A policeman in Bozeman Montana was recently forced to resign for an offhanded comment on his facebook page suggesting “there should be a law saying police can take people to jail for being stupid.”  Frankly I agree, and possibly would add voluntary sterilization as well. Crap- now I’ll never be able to get new job. Bozeman has had its run ins with social media in the past though. As Adam Ostrow’s post in Mashable illustrates, Bozeman is not the only city or town or employer struggling to come to terms with practice and policy around social media. From the NFL to the US Military, employers and intsitutions are having a hard time figuring out this whole thing.  Bozeman Montana, the employer, was embroiled in controversy earlier this year when new policies for hiring city employees required job applicants to divulge their user names and passwords for any and all social media sites or chat rooms they belonged to. Several other examples of employees being fired for work and non-work related comments on social media sites have been reported on over the past while. A CNN blog cites a “Top 10 Tweets to Get You Fired” list where prospective employees lost a job opportunity for tweeting something stupid, or in fact lost their current job from doing the same. Facebook has also been a vehicle for early job dismissal, and in a controversial way at times.

In fact another Mashable article states that 8% of US compnies have fired an employee for Facebook comments. So whatever you do- keep your negative comments to yourself-OR join a group like Protocols in New York City. To quote an article by Allen Salkin of the NY Times the concept of Protocols is as such:

“…held every two weeks since September 2008 in a small private penthouse in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood, (Protocols) is  hosted by five news media types who each invite two guests. The idea, according to a host, Michael Malice, an author and blogger, is to let invitees talk fearlessly in the present.”

A radical new idea in our modern times, be present, here, now, focus on what you are doing or just let the moment be. Not everything we do has to be chronicled on Facebook, Twitter or every other site and app for posterity or nostalgia’s sake. And though it may seem revolutionary and daring, it is in fact an ancient and quite well known approach to using your time. It is a core tenet of Buddhism.

So next time you want to tweet about how stupid your boss or coworker is, or vent on Facebook about how boring and useless your job is just sit back, take a deep breath and ask yourself “What would Buddha do?”

They say 100 billion spam emails are sent every single day. Most eBay auctions for big ticket items end with the buyer saying they’ll happily pay once you send the item to an address somewhere in Nigeria. And if you’ve ever tried to sell a computer, concert tickets or sex (joke) on Craigslist, there’s a pretty good chance you were paid with a forged money order. And now that social networking is all the rage, scammers and spammers have figured out lots of ways of making a few bucks while ruining the fun for everyone else.

(image from CrunchGear.com)

In just a few minutes of looking, I found a whole variety of stories about all the different and devious ways the un-scrupulous are taking advantage of all us social networkers. CNN reports the (unsurprising and slightly belated) news that not all Tweets are as innocent as Lindsay Lohan’s posted topless self-portrait. In a growing number of cases, spammers are using Twitter to send out links to malware-infested websites. Considering the relative youth of Twitter, we hopefully have a year or two before Tweets go the way of email, with 85% or 90% of them being spam offering super-oooOOOO-low PREICES for pres**crip**tion meds!!!

Click fraud, as mentioned recently right here, is another slightly more devious and insidious type of scam perpetrated on those who use social networks. In this story from Tech Crunch, angry Facebook advertisers complain they’re being robbed of thousands of dollars by click-bots. Interestingly, Facebook didn’t do much to address their complaints, despite the fact that click fraud is a huge (and growing) problem for social networking sites, as they look to monetize their sites more and more.

Of course, not all scams are perpetrated by lonely, cash-hungry spammers. Lots of corporations are doing their part to decrease the faith users put in the information they get from social networks. So many companies are secretly paying bloggers to write positive faux-reviews of their products and services, that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is starting to look into it. In fact, new guidelines may be in place by the end of the summer that will allow the FTC to go after bloggers who make false claims or fail to disclose an existing conflict of interest. And on that note, I should probably let you all know that I have no connection whatsoever to Lindsay Lohan or anyone selling discount prescription meds, but I do occasionally go out for gelato with these guys.

So, inevitably, it happened. The heavyweight Twitter battle between Ashton Kutcher and CNN was close for a few rounds, but it ended with a loss for mainstream news, and a win for the guy from Punk’d. If you hadn’t heard, there was a race going on to see whether Ashton or CNN would be the first to reach a million followers on Twitter. This chart follows the action in real-time, and while you won’t be able to be there for the historic crossing of the million threshold, it still makes for compelling viewing.

As if that weren’t enough, the blogosphere, the tweetosphere and pretty much every other osphere you’d care to mention, are abuzz. According to this article, there have been rumblings from deep in the Tweet Cave that something big is afoot. Yesterday, Twitter founder Evan Williams posted the following: “Tomorrow just became a very big day (Sorry for the teaser – more later)”.

Speculation is rampant, with much of it pointing out the fact that the big day tease may be related to the fact that Oprah is doing a show on Twitter today. In fact, she’s apparently sending her first tweet as we speak. Her guest on the big show? Ashton Kutcher. I do wonder who exactly decided it would be good TV to have Oprah and Ashton both sitting on a couch madly sending tweets as fast as they can. And for that matter, who decided Ashton should be the official symbol for all things Twitter? For the life of me, I was sure he was busy being the symbol of a good, deeply entrenched Oedipal complex.

People who write articles and blog posts and whatnot have figured out a few tricks to attract readership. One popular technique is to use wild exaggeration in the headline, to try to fool people into thinking the article or post is more significant than it is. (cough, cough…) But another far, far more important and well-utilized technique is to SEO the hell out of everything you write. Now, search-engine optimization is a tried, true and accepted way to attract readers to your website, whether you’re trying to sell stuff, increase ad revenue or just bump up your readership. But where it gets a little dodgy, in my opinion anyway, is when the mainstream media starts getting into the SEO game. There’s one little throwaway line in these writer guidelines for the Huffington Post posted yesterday, where they say that submitted articles may be edited for SEO purposes.

Well, what’s the big deal? Of course media outlets want to attract readers using any method at their disposal, right? The big deal is that SEO is a slippery slope. On one end of the spectrum, it can be as simple as using tags and keywords to improve your Google ranking. But at the other end of the spectrum you get into a situation where SEO dictates content. The web is full of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of sites that create content purely to get traffic from search engines. That’s why there are, when I checked a few minutes ago, 207,000,000 returns when you Gooogle the phrase “Top 10″. A long time ago, someone figured out that top 10 lists are a great way to attract readers, and now there are more of them online than photos of Britney Spears’ crotch.

But when big media, the CNN’s and CBS News’s of the world, start creating content just to attract traffic, they’re not really doing what media should be doing. Instead of investigating and informing their readership about “real” news, they’re writing countless articles about who got kicked off of American Idol, or the “Top 10 movie car chase scenes”. Okay, maybe this doesn’t actually spell the destruction of the world…maybe I exaggerated slightly in the headline. But it is an interesting, and kinda crappy, side-effect of the intricacies of SEO.