Jenn’s Other Blog

In our most recent survey, one of the major needs expressed by respondents was a need for ways to social network more effectively. As I’ve mentioned before, my favorite social networking site is Facebook, because of its ability to interface with all so many of the other sites, and because I believe it is an example of the future of social networking.

Facebook is useful for many aspects of social networking, but the one we’re going to discuss today is promoting your own blog. Before I get started listing the blog promotion opportunities, I cannot stress enough the importance of not overusing any of these strategies - and the importance of not using Facebook only for promoting a blog. Try that, and you’ll lose friends faster than you can add them. The purpose of Facebook is to foster genuine networking relationships - and no one like to be “spammed.” But along with superpoking, sharing videos, writing on friends walls, and responding to clever status messages, here are some great blog-promotion opportunites with Facebook:

1. Sign up for FriendFeed, and add the FriendFeed Facebook Application, and selectively submit your blog posts to the Feed.
2. If you’re on Twitter, you can automate the above submissions by adding TwitterFeed, and then adding your Twitter stream to your FriendFeed.
3. Join Groups that relate to the content of your blog, or start a group on the topic of your blog. As a group administrator, you can message the members of the group when you have an action item that your think they’ll all be interested in (heed word of caution above about overusing these techniques).
4. Put links to your really important stuff in your “status” message (occassionally). Note, there are several Twitter apps on Facebook that automatically update your Twitter status to your Facebook status - if you’ve installed the TwitterFeed app in #2 above, I would not recommend using these apps. Your Facebook Friends might grow weary of the constant blog promotion directly on Facebook.)

Also see:

• Patrick Ruffini: The Early Adopter Effect
• Facebook info on the WebWarriors Wiki
• How to Develop a Social Networking Profile in Four Easy Steps
• Friendfeed: Web 2.0 for Fans of Discussion Forums

The Telegraph is quoting a Saudi clerick, Ali al-Maliki, critical of Facebook:

Facebook is a door to lust and young women and men are spending more on their mobile phones and the Internet than they are spending on food.

He says that like it’s a bad thing - I mean, afterall, we wouldn’t want the Saudi teens to get fat, and start resembling “ugly Americans,” now, would we?

Facebook has become quite a divisive issue in Saudi Arabial, according to Arab Media and Society, with the young women arguing that, it “to express their feelings and build friendships with young women from all around the world. They continued that it granted them the opportunity to learn about different customs and traditions…”

Unfortunately, there is a very sad side to this story. Maliki’s attitude represents that of many other Saudi’s, and one of these men took it to the extreme by murdering his daughter after he caught her communicating with a man on Facebook, in what is commonly called an “honour killing.”

A friend who brought this story to my attention pointed out that there is a third perpsective on this issue, which is the west’s observation and commentary on the events. On the U.S. based social news site, Digg.com, a user posted the story from ValleyWag, to Digg.com. His comment (thanks, Tim!) was, “You should keep an eye on not the article itself, but the Digg-no-crati’s response…already the first couple of comments are out of this world!”

He was right. The story had made the front page of the site, and received over a thousand Diggs, and over 350 comments. While the submitter’s story description was simply neutral and factual, the comments were very empassioned. Some of the comments expressed the expected shock and sadness over the death of the young woman.

Many of the comments, however, were attacking those who dared to insinuate that this “honour killing” might reflect negatively on Islam. Some commenters attacked the submitter, simply for posting the story. Others pointed out that Christians and Jews do bad things, too. Some were attacking the institution of religion altogether.

Here’s an interesting comment, by omegaredIX, basically blaming the west for the problem (***** indicates words deleted by the profanity filter):

Well dumbass Radicals on both sides ***** things up for moderates on both sides as well. Does the westboro baptist church define all baptists? I condemn violent acts on both sides but i also condemn ignorant tools saying “religion of peace” like they know what the ***** they are talking about. Extremist ruin things for everyone. We should also understand why people kill in the name of Allah and why they are blowing themselves up etc. All you have to do is look at the Wests impact on the Muslim world. Throughout Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, the Iran-Iraq war. This research will also take days seeing as you actually have to open a ***** book and study thousands of years of history to really grasp and know what the ***** you are talking about.

ralphthemagi defended the Saudi culture:

It’s their country. Their a sovereign nation. It is, like it or not, their right.

One Digger named slyzxx bemoans:

what is digg turning into anti islam ?…

And this pseudo-intellectual, Stryder81, assumes that the young woman apparently deserved to be killed, because if she didn’t want to follow the rules where she lived, she should have simply moved. This one even includes a catchy phrase at the end [emphasis mine]:

I swear if one isn’t careful on digg, they can catch a heart attack.

How so many give such Naive & ignorant comments to this day on a social news site is incredible to me.

First off, This is in ” Saudi Arabia ” done by an ” Arabian Individual ” it has NOTHING to do with Religion.

# 2, Whether you or I like it, that is the way they operate over there. Knowing that, You should not play with fire unless it is justified one way or another, unless you are a female.

Those of you bashing on Religion so quickly just because of a story or 2 then taking out verses that are meant for one thing and not the other to try and justify your own personal disagreement shows nothing more than pure ignorance at it’s finest.

Bottom Line, This girl was going on there looking for a guy, not to socialize with friends. You people who look at this as ” wow thats crazy, all she did was talk to a guy ” are the same ones who look at 14 year olds on Maury Povich with 10 kids and say ” Damn, society today has really changed ” and flip the channel.

If you live somewhere where you can’t wear a red shirt, don’t wear it or move. What is so complicated.

I don’t condone murder, I don’t care what it’s for, but don’t try to push the buttons of the hand that feeds you especially in a country that has had these laws for many many years.

Laws of the LAND ( Saudi Arabia ) not ” The Qu’ran “

I find the number of people on this social “news” site willing to defend and excuse something as brutal as killing one’s own child shocking. I can think of only two reasons for this happening: Either Digg.com has become the go-to place for the a heartless, mindless subset of the internet generation, or there is an element operating on the site, systematically spreading disinformation.

Several of my friends on Facebook have joined FriendFeed. I did, too, yesterday, and am very pleased with what I’ve found. For one thing, it distracted me from the frustration of playing with a bunch of Google Gadgets that won’t fit into my already-too-crowded sidebar; but mostly because this is a very cool network.

Mark “Rizzin’” Hopkins, at Mashable, explained it this way:

…What goes on behind the login screen at FriendFeed isn’t indexed by Google or publicly discoverable, either, so a lot of the comments get a much more ‘behind-the-scenes’ raw and uncut feel to it….This opt-in discussion, thus, is seeming to be a much more common theme in the social media/Web 2.0 world. I must say that I like it. While services like this can be a time sink, it doesn’t compare to the type of time-sink an actual web forum would be. In fact, forums, for the last several years, have been completely cut out of my surfing habits due to the fact that simply don’t have the time to commit to developing the relationships inside several small communities. With FriendFeed, though, it’s a place that I can go occasionally that is doing some of my posting for me (i.e. grabbing my feed items and republishing them), as well as allowing me a place to have short exchanges with a lot of the folks I know and read on a daily basis.

According to its “about” page,

FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends…FriendFeed automatically imports shared stuff from sites across the web, so if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. And if your friend likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. FriendFeed makes all the sites you already use a little more social.

I’m able to view my FriendFeed from Facebook, or from any feed reader, or even by e-mail. I can even add “imaginary friends” - friends that aren’t signed up for FriendFeed, but have feeds elsewhere on the web that I like to follow. This is a big time-saver to me, as a blogger, because so much of blogging involves linking to what other bloggers are doing, and now I can see what they’re doing all in one place. Sign up for FriendFeed here.