A Letter from Joyce Kohl

If you were a reader of David Boles Blogs back in the day when we were more formally known as — GO INSIDE Magazine in the early 90’s — you will be as delighted as I was to hear from our venerable friend, and early ally, Joyce Kohl, who touched in this morning via the Boles Blogs Contact form to give us an update on her wonderful life.

Continue reading → A Letter from Joyce Kohl

Blast from the Go Inside Magazine Award Past!

I am not one to live in the past or have any regrets.  History cannot be changed and regret only rots the promise of tomorrow.  In putting together this new Boles Blog to reflect what came before in 14 other instances of thoughts and writing, I came upon the old Awards page for the now retired Go Inside Magazine; and I found great joy in looking back at those wildly created and brightly colored animated .GIFs, and I decided to share them with you here now.  I moved the images off the now dead GoInside.com domain and placed them on the live Boles Books domain for serving, but I left the historical, clickable, URLs intact as a compendium of the greatest hits of what was, really, The Original Internet.

Do you recognize any of these websites?  Animated .GIFs were big back in the mid-1990’s, and one good way to promote your new website was to “give an award” to another website — there were no blogs back then — and require a link back to your award website.  The most elite award we won was from, at the time, the fledgling “Microsoft Network.”  MSN was starting with a big bang and a booming promise and it was a Big Deal to get that congratulatory email from Microsoft telling us we were “The One” for a day.  That single award from MSFT doubled our readership for the rest of our being.

4anything.com award!Innovation Award! (28155 bytes)

The Microsoft Network! 2825 bytes) awardit.jpg (3096 bytes) Ravi's Elite Website (4628 bytes) Great Gig Award! (9052 bytes)

NealWeb Award Winner! (8465 bytes) Cool Bananas! Laziness Central Site of the Day! Star Site Award (3753 bytes)

PC Webopaedia Outstanding Page Award Dynomite Site of the Night Cool Site of the Hour! Pirate Pete's Catch of the Day

Top 100! Rocking the Web! Top Ten! Top Fiver! Top Five!

Continue reading → Blast from the Go Inside Magazine Award Past!

How John Biggs and Tech Crunch Blew Up the Boles Blogs Network!

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!