How Did You Find Me?

There are a few people who blog and and make a living at it-John Chow, Dosh Dosh, Pro Blogger, a number of geeky tech blogs that I never go anywhere near and likely a few hundred other good people that I don’t read. Other people, well, I am not sure what their reasons for blogging are. I started If You Write It with the goal of making $300 a day, and have come as close to that goal as making four or five dollars a day.

I had A Plan, but found it to be too much like, oh, what do you call it?-work.

So I tend to tool around the net looking at blogs and playing with social networks and just seeing what people are blogging about. If I find something interesting, say someone wrote a review of a book on tying knots, I might leave a comment that says-Hey, you know I like tying knots ;). And maybe a few other readers would say other silly things. All fun and silliness. If I were in the library and noticed someone reading a book on knots and walked up and said-Hi, you know I like tying knots. They’d call security and reach for their can of mace.

Curiously, something like that happens in cyberspace once in a while. I’ll leave a comment on a blog post that I found interesting and the blogger will respond in shocked horror-HOW DID YOU FIND MY BLOG?????? I used a computer.

I had a very similar encounter on Plurk the other day. I tend to go to the Plurk front page-well, they call it the Interesting Plurkers page-and look at the plurks-then go to some Timeline I find worth commenting on and leave a comment, or plurk, my own in response. This is how I have gathered my small army of friends on Plurk. I plurked someone the other day and they came and demanded to know who I was and why I was plurking on their Timeline. Hmm, social network on the world wide web that anyone with a computer can access-well, how dare I invade their space?

They seemed to be of the opinion that their personal plurks were somehow a private chat network that only they could see. Well, you can set plurk up that way, but this intrepid plurker had not done so. His plurks were set to Visible to the Whole World. He seemed genuinely upset about this, at least briefly-as he and his friends liked to Plurk about personal stuff.

Of course, Plurkers and Bloggers are not the only people who have an odd idea of privacy on the web. I’m reminded of all the countless numbskulls on Myspace who think posting pictures of themselves with their dildo collection is funny-until everyone they know finds the pictures and they are humiliated. The most extreme case of Myspace Madness of course was that psycho bitch who caused a girl to kill herself and then had the balls to blame the girl. Social networks can be really, really unsocial.

For the most part I like Plurk better than any of the other sites I have used. I have like zero Karma on Reddit, I got kicked off of Newsvine, the most Diggs I ever had is about 7 or 8, and I don’t seem to get a lot of Stumbles either. Facebook is a myster to me and there are just too many other places to bother with. I do get a few hits from these sites though, so I keep trying. Plurk however, has something going for it that none of these other Social Networks do-it’s fun.

I hit the front page of FARK one time and got about eight thousand hits in one day. Got a few comments as well-on FARK itself there were something like a hundred comments-almost all of them were negative. Not that this bothered me all that much, but it just seemed a bit odd. Of course, I seldom write glowing movie reviews myself, so I can understand that it is easier criticize than praise. Still, it was my goal to be seen and get hits, so it worked out fine.

I’ve had a bit of fun with Entrecard, shocked by both how many bad blogs there are out there and how many pretty goods there are as well. There are a few of the big name bloggers there, but mostly the big names on Entrecard are unheard of outside of Entrecard. To honest, I never heard of John Chow until I found him on Entrecard.

Recently I found a post that said you should bookmark 300 Entrecard sites, them open them all in Tabs and zip right through your card drops. Easy for him to say-my machine chugs to a halt if I open twenty tabs. But I did try bookmarking a few blogs-I have been a bit shocked that in less than a week several of the sites are already gone, or have removed their Entrecard widget. Oh well.

One of the fun things about Plurk is that you can sort of talk to a couple of the Big Bloggers-both Dosh Dosh and Problogger are active on Plurk and you can Plurk them and they might even respond to what you say. I know, you can leave comments on their blogs, along with a few hundred other people-Plurks are a bit more direct than the mob comment.

This is sort of like being in a chat room with Britney Spears and Brad Pitt, well, the blogsphere equivalent anyway. When I first started blogging I did a bit of celebrity blogging and found Perez Hilton. I blogged about Perez and he paid my humble blog a visit-I guess he wasn’t too impressed, but it was kind of cool that he stopped by.

Now I wonder if Kevin Bacon is on Plurk? Are there six degrees of separation in the Plurkverse?

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