Flashback to a post I wrote about personal branding, in particular your name.

I suspect it’s something that happens as you get older, but sometimes I roll my eyes at people who persist in using nicknames on the Interwebs.

If it’s a nickname you’ve had In Real Life, then fair enough. But otherwise?

Why use it online if you’d never call yourself that elsewhere?

It’s true, for a few years around my early-20s, I used one: Raymond Luxury-Yacht, after the character in Monty Python who declares his name is actually pronounced “throat-wobbler mangrove”.

(That sketch is one of a handful that had me literally rolling on the floor with uncontrollable laughter the first time I saw it.)

These days assuming someone isn’t trying to deliberately hide their identity for some reason, nicknames just seem a bit… well… silly.

I’m not talking about the name of a blog/web site, or contractions of a Real Name, but a completely made-up nickname for no reason other than it sounds good.

Does anybody go the whole hog and use deed poll to change their Real Name to their Net name?

It’s another of these things which is down to personal choice, I suppose. And maybe of course I’m turning into an old man.

Expecting some interesting comments from those who use nicknames here!

Thanks in part to Google Reader and the miracle of RSS feeds, I read way more blogs than I post comments on. I do leave some comments, but I just don’t have the time to properly have a blog.conversation on all the posts I read.

I try to bear in mind the XKCD cartoon: “Someone is wrong on the Internet” — sure, if you want to discuss and debate anything, there’s no shortage of places to do so. But if you contribute to them all you’d be at the computer all day and all night doing it.

So you (and indeed the writers) of some blogs might never know that I enjoy them. This post is to make amends for that. Here are ten of my favourite blogs that I rarely or never comment on:

• Highriser — some great perspectives on Melbourne life
• Jayne’s Our Great Southern Land, highlighting Australian history
• I Started Something — the influential Long Zheng, from somewhere down near Hastings on the Mornington peninsula, stirring up the Windows world with observations, particularly on forthcoming releases
• Overheard in Melbourne quotes many of my fellow Melburnians and the amusing things they say. I particularly liked the one today: Like…my brother has this livejournal thing, and there’s a group he’s a part of, all about embarassing things people say, and how other people overhear them and post them on the internet. He reads them to me sometimes - some of them are really bad! And, like, I’m always afraid someone is going to hear me saying something dumb, and put it up there and he’ll realise it was me. Oh my god. What if I’m already on there??!!
• Ed Bott has his own blog and one on ZD Net has a constant stream of opinion and advice on PCs
• James’ Chaucery blog highlights little factoids, and is what inspired me to do those little graphs that pop up occasionally
• Kensington Victoria is random topics, often funny, from some bloke in Kensington
• Coding Horror is a well-known programmer’s blog from Jeff Atwood, who has some incredible insights into the lives of professional geeks like me
• Transport Textbook has a lot of interesting (at least to me) articles on transport (specifically public transport) theory.
• For some reason I find the Washington Post’s Get There blog equally interesting. I’ve never been to DC, I don’t even know that much about the geography or politics involved, but it seems they have some similar problems in transport to Melbourne, with congested roads, crowded trains and buses, and disruptions from time to time causing havoc. I wonder if one of the daily papers here would take up something similar — I might suggest it. They do seem to be able to illicit a more forthright response than is often seen here, though the Leader blogs with people like John Rees from Connex and Darren Peters from the South Morang Rail Alliance may be showing the way.

I wouldn’t expect everybody to read what I read, given some of them are specific to my interests.

I read (and like) a lot of other blogs, and specifically excluded those written by my friends and acquaintances (hello to Tony, Trish, Ren, Kathy and all the rest of you), as I’m sure they know I’m reading, even if I don’t comment often.

At some stage I should go through the links on my own blog’s margin and update them to something closer to this list.

What other unsung blogs are there out there?

Facebook wants to know if I speak “English (UK)”.

And they want to know if I want to be an interpreter for them.

You what? What a strange question.

Since when do non-US-English speakers need to have translations from the Americans?

Anyway, why isn’t it asking me if I speak English (AU) ?

And if Facebook’s revenue was USD 300 million last year and they’re worth an estimated USD 15 billion, can’t they afford their own translators?

1. Superparma is gone… but parma.com.au has arrived to take its place.

2. I’ve talked before about how kids inherit traits and behaviour and interests from their parents. I was struck by this clever alcohol awareness advert which shows it well.

3. To the self-confessed lurker lady in the red raincoat yesterday in Collins Street: Thanks for saying hello.

Plenty has been written about this before, but I’ll put my oar in.

Facebook knows lots about you. Most users key in a bunch of stuff about their hobbies, favourite music, TV shows, all that kind of stuff. They know (roughly) where you live, how old you are, often your marital status, your interests.

So why are their adverts so hit-and-miss?

Sometimes they’re spot-on. I’ve seen Life On Mars t-shirts advertised, with pictures of Gene Hunt proclaiming some particularly amusing line from the show, such as “You’re surrounded by armed bastards!”. I’ve clicked through, and seriously considered ordering one. Well, until I saw the price.

But most of the adverts are useless. Hold ‘em poker — is there anything in my profile that suggests I’d be interested? Meet hot singles — Facebook knows I’ve been in a relationship for almost five years. Surely it isn’t predicting some kind of seven year itch coming up? Earn money from surveys — did I click on a “I need cash” option somewhere in my profile?

Snoring keeps her awake — uhh, no comment.

If computer systems are going to store a bunch of personal data about you, you’d think they’d at least make the effort to use it in a sensible way — not to mention if they get it right, they can make more money.

Or maybe I shouldn’t complain. At least the way things stand, I can happily ignore most of the ads that appear.

The top ten Daniels, according to Google Australia (which shows pages from worldwide, but skews slightly in favour of Aussies):

1. The biblical Daniel.

2. The accompanying Book of Daniel.

3. Daniel Boulud’s Restaurant Daniel in New York City.

4. The Daniel Morcombe Foundation, working for protection of children from abduction.

5. Daniel Measurement and Control of gasses and liquids.

6. Craig. Daniel Craig.

7. Harry Potter’s Daniel Ratdcliffe

8. waferbaby.com … whatever that is — it’s being rebuilt. Someone’s blog, apparently.

9. Daniel Boud, who appears to be a photographer. Or if he isn’t, he should be — the pics on his site are excellent.

10. 16th century mathmetician Daniel Bernoulli

And me? Turns out I’m number 11. W00t!

And where do I sit in the world ranking of Daniels? (According to the Google Rank Checker, I’m down at 819th on Google.com)

Any interesting finds searching for your name?

Damn. Superparma.com is no more. And they built the site in such a way that it seems to be impossible to get at anything except the splash page via archive.org, so the ratings they compiled may be lost forever.

Groan. WarGames 2: The Dead Code now in pre-production, and aimed at direct-to-DVD.

OK. I was talking last week about not renewing with the RACV. As it happens my renewal form just arrived, and my membership runs out in a few weeks, so I’ll start shopping. Ultratune is looking pretty good (thanks Peter).

Ah, emails. Do we all know the danger of hitting Reply All instead of Reply? Will Joanna Purdy be the next Claire Swire? Or maybe this one won’t snowball. (I’m too polite to forward it around.)

PS. Sorry, a server glitch (well, actually an upgrade I forgot was happening) has (hopefully temporarily) lost a couple of comments on this post.

I have a profile on Facebook. I don’t spend a lot of time there; mostly playing the Scrabble clone Scrabulous, actually. (I’m winning one game thanks to “zit” on a triple word score; the other is heading for a photo-finish.) And seeing what my friends are up to.

I’m not doing the free-for-all friends thing. I’m only adding people who I actually know. People I’ve had real two-way interaction with at some stage in my life. Which probably doesn’t include most of the people reading this blog post.

I’m afraid I just don’t buy the idea of adding anybody who pops up requesting it.

In October the BBC reported results of an experiment: they created a fictitious Facebook user called Amba Friend, and sent friend requests to 100 random Facebook users. 35 said yes, and ones details were used by the BBC investigating team to open a bank account and credit card in his name. Which worked.

Computer security company Sophos did a similar experiment back in August, with 87 of 200 happily adding Sophos’s toy frog “Freddi Staur” as their friend. Sophos posted guidelines for protecting your privacy on Facebook, which is well worth reading.

Obviously it highlights the dangers of putting too much of your personal life (or at least, your details) online. Hell, I’m wary about putting my birth date online — though it’s not excessively hard to find. My address? Nup, no way.

Not that I really believe anybody is going to try identity fraud on me via Facebook.

But I’m not doing the whole “whoever has the most friends wins” thing. If we’ve actually met, if we’ve actually spoken, if we’ve actually had some kind of meaningful two-way interaction then great, I’ll add you! (I might even go looking for you — I’m pretty curious about what some of my old school and uni friends are up to.)

Otherwise nup. Don’t feel offended; it’s not that I don’t like you. I just don’t know you… and that’s not how I’m using Facebook, sorry.

But hey, I’m sure there’s plenty of other random people out there you can add. Amba Friend and Freddi Staur, for a start.

…

I don’t indulge in MySpace. Call me an old man if you like, but it’s too loud for me. Oh dear. Do I have an Old Man’s attitude to social networking?