PSoTD

Do you welcome any contact from Public Relations (PR) firms or any corporation to provide information, offer comment or suggest people you might be interested in talking to?

This seems alien to me.

Ali Riaz has 126 friends on his Facebook account. Ten of them are his employees.

Riaz does not mind befriending his staff members online - as long as they initiate the process. "I don't want to impose," said Riaz, chief executive of Attivio, a software company in Newton, Massachusetts. "Everyone has a different definition of what is personal and private. There is a line there, but it's a wiggly line. Whenever you are in a power position, you have to be careful."

Networking sites like MySpace and Facebook introduce people to new friends and expand their cybercircles of pals. But they are also introducing people to a sticky etiquette issue that is becoming more common: What if your boss wants to be your buddy?

That can be an awkward intersection for people who try to keep their personal spaces and their workplaces separate. But as professional and personal worlds increasingly collide online, it is becoming harder to escape the boss's reach after hours.

Here's why this is sticky - Facebook asks for the employer. If a participant enters that information online, it makes it easy for the employer to find such employees on their service. If the employee is actually using the employer as a way to define themselves on Facebook, they are displaying their behavior on Facebook as one of a company's employee, and opening themselves up for contact by other employees of the company, including the boss.

Facebook doesn't give users the option of putting in their profession WITHOUT their employer. If Facebook would do this, it would help out in this arena. As a former boss, I think the rule is pretty easy to figure out - no initiated contact of employees through Facebook that do not list their employer. Employees need to have their space away from the office. So give it. Employees should figure out that if they display their employer's name on their profile, the employer may be interested in what is being posted. It's that simple.

I never understood it, anyways - it just prevented advertising purchases for higher risk keywords. Do they want to sell inventory or not?

Yahoo Search Marketing has announced that it will eliminate its 10 cent minimum keyword bid for text-based ads in the United States. The change is set to go into effect this week, according to a Yahoo spokesman.

The pricing change “is simply the next step in Yahoo's ultimate goal of offering the most efficient pricing for high quality advertisers and continually improving the ad quality for our end users,” said Kristen Wareham, director of corporate communications for Yahoo, when reached by e-mail.

Okay, I will admit to having a Facebook account, and from time to time I go there and do some of the goofy questions and apps they offer, but I guess I don't get it. I see Facebook as a silly little diversion, and there's no way in the world I would pay to use it, and I find the advertising there just as useless as I find most of the advertising anywhere else on the Internet. So why in the world would Microsoft value it at $15 billion dollars? How?

I know that some of people are buying into some sort of "referral" model of advertising that will somehow become more effective on Facebook, but I don't think so. I have found that the outside messages - advertising, news feeds, etc., - on Facebook are actually MORE ANNOYING there than they are in other places. Why? Because in other places, they're just competing with some other big company's noise, but on Facebook, they're competing with information about - and from - people I actually, or at least sorta, know. The advertising drops even more significantly on the "matters to me" scale by comparison.

So... once again, I just don't get it.

Hat tip to Suburban Guerrilla. Rotten Neighbor is sure to bring out the big uglies of the Internet.

4 per cent of internet data traffic consists purely of junk.