Last night, Judith Meskill tossed me an IM about a post she made. Her most recent post outlined the rather messy plight of trouthgirl, a once Friendster employee, that was fired for her blogging.

Joyce Park, Troutgirl, is a published PHP developer and played a critical role in the re-launch of Friendster on the PHP platform. She had mentioned previously on her blog that the site migration was completed and the post received quite a bit of commentary. Mind you, this was public information by all accounts.

Yesterday, she posted her entry “Shitcanned” where she made it clear that she was released because of her blogging. Specifically, there were two entries mentioned, including the one above:

The levels of irony on this are pretty deep. For one thing, I wrote a fairly well-known paper last year about the need for semi-permeable blogging. For another thing, by all accounts the particular posts that led to my termination were this one and this one (although feel free to check my archives for any other incriminating information). I try really hard not to blog about anything that is not a matter of public record… but I guess that’s not protection any more. You get Slashdotted, make Udell’s column, lose your job. And finally, it’s especially ironic because Friendster, of course, is a company that is all about getting people to reveal information about themselves…

Source: troutgirl, “Shitcanned”

It’s hard to put into words how incredibly asinine this situation is. A social networking company that persecutes its employees for engaging in social media. It’s almost to hold her responsible if someone found her on Friendster, congratulated her on her PHP work, and she accepted that testimonial for display.

For some time I’ve noted that Friendster was plagued with issues as it still fails to provide a context for which I can apply the network to anything but the relatively trivial or low-use “lost friend” search. This only leaves a worst taste in my mouth now and definitely mars the image of the company as a whole for me.

I’m definitely not alone in this. Jeremy Zawodny’s Fired for Blogging shows just how frustrated some people are — he’s quit Friendster now (photo available), leaving the apt reason “firing employees for blogging”.

Last week, Blogger announced that they were going to start sharing the wealth (well sort of). Previously, Blogger had forced advertising on all free blogs, in the form of an ugly banner ad. Recently, they’ve decided to start running Google Adwords on the blogs, with one kicker - the blog operator gets their share:

You may have noticed that we recently removed our ads from Blogger powered blogs. We were making money from those ads but you weren’t getting any of it. Now, we’re inviting you to set up your own Bloggerized AdSense account so that you make the money. What’s the catch? We’re going to take some of the action. Based on what we have learned from AdSense so far, this will work out very nicely for both of us. Please note that this program is optional and that it is not required for you to have a Blogger powered blog—all bloggers are invited.

Source: Blogger Knowledge

Peter Caputa touched on this briefly in a post of his own. As Peter sees it, “This is the future. services that let people have their own identity online and let people have their own personally branded media outlet, which, if they are good at it, can earn them $, maybe even a living.” I definitely have to agree.

I have wondered about something related to this, the notion of personal sponsorship. This always reminds me of the scene in Happy Gilmour when happy becomes a welcome sponsor for Subway. Translate that into our terms and that looks something like this: As People’s Media grows in popularity, authority, and credibility, traditional media and its outlets will be forever changed. Smart businesses will heed the advice of marketing gurus like Seth Godin and join forces with their most loyal and vocal customers.

Google BlogSense, and AdSense in general, always bothered me since I did not have control over which companies were represented. Sure the ads “fit” my content, but that fails to account for my preferences. In general, arranging sponsorship is a lengthy process. Ad networks like BlogAds, etc. are starting to change this somewhat in that sponsors are getting to choose their outlet. It seems to fit that the reverse could be true as well. I should be able to toggle which companies/brands most interest me and welcome conversations from those companies.

Does this exist? If not, it should.

Many people are drawn to online dating because it provides a pressure-free environment to meet people with similar interests. That’s the politically correct answer. Of course, it boils down to people seeking out the hottest looking guy or girl, rattling off a cheesy message, and crossing your fingers (at least if you’re a guy in the maze).

For some time, there’s been a serious issue in terms of validating identities of individuals on the site. Makers like True.com and eHarmony have tried to introduce services that prevent mismatches, either by surveys and profiling or direct identity verification services. Of course, the majority of the problems have come from members of the dating community “faking” information about themselves to increase their change of “success”.

But what do we do when the site publisher is the faker? Till now, it hasn’t been outted — until now. It seems that JDate, a product of MatchNet, has taken to using the photos of adult film stars and models for it’s membership ads. This means that the next person you see that seems too good to be true actually may be. As Haaretz International reports:

However, Haaretz has found that the site’s banners systematically use fictitious characters based on pictures of models taken from pornography sites.

The changing banners carry pictures of different women, all of them young and attractive, and they all invite the surfer to “chat.” Apart from Hila, you can meet Sharon, aged 26, who is also very pretty and single, and like all the girls, she too is looking for a Jewish husband from a good family. At least, that is what the banner says.

But Sharon is Devon Sweet, a model whose homepage says she is a shy student from the United States who “is carrying out an in-depth study into the popularity of bisexuality among young American girls.” And what about the Jewish husband from a good family?

Source: Haaretz.com, ” JDate banners feature pictures of porn models” via GreedyGirl.com

BUT, before you give up faith. MatchNet has confirmed that they purchased the pictures from a photo archive and had no ideal the photos were from porn stars. That aside, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth and breeds suspicion in the minds of many, myself included.

John Dowdell points to an interesting little discussion on the value of Wikis. It seems that there are members of the academic community, and net population at large, that consider sources such as Wikipedia, and Wiki in general, to be “shady” at best.

The original article takes note that there is no “formal editor” in place which leads to rampant errors and misinformation. The supporters of Wikipedia contest that the very nature of the Wiki means there are thousands upon thousands of editors all auto-correcting the content.

In the discussion that pursues, an interesting aspect of Wiki is raised, namely, “I could edit it, but it will be changed back to the wrong information because people don’t like the truth”. This is definitely a fascinating observation of the potential to steer the depiction of “facts and history” in a direction that best suits the authors. This harks back to something from one of my first philosophy classes — “History must be considered from the point of view of the author.”

Another good observation focused on the gradient of reliability that can be seen based on topic matter. One comment noted that programming and software architecture Wikis, far less subjective than say, politics, are generally spot on in terms of content. I imagine that this is also the case in enterprise uses of Wikis, though there is a great deal of politics at work in many of those environments so it’s hard to tell from here.

I spent the better part of an hour last night talking with two of my best buddies, who also happen to be unix system admins, about the use of RSS as an alternative to E-mail.

Despite all our attempts to figure out a solution that was viable, we kept hitting dead ends. For the most part, however, the obstacles are not technical at all, but rather are social. Driving adoption of something like RSS-based e-mail is the main hurdle. Simplicity and ease-of-use is another large trap.

Yesteday, I received a trackback to the Top 10 list I quoted. The guys on the end of that conversation had some interesting points to make in favor of e-mail. It seems worthwhile to mention them here.

• “Email is a de-facto lowest common denominator - With few exceptions, when I send an email I know that the recipient will be able to open and read the contents. […] to expect that we’re all going to switch any time soon to RSS, or instant messaging, or whatever alternative technologies exist - is optimistic to say the least.”

• Email is asynchronous - “Something that instant messaging advocates often ignore, I think, is that email is an asynchronous medium - it doesn’t matter if I’m not logged in at the time when the message arrives, because it will be stored for me to deal with later.”

• Email is cross-cultural - “Despite the scope for misunderstanding and miscommunication, email provides an acceptable sense of distance to allow for a relationship to develop - the language of messages can casualise over the course of the interaction, whereas it’s far more difficult to be as formal in an instant message.”

• Email is auditable - “In an ideal world, these situations wouldn’t arise in the first place - but we live in imperfect times, so there’s sometimes a valid place for a communication tool with a built-in audit trail.”

Source: infosential.com, “Reports of the death of email have been greatly exaggerated”

This raises a point that I was making yesterday with my friends. The substitution of RSS for e-mail usually implies the use of some other medium, namely IM, as the method for spontaneous conversations. IM is wildly popular, but it’s also no substitue for what e-mail is (not yet anyway).

News.com reports on a new study that takes a look at the use of IM outside of the home space, specifically in business and mobile environments. Some interesting findings:

Nearly 27 percent of all IM users surveyed said they use instant messaging at work. This represents an increase of 71 percent over last year, AOL said.

Seventy percent of those who use IM at work do so to communicate with colleagues, while 34 percent use it to interact with clients or customers. Eleven percent of office IM users said they have used instant messaging at work to avoid a potentially difficult in-person conversation, and 62 percent send occasional instant messages during their workday to check in with family and friends.

Researchers that found mobile usage is up as well, with 19 percent of IM users sending instant messages or SMS (Short Message System) messages from mobile phones and PDAs. That’s up from 10 percent last year.

Source: News.com, “Business, mobile IM on the rise”

It is interesting to see that while IM is used largely as a quick way to communicate information and receive input, it’s also used as a social forcefield of sorts that provides a “comfortable distance”. Looking back at my use, I can recount many situations where I’ve used IM for this purpose. Of course, usually it escalates into a phone call when things are really bad.

One interesting last observation is that “The most important IM features are photo sharing, customization and file sharing”. Unfortuantely, I’ve never had great success really using IM as a file-sharing gateway when it comes to firewalls, network latency and other IM gremlins.

Stowe is dead-set that e-mail will see its end sooner than later, vowing that he “hates it” for many reasons, beyond the SPAM issue. I’ve argued (see “Will RSS Replace E-mail?“) that RSS is not entirely ready to provide what e-mail is providing us now.

Chris Pirillo provides an intriguing Top 10 reasons why e-mail will meet its maker. Here they are, abridged:

1. RSS is an unspammable medium.
2. As of yet, you can’t spread a virus (or worm) through an RSS channel.
3. The user is FINALLY in full control of his or her subscription (entirely).
4. Instant organization.
5. RSS was crafted with repurposing in mind.
6. High-Impact, Cost-effective, Immediate, Measurable, and Targeted.
7. Entries can be changed, removed, or expired.
8. Users will continue to think twice about sharing their e-mail address with anybody, even after any sort of “legislation” is passed.
9. News aggregators will continue to evolve, but are “good enough” to start using today.
10. The idea of RSS, much like e-mail, is not going to disappear.

Source: Lockergnome, “Why RSS Will Kill E-mail Publishing” via Radiant Marketing

I think two one of the more interesting questions to ask ourselves are:

1. How will we simplify the creation of RSS channels between individuals?
2. How will we secure RSS channels?

There are many solutions that now provide e-mail to RSS gateways. Unfortunately, the abdication of this throne will require more than generating RSS from e-mail as that’s really a different beast.

On the security front, we’re right now forced to use SSL and HTTP-AUTH. Unfortunately, the support for these is somewhat limited while also obtrusive by design. I can imagine the world where I have to authenticate all 300 of my active channels and how annoying that would be for me.

Everyone that knows someone that’s used a Social Networking Service (SNS) has undoubtedly received some form of Social Network SPAM. You know the message, the one that anxiously impersonates a “friend” of yours and the long lost value they’ve found in this new tool.

Finally, it’s starting to get into very annoying, and dishonest, cracks and crevices. The latest culprit, Multiply.com, is getting a lot of flack from a growing audience of annoyed victims.

David Weinberger first hit on this with his “After receiving my 15th request to be someone’s friend at Multiply.com” where he notes “These social networks in my experience continue to be all maintenance and no value.”. Clay Shirky picked up the torch not too long afterwards with this interpretation of motives:

The canonical example of a negative externality is pollution — if spilling effluvient into the nearest river costs me nothing, so what if it kills all the fish. That’s certainly cheaper than installing filters, now isn’t it? Multiply is social pollution, and the environment it’s polluting — my willingness to assume mail from friends and business contacts is likely to be of value — is exactly the environment that social services require. In the long term, they are fouling their own nest.

But they don’t care about the long term, they only care about getting more members now now now. Fortunately, the subject header of the mail always has the non-common word Multiply, so those messages are easy to flag as the spam they are. Better, though a bit more work, is to write everyone who gives Multiply permission to spam you and ask to get them to take your name out of the Multiply db. It won’t keep Multiply from spamming in the short term, but it may hasten the day when your friends stop granting permission to spammers to use their name to reach you.

Source: Many 2 Many, “Multiply and social spam: time for a boycott”

David’s point hits on something I have been building the case for here over the last year: SNS 1.0 is significantly flawed. As I’ve previously noted, “SNS 2.0 will have one striking characteristic, an underlying Purpose-Model”.

If there’s a secondary characteristic, it is that is will be respectful of our personal space and privacy — privacy is a requirement, not a feature.

For most blog zealots out there, RSS is the holy grail. Outside of that audience, quickly other areas of the world and culture are starting to see that RSS is a useful medium and applying it in new and interesting methods.

Today, my favorite aggregator, Full As A Goog has pointed out three incarnations of note:

• Ebay Auction RSS - Watchers of ebay can now perform searches against the ebay RSS feeds and get their results served up to them custom [via Topstyle]

• Weather RSS - For those of us that are obsessed with the weather but not so far over the top that we need WeatherBug on the desktop, this RSS service will serve up your daily weather, even with icons [via flex-mx]

• MP3 RSS - Lovers of the white candybar have a new source for music, RSS. Using RSS Enclusures, a little clever scripting by Adam Curry will pull MP3s right out of the RSS feed and load them into your iPod [via flex-mx]

There are countless times a day that I come across a situation or conversation where blogging technology seems like the ideal format for solving a problem. As might be expected, blogging does not have the mindshare it really needs to penetrate these spaces, yet. I’ve argued before that the best way to prove something is to produce successful use cases and announce them from the tops of the highest building possible.

Many folks in the PR business are waking up to the potential, even embracing it. MarketingProfs.com is running an interesting story on cases where blogging could have been applied to give an extra edge or to complete an offering.

Read it now: “Ten Companies That Missed Great Blog Opportunities”

Do you have stories about clients that bawked at your suggestion of blogging? Can you think of places where you see the need for blogging? Let me know.