Life… and a Little About Marketing

Spamming & Jamming - OR - Are you for REAL?

Thats a tough question for a marketer trying to promote something within an online network of people that could be percieved by an individual as social peers, users, contributors or dollar signs. Are you spamming or contributing to the community? Are you adding another page of crap to the world wide web or helping out? If your mother wouldn’t approve then it’s probably not a good thing right? Oh but it’s your job? Look at you, you spammer…

I’m only kidding there but I think it rings a bells for a lot of people involved in online communities. Theres a lot of talk of social networking AND social bookmarking over the last couple years and it seems to be picking up steam as we head into 2008. More and more social networks are popping up every day and driving search engine strategist batty with so many options what do you do: tag, digg, reddit or bookmark it first? Black hat spammers and search engine manipulators are keeping the Spam Teams at sites like Digg, Facebook, Del.icio.us, NetScape and MySpace working over time with ways to keep the perpetrators away. Its not uncommon to hear about people getting banned by Digg or Reddit. Below is an example of how social networking could work…

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Over the last year or so I’ve stubmled upon {no pun intended} quite a few of these new networks and in attempt to keep track of some of them I’ve started a list here…

Technorati
http://technorati.com/people/technorati/Webfu/

Delicious
http://del.icio.us/gregbeddor

BlueDot.us
http://bluedot.us/users/clockwork

MyBlogLog.com
http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/webfu/

Last.fm
http://www.last.fm/user/webfu

LinkedIn.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/beddor

MySpace.com
http://www.myspace.com/beddor

My Blog on MySpace
http://blog.myspace.com/beddor

Propeller.com
http://www.propeller.com/member/clockwork/

Netscape.com
http://www.netscape.com/member/clockwork/

StumleUpon.com
http://webfu.stumbleupon.com/about/

Squidoo.com
http://www.squidoo.com/webfu

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What is a social networking website?

A social network service focuses on the building and verifying of online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others, and which necessitates the use of software.

Most social network services are primarily web based and provide a collection of various ways for users to interact, such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, and so on.

The main types of social networking services are those which contain directories of some categories (such as former classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages), and recommender systems linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with MySpace, Digg and Facebook being the mostly widely used in 2007.

Browsing through the webmaster forums at v7n I found another fella’s list of social networking websites, according to him these are the top 10 for August 2007 -

1. digg.com
2. Netscape.com
3. Technorati.com
4. del.icio.us
5. StumbleUpon.com
6. reddit.com
7. Fark.com
8. MyBlogLog.com
9. Slashdot.org
10. kaboodle.com

— This list looks very similiar to mine. Although lately I’ve been enjoying Last.fm and My Blog Log more than my usual haunts at myspace, v7n and digital point. Bluedot has been a favorite recently as well. Thing is theres hundreds of these websites online now and more coming everyday. Frankly I don’t care about joining anymore. Although I always love to hear about current trends and new ways to network online… please feel free to add to my list if you know of anymore leave me a comment.

G