Today I will tell you about “Social Networking”, which I am not much of a fan of, but from the emails I receive, many of you are.  Most people will need a definition of sorts before I get started, so here goes. 

A Social Network started out as a group of people who usually have the same hobbies, jobs, political leanings, etc.  The owner of a site writes their thoughts, findings, feelings and expertise about these interests on the internet.  The social part comes in where people of similar interests find their Blogs (combination of the words weB and LOGs) and then read and/or discuss what is said by the original poster to the site.

Many people make long lasting friends from these sites.  I would rather pick up my phone and call a friend to talk about life, but I guess I am just an analog guy in a Web 2.0 world…even though I am a geek.

I am writing this article more specifically about, “Mini-Blogs”.  I have heard them referred to in different ways but I like that term.

There of several of these mini blogs in the forefront.  For each of these I will give you a link to my site mini-blog.  Don’t get too excited, since I don’t care for them I don’t really post any juicy information but I thought you may want to take a look at them.  You might like this and find you enjoy writing and reading thoughts and ideas.

Twitter is one of the first that I ran into (http://twitter.com/rondoyle). Twitter is about the most basic.  You can type up to 140 characters and people can instantly read what you wrote. 

I will put the next two together as they are similar; however, I am sure the pro users of each may disagree.  They are Jaiku and Tumblr (http://doyle.jaiku.com and http://rdoyle.tumblr.com respectively).  I feel that Jaiku offers many extras but they are both pretty slick.  With Tumblr you can post pictures too…check mine out.

Pownce is last (http://pownce.com/Elyod).  If I were a blogger Pownce would be my favorite.  The reason it is my favorite is because it just seems to have a lot of “stuff” and is fairly simple to use.  Pownce just started up a few months ago and is now in the testing phase.  You can only become a Pownce member by invitation from another member.  Check out my Pownce account if you want one become a member; the secret word is “hummingbird”.

The reason I don’t care for blogs is that the majority of them are opinions and boring day-to-day happenings.  Also, they started as people sharing similar interests; however, today it is about becoming a “friend” of a blog.  The game seems to be to see how many friends you can get on your blog, whether they participate or not.  Boring.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 1:51 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.