Loving tech, social networking, and blogging doesn’t mean I’m not also a dad. Heck, I’ve been a dad over half my life now.  Chris Brogan started a site for men like me, Dadomatic.

Dadomatic is a place for dads that blog to blog about fatherhood and family. This can take the form of advice, product reviews, or how-to articles. Visitors to Dadomatic will find whit, wisdom, and wackiness. Best of all it’s family friendly.

I’d like to point you to my two most recent Dadomatic offerings:

Massage and your children

Love, Anger, Kids

Some of your favorite bloggers blog there as well. Jeffery Sass, Chris Brogan, and Doriano Carta aka Paisano.

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• A New Podcast, Starring A “Cast of Dads” (sassholes.blogspot.com)

Just got this great news from my cohort Paisano:

“Hey guys. Just wanted to let everyone know that it’s finally going to happen. I’ve been working on a special deal with ABC and Good Morning America producer on a new blog post that we’re going to feature exclusively on “The 5 Most Critical Legal Documents Every Dad Must Have for his Family”. Chris Cuomo will be interviewing Alexis Neely on the air on 8/26/2009 (She’s one of the most well-known family lawyers in the country) where they will talk about Dadomatic, what we do and share the link to our exclusive article. We can expect a tremendous influx of new readers and hopefully subscribers!”

This is very exciting for all concerned.  Dadomatic.com was kick started by Chris Brogan as way to get dads blogging about being dads.  The epitome of daddy blogging you might say.   Dorian aka Paisano is the editor-in-chief, while I and several other dads write about raising children, being a spouse, along with product reviews.

Exposure from this will really bring the multi-author blog into the limelight.  Now to get off my tail and start writing. I could be the next daddy blogger on Good Morning America.

Paisano indulges himself with thoughts about the unchanging faces of social networks. Here’s an excerpt:

The way we communicate on social sites like Twitter and Facebook has to evolve at some point when it comes to expressing ourselves beyond just plain text. I don’t mean merely by using video which has already begun with services such as Seesmic, 12secs and Utterli. I’m talking about allowing us to use visual aids similar to the way we can use emoticons when text messaging. You know, those little smiley faces we add at the end of IMs on GTalk?

He challenges the notion that a static icon to represent us should be the standard, and discusses some presently used alternatives on some networks.

What do you think? Smileys? Rotating picture? Mood based pictures?

Drop by Paisano’s blog and leave your thoughts.

Courtesy of Paisano.

Hey, that’s me.

Alltop much? If you want to know what’s hot, or at least the top 100 in something, there’s no better way than to visit alltop.com. Today is the premiere of utterati.alltop.com. It’s the site for the top Utterz users on the net.

Notice anything? Yep, yours truly made the page. My name is up there along with such greats as Chris Brogan, Andy Caster, and Paisano. Woot.

Do stop by the Utterati page and check out some of the goodness. You won’t be sorry.

Twitter Hashtags and Groups « American Pai
“As your list of friends grows on Twitter, the amount of messages that scroll across your screen increases exponentially. Pretty soon it becomes impossible to catch messages directed your way in real-time. Ultimately you have to resort to backtracking or using a search tool like TweetScan (R.I.P Terraminds!). Increasingly members of the Twitter community are demanding better ways to filter and group all of this information. One of the new solutions has been Twitter Hashtags and channels.”

Yes, Twitter Hashtags are becoming more widely adopted. I have used them more often, especially for tweets regarding Austin, where I vacationed.  Hashtags is a site that tracks the use of the # symbol in Twitter posts. It’s really that simple but that one act provides a wonderful opportunity. That’s the opportunity to follow all of the posts about a specific # tag.

In my case, I tagged posts with #Austin where I provided links to pictures and blog posts, even people.  At the outset one might think there is little extra value here so far.  Hashtags turns that into tweets that users can subscribe to.

Now a user can go beyond following real life friends without having to add lots of strangers on Twitter.  Hashtag will send those tweets with the # tag, say #Austin, right to your door Twitter box.

So this sounds great right? There are downsides though.

1) # tags interrupt the conversation – yes, as they are still new, when used, followers may inquire about their use and the conversation strays; the tags also interrupt literally by breaking up the flow of words and letters.  Several of my followers have actually complained to me.

2) #tags are seen as link bait – because the tags intended purpose is to allow Twitter messages to be found by engines such as Hashtags, your Twitter buddies might feel put off that your post is more to draw attention to you and your links than be real conversation.  This is a valid concern in my opinion. I’ve already seen that use where no attempt is made to engage others.  Those tweets stand out often by a lack of any other text in the message.

3) #tags waste space – and there’s a shortage of that built right into Twitter. This is probably the most reasonable argument against their use. Paisano and others agree that it’s time for Twitter to bring on tagging outside the message.

I’ll keep using # tags for now, but only where it really serves a purpose.  Already evident is the use of the # even when the post has no intrinsic value about the tagged word.

What will you do? Use them? Abuse them? Ignore them? Drop your friends that use them?  What will come next? Are you working on the next best thing for Twitter?