I know I’m a cranky, picky bitch. But here’s the thing: while I like networking as much as the next freelancer, I do not like social networks. Bebo is for children, MySpace is the AOL of its era, and LinkedIn is all very nice as far as it goes, but it’s virtually impossible to find anyone I’m not already connected to – by the thousands of email addresses I already gave them.

Facebook in particular, however, is really starting to drive me up the wall. I know it is incredibly 2007 to pull the Oh My God, I Hate Facebook and Am Leaving! drama queen stunt, though, so I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to complain about it instead.

First of all, while it’s nice to get in touch with old friends and colleagues, I want to be able to find you, see what you’re doing, and keep up with the handful of critical changes likely to happen with you in the course of a year: new job, new city, new spouse, new kids. If you want to know what’s up with me, I have a blog. What I do not have is the capacity to conduct the exact same “Hey! Long time no see! What are you up to?” conversation 30 times in a month.

Second of all, I do not want to suck your blood, take your quiz, or play scrabble with you. It’s nothing personal, but I can probably play Scrabble by post in less time than it will take me to kick your ass on Facebook. On a professional level, I am disgusted that Hasboro has put the kybosh on Scrabulous because it’s an increadibly stupid move on their part. On a personal level, however, I will die a happy woman if nobody ever challenges me to play Scrabulous ever again.

And last but not least, I hate to be the one to break this to all of the many Facebook whores out there but: your mama is ugly. Facebook was no beauty queen of a website to start out with, but there was always the hope it would get better. The recent redesign has proven that for the foreseeable future, at least, that’s not the case – it’s still cramped, still frustrating to navigate, and still a glowing example of grody-arsed ad placements.

But of course I’m staying. Mostly so I can log in once every three months to discover all my new friends I’ve never heard of. And then have them ask me what I’m up to.

Pat Phelan has a post up over at his blog in which people have been discussing boundaries and blogger ethics in terms of full disclosure. This kicked me up the arse to go and do something I’ve been meaning to do since Day 1: add a Disclosures page to my site.

There are some cases that are cut and dried, like the instance Pat is highlighting. If you’re being paid by Flixwagon, using Flixwagon on your site, demoing Flixwagon, and/or writing about Flixwagon in your own space or others, you need to disclose that you have a financial relationship with Flixwagon.

And then it gets muddy. Because by paid, I mean any exchange with a monetary value attached to it. If I got free hosting from Blacknight (which I do, although not for this blog) and wrote about Blacknight and how awesome they are (which I have), I would be ethically obligated to disclose in my post that I get free hosting from Blacknight (which I did, just for the record).

Furthermore, were I interviewed by a journalist about blog hosting and mentioned that I send all my clients to Blacknight, I would also be ethically obligated to disclose to said journalist that I have an existing financial relationship with them in that I get free hosting.

After that, it’s up to the journalist to put that fact in the piece or not, but I think they should. If they didn’t, you better believe I’d be right here in your browser (or RSS reader, as the case may be) disclosing that myself as soon as the article was published.

Why? Because the fact that I am either getting money or getting freebies by its very nature colours my perception of whoever is giving them to me. Tom Raftery hates them, and I know this. I, however, love them – in part because I’ve never had an issue with them, but also in part because they have given me something that makes me happy. I feel special, warm and fuzzy about Blacknight because they give me stuff, and the fact that they give me stuff slants my opinion of them.

Therefore, when a journalist asks me “What is the best blog hosting?” and I say “Blacknight,” this is not based on an survey of the market or even on my experience as a typical customer. My opinion is no longer impartial because I have an extra relationship with them, and it’s one that involves money, goods or services.

And if that’s true of €33 worth of free hosting for a tiny site that isn’t even running, it’s exponentially more true as the numbers and visibility go up. The web is incredibly powerful in forming opinion, and to not reveal a paid relationship when you endorse or evangelise about a company, product or service is an abuse of readers and viewers. It harms – and can potentially destroy – credibility.

Which, before you ever pull a referral, ship a product or sell a service, is the most important thing anyone has online.

The tiniest bit of internet sleuthing reveals that Dublin based marketing firm Inspiration were the SEO company behind Irish Greeting Card’s recent debacle. Their homepage proudly declares it, in fact.

The part that made my jaw drop, however, was the next notice on their home page:

Cathy McGovern, Inspiration was one of three guests invited by Enterprise Ireland’s eBusiness Unit to participate in a round-table discussion on issues surrounding eMarketing and how it can be exploited by SMEs in Ireland.

Emphasis mine. I don’t have a problem with Enterprise Ireland and I think they’re providing key help for a number of high potential start-ups. Given the state of the economy, God knows bright businesses need the help now more than any time in EI’s history.

Somehow, though, I don’t think this episode is the kind of “exploiting” EI had in mind when they funded Irish Greeting Cards for online marketing consulting. A relationship between EI and Inspiration would seem to exist, but if that’s the case, my hope is that in the name of upholding best (or even acceptable) practices for online business, EI’s eBusiness Unit terminates it.

Post haste.

I started cringing as soon as the email hit my Inbox and it just got worse from there.

A fairly new business called Irish Greeting Cards has been dumping little email missives onto a number of Irish bloggers today. From the badly worded, poorly punctuated and grammatically convoluted copy, we have:

We’ve just completed a major upgrade of the site… The cards are unique in that you can personalize most cards on the outside and your own message on the inside. What we’re looking for is for bloggers to mention the offer and site to their readers (if you think it might be useful to your readers of course) and point them to the Greeting Card Site and perhaps encourage their readers to tell people who might think the cards are worth ordering.

According to Mulley, this contacting campaign was devised by a SEO strategist hired by the company. I have no idea who this SEO guru is, which is good – because if I did, I’d be sorely tempted to haul him out back and shoot him. Frankly, this company had more than enough going against it to begin with without his specialist help.

I am willing to bet that this SEO expert also advised them on their spam blog. And wrote all the “content” himself, lovingly filling it with re-constituted pork. It’s easy to see exactly how much effort went into this grand affair.

The only thing they did right was to mention in the email that “We’re not looking for better Google rankings” and invite me to set my links to no-follow. Which is the only thing they asked me to do that I’ve actually been happy to comply with.

The thing that pisses me off the most about this is that I would have used this service. I hate trying to remember occasions in advance, I hate going to the post office, and I hate filling out cards. I have been looking for a service like this in Ireland so that I can pretend to care enough to send cards by being horrendously lazy and doing it online.

What could they have done better?

• Emailed me an offer to try their product myself. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to forget I have a blog. If I liked it, I’d have blogged it, just like I do with other online services I love using.
• Dropped in a humble PS invitation to tell my friends if I enjoyed my card sending experience with them. Blatant solicitations to pimp their untried products to my blog audience is not the kind of transparency we’re looking for.
• Not shat on the entire concept of blogging with the absolute worst example of… I’d say blogging, but that isn’t anything close to blogging. That’s using WordPress as a CMS for spam.

Granted, not having a product that sucks out loud would have helped, and a little more thought about their “Irish cards, Irish diaspora” positioning wouldn’t have hurt, either.

I mean, know I’m a transplant, but I’m pretty confident there’s nothing particularly Irish about stock images of toast.

Having said that, I’m desperate enough that I probably would have become a regular customer of this outfit and sent the crappy cards to my friends and relatives, just on the basis that they’re better than the cards they are currently not getting at all. At this point, however, all I can do is tell all my friends:

Don’t use Irish Greeting Cards.

Update

Popular wisdom would have you believe that buying a house is one of life’s most stressful events, right behind the death of a partner or divorce. Having just this afternoon bought a house, I have to say: this is one of the least stressful transactions I’ve ever been through. Seriously. Easy peasy. A snap. Eight weeks start to finish. Done and dusted.

Although I know nothing about buying houses and even less about buying houses in Ireland, I am generally very lucky in finding people to work with who make being clueless easier. At this point I can say with some authority that I still know nothing about buying houses, but we’ve become very good at writing enormous cheques and in return, someone has given us keys to a building we apparently now own. This is due mostly to the efforts of these people:

• Mortgage Broker: We fall into the “specialist borrowers” category so we needed a mortgage broker. I worked with Jonathan O’Brien at White Star Mortgages. He was awesome, very responsive, and gets points for answering after hours emails from his Blackberry. I found him through AskAboutMoney when bitching about our first mortgage broker, who sucked out loud.
• Mortgage Company: Springboard. They do broker-only loans but had the best rate available to us, so I’m doubly glad we went through our fabulous broker.
• Conveyancing Solicitor: I found Aileen Walshe when looking for flat fee conveyancing that wasn’t done by the equivalent of a conveyancing sweatshop. She’s excellent. At one point she got in her car and drove to the seller’s solicitor to pick up the contracts they continually failed to put in the post. Even our estate agent said she was great. She charges €995 plus VAT.
• Auctioneer: Speaking of estate agents, ours was Dermot Lynch at James Coughlan. He drove me around Cork all afternoon one day, and since he’s done a bunch of property renovations, he was very handy to have in tow. He’s also lovely and smells gorgeous.

The flip side of there being no moments of horrendous stress is that there’s also been no joyous moment of “woot!” so far. I suspect that this is because I’ve treated this whole thing like a very tentative and theoretical house buying exercise: if we can get our cash in place, if someone is actually dumb enough to loan us a big pile of money, if we can find a house in our budget, if they accept our offer, if the mortgage company actually draws a cheque, if it actually closes.

I was sincerely prepared for this to fall through at any given if, but as it happens, they all fell in line. John let me know he’d picked up the keys this afternoon with a text message that says “zOMG H0WCE K33Z!!” He’s also been running around yelling “Get off my lawn!” for practice. At what, I’m not sure, since we won’t actually have a lawn, but I suppose “Get off my concrete!” doesn’t have the same ring to it. He’s really digging home ownership.

Me, I’m convinced the whole building will collapse during renovations, taking at least two adjoining neighbours with it. More than that, while I may be new at this, I know one thing for sure:

It isn’t the house buying that will kill you. It’s the house moving.

Last week a whole pile of wonderful stuff arrived through my door, including this amazing Very Special Project from the equally amazing Marian of Made Marian. It is a scarf — a glorious, beautiful, delicate blue scarf:

It is completely stupendous though totally unnecessary and I’m thrilled to have been gifted with such a wondrous thing; I’ve worn it all over town already. More than loving it, though, I was completely impressed by it. I mean, the fact that you can take what is more or less a ball of string and a couple of chopsticks and make a scarf out of it is pretty damn cool. The fact that it was made by someone I know and not some kind of magical fairy is even cooler.

Scarves: Not made by magical fairies. Who knew?

One of the other things that arrived through my door was my fabulous friend Tara from London by way of Toronto, who came toting 12 balls of yarn, half a jumper and several pointy sticks. We went out for coffee and I watched her knit; we went out for dinner and I watched her knit; we went out to the pub and I watched her knit. Finally, when we went out shopping and inevitably ended up at the yarn store, I asked her if she would teach me to knit, too.

It took an enormous amount of patience and about five false starts, but she did it, and now I can more or less do it, too. Behind the blue scarf Marian made me is the first few feet of the scarf that she inspired and that Tara taught me to knit. I don’t have a lot of faith that I’m ever going to learn to make anything more elaborate that what is more or less a very wide but straight line even though Tara bought me Stitch ‘N Bitch. My knitting skills at this point are decidedly less knit one, purl two and more knit one, knit one, knit one and, I suspect, destined to stay that way,

But it doesn’t matter: I love knitting. And I also love how I came to knitting, too. Traditionally women learned to knit in large social and family circles, of which I have neither. I learned from my internet circle: inspired by Marian and taught by Tara who was taught by our other friend Lucy, all of whom I know from online.

Anyway, many, many thanks to all of these ladies for my new obsession. I’ve got a whole new cause of RSI and I couldn’t be happier.

Apparently my RSS feed and Pat Phelan’s RSS feed decided yesterday to run off to Jamaica together. For about 20 minutes during a server hissy fit, his site re-directed to mine, and his millions of loyal follwers got my posts in their Pat Phelan feed.

We thought the problem was resolved after 20 minutes, so I’m test posting to see if this is still occurring or if our feeds have returned to their respective marital homes.

If you are a Pat Phelan reader, I apologise unreservedly for what must be a very confusing feed reading experience. If this issue is still occurring, there may be a subsequent post here to check the next fix has worked. Again, apologies.