I remember years ago I read an article about the rise of fake Instagram accounts that follow those of us on the site, using the avatars of very pretty women. It’s pretty easy to tell these accounts are fake because… well, let’s face the fact that suddenly having a stunning woman with a foreign name following you is pretty suspect. Not only that, but you might get a message saying something like “hello dear” or “I’d love if you sent me a private message”.
nothing fake about this nutella pie!
Whereas that’s a nice pipe dream to believe, knowing my own personal history, I’d be an idiot not to doubt it; so would you. If you need to, you can click on the name and notice there’s only a few images along with a fake link to follow if you want more… trust me, never click on those links. Continue reading The Proliferation Of “Fake” On Social Media→
There’s a lot of great relationships to be made via social media. I’ve met people from all over the world who I can talk to at any time and have great conversations with. It’s always possible that I could potentially do work with some of them, and I’ve hired people from other countries here and there to handle some of the small things with either a website or blog that I wasn’t in the mood to do or didn’t have the time for.
As with anything in this world, there’s a whole lot of mean people also. Sometimes, the mean people are actually pretty nice most of the time, and then suddenly out of nowhere they look like they’ve just lost their minds for one reason or another. Continue reading There’s A Lot Of “Mean” On Social Media→
Last May I wrote an article about my signing up on a website called Buy Me A Coffee. I mentioned that it was a way for creators to earn some money by allowing people who consume their content to give them a payment if they liked what they’d consumed. I got a little bit of money from a couple of videos and one from an article I wrote. I changed from coffee to pizza because I don’t drink coffee, but it turned out I couldn’t get the plugin to work showing pizza, which is why that funny looking ball is around the bottom right of all my articles.
That’s about the size of it
I’m not gonna lie; I thought this would be a panacea for getting paid for some of my work. I had a similar thing I ran for years on this blog that was attached to PayPal. I can’t remember when I removed it or why I removed it, but for all the years I had it on this blog I only got one $5 payment; thanks to whoever that was. 🙂 Continue reading The Buy Me A Coffee/Pizza Problem→
If you get to thinkin’ you’re a person of some influence, try orderin’ somebody else’s dog around.”
Back in August I decided to try a little experiment; y’all know how I like to try experiments from time to time. Going into this one, I was betting I knew how it would turn out, but still had some hopes that maybe I was wrong. In the end, there were some interesting lessons to learn.
What I did was fairly simple. I decided that for the week I wasn’t going to initiate any conversations or share any information on either Facebook or Twitter, other than my normal marketing endeavors on Twitter whenever I create new content. The only caveat I had was that if someone wrote me first I would reply. But if nobody tried to contact me, I wasn’t going to post any other links, or do a retweet, or reach out to comment on something anyone said, including just saying hello. In essence, I wanted to see if anyone would miss me. Continue reading How Important Are You On Social Media?→
As someone who blocks as much stuff as possible without my authority, it seems like asking about our right to privacy online is the strangest question. We all say we want to be able to disseminate whatever we want to on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, yet still retain a bit of anonymity here and there. I actually understand some of that, as Mitch isn’t my birth name, and I tell almost no one what my middle name is. If one decided to really dig deep on the internet, I’m sure they’d find both answers.
He’s not getting any privacy
When I first got on the internet back in December 1995, I didn’t understand what most of it meant. The first service I signed up for was AOL. Like many people, I got that disk in the mail, loaded it onto my computer, and the rest was history. So was my privacy, because pretty quickly I started getting all sorts of email from companies that contracted with AOL for my email address. And things took off from there. Continue reading Do We Deserve Privacy Online?→
Blogging, Social Media, Writing, Motivation and General Stuff
