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From Twit to Tweep: A Groundling in the Twitterverse

Yesterday, I participated in an odd, one hour, “web session” with the Twitter Small Business advertising team where you submitted questions beforehand in anticipation of getting real world answers you could use to promote your small business on Twitter.

Instead getting helpful, direct, answers I was pricked back in time to the beginning of my blogging life and the excellent startup FeedBurner service.

Do you remember this fiery, iconic, logo?

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Weaving the Social Mesh: Write What You Want to Know

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.

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LEET! We Now Have Over 1,337 Boles Blogs Followers!

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:

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Three Time’s the Charm: Boles Blogs is Freshly Pressed Again!

There’s nothing quite like the joy of being recognized by our respected peers for the work we spin and propagate into the wilds of the worldwide web, and when we received a welcome, and now more familiar, email last night telling us the great, good, news that our article of the day — Repressing the American Dream: Rural Villages as Retirement Communities for Young’uns — was the latest WordPress.com Freshly Pressed editor’s pick, we were shining in shadow:

Hi, David!

I hope your blog is ready to welcome some new readers — your post ( http://bolesblogs.com/2014/01/21/repressing-the-american-dream-rural-villages-as-retirement-communities-for-younguns/ ) will be featured on Freshly Pressed as a WordPress.com editors’ pick!

Another thought-provoking piece, as we’ve all come to expect from you — thanks. It’s a great post that deserves a wider audience.

FYI, you can now spread the good news by sharing the link http://discover.wordpress.com/, which lets anyone see the Freshly Pressed showcase whether or not they’re logged in to WordPress.com.

WordPress.com is the biggest and best blogging community because awesome bloggers like you make it the best. Thank you for publishing with us, and congrats! Have fun with your new readers.

Cheers,
michelle w.

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Winding Up 2014

As we wind up into 2014 — and by “winding up” I mean a tightening of the dramatic coil, not an unwinding of tension — it’s time to contemplate where we go from here as a community of intersecting minds.

My first thought is that since 2014 is the Chinese — “Year of the Green Wood Horse” — and in every way that tells me, as a Wood Dragon, that this year is going to rock in predictable and amazing ways.

My first hope for the union is that since there’s a longer term budget deal in Washington, much of the vitriol and hatred spewed by the politicos in Washington, D.C. will die down a bit.  I realize the cruelty will never really go away, but lowering the temperature just a little bit will help us all get along just a little bit better.

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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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