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How Technology Creeps into Everyday Existence to Become Ubiquitous

Let’s roll back our minds a decade to a time when people were not constantly on their smartphones.  Facebook isn’t in our everyday lives for another two years and Twitter will hatch a year after that in 2006.

Smartphones aren’t even called smartphones — they’re just dumb “cellular phones” that do rudimentary text messages without multimedia attachments like images and video.

That barren time in technology was still a difficult one of wide, generational, gaps when it came to the rapid, everyday, adoption of technology.

Those of us who grew up on payphones and single-line telephones in the home, were often put off, and perhaps, even offended by the younger among us who insisted that their cellphones were not just extensions of communication, but a very connectoid of being human.

When I was teaching at a major technical university on the East Coast way back when, I implored my students to not just put their phones on vibrate — at that time in the technological evolution, the vibration of the mechanism in the phone was just as loud as a ringtone — but to actually turn off their phones during the few times other students were giving a formal, graded, presentation in class.

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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.

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Seeding the Social Mesh with Sprout Social

I’ve been testing several social media managers to continue the brand consolidation of everything Bolesian — and to help make updating the Social Mesh a much easier, and more centralized task.  I used to spend all day writing new updates for each, individual, social network.

Yes, handcrafting unique updates is always best, but sometimes time and tide work against that noble effort because you’re propagating old work instead of creating something new.  The rise of Google+ Pages Vanity URLs broke the handcrafted dam.

My first shot into managing all the social profiles — LinkedIn, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ Pages — was HootSuite.  I ultimately found the Hoot experience overwhelming and brittle and I hated using their image network and link-shortener.

Next, I tried Buffer — a good choice, but the vanity URL shrinker did not reliably work across all profiles, and images posted to my Twitter stream would not natively expand in view.  You had to click on the images to get them to show even though they were in the Twitter image bin.

Enter Sprout Social.  Yes, Sprout Social is expensive — a free 30-day trial does not equate with a free account like HootSuite and Buffer offer — but I knew NYU and other big organizations were using Sprout Social and, I thought, even though I now have over 20 social profiles to manage, and Sprout Social limits me to 10 accounts on their $39.00USD per month first-tier plan, I should still give them a try.

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Using HootSuite to Suit Your Social Networking Mesh

If you have more than one social network you want to update, you need a way to effectively interact with your Social Mesh — you need one centerstone from which all thoughts can spike and spire.

I am currently using HootSuite — a social media dashboard that you can configure to help manage updates to your online work life.  A major benefit of HootSuite is that I can think once and publish 20 times.

Propagation is now — the future is no longer singular — we are perpetually pluperfect.

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Cracking the Fiery Core: We are Not What We Have

How many of us live to be defined by our possessions?  How many of us find value only in what we have achieved and won and coveted?  I wrote about this nagging issue of human governance on November 22, 2006 — “Worthy of History: Only Expensive Things Survive” —

The perversion of the historical accuracy of how our ancestors lived, and how we currently live, is created by preserving only expensive possessions — tokens, icons, valuables – and in the purposeful construction of indestructible architectural monuments used by the privileged few.

History is skewed by this preservation technique because it only pretends to tell future generations how people actually lived. When we visit museums we are only seeing what the powerful majority of the culture of that time deemed important enough to save and pass down.

We only get to know what they thought was worth saving and inevitably those things are the expensive, the pretty, the unique and the tokens of the wealthy. Even pioneer and Native American museum dioramas are idealized with hardy items and the most beautiful things. The ordinary is forsaken for the power of the inherent value in the preservation of the perceived best.

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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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Have You Wasted Your #Hashtag?

I have never been a fan of Twitter or Facebook or the other social nooses that now pass for content creation, and I’m glad when I read — every so often — that I am not alone in my disdain for the lonesomeness of a hooligan world gone viral:

Twitter

It’s toast. Over. Done. History. Soon to be as behind the curve as Facebook, someday completely forgotten like Friendster.

Huh?

It’s the cacophony.

You see there are too many people on the service. As a result, very few are heard. It’s happened over the past six months, tweeting is like a stone in a waterfall, or more accurately, pissing in the wind. In other words, if you tweet and nobody reads it have you wasted your time?

Today Rick Warren tweeted something I wrote. He’s got in excess of a million followers. The fact that I can reach him stuns me. But despite his only tweeting twice since then, the retweets have not gone nuclear. Oh, there are plenty, a double digit number, nineteen to be exact, but if it had been six months ago, I’d be a hero at the Saddleback Church.

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Do You Fear the National Security Agency Surveilling You?

I am befuddled by all the faux outrage in the online media bout the National Security Agency spying on us via our internet behavior and telephone calls.  Should we really be surprised by any of this?  After all, this sort of panopticonic staring by self-anointed government elites is nothing new.

Let’s take a quick Boles Blogs trip back through time to examine our intrepid reporting on this matter of the NSA spying on us.  We begin on June 30, 2006 — You are an Electronic Jigsaw Puzzle:

It’s horrifyingly fascinating how this government effort to connect all our dots appears to be orchestrated in pieces using separate private companies to deter detection of a non-severed surreptitious intent — banks for banking records; conservative ownership of personal web portals for access to MySpace data; internet providers who reply upon government regulation to stay in business are required to help monitor and analyze internet traffic patterns and process email keyword triggers — leads the cogent among us to question who we really are and if we actually own a right to any sort of privacy whatsoever.

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