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By Guest Blogger: Marc Berry

Marc and his wife write real talk about all areas of relationships, from sex to abuse to pure love and the language of flowers at The Incurable Romantic. Marc is also the author of techne-eikon, a blog about Web 2.0 and Internet Marketing. You can also follow Marc on FriendFeed and/or Twitter.

You can also follow Teeg on FriendFeed and Twitter.

FriendFeed for the Socially Inept - Part 1
Read Part 2

As a blogger I am understandably interested in Web 2.0 and online social networks such as StumbleUpon, Digg, and Facebook. Unfortunately, when it comes to these networks I am the very definition of socially inept.

I’m not afraid to admit it: I’m a bad friend. I forget about people and sites and networks and all that. I have online ADD, jumping from one thing to the next, and immediately forgetting what I was just doing. It doesn’t help that in order to maintain my involvement in most of these networks, I have to actually go to the site, log in, and play catch-up. Thumb something up, digg it, and oh yeah, twitter it. Add in forums, groups, chats and RSS feeds, and the information overload becomes unbearable.

It’s a wonder I haven’t thrown my computer out of the window yet.

Enter FriendFeed, my newest friend… FriendFeed is an aggregator for all your online social activities. It brings all your friend’s network activities under one roof, making it easy to keep up with what everybody is doing.

Of course, first you have to add them as friends on FriendFeed, but that is usually just a matter of searching for them, and subscribing to their updates. If there is someone that you want to follow, but they aren’t on FriendFeed, sending them an invitation is as easy as typing in their email address, or having FF import your address book.

This naturally brings up the question, “Must my friends be FF users in order for me to follow them”? Thankfully, they do not. FF has a friends setting called “imaginary friends”, which allows you to follow non-members around as they post stuff to their favourite sites.

Only publicly submitted information is tracked, so your friends won’t think that you are too creepy, which is always a bonus. You can also add their blog’s RSS feed, making the service a simple RSS reader, though if you really use RSS, you may find a dedicated reader a better solution.

More 10 Minute guides. I really do want a whole series of these. And if you or someone you know would like to write one, let me know. I think a whole set of these would make a great resource. Hmm, now I’m thinking I need a logo for this series.

A Day For Hearts. For the next 14 days, from now through Valentine’s Day, Dr. Mani has asked bloggers to help raise awareness of Congenital Heart Defects. I plan to write more about this later, but one idea I had was to offer an e-book for a donation. I took the instructional article I did a while back, Getting Started With StumbleUpon - Using the Toolbar and turned it into an e-book with better graphics than the article here on the site. You’re welcome to download the book, but please, if you can, make a donation also.

I’ve been tagged for a couple Memes. These will be fun! One is called “The Bucket List” after the movie of the same name. The idea behind it is…If you found out you only had a year to live, what are the things you would want to do during that year?

The second meme is called “7 Things About Me“. I get to share 7 stories about myself with you, and then tag others to tell their stories.

Be The Blog. I’ve had this award on my blog for a couple months now, Ange of Buzzing with Ange presented it to me while I had a rather bad sinus infection, and somehow I totally forgot to ever write about it or to pass it on to anyone else. So, I’ll be looking for others to pass the award on to and explaining what Be The Blog means exactly.

I think that’s everything on my list. Not much at all, right. But still, I think I’d better get to writing if I’m going to get done anytime soon.