Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
I have been sitting back for some time now, watching and listening to people’s opinions of Facebook. They are wide and varied, but lately, I have been hearing some grumbling. I have heard it from friends and I even heard it on the radio this morning. That’s what prompted me to write today.
For those of you who don’t know what Facebook is, it’s a social networking tool intended to connect you with anyone and everyone from your past, present and future. It’s pretty powerful and pretty awful at the same time.
I am going to give you my experience with this website and let you draw your own conclusions.
A few months ago, I opened a Facebook account. I did this with the intention of placing my blog link on the “Info” page, to drive visitors. You know me, I am always trying to hook new readers. At the time, I had been reading so many articles online about the value of marketing your website, business or service on these social networking websites. I really didn’t think it was a bad idea. Now, being a few months later, I am seeing the value of it, but the good comes with the bad.
A few weeks after opening the account, I began getting friend requests. The friend requests were from people that I completely forgot about in my life. They were from all sorts of nooks and crannies…you know, like from that classmate who moved out of town during nursery school. It was remarkable. I started making friends. As time went on, and I made more and more friends, I started reading these little messages that my new friends would type in their profile. It went something like this – “John Doe’s is rubbing his foot” and “Jane Sue smells something weird in her apartment.” It was cute in the beginning, but then as time went on, I started feeling a little strange about reading things from people who I really didn’t know. I began to realize that I might be going down the wrong path by knowing too much about the guy who moved away when I was three years old. First, it was getting annoying and second, it was a little creepy.
I decided to take action. I logged into my Facebook account one night and decided to delete about 25 of my “friends.” I got rid of the people who I didn’t care for all that much, or never actually talked to in the first place. It was like a weight had been lifted off my chest. My life went on.
A few days later I started complaining to a good friend that I was beginning to feel uneasy about the whole Facebook experience. I knew that I was merely trying to market my websites and that I needed to “network” and gain “friends,” but the little voice in the back of my head started telling me that this whole experience was more difficult on the mind than it was worth.
Let me give you some background about my personality – I like to maintain a low profile. You might think that’s amusing because I write so much on this blog. You might ask, “Jay, if you like to keep a low profile, why do you put yourself out there so much?” I would answer, “Because I like you guys. I also get to choose what goes on here and there isn’t much that I don’t have control over.” Also, if there is someone reading this blog that I’m not necessarily fond of, I don’t know it. If I don’t know it, I don’t care about it.” You see, with Facebook, everyone is right in my face and I don’t like that.
I am fairly satisfied with where I have come in life. I’ll admit that when I re-connect with people who I sat next to in my elementary school lunchroom, it brings me back to the not-so-comfortable days of my existence. I’m sure we’ve all had them. It’s when the white milk cost five cents and the chocolate cost six. Those days were strange and hard to remember, but one thing is for sure, I don’t really want to relive them. One of the things Facebook is really good at is offering you the chance to relive your whole past. Since much of our experiences have to do with old friends and acquaintances, Facebook puts your past front and center.
If there is one thing I like about where I am now is that I put myself here. If I wanted to be back where I used to be, I would put myself there. Since I haven’t, I think I am saying something. I don’t want to relive my past. I would actually like to move on from it and never look back. Don’t get me wrong, I had a great childhood and met many fantastic people along the way, but I think there comes a time in life to move on from those relationships to form new ones. It’s called being mentally healthy. Maybe we should call it the “shedding of time.” It’s been going on for thousands of years and for it to stop now is wrong, in my opinion.
If you are a member of Facebook, you might have had some of the same thoughts. They might not be as prevalent as mine, because I am quite sensitive about these types of things, but they may have popped up from time to time. Admit it…you have winced at the computer screen at least once while seeing someone’s name pop up asking you to be their friend. You may have been tempted to write back telling them that, “No, you don’t wish to become their friend because you were actually hoping to never hear from them again. But thank you for the offer.”
For the past few weeks, I have been threatening to delete my Facebook account. I think it might be time for that to become reality. By dumping this reminder of my entire history, I can move on the way I had been for so many years. I mean seriously, if I wanted to be reminded of my life while growing up, I would go put an offer on the house I grew up in, buy it, put down some shaggy green carpet in my old bedroom and live like I had for 22 years. I think you’ll agree, that’s just not cool.
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Sunday, November 16th, 2008
You know, I have been looking for an industry magazine for about a century now. It’s amazing how difficult my search has been.
One would think there would be hundreds of magazines out there geared towards people who work on the web. I mean, jeez, Google figured out how to target the “webmaster” community about 10 years ago and I think they hit the nail on the head.
For the uninitiated, the webmaster community is the group of people who have a lot to do with what goes on the web. If we didn’t have these folks, we would have a bunch of sales guys and a bunch of programming geeks getting a whole bunch of nowhere. The webmasters are those “middle of the road” folks who have some social ability as well as some technical ability and are able to speak to both the business side and the technical side. It’s a huge market and the population is growing every day.
For years, Google has had the good sense to target these individuals with all sorts of web tools and products. I can go on forever about who does well and who does not so well on the web, but my point here is that if Google has done it, where the heck is everyone else?
As a web guy, I get advertised to for a few things. Mainly hosting companies, domain names, software, etc…It’s most likely a heck of a lot more than I realize.
One thing I have been trying to do for the past few years is to really get involved with reading about the industry. I have been looking for a magazine. I mean, they have magazines that target butterfly catchers in Brazil. I thought a magazine for people who work on the web would be a no brainer.
A few years back, I almost got lucky. I found “Revenue Magazine.” This has been a pretty good magazine, but mainly targets the affiliate side of things on the web. It’s almost there and they do include many areas that I am interested in, but they are also lacking in many. I think they come out with a paper magazine about once per quarter, so there certainly is some downtime in between.
I recently discovered “Website Magazine.” Now, this is much more up my alley. Website Magazine is for the web guy or gal. If you like to get your hands dirty, this might be a good fit. I get emails about once per week with some pretty good articles and I just received my first paper magazine yesterday.
Website Magazine
I must warn you, this is a fairly new magazine. The pages are quite thick, so you think there is more packed inside. I flipped through a few pages and soon realized that I was about half way through the whole thing. I am sure that more content is forthcoming though. I am patient.
In the meantime, I am at least satisfied that someone with a brain out there decided it was time to actually give a very hungry market what they are looking for.
Now, if I could just get someone to start delivering wood pellets…
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Sunday, July 20th, 2008
I decided that today would be a good day to start configuring Joomla.
I logged in and began at the “Site” section of the Global Configuration area. I took a quick look and noticed that there wasn’t all that much to configure. Here is what I did:
- Changed the editor from Tiny MCE 2.0 to no editor. I don’t like giving others access to HTML on my sites.
- Changed the Global Site Meta Description to Fiixer. (Just a fill in word to get rid of Joomla)
- Changed the Global Site Meta Keywords to fiixer.
- Switched the Search Engine Friendly URLs and Use Apache mod_rewrite from no to yes. Search engine friendly URLs using Apache mod_rewrite is pretty simple if your server and system support it. Some people say doing this enhances your website’s indexing and ranking in search engines. Basically, it changes “index.php?a=aboutus&b=andaboutyou” to “index/aboutus/aboutyou.” It’s cleaner and gives your visitors a chance to remember your URLs. It’s up to you if it’s worth it.
Next, I visited the “System” section of the Global Configuration area. In this section, I mostly kept everything set as it came, but did change two areas:
- Changed the New User Registration Type to “Author.” (I think this gives the registered members the ability to submit articles and web links, but they must be approved by an administrator)
- Turned Cache on. (speeds up page loads on heavy traffic sites)
In the “Server” section of the Global Configuration, I left everything alone.
Ok, that was fairly painless.
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Sunday, October 7th, 2007
Ummm…yeah, I think I can help you out with that. This is an easy one. Whether you have an online business or a “brick and mortar” one, there are a few places online that can get you the exposure you are looking for.
The first place to start advertising is online classifieds. Here are some very popular ones, depending on your niche…
- Pet Classifieds
- Free Classifieds
- Motorcycle Classifieds
- Boat Classifieds
- Auto Classifieds
Now remember, more than one of these websites above might be right for you. Feel free to advertise on the ones that fit your business.
A second great place to get the word out about your business is an article submission website. The reason these types of websites are so effective is because the articles are written by you. You can include whatever you want, such as a description of your business, what you offer, address and phone number, website, etc…You get the picture.
The last (for this post) great place to advertise your business is in a business directory, of course. There are tons of people out there every day searching for businesses close to their homes. They remember the business name, but not the phone number or address. They search Google or Yahoo! and type in only what they remember. Chances are, if you listed your business in an online business directory, you will appear and get that phone call you are looking for.
Until next tiime and good luck.
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Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
I thought this was interesting. I just found this article on Digg.
The article lists the top 25 eBusiness websites based on a few factors. I like this list, because I have visited a few of these websites. I do get a little jealous because I hate to see these huge numbers from other websites than my own. I mean, hey, more power to ya’, but still, it’s not me. Oh well.
Here is the list of the most popular eBusiness websites. I have probably visited the top six at some time or another.
If you are into SEO, eBusiness and things having to do with being a webmaster, you might want to bookmark this.
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Thursday, August 16th, 2007
FirstRSS ERROR: "http://www.articlehub.us/articlerss.php" NOT FOUND!
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Sunday, July 8th, 2007
I did a few upgrades this weekend…all of my blogs as well as my “Article Submission – ArticleHub.US” website.
The article submission site upgrade is really cool. Not only did the company that created the software fix a bunch of bugs that I have complained about, they also added a really cool feature. Now, I can pull article submissions from Isnare.com. Isnare.com is a huge article submission website. Many people post articles to that site. The new feature in my software allows me to map my own categories to Isnare’s categories. When someone submits an article to Isnare now, it automatically posts on my website, filling it up.
Yesterday, before I did the upgrade, I have about 60 articles. Right now, I have 146. That’s a pretty good improvement. You may be asking yourself, “What about duplicate content?” I am not too concerned. I was never under the impression that people were going to write unique articles for my site only. I think people write the article once and then go around from article site to site, copying and pasting that same article.
I have had a semi-decent stream of new authors and article submissions, but this is certainly going to help.
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Saturday, June 16th, 2007
Anyway, I found the grand pappy of all article directory lists. Right now, there are 590 article submission websites listed on this page, with more being added every day. When I was looking last week for these types of websites, I found a bunch, but none as eloquently laid out like this. Many of them had multiple pages and all that. What a pain in the butt.
Ok, I’m outty.
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