There has been a growing trend of online services designed to build social networks in centralized and sometimes closed environments. While there are merits to this approach, the abundance of options is crippling and confusing. Invariably, everyone must join every site and we’re left chasing each other around. This has created an artificial sense of centralization in a decidedly decentralized environment.

No matter how many different tools are made available, I know I can always find my social network at the home base of each of its individuals. In most cases that’s the blog site of each individual.

Last week, 76 design launched two new WordPress plugins designed to put the power of social networking back where it belongs… in the hands of the community. I particularly like the idea of their FriendsRoll plugin (which I have installed on my site ***). It allows members of my network to connect with me on my own site, and I on theirs. And because the plugin goes with my own site, there are no concerns about privacy. I will not share or sell the information that my network provides to me. I will not post targetted advertisements on my website based on aggregate marketing information collected during the process of establishing the technological friendship. Indeed, the 76 design plugins don’t even allow the collection of this information.

Facebook may be convenient, but it’s far from respectful. To that end, expect a post from me tonight or tomorrow on yesterday’s Facing up to Facebook session at the University of Ottawa.

Bob and I have both lamented about the ever growing spread of social media tools geared towards expanding and engaging one’s community. I’ve dabbled in some of them, each of which addresses a specific need for community building. Today, Carter Harkins introduced us to a tool that I think I will be spending a lot of time getting to know. It’s called Crowd About and it fills a need, specific to Podcasters, that no other service does: contextual commenting. Carter is one of its creators.

Crowd About offers a simple way for your community to be more actively engaged by allowing it to create text or multimedia comment to any media file in your Podcast feed, and then apply the comment to a specific location of that file. Imagine having your content indexed by comment threads and being able to consume comments by clicking a specific location of your media file, and then participating in the discussion yourself. In fact, you can even index your own content and then let the conversations begin. That’s the core of this tool.

It doesn’t stop there. Crowd About can be integrated into your own Podcast site (WordPress and others) so that the “playground” (my term, not theirs) comes to you and your community - instead of you and your community having to go to the playground. About the only drawback of that integration is that participants are required to be logged into a Crowd About account.

Of course, requisite profile and friends technology is part of the tool. Has anyone figured out how to create a single friends repository in WordPress that can be referenced by every other technology, yet?

If you are running the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin (version 3.1415926) on your WordPress site, you should know that there is a bug when you upgrade to WordPress 2.1 that results in the disappearance of UTW tags from a post when a comment is submitted.

The good news is, there is a fix published on moeffju.net.

Last week I raved about at WordPress stats plugin called FireStats. As part of my post, I noted that there was a minor presentation problem in the admin interface which turned out to be an incompatibility between FireStats and the Sociable plugin. Omry Yadan, the creator FireStats, has commented on that post to report that the problem has been fixed.

Omry has made some changes to the Sociable plugin and released sociable-1.2-firestats-safe.zip as part of ticket #51 on the FireStats site. He has also sent the updated code to the author of Sociable, Peter Harkins.

Now that’s a great story about open source!

About a month ago, Anders Holte Nielsen announced that he has discontinued development of his popular Counterize WordPress plugin, a plugin that summarizes and presents statistical information about a WordPress blog. Fortunately, he offered a solid alternative, the relatively young FireStats plugin by Omry Yadan.

I installed FireStats on two of my WordPress sites today. The installation was typically easy and the interface is slick with a collection of important statistical information. Even so, one of my FireStats installations came up with nice tabbed navigation interface, the other did not. I posted a comment on the FireStats Blog to report the problem. Omry was right on top of the post - he replied within fifteen minutes. The issue appears to be with the way the Sociable plugin applies javascript to the WordPress administrative interface, and Omry is tracking the problem as issue 51 in his ticket system.

If Omry can add a graphs tab that provides graphical representations of hits and visits by hour, day of week, day of month and month of year (current, average and running totals for these graphs would also be great) I would have no reason to operate any other statistical plugins. For icing on the cake, I would love it if FireStats had full featured statistical gathering for the PodPress plugin since PodPress has some unresolved bugs and development efforts seem to be stagnating.