Do you remember the anti-social Internet, where nothing was connected to anything and no one communicated using it?

Neither do I.

From its outset, the Internet has been about people sharing and communicating information and ideas. In the late 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee first conceived of a hypertext project at CERN as a means for researchers information. In August of 1991 the first web site was put online at CERN, and we’ve been all typing up a storm ever since. In addition to web sites and the tools to browse them, the first killer app of the Internet was e-mail.

In addition to email and web sites, electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs) like the ones I frequented on Fidonet in the eighties were, as the Wikipedia article correctly points out, a precursor to the World Wide Web. You could say that we had a social Internet before we had an Internet, and the latter was just a bunch of protocols to run it on.

Enter The Web 2.0 Now Here’s Something We Hope You’ll Really Like Social Internet

For the last few years a lot of people have been spending a great deal of time on various social networking sites. In 2006, Myspace allegedly reached the 100 million user mark — a number that at least one geek has debunked. The popular real estate social networking site, ActiveRain, also launched in 2006, and many agents and brokers including me have invested (squandered?) a great deal of time there. More recently, I’ve been amazed by how many messages I have whenever I log in at Facebook or Cre8Buzz or one of the other social networks I’ve participated in — and I’m not really that popular a guy. Ann Cummings invites me to use FunWall. David Smith pokes me. Oliver Muoto received a can of Whoop Ass.

Poor guy.

For awhile there I was getting email daily updates from Facebook, telling me the most inane things

I turned that off eventually.

Seven Criticisms of the Social Internet

1. It’s Amateur, in the sense that you don’t get paid for it.
   Andrew Keen has probably written more about this criticism than anyone. As a corollary, I agree with this argument, insofar as I’ve made a decent living off of several web sites I’ve created and maintained, but no money at all off of ActiveRain. Even the referrals I’ve received have not come from ActiveRain, but from people finding my own web sites.
2. Someone’s might be getting paid for it, but it won’t be you.
   One of the most amusing incidents in Move.com’s failed acquisition of ActiveRain was this ActiveRain apologia about who owns the content on ActiveRain. Still, I don’t recall any discussion about how the thirty-million would have been shared if the transaction went through. Oh. See also, this article about remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.
3. It’s Amateur, in the sense of incompetent or unskilled
   Think: Myspace web pages. Pink on purple, anyone?
4. It’s Amateur, in the sense of trivial or unimportant
   OK, this one’s almost built in. In order to socialize, human beings have to lighten up a bit on their seriousness. Still, it does seem to me that one can base an adult friendship on banter a bit more sophisticated than throwing sheep at one another.
5. You Can’t Optimize for Every Web Site There Is
   Every web site has its own rules for getting to a top ranked listing. I prefer to shoot for the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN in that order. These are sites that buyers and sellers use when they’re buying and selling, not socializing. Yes, this means I’ve had to give up my coveted #2 spot on ActiveRain. So far I haven’t noticed a difference.
6. It’s Anonymous
   Having their cake and eating it too, social Internet socialites believing in the absolute sanctity of open information (thou shalt not ever censor me), even if they don’t sign their names or take responsibility for their actions. Human-Powered Search Engine Mahalo goes a step further and recommends that instead of a photo of your human self, you “Be Cool” and use a Wee-Me Avatar instead. Apparently being Human-Powered wasn’t cool enough in its own right.
7. It Confuses Grouchiness with Erudition
   With a hat tip to Quote of the Day and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand (famous consumer of steak), “You Are Not superior just because you see the world in an odious light”. And yes, I do apply that criticism to myself as well, and see this as one of my less useful posts. I can never get enough of the Internet Commenter Business Meeting. To be sure, that’s not new, either. We had the same sort of thing going on in Fidonet. To puree a metaphor, there’s something about sitting behind a keyboard without a real face in front of you that makes it harder to wag your tail.

Here is a tutorial about getting started with Windows Live Writer. It takes you through the process of downloading and installing the software and configuring it for your Wordpress Blog. Enjoy!

When I first got into Real Estate, I came from a background in software development (including, most recently, web site development). Because of this background, as soon as I learned that people were meeting real estate clients on-line, it became my goal to create a profitable web site. Soon afterwards, I set out to create and maintain several profitable web sites.

When I first heard about blogging in 2003, I thought of blogging software as a way to do help me do just that. They say if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see everything as a nail. In my case I saw my task as content development, so every type of software I looked to me like a content management system.

With the rise of social networking, I began noticing a shift away from creating your own content on your own site to hanging around with your friends. In the last year or so, I’ve been repeatedly surprised by the extent to which people — including my colleagues, other Realtors® — are content to rent instead of own their online properties. This was driven home today by an outstanding article by CopyBlogger’s Brian Clark, Are You Someone’s User Generated Content? Clark points to many articles by leading bloggers discussing the regrets people have felt when they neglected their own Internet properties — their blogs — to explore social networking.

Clark sums up my own feelings about frittering one’s time on Facebook, (or mismanaging it on MySpace, if you prefer):

For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating “user-generated” content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.

This metaphor should be especially apt to Realtors®, who know first hand the benefits our clients can derive from their own sweat equity.

Is your sweat equity being invested in your own online real estate, or are you remodeling someone else’s kitchen for free?

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I’ve been known to be somewhat ambivalent about Social networks (ya think?), and anyone who enjoy’s Andrew Keen is not a likely candidate to score very highly on the Web 2.0 hype-o-meter.

Having said that, I’m really getting quite a treat out of Web 2.0’s newest starchild, Cre8Buzz. Real Estate professionals can join here. (I’m not sure whether the general sign-up is open to the public yet or not. It was “invitation only” when I first visited). When you come by, be sure to visit me and say hello.

There’s an interesting ranking system, “Buzz Rank”, that combines other users voting for you and your own participation. If you use their widget, the score that’s published is your score within your community category, not your overall score for the site, which is kind of neat. OK, what can I say — I was the Lisa Simpson type of kid who liked to bring home “A’s” on my report card.

It’s still pretty new, so there’s a good chance the Antman will come by to say hello to you in person. Ants with megaphones — what’s not to love? Social network — cute.

Everyone to date has been pretty hail fellow well met with no special politics brewing yet.

Another thing I like — I mean I really like — is the fact that people aren’t contacting me to install the newest Facebook application. Being poked was silly enough, but getting Superpoked with a sheep thrown at you is just TOO IMMATURE. But ants with megaphones, on the other hand — that’s an age appropriate play group for me.

It has a customizable profile page a la Myspace, which I like since my alter-ego the real estate broker capitalist can put up the corporate logo and feel good about it. JavaScript widgets don’t work — tried that. Of course, the downside of customization is that you bump into the usual folks who have fairly unreadable pages with background images of light green aliens and foreground text that’s dark green 4 pixel high Old English Script italic or what have you. People, I know you’re all democratically broadcasting yourself and all, but readability matters.

My only real complaint so far, and I’m sure this’ll get fixed as time goes on, is the interface to the blog, which is primitive in the extreme. We’re talking you can’t yet code an HREF tag in there. It finds “http://” and does the right thing with that, but no links of a more sophisticated nature are allowed. Even some of the most basic formatting just doesn’t work. But what the heck — it’s a beta, and it’s a social networking web site, not a pacemaker, so as a programmer I get it.

OK, just one other thing. I know the developers are probably too young to know about this movie that was already sixteen years old when I watched it as a kid, but here’s the thing: ants don’t buzz. They make the Them! movie ant noise. If you’ve never heard that noise before, you really should go check out Them!. Watch the whole movie, or fast forward to about 27 minutes 30 seconds and you’ll not only get to watch Joan Weldon walking around, which is always a treat, but if you let it play about two minutes you’ll get to hear plenty of good ant noises.

This weekend at the bookstore I browsed through Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur with a lot of interest. I also looked into a book that’s probably at the opposite end of the Web 2.0 Hype-o-Meter, Wikinomics.

Keen argues with some justice that with the huge proliferation of blogs, the Internet has become a write-only Darwinian struggle to see who can filibuster the longest, with everyone yapping our heads off and no one really listening.

What?

Wikinomics, on the other hand, left me wondering how I, too, could benefit from this whole massive collaboration thing to become blindingly wealthy and massively collaborated, but I couldn’t come up with anything off the top of my head.

As they say on Ron Popeil Commercials: “But wait, there’s more!”

Now not only can your blog be one of over 50 million blogs in the keyboardosphere, now you can be the first on your block to have your own social network, thanks to Ning.com. In the words of Ning CEO, Gina Bianchini:

“Marc and I founded Ning in October 2004 to give everyone the opportunity to create your own social networks for anything.”

Atta girl, Gina. That’s just what we needed, social networks for anything!

And in the true spirit of Web 2.0, I have decided that if I can, of course that means I should, so I am now the proud owner of not just one, but TWO social networks, with me as the one member each!

That was the whole problem with MySpace, come to think of it — they let YOU in. Now we can each have our own MySpace, which for the sake of clarity we can call MyMySpace, to distinguish it from YourMySpace and ThatOtherGuysMySpace.

No, but seriously, come join me. We can massively collaborate, at least on a small scale. Won’t that be cozy?

The first network I noticed when poking around Ning was the virtual Sangha. Hey great, I thought, I’m a Buddhist, but it turns out that one’s by invitation only.

Well, at least I’m not the only anti-social Buddhist with his own social network.

But I have two of them. So there.

After that, I decided to check out the RightHealth Social network. At the right are some of the forum questions from RightHealth so you can get an idea of the quality of the discourse. (Click to enlarge).

I didn’t wait for it to get this bad, it was the first thing I bumped into.

I wonder if I started a Luddite group if Andrew Keen would join me.