I was thrilled to co-host DL.TV today with Roger Chang (Robet Heron was out at CEDIA), and we had a really good time. Roger is a riot, and I’ve been on his and Tom Merritt’s podcast East Meets West a few times, so I knew it would be a lot of fun. I’d love to do it again some time (hint, hint). We talked about Apple, Terminal hacks (they’re not really hacks, just some fun tips) and dragons. Lots and lots of dragons. So basically, it was my perfect afternoon.

Also, I was taking a look at my referrers this afternoon after all the iPhone rebate hoohah, and I noticed that I was linked to from the CNET News.com blog! That was exciting to me, anyway.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the relationships that we form online, and how they affect our lives. We interact with hundreds (in some cases, thousands) of people online everyday, but rarely do you know more about a person than a first name, handle, or icon. Regardless, oftentimes an emotional attachment is made (for better or for worse) because you know someone through their opinions and words. I’ve been wanting to talk about this for some time, but I don’t know if I can find the right words to express how I feel on the matter, so stick with me.

This past month, two people whom I knew through online communities passed away. The first was Bruce Galloway, a member of my guild. He fell sick very suddenly, and the entire guild banded together to support him. It was a wonderful thing to see at the time, and when he passed away we shared in our grief together. Only a few of us had actually met him in person, but the feelings of sadness and loss were no less painful because of that.

The second person was Ben High, a listener and contributor to ExtraLife Radio, a podcast that I’ve listened to for a long time. He had a great segment that he would send in to those guys almost every week where he would showcase a new indie band. He was only 19, and he also died very suddenly and unexpectedly. When I learned about it, it broke my heart to think that someone so young and with so much potential was gone.

And when James Kim, my good friend and coworker at CNET, passed away this last December it was astonishing to see the outpouring of support from the online community. As the Internet becomes such so intertwined with our daily lives, it seems like we find new ways to share emotion about the loss of someone important to all of us. When someone dies in a community they come together for the wake, to grieve, to discuss the person’s life and accomplishment. Online we do the same thing, but we’re oftentimes separated from one another by thousands of miles.

I’m not really sure what the point of this post was. The internet is a wonderful way to meet new people, but at the same time the reality often hits that there are real people on the other side of the screen who can get sick, or have an accident, or die. Trying to understand how to deal with the feelings of losing someone you know but have never actually met is a task that we’re all going to have to become more familiar with as time goes on, and as we become ever more absorbed in the online world.

I just did something that gave me a moment of moral pause – I posted a link to Twitter to a Digg article that I myself submitted from the Crave blog. I wondered immediately after I did it that maybe I should have just linked directly to the Crave article itself — and I’m not even going to start wrapping my head around about how meta it is to twitter an article about Twitter.

Do you see the oddness in that? By using Digg as the way point, I might be taking initial traffic away from the Crave site, but with the hopes that eventually it will garner far more traffic in the long run (if, in fact, it gets dugg). It’s like web traffic gambling! Does this break blogging etiquette? Is there a set of unspoken linking rules? When I was on BOL, we would always try to credit both the original source article, as well as the proxy (Digg, Slashdot, Techmeme, etc). I guess if you credit as many sources as possible, there’s less of a chance that you’re upsetting someone along the way.

Jason (my new boss, btw) went on a little rant yesterday about Facebook, the wall-garden effect, and the general overload of information coming from the social networking sites. This is something that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately: how do I manage all of these networks, and what benefit am I really getting out of them?

Since at this point I’m a member of too many networking sites to even begin listing (it’s a sick, sick addiction) I thought I’d talk a little bit about the few I use regularly, and what I use them for.

Facebook: I’ll talk about this one first, since it’s the one that’s giving Jason the most grief currently. I add everyone to Facebook as a friend (I’m not sure why I decided that was a good idea, but I did). It’s true that it can make it a tad overwhelming, but at the same time I enjoy seeing what people post, and I like getting a peek into everyone’s lives. Is that weird? The invitations and group invites are something I largely ignore, but only out of necessity – if I joined them all, it would be completely unusable. As for the email notifications, I have all of my Facebook items bypassing my inbox (they go under the *misc tag), and filtered as such it makes it easier for me to check periodically.

Facebook is only as daunting as you let it be. There’s a lot of information floating around, but with the correct filtering it can be useful.

MySpace: I only use this to keep in touch with friends back East, or from college. Most of my friends haven’t left MySpace – they use it because it’s all they know, and they have no reason to try something different. I don’t even use the email address I’m registered with there anymore, so I don’t worry about notifications. Honestly, I’m bitter that I still have to use that bloated, inflexible website ever again.

Twitter: I’ve fallen off the Twitter bandwagon a little. I still enjoy using the site, but I’ve noticed lately that it’s the same people posting the same links to their blogs all the time. Somewhere along the line it became a tool for bloggers to pimp their own stuff, and the fun interactions have decreased. I still love Twitter, and the Twitter guys are great, but I may need to re-evaluate who I’m following to bring back the interesting bits.

Pownce: I’m still excited over this one – I love that I can post links, files and events all in one place. But the best part is that now I can create sets of people that I can post for and monitor. There’s a lot of information, just like every other site, but now I can whittle down and choose what I want to view.

So anyway, I guess what I’m tying to say is that you have to choose which sites are valuable to you, and then find a good way of handling the torrent of information that is sent your way. Gmail filters are a godsend for me, because they keep the social networking spam out of my inbox and stored away for perusal at my convenience.

I agree with Jason that people are getting too “splintered” with social networking sites, and that’s why I’ve decided to make sure a couple of them are always up-to-date (Flickr and Last.fm are mainstays for me). I think everyone is still in the trial and error period – the best sites always float to the top, and that’s where people will stay.