These days it’s almost impossible to turn on the TV or read news with out seeing something about social media, social marketing, or social networking.  Sites like Facebook, which is now the most trafficked site in the US, along with Twitter, Digg, Linkedin, MySpace, Youtube, Ning, Mixx, and more are all trying to get more users to spend more time on their sites in hopes of gaining bigger position in the Internet to where they can monetize and make some money.

In fact, just last week Twitter announced it’s own monetizing strategy, which includes paid tweets from major companies.  Facebook has been doing this for years already, and the same with MySpace, but it’s the first for Twitter and assuming it’s successful, more will follow.

Most people would say that birthdays are great, although some don’t appreciate them as much as others do I suppose. It’s not that I can’t see why some people don’t like birthdays, but most are reasons of vanity or insecurity and not really justified as all around belief.

I personally like birthdays for a lot of reasons, and not just because of the presents, even though those are nice to get as well.  However, it’s nice to be acknowledged, and with the use of social sites today, there is a lot more of that. For example, sign into Facebook and I get dozens of birthday greetings from people that I had never gotten them from before. This is a nice way of connecting and feeling special. I used to be happy just getting  call or two from a friend or family member, but not I can expect to get dozens of birthday wishes over a couple of days. Greetings come in from various sites where my birthday is posted for public view.

I’ve been blogging for about two years now and I have to say that I love blogging. Blogging is one of the few things that we can all do to help each other share thoughts, gain more knowledge, and maybe make a couple of bucks.  There are so many ways to do a blog, and things to blog about that I wonder why everyone doesn’t have a blog already. In fact, I’m so happy blogging that I run 4 personal blogs, as well as half of dozen blogs for my company.  In addition, my company is seeing the value of blogging and they are letting me set up even more blogs to help generate viral marketing on the web.  Blogs can be about anytime and everything.  The best blogs are the ones that really have good content and not just some collection of random posts and articles that a person gets off another site.  True bloggers know that the only way to build an audience to put out unique original content that is thought provoking and relevant.