I’ve been surfing through quite a lot of tweetheads at Twitter, and adding a few of them as friends, but for some reason the number of friends for my profile stayed the same no matter how many people I added. I chalked this up for being a time delay before the server updated my profile, but I finally had the presence of mine to try it again using IE7 instead of Firefox.

Yep, you guessed it, adding friends doesn’t work if you’re using the Firefox browser. Not only that, you can’t delete tweets either. WT*??

Give me a flipping break Twitter. Are you guys such anal fart knockers that you can’t even make your website standards compliant for REAL browsers?? Get a fricking clue already you schmucks.

Sheesh, 20 minutes of my life wasted and now I have to do it all over again.

As I travel around the blogosphere, I’ve come across numerous tips and advice on how to successfully blog and develop a strong readership. Some of it involves developing a community of friends on social networks that could potentially bring an onslaught of massive traffic to your site. This can be done once you establish a mini-network of friends who can collectively Digg, Stumble or Reddit your blogging content, with you of course agreeing to do the same for them in return (sort of a you scratch my back, I’ll shave yours arrangement).

Some people can be really good at this for whatever reason. Me on the other hand… I can’t make friends in real life, I’m supposed to do it on here? My ass. I begged just ONE acquaintance of mine to stumble my blog so I could get a boost in traffic and of course I got blown off. Obviously this isn’t going to be a winning strategy for me right now. Ahhhhh, if only I were a hot babe, how easier this would all be…..

But anyway…

A few of the blogging experts I’ve encountered also recommended getting an outside web designer to develop the look of your blog for you (and also assist in optimizing it for search engines). Look, I don’t want no designer touching my private goomie gammies, capice? The thought of a third party having access to my code like that just doesn’t give me any warm and fuzzy thoughts, ya know?

But I can understand the rationale behind it. Blogging, or rather, professional blogging is HARD work. You’re basically doing the work of three people largely because it’s a three pronged process: promotion, maintenance and content building, all of which can be full time jobs unto themselves. And because I spent so much time on the former two for the past couple of weeks, I left myself little time for the latter.

Obviously, that will have to change as I try to find a way to balance these three aspects to blogging. But now I’m sorely tempted to just say “You know what? Screw it, it’s time I started BLOGGING, PERIOD.” It doesn’t matter that I still don’t really know who I am as a person, much less what the hell my niche should be. I think I need to just get up and go, and let the words flo’. Maybe this way I’ll somehow be able to create something coherent and interesting enough to attract a readership larger than the 5 people who regularly visit the NPR website.

A writer at MSNBC recently took a look at the Twitter phenomenon and concluded that Twitter was ultimately boring and stupid. Maybe instead of spending her time clapping her hands and gleefully exclaiming, “Oooooh look at me, look at me! I actually get paid to write the crap I do!” she might see there’s more to it than just announcing to the world when you recently hit the john.

Twitter brings back to life the concept of microblogging, where instead of sifting through long winded blogging entries, we can read a snippet that’s 140 characters or less. For those gifted in the “less is more” approach to blogging, such “tweets” can provide the reader remarkable insight and helpful information without forcing him to sacrifice precious time, a commodity that is becoming even more precious as the inane, white noise of the Internet continues to expand (thanks MySpace!) Check out my latest Twitter friend for an example. Most of her tweets are links to articles she’s been reading, which have proven to be very informative to me and I’m sure a few others as well. The rest are usually witty insights that either makes me snicker or break out laughing.

But besides that, Twitter gives people an opportunity to CARE. It may be vain in some respects, but there’s another part of the equation telling us that when we tweet, people sometimes actually listen. And when they listen, it shows they care. I know with my friends, I’d actually would want to know what they were doing, what they’ve recently been thinking of, how their day’s been going, and so on. If one tweets out a message, “Not feeling well today,” I might be inclined to give them a call and make sure they’re ok. I have an online buddy who recently took an extended road trip halfway across the U.S. She’s not a Tweethead, but had she been one, I would have LOVED to see the kind of tweets she likely would have made during that trip. Her writing has a hilarious and engaging style to it, so there’s no doubt any tweets send to my Twitterbox from her would have been equally as engaging and fun to read. But because I also consider her a friend, anything I read of hers through Twitter would never be considered stupid or boring. And that I think is really the point: Twitter is a tool that can not only enable people to “blog in the moment,” it also helps bring friends and family together. And yes, as with any new technology that comes along, people will always find ways to abuse it or use it to gratify their already bloated egos. Too bad the MSNBC crank who wrote that piece couldn’t get past that to see the value Twitter could truly provide. But then again, this is MSNBC we’re talking about. One can understand why Twitter might seem less than alluring to use should Chris Matthews ever discover it.

Is it me, or does the mass of social networking (or Web 2.0) sites out there seem to be such an overwhelming chaos of convoluted information that even Einstein would have trouble making sense of it all?

Unfortunately though, not content to see 3 or 4 daily readers perusing my blog (despite my anti-social tendencies), I decided to make a journey through the social networking universe and see what was out there, and whether I wanted any of it to come back to my little corner on the web. I also needed a vehicle that would help me find relevant content that could truly inspire me (while also setting me apart from other bloggers). I started by going down the list of social networking sites found at Wiki, and from there I proceeded to spend the rest of the day clicking from place to place, sometimes bored, sometimes impressed, but mostly confused and perplexed.

Some sites seemed simple enough in its concept, but others begged the question: “What in the blue @#$% is the point of all this?” First there were the MySpace clones, some of which appear to improve on MySpace’s shortcomings. Whatever. As far as I was concerned, such sites were online slums exhibiting the worst that humanity had to offer, so I quickly moved on whenever it became obvious that a site I was visiting had been designed using a model similar to MySpace. To be fair, Facebook wasn’t nearly as bad or coarse as some of the MySpace pages I’ve surfed, but it’s really designed for those attending college (and for employees of popular companies).

Then it was on to sites that offered… well I wasn’t exactly sure what it was they offered. The worst offender I think had to be BlinkBits. I just stared at this thing for what had to be 30 minutes and I still couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do. It did appear to be overwhelmed with spam though, and whenever I made a test submission, the content just seemed to get lost in all the advertising for Viagra. Hooo-kay…. Blinklist on the other hand seemed to be more polished, but it was still hard to understand the actual purpose of it. The list of “blinks” I sifted through didn’t seem appealing enough for me to check out (and again a lot of the blinks appeared to be spam).

My headaches from surfing finally started to wane when I began checking out the social bookmarking sites. Del.icio.us as some people by now probably know is the most popular one there is, but to me it seemed a little… bland. REALLY bland. So bland in fact that I thought for sure I was missing something, a key feature I was supposed to enable to access its full features. But nope, Del.icio.us was just a simple bookmarking service that utilizes tags to help you organize your bookmarks. Its interface though was just plain UGLY to me, and once I realized it couldn’t be changed, I began to understand why other social bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia existed. I’ve already uploaded my bookmarks to Del.icio.us, but I think after I organize them I’ll export tham to Ma.gnolia, which has a much more polished and appealing interface to me. Del.icio.us seemed like the barebones equivalent of a Linux box, while Ma.gnolia gave me that happy-dappy, flower-filled MacOS feel, complete with sunshine and rainbows. There were a few other bookmarking services as well with some truly novel concepts, like Backflip’s method of organzing your bookmarks in a Yahoo style directory, but the rest more or less seemed redundant to me.

I then moved on to blogging oriented communities, like Xanga, Blogger and LiveJournal. But the most polished one I’ve found thus far was Vox.com, created by the makers of the MovableType blogging script. I’ve already been able to duplicate most, if not all of the features offered by these communities on my own blog, so I didn’t feel the need to join for the time being. One community that stood out a little though was MyBlogLog, which was designed with the idea of having people connect with other readers of their favorite blogs. I played around with it for a while, but didn’t see much use for it, partly because my favorite blogs weren’t listed, and partly because the listing of readers for a particular blog didn’t tell me much, if anything. All you see is a small thumbnail of the reader and their usually cryptic usernames underneath. It was still an interesting concept though, so I may decide to stick around and see if I can make it worth my while. There was another site called Squidoo that looked intriguing as well, giving users the ability to create “lenses” that were in essence start pages piecing together a variety of content reflecting the user’s personal interests. At least I think that’s what it is. It basically just offered a different way to organize content, but unfortunately the design seems to make it susceptible to spam as well. Some of the lenses read more like bland advertisements rather than a user’s actual personal take on places on the web that interested him.

For the most part I ignored some of the popular social networks based on specific themes since I was, ironically enough, already a member of them. Namely, I’m thinking of YouTube, Last.FM and Flickr. These three sites have definitely proved their weight in gold, and I’ve been consistently using all of them to complement my own blog. It’s funny, while I generally despise mainstream social networks like MySpace, these theme based networks on the other hand are like manna from heaven. There’s even a site called Doostang that’s designed to help people find jobs through social networking. Muy coolio.

I also came across a few nifty sites that offered a variety of ways for people to organize get-togethers and meetings in real life. Dodgeball (which uses mobile phones to send you alerts when friends and crushes are nearby) and Meetup (which allows you to find groups and meetings of interest in your area) were two of the best I’ve seen. If I had any friends I’m sure these services would certainly come in handy.

Finally, I soon I began descending on news oriented sites like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Tailrank, NewsVine (and many, many more). Newsvine by the way actually looked in some ways like NetVibes (a service that allows you to design your own personal start page through aggregation). It looked interesting, but WAY overloaded with content. It was one of those things that required your full attention in order to understand how it worked, but I suspect I’ll be investing a lot of time learning how to use all the features it offered only to end up wondering why I bothered in the first place. Tailrank was more blogging oriented, providing feeds for the user that can help you glean what
topics were currently drawing the most interest in the blogosphere. Reddit offered a Slashdot-like way to submit and discuss news items in a vanilla but very addictive format. Then there was Meshly, a service that offered a way for users to submit articles and content via instant messaging. Digg was far more polished in its look and voting system and remains one of the top sites in this particular category of social networks, but in the end I began to realize why these particular sites weren’t that appealing to me. In truth, I wasn’t really a news oriented person. I’m as interested in what’s happening in the world as anyone else of course, but sites like Digg and Reddit completely overwhelm you not just with news related items, but LONG discussion threads such news articles regularly spawn. They seem to go on forever, and ever, and ever, and…

I also noticed that these news oriented networks tend to draw a particularly monolothic demographic, so much that the vast majority of users that peruse these sites could probably be described as angry white male geekazoids who generally spend their pastime decrying in rabid fashion the latest evils of the current White House administration. Ironically enough, this probably would have still been the case had a site like Digg been launched in say, 1998, which back then would have undoubtedly provided an outlet for angry white male geekazoids to vent their frustrations over, uhhhh… the latest evils of the White House administration. In a way this is what I believe is the downside of time based content. It’s repetitive, cyclical, and ultimately boring. Wars come, wars go. Scandals come, scandals go. There really is nothing new under the sun. And I was getting tired of reading through news items that continuously sparked the same old rehashed arguments and flame wars ad infinitum. Good grief, tell me something NEW.

And yet the blogosphere is mostly awash in news, and discussions (or flame wars) over said news, so much that they start to become almost indistinguishable from one another. Where was the diversity? Where was the focus on timeless content, on things that might really matter? The void here was remarkably palpable to me, abandoned instead for themes that would guarantee the heaviest traffic: news and politics. Quality is forsaken in the never ending quest for quantity. And why not? Quantity after all is what brings in the mula.

Tired and weary from my online journey around the world, and from sifting through the endless content at places like Reddit and Digg, it occurred to me that I already had something wonderful and good all along, patiently waiting for me to come home. I had a means to explore timeless content the way it used to be done, back when the web was just getting started. Back when it wasn’t all about news, but about people, about true individuality and innovation. About things that mattered. That something was a small little toolbar currently residing at the top of my browser, provided to me by the good folks at StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon was really what I had been looking for all along. A way to surf the web aimlessly and randomly, and yet still find wonderful places that I could bookmark or blog about in a heartbeat. I was finding content that mattered to me, content I never would have found in a million years perusing sites like Reddit or Digg, or even via a search on Google. The kind of community StumbleUpon offered also proved to be far more diverse, and a more accurate reflection of the general population of mankind. StumbleUpon was the kind of social network that attracted people from all walks of life, rather than just a particular demographic of smarmy geeks who coined phrases like “Web 2.0″ and “folksonomies,” and then expecting the rest of us mere mortals to know what the hell they’re talking about.

So finally, after two bleary eyed days of clicking and surfing, after seeing what’s out there and beyond, the prodigal blogger has finally stumbled his way home. And who knows, if even StumbleUpon should lose its appeal after time, I could always create my own social network.

It was Uptown Girl’s birthday recently, so I decided to surprise her by having flowers delivered to her doorstep. I wanted to show her I was sincerely interested in her, and I admit I was kinda hoping the flowers would tug at her heart strings a little more too.

I got several text messages from her when she got them, so that’s encouraging. Nothing about me of course is normal, and if I hadn’t told her I was hearing impaired and hated using the phone, I’m sure she would have called instead. Trying to generate something solely via email with someone who is not much of an Internet person to begin with is, to put it mildly, a bit frustrating. Especially when that someone is so busy at times she barely has time to herself, let alone the time to email someone. I was going to have to call her in order to sustain things

I knew I was going to have to go out into the real world if I wanted to get somewhere with her, and even though she was understanding and was willing to take things slow, I couldn’t string her along forever.

So I began the process of improving my hygiene and my health. My experience so far though tells me this was not going to be a walk in the park for me. First I went out and bought some anti-acne facial wash to clean up my face a little. The net result was no change in my acne, but my lips began to shrivel up like I had swallowed a pound of alum. Even a week after I stopped using the wash my lips were still parched and crusty. I also had dried skin on my nose that still wouldn’t go away after applying several cans of vitamin E and aloe vera cream on it, a body wash whose pleasant odor dissipated five seconds after I got out of the shower, deodorant that gave my armpits rashes even though they contained “all natural” ingredients, nose and ear hair that even a weed whacker would have problems gutting, and perpetually sweaty palms that drive me so crazy I’m considering using a blow torch to keep them dry.

Cripes this was hard. It was like my own body was furiously plotting against me, determined to ensure I’d live out the rest of my days as an unwed hermit. Compounding things even more was the fact that I haven’t had a decent wardrobe in years, partly due to wearing a uniform on my job (thus vacating the need for any dressy attire) and my Homer Simpson shaped figure.

No wonder I’m so afraid to step outside the door. And now I have this beautiful and accomplished woman that I’ve somehow managed to get the attention of, but because my stupid ass wasn’t willing to wait and get my body under control first before I started seeding dating profiles halfway around the galaxy, I now have to deal with the possibility that I will completely humiliate myself and ruin my chances with a rare and decent girl, the likes of whom may come only once in this lifetime.

For whatever reason, I seem to be continuously pitted against insurmountable odds in my quest for a life (and some smoochies…. ok lots of smoochies). I can either toss in the towel and decide this is a war I can never win, or take it head on, Rocky style.

And I think if I do go down for the count, then I should at least go down swinging.

There may be nothing else in life that could capture those elements of my personality that equally combine outrageous comedy, despair, hope, and yearning for love than this famous Saturday Night Live video, starring John Belushi and his rendition of Joe Cocker’s “I Get By With a Little help From My Friends.” As dark as my personality can be at times, I am at heart, a true comedian.