Category: social-networking

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes…. and Fail at LJ

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy5 Comments

Those of you reading this on Livejournal, my former blogging platform, have already seen the massive fail that is the new β-Friends page (discussed in this post on LJ-Releases and this post on News). I do not like it one bit — I don’t like its look; I don’t like the infinite scrolling, and I believe it will further drive people away from LJ, which may be their goal.

As a result of this change, for the time being, I have modified the LJ crossposter to require that comments on my post be made on the WordPress master blog at cahighways.org. You should be able to log in with your LJ or Facebook (or even Twitter) account.

Further, if this change remains, I plan to look seriously to deprecating my LJ presence (i.e., if the friends page is painful to read it, I’ll likely not read it). As I want to keep in touch with all of my network friends:

  • If you have a public blog and mostly post publically, I’ll be glad to add your RSS feed to my Google Reader list. Please let me know the feed URL
  • I’ll probably move the crossposting over to my DreamWidth account, which has the same username as on LJ. I encourage those of you on DW to friend me there and to post there. I will rapidly friend you back. Please let me know if you are posting only on DW, so I can start reading my friendslist there (currently I don’t, because those who post on DW also crosspost to LJ).
  • If I move the crossposting over to DW, I’ll set up DW to then crosspost to LJ, for the few souls that remain there.

I have quite a large number of images used on posts over in the LJ image archive. I’m open to suggestions as to how to most easily move these images onto the WordPress Media Archive, and adjust the WordPress version of the posts to use those images. I do not plan on deleting my LJ account, because I do want to preserve comments. My account is permanent, so stuff should stay around. Although, with the current Rooskie Leadership, one never knows.

Comments and thoughts about this are welcome (of course, you’ll need to do them over here at cahighways.org).

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Opening a Can of …

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

Ah, lunchtime. The time of day when a persons thoughts turn to… tasty canned meat products. Oh, perhaps, they turn to the other kind of…

I mention this because I happened to look at my WordPress Dashboard, and saw the little note: “Akismet has protected your site from 23,482 spam comments already.”. Over 23,000 spam messages since I moved to WordPress in January. Wow.

Seeing all this, I thought I would write a little post for the spammers with some advice on how to get comments on this blog accepted:

  1. First and foremost: Make the content of your comment relate to the post. If it has absolutely no connection with the post, it stays as spam. For example, if in response to a post on politics, you write “Hey cheers! I apply earbuds abroad because health of their portability, even though I favor over all the ear”…. it ain’t gonna fly.
  2. Don’t just complement my blog. I know my blog is great; I don’t need comments saying it. I want an intelligent dialogue with my readers, not sycophants. Thus, a comment like “Very interesting info!Perfect just what I was looking for!” won’t fly on its lonesome (especially if the link for the poster is a site selling designer handbags… more on that later).
  3. Don’t tell me you’ve bookmarked my site (“Hi there, I found your web site via Google while searching for a related topic, your site came up, it looks great. I’ve bookmarked it in my google bookmarks.”). I don’t care. Comment on the specific post.
  4. Make your post grammatically correct (e.g., not “You are my aspiration , I have few web logs and occasionally run out from to post .”). If you don’t know how to compose proper English sentences, you will not be posted.
  5. For that matter, make your posts in English. If I can’t read your post, I won’t approve it. Russian spam (“фото звезд”)… I’m looking at you.
  6. Comment on a recent post. I’m still getting spam comments on posts I made last January; just a few minutes ago, I received a comment (“Hi my family member! I wish to say that this post is awesome, nice written and come with almost all vital infos.”) on a post about the iPod I made back in June. If you are commenting on something more than a week or two old, especially when it is not on topic, you’re a canned meat product.
  7. I look at the sites you claim to be from. If your comment has as its authors link a site clearly selling something, be it designer-knockoff purses, sex, viagra, or anything else, potted meat you are. Yes, this includes the purveyors of “ugg boots uk cheap”.
  8. I also look at your email address. What, you won’t give me an email address? Sorry, Charlie.
  9. If you are attempting linkbacks, the article from which you are linking had better relate to the linked article. For example, on a post regarding the musical “Justin Love”, I just received a linkback from a site with the webaddress “xamthonedistributor(dot)net/harga-xamthone/4570035123”. Somehow, I can’t believe this site has anything to do with a musical about a gay celebrity coming out of the closet.

I think, in all the time I’ve been using Askemet, I’ve had two false positives. I’ve gotten pretty trusting of its results. Of course, it will be interesting to see what spam gets attached to this post.

Of course, what I really want is non-spam comments. That’s where you come in. I encourage you to comment and interact with me on the subjects of my posts, and turn this into a conversation.

 

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Musings on Social Media

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

Earlier today on Livejournal, theferrett posted an interesting piece about the “death of Livejournal”. In this post, he linked to an article from the DailyDot on LJ’s decline. The article posited that the lack of new features was the reason for LJ’s demise. This prompted a really interesting discussion on LJ from die-hard LJs… and got me thinking…

I’ve been on the Internet since 1979. You read that right, 1979. In my sophomore year at UCLA, I started reading (don’t recall if I was posting) to SF Lovers. There are a few reading my FB who were with me around then. Later, in the 1980s, I was very active on another social media: USENET. I made many many friends on Usenet, and was active in a large number of newsgroups. But as with all things Internet, the folks from AOL invaded (:-)) and it went downhill. Usenet is still around today, but is filled mostly with spam and is a vast shadow of what it once was.

In 2004, my good friend Nicole (ellipticcurve) introduced me to Livejournal and I began blogging. As usual, the first posts were crap, but I soon developed a style and made many more new friends. It is what introduced me to long-form blogging, and I still treasure the people I met on Livejournal, the many comments I received, and the communities I participated in.

However, if you visit Livejournal today, it is a shadow of what it once was. Many people have left. Few people comment on posts. Those who remain there remain because of the communities, and it is because it is where friends they treasure remain. That’s why I still crosspost there. But it is clearly a platform in decline, at least outside of Russia.

Where did the people go? A few went to MySpace, when it was popular. Later, they went to Facebook. A few went to Dreamwidth. Some went to Twitter. A number created WordPress or Blogger blogs (I did the former). As the platforms proliferated, the communities splintered, and dialogue declined.

Today, I do what I can. I post on my WordPress blog, and propagate it over to Facebook (both manually and by RSS). I auto-crosspost to LJ. I manually share to G+. But I still get less interaction on my posts than I would like. I fear we’ve entered the “TL;DR” generation. Certainly I doubt that anyone has read this far.

Blogs continue to morph. I’ve recently been looking over at Tumblr. It is a different way of blogging, at least the way most people seem to use it. To experiment, I did create a Tumblr of my own; (cahwyguy) I’m unsure if I’l use it (just as I have cahwyguy reserved at Twitter, but never use it). I haven’t explored much there, so if there are feeds you recommend I follow please let me know.

So I’m curious about you — those who have bothered to read this far. What social media do you use, and why? Do you migrate to new platforms when they come out, or do you just stick with a tried-and-true? What do you perceive as the strengths of one vs. the others?

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Connections

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

One of the things I find interesting about Facebook are the connections it uncovers when it suggests friends. I notice this when I periodically scan the list of suggested “friends” to see if it actually found any real-life friends. In doing this, I often discover that my circles of friends intersect in all sorts of strange ways:

  • Example #1: Rabbi Lisa Hochberg-Miller. Rabbi Hochberg-Miller is a rabbi out at Temple Beth Torah in Ventura, who I’ve met a couple of times when I’ve been to her congregation. Not surprisingly, she’s friends with my cousins that live in Ventura, and some of the rabbis that I know. But, surprise-surprise, she’s also a friend of some family friends in St. Louis. How they know her, I have no idea.
  • Example #2: Mark Kaplan. Mark is a regular director out at REP East in Saugus. We’re subscribers there and have grown to be friends with the theatre’s leadership, so it is no surprise that Mark was suggested based on the theatre folk. But he’s also friends with a loads and loads (try over a dozen) people I know from camp. Now I’m wondering if I should know Mark from my years at camp.
  • Example #3: There are a large number of people that are friends from Livejournal, most coming through my connections with Nicole and the various dance groups she’s been in. It turns out these folks have mutual friends with a friend from high school I recently connected with.

So what odd connections have you discovered through what Facebook suggests to you?

Music: Buffalo Springfield (Buffalo Springfield): Bluebird

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Hey You! Yes You! The person reading this!

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy1 Comment

I almost missed it, but this is the end of National Delurking Week. So now is your time. Please comment and let me know you are reading this. You can comment on Livejournal, you can comment on Facebook, or you can comment on blog.cahighways.org: I’ve got it set up so you can comment with most social network sharing IDs, even Twitter. So don’t just hide: come and test my commenting mechanism, and let me know if you enjoy what I post.

Music: Genius + Soul = Jazz (Ray Charles): Birth of the Blues

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About This Morning… Umm… Oops…

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

As I wrote earlier this morning, I’m in the process of moving the primary blog over to a WordPress blog, to be located at http://blog.cahighways.org/ . I say “primary”, because it is set up to automatically crosspost any entry to Livejournal, which in turn cross-posts it to Facebook. Facebook is also currently posting the RSS syndication of the Livejournal blog.

Here’s the “oops”. This morning, as part of the blog setup, I asked WordPress to import my blog from Livejournal. Which it did. It then started to automatically cross post the old entries back to Livejournal, where they were then crossposted to Facebook, and RSS fed to Facebook (that is until LJ disconnected Facebook connect for too many posts too fast, and I turned off automatic crossposting until the merge is done).

The net result from this: I overloaded your friendslist on LJ with the duplicate posts, as well as overloading those reading current posts on Facebook. I then had to go and remove all the duplicates, which (of course) meant that in some cases (mostly 2004 and early 2005) I left the duplicate and accidentally deleted the original. I also discovered that the process creates a public crosspost to friends-only posts (which are password protected on the WordPress site).

For those of you creating WordPress sites, a strong lesson to be learned: import before you enable crossposting!

I do welcome comments on how the WordPress blog is emerging. I’ve set things up so you can log into the WordPress blog to leave comments with your LJ, Facebook, Twitter, and a few other IDs (yes, that meant I needed to create a Twitter account). I’ll note that I don’t plan to leave Livejournal, nor to stop reading my friendslist. I’ve got a permanent account, after all :-). It is just that given LJ’s behavior of late, I’d rather have my blog someplace under my control. It also gives my blog greater visibility, and prepares me for the day when I won’t always be able to use semagic.

 

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Who Is The Customer?

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

Well, LJ has made another change to their interface, and the community is complaining left and right about it. As for me, it got me thinking about the customer.

We all know businesses are in business to serve their customers. But we often forget to think about who the business perceives their customer to be, and then mistakenly assume it is us, the consumer. Often, we couldn’t be more wrong.

Take Livejournal. Perhaps in the beginning their customer was their user. Certainly that was the case in Brad’s day, when their only income was paid accounts. The minute LJ added advertising, the customer changed. The new customer—the one that pays the bills—is the advertiser. LJ moved from having a more usable site to wanting a site that attracted the most eyeballs that were the most sticky. When SUP bought LJ, the customer shifted slightly to the Russian advertiser, for the Russian market for LJ is so much bigger than the remainder. This explains quite a bit. It explains why LJ doesn’t care about its paid users anymore. It explains the growth of “Oh No, They Didn’t” and its clones: these bring outside viewers to the site. It explains the design changes and connections to Facebook and Twitter: bring in more eyeballs and bring in people from outside. LJ isn’t about its users or communities anymore. LJ can get away with this because the users are stickey: either the others in their community are here, or it is too much trouble to change. That’s why people often stay with services that suck. Just ask any bank. As for Dreamwidth… it is where LJ was in the beginning, focussing on the user. I can’t answer whether it will stay that way, but it is not going to gain the critical mass of users it needs unless LJ drives them away. DW will always be a niche player: it’s users will primarily be LJ refugees or the small corner that is fandom. It doesn’t have the mass market attraction.

But this post isn’t just about LJ. Look at banks and the banking system. Who is their customer? Who pays their bills? More often then not, their customer is not the individual account holder, but the institutional investor and the shareholders. Banks exist to make profits for their shareholders and other investors, not to return funds back to the account holders. This is why fees go up and service gets economized. This is why banks and financial institutions go after the risky investments: to bring in more profits, and return more to the preferred investors.

Let’s look at politicians. Who are their customers? Who pays their bills? Two answers here: lobbyists and the people that elected them. The lobbyists are a customer because they pay the bills: they make the donations, they fund activities, they funnel the dollars. As for the people that elected them, it is important to note that this is not their district as a whole or the country as a whole. Most politicians do not really care about their entire district or what is good for the country as a whole. They want to talk to their solid base that will re-elect them, so the lobbyist money can continue to flow in. This is why redistricting and number crunching has destroyed this country. Districts give politicians majorities in a particular party, and thus they can appeal to the party faithful to get them elected in the primaries (i.e., the majority within their party within the district). This is what the Tea Party and Conservatives are doing, to put it bluntly. Once having passed the primary, they only need to be less worse than their opponent. Republicans are more likely to vote for a Republican who is bad than a Democrat who is good (and the same for the Dems).

Understanding the customer explains a lot. Of course, over-understanding is equally bad. I alluded to that problem in the last paragraph, and perhaps I’ll do another entry on that in the future.

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Thoughts on Timeline

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

I’ve just enabled the new Timeline feature of Facebook. Here are my initial thoughts: If you are someone like me, who (a) doesn’t post a lot of status updates (especially creepy or ones that can be mistrued), (b) doesn’t have a lot of pictures, and (c) doesn’t put up a lot of personal information (such as employment history, relationships, etc.) with dates…. it’s tolerable. It makes it easy to go back in time and see what you posted.

If, however, you are like the typical Facebook user, sharing far too much information with the world that shouldn’t be public in the first place… if you put your entire resume on the site.. if you update your relationship status everytime someone looks at you… if you are tagged by lots of other folks in drunken pictures or compromising positions… this is going to freak you out.

My advice: Make sure your privacy settings are tamped down well. Friends only, or at most friends-of-friends… if you trust your friend’s friends. One caution on that: remember that the privacy is not the friends list at the time the post was made, but today’s friends list.

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