• case 1 - virb.com: since signing up, i have been bombarded by friend requests from bands, and have visited their pages to find customized pages and music samples. this is one part of the myspace experience. although it's been championed by the grown up myspace haters for it's visual panache, it's not something i want a part of.
• case 2 - facebook.com: since signing up, i have been plunged into old friendships that have been buried by time and distance. it's the same experience i had when i added my real name to my myspace profile. except with less blinking text, annoying music, and ugly slideshows.
• using the 'posted items' feature on facebook led me to understand which sites value my presence there, via the meta description tag on my profile pages:
  • case 1 - Last.fm:
    

    Listen to sunburntkamel’s personal radio station (17,480 tracks played). sunburntkamel’s top artists: dredg, Cursive, In Flames, Hot Water Music, The Appleseed Cast, Opeth. Favourite tags are seen live, emo, Progressive rock. Get your own music profile at Last.fm, the world’s largest social music platform.

  • case 2 - flickr:
    

    Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Show off your favorite photos to the world, securely and privately show photos to your friends and family, or blog the photos you take with a cameraphone.

  for flickr, i am an advertising vehicle. last.fm does their advertising in the description of their home page, not my profile:

  The world's largest social music platform. Show off your taste, see what your friends are listening to, hear new music, get personal radio, recommendations, and downloads, all for free.

  can you guess which site's persuaded me to support their efforts?

So, the plugin is nice, but you can also do it in themes, just add:

 <?php if ( is_category() || is_archive() || is_search() || is_author() ) { ?>

    <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"><?php

} ?>

<?php if (function_exists('is_tag')) { if ( is_tag() ) { ?>

    <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">

<?php } } ?>

to header.php. The UTW stuff (is_tag()) is a little annoying, but other than that, it's boilerplate.

Google

google seems to be aware that sbk.wp.com = sbk.archgfx.net.

Except that external pagerank checkers don't see things that way. sbk.archgfx.net gets 0 from blogflux' pagerank checker, while sbk.wp.com still holds down a 6.
Also, as far as their blogsearch is concerned, sbk.wp.com is doing far better than sbk.archgfx.net, with no overlap in links.

Yahoo!

After changing my yahoo! site explorer account to check archgfx.net rather than www.archgfx.net, my inlinks doubled. That's because they're counting inlinks to sbk.wp.com as well, so they get the prize for handling the domain mapping the best.

Technorati

it pains me to even mention technorati. People who use technorati as any sort of metric, seem to also think that 10 is a valid sample size. Nonetheless, a technorati rank is some sort of badge of how cool you are. technorati falls prey to the same trap as google's blogsearch, maintaining separate rankings for both addresses. having only looked at google and yahoo's webmaster tools, i wasn't aware that i hadn't maintained my ranking, until i read //engtech's rundown on trying to get technorati to fix their rankings. Technorati still removes anyone who gets their ranking by distributing blog software that links back to their site. That sort of lack of skill (google's blogsearch is perfectly capable of removing backlinks to archgfx that come from disconnected) coupled with a lack of value for those who give back to the community really makes it hard to trust them.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

they're all hosted on wordpress.com, so you can use them 'as-is' if your blog is hosted on wordpress.com. if you're running wordpress on your own host, I highly recommend alex king's share this plugin, or the sociable plugin. (in fact, i grabbed the icons from these plugins). If you're not running wordpress, you must not be cool, and therefore, I cannot help you.

First thing, you'll want to grab the code. it's in this text file:
Social Bookmarking Template

Next, publish your post. Then open up the template in a text editor (Notepad on windows, textedit on mac). You'll want to go to Edit > Replace (or Find and Replace), and replace any instances of xURIx with the address of your post (this is why you had to publish it first).

Now do the same thing, and replace xTITLEx with the title of your post. You'll want to put + signs in place of spaces, though (e.g. social+bookmarks+on+wordpress.com) so that the links work. After that, select everything and copy it.

Now go back to your post and edit it. if you're using the rich text editor, you'll need to switch over to the (scary) code tab. paste all this at the end of your post.