I didn’t realize this blog was on Advertising Age’s “Power 150.” Ironically, I’m ranked 151 (or, at least I was when I noticed it). Also, ironically, there are 360 weblogs on the Power 150. This badge is supposed to show my current “rank.”

From the New York Times article about Microsoft paying $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, comes this quote from “a venture capitalist who is bullish on Facebook”:

“Facebook is based on who you really are and who your friends really are. That is who marketers really want to reach, not the fantasy you that lives on MySpace and uses a photo of a model.”

Obviously, the person who said this (who I don’t know, but with whom I share six “mutual” Facebook friends) is projecting his grown-up experience using Facebook. However, I feel certain if we polled a sample of the more-typical user of Facebook with the question, “Do you think the “you” people project on Facebook is really who they are?” they’d come a little closer to having the perception of Facebook that was recently articulated by Alice Mathias in a NY Times Op-ed piece written to debunk the notion among “its rapidly assembling adult population…that (Facebook) is a forum for genuine personal and professional connections.”

Explains Mathias:

“I’ve always thought of Facebook as online community theater. In costumes we customize in a backstage makeup room — the Edit Profile page, where we can add a few Favorite Books or touch up our About Me section — we deliver our lines on the very public stage of friends’ walls or photo albums. And because every time we join a network, post a link or make another friend it’s immediately made visible to others via the News Feed, every Facebook act is a soliloquy to our anonymous audience.

In other words, the stuff marketers really want to wrap around their brands.

Advice to young caffine addicts. The Starbucks’ iTunes free ‘Song of the Day’ cards look like something you should collect and put in a shoebox so that one day about 30 years from now, when your mom is cleaning out the attic and throws the box away and you later discover people are selling them on eBay for some ridiculous price, you’ll be able to tell people how your mom threw out a rare rookie Sonya Kitchell Starbucks iTunes card worth $500.

Note: I picked up those cards on the left this morning — so, I guess it was a four free songs of the day at my neighborhood Starbucks.

This announcement by Union Square Ventures explains why they’ve invested in Tumblr.com. It also contains a detailed explanation of what a tumblelog is. I use Tumblr.com to aggregate all my posts, tweets, photo-sharing into one “lifestream” that I call “River of Rex.” I describe the page as a confluence of all my various online posts (”streams”) right before they flow into the Gulf of Rexico. Recently, I redirected the previous URL, rex.tumblr.com to the URL RexHammock.com. Tumblr makes such redirects easy-to-do.

I love the tumblelog concept and I find Tumblr.com a brilliantly simple platform to use. However, I hate having to explain to non-conversational-media-geeks yet another one of these “things.” My friends in the real world still have problems understanding the whole “blogging thing,” so I’ve given up on trying to explain to them the nuanced similarities and differences among blogging, posting media to Flickr or YouTube, group messaging via Twitter, maintaining an identity on a social networking service and a tumblelog.

Here’s an earlier post related to simplicity of setting up and maintaining the River of Rex.

Speaking of tumblelogs and lifestreams, I just noticed that Plaxo has added something it calls a “lifestream widget” that does precisely what the RSS aggregation part of a tumblelog does. Here’s mine:

Technorati Tags: tumblelog, tumblr