It never ceases to amaze me that lack of insight companies put into their “social media strategy”. Why do companies think that just putting up something on the Internet means they are going to generate business as if the World owes them a favour.

The fact is putting up a Facebook page or creating a Twitter account for your company doesn’t mean you’ve gone all Web 2.0. The “social” part of social media means engaging and interacting with people - this isn’t simply a broadcast medium.

No this isn’t in reference to my recent lack of posts for which I can only apologise - most of my spare time (of which there isn’t enough of) is spent with my 12 week old son. A pretty good excuse I think you’ll agree so don’t be too hard on me.

An article in Wired says Blogs are so 2004 says blogs are overcome with a “tsunami of paid bilge” so “Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.”

Hmm a little overreaction methinks. The Internet as a whole is full of paid and unpaid bilge so maybe that should be shut down?

Really it’s all a case of quality control which is also going to be the case of the other technologies mentioned in the article such as Twitter.

How do I find blogs? Well it isn’t a conscious decision on my part; I simply find them on my travels around the web. If I happen to surf onto a post of interest I will look at other posts in the blog and if they’re really lucky and I like what I see I’ll subscribe to the RSS feed. I’m the quality control and my quality control is tight - I subscribe to about 50 feeds in total which I don’t consider a lot as I’m a pretty heavy Internet user. This list is constantly reviewed if I don’t like the way a blog is going I hit the delete button - not really that difficult. Recommendations I like too as that web is a rather large place.

It’s just the age old web spam issue which the search engines are constantly fighting anyway - blog or webpages alike it makes no difference.

Well he isn’t actually but it’s a similar sort of headline that was taken seriously and reported by CNN. It would seem a blog reported Mr Jobs (High godness of Apple) had a heart attack and CNN broadcast this causing a drop in Apple’s share price.

A little bit irresponsible of CNN not to get this confirmed after all don’t believe everything you read online. It would also seem there are investigations to see if this story was published with the intention of pushing down the share price.

The media have been ever ready to attack anything Internet related as either the root of all evil or a fad that will disappear after a short period of time.

Social media websites, being the “new” thing have been repeatedly attacked as a bubble ready to burst - a claim I’ve always thought was way off the mark. My opinion was that users were becoming more mature and using websites in a different way with just some flaky users just stopping use.

Well Facebook have announced their first 100 million users (although how many inactive accounts is a mystery) and Hitwise is showing Facebook traffic is up 50% year on year. Now these are hardly figures showing a bubble bursting are they?

People like to socialise and it’s only natural they’re going to extend this online if the tools are available.