Today, December 24th:

Ron Samuelson, 36, is still smarting after being unfriended a month ago. The chief executive of jewelry retailer Samuelson’s Diamonds Inc. in Baltimore, Md., tried to view the profile of one of his Facebook friends — only to find his access was limited because they weren’t friends anymore.

Insulted, Mr. Samuelson wondered if his supposed friend, also a jeweler, feared his profile would give away competitive information, or if he had done it by accident.

It wasn’t long before the missing friend resurfaced, this time requesting to join a private Facebook group Mr. Samuelson had created for jewelers to network with each other. Still hurt, Mr. Samuelson says he hesitated before approving his request, but ultimately “chose to take the high road.” He says he would never get in the habit of unfriending people himself. “Diplomatically, it’s probably not the right thing to do,” says Mr. Samuelson, who has 466 friends on Facebook.

Mr. Samuelson declined to name the fellow jeweler. “I don’t want to burn any bridges,” he says. “He may be a future business contact.”

The reporter had run across one of Ron’s blog posts awhile back, “Unfriended on Facebook: Compliment or Diss?” Guess it does pay to just… blog. Who knew!

It’s interesting to come into industries which are typically very distant from the hi-tech world, and help them make use of the newest technology. My end of this deal has typically been the internet, web design and development, and with Samuelson’s my role has been mostly that.

I have to say I’ve been lucky, as when I arrived a half a year ago, we were already well into the action. The guys were already on Facebook and had created groups for their interests, and were involved in other services like LinkedIn.

Wordpress, when you need to publish something, anything...

By the by, this blog runs on a delightful piece of software called Wordpress. I would suspect (though my research powers fail me) that a good 25% of blogs are running on it. It’s pretty simple for those of you who don’t know. You go to Wordpress. You register. You make a new blog. Then, you log in and write what’s going on with you, and press ‘publish’. Basically no technical skills involved.

Anyway, I’ll be posting on topics relating to my expertise. Don’t worry – I’ll keep it interesting.

But (stay with me now) we took a look at our events page – you might’ve seen it – and realized that it had not been updated in perhaps a year, despite the fact that new events had come around. Now, we realize that the point of our website is to be useful – and it’s easy to see how that kind of page wouldn’t be very useful…

It just so happens that in the past year, we’ve seriously expanded our presence on the internet, including on the now-ubiquitous social networks facebook, myspace, linkedin, and twitter. Ron even started his own blog, Ramble on Ron. We decided that with our current website, there was no way we could keep our customers abreast of recent developments, whether they be events, press releases, or just happenings around the Baltimore area.

So that’s where this blog comes in. You can even use the feature to the left (newsletter) to get this stuff in your email (if you’re so inclined.) Watch this space for important news – well, as important as we can make it, anyway.

The sidebar on the right has all kinds of links – in case you’ve got some spare time you’d like to use – both about us and about this blog itself.

Thanks, and have a great day.