300 Reasons to Stay Up All Night

I spend waaaayyyy too much time online these days.  So much so that I haven’t been out to a bar or club or restaurant in weeks.

Some of you are laughing (and you should) but too many of you aren’t laughing.  It’s easy to understand how even reasonable people get stuck in the web.  Stuck like flies in, uh, well, like flies in a web. And many of you are worse off than I am — I have friends who are up all night playing Farmville or madly trying to upload another 10 gigabytes of family travel photos to Picasa.

But even that is not the half of it.

Want a picture of what’s REALLY going on?  Check this out. Social Networking Has Gone Mad.  [And if you can’t see the picture, here’s a Wiki List of active social networks.]  And this is just the beginning. My brother Jim says “Social Media is just 3 seconds old.”

Today, hanging out online is like walking down High Street.  Or the Bowry.  Or Haight Ashbury.  Or all of them together, stretching in a thousand-mile long, unbroken line of taverns, flop houses, hooka bars, discos, clubs and worse.

In fact, there are now far more than 300 active “social networking” websites.  (And I thought FaceBook and Twitter were the bomb.)

Now, “being connected” is a race.  How many sites can I post, blog, ping, digg, and stumble over before I drop from exhaustion each night.

Can I reach enough people on Tumblr.com to make it worth my while?  Or should I head down a back alley that drops me at the door of Squidoo.com, where just saying the name seems to guarantee a dot-com love fest.

Which brings me to the reason for this post.  Here it is… ready?  My reason for posting tonight is just exactly this: “<!–5b7d5ade352a420d8bb7b33ec3e2b84b–>” 

No, that’s not a typo.

Yes….  <!–5b7d5ade352a420d8bb7b33ec3e2b84b–>.

This is one of those linking codes that ties my blog to some other site. (digg.com in this case)

So there you are.  I’ve accomplished one more step in the social media networking madness.  1 down, 299 to go.

If I’m a bit bleary-eyed in the morning, just say, “<!–5b7d5ade352a420d8bb7b33ec3e2b84b–>”

To your profits,

David