, EBay and Twitter) ...

Refer link to Facebook Develepers, "Announcing Facebook Connect" by David Morin on Friday May 9th at 12:32pm.

Expect a lot of discussion around who has the most Dataportability compliant effort ... The battle lines will be drawn over data ownership, access and privacy ... Refer first article from David Recorden (Open Platforms Tech Lead at SixApart) entitled "MySpace's Data Availability is not Data Portability" over at O'Reilly Radar ...

Let the games begin.

After two to three years now of nothing short of explosive growth, seems like Social Network users are feeling a little remorse …

• Prospective employers reviewing their Facebook and MySpace postings and photos

• Some Colleges when assessing applications also review Facebook and MySpace accounts

• Search engines discovering content that users “thought was private”

• Beacon (Facebook) disclosing online purchases – although Facebook has now made this feature opt-in

• Lack of awareness of the privacy settings

Great article in The Washington Post today by Staff Writer, Kim Hart … “The Rise of Alter Egos in Everybody’s Space – After Oversharing, Users Recast Their Online Personas”. As noted in the article, many users are resorting to deleting and/or ‘rebooting’ their profiles to clean the slate …

Comscore Logic ≠ Google Revenue Growth …

restated as … Comscore ≈ Σ(measured clicks)+/- {insert margin of error, PR spin}

Blogosphere … Google 1; Comscore 0

Comscore is in the business of measurement of clicks. Google is in the business of monetization of clicks. The big disconnect over the past 24 hours was that Comscore had effectively convinced the market that Google search was down – predicting that digital advertising revenues were ‘off’ … and well, err, seems they were wrong.

Here is Comscore’s analysis and position …

Comscore Blog - "Why Google's surprising paid click data are less surprising" by Magid Abraham (James Lamberti, SVP of Search and Media at comScore, is a co-author of the post) on February 29. 2008

The industry had well covered Comscore’s position – refer:

Many of my colleagues have cautioned me about the time it takes to blog. They’re right. Time, energy and discipline. So far, so good. Actually, quite enjoying it …

Naturally, next step is to seek out some tips from pros … No shortage of input here across the blogosphere.

To spread the ‘linklove’, a few of the better sites for blogging tips are … drumroll please … BloggingTips and ScoutBlogging (corporate blogger tips)– both from Scout Media out of Boston ... and Problogger.

However, to go with the power of the blogosphere (mathematically aggregated – SEO, SMO gamed or otherwise), Problogger seems to be the community fave … Source: DailyBlogTips

Following on from yesterday's post, here is the National Adverstising Initiative draft Principles RoadMap. Their efforts have come a long way in their stated objective ... "Helping you protect your privacy online." Couldn't be simpler.

What is "Sensitive"? ... Here is the proposed list:

Certain medical/health conditions:

• HIV/ AIDS status
  Sexually-related conditions (e.g., sexually transmitted diseases, erectile dysfunction)
• Psychiatric conditions
• Cancer status
• Abortion-related

Certain personal life information:

• Sexual behavior/orientation/identity (i.e., Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender)
• Criminal victim status (e.g., rape victim status

The challenge that I will reiterate is that someone needs to know this information to PROHIBIT the advertising ...

The Economist recently published an article on Online Social Networks entitled “Everywhere and Nowhere”.
The article leads with … “ Social Networking will become a ubiquitous feature of online life. That does not mean it is a business.” Moreover, it concludes with … “ Social Networking may end up being everywhere, and yet nowhere.”

Online / Digital Marketing Spend – not a business? Check again. Over $20 billion in revenues in 2007. Amount targeted towards niche social venues? – over $2 billion in 2007 (with this sub-segment projected to grow at a staggering 75% per annum). Why? They build targeted, relevant communities of interest. Conversations aggregate around communities of interest … not brand web sites. Savvy marketers understand the difference.

Refer video below on The Google Privacy Channel. In short, it demonstrates the issues that Google and the Internet community are struggling with ... notice how many times Peter Fleischer (Google's Global Privacy Council) goes out his way to explain new advancements in the first half of the video and how they apply only to "unauthenticated search" ... meaning, if you logged in to GMail of any of the other Google products, this doesn't apply ...

If you have more than ten minutes and really want to explore Google's position on privacy, head over to The Google Privacy Channel. Remember, it is not just search ... think DoubleClick, Picasa, Orkut, Google Checkout, Google Talk (IM), GMail, etc ...

I connected with Rajesh Setty, CEO of Suggestica yesterday. We were discussing blogs and blogging … after clicking over to his blog (Life Beyond Code) I couldn’t resist riffing a little more on the New York Times article by Matt Richtel entitled In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.