Reading Time: 2 min I’m seeing more and more people claiming to have “done the research” to support some kind of claim, and I suspect most of the “research” there is rather dubious. In most cases, they’re simply saying “I believe the views of person x instead of person y” — and that’s mostly ok. If you trust one […]
Social Media
Building castles out of sand
Reading Time: < 1 min When it comes to building your presence online, you can build it out of rock or out of sand. Naval said it well on Twitter a few years ago after Alexander Cortes was kicked off of Twitter: Building a following on Twitter is building a castle out of sand, as the implacable tide shifts in […]
Facebook still isn’t listening to you
Reading Time: 2 min It’s a common joke (or sometimes a fear) to “be careful what you say, because Facebook (or Google) is listening to you“. While it may be often intended as a joke, there are many people that think it’s true and there are some decent reasons to believe that it might be. However, I don’t think […]
Where do you really get your news?
Reading Time: < 1 min Almost every day I see someone complaining about “the media”, and the lack of coverage on a particular story or the slant given to something that happened. Despite that, I still maintain that you are the media. It’s important to have professional news organizations out there, for sure, but they no longer have very much […]
Shiny, happy, fake people
Reading Time: < 1 min We all know it’s true, but we all do it anyhow. We know that people only show their best side on social media, yet we compare our own lives, and our messiness, to the perfectly curated feeds from others. In the book “Back to Human“, author Dan Schawbel points to a study from a few […]
Blogging isn’t a tech issue, it’s a fame issue
Reading Time: 2 min I’ve said on here quite a few times that most everyone should have their own blog, and they should use it as the central place to share their ideas. I still fully believe that, but a recent post from Manuel Moreale has me rethinking my perspective a little bit. Here was his main point: No […]
Spam makes it harder for the good stuff to shine
Reading Time: 2 min Spam is just a bad thing. We all hate it. The problem I’m finding lately is that it’s also making good things appear to be more questionable. “Why did you write about that?” A while back, I shared on my Facebook about some great new charging cables we bought for our devices around the house. […]
The location changes, but the story stays the same
Reading Time: < 1 min The world of marketing is moving faster than ever. If you’re reading this near the time when I published it, you’re likely considering how Clubhouse and TikTok fit into the world of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If you’re reading this further in the future, those all have likely changed. This inspiration for this post actually […]
The best use of hashtags
Reading Time: 2 min Hashtags show up all over the place in social media; sometimes used well, sometimes not so much. Here are some quick thoughts on them. They started for groups Chris Messina first proposed using a hashtag back in 2007. They weren’t linked to each other, but the idea was that users of his group could search […]
Brandolini’s Law
Reading Time: 2 min This is something we’ve all seen before, but I never knew what it was called. When someone posts false or misleading information online, the effort to refute it is generally an order of magnitude larger than to produce it. Coined in 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, it’s known as Brandolini’s Law, sometimes known as the “bullshit […]