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Preventing Avatar Spam and Gaming Facebook LIKEs

If you live on social media networks, or if you write a blog, or manage a Facebook page, you’ve certainly seen a rise in efforts to game the networks for profit.  Way back on September 11, 2006, I predicted right here on this blog that people would begin to use Avatars — their online identity — to make money by selling their craven image to the highest bidder:

What’s to stop active — or better yet, INactive — blog commenters from getting hired by companies to change their Avatar to promote a website or a phone number or some other advertising blitz? Can you imagine being a new beer company and going out and finding the top 1,000 blog commenters and having them all change their Avatars to the logo for your beer?

Why it’s sheer viral genius! You could buy hundreds of thousands of page views on the cheap that could reach for years back into the history of Avatar-enabled blog pages on thousands of blogs — and the beauty part is this: No one would be the wiser.

The Search Engines already indexed and tagged the old content as safe and sufficient and your Avatar Ads would be silently served up when a search return is clicked through to the blog. The Blogmaster would never know — especially if you were not posting recent comments.

Continue reading → Preventing Avatar Spam and Gaming Facebook LIKEs

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A Memory of Thanks to Ebert and Siskel

With the passing of movie critic Roger Ebert this week, I have been trying to find a centerstone from which I can write about his death.  Here’s what I wrote about the man on February 19, 2010 in my article — What Roger Ebert Speaks to Our Students:

Now that Roger fights on to live to write and to watch and to read and to love over and over again — any sense of our self-pity or our internal mourning is forever put to rest in the example of his unbelievable fight for an imperiled life that continues to thrive against the belly of the beast best efforts of every malignant cell and troubled tissue to take him from us.  Every day we die a little, and each night, we dream a lot of the days yet to live.

Continue reading → A Memory of Thanks to Ebert and Siskel

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One Thousand Boles Blogs LIKES and Counting!

We did it!  With your help over the last six weeks, Boles Blogs won over one thousand LIKES here on WordPress.com!  We previously promised you we’d keep you looped in on our badges of honor as the days pass along — and today we share with you the results of our hard work and your good reading!

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The Curious Case of the Missing “C” and Why David Has to Edit My Punctuation

For economic reasons, I decided I was not going to ship my once state of the art gaming computer to Portugal when I moved.  “The Beast,” as she was known, would have almost doubled my shipping costs by the time all the relevant insurances had been applied.  It was simply not worth it.

She was sold to friend with whom I hear she is very happy.

This meant that when I got here I shared a computer with Mr P.  As anyone knows, sharing a computer is a delicate affair at the best of times and although we did not come to blows or even utter a cross word it soon became apparent that we needed another computer.

Continue reading → The Curious Case of the Missing “C” and Why David Has to Edit My Punctuation

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The New York Times Confirms Our Boles Blogs Comments Policy

Here at Boles Blogs, we have always had a strict and unbending Comments Policy — that you had to use your real name, you could not insult other commenters or authors, and absolutely no curse words allowed — among many other rules.

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State of Boles Blogs on Bing and Yahoo

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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The Written, Rising, Art: On Writing Writing Prompts

A great joy of teaching is when your students surprise you with something unexpected.  One good way to find out what students are thinking is to ask them to respond to a writing prompt.  My favorite writing prompt for Playwriting students is to ask them to write a dramatic scene that begins with this line: “I’m going to kill you!”  30% of students will immediately write, as a second line, “Just kidding!” — but for those students who believe in the threat first line, the rest of the story tears off.

Continue reading → The Written, Rising, Art: On Writing Writing Prompts