Social Media and Mob Reactions

I don't know what happened here. NewspaperGrl just twitted the following:

Twitter teaching me not to respond to people. Lost 30+ followers last time. Maybe I should turn off Quitter - this is supposed to be fun.

NewspaperGrl is totally dedicated to the social media scene. Her twitter account has some 4600 followers (I started twittering about the same time and racked up some 57 followers. I suspect many are doing an obligatory reciprocal link.)

Even with my tiny tweetership, I've discovered the same problem with the instant feedback of social media. The mob likes to show displeasure by banishment.

Whenever a person says something that falls outside the realm of the mob's desire, the person gets slammed.

In the social media paradigm, the people who concentrate exclusively on their image and avoid substantive investigation of issues, rise to the top.

The game where people follow thousands of people on twitter in hopes of building a thousand followers seems a bit absurd to me. When you follow a thousand people, you really aren't following anyone. You just have random, meaningless messages.

I hope that NPG goes back to having fun and is less caught up in twitter stats.

Microstock Recorder

I created a program for recording MicroStock. The term "Microstock" refers to images created by graphic designers licensed for use in blog posts and what not. I encourage bloggers to use MicroStock. MicroStock lets you add fun images to posts while giving some cash to graphic designers.

Good netiquette demands that you credit artists for their work.

I included a stock photo in a snide little post called "Reason's Greetings" with a Christmas scene photo. Realizing that the artist may not share my opinions and would dislike having my page show up in a google search for his name, I decided that a better way to credit the designer would be to create a separate page with microstock credits. This page has links to the designer's microstock page, and a link back to my project.

On the SE0 side of things, good netiquette happens to make an inbound link back to my blog post.

I designed this Microstock crediting program for my own use. I decided to make the program open to the public at large. I invite anyone using MicroStock in blog posts to use this program. It is simple: You enter basic info about the picture and your project. That info creates a page. To credit the graphic designer, you simply add a link to the credit page. As there is a link back to your page, this process is beneficial to both you and the graphic designer.

NOTE, the program is intended to credit designers for their work. I will delete entries of people who fill up my database with spam.

If you happen to be a photgrapher or graphic designer, Scott Maxwell created the following graphic to explain the overall MicroStock process. (Clicking the image brings you to the "Microstock Credit Page," which links back here.)

Themes Project

I am not happy with the Blogger "label" feature. I had been hoping that the label feature would build an index for this blog. Instead, it simply feeds a weak search function.

So, I decided to make an external index. The advance of an external index is that I will be able to index more than just this one blog. I could include articles posted on other sites and forums. I will put the themes on the site y-intercept.com (notice the dash).

To make the index a bit more useful to the web surfing public, I split it into several main categories:

• The Abstract Themes section lists abstract philosophical themes like true and paradox.
• The Current Events section indexes articles on current events and politics.
• photo indexes articles that involve taking pictures.
• The local directory includes articles about the Community Color project.

I am building this same index structure into the backend program used by The Roots of Sound Rational Thinking and other research projects.

Welcome Geniuses

I wonder if they are just stroking my ego, or if they are simply livid about my use of complex sentence structures. Anyway, the blog readability test tells me that this is a "genius level" blog.

They probably just picked up on the fact that I don't spend enough time editing posts.

The funny thing, though, is that I actually like complex sentences. If I did more editing, it would be to fix mistakes and not to dumb down the writing.

It takes a complex sentence to convey a subtle idea.

One of the reasons that I detest the public schools is that they have been systematically dumbing down both our language and our population. The modern public school has actually convinced millions of people that thinking and writing on a fourth grade level is a good thing.

Schools teach students to sit down with a grammar checker and work until they've pulled all of the beauty from the language. What gives what that?

Fixed BlogRoll Link

Ooops, the BlogRoll link in the side bar was pointed to the wrong place! I just fixed it.

The blogroll currently lists 400 sites--primarily from the US Mountain West (Utah, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming). My game is to emphasize location, so I break out the roll by community.

Why

Part One

For the last several years, I've burned the midnight oil creating a collection of directories called Community Color. The goal of this project is to explore the way that local communities are reflected on the web. I am from the Mountain West. I was born in Denver and have lived in a variety of towns in the Mountain West. So the effort concentrates on communities Mountain West. In this project I've indexed a variety of towns that I consider to be cultural centers of the area.

The goal is to show the diversity of things that exist in a community. The directories are inclusive. I list any site I find from or about a community (well, except porn or hate sites). These community directory are my primary statement about the direction we should be taking on the web.

In 2003, I decided to start a blogspot blog. I had spent so much time on the local community (with absolutely no reward for the effort) that I decided to just do a mind fart blog on whatever.

As with most mind fart blogs, whatever often turns out to rants about national politics.

I had a progressive education. In my progressive education, I was taught a propaganda technique called "Critical Thinking." The idea behind critical thinking is to criticize American culture, the free market and people on the right. Being hypercritical of America is supposed to somehow lead to social justice and progress.

I finally realized that critical thinking and progressivism are both dead ends. But I have yet to learn a new writing style.

The reason I mention this is that my blog and community sites have completely different bents. The blog concentrates more on national issues and universal thought and is often negative. The community sites focus on the community and are of a more positive nature.

There actually is a message in this. It is my belief that the best way to affect change is to think locally and act locally.

Unfortunately, the message of the two efforts get in the way of each other. Most people who read my blog simply think I am a jerk.

Part Two

IMHO, the primary value of a blog is in the field of social networking.

For that matter, if I were to give a single message about blogging, i would say the best approach to the art form would be to concentrate one's effort on blogging about the local community. There is very little need for people to blog about national politics. Contrary to our education. Critical thinking posts generally just lead to partisanship.

I think there is a greater value in blogs about the good things in the local community.

IMHO a great blog would have links to all of the little hidden treasures in a community, and should have a blog role with other local sites. I am not doing that with this blog because I do so with the directories. Capiche?

Blog Role

Anyway, this "why" post is to explain why I am not doing this blog the way I think blogs should be done.

The reason, of course, is that the community directories are my community effort. I do not have a blog role on this site because the community directories list well over three hundred blogs. I really didn't want to waste time doubling up the effort and listing all the blogs twice.

I just created a blogs page which is a master index to the blogs to which I link. The total is currently 350. Yes, I've read a large number of posts in all of them.

Next: The answer as to why I don't have a blog role is that the community directories are my blog role.

Next: Why is this blog so icky? Well, it is just a mind fart blog.

Finally: Why did I just write this post: Well, I wrote this post so that I could link to it from my blog index.

Salt Lake Blogs

The Salt Lake Blog directory had 125 entries. It was too big.

So, I split the page into four baby pages:

• Business Blogs includes blogs by Utah business, or about business, technology, marketing.
• Personal Blogs include personal online journals, or musings on religion and culture.
• Political Blogs shows blogs that are following local or national political events.
• Finally, my favorite is the Photo Blog section where photographers (and other artists) show their works with photo essays and links to art sites.

I really don't like this game of classifying sites. Multidimensional people have posts on all sorts of topics.

However, I think the change will drive more traffic to the blogs as this change allows me to more fully integrate the blogs into the rest of the directories. For example, I am able to put a link from the Photography Page to the photography blogs.

NOTE, I just changed the name of personal blogs to 'blogs - cultural.'