The presentation I will be doing next Wednesday at the AADE Annual Meeting 2011 in Las Vegas with Hope Warshaw (@HopeWarshaw), Amy Tenderich (@AmyDBMine) from DiabetesMine and David Edelman (@DavidTalk) from Diabetes Daily.
The presentation I will be doing next Wednesday at the AADE Annual Meeting 2011 in Las Vegas with Hope Warshaw (@HopeWarshaw), Amy Tenderich (@AmyDBMine) from DiabetesMine and David Edelman (@DavidTalk) from Diabetes Daily.
Update: I was prompted to revisit this post, originally written in June of 2007, after I read a great entry written by Dr. Casado, titled “El Que Segmenta, Gana” (The person who segments, wins).
Also relevant to this topic, the post from earlier in 2011 “10 ways to clean up your Twitter feed“.
Enjoy…

(Design: Mat Giordano)
“Each of us will belong to between 12 and 24 online and/or mobile communities by 2010, and our power to do good things and disrupt old industries will be unique and radiant.” – David Silver, Smart Start-Ups
Reading this phrase recently made me wonder how many communities am I currently a part of? This was the tally I arrived at:
New communities, from June 2007 until June 2011:
In 2007, I was a member of 13 communities where I participated in on a regular basis! Fast forward to 2012, the number is… (drumroll)… 13! Not much as changed, huh? I guess the level of engagement has changed and having a clear idea of what each community/network is for, realizing that you get what you put into it.
(from this point on, the post is the same as in 2007)
So, I begin to wonder: how much is too much? After all, all of these online communities do add something to my life in one way or another, don’t they? Or is it possible I may be letting other things pass by the side by spending too much time online?
Social Networking Fatigue and Other Online Ailments
A while back, I was filling up my tank at a nearby gas station and noticed an ad above the pump that said: “Has ‘Pay at the pump’ made us lonelier people?” and went on to invite you to hop in to talk to the cashier once in a while, instead of always using your card to pay outside.
That little message stuck with me. In today’s social media environment, we claim to have more “friends”, yet how many people do we really get to talk to, how many folks could we claim we really know. Not too many: like a comment on this post said, “… having friends is about not just sharing information, but responding uniquely and interacting with said friend.”
Is the solution to unplug ourselves in order to deal with the Social Networking Fatigue that comes from dealing with hundreds of people? Should we go cold turkey and erase our names from the Social Networks of the world (good luck with getting Google to wipe you out!)?
That may be a bit extreme, because we’d loose the real opportunity that these tools give us to connect or reconnect with the people we can’t physically stay in touch with. But, in general, we have lost some of that “touch” that things used to have.
Remember the movie Cars? The whole organic experience that Route 66 used to bring to the lives of travelers was substituted by the speed that the Interstate brought to their trips, getting them quicker to where they were going to, but loosing them the chance to really connect with others during their trip through the Southwest desert.
I don’t think there’s any going to go back to our pre-online times (nor does it make sense), but next time you realize it’s been hours since you last spoke to someone, turn off the monitor, grab your keys and go pump gas somewhere. Just remember to say “Hi!” to the guy inside when you do!
Scott Shanselman delivered this amazing presentation (which I missed) at Blog World Expo 2010 in Vegas. Enjoy… and learn! (I know I have few of these that I can apply to make my blog suck less!)
A few weeks ago, I blogged about Bing and how it had broken into the top 5 referrers of traffic to this blog. Today, I am happy to report StumbleUpon has entered that space too.
A few weeks ago, as a result of a former Ning colleague joining the ranks of StumbleUpon (SU, among friends), I decided to give it a shot again. I installed the extension to help me stumble upon pages as I visit them.
So far this month, I am seeing SU behind approx. 5% of the traffic to my blog. Are you seeing anything like this?
I had never seen it anywhere until today… I am talking about Bing as the #1 source of traffic to my blog with a whopping 30% of the traffic vs. a little over 20% now coming from Google Searrch!
See the screenshot showing all traffic sources since May 1:
Apparently, I am not alone and Bing may be a better search engine after all.
Are you seeing anything like this?
What does it mean? Don’t know. Nearly 2,000 posts later and 3,000 days later, blogging just feels so normal… kinda like brushing my (slowing fading hair) or having a cup of coffee.
I’ve had my ups and downs: been through periods of posting 3-4 times a day (back in 2006) and times of posting 3-4 times a month (mid-2009) when I was deeper into Twitter… well THAT much hasn’t changed!
If you read this, do you have any favorite posts from the past 8 years?
A couple of months ago, my friend Danilo helped me migrate my blog to its new WordPress home. Besides posting, I’ve spent the past few weeks learning the ropes of the WP backend.
WordPress lets you choose themes for your blog and the theme Danilo picked (for which I thank him!) is called Thesis. If you are using Thesis like me, I recommend you follow these steps to add a Facebook “Like” button at the bottom of all your posts.
One small thing, though:
I HIGHLY recommend you install the Thesis OpenHook PlugIn recommended by the author. It will save you a lot of time and protect you from making dangerous mistakes mis-handling PHP files via FTP.
A small correction to the WordPress listing for the Thesis OpenHook plugin: it reads “Visit Design -> Thesis OpenHook and customize to your heart’s content!”
Actually, to customize things to your heart’s content, you’re supposed to click on the Appearance tab on the left of your WordPress backend and click on the Thesis OpenHook link.
Ah! If you find this post useful, please click to Like below!
Update on 4/23/2010 (from Jim F. Munro’s blog post about this):
Jim posted a workaround on his blog showing how to display the “Like” buttons on all posts appearing on the home page of Thesis-themed WP blogs. As you can see, it works like a charm!
Earlier today, I was reading the post by my friend Kerri from Sixuntilme where she refers to how her views on privacy/disclosure have evolved since she became pregnant. It dawned on me that I have also changed how much I value my privacy online, perhaps not since we had our son but more in the past couple of years.
Back in March 2007, we started TuDiabetes, a social network for people touched by diabetes. At the time, I was already fairly comfortable in social media, being a member of more than a dozen networks. This meant, I opened myself up quite a bit… perhaps too much.
Below are some of the things I do when it comes down to my privacy. Why? Because there are enough people out there that don’t have the best intentions in the world. So that doesn’t mean I have shut up and stopped participating in social media altogether (those who know me know that NOT to be the case -if you don’t know me, Google me and you will see what I mean). It just means to be mindful when you share something online, withholding what you don’t feel comfortable sharing with people you don’t know.
Some of these list items have been cause for some people to get upset at me: I insist -it’s nothing personal… just my own privacy policy.
Do you think I am too paranoid? What is your online privacy policy like?
After nearly 8 years of living in its Blogger home, my blog has now moved to its new home on WordPress HERE!! The content is all here, but under the hood, I am happy to have a better engine powering it.
Thanks to my friend Danilo Campos (who is also now a Bay area neighbor) who gave me a hand setting it up!
Since it took me a bit to figure out (it’s more straightforward to do in WordPress, not surprisingly), here are the steps you need to follow to add a TweetMeme button to Blogger:
1) Insert the Tweetmeme code as explained here. Before you start banging your head against the wall, note the subtle checkbox (thank you Blogger!) you need to check to uncover the Widget Templates:
2) Then, you want to customize the username that appears by default when people click on your newly inserted Tweetmeme button. Nothing against @tweetmeme, but follow these steps to switch it to your own Twitter username (askmanny, in my case)
Save and VOILA!! Happy tweetmem-ing!