In the past few years, the smartphone market has basically been divided into two camps: iPhones and everything else.

RIM’s dominance in the smartphone sector was primarily in the corporate world, where businesses appreciate the BlackBerry’s ability to seamlessly integrate with Microsoft Exchange. In the corporate world, BlackBerrys have been handed out for years. But the iPhone has raised the bar in terms of what consumers expect from their handheld devices. It’s not just about e-mail and text messaging anymore; it’s about web browsing, social networking and apps.

When my outdated BlackBerry Curve died over the weekend, I was heartbroken, to be sure. But I recognized early that it gave me the opportunity to upgrade. And I love new gadgets.

As an AT&T customer, I could easily go the iPhone route. I’m an iPod Touch owner and love the device. But I know enough about iOS and the iPhone interface to know that I don’t want an iPhone. I don’t particularly enjoy typing on a touch screen. And I want a device that does what I want it to do; the promise of hundreds of thousands of “apps” does not impress me if 95 percent of them are useless. I despise having to use iTunes. And, frankly, the design of iPhone 4 is just not rugged enough for me. So I decided to stick with BlackBerry.

I had my heart set on a Bold. But at the AT&T store, the Torch jumped out at me. It’s sleek and solid. It feels good in the hand. The touch screen is responsive and pretty, and the keyboard, though it has taken some getting used to, makes typing so much easier. But the best part of the Torch? The updated BlackBerry OS and the much-improved web browser.

The first thing you notice about the Torch is its familiarity. BlackBerry die-hards will be happy that, unlike the Storm, this IS a BlackBerry, through and through. It takes a matter of minutes to acquaint yourself with the ins and out of the OS and you can get started messaging and making calls immediately. I’ve read reviews that the Torch’s processor is underpowered, thus rendering the OS sluggish. I haven’t had that issue. I find the phone responsive, quick, and a real pleasure to use. The added ability to create folders for your shortcuts means more organization and less clutter. My favorite part of the BlackBerry — the integrated inbox — remains. RIM has done a better job of handling popular social networking apps, and now includes a Social Feeds feature, which integrates feeds from social networks and RSS into one central place.

The new web browser is excellent. Again, I’ve read speed complaints. But anyone familiar with BlackBerrys knows the secret to web browsing was to immediately download Opera Mini. That’s no longer necessary. The new browser supports tabbed browsing elegantly, keeping the tabs out of the way until you want them. Pages render quickly and properly. Pinch to zoom is included. I’ve found myself actually surfing the web on this device — a near impossibility with BlackBerrys of the past, even with Opera Mini. Even YouTube is a pleasure on the Torch. With just a few seconds of buffering, video renders smooth and largely uninterrupted, even on a 3G connection.

The downsides? Not all apps from your old BlackBerry will run on BlackBerry OS6. Twitter and Bing do not have supported apps yet, which means you’ll have to run UberTwitter or some other client. And Google apps run smoothly, though I’ve found I prefer Bing’s mobile app. Screen resolution could be higher, but the Torch’s screen is bright and pretty.

In all, RIM did exactly what it needed to do with this device: It stepped up the game and proved it’s still a major player in the smartphone market — one capable of creating gadgets that aren’t just good for the corporate world, but are also enjoyable for consumers.  This is, without a doubt, the best BlackBerry ever.

UPDATE: A couple of other little downsides:

To unlock the Torch, one need only press a single button at the top of the device. Unfortunately, that’s a little too easy, especially if you leave the Torch holstered most of the time. It seems to come unlocked a little too often when you don’t want it to.

RIM has gone from two custom convenience buttons to one. It’s not a huge problem, but those who’ve gotten used to two buttons will be forced with a difficult choice to make.

Call quality is good…sometimes even excellent. But from time to time, there is a small tinny sound. It’s bad enough to be a bit annoying, but not a dealbreaker.

I admit it: I’m addicted to my iPod Touch. I love having a tiny computer in my pocket. I love having the ability to check baseball scores, surf the net, watch YouTube videos, monitor my e-mail, plus listen to music and watch video any time I want. If I’m bored, I can fire up a game of Fruit Ninja and I’m good.

A couple of weeks ago, I awoke to find my beloved iPod dead. It wouldn’t turn on at all. The battery was at 75 percent the night before, so I was surprised, but not alarmed. I figured the battery had drained overnight. No big deal. I plugged it in to charge, took my shower, got dressed for work. But when I went to grab the iPod, it wasn’t charging. It was still dead, though now hotter than blazes from being on the charger for the past hour.

I tried charging it in the car and at work. No dice. It wouldn’t do anything. It was a brick. The computer didn’t even recognize that anything had been plugged in. Heartbroken and frantic, I went online. I googled. And googled. And I found that I wasn’t alone…the web is teeming with iPod Touch issues. And no solutions that I could find.

So I checked Apple’s website. I tried everything it suggested. Still no luck.

I’ve heard for years the talk of Apple’s legendary customer service, so I figured I’d give it a try. Maybe call someone, find out if it’s a known issue with a quick fix. But after logging in, I was informed my iPod was no longer under warranty. A phone call from a “Genius” (the supposedly know-it-all help desk folks) would cost me $29 — not to fix the problem, but for the phone call itself. That’s $30 just to talk to someone, with no guarantee that they can help at all.

No thank you. I decided to go to the local Apple store and talk to a real-live “Genius.” It’s not far from my office, so I figured I’d drop by on my way home from work. I talked to a polite young man who informed me I had two options: Wait an hour and a half for the next appointment or schedule an appointment for later. Now, all I wanted was for someone to listen to the symptoms and tell me whether it was fixable. But, alas, they wouldn’t talk to me unless I waited or scheduled an appointment. I left.

On Monday I made an appointment. I got there early, and again was met by a nice young man. As I expected, the appointment lasted fewer than five minutes. He plugged the iPod in. He shined a flashlight into the  ports. He cleaned the ports and plugged it back in again. The verdict?

“It’s fried,” he said. “We can’t do anything with it.”

He told me the problem is not uncommon. And since it’s three months outside the warranty, he offered me two choices: I could buy a used one for $100 or I could buy a new one, and they’d happily give me 10 percent off.

Ten percent? My iPod Touch is the 16 gb model, which Apple no longer makes. If I buy a new one, I can get the 8 gb version for $199 or the 32 gb for $299. So I save either $20 or $30 — a small (very small) attempt to make up for a product that failed long before what I considered life expectancy. I told him I’d think it over. See…I’m not about to spend $300 on a device I know will be outdated this fall, when I expect Apple to release a new iPod Touch that comes with a camera or two and supports all the bells and whistles of the new iPhone.

I also remembered that the iPod was a gift from my parents, who wisely purchased it with an extended warranty from the store (not Apple). I made a couple of phone calls and was put in touch with a CSR. She took down some information, but couldn’t find a record of my warranty. What she said next, though, surprised me.

“I’m sending you a UPS label,” she said. “Just send the iPod in and we’ll have it back in seven to 10 days.”

“I’m sorry…what?,” I asked. “I thought you didn’t have any record that I have a warranty.”

“That’s okay,” she answered. “We’ll take your word for it.”

“So…I send it to you and you tell me what it will cost to fix it?”

“No. You send it to us and we send it back when it’s fixed.”

At that point, it seemed like my last best hope. So I mailed it in, free of charge. Four days later, it was returned. I plugged it in. It came on, charged up and worked…almost.

I noticed trouble connecting to WiFi, and the battery seemed to be draining quickly. The next day, I called a number they’d provided. They didn’t put me on with a CSR this time…they put me on with the guy who actually did the work. We chatted briefly and agreed I’ll send the iPod back. His promise? He’ll have it in perfect working order before I get it back again. But he told me a lot more than that.

He told me he’s surprised at the number of iPods he fixes after Apple Geniuses tell customers they’re beyond repair. In one such recent case, and Apple Genius told a customer they’d need a new iPod because music would only play through one side of the headphones. Corey fixed it in minutes, just by soldering the headphone jack.

So here’s what I learned about the Genius Bar: It’s a sham. Apple Geniuses aren’t really there to fix your problems. They’re certainly not real technicians who, as Apple claims, know your product inside and out. In fact, they’re the Apple equivalent of the Geek Squad. And their goal is to fix your issue by selling you something else. Sure, while I was at the Apple store, another Genius was helping an older man sync his iPod with iTunes and led him through the process. But that’s simplistic help. It isn’t the line we’ve been sold.

Apple’s customer service model is pretty easy to dissect: It’s based on marketing, not talent. Like Best Buy, Apple markets Geniuses as highly trained technicians who can help with any problem. If you’re under warranty, that’s easy — they give you a new one. If you aren’t under warranty, that’s easy too — they tell you to buy a new one. There’s nothing technical about that. But people leave the Apple store feeling content anyway. Why? Because they believe they had no choice but to spend $300 on a new iPod. A Genius told them that was the only solution.

In my case, the Genius was either lying or flat-out wrong. Not only was the iPod not fried and not beyond repair, it only needed one simple part — a battery. Apparently, that simple fix took more than a Genius to figure out.

In real estate, location is everything, right? Put your business on the right street and you could make a killing. Put it in a dumpy neighborhood and you could be closed in six months.

The Internet’s not all that much different.

I’ve been in the Internet business a long time. Longer than Facebook. Longer even than Google or YouTube. I make a decent living helping clients use the Internet to promote themselves, better serve their customers and keep their own doors open. It’s a vocation I enjoy. One thing I’ve learned? The whole Internet is a dumpy neighborhood.

That’s right. I said it. The whole Internet is that dumpy neighborhood. It’s filled with perverts, lurkers, sleaze balls, snake-oil salesmen and worse. And more than that? There are way more people there who don’t want your product than there are who do — hundreds and hundreds of millions of people who want absolutely nothing to do with whatever you’re selling.

People love the idea of doing business on the Internet, because opening a storefront there seems like opening a storefront on the busiest street in the city. But it isn’t. It’s more like opening a storefront on the Autobahn, where the vast majority of the traffic is flying by, and nobody stops unless their car breaks down or they need to take an emergency bathroom break.

If we continue to torture this metaphor, I’m sure our search engine optimization friends will say that’s exactly what SEO is for…it’s like a road map, telling drivers exactly where to go to find what they’re looking for. And perhaps they’re right.

But as I tell my clients, think about your own shopping habits. When you go shopping, do you bring a map, drive around town and hope you find what you’re looking for? Or do you head to the mall and know exactly what stores you like? Do you pop into every store on Main Street, or do you read through the Sunday circulars and know where the sales are?

I’ve been harsh on SEO in the past, primarily because in my experience the vast majority of SEO “experts” know just enough to be dangerous. And with that nugget of knowledge, they’re willing to charge a fortune — all based on promises they can’t deliver on. And while I believe websites should be search-engine friendly, I can’t stand idly by and allow good people to be taken in by the idea that generating sales online is as simple as spending money on SEO. I can promise, without hesitation, that it does not work that way.

Very few people shop blindly. They aren’t typing in some random phrase  and then buying the product from the first website they see. In fact, the vast majority of traffic — and therefore the vast majority of sales — on any website should be “direct request” — meaning someone actually typed in your name and visited on purpose.

I’ve had plenty of lively discussions on this site about the importance of drive-by traffic — the folks who google some term and stumble across a particular website. My argument is now and will forever be that this “drive-by” traffic is just that — it’s folks who were just driving by on that busy freeway. Perhaps they craned their necks as they passed, but they aren’t going to buy from you. They may even be on the wrong street.

Some of my SEO friends will tell you to take advantage of this traffic — to optimize your site so drive-by traffic becomes a profitable. But doing so is pandering to the lowest common denominator, and it isn’t serving your actual customers.

As I’ve said a thousand times: Advertise. It’s the only way to become a destination. No matter what you’re selling, make sure you’re an expert on that product. Make sure nobody knows it better than you do. Provide value and an amazing customer experience. Get people excited about supporting you. Create an ad campaign that targets your market and actively reach out to help people who could use products you’re selling.

SEO can get your address on the map, but advertising is the big billboard above the building, shouting “_____ on sale today!”

Before you spend money on anything, think about your own habits. If you aren’t excited about the way you’re marketing your business, chances are nobody else will be either. Be dynamic, incredible, and worthy of your customers. Don’t just rely on putting your business on the busiest street.

It may be piling on, but I can’t be quiet about Facebook anymore. I don’t want to be there and if I could, I’d have been gone ages ago. But if you can get out, I suggest you do so now…before it’s too late.

Let’s break it down:

Back in the beginning, Facebook seemed so…friendly. It was an exclusive club, open only to students. And it felt so much cleaner than the MySpace cesspool. Everyone was eager to join Facebook, and as soon as Zuckerberg opened the doors, millions streamed in. Now Facebook is the biggest, baddest social network on the block…a nation of 350 million unto itself. Problem is, this isn’t just a social network of your friends, and you aren’t just sharing your photos, antics, likes and dislikes and your bathroom habits with your buddies. You’re sharing them with Facebook itself. And Facebook isn’t laughing with you or consoling you; it’s making money off of you.

We knew that, didn’t we? I mean, Facebook is a business. But it really hasn’t been apparent to most of us just how Facebook was going to make money outside apps and ads. In plain English: Zuckerberg is selling access to your “private” information to other companies. There’s no “stupid” or “blind” ad network serving up ads. Facebook is a recon mission; you are the target. It’s a brilliantly executed social engineering plan, wherein Facebook earns your trust, gets you to tell all your dirty secrets, and then sells you out. So…basically the Linda Tripp of social media platforms.

That should scare the crap out of you. Especially given Zuckerberg’s track record with private information.

On Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile, he lists his personal interests as “openness, making things that help people connect and share what’s important to them, revolutions, information flow, minimalism.” That all sounds pretty good, right? But how open is Zuckerberg? Let’s just say his profile updates are generally about his company, and he has a total of 40 pictures uploaded on his account. He wants you to share things that he won’t. That says a lot to me.

I count myself lucky that I’ve never been a fan of oversharing. My own Facebook account has precious little on it…a couple of pictures, a few updates, a sparse bio…and that’s how I wanted it from the beginning. I can’t trust a service that wants too much access to my life and, frankly, neither to the hundreds of “friends” one can accumulate on Facebook in a short period of time. But it only takes five minutes browsing lamebook.com to realize there are a bajillion Facebook users who have no problem posting anything and everything they can think of. And as the entire web becomes a Facebook application, even more of your information is going to be stored in the Facebook brain.

Drop the Kool-Aid and run.

Facebook is like the Hotel California: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. That’s because the second you upload or post anything, Facebook owns it. And now Facebook’s Open Graph API means Facebook even owns your online habits. I’ve been stunned over the past few weeks to hear folks talk about leaving Facebook, deleting all their embarrassing pictures and disabling their accounts. But disabling and deleting are not the same thing. If you’ve disabled your account, you can still be tagged in photos and notes, you still get update e-mails and if you log back in at any time, it’s like you never left. If you want to delete your account, instructions are here.

Adobe has finally come out with its official response to Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ now-famous Thoughts on Flash blog post. In reading it, one gets the sense the Adobe is very angry, but fears defending itself. Instead of the milquetoast response, Adobe should have gone point by point to counterattack Jobs’ claims.

Since Adobe won’t, I will.

1. First, there’s “Open”. Jobs says Flash is 100 percent proprietary, and therefore doesn’t fit into Apple’s version of what the Internet should be. And though Jobs admits Apple has proprietary products, he doesn’t admit that the vast majority of Apple’s products are proprietary — so proprietary, in fact, that Apple’s license agreements don’t allow users to run Apple’s operating system on anything but an Apple computer. And Apple has updated iTunes several times to keep users from synching the Palm Pre to iTunes. Jobs cannot argue that he is now or ever has been a proponent of “open.”

2. Second, there’s the “full web”. In answer to the claim that iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users don’t get the full web, Jobs responds by ignoring the point. He says there are plenty of places to get video from, and that although Flash games aren’t playable on his devices, there are plenty of games available in Apple’s App Store. Perhaps. But he ignores the large volume of rich content residing on the web that was built in Flash. Not just videos and games, but whole websites, advertisements, photo galleries and more. On the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad, you’re barred from that content — not because it isn’t possible, but because Steve Jobs has decided it isn’t necessary.

3. Third, there’s reliability, security and performance. Jobs says Flash is full of security holes and bugs, and therefore not trustworthy. Know what else is full of security holes? Mac OSX. As was recently widely reported, Macs are more susceptible to viruses than PCs. Fortunately for Apple, market share is still so low that malware developers just don’t bother writing malicious software targeting Macs. Jobs says Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. That surprised me, particularly because I’ve heard that Macs never crash. But if we take Steve on his word, wouldn’t that make Apple partly responsible? Wouldn’t the team at Apple want to figure a way to work with the plugin and create a more stable OS?

4. Fourth, there’s battery life. Jobs says using Flash will drain batteries. Again, Jobs defaults to the video argument. Frankly, I don’t disagree that video is better served in h.264, and if that means longer battery life, all that better. But Apple could better serve its customers by allowing customers to control their own experience. If it means battery drain, so be it. The user learns something. But the bigger point — getting the full web — wouldn’t be a substantial draw on battery life. Video here is the straw man set up to redirect attention from the essential parts of the web that are missing.

5. Fifth, there’s Touch. Jobs says much of the content developed in Flash does not interact well with touch devices. For that, he blames Flash. But I believe the opposite is true. Flash was around long before the iPhone. The fact that Apple hasn’t figured out how to handle simple things like rollovers is not Adobe’s fault. In fact, it shows a huge lack of understanding about how people use the web. It isn’t the Internet’s responsibility to live up to Jobs’ vision; it’s Apple’s responsibility to deliver the content people are looking for — whether Jobs like it or not.

6. Sixth, the most important reason. Jobs says Apple won’t let iPhone and iPad developers build apps in Flash because it will lead to clunky, slow, bloated and substandard apps. And, according to Steve, it’s important to protect the user experience. In response, I’ll say that I own an iPod Touch. I use it daily. I’ve downloaded plenty of crappy apps that crash and freeze, games that nag you to buy the full version or just don’t work at all. And if Jobs wants to talk about bloated, slow, substandard apps, he needs look no further than the PC version of iTunes. Without a doubt, it is the absolute worst, clunkiest, slowest piece of software I have ever run. Ever. Even last night, it halted the download of my daily podcasts and would not resume the downloads. I couldn’t even close iTunes without using my Task Manager. The point is that Jobs is only concerned with user experience when it suits him…and it suits him in this case because his team can’t figure out how to get the iPhone to run Flash.

Bottom line: Adobe was essential to Apple’s rise from near death a decade ago. Products like Flash, Photoshop and Illustrator were (and are) considered standards for the creative class that kept Apple afloat. Apple owes it to Adobe to be more open, more cooperative, more forgiving, than perhaps it would be with any other company.

If I were running Adobe, my response would have been more simple, more direct, and have greater impact: I would announce that Adobe is no longer developing Mac OS versions of its products, because Mac OS is not open, Apple does not support the “full web” on its products, Macs are too vulnerable to security breaches, Apple’s mobile devices do not offer sufficient battery life, Apple product developers don’t understand the way users interact with the Internet, and Apple doesn’t care about user experience.

I’m sure the Windows crowd would accept that in a heartbeat.

If you need any more evidence that today’s journalism is a rudderless ship drifting about aimlessly, look no further than the reaction surrounding the recent decision to change the AP style for “Web site” to “website.” It amazed me to see the phrase “AP Stylebook” on Twitter’s trending topics, and as a former journalist who hasn’t quite washed the ink from his hands, I was curious.

My reaction to the news? So what? I yawned. I moved on.

And then I saw this. In a nutshell, Robert Niles of The Online Jounalism Review argues that journalism students need to ditch AP style and start learning SEO. Now my blood is boiling. Check out this idiocy:

The newspaper industry developed a common style, maintained by the Associated Press, to meet the communication needs of a print-based industry trying to most effectively communicate with a broad audience.

Today’s online publishers, editors and reporters need a new style that most effectively allows their words to reach their intended audiences. Unfortunately for them, the print-inspired AP style is not that. Today’s (and tomorrow’s) journalists need to learn search engine optimization [SEO] techniques as much as, if not more than their predecessors who worked the print industry needed to learn AP.

The argument is that AP style is for print; SEO is for online. And Niles argues journalists need to learn how to use SEO in their writing to help content “jump to the front of the line” in search engines. He says “good SEO can help make your pages more lucrative in keyword-targeted advertising systems, such as Google’s AdWords.” None of that has anything to do with journalism, and it absolutely shouldn’t. Ever.

AP style is an attempt to find a common, understandable language amongst members of the news industry. It sets rules so there’s a degree of sameness in language from one writer to the next. It allows for an authoritative voice that denotes a particular discipline. As such, it is extremely necessary. And not just for print. Even online, a website that doesn’t follow a consistent style is uncomfortable to read. Some readers may not pick up on why, but inconsistent capitalization, punctuation and language are disconcerting. AP style eliminates that.

As for Niles’ argument about SEO? It’s bunk.

A true journalist reports the truth, and should never never think of profit. Following Niles’ advice amounts to creating advertorial content. It’s slimy, dishonest and chips away at the pillars of what journalism should be.

One need look no further than Gizmodo’s recent series of stories about the next-gen iPhone to see why creating performance-based content is a bad thing. According to Gawker Media owner Nick Denton, Gizmodo reporters are paid “traffic bonuses” for their stories, and the reporters who broke the story about the next-gen iPhone stand to make a decent heap of cash for essentially buying property considered stolen under California law. That’s not good journalism. But it did quadruple the number of visitors to Gizmodo.

Reportage for the greater good and solid writing will get attention. And it’s worthwhile, even if it costs you.

As a young journalist, I investigated the trouble local pantries and soup kitchens had getting food donations from a large retailer (I won’t name the company, but it happens to be the largest retailer in the world). After the story ran, the retailer refused to sell the newspaper at the store. It cost the paper a considerable amount of money. But you know what else? Our local food pantries started getting donations. And due to customer demand, the paper was back on the racks there in a matter of a month.

Bottom line? Journalists need to write for people — not search engines. And if folks like Niles are the future of journalism, we’re in a lot of trouble.

With the big Apple iPad launch came a flood of reviews across the media. David Pogue loves the device. So does Walt Mossberg. Old Media are throwing themselves at the iPad as if it’s the promised savior.

For the New York Times and Popular Science, Conde Nast and the host of Old Media producers building apps, the iPad could very well be the last, best hope.

It’s no secret that newspapers and magazines are suffering from nosediving reader numbers. And nosediving reader numbers mean nosediving advertising dollars. Fewer ad dollars means less cash to pay stockholders, bloated management trees and, ultimately, journalists. And it’s less money to buy one thing these organizations have relied on since Gutenberg: paper.

Paper is a huge expense for newspapers, rivaling only salaries for the top expense at most print publications. Paper (and ink) costs can be downright crippling, but without paper, there’s no business. It’s like running a McDonald’s without frozen hamburger patties.

The iPad gives print publications the exact out they’ve been looking for: a device folks can use to flip through the pages of their favorite periodical — almost as if they’re holding the paper itself. It offers designers full control over the look of the thing, unlike the fairly typical newspaper website. It’s a wonderful way to print a newspaper or magazine without using paper. Brilliant. Newspapers could actually charge a whole lot less for their products and still make enough to pay the bills. And then some.

But the Internet is already an excellent platform for publishing. Heck, I do it myself whenever I get the chance. It’s cheap, reaches a vast audience, and publishing is immediate. So why are publishers so eager to put in the time and expense to join the iPad bandwagon?

Control.

Newspapers, by and large, hate the free Internet. Believe me on this. I’ve sat through the conferences and the seminars. Even now, publishers are confused and frightened about cannibalizing their print content, working too hard to generate added-value online content and how to handle the comment sections of their sites.

It’s that last one that really sticks in their craws.

In the pre-Internet days, it was easy to moderate public opinion. An editor just decided which letters to print and which to leave out. These days, it’s not so easy. Commenters and trolls say whatever they want, whenever they want. And thanks to the Safe Harbor rules, newspapers can’t do much about it, other than automatic filtering.

The iPad brings back  those halcyon days when the editor decided everything. That’s because the iPad is about consumption, not interaction. It’s a device for consuming media — not creating it.

I’m not saying that’s an entirely bad thing. I am saying it’s a potentially dangerous thing.

See, we count on our newspapers and magazines to be our watchdogs. But who watches the newspapers? Who calls these outlets out when there’s conflicts of interest, shoddy journalism or outright lies? For the past 10 years, bloggers and commenters have been serving that function. We’ve held journalism to a higher standard than journalists hold themselves to. And that’s a very good thing.

By the time you read this, I’m hoping to have fewer Twitter followers.

A couple of weeks ago I pointed you over to Atomic Tango, and Freddy’s wonderful tongue-in-cheek post about scoring more Twitter followers. If you haven’t read it yet, do so. It’s one of the truest, funniest and most interesting things I’ve ever read about Twitter.

It was funny at the time, and it made sense, but I wanted to put Freddy to the test. See, his contention is that you score more Twitter followers by doing slimy little things…and really, you do them to accomplish one slimy big thing — amass scores of fake Twitter followers so you can, well, brag about how many Twitter followers you have. And then get more Twitter followers.

Step one, according to Freddy: Keywords. Use enough of the right ones, and you draw the attention of Twitter zombies and spammers. The right keywords? Things like “MLM,” “network marketing,” “downline,” and “wealth.” And you can throw in SEO, SMM, SEM and any other buzzword used by the slimiest spammers on the net.

So I tried it out. I posted one simple tweet, packing it with keywords. I was in my office at the time, it was the end of the day, and I was headed home. Between posting that tweet and getting into my car, I gained seven new followers. On the drive home, I gained three more. Over the next couple of days, I posted five more tweets, packing each with keywords. I’ll add here that none of the tweets could have been construed as serious. In fact, I was brazen about calling out “my zombie friends” to make sure the follow process was automated. In short order I picked up about 60 new followers. I say “about” because I screwed up at first, and didn’t follow the zombies back. Those I didn’t follow dumped me within 24 hours. Lesson learned.

Those I did follow sent me automated direct messages almost immediately, offering to sell something. Awesome.

Then I realized what I had done. I ruined Twitter.

Now my stream is polluted with SEO experts, get-rich-quick schemes, automated tweets about blog posts from months ago and lots of ways I can use the Law of Attraction to make my life better. I don’t need Twitter for that; I already have an e-mail account.

Before this little experiment, Twitter was a pretty good news feed. I follow news outlets, tech journalists, local people and folks I consider experts (not people who call themselves experts) in fields that interest me. Sure, I’ve built a couple of lists to pull them from the haystack I created, but that just didn’t work for me.

So now I’m going to tell you the real secret of Twitter: Follower counts don’t mean anything. Nothing.?The only folks who have a lot of followers are celebrities and liars. That’s it. Why? Because everyone on Twitter believes they’re a leader; nobody wants to be a follower. We’re obsessed with our own follower counts because, well, what’s the sense in posting anything at all if there are only three people listening?

The sense is here: If you use the methods above and score 97 more followers than the three you used to have, there are still only three people listening. Zombies can’t hear you and won’t respond.

Want to get the most out of Twitter? Stop thinking about who’s following you and start concentrating on who you follow. There are brilliant people (like Freddy) posting brilliant things. And don’t worry about whether they’re following you back; follow them because you’re interested.

You get the most out of Twitter not by talking, but by listening. And if you’ve got engaging content to put up, do it. Talk to your followers. Respond to those you follow. Have a conversation. But don’t do any of it for the numbers. That’s the secret.

So…

I’m headed over to my Twitter account. And I’m unfollowing all the spammers, zombies and slimeballs.

I’m better company than that.

I don’t visit Chat Roulette. Let’s just get that out of the way right now. I don’t go there. The mere thought terrifies me. It shouldn’t — after all, I’m a grown man. But there are some things I’d just rather not see.

Chat Roulette is a pretty brilliant idea, actually. It’s one of those ideas that could only have been dreamed up by an idealistic teenager, who just wondered what it would be like if you could just hit a button and video chat with a random stranger anywhere in the world. Pretty awesome, right?

Wrong.

Like way too many other things online, creeps are immediately drawn in. And just to be clear, Internet perverts will always find a way to ruin any good idea. Always.

In the Chat Roulette I envision, a schoolteacher could put the service up on the projector in front of the class, hit a button and be connected to someone in Germany or France. The kids could ask questions about the chatter’s traditions or the food. They could actually learn something. It would be like when I was a youngster and we had penpals in other countries, only Chat Roulette would allow users to speak in real-time. I could even see classrooms using this daily — like a daily trip around the world. And even average Joes could go online and chat with random strangers, either for fun or to learn. It my vision, Chat Roulette could play a huge part in drawing the world closer together, breaking down borders and fostering understanding between people.

Instead, we get perverts.

C-NET’s Natali Del Conte, in a report for CBS, showed it doesn’t take but a couple of mouse clicks before a Chat Roulette visitor is exposed to nudity or propositioned for sex. And, as such, it’s not a safe playground.

I don’t know what the 17-year-old Russian lad who invented Chat Roulette had in mind when he launched the site a few short months ago. According the rules, there’s no pornography, nudity, illegal or immoral behavior allowed.  But as Jon Stewart points out, this is the Internet.

Point is, the Internet’s never seen a good idea it couldn’t screw up. And Chat Roulette was ruined before it ever got off the ground. My advice to the Chat Roulette developers? Figure out a content filter that allows safe surfing, and you’ll find your user numbers grow. Legitimize your site before it gets any more out of hand than it already is, and perhaps create an education-only section, where school kids can interact with each other in the classroom.

Right now, all you’ve got is a website that proves people suck.

The Viacom vs. Google court battle is getting downright nasty. Viacom has dug up a bunch of e-mails and instant messages they claim show YouTube’s founders were purposely leaving copyrighted material online during YouTube’s early days — damning evidence against Google.

But more interesting are Google’s claims that many of those copyright-infringing videos came from Viacom itself — some of them uploaded to YouTube by Viacom employees, who were directed to put them online from places like Kinko’s, where they couldn’t be traced back to Viacom.

Already, Viacom has backed down from some of its claims, based solely on evidence that it did indeed upload its own videos to YouTube (hence, Viacom as copyright holder could not infringe on its own copyright). Now, this new accusation throws into doubt the rest of the alleged infringing works. How can Viacom prove which videos actually broke the law?

The issue boils down to this: Early on, and up to today, Viacom sees online video as a threat to its business model. But execs probably wanted to take advantage of the medium from the very beginning. By uploading videos, Viacom got two things: attention for the shows and content it was promoting and grounds for a lawsuit down the road. It got both.

Antics like this don’t surprise me at all. They just point to a crazy, disheveled slash-and-burn mentality, in which in Viacom’s collective mind it can do no wrong. It’s a mentality in which the company can willingly and unabashedly twist the law to its own advantage. And, if my personal experience is any indicator, Viacom is very likely succeeding more than anyone at this point can guess.

Nearly four years ago now I was producing a series of local spoof news videos for an online project I was getting off the ground. In one video, our crew took aim at Tom Cruise’s fight against South Park (the infamous Scientology episode). In editing the video, we used approximately 5 seconds of video from that episode, to illustrate the Cruise parody. We used no audio whatsoever.

Shortly after the video hit YouTube, it was unavailable, with a message that said it had been “removed for violating copyright.”

I was enraged. There was no proof the video violated copyright. In fact, it was a clear case of fair use. YouTube followed the letter of the law that is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — once a complaint is received, the video is removed. I disagreed with the decision, but understood why it was removed. I first fought YouTube for labeling me a copyright infringer. Though the DMCA forces YouTube to removed the content, it does not mean a conviction has been won. Eventually, the note on the video said it had been “removed due to a copyright claim by Comedy Central/Viacom.”

My next step was to call the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

With a little help, I filed a counter claim, they failed to respond, and within days the video was returned to YouTube. As a lawyer at EFF told me, the video was clearly fair use.

So why was it removed?

Viacom’s policy was clearly to take down anything it didn’t like, banking on the fact that most users wouldn’t fight back. Since Viacom doesn’t actually need proof to get a video removed, it could, for all intents and purposes, remove any video it didn’t like — even if it in fact didn’t contain a single bit of infringing content.

Here’s the video, just in case you’re interested. It’s still on YouTube:

The question here isn’t just about user-generated content. It’s about our rights, and the dishonest tactics the movie, television and music industries have been employing to stifle innovation while padding their own pockets.

It’s about time this is all coming to light.