I just made this up, SocNetWrk. The time is 4:30pm on October 12 2007.
Yes it’s new, I just Googled it.
SocNetWrk is nowhere to be found. I just sent out a twitter to that effect alongside WikiSpam, which is from a twitter post that Tantek just twittered.
I have been writing out the words Social Network and Social Networking now in tags, and it is such a chore, I mean, really !
I quote Bruce Schneier from his wired blog Security Matters goes into greater detail about the gathering StormBot Threat. I posted a brief riff about this Sept, 9,07 about the DDoS attacks on the the anti-spam, anti-phishing sites that track the activities of the online scammers and spammers, 419Eater and the anti-scam site Scamwarners.
This Bot-Net-Worm coordinated DDoS attack was very sophisticated in both how it went after these sites and why. Bruce Schneier has some excellent research and reveals some possible insight into the root of this attack, and some facts about the techniques of the programmers and social engineers behind the Storm Worm.
“Worms like Storm are written by hackers looking for profit, and they’re different. These worms spread more subtly, without making noise. Symptoms don’t appear immediately, and an infected computer can sit dormant for a long time. If it were a disease, it would be more like syphilis, whose symptoms may be mild or disappear altogether, but which will eventually come back years later and eat your brain.” Link
I have been having a good time using Twitter lately. Lots of cool people, throwing out info about the daily minutiae of their lives. Being online all the time during the work week and beyond, it is nice to have a little SMS type broadcast device for the Wild West that is the Web.
I was remarking to someone today how Twitter is like having your own personal live PR feed to the internet, cause in Twitter your can broadcast relevant links, combined with Tiny URL, it makes for a powerful tool.
After I first started using Twitter, I was re-doing my ancient photography site, and I put into Google my name. EGADS ! I saw all my Twitter thingys all over the first page of Google. I quickly changed my real name in my settings, and re-thought how silly I was going to allow myself to go.
I am hoping the spammer types are not going to get a hold of this information, cause it could bring down the whole Twitter network, or whatever it is.
It id pretty awesome, even though Twitter is not a syndicated PR feed, the fact that it can be used to broadcast relevant links, coupled with the way Google currently appears to index Twitters ‘broadcast’ brings up some interesting ideas.
from: Toward a Semantic Web
“At this point, nearly every Web designer that learns about microformats starts using them,” Tantek Çelik, chief technologist at Technorati and co-founder of Microformats.org, told InternetNews.com. “Because microformats require only some HTML authoring ability, millions of Web authors and designers are able to use them immediately. This is a much lower barrier to entry than many previous Web technologies, such as XML and RSS, which require the skills of a programmer.” -Tantek Çelik
Developer
September 21, 2007
Microformats: Toward a Semantic Web
By Sean Michael Kerner
Found on Twitter Microformat’s Twitter Account.
Meanwhile, I have enabled ‘Operator’ a Firefox Plugin created by Mike Kaply, and now, just the last few minutes I am surfing the web with it enabled, wow ! Kinda like the scene from John Carpenter’s 1988 movie They Live ! , Roddy Piper, putting the sunglasses on and seeing a new world, only this one is positive.
Really hooked now !
XFN is an amazing concept, and after looking at the incredible Page Rank of these various URLs, and not a theoretical one.
I first heard about Tantek when someone posting a thing on Digg about putting the term ‘Tantek’ into Flickr’s search engine, and finding all these pictures of this Uber Geek looking guy with all these hot geek intelligentsia babes. It you looked at the photo stream from the search you are looking a some sort of geek-tech-babe-magnet.
So I made him a contact a while back, not knowing who the hell he was. Fast forward to about 8 months ago, when I discovered Blue Host through the recommended Word Press.org hosting lists, that let to the Open Source auto loader Fantastico, which let to the top of my head being blown off and finding myself slinging hosted Word Press blogs built primarily for the ease of use, CMS and ,most of all, the stunning indexing potential + power with the search engines. (ridiculous sentence there 
What is my point ? The point I am trying to make, is that, over the last 8 months, I have immersed myself in WordPress though building the things for clients. There has been some shift, a profound one, in my understanding of this emerging technology.
The word ‘Semantic’ for instance. Like the word ‘relevance’, which I never used years ago. Google changed all that, fer sure. Kind of like the word ‘obfuscate’, you never heard that one before the Bush Administration came to power. Semantic as it relates to HTML, CSS, metatdata and the deeper structures in the application Word Press.
GMPG Efforts , XFN and XFN 1.1 Creator. These three links are filled with some mind boggling technology as it relates to ‘relevant’ linking over the Internet. XHTML Friends Network (XFN) is such a pure concept, very interesting, for the ‘microformat’ is, and I am going to have to quote Wikipedia here, is:
“Microformats emerged as part of a grassroots movement[4] to make recognizable data items, (such as events, contact details or geographical locations), capable of automated processing by software, as well as directly readable by end-users.[4][7] Link-based microformats emerged first. These include vote links that express opinions of the linked page, which can be tallied into instant polls by search engines.[8]” Wiki
Tantek is one of the key players in this initiative,he is also one of the founders of Technorati and the whole full circle thing is pretty exciting. Matt Mullenweg, on the other hand, is the main man behind WordPress, and developed the first version of XFN Creator.
Dilbert Rocks Today ! (White People High Five !)
I will probably have to take this down, but it is so on point to what I have been involvedly with, I laughed out loud this morning when I read it in the paper. Right on point, most people who read this today will think Scott Adams was writing gobbledygook, but I know for a fact that this exists ! *LOL*
“419Eater DDoS’d?
We’ve had a report that the popular scambaiting site 419Eater and the anti-scam site Scamwarners are the latest anti-spam sites to fall victim to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Both sites are down at this time. Details are hard to come by, but there’s apparently been speculation that the attack originated from a Russian spamgang. ”
An interesting piece commenting on an underground virtual war happening over the web right this very second. The Denial of Service Attacks are apparently being launched by a humongous Army of Zombie Bot Nets:
“There have been reports that they have built up a botnet containing more than a million computers, not all of which are currently being used for stock and pill spam.”
Those organizations fighting the ‘good fight’ against spam and phishing scams are being taken down and off the grid right now as you read this post. Epic !
And I love Gmail !
I have a lot of blogs these days, to test out the medium, play around, test SEO in real time. I have been plating with some of my incoming spam from my spam folder, marveling at how the spammers have been creating amazing ‘quasi-text’, that reads quite well. There is some internal logic that the spammers have hit on, mining text form the entire internet and running it through some sort of ‘Anti-Google’, a text ‘blender’ as you will that grabs random text from all over the web and ‘blenderizes’ it into a strangely coherent form. I have been trying to achieve this, and failing miserably. In my search for an effective ‘Anti-Google’ I found this: Link
Excerpt:
“Taking their inspiration from the philosophy of sampling, William Burroughs’ cut-up technique, Jeff Noon’s “Cobralingus” project and too many long nights spent on music mixing desks, art-text-terrorists the Lazarus Corporation have created an online mixing desk – for writing.
The text mixing desk manipulates your writing with a succession of outboard effects – such as the “transgenderiser”, which swaps the sex of any gender-specific words faster than a Thai plastic surgeon, and the Burroughs inspired “cut-up engine” which takes a pair of scissors to your work and dances gleefully on the bleeding remains of your carefully constructed sentences.
But why on earth would you want to mangle your precisely worded prose in this way? Well, the Godfather of Beat and author of “Naked Lunch”, William S Burroughs, explains it best:
“The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit … had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.”
…or in the case of the Lazarus Corporation’s text mixing desk, with some sharply written lines of code. This is, after all, the 21st century.”
I just have to laugh, I had no idea. ‘Darling, can you pass the grey pupon ?’
Way Too Good for Facebook or MySpace?
For the rich and well-connected who don’t want to rub elbows with those who aren’t, exclusive social networks pledge to keep out the riff-raff
by Catherine Holahan
Technology
Roger Allen Conner Jr. has little use for the common folk who frequent MySpace (NWS) and Facebook—you know, the clubs anyone can join. “A lot of social-networking sites are very low-quality,” says Conner, the 22-year-old founder of a North Carolina consulting firm named SiloIQ. “The type of individuals that are on these social-networking sites are generally not well-networked themselves.”
Not even a business-oriented network like LinkedIn will do. To put it bluntly, Conner wants powerful friends: the kind of people who board private jets after cutting business deals. People who don’t get stopped by the bouncer at New York’s Bungalow 8 nightclub. People with connections who can open doors and get his company noticed. People with log-ins to a SmallWorld.
The question I have been asked lately has been, ‘How to monetize Web 2.0 ?’ I think that is the $64K question, and my take on it is two fold.
One: It’s a tough crowd ! These folks (me included) have high ‘Bull Shit O’ Meters’ and are skilled at not allowing themselves to be distracted by silly, irrelevant advertising. The ads being displayed on the page no only have got to be on point with the page subject matter, they have to be intriguing and relevant on the ‘lateral slide’.
Two: The Web 2.0 crowd, once you gain their trust is loyal to the extreme. It is back to the ‘No Bull Shit’, on point relevancy of subject matter and also a sense of irrelevant humor doesn’t hurt as well. Good writing, riffing on the experience you are having on the page, on the browser, on the web.
Facebook and MySpace are starting to make bank on online advertising, but a recent Forrester study shows that traditional online ad formats aren’t really playing well for advertisers. The result is a growing concern that social networking isn’t a marketing boon.
There’s a new movement in some marketing circles that says social networks should be used more like a customer-relationship management (CRM) tool. eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson called advertising on social networks “low-hanging fruit” for marketers that need to figure out “a model that expands the beauty of social networking.” However, it’s far easier for marketers to buy display ads and sponsorships than to develop widgets.
Using it as a customer-relationship-management tool could be one answer; former Jay Walter Thompson CEO Chris Jones said MySpace is at a crossroads. It doesn’t want others using its audience for marketing purposes without getting a piece of the action. Jones is now an adviser to widget-creator FreeWebs. Indeed, some marketers, like Carnival Cruises, have developed internal social networks to let customers review their products and talk to the company directly. That’s part of Facebook’s expansion plans; get companies to develop continuing relationships with consumers.
Since my primary focus is on SEO, Search Engine Optimization, and when I look to optimize a web site, or a web page, I am looking at Google, then the rest of the search engines, I care about what Google thinks. Google accounts for over 88% of all search these days, so all I really care about in the search space is how the web page is seen by Google. Remember, Google does not publish anything about it’s technology, nor will it, ever. You can only glean this information through SEO experience, and listening to SEO professionals. So when the CEO of Google speaks, it is very important to listen !