Social Stalking 2.0

Between Twitter, Facebook, Digg and Jaiku, you really can tell a lot about someone by the traces they leave online. Especially with Jaiku as it also allows you to add all just about any RSS feed you might have online: News, Blogs, Podcasts, VidCasts, Photocasts and generic lists. It is truly amazing how all these 2.0 sites allow you to create some of the most stunning content rich sites without any knowledge of HTML, server side scripting or database development. I’m not shy of blogs and site development but this whole tech section has been built using only Google’s tools:

• I am using my GMAIL account to as the main ID for all these tools. As much as MSN wanted you to do this with Hotmail and Passport, Gmail managed to tap into faster and more effectively.
• The site is obviously hosted on Blogger, even I could of had it hosted on my server, the online layout templates where so easy to use and customise that it just was not worth the hassle of the coding something like I did for Planet Fortier.
• Some of the Photo Albums are provided by Picasa Web Albums. Sure I could have used Flickr, but I have been using Picasa offline for while now and it just works for me.
• The videos come straight from the freshly acquired YouTube. I must admit that this is not the easiest way of integrating video content, there is a certain amount cut and pasting to be done. The Blogger templates seem to have a way of integrating video channels but I have not played around with this enough to make a fair call on this.
• I am also able to post pictures and short content straight from the Treo 700P by emailing everything through my gmail account and simply appending [#end] at the end to make the signature and any other message does not get added to my blog post. I will admit that with out a pretty good data plan and EvDO speed this part of the process would suck. With EvDO access I can post 4 pictures and some text in under a minute and I don’t have to be standing still to do it.
• Some of the longer post, I use Docs & Spreadsheets to prepare them, the auto-saving feature is pretty useful , it also includes a pretty good HTML editor to quickly [Stylin’] some posts, it also publishes the post straight to the blog for me and if I need to make an update, it will go ahead and re-publish the post once I have made the changes and saved them.
• Finally I am using AdSense to help recuperate some of the cost of the servers as well as paying for the tech toys I’m and the lattes that fuel the creative genius (term used very loosely here).

So these tools are just Google’s, obviously I pay for none of them which make the whole thing even more unbelievable. I am also using Twitter with text messaging (SMS) to post all my random thoughts, I also like Twitter because it texts me updates on people I am following throughout the day. I must admit that Merlin Mann’ s Quips keep me smiling and trying to figure out what Veronica Belmont and Amber McArthur are talking about usually keep me pretty busy. Jaiku is very much like Twitter except that for now it is mostly web based, no SMS integration, I like to use Jaiku for the 2Fat Dads stuff , Leo Laporte is on it as well so it makes it very active. Jaiku’s best feature has to be it’s aggregation service for all of your other Blogs and RSS feeds. This basically gives one place to tell everyone you know what you are up to. Even more powerful is that you can use one of their badges on any of your sites and it display all of the feeds as they roll in from your blogs, twitter, and so on. This means you could SMS some random thought to Twitter and instantly your sites, your blogs, your friends Mobiles and even your Facebook contacts will be updated as to what you are doing.
See what I mean by social stalking 2.0… Scary stuff huh!