I almost fell for it – can’t remember how I got onto Salon.com, maybe it was just to read a story in my RSS feed in more detail – I think it all started on Facebook – where I was initially looking for what I posted to my feed recently.

I can’t even find the page on Salon.com that I went to because the page is probably served up dynamically and the related information is geo-targeted to me, I’m guessing.  But I ended up on a “fake news site“  reading a fake commentary by a fake reporter (who exists in multiple places with different stock portrait photos)  that sounded too good to be true AND was written to be search optimized.

Scams are getting more sophisticated and with artful content management systems, and the geo-targeting – the link appeared in Salon.com after all.  But then again, Newspapers are dying and trying to make ends meet – I understand that – and Salon.com may not be the most reliable place to read it – but I suspect I would find Adblade over at the New York Times – then again, maybe I’m wrong.

But maybe Mark Cuban knows the answer and he thinks it doesn’t look so good for Google (who started it all – or popularized and monetized it the best).  According to Mark Cuban.

There is a wholesale change occurring in how we acquire information. In the past, if we were looking for a new restaurant in our home town, the score of a game or news headlines we may do a search to get information. Now, as the commercial says, “There is an app for that”. Just download the app that lists the restaurants, points of interest, museums, news, sports scores whatever you are interested in to your app enabled device of choice.  If there isn’t an app for it today, there will be.  If you carry an Apple or Android (owned and offered for free by Google) enabled device just look at how your information discovery and consumption habits have changed.  Do you search more or less?  Do you now get information from Apps that you used to get in search results ? Of course you do.

All that information in all those apps on all those devices, as well as the discovery steps you take to get that information are all hidden from Google (at least on the IPhone and non Android platforms, which may be why Android is free and available to all in an effort to counterbalance this problem). Worse for google, with companies like Urban Airship and Superfeedr.com, more and more real time updates are being delivered exclusively to apps, independent of the device operating system  and not being posted on the web.

Reminded me of a recent meeting I had with Dana Todd (known in the search engine world and someone I interviewed 4 years ago at Webmetricsguru.com) who works with a company that sells related stories that Newspapers and Magazines pick up – then it all came together – I saw what was happening  -online  newspapers/ magazines  want to fill up unused inventory and monetize it – in comes Newsvine along with AdBlade (maybe there’s a few more steps/companies in the picture I suspect fake news sites weave in stories that are made up with others from citizen journalists) in an supplies a story or two – when someone clicks on it – the publisher makes money – that’s what I think happened.   If your not looking that closely, the story looks real.   Hmmm.

Guess you have be even more careful

Anyway …  According to Steve Rubel Klout to Launch Facebird for Facebook I tried to get FaceBird to work but today I can’t even login to Klout.net much less Klout Labs (none of the links work their, either – so maybe I’ll need to wait a day or two more before I can write about what Facebird does after I can play with it myself.

Also, ManyMoon(s) looks good – haven’t tried it yet (names seems familiar though, maybe I wrote about them before), JaTin writes about it – maybe it’s worth taking a closer look.

Yesterday I noticed a post at Social Media Today on how Social networks are redefining what a friend or a relationship really is and it got me thinking about how there are a few ways to look at it.  One point of view is that we’re in a Social Media “bubble” and we can’t meaningfully interact with more than 150 people vs. those who think that Social Networking amplifies the amount of people you can have “weak” relationships with by a factor of “N” – or the number of contacts that you add to your network.    Other are in the middle – closer to one side or the other.  Here’s more from the SMT post:

It’s forever changing the etymology of commonly used words; and I would say easily within a few years it will completely alter their understanding and perception as younger generations continue to evolve as digitals’  new natives.

Here are the prime and most glaring examples.

• Friend-Means absolutely nothing anymore. All it means is that we have allowed the other into our networks, or vice-versa. Soon we will have to qualify what kind of friend you or they actually are.

• Follow-At its core, to follow would mean to come or go after; proceed behind; go in a straight or obvious course. There is nothing in the social networking world that resembles that definition. But as it stands now, if I were to tell you that I follow him or her-there still might be a pregnant pause. That too will soon change.

• Like-I don’t even know where to begin.

• Relationship-the definition of the relation connecting or binding participants in a relationship would seem to closely align itself with today’s social networks. However, some now think that relationships can be built on the thinnest of determinants. Which lead to this next tweet from me:

Oil Spills – seems to come up a lot lately – I even wrote about it last weekend in TwitterDemographics Insights – GulfSpill but if you want to see Oil Spill Visualizations and even see what that might look like “if it was in your hometown or area”  look no further than this post.

.. Yeah, back to the Gulf.  And that’s got people thinking about the Safety Calculus after BP.

Getting back to Social Media – here’s an interesting correlation between traditional research and Social Media Research by Annie Pettit – who also reads this blog – and I think have met at Sentiment Analysis Symposium a few months back.

One of the things that really excited me was seeing  Hyperlinks Embedded In Printed Books - which is just what I was imagining would start happening – here’s part of that post.

A professor at Purdue University, Sorin Matei, has embedded books with two-dimensional QR codes that work as hyperlinks when photographed. Matei’s project Ubimark tries to focus on people who prefer print books over e-books but still want some interactive elements in them. Ubimark aims to enhance the physical reality of books with stories, travel experiences, ratings or information from the web. The classic novel, Around the World in 80 Days, is the first book to be available under this project, with bar-like codes.

The QR code in a book, pamphlet or other “offline” marketing is one of the things that will tie together online with offline marketing and Social Media  tracking, btw, which includes Social Media monitoring.

And that reminds me – my SlideShare on the Future OF Social Media Monitoring, presented in London last November,  has now been viewed over 11,000 times.