Taken as a hypothetical or general question, in each situation the conclusion I reached would have been different. Each demonstrated the important of context and specifics.

How to lose your right to browsing privacy

I’m a strong believer in the right to browse largely anonymously. Web Analytics will give any webmaster a degree of personal information about their visitors - whether that be IP, domain, service provider - but this information shouldn’t really be used. It certainly shouldn’t be used to track individuals.

…but there are exceptions. I often look at my analytics information to see what Google searches are bringing traffic to my site. I’d noticed since my post a while ago ‘Only Cute Girls Make Me Stumble‘ that I’d started picking up odd bits and pieces of search for “cute girls”. Not entirely surprising given the amount of people who use the web to look at pictures of cute girls, even if they’d be sadly disappointed on reaching that article.

None of which was of major concern until a couple of days ago. Mistaken searches for “cute girls” based on a blog article title is fair enough. Someone coming to my site following a Google search entitled “images of cute girls of age 6″ is an entirely different matter. That’s disasteful and potentially illegal.

My analytics data provides me with an IP address and a service provider for that visitor. Not a huge amount of data, but more than nothing. Its a visitor from India, and nothing may happen, but I have no qualms about dropping the service provider a note with the information.

Does pay always undermine independence?

When you start to get paid to do a particular piece of work you lose some control over it. As they say, “Those who pay the piper call the tune.”

I was pointed recently towards the site ReviewMe. The basic idea is simple, you submit your blog, it gets checked by the staff at ReviewMe, and you’re then eligible to write reviews of products (based on the subject matter of your blog) for payment.

The site says that there’s no requirement to provide positive reviews. And you can pick and choose what you review. I’m still wary.

Does it undermine the authority of Fog of Eternity?

Even if reviews are only a minor part of the site (and I wouldn’t post more than one a week), are people going to be interested? Or will they feel that the site has “sold out”.

You’re not “required” to give positive reviews?

ReviewMe say that there’s no need. But they also say that the “vast majority” of reviews are positive. Is that tacit pressure to give positive feedback to their clients?

Why I’m going to give it a test run

Once I’d had a look around the ReviewMe site my concerns were reduced. It’s easy to pick and choose. And frankly I’m independent enough as a person that I’ll say what I think regardless!

But the biggest reason I decided I’ll give it a try is that I realised it’s a good way to find new services. Some of the offered reviews are of betas and services I hadn’t heard of before, but look interesting. If a service like ReviewMe can give me a route into new products as well as providing a little bit of pin money, then that’s all well and good. It benefits Fog of Eternity all round.

Bending morals by circumstance

If you’d asked me “is it right to track back people who visit your site?” then I’d have said no. If you’d asked me if it you thought a site could benefit from paid reviews, I’d have said no. But context is important, and I think in both the situations above I’ve come to a fair and considered conclusion.

What do you guys think?

Social networking exacerbates the problem. It creates a sameness in the conversation, because everyone is looking at the same subject. In early May everyone was talking about how great Twitter was. In late May everyone was talking about how annoying Twitter’s downtimes were. This month it’s Friendfeed and the fragmentation of conversation.

Did you hear the one about … oh … you did already …

Different viewpoints are all well and good. But how many different viewpoints are you going to get among hundreds of blogs all addressing the same topics? People see that something is “the buzz” because they read it on Scobleizer. Then they talk about it on their own blog and link back to the original articles.

They probably develop more immediate traffic this way - it’s the fashionable thing after all. It’s easier to continue a trend than begin one. But how much value is being added to the wider discussion? Doesn’t the conversation just become circular, and inaccessible to new readers? When we talk about the topics that everyone else is talking about we’re not adding originality.

OK, we’re all talking about the same overall topic - social media. But it’s rarer to find an original subject than it is to find an article similar to something you’ve already read. That’s not beneficial to the long term development of social media. It keeps it insular, it doesn’t widen the conversation. We’re happy enough, people come and visit our sites and comment on our thoughts, but there’s not much new material being developed.

If everyone is special then no-one is

The derivative nature of these posts and the discussion stops us moving forward. Social media is failing to widen functionality and accessibility to the non-techie, the non-early adopter. Its highly cliquey when it should be as open as possible.

We think of ourselves as specialised, as interesting, as unique. But in many ways we’re as “unique” as the emo kid who listens to My Chemical Romance like millions of others. Who thinks his angst and his emotion are something special. We think our voices are important in large part because they are our voices.

Don’t be a dedicated follower of fashion

That internal conversation is important of course, because we’re honing and developing the media and its services. There can be new perspectives on popular topics - for example I always find Alexander van Elsas tends to offer an original viewpoint on the buzz. But that can’t be the only conversation, we need to extend ourselves.

We need more original thinking in the blogosphere. I’m going to challenge myself to do this, and I challenge you to try something similar, at least from time to time. If something is the buzz topic that week, then don’t write about it. Refuse to write about it. Write about something completely different. Don’t continue a conversation, start one.

Which seems to be the same across the technology world. We can’t merely like something and dislike something. We have to love things and despise things. A couple of months ago we loved Twitter. Now it’s had a little bit of downtime we hate Twitter, but we love Friendfeed. Macs hate PCs, and like to patronise them. People aren’t just loyal to brands they are LOYAL to brands, to the extent of reacting aggressively and rudely to their competitors.

The only other medium that I can think of that provokes such strong feelings is music. You don’t see people looking down on others because of the cereal they eat. We don’t laugh at morons who drink Snapple instead of Mountain Dew. Yet for some reason - and we’re talking about mere tools here - we can’t extol the virtues of a computer, a browser, a social media service without denigrating another one in return.

But it doesn’t matter what we’re talking about.

Browsers can all…well…browse

There isn’t much difference between Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Opera. All are perfectly fine for browsing the internet and taking pretty much full advantage of its functionality.

They have their strengths and weaknesses. Internet Explorer is more widely supported by corporate sites (e.g. the Citicorp owned Egg online banking site still has limited non-IE support), but IE6 and 7 fail to adhere to standards. Firefox is extensible, has great add-ons, but is resource heavy (even with version 3) and…for me anyway…is the least stable browser in terms of crashes. Safari looks pretty. Opera is perfectly capable but has little market share.

Actually, I even have a pretty PC

There isn’t that much difference between a PC and a Mac. PCs aren’t the incredibly user unfriendly tangles of code and crashes that Apple suggests. They have more software, tend to have more power for the price. Macs are a bit more user friendly, significantly more stylish (generally) and have a “cool” image.

Twitter still does what it’s supposed to

Twitter was good before, and it’s good now. It went down a few times, it’s not the most reliable free service around. But it’s still great. Friendfeed is also great. Its possible to like one without liking the other. It’s possible to like Plurk and like Twitter. It’s more interesting to state your hatred for Twitter and how you’re going to abandon it (…especially if done so in 140 characters!).

Passion is good. Crazy…not so much

It’s good that we have passion for products and services in the IT world. Passion leads to excitement and further developments. But seriously, people need to chill out a bit sometimes. I look sometimes with jaw dropped at the incredible aggression and strength of feeling in a debate on the merits of an operating system, a browser, Twitter’s merits.

Be happy that we have a choice. Be happy that there are options for people who don’t think that it’s somehow morally wrong not to use Firefox! Be happy that Twitter and Friendfeed can coexist, and that Twitter and Plurk are forced to excel to compete. Competition is good, competition between more than one perfectly capable product is even better.

For me, like many others, blogging is a professionally focused hobby. I might develop long term benefit through work opportunities, but I’m not monetising the blog. I work in a salaried role as well, and so Fog of Eternity is just one of a number of hobbies vying for my “free time”.

I talked a little while ago about time management, but I thought I’d give a general idea of the kind of plate spinning that goes on. Even for those with good time management skills (and I don’t claim to be one) it’s a struggle. For us “part timers” blogging is a extensive commitment to an already busy life. Here’s an example from the last week for me.

We need to pay the bills

I work full time for a non-IT company doing web design and development. It’s a reasonably large company, but the web and online team is two people. I think we’re pretty innovative in our approaches relative to the rest of our industry. But a two person team can find themselves under a lot of time pressure.

The last week saw my time taken up by three main tasks, and was a pretty heavy week in terms of late hours:

• the development of a blog/online discussion portal for one client
• sketching out several microsites at short notice
• drawing up of email templates for promotional mail-outs

Clients often make late changes to job specs based on new information or preferences, and there are deadline pressures for microsites to be live before press advertising. As a result I’m lucky if I have a week when I can work a “standard” 9-5. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy working for the company, but the hours can be variable given the nature of my role.

Personal projects

I finally got round last week to putting together a pet project I’d been thinking of for a while. You can see the results at www.myfriendsdontknow.com. It’s a bit of fun and an interesting design exercise. But it’s also something that I hope might develop into something quite popular over time (even if I did mess up the StumbleUpon submission so that it got tagged as an adult site, something I apparently can’t reverse!).

Putting the site together from scratch, based only on the sketches and ideas I’d jotted down, took time. Ironing out the styling glitches for cross browser took quite a while longer. It’s not in “final format”, but it’s up and running. Even when running it still requires a time commitment, to moderate and post the “confessions” that are central to the premise.

Family life

I think my family life takes up less time than others. In this I am not lucky. I’ve been married for a few months but my wife and I are seperated by the Atlantic Ocean, her in the US and me in the UK. In the long term I’ll emigrate, something I’m hugely excited about. In the short term it means a regularly scheduled 1-2 hour phone call a night. It’s one of the best parts of my day, but still a time commitment.

All work and no play

It’s important to make time for pure relaxation, time just for ourselves. For those of us with families that’s the biggest and best part of non-tech time. We may be tech geeks but we have friends we want to see! I have a couple of hours a day I can spend cementing my geek reputation with my volunteer position in The Camarilla live roleplay society. There’s Grand Theft Auto IV!

Sometimes it’s OK if the plates drop

The last week for me was pretty busy. One of the things that fell by the wayside was posting here. I felt bad about it. But I shouldn’t really - I know I’m going to come back to it. I’m sure most of my readers have similar stories of similar weeks. And in those weeks it can be difficult to keep, and things get missed or left out.

Chill out when there’s a day, or even a week, when you can’t get everything finished.  Guilt can be a terrible demotivator, even if it’s guilt over something trivial. Avoid that guilt, realise you’re a human being. Then, when the time frees up again, you can come back to those things you missed with a renewed sense of vigor and purpose.

Take a look at these quotes and see how relevant you think they are.

…a vast number of companies all have the same business plan of monopolising their respective sectors through network effects, and it’s clear that even if the plan is sound, there can only be at most one network-effects winner in each sector, and therefore that most companies with this business plan will fail.

…an Internet company’s survival depends on expanding its customer base as rapidly as possible, even if it produces large annual losses.

Make a certain amount of sense, don’t they? Except those quotes are paraphrased from the Wikipedia entry on ‘dot-com bubble’. The only thing I’ve done is turn the wording into present tense rather than past.

An Investopedia article threw up a quote that’s even more pertinent.

…investors want big ideas more than a solid business plan. Buzzwords like networking, new paradigm, information technologies, internet, consumer-driven navigation, tailored web experience, and many more examples of empty double-speak filled the media and investors with a rabid hunger for more.

I hear the same buzzwords today. In fact some of them are mentioned as reasons why Web 2.0 will succeed where the first dot-com boom failed! Terms like “consumer-driven navigation” and “tailored web experience” are often cited as an advantage of social networking services, and a boon for advertisers.

We’ve seen major investment in social networking groups like Facebook and Myspace. Rising venture capital investment in internet companies in general. For a while there was more wariness about the long term success, a hangover from the late 90s boom and bust. That wariness seems to be disappearing …people are getting caught up in the excitement of a bubble again. We’re seeing the same media excitement that often accompanies a boom.

Yet I still don’t see a way for many of these social networking services, the bastion of new investment and the ‘Web 2.0′ model, to effectively monetise. Even with the gathering of personal data from users to allow focused advertising …yet people still ignore it. Compared to traditional models and mediums, online advertising fails.

But there’s no practical way for most of these sites and services to charge. They’ve created an expectation that they will be provided for free. The quickest way to kill their user base will be to charge, with the exception of some niche sites that offer a genuine service that isn’t available elsewhere. That’s a tiny minority.

So how are these multitude of companies and services going to turn a profit when the venture capital finance runs out? Which ones are going to survive a bust? Is a bust inevitable again, or am I missing something?