Giving Empire Avenue a Try

I just joined a site called Empire Avenue. It's sort of like a combination of a Social Marketing site and a game. The idea is that you buy shares of other members, and they can do the same for you. It's like a mini stock market, but doing well will give you social currency- in other words, you can get added visibility for your blogs, your photos, your works.

You are rewarded for having active blogs, using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flikr, YouTube, Foursquare and Instagram. The currency is called Eaves. They say that they don't translate into real cash, but it looks like there are certain things you can buy with them.

It may be more than I want to deal with, but it may be just enough fun to participate. If you want to join, see Empire Avenue.

Use About.me as a Hub of Public Info

If you would like people to be able to find you and manifestations of your diverse presence on the web, about.me may be a good option for you.

About.me allows you to create a consolidated personal profile, and a dashboard to edit and track all of those components.

You can create a list with links to all of your blogs and web sites. Profiles to quite a few social media sites can be added, including at the present, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,Wordpress, Blogger, tumblr, posterous, flikr, typepad, foursquare, formspring, YouTube, vimeo, last.fm, daily booth, Instagram, behance, and fitbit (they have not yet added Google+, but technically that's still in beta). If you add a blogging service as an import, it will add that logo and a feed of your blogs.

Links to any URL are fine too.

You can add a custom background, choose from several fonts, and move elements around to some degree.

There is a statistics page showing how many views there have been of your profile, and how many outgoing clicks on your links and services.

About.me is not quite as versatile as one might like. In the forum one can read about a lot of features that people would like to see added. However, it is a great way to connect all of your identities for people to find.

Be sure to choose a username that you want people to remember you by, because it will be a part of your link. I may end up using this on my business cards rather than listing several URLs, so I chose joan_h_young. This makes my about.me link http://about.me/joan_h_young

Giving Likaholix a Try

I just signed up at a new social networking site called Likaholix. The theory is that you find other people with similar interests to yourself. You can create interests, so you are not limited to the shallow list of things that someone thinks you should like.

In that respect it is similar to Smallaa, which was a great idea but so difficult to navigate that I pretty much gave it up. Likaholix is very new, so it remains to be seen how well it will do. But new things are often worth a try!

It's a little confusing how to add links to your topics, but I'll update this when I figure it out.

Likaholix

web ad income today (4 blogs, 2 web sites): Adsense $.03 Adgitize $.81 Project Wonderful $.03 ______________________ Total: $.87 Total to date in April $4.35 Total in March $4.88