LEET!
Today, thanks to you, we celebrate yet another milestone here on Boles Blogs: We have surpassed the 1,337 Followers mark!
Here’s the latest morning addition to our WordPress.com Trophy Case:
Continue reading → LEET! We Now Have Over 1,337 Boles Blogs Followers!
I am often asked by friends and associates what they should write. They want to know how to get people to read their blog, buy their book, get more followers on Twitter or more Page LIKEs on Facebook or lots of plusses on Google+.
My answer to that inquiry is always the same: “Just Write Something!” — and everything else will eventually fall.
That advice jumps in the face of two common writing canards: “Write What You Know” and its doppelgänger, “Write What You Don’t Know.” The first school of thought allegedly makes you an expert on your own selfie life; the second avenue of percussion quickly resounds into a research project where the self often goes missing.
Continue reading → Weaving the Social Mesh: Write What You Want to Know
I’ve been professionally writing for most of my life. In 2004 or so, I bet big on daily blogging, and found a lot of success in the prairie days of the early, roughshod, internet. Years before that, I was writing for paper and online magazines.
One thing I missed in my dedication to longform writing was the initial wave of mixing traditional work with social media networks like Twitter and Facebook. So what I did, in effect, was to give over control of the discussion of my articles to the wild internet where — through back channel conversations of which I was not aware — my work was being discussed and evaluated.
Boles Blogs readership has remained vibrant and steady throughout the years and, lately, we’ve even been growing lots of Followers and LIKErs. All numbers are up across the board, so I wasn’t searching for a cause — or even begging a reaction — concerning our direct-response comments flow.
Funny that people didn’t want to login using Twitter to comment on my articles here, but they were perfectly fine “discussing my work” on Twitter while logged into Twitter. I understand that meme-shift, though. Commenting here is participatory. Starting a new Twitter stream makes you a publisher. It’s all about dynamic control and perception. You fight that sort of back-channel co-opting by being there and being alive and watching and responding.
The remedy for that missed meme was to not just propagate new articles into Twitter and Facebook, but to be more proactively lively in the Social Mesh to make more of a difference and to be more easily found.
There’s nothing quite like waking up early on a Sunday morning to a voicemail ping that a new message is waiting to be heard. Imagine my non-delight as, at 7:00am, I listened to some woman start a five-minute rant against and article I wrote eight years ago — and she started it all off with this sentence:
“You’re a piece of sh@t.”
I’m not spelling out the her word of the day, but you get the idea of where the rest of her message was heading.
Based on the Googly mess that is a Google Voice email transcription of that voicemail, and the manner in which it started, I deleted the voicemail after that first sentence without listening to an insane person trying to wield imaginary power against ruining my day.
I found it highly amusing that the Google Voice email transcription ended the call with the woman admonishing me to be kinder and gentler and to become a “compassionate person!” Harr! There’s nothing quite like the cold fish of irony slapping a hapless caller right in the face as payback for drunk dialing!
Continue reading → How Not to Leave Blog Feedback at 7:00am on a Sunday Morning
It’s that time of year again for 2013 reflection and to get set for racing into 2014 and the New Year, and that means we are pleased to announce the — Best of Boles Blogs, Volume 4 (2013) — now for sale on Amazon!
Over the years, many of you have asked for a way to promote the ongoing publication of Boles Blogs and to also have a way to read some of our best writing when you’re offline. The solution has been a “Best of” series of books published by Boles Books Writing & Publishing that we sell on Amazon for your reading pleasure.
Continue reading → You May Now Buy the Best of Boles Blogs, Volume 4 (2013)
We reached the One Million — 1,000,000 — reader/hits/visitors milestone for the first time (again!) here on BolesBlogs.com since we became the consolidated Boles Blogs a year and five days ago.
Reaching a million of anything is an accomplishment and a joy, but it also forces you to reflect on what was and where you once stood as you wonder if you’d stayed the course and kept a finite focus, readership would likely be over Ten Million — 10,000,000 — reader/hits/visitors today instead of just a million.
In November 2007, when we were only the Urban Semiotic blog — we were close to smashing the one million mark — and we did just that a few weeks later! It’s hard to imagine how many millions of readers we’d have tallied by now if we’d stayed a single blog.
Continue reading → Evaluating Lost Blog Readers: Ten Million vs. One Million
It’s been about a month since all 14 of our former network blogs, Urban Semiotic, Go Inside, Boles Blues, Panopticonic, Carceral Nation, Boles University Blog, 10txt, RelationShaping, United Stage, WordPunk, Memeingful, Scientific Aesthetic, Dramatic Medicine and Celebrity Semiotic became this Boles Blog. In that brief time, we’ve published over 80 new articles. That’s a World Publishing Record for any of our single blogs.
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