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Back Channel Blog Comments: The Wages of Sin for Not Facilitating Your Own Social Media Stream

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.

Continue reading → Back Channel Blog Comments: The Wages of Sin for Not Facilitating Your Own Social Media Stream

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How Not to Leave Blog Feedback at 7:00am on a Sunday Morning

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

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Why We Converted a Facebook Personal Account to a Business Page

On Saturday, I made the decision to convert my personal Facebook account into a Business page.  It was not a difficult choice to make because, even though I had over 5,000 friends and 200 followers — when your friends queue is full, Facebook forces them into “following” you — I was really only posting Boles Blogs updates to my timeline.

Even though I don’t make any money from Boles Blogs, creating a Facebook business page offers some unification of thought and clarity of purpose on the social network.  I would “lose” my friends and their updates, as well as my own timeline since 2006, but I would also gain thousands of “Likes” — “friends” get converted into “Likes” when you convert a page — and my “followers” would also, magically, become “Likes” on the new page, too.  I would only have to update one Facebook page instead of two.

Here’s what the new Boles Business page looks like now on Facebook:

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Today is Our Eight Year Anniversary on WordPress.com

This morning, at 2:55am Eastern, as I was waiting for the Apple Store to open at 3:01am — a lovely notification popped up in my WordPress.com admin area telling me today, September 20, 2013 — was my eighth year anniversary on WordPress.com!

Now that is a milestone to celebrate!

I remember I was one of the super-early adopters here on WordPress.com and I was the in the early 500s as a registered user number — there are now over 80 million WordPress blogs in the world.  I loved the idea of Matt Mullenweg‘s WordPress.com right from the start:  An excellent publishing platform that was dead-simple to use all day every single day of your life!

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Great Blog Posts Demand Excellent Article Rewriting

Our beloved Boles Blogs author Nicola just finished writing an incredible, and memorable, stretch of connected articles that absolutely deserve our devotion and celebration!

Over the past 20 days, our Nicola wrote 18 articles for publication.  These were not simplistic blog posts.  These were intricate posts packed with photographs and personal insight.  Many Boles Blogs articles average 300-500 words, but Nicola’s works in this stretch averaged over 800 words per post and many doubled that number.  That’s over 15,000 words written in 20 days!

Continue reading → Great Blog Posts Demand Excellent Article Rewriting

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Revisiting the “Freshly Pressed Effect”

Yesterday, we were delighted to win a spot on the WordPress.com Freshly Pressed page for our Kaposi’s Sarcoma article, and that sort of public recognition has, in the past, meant big booms in readership and other quantifiable areas of blog publishing and — as I did in the past with our first Freshly Pressed win for Black Cat Bone — I will share those metrics with you now.

First, because of our Freshly Pressed feature on June 5th, we enjoyed our “Best day for Follows on Boles Blogs” — that is a big and huge record for us because followers tend to become dedicated readers and they stick around.

WordPress.com followers are counted, and not counted, in odd ways.  Facebook friends are counted in the final, public, tally, while  “moved” followers from old blogs to a new blog do not count.  No LinkedIn connections are counted as followers — even though they should be — to match the same relational logic as Facebook friends.

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Boles Blogs Wins Freshly Pressed a Second Time!

Yesterday, around this time, I received the following email from WordPress.com editrix Michelle Weber:

Hiya David,

Dust off the welcome mat and get ready to welcome some new readers — we’ve picked your post (http://bolesblogs.com/2013/06/04/do-you-remember-kaposis-sarcoma/ ) to feature on Freshly Pressed on WordPress.com!

This must have been a tough post to write, but it’s an important one — thank you. We thought it was a great read and think the rest of the community will agree — we’re really looking forward to the discussion that comes out of it, and are glad we can give it (and you) some more exposure. The wide variety of high-quality content on your site deserves a bigger audience!

Keep up the great blogging! Follow @freshly_pressed on Twitter to be inspired by other great bloggers — we also tweet each new Freshly Pressed post, so it’s the easiest way to know exactly when to start bragging. (I’ve tagged @BolesBlogs in the tweet, so you should get a mention notification as soon as it launches.)

Thanks for being such an awesome part of the WordPress.com community. We couldn’t do it without you!

Cheers,
Michelle

Continue reading → Boles Blogs Wins Freshly Pressed a Second Time!

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Sitting on a Script Professor Domain Squatter

On February 6, 2012 I wrote — David W. Boles is THE Script Professor — because some unsavory person in another country created a new domain based on my ScriptProfessor.com domain by merely adding a “the” before “ScriptProfessor.com” to create “TheScriptProfessor.com” and I was outraged:

Let there be NO DOUBT on the Internets that I, David W. Boles, am, are, and forever shall be, THE Script Professor!  I have been  THE Script Professor since November 28, 2005, so let there be no question to my authenticity as pale imitators and purposeful thieves step forward and try to wrangle in private and modify in public my mark to serve their selfish ends by fogging reality and futzing legal authority.

This week, I was able to reclaim that illegally registered domain and “TheScriptProfessor.com” now rightly redirects to “ScriptProfessor.com” and the world is right and good again as you can see in this partial screenshot of some of the domains I own and operate:

Continue reading → Sitting on a Script Professor Domain Squatter

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Be Blunt and Cruel, it Saves Time

As a proud, but inveterate, INTJ — I have a philosophy of life that few people understand: “Be Blunt and Cruel, it Saves Time!”  I never use that philosophy with others without permission.  That philosophy is fully how I prefer to be treated, but few people are willing to abide the terms of what they perceive to be “rough language.”

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The Rhythm of Writing

When you’re in the midst of writing something, you settle into a natural rhythm.  The words set the backbeat and the fingers follow the melody in your mind.  Yesterday, when I sat down to write about the sun, there was a lot of racket outside my window as four corners of an intersection were being torn up to replace the sewer drains.  I decided to put on my closed-ear headphones, crank some iTunes music to drown out the heavy machinery, and write my article.  I discovered, to my dismay, that something had changed as my natural writing manner was out-of-sync with my eye.  My fingers couldn’t find the melody.  My words had no natural backbeat.

Continue reading → The Rhythm of Writing