Page 4 of 9

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → Revisiting the “Freshly Pressed Effect”

Posted on

The Asynchronous Lives in Parallel Project

Our lives are performed in dramatic arcs that intersect and reflect and repulse and reflex:  Are we divinely predestined or merely reflexive?  The other day, I was thinking back on when I was a young child and, feeling alone and frustrated, I would climb a cherry tree in our backyard to get away from all the noise and hubbub of earthly living.  From my vantage point 20 feet in the air, I could smell the wind and get a sense of a horizon that was far and above my current station.

Continue reading → The Asynchronous Lives in Parallel Project

Posted on

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

Posted on

Sheryl Sandberg and Public Valley Speaking

What do we think of Sheryl Sandberg?  She’s the big COO hoo-ha at Facebook, and she has a new book that is polarizing the public dialogue on “women in the workplace as women in power.”  I admit I don’t know much about the woman, and my initial exposure was reading about her online.  I haven’t read her book, and I’m not interested in picking a fight about her shallow arguments, but what struck me most about her recent PR tornado is how unappealing I find her as a live speaker arguing her points in person.

Continue reading → Sheryl Sandberg and Public Valley Speaking

Posted on

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.

Continue reading → The New York Times Confirms Our Boles Blogs Comments Policy

Posted on

Please LIKE the new Boles Blogs page on Facebook!

As the man I am, I have over 5,000 friends on Facebook.  As the blog I want us to be, we currently have seven “Like” friends on the new Facebook page for this new old Boles Blog that I created last night.  Oh, the good old wild days when I could blink and I’d have too many friends to count and Facebook would warn me to be less popular:

Getting to 5,000 Facebook friends was a fascinating experience. It was easier to move from 2,500 friends to 5,000 than it was to go from zero to 2,500. I thought I’d hit that 5,000 friends limit in June, but it took to the end of August to get there.

Today, I am asking you to help build up Boles Blogs on Facebook by clicking the link below to “Like” us now and forevermore:

http://Facebook.com/BolesBlogs

Continue reading → Please LIKE the new Boles Blogs page on Facebook!

Posted on

WolframAlpha Tells All on Facebook

What is WolframAlpha doing on Facebook?  Why, it’s parsing your data and making it it pretty while it fascinates.  I love this word cloud mixup of “Davidescu Boles” and “David Gordon” all sitting there scrambled and brewing together in a “today” slurry of “reviews” “stories” “wonders” and “google jazz reports” — I love visual data!

Continue reading → WolframAlpha Tells All on Facebook

Posted on

What Makes an Urban Campus?

Facebook, bleeding money and prestige, are forging forward with plans to build a huge, sprawling, Metropolis Campus that looks like a giant warehouse that was built on a Tilt-a-Wheel and then bumped for good measure just to be jazzy.  There’s no sense of privacy or sacred space.  It’s all one big blob of a structural maze and a spinning internal eyesore.

Continue reading → What Makes an Urban Campus?

Posted on

Child Abuse and Fake Name Facebook Replies

There’s nothing quite so disturbing as posting an update on Facebook and then having a guy with a fake name try to take you on by defending — or “understanding,” as he put it — why a parent would strike a child because of stress.  I said then, and I say now, “I do not, and will never, understand why any parent would raise a hand to any child.”  I’m not being dramatic or presumptive.  I’m being factual.

It all started when I posted a link I posted to my article — How Home Foreclosures Trickle Down into Child Abuse — and the guy with the fake name put a comment on that update.  At first, I thought he was agreeing with me, but it turned out he was really defending the abuser, as you can see in the message stream:

Continue reading → Child Abuse and Fake Name Facebook Replies

Posted on

Talking Beats Texting Among Teens

When I was a teenager, going online meant connecting to a friend’s local bulletin board system and checking the message boards, though you knew that you were never connected at the same time as anyone else since we were using dial-up modems to connect directly to computers that were just like yours — pathetically slow compared to the computers of today, or even the iPads! For the most part, however, we did our communication face to face and on the phone if that was not possible.

Continue reading → Talking Beats Texting Among Teens