Longtime readers of this — David Boles, Blogs — publication machine know I have always held a deep-rooted hatred of Wikipedia because of its provocative, and well-documented, willy-nilly publication history, and its ongoing stigma of defacing, and not defending, the public record; and now, after my page was recently deleted, my original notions about Wikipedia stand in even harder evidence today.
Three days ago, after publishing our latest Boles Book — American Sign Language Level 5: A Field Guide for Advanced Communication Techniques for People with Other Disabilities — I unwittingly ran afoul of Facebook’s advertising rules. I had “too much text” in my book cover image and so Facebook censored my $40.00USD boosted post promotion of my book midstream, effectively blocking my book cover image on their social network because my design aesthetic didn’t meet their advertising rules.
Continue reading → Facebook Censors Boles Books Cover Advertising
Sometimes when there seems to be injustice in the world, we must come to the aid of those who have been wronged if they are not able, on their own, to defend themselves. Sometimes, however, we will see someone who appears to be crying out for help — but realize that they aren’t nearly as helpless as they appear. Such is the case with British journalist Guy Adams, who had his Twitter account suspended after he posted some tweets that were critical of NBC’s extremely poor coverage of the Olympic Games in the UK.
Continue reading → Did Twitter Censor a Journalist? Maybe not!
When children are in school they have many hours of learning to do and since one of the foundations of being able to learn well is being properly nourished, you would think that schools would go out of their way to make sure that the brain food they feed to their students would be nothing but goodness. We know, unfortunately, that the brave battles being fought by such heroes as Jamie Oliver that this is not the case.
There are a lot of things going wrong in New York Public schools — there is overcrowding and a lack of funding, teachers that get shipped off to rubber rooms and too many children that find a lack of reason to pay attention in class. Now on top of all that, teachers have to be careful how they write their tests because they now have to avoid using certain words that are deemed to be unpleasant to students.
Why does Facebook insist on continuing to tell me who my friends are and are not? On August 27, 2010 I wrote — Facebook as Probiotic: I Now Have 5,000 Friends — and I was delighted I had so many new and coveted virtual friends on Facebook:
The Facebook friends count is volatile as it jumps by a count of ten and then drops by ten throughout the day. One moment, you have 4,900 friends and the next time you update the page moments later, you’ve dropped down to 4,890 friends — that makes adding new friends a bit perilous and hard to predict because Facebook is sensitive if you try to add too many friends too fast, or if you accept too many new friendships too quickly.
Facebook will not hesitate to warn you against — or even ban you from — adding too many friends. I don’t understand why.
Facebook have always been bullies and censors when you try to add new friend requests if they don’t think you really really truly know those people — and they block you. That is annoying and irritating.
This week, Facebook started a new bullying ploy from the other side of the “friending” dyad — harassing ME if I want to accept a NEW FRIEND invitation from someone else they don’t think I know! Here’s the screenshot proof:
Continue reading → Facebook Warns Me Against Accepting New Friendships
This has been a wild week with Apple threatening me with takedown notices and Tech Crunch riding to the rescue and then reflecting on what it means to be a blog publisher and dealing with threats from Apple Fanbois and lessons in legality from anonymous amateur Copyright commenters.
One lesson I learned this week, is that if you contact Tech Crunch for feedback and advice — as I did when I wrote asking if they’d ever seen a Takedown Notice like the one Apple sent me — you better make sure you tell your story first, or Tech Crunch will beat you to the publication punch — and that’s precisely what happened to me, and I couldn’t be happier about it! Here’s why:
Tech Crunch’s John Biggs took my inquiry and ran with it and published the Apple threat letter and I was amazed by the power of that simple article. Bigg’s story currently has 44 comments, 192 Facebook Likes, 609 Tweets, 153 LinkedIn Shares and 41 Google+ mentions. However, those numbers only begin to tell the story of the real Tech Crunch muscle in the marketplace.
Continue reading → How John Biggs and Tech Crunch Blew Up the Boles Blogs Network!