What information have companies collected about you? Your attention data, behaviors, demographics, clickstream patterns, etc… and more.

Which companies have personal data about you?
Where is it stored? Who has control of it?
Or rather.. who have they sold it to? And what will they do with it?

MANY companies now maintain a large array of personal info about anyone who uses their website or other services. Most companies use personal data to target products, advertisements and other offers to consumers.

Pierre-Guillaume Wielezynski of the World Bank, posted about a future model of user-centric ad-serving where corporations partner with individuals to access their personal information.

About Drupal for Facebook:
(from the Drupal project page)

This set of modules and themes turns Drupal into a platform for developing Facebook Applications.

With Drupal for Facebook, you can harness all the power of Drupal in your Facebook App. If you already have content in Drupal, you can expose it on Facebook.

The Drupal for Facebook philosophy is that the functionality already built into Drupal should be used to create Facebook Applications. Where possible, we use Drupal’s user management, permission schemes, blocks, views, etc. to implement the Facebook App. Experienced Drupal users will find it very straightforward to build a Facebook App. While Facebook developers new to Drupal may want to spend some time on Drupal.org learning best practices.

At this point, I strongly believe that social media spam prevention must occur at the social network software level. Social media sites can fight social spam by create algorithms that individualize user experience by interpreting relevancy through user relationships. Relationship data can come from what & how a user votes for, views, reads, recommends, bookmarks, or includes in his or her personal social network.

Utilizing OpenID Systems

Hopefullly, OpenID systems will allow social media sites to share user reputation, relevance, preference, and trust data with other social sites. More user data leads to the creation of more effective social media spam prevention tools, as well as increasingly relevant user experiences that give you exactly what you want.

Embeddable videos include YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Revver and Vimeo. Pownce has just added additional customization options, too. Read a good review of these new Pownce updates at Jeffro 2pt0.
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Look me up on Pownce @
http://pownce.com/socialmedia
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Pigeon has cracked the MySpace MSPlinks code.

In his words:

The obfuscated part of an msplinks URL is simply the original URL preceded by two digits and encoded using base64. Thank the Lord that it’s not actually encrypted. This makes it simple to recover the original URL.

The good news is that you don’t need to know programming of any sort to remove the MSPlinks.com redirects. Pigeon has created a bookmarklet that solves the problem.

Hiitch is a desktop social networking platform. It’s open source. You can actually download the source and create you own private social network with others you invite.

I’m still new to Hiitch so I’m still exploring its functionality, but it looks very exciting. I will definitely post updates as I get more accustomed with Hiitch’s social networking functions and others features.

The MSPlinks.com redirects are a backward step for online safety. MySpace has knowingly made users more vulnerable to online predators in its quest to increase profits.

If you haven’t already read how MySpace sacrificed user safety to boost revenue, you may want to.

You may also want to read about how MySpace used scare tactics to muscle users into viewing MySpace.com content in order to get big advertising deals. And their plan is working.

Pali Capital considers August 17, 2007 a monumental day for social networking and Myspace in particular, as Coke paid $1 million to have a Coke-branded MySpace home page for that entire day.

MySpace and Coca-Cola have in fact struck up a larger advertising deal that involves targeted advertising on all MySpace-produced MySpace pages (they won’t be advertising on pages that contain user-generated content.)

How was MySpace able to gain the confidence of major advertisers?
Let’s review the recent chain of events:

1. MySpace quietly added a bunch of unoriginal content sections that already exist on a number of other websites. (Ringtones, music videos, chat rooms, news, weather, horoscopes, etc.)

Round up of SMO coverage from the San Jose SES conference taken from unofficial SEO blog. SMO Speakers at SES included:

• Neil Patel, Co-founder, ACS
• Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMoz
• Todd Malicoat, Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant, stuntdubl

Todd Malicoat gave examples for types of linkbaiting hooks:

• attack
• humor
• contrarian (contrary opinion)
• news
• resource
• ego
• picture/movie

He also listed top title ideas and other social media optimization tips.

Rand Fishkin explained social media marketing and said that the social media marketing goal is to build friends and relationships in the blogosphere and at online social sites. Your target social media marketing audience is not same demographic as your customers.

What is ShiftSpace?

This is one of the most interesting applications of social network that I’ve seen in a while. Instead of operating on a completely separate domain, like MySpace, ShiftSpace allows the entire internet to be included in the landscape that forms the ShiftSpace network. This means that ShiftSpace users can interact in real ways with existing viewpoints, discussions, and events that are actually occurring throughout the world. This makes ShiftSpace more relevant than any closed system could be.