Slow news day?  Let’s let aside the whole “Web 3.0″ vs. “2010 Web” Debate.  They’re all just terms after all, right?  Let’s focus on something a little more important, like the fact that an established journalist like Kara Swisher can’t use correct grammar in her titles.  Let’s look at the definition of “Wronger”:

“One who wrongs someone; One who commits a wrong; Comparative form of wrong: more wrong”

Keep in mind that the only definition of “wronger” provided by Google was that one, by Wiktionary.com, something many would hardly consider a credible dictionary.  However in this case, even their definition states Kara is completely wrong on this matter.

What’s the deal with bloggers, journalists, and marketers feeling it’s okay all-of-the-sudden to relax their use of grammar?  These guys all have editors that check their work, and I wouldn’t hesitate to think they have all had much more English training than I have.  I mean, even Apple’s doing it - what’s with the whole “Funner” theme?  Does that terminology make it sound “more fun”?  To me, it just makes them look stupid.

I hope Kara’s use was just tongue-in-cheek, but let’s stop this practice.  It’s simply wrong.

That title sounds too much like a get-rich-quick scheme. But let’s face it, as bloggers, number of readers and traffic is important to us. Regardless of whether it’s to get money or just allow you a voice to share knowledge (the reason this blog was created), traffic plays a big part in that.

Here’s a simple trick to get you at least some traffic. I do admit it’s a little selfish, but it’s win-win so I don’t see the harm. I’m going to give away a little secret (and I hope Louis doesn’t mind me sharing). Louis Gray and myself both bookmark each link back to our blogs on Delicious. Louis taught this to me as a neat trick to keep track of the coverage a blog gets around the web. You’ll notice you can click “Coverage” on LouisGray.com right now and see all the mentions of his blog. Mine can be found here. I also do the same for SocialToo.

Here’s the benefit to you: Those links get populated on FriendFeed, more people see them, comment on them, their friends see them, comment, and the process goes on. I see mentions on these shares by Louis (and myself) all the time thanking him for sharing, but in reality, they made that share inevitable. It’s simple, mention our blogs and we share them with our friends whether we or you like it or not.

I thought this technique used to track our blogs’ coverage could benefit you as well. In addition, just mentioning a blogger’s name or linking to their blog at least gets their attention because they get notifications through trackbacks, even if they don’t re-share it or post to delicious. Bloggers, regardless of who they are, all have a little bit of ego in them. The most successful ones like to know who is talking about them, and track that regularly. Want a blogger’s attention? Link to them.

Regarding tracking coverage through Delicious, do you do this for your blog? Do you know any other bloggers that use this technique?

Saturday morning, starting at 9am, Ashton Kutcher, in partnership with Digg.com and Revision3’s Kevin Rose will be doing a production, streamed over the live streaming service, Qik, all day for 24 hours right here in Utah. The idea is to get major blogging personalities such as VentureBeat’s Tech Blogger Matt Marshall, along with other personalities such as Video Game Blogger, CJ Peters, as well as Geek Entertainment TV’s Irina Slutsky, and Non-Society’s Geekette, Meghan Asha, to do crazy tasks while at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City Utah. Interestingly, they have picked bloggers from San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and other locations, but ironically no big bloggers from Utah were selected. Ashton and Kevin, you know we can compete as well as the rest!

With Matt Marshall in the crowd, he will probably be the most familiar with early-adopter technologies and the audience of this blog since that is what they cover, so it will be interesting to see how he and his partner, Shira Lazar, will do in the contest. Ashton Kutcher, via his Twitter account, is asking for suggestions on what you would like the contestants to do, so hopefully Utah can represent. Regardless of what happens, I fully expect the entire contest to be one big punk on Utah Saturday so beware of what you see as these bloggers fight to do anything to win this reality competition tomorrow. You can watch the competition live, over Qik at the website http://www.24hoursatsundance.com. Prepare to be Punk’d.

Matt and Shira, we’re rooting for you.

Photo courtesy Matt Olson

One of the reasons I started this blog back in 2004 (I believe it was actually earlier, in various forms) was to enable me to chronicle the intellectual things I came across throughout life. This year has been such an amazing year for me, experiencing the birth of my son (which we Twittered and Ustreamed), the birth of 2 identical twin nieces (which I didn’t document here), to the complete opposite of the spectrum with the death of both my Grandfather, and just recently my Grandmother, whose 85th birthday would have been January 1st, 2009. I have experienced such joys, and at the same time such sorrow, and you all have been there with me every step of the way. I’ve never done the “list” thing before (never had time!), so I thought this year would be different. I thought I’d go through each month and share with you some of the highlights on Stay N’ Alive this year.

January

January was the start of my Twitter woes, with frequent outages and frustration.  ChaCha saved my brother due to lack of weather and traffic reports in the area he was traveling.  January was the month I created my largest annoyance, coining the technique (which was the first time the idea was mentioned anywhere, I believe) of tagging friends in Facebook Notes to bring attention to them.  This technique worked and helped me build relationships with several bloggers I am now friends with today.  I now hate the technique because everyone uses it on me.  Myspace announced their own developer platform, giving hints to a date OpenSocial would go live.  Pownce, which ironically I was a user of long before Twitter, began to show purpose for me.  People got confused about what the Facebook Platform was, and the leader of my faith passed away (Death #1).

February

I started February by coining my idea of Social Media bringing back the small communities and villages of olden times.  I pointed out the fact that Amazon has its own Social Network (which surprisingly still, not many people are aware of).  I took my very first trip to the Bay area, and got an awesome tour of the Googleplex from my cousin, who treated me to one of the best lunches I’ve ever eaten.  I wrote my first OpenSocial application, and realized web development had changed as we know it.  Back then, Twitter Track over SMS still worked, so I wrote one of the very first posts suggesting Twitter as a tool for disasters and emergencies.  Other than for news, I’m not so sure about that any more.  I launched OpensocialNow.com, which quickly fizzled as I ran out of time.  London had a small, but rare earthquake, and I saw it first on Twitter, on my cell phone, via track. In February I published my first book.

March

March, Facebook introduced their Feed Forms (which we were first to announce), providing a way for developers to easily publish stories to the Facebook news feed.  March marked the birth of our 4th child and youngest son, Jesse III, which we Twittered, blogged, and Ustreamed the entire way.  We began to see the makings of the first Facebook Worm, which this blog was one of the first to report (and henceforth recorded by Fortiguard security, and then PC Magazine’s blog).  Google launched the OpenSocial Foundation, and Yahoo became a member and announced their (future) support for the platform.

April

April I attended my first Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.  I learned the wonders of the Bloggers Lounge, and met several great new people there.  Bungee Labs made some great announcements there, and it was looking up for them as Google announced their App Engine platform and the idea of Software as a Service was put in the public eye.  Of course, with layoffs later down the road, things aren’t looking so hot for them right now.  April was also a hallmark month, with the launch of SocialToo.com at the end of the month, in a very small announcement, I invited my small audience at the time to join and help build out intelligent blacklisting for the service.  It was this time I met Guy Kawasaki and built out the UI on his behalf to enable him and myself to follow those that were following us on Twitter.  We didn’t officially launch to the general public until last month. April, I also got to guest post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog.

May

May was an exciting, and somber month at the same time. My former business colleague and friend, Phil Burns’, daughter was diagnosed with Leukemia.  Through Twitter and this blog, and others kind efforts of sharing on their blogs, we were able to raise over $10,000 in just a month, all through means of social media.  This further witnessed to me the power of Social Media, and makes me truly believe in some of the things people like Beth Kanter are doing right now.  In March, I wrote my first 1-word post, in response to another one-word post on TechCrunch, which was in response to Twitter being down for the umpteenth time in a matter of days. That prompted Twitter to blame their outages on Robert Scoble, and Robert Scoble blaming Twitter for their own problems.  I took a trip out to Google I/O, and Robert, under last minute circumstances, invited me to join him in going to the Twitter offices and working things out.  It was there I met Ev Williams and Biz Stone in person, realized what a mess the service really was, and ended up on the front page of TechCrunch.  It was just after that that Twitter continued their classic behavior of cutting out features from the API with little to no notice to developers. It was at the same conference I was able to speak for the Slicon Valley Web Builders on Facebook Development in FBML.  April was also the month I began seriously using FriendFeed.

June

June was a somber month for me.  It started with Facebook announcing their yearly F8 conference, right in the middle of OSCON, both conferences I was hoping to attend.  The most somber part of the month however came when my Grandfather, and namesake, died in a quick turn for the worse due to Cancer and old age.  This was a hard thing for me, being one of the closest people I knew to die.  It was also death #2 of the year of people I adored.  Shortly after that, on my way to the funeral services in fact, I noticed some developers were completely shutting down their apps due to problems with the Twitter API.  I predicted they would continue to succeed regardless.  The month ended somberly, with Bill Gates, a hero of mine, leaving Microsoft.

July

In July, I got my new 2nd generation iPhone, and realized it needs Privacy controls. I attended Facebook’s F8 conference, where I predicted, and they very quietly announced plans for a mobile platform API. All this occurred as they were announcing the launch of Facebook Connect.  Right before F8 I finished my second book. In July I left Twitter, learned some valuable lessons about the service, and ended up coming back a few months later when I realized no one was joining me.  SocialToo announced Identi.ca support.  July was also the month I began blogging as a member of the team at LouisGray.com.  My first post was about none-other than blogging.

August

In August I celebrated my 31st Birthday.  OpenMicroblogger launched their competing software to the Laconi.ca Open Source microblogging platform.  Twitter launched the ability to track threaded replies in the API, and I began to suggest that the Twitter platform needed a meta tagging language to remove the need for the “@”.  Some suggested that the LDS Church was buying Facebook (yeah, I know).  We saw history made as the Olympics hit China.

September

September I took a temporary turn to full time work, going to help out i.TV bring their App to the number one spot in the iTunes App store.  Since then they have continued their growth, and continue as a client of mine as I build out SocialToo.  I launched the first public Wordpress plugin for Facebook Connect.  Wordpress.com passed 4 million blogs.  I had an excellent time at BlogWorld in Las Vegas, where I roomed with Louis Gray and met a ton of new people and bloggers (are bloggers people?).

October

In October I announced for the first time I would be voting for a (gasp!) Democrat.  i.TV reached #1 in the iTunes App store, and I got to witness it first hand, having a part in their promotion and growth.  Facebook reached their 10 billionth photo and we were one of the first to report it.  Proposition 8 in California became the center of a love/hate storm.  Someone left a suicide note in the Facebook developer forums.  SocialToo announced Follower statistics for our users.

November

I spent a lot of November speaking, starting with an O’Reilly Webinar on Facebook development for beginners.  America elected our first African American president, and I voted, but had to pay for my Chik Fil A sandwich.  I presented to a large group of CIOs in Dallas.  SocialToo went live to the public! (and Guy Kawasaki joined forces to help launch it, as co-owner) I presented Facebook Development in under 5 minutes at Ignite Salt Lake City.

December

I started out December participating on several panels.  We launched a new redesign on Stay N’ Alive.  My family and I took a vacation to Las Vegas.  After getting back, just 2 days before Christmas we received disheartening news that my Grandmother had passed away.  This would make death #3 of the year, but we’re happy she’s home for Christmas.  We ended the month with great news however, announcing Louis Gray joining the Board of Advisors for SocialToo.

Have a safe and Happy New Year!

As I write this, it’s quickly approaching midnight here in the MountainWest.  It’s been an incredible year for me and this blog - I can’t wait to see what lies in store for the next year.  In the meantime, “Stay” tuned, and keep watching here and LouisGray.com, as well as my new business, SocialToo.com for more great content regarding Technology, Social Networking, and new technologies.  I promise to keep things exciting around here, and look forward to the upcoming year.  Let’s hope I don’t explode!

If you haven’t been by to visit the actual blog lately (hello my loyal RSS Readers!), you might want to click on the link up there to come see what it looks like. Thanks to my friend and talented Graphic Designer, Brandon Babb, we now have a new design! I’d also like to announce a few new directions for Stay N’ Alive.

Community

You’ll notice on the right there’s now a “Community” sub-section with options to join the community on either Google Friend Connect, or Facebook Connect.  Choose one, or the other, or both!  Right now it’s a great way to know what other friends of yours are readers of this blog, or perhaps get introduced to someone new.  Or you can just invite your friends and tell them about a story you like, asking them to join the community as well! (I suggest you personalize your message)

It should be noted that by joining Friend Connect (just a single click if you have any Google account anywhere), you’ll have the option to also post on the wall you’ll see under the same “Community” subsection.  I encourage you all to get on the wall and communicate!  You can leave a message for me, or respond to others’ messages.  The replies are threaded, so it makes for a great place to just talk amongst yourselves.  Also, through Friend Connect, if you are a Twitter user, you can now invite your friends to read an article via Twitter by clicking the “Invite” link, choosing the “other” option, and then Twitter.  Google just announced this today.  I’m sure you’ll see many more features launched in the future as Google tries to compete with Facebook.

If you join Facebook Connect, you’ll have the option to invite your Facebook friends.  In the very near future you should be able to also use this same identity to comment on posts, post those comments to Facebook, among other things.  (It’s still unclear if this will be through Disqus or not)  For now you can still share the posts to your profile, and see other Facebook users and friends that have visited the site.  Expect to see much more as I begin to enhance and expand both Friend Connect and Facebook Connect to further enhance the site.

More About Me

Let’s face it, I have to pay the bills.  So I have included some more information about me, and about the blog.  Go ahead - click on the “About” section.  Oooh - see it expand and contract?  Pretty cool, eh?  This will only get better.

You’ll notice I now have information about my Speaking, and Consulting.  If you know someone, or have an opportunity in either of these areas, please don’t hesitate to send people my way.  I’d love to see how I can help you, as I feel I have a few talents I can share with you and your friends in various capacities.  Check out my client list if you want to know results.

Also, I’m avoiding it for the moment, but those little square boxes in the upper-right could be for sale if you would like to make an offer.  I also have 3 more boxes that could go below those, and they can be combined to make bigger boxes.  Let me know if it’s something you’re interested in.  Make me an offer and I’d love to consider it, although I’m still debating if I want to sell ads here or not.

Photography

Dooce, watch out - I’m coming for you!  There’s more than enough room for the two of us here in Utah, and us Daddy bloggers can compete with the rest of ‘em!  As of yesterday, I’m now starting (at least) a photo of the day.  What the subject of these will be I’m still debating, but I’m open to suggestions, and feedback.  My goal is to tell a story.  Photography is a passion, and hobby of mine - I’d like to share some of that with you.

You’ll still get the same tech news, same early adopter technologies.  I’ll still be blogging regularly on LouisGray.com, InsideFacebook.com, and occasionally Dadomatic.com (just search for my name on any of those sites), but this is always my home.  Keep coming back!  Oh, and trust me, there’s much more to come.

As I said earlier last week, Friday I was on a New Media and Journalism panel with Paul Foy of the AP and Fields Mosley of KUTV Channel 2 news here in Salt Lake. As the blogger of the group, I had a unique opportunity to share some of the new advances in Media. I gained a new perspective on journalism and shared my thoughts over on LouisGray.com (where I regularly blog - subscribe to see more of my posts there!).

Here’s a brief quote:

“As the blogger of the group, I was obviously the least experienced in the field of journalism. I actually felt quite awkward at times feeling they thought I was out of place, and was that “guy who sits in his pajamas in his parents’ basement”. (I actually brought that up, mentioning only half of it was true - I’m actually at Jiffy Lube as I write this, awaiting my car to receive its safety and emissions certification. And yes - I’m dressed.) However, in reality, in a room of PR and marketing professionals in the tech field, they were actually the ones out of place, and I think that became evidently clear as one of the audience members asked who in the audience had published some sort of content about the event we were in during the event. Almost all of the audience, including me, rose their hands. The traditional news reporters were the only ones without their hands raised, further showing the sad state of our news media today.”

Old Media is dead. Read more over on LouisGray.com.

It would appear that in the last 2 days, TechCrunch has again gone down a spot in the Technorati top 100 from #2 to #3. This would put Gizmodo in the #2 spot, making Gizmodo now the #1 Tech Blog on the internet. The #1 spot on Technorati is still held by the Huffington post, a politics blog, and it’s unclear if it will remain that way now that the elections are over.

Technorati results are calculated by number of links in a short time frame, which means that fewer people are linking to TechCrunch these days. Is the internet revolting? FeedBurner shows their reader count still going up (I had to do an archive.org search, and the FeedBurner widget comes up there showing their current count - it’s interesting that they removed that count from their live site however). They hit 1 million readers back in September, and since then they seemed to have gained 300,000 more. Gizmodo has not published their subscriber numbers.

So it goes to show that links, and Technorati results really don’t matter in the end - it’s Readers that count. It’s still interesting however the trends of linking we’re seeing lately. There’s no doubt TechCrunch is still a force to be reckoned with.

The end of this year is turning out to be quite an eventful one for me. This Friday I’ll be doing a free O’Reilly Webinar, “Creating Facebook Applications — A Beginner’s Guide”. The webinar starts at 10:00am PST, and I’ll probably talk for about 30-40 minutes on how to get started in Facebook App development, after which we’ll have a question and answer session where you can ask your own questions about Facebook development. Register now, as attendance is limited! From the registration page:

“In this session you’ll learn how your apps talk to Facebook, how Facebook talks back, where to find the information you need, viral integration points to promote your app, and learn the very basics of creating a fully functional Facebook application. Come and listen in and bring your questions as [I] present this valuable topic towards getting your web apps recognized through the great tools Facebook provides.”

In the meantime, you may purchase my book on Amazon to get a head-start!

November 13, 6pm MST - Ignite Salt Lake City

Next week I’ll be condensing my presentation even more in what ought to be a fun night of fast-paced information, random facts, and hilarious stories at Ignite Salt Lake City. Each presenter is allowed to talk about almost anything - there are just a few rules. Each presenter has 5 minutes, 20 slides, and each slide automatically rotates every 15 seconds. I’ll be doing the impossible and talking about “How to build a Facebook App in 5 minutes”. The free event is sponsored by O’Reilly, and boasts participants such as Josh Coates, CEO of Mozy. O’Reilly does these around the nation, and Salt Lake City is quite lucky to have one of their own. I’m looking for a great evening of informative fun!

November 20 - Global Entrepreneurship Week Utah

Details are still forthcoming, but I’ve been invited to speak at Global Entrepreneurship Week, Utah on the 20th. I’ll share more details as that works out, but mark your calendars!

December 5, 7:30am MST - Utah Technology Council

On December 5, I’ll be on a panel with other traditional media reporters talking to PR and Marketing professionals at the Utah Technology Council. I’ll be “the blogger” of the group, and hope to share some of the ways marketers and PR professionals can get interest from bloggers, and the types of things we like and dislike. I warned them I may have very different opinions than the traditional media reporters there, and they were very open to that - it should be a very fascinating conversation! I’ll share more details about that as I get them as well.

In January I’ll be judging a yet to be disclosed development-related contest that I’m very excited about. The contest will take place in the Bay area, and I’ll be judging entries submitted - I’m really looking forward to this one. It’s fun to see the creative juices of developers and what others can come up within a limited environment.

So, if you’re in the area for any of these (or online for at least one of them), stop on by and say hi! I’d love to see you and welcome any questions or feedback you may bring.

A few of the Automattic developers are announcing a new beta program for Wordpress.com blogs in which blog owners can enable Intense-debate and Disqus-style e-mail replies to comments on a blog (this blog uses Disqus comments). Such an announcement comes on the heels of Automattic’s purchase of Intense-debate, and according to Joseph Scott (one of the developers), the feature was actually co-written by one of the Intense-debate developers, Jon Fox.

According to the various posts, soon users will be able to comment on Wordpress.com blogs, and when they comment, the blog owner will receive notice of the comment via e-mail. The blog owner can then respond straight from the e-mail without having to go back to the website to comment.

This integration seems to be just the first step of Automattic integrating with Intense-Debate. Other competitors that provide similar offerings are Disqus, and JS-Kit. Disqus doesn’t seem to be worried however, claiming that only 5% of Disqus blogs are based on Wordpress (I personally, am a big fan of Disqus). Such a unified effort should worry the competitors however - where so many blog owners are now seamlessly integrated into a hosted commenting solution, every reader of those blogs will now also be required to integrate. It will be interesting to see what the response from the competition will be.

The beta is for Wordpress.com users only. No word on if self-hosted blogs such as Stay N’ Alive will be provided an update.