There are a lot of news about facebook privacy lately, from f8 “like” feature to their apps/chat bugs. We can see these reports from google’s employees who explain how to delete facebook profile (may be they have their own reasons, but it is still true). Seems like everybody wants to ignore your privacy as much as possible, and the truth is that nothing is really private. As a matter of fact, I have been ignoring privacy policies myself and always assume that nothing is really private. In ad driven world many companies still use private data to target users in a better way.

Anyway, it applies to forums, instant messengers, email, even phones to some extent. May be I am a bit paranoid, but I just treat everything with the feeling that someone may be watching. Just be careful saying things that you wouldn’t say in public no matter where it is.

As for important conversations, I prefer in person meetings over any other. If it’s not feasible, phone and skype are my best options. I still do im for the issues that don’t matter much. Whenever you have something important to talk about, just choose the source wisely.

Here is a good old school song for you

If you are like me and just starting to blog, one of the easiest way to get traffic is to be active on other blogs that you read. Post comments and provide feedback. All these time my number 1 source was google, but as you can see, it moved from #1 to #7 this morning. It will probably change by the end of the day but blog traffic is still a big part of my visitors. Surprisingly enough, one of my comments got some attention on ppc.bz yesterday, which resulted in a third of all my traffic this morning. I may have received the unexpected response to that comment, but none the less, who cares when it’s my first month blogging.

The morale of the the story: Be active on the blogs you read.

After installing sexybookmarks plugin I retweeted the newest post on affiliate marketing. I didn’t expect anything other than a few of my followers to click a link and check out the post. I had my email opened and all of the sudden it went crazy with new twitter follower updates. I got 8 new followers within the first minute.

So I did some testing. I went into the second old and unused account and did the same thing. Instant followers there too. I searched for the term “affiliate marketing” on twitter – http://twitter.com/#search?q=affiliate%20marketing and noticed that while I was listed on the search page for a few minutes, I was getting new followers, mostly people interested in affiliate marketing.

What was strange is that I only got 2 new readers on my blog, which may have been from my loyal followers as well.

People who followed me on both accounts were different, so they must be real people rather then bots following everybody who posts about affiliate marketing. Some had a very significant amount of followers as well.

Anyway, here is the point: Do you need twitter followers? Keep on retweeting the blog posts. I did my retweet at 1am PST in case it matters. By helping the blog you like, you are helping yourself since there are quite a few ways to monetize twitter accounts now.

Just click the twitter birdie on the sexy bookmark plugin below to retweet this post if you want to test it out.

Good luck.

UPDATE: Retweet of this post resulted in only 4 instant followers. Not sure if it is because of the keywords or because the results on the search page just rotate faster at 7pm PST.

Update: A little late, but I finally got around to installing Ubuntu again and creating a blog on the domain.

Finding a good domain name can be very random.

Every once in a while I look through top stories on digg. Today I came across the article that talked about the next release of Ubuntu – 10.04 codenamed Lucid Lynx.

I was thinking about a domain for a new directory as I was reading the article. Than I thought about lucid lynx and what a great name it can be for one. After checking lucidlinks, which was taken, I tried lucidlynx.com. To my surprise it was available, as long as .net, .org and all the rest. I bought the .com, and left .net and .org in case you still want to buy one (assuming you are the first one reading it) since the value may go up by April 2010.

I don’t think that I will be making a directory on lucidlynx though, unless 10.04 changes the code name closer to the release date. I actually ran Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope, for a while. It was pretty interesting to mess with it since I haven’t had Linux installed for several years, see all the changes to the kernel, UI and applications. I had to let it go since I installed it on my new i7 with all the new hardware and Jaunty didn’t have my video card drivers.

Anyway, to make a long story short, now I am thinking to install Lucid Lynx when it becomes available and blog about all the useful commands, learning experiences and tips. Just a plan for now, who knows, may be I will do something different with it down the road.

I thought I would post this article just to show how sometimes you can get a pretty valuable domain name or an idea as soon as you hear about something coming out. Even though you may think that digg is a distraction most of the time, you can always make something useful out of it.