Despite all the buzz, the geolocational social media features offered by Foursquare and other sites are slow to catch on with privacy-wary mainstream audiences.

And somehow, I don’t think that offering up an MTV-sponsored check-in badge for every visit to the STD clinic is going to hasten adoption:

The badge itself is lime green and black, with the letters “GYT” emblazoned in the middle.

Foursquare users can go to their own health care providers, or they can find nearby clinics by visiting [the Get Yourself Tested website] and entering their ZIP code. Once they’ve checked in, users will have to post — or “shout” in Foursquare lingo — the letters “GYT” to their friends.

The goal is laudable, of course. And at least Foursquare isn’t offering up mayorships for frequent testers — I imagine such a crown would cure this targeted younger generation of its inherent open-book lifestyle attitude (and lead to a lot fewer dates).

Although I guess that, if this confluence of digital and biological intimacy somehow catches on, it might revive the now-obsolete term for sexually-transmitted ailments. Thereby giving “social” a whole new meaning altogether.

Early last week, I received a couple of unsolicited offers for revenue generation from the content I’ve generated on the Web:

- D2, a newspaper-insert magazine-lette akin to the New York Times’ T Magazine, requested permission to use a long-ago photo I took of the former American Apparel billboard adspace on Manhattan’s Houston Street (a crop of which is featured above).

- The same day, someone at vectorTrap asked to place a text ad on the index page of this blog. Something to do with wireless phone service, I think.

The common thread? Both offers flaked out. I might have scared them off. I asked for a relatively hefty sum from vectorTrap (“hefty” if you consider that I’m sure these outfits usually pay out only a couple of bucks to more naive bloggers), while I told D2 that I’d expect accreditation and some sort of compensation. I didn’t hear back from either after relaying that information. I know D2’s request was time-sensitive, hinging on the production deadline for their next issue, so I assume they moved on.

No big loss, although I’d gladly take the money/credit if it was offered up. Part of my ulterior motive was to avoid going out of my way for such non-spam inquiries, so in that sense, I got what I wanted. The micro-monetization of user-generated Web content doesn’t seem well-structured for substantial cash outlays.

Lots of buzzing over this week’s rollout of Facebook Places, including the obvious lifting of the social-media-meets-location concept from Foursquare.

Maybe too obvious, judging from the current Places logo, shown above. Notice how the streets intersect within that little map glyph-box, to form a familiar numeral? It’s hard to miss:

“Bahaha. It’s a 4. In a square. And on that night, tongue and cheek were reunited.”

And to infer further, that giant location marker can be seen as poking its way into the heart of that geolocational map. Or dropping like a bomb. You make the call.

If this wasn’t an intentional subliminal visual, then some Facebook designer drone is getting fired today. At least he’ll know where he’s at.

Two years after the turn of this century, I started blogging. Two years after that, I moved my bloggage to Population Statistic. And today, to the day, I’m celebrating six years of running this every-single-day-posting blog.

And how am I celebrating? By seriously considering closing up shop.

It’s true. The handful of regular visitors to this space may have noticed the precipitous drop-off in posting lately, down to a single post per day. That’s well off my pace from years ago, when I would routinely knock out 4-5 posts daily. There’s no doubt about it: I’m running out of steam. I still enjoy writing on this, my little corner of the Web, and even look forward to it most days. But even when the motivation is there, I’m finding it difficult to produce anything that I’d consider worthwhile. It’s getting to the point where I’m disqualifying potential material, ostensibly because it’s not interesting enough, but really because I don’t feel like going through the exercise of crafting a mini-essay.

I can’t say that this low-ebb phase will last. It’s entirely possible that I’ll recharge the creative juices soon, whether due to a change in climate, a shift in lifestyle, or some other factor. But at this moment, I can’t see it. And I don’t see the point in pushing on when I’m not fully into it. Rather than go to a non-daily posting schedule — which is the present trajectory — I’d sooner just pull the site down. Maybe to start over with a new site/blog, or maybe not.

This is kind of a downer way to commemorate a six/eight-year run, especially since most bloggers are lucky to keep at it for more than a few months. All thing have to end eventually — assuming I do end this online hobby. Stay tuned.

Blog-housekeeping note: Starting today, I’ve installed Twitter’s official Tweet Button onto this blog, for both individual posts and aggregate post pages.

This replaces the Topsy Retweet Button that I’d installed as a plugin back in March. I’ve long since deactivated that one, as it started exhibiting some bugs a few months back. It doesn’t look like Topsy is even supporting the plugin anymore, so I’m 86ing it. The only thing I’ll miss is the included feature of pulling in “reaction tweets” as trackbacks onto the linked-to posts; but that was the main feature that was bugging out, so I’ll just have to find an alternate solution for that one.

We’ll see how the Tweet Button flies around here. It’s currently in a butt-ugly placement at the end of the post content and atop the post-footer info; if I find the motivation, I’ll hack through the CSS to make it line up prettier. For now, it’s functional, which is good enough.

With just a little HTML and a smidgen of PHP, you too can build a human body in Web-compliant code:

Just in case you want to customize to your own physiological specs, here’s the bracket-by-bracket markup from above:

It’s telling that the PHP comes into play only when defining boobies and private parts. Like you couldn’t already tell this was devised by a guy-geek…

The explosion of digital and online communication options has resulted in nobody under 40 ever returning your phone calls.

Young people say they avoid voice calls because the immediacy of a phone call strips them of the control that they have over the arguably less-intimate pleasures of texting, e-mailing, Facebooking or tweeting. They even complain that phone calls are by their nature impolite, more of an interruption than the blip of an arriving text.

Kevin Loker, 20, a rising junior at George Mason University, said he and his school friends rarely just call someone, for fear of being seen as rude or intrusive. First, they text to make an appointment to talk. “They’ll write, ‘Can I call you at such-and-such time?’ ” said Loker, executive editor of Connect2Mason.com, a student media site. “People want to be polite. I feel like, in general, people my age are not as quick on their feet to just talk on the phone.”

This does, of course, jibe with fewer and fewer voice minutes being chewed up on cellphones, in favor of text and data. We’re moving toward a standard where our mouths are shut, but our fingers are flying.

A couple of observations from this trending:

- The group that’s stubbornly sticking to phone-chatting — generally Baby Boomers now in their mid-40s and above — are the same ones who largely abandoned the old ritual of personal letter-writing. Their social connectivity revolved around the immediacy and ease of local and long-distance phone calls; the asynchronous written word was shunted to strictly business-related matters. So now, it must feel like something of a betrayal to have to resort back to writing (texting) versus speaking in personal relationships.

- Synchronous vs. asynchronous modes of communication are at the heart of all this. When speaking with someone — either face-to-face or on the phone — you don’t have the luxury of responding at your own pace. With email, text, and IM, you generally do, even if it’s only for a few seconds. There’s a comfort level in the latter that doesn’t exist with an open line. And I think this illustrates the feeling best:

Answering a phone call requires a certain amount of psychological energy, she said. “I put it off because there’s something confrontational about someone calling you,” she said. “You have to gear up for it.”

I’d like to think that this distillation of dialogue into written snippets results in less noise and more signal. But that presumes that the content of this communication is actually improving — and since we’re talking writing about human beings here, that’s a pretty silly notion to hold.

The tail end of July must be perpetually uneventful, if the following “This Day In History” blurb from my Excite homepage is any indication:

Jul 28, 1865: The American Dental Association proposed its first code of ethics.

Earth-shaking development, in the midst of the concurrent (and, let’s face it, comparatively minor) Civil War. Because you absolutely need ethical guidelines while sticking your hands in some stranger’s mouth.

I’m not above triggering an online meme based around images of some anonymous hot chick. And so:

The above two ads have been making the rounds on websites I routinely visit. Nothing particularly special about them — one’s pushing the acai berry fad, while the other claims to hook you up with Apple gadgets for low-low prices. Nothing shady there, I’m sure.

But obviously, the common thread is that tanned blonde woman, posing as some kind of investigative reporter in both instances. She must have a fairly free-formed beat if she’s covering “breaking news” on both superfoods and iPads. Reportage versatility is highly valued…

Obviously, she serves as an eye-catching prop in both ads. It probably works too, to the tune of an extra percentage-point or two in clickthrus. I’m just wondering who she is, and what possible connection there is. Is she actually behind both ventures, as a sort of scammer-girl of all trades? Or simply a stock-photo model, whose image was procured by separate ripoff operations? From such are online mysteries born…

The alleged demands of SEO started taking a toll on online news headline-crafting years ago, and now we see the bland results:

Newspapers still have headlines, of course, but they don’t seem to strive for greatness or to risk flopping anymore, because editors know that when the stories arrive on the Web, even the best headlines will be changed to something dull but utilitarian. That’s because, on the Web, headlines aren’t designed to catch readers’ eyes. They are designed for “search engine optimization,” meaning that readers who are looking for information about something will find the story, giving the newspaper a coveted “eyeball.” Putting well-known names in headlines is considered shrewd, even if creativity suffers.

Early this year, the print edition of The Washington Post had this great headline on a story about Conan O’Brien’s decision to quit rather than accept a later time slot: “Better never than late.” Online, it was changed to “Conan O’Brien won’t give up ‘Tonight Show’ time slot to make room for Jay Leno.”

I still question why such pun-filled blurb creativity needs to be sacrificed. I can’t believe that Google or any other content-crawler would penalize a page that’s otherwise chock-full of pertinent keywords, just because the headline doesn’t precisely jibe. In fact, I’d think that a unique hed would make an article link stand out from the surrounding vanilla descriptions. As in the above example: After scanning line after line of “Conan-Tonight-Leno-etc.”, wouldn’t the clever wordplay of “Better Never Than Late” lure more eyeballs, just out of curiosity? I’d like to think so.

RentAFriend.com offers non-sexual companionship services for an hourly fee. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the platonic-supply business is booming:

“I wish I had more to tell you,” [RentAFriend member Christopher] said, shouting into his cellphone as a city bus roared by. “But not one person has called me since I signed up five months ago.”

Next I called Sabine. She’s 51, from Germany, and charges $30 an hour for her friendship. That’s also her rate for her regular job: pet-sitting exotic animals, namely reptiles (she has 45 of her own at home, including a python). She joined RentAFriend because she “thought it was a great concept,” though, like Christopher, she’s been a member for several months and no one’s called her…

The next 10 or so people I left messages with never called me back, maybe because they’re working overtime in hot-air balloons.

One qualifier: The above sampling took place in Los Angeles. And as we already know, the definition of “friendship” is different in LA:

…When people talk about ‘friends’ they often aren’t really claiming to know that person socially, or that they see them on the weekends, or have their home number. They would even be surprised if you made that assumption. To them, when they say ‘friend’ they mean it, and expect it to be understood by the listener as, ’someone I know’.

So, at least in Southern California, it makes little sense to pay for a relationship status that you can claim merely by bumping into someone a couple of times. As for other areas, those friending rates are probably high enough that it actually makes more sense to just ask someone out for a date — with the same ultimate dollar figure, and at least the possibility of a more intimate conclusion.

More than a year ago, we were expecting future sports-transaction news to be delivered directly from the players, via social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook.

But when you’re LeBron James, and you’re the preeminent free agent of this 2010 National Basketball Association offseason… Well, why settle for a measly Twitter account when ESPN will give you an hour of airtime to announce “The Decision”?

Sources told ESPN The Magazine’s Chris Broussard that representatives for James contacted the network, proposing the idea of a dedicated special. The sources said James’ representatives requested they be allowed to sell sponsorship for the broadcast, and ESPN agreed.

“Due to the unprecedented attention and interest surrounding LeBron’s decision, we have decided to make this announcement on national television,” James’ business manager, Maverick Carter, said on lebronjames.com.

Old media trumps new media once again, when it comes to the monumental events. And indeed, James announced his choice of the Miami Heat tonight, a moment that was blunted only slightly by the leaks earlier that indicated he had decided on south Florida.

Considering how commoditized other aspects of sports business have become, having a marquee player build a television special (really, an advertising vehicle) around his contract signing is a natural. The NFL Draft is a major offseason viewing event, and “free agent frenzy” coverage is a major staple in all major-pro sports media (including college signing days and the like). Since the audience interest continues to grow, we can expect future dedicated event coverage like this, stemming from the players or the teams/leagues. It’s a significant step in that a player like James now commands enough clout to control the message so thoroughly, and on an enviable national-broadcasting stage.

The only thing, regarding James’ @kingjames Twitter handle: Typical of many celebrity accounts, he’s amassed a few hundred thousand followers while following nobody. A deft move, simultaneous with James’ live announcement on ESPN, would have been that zero-following changing to a 1 — with that one being the team he finally chose. Perfect orchestration, and a nod to the online fanbase. Maybe for the next mega-free agent circus, next NBA offseason.

Paisley Park’s own Prince has roused the online rabble by declaring that he’s done with the Web:

Unlike most other rock stars, he has banned YouTube and iTunes from using any of his music and has even closed down his own official website.

He says: “The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it.

“The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

Quite the Luddite approach to modern media. I’m sure someone else, somewhere, has referenced Prince’s classic “1999″ as a reference point, as in His Royal Badness wishing that the InterWebz would revert to that year, when MP3 downloads were an iffy affair on dialup speeds. If not, I’m doing it here.

This funny quip has been making the rounds on Twitter this week, and I can’t think of a more apt summation of The Twilight Saga than this:

Dear Confused Teen Girls: Someone who sparkles and won’t have sex with you isn’t a vampire; it’s a gay guy.

Disheartening to realize that that dreamy bloodsucker is really a something-else-sucker. But on the bright side, those teenage girls can emulate their sexless fantasies with the nearest available gayboy.

On another tack, here’s another interpretation of Team Edward versus Team Jacob:

In the war between Team Necrophilia and Team Bestiality, I am Sweden.

Funny how a whole new pop-cultural perspective can be gained in a mere 140 characters.

Other social network imports haven’t caught on in Japan like Twitter has, and it may have to do with the un-bird-like translation:

“It’s telling that Twitter was translated as ‘mumbling’ in Japanese,” [consultant Motohiko Tokuriki] said. “They love the idea of talking to themselves.”

I can’t imagine a “mumblr” catching on in the English-speaking world. Maybe the art of the mumble is more respected in East Asia.

Since it doesn’t play music videos anymore, MTV is prepping for the next generation of content-filtering talent: An officially-designated, in-house “Twitter jockey”, or TJ.

The recruitment effort, which is officially called “Follow Me: The Search for the First MTV T.J.,” is planning to announce its first 18 candidates this week, culled from viewers with strong Twitter and Facebook presences. Two additional candidates will be chosen through a Web site, tj.mtv.com, where viewers can nominate friends or — more likely — themselves. The candidates will then face off in a series of competitions starting in July, with a winner to be selected in a televised event on Aug. 8…

Stephen Friedman, the general manager of MTV, said in a telephone interview that the T.J. position was created partly because of the huge online spikes that MTV enjoys during broadcast events like, say, a new episode of “Jersey Shore,” or when Kanye West grabs Taylor Swift’s trophy at an awards presentation.

And they’re not skimping on the salary, either: $100K for a year of tweeting. I would nominate myself, except that I’m ridiculously too old for MTV (39 tomorrow!), and I’m probably not tapped into the proper pop-cultural zeitgeist to pull it off. Maybe if VH1 ever needs a “teej”…

If it’s not enough for your TinyURL or bit.ly shrink-link to be an effectively blind destination, then new URL shortener Trick.ly furthers the online obfuscation:

Trick.ly is a free service that shortens and password protects web links you want to share with select individuals on the internet. And rather than rope you and your contacts into a new social network, Trick.ly allows you to share with people on-the-fly.

If you want to protect secrets from the “merely curious”, Trick.ly lets you put a password on links with clues only your friends would get.

So instead of directly heading for the intended page, Trick.ly speedbumps you first for the password/security question. A short pause, and maybe an appreciated one — but a process that ultimately gums up the free-flow Web even further. Just what we need.

Still, this is a creative approach. It doesn’t look like it’s particularly secure; I’m sure you can crack most user-generated passwords with little effort, so top-secret links should go elsewhere (like, not on the Web in the first place). I suppose Trick.ly is no more inane than any other shortening service, so get as tricky as you want with those shortform links.

Today I received my first-ever payment check from Yahoo! Publisher Network. It’s also my last-ever check from them, as Y! shuttered its answer to Google AdSense not long ago.

My grand total? Five dollars, eighty-five cents.

That’s four years after signing up to be a Network partner. But my tenure was short-lived: I swapped in the YPN ads for a brief test-run, immediately saw that they weren’t serving up anything of value, and promptly ended my experiment. I never did tinker with them again; AdSense pays well enough that, frankly, it’s not worth my time trying out blog-advertising alternatives.

I never bothered to close my YPN account. I would receive infrequent auto-messages over the years. From those, and casual news-tracking, I knew that Yahoo!’s foray into ad syndication was doing poorly. I figured it would end soon enough, and now it has.

And I’ve got a paper check to show for it. Hardly worth the cost of printing it and mailing it out, but there you go. I will indeed deposit it. My dreams of Internet millions obviously won’t involve the Sunnyvale company.

As much as we’re accustomed to consuming online content in decentralized, permalinked chunks, it sometimes pays to take in something in its “true” synchronized state. To wit:

Liz at Bobulate follows up a post about the virtues of standing still with one about the joys of jumping. Both dealing with the wholly literal versions of those states of being, to boot.

The free-form ease with which you can switch gears so completely from one day to the next is probably why some of us started blogging in the first place. Always good to come across such entertaining reminders.

I never knew that there’s a acronym name for frivolously-bullying lawsuits filed by deep-pocketed organizations against individuals:

Some first amendment lawyers see the case differently. They consider the lawsuit an example of the latest incarnation of a decades-old legal maneuver known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or Slapp.

The label has traditionally referred to meritless defamation suits filed by businesses or government officials against citizens who speak out against them. The plaintiffs are not necessarily expecting to succeed — most do not — but rather to intimidate critics who are inclined to back down when confronted with the prospect of a long, expensive court battle.

Basically, litigation by attrition. Fortunately, a lot of states have anti-Slapp laws on the books. So depending on where you live, you can yelp and tweet your rants with wild abandon, without worrying about being dragged into court.

Caprice Crane hears tell of gourmet-ish airs at 7-Eleven, and calls them on it, Book of Revelation-style:

7-11 sells Four Cheese Pizza. The cheeses are: War, Pestilence, Famine and Death.

End-times delivered not on horseback, but on a hot-and-crispy bread crust. To which I can only tweet: Apoca-licious!