Tag Archives: Facebook

Companies That Don’t Understand Social Networking

Business, Social Networking, , , , , , ,

We’ve all heard the story of a major company that totally blew its social networking strategy by doing something really stupid, like tweeting something inappropriate, thinking it would drive business but ended up driving it away instead. But there’s something even worse, at least in my opinion, and that’s a company that wants to engage in social networking but doesn’t understand what engaging in it means. An example is a company that advertises that it has all sorts of hip connections on social networking sites, but then turns around and blocks all of those sites from everyone of its employees. This wouldn’t be so bad if the company didn’t keep sending out notices to employees about how they are now on Facebook, starting up on Google Plus, and then asking employees to participate as well. And when that employee attempts to do so, they get a blocked message, indicating that the job considers that site to be an illegal site for viewing at work.

One of my favorite sorts of erroneous activities involves the housing complex where I live. They put up a bunch of signs around the complex, saying: “Add and Follow us on Facebook for current news and activities!” Four months ago, I attempted to add them on Facebook; they haven’t accepted. Yet, each day I see their signs on the bulletin board at home, just begging me to add them to my Facebook profile.

These are companies that don’t get the whole social networking thing. If you want to engage in social networking, you have to actually engage in social networking. You don’t just get a presence and then expect the masses to come flocking to you, but then decide you don’t want to spend the energy actually working with the environment. The work thing is a no brainer because you’re never going to have a real social networking presence as long as the majority of your staff can’t promote it. If the only Facebook presence you have is a Human Resources person who gets paid to have to maintain the connection, you’ve failed in all things social networking. Basically, it’s a plea to join their network but then a follow up statement to say that your employees aren’t allowed to communicate with the masses you just asked to join. Sure, it keeps people from doing something to embarrass you, but what these companies don’t understand is that social networking is about people, not about people interacting with a company’s icon. That’s why Google is destroying any business presence with Google Plus; at least they understand what a social network should be about. Although, I admit, I suspect they’ll backtrack on that once they realize that Facebook will take advantage of their absence.

Personally, my belief is that any company that avoids letting its employees engage in social networking is doomed to be considered old hat. Any company, like my housing complex, that considers social networking one-way only (we speak, you listen), then they’re doomed to fail as well.

Unfortunately, social networking is one of those animals that takes many years for people to truly understand. And as I’m pointing out, sometimes they never do.

Trying to Get Established with the E-book Markets

Books, Business, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been spending a great deal of time lately exploring the whole e-reader market. My reasons for doing so are probably obvious, as I’ve pretty much given up on ever getting sustainable establishment from the main publishing markets, as everyone seems to be a writer these days and trying to get an agent to even read a manuscript is like trying to get Charlie Sheen to act responsibly.

Anyway, so some months ago, I put up one of my previously published books onto Amazon for the Kindle, and it has had a few sales, but mostly, it’s a lot like standing on a corner and trying to get people to read printout copies of a manuscript. People just don’t seem interested. And I don’t think it’s that their not interested in me or my writing; they’re just not interested in purchasing books from someone they’ve never heard of. It’s the same dilemma writers have always had, except there’s a lot more of us these days, and practically the only way to establish a career as a writer is to be famous for doing something else. So, if you can cook and have a cooking show, you might make it as a writer. If you’re a reality show star and have gratuitous sex with people who live in your reality show house, you might have a career as a writer. If you were a famous baseball star who took performance enhancing steroids, football star who beat up your girlfriend, musician girlfriend who got beat up your musician boyfriend, washed up movie star who seems to get arrested for practically everything written on police blotters, or some older guy who lived through abuse by your evil stepmom, well, you might have a career as a writer. But if you’re actually a writer who writes novels, and that’s all you really have to share with the rest of the world, your chances of making it as a writer are about as good as you making it as a millionaire by winning the lottery. Okay, maybe a little less.

So, what is a writer to do, if he’s not interested in starting a gunfight with the local police department in hopes that he might live long enough to write about it while in prison, well, the answer seems to be “write an e-book and get famous that way.”

The funny part of that solution is that making it as an e-book star is just as ludicrous as making it as a professonal blogger. Unless you have a gimmick, or you get seriously lucky, your chances aren’t that good. Even if you’re a great writer, it appears that everyone seems to be a great writer these days, so you really have to have something else working in your favor.

So, in actually trying to get established as an e-reader writer, I started with Kindle, and like I said, so far I’ve sold a few books and seem to be as popular as Pee Wee Herman at a stripper’s convention. Okay, I’m wrong on that one. He’d probably be a bit more popular than I am right now.

But what I have been doing is reading everything I can find on how others have actually made it. And what I’ve discovered is that everyone talks about how e-readers and e-books are the solution to the current glut in writers out there, and how it is the solution to getting past the impossible gatekeepers of publishing (even going around the publishing industry itself), but what no one really seems to do is point out exactly how that success is supposed to happen. I’m constantly reminded of the Southpark episode with the underwear gnomes, when the kids ask the underwear gnomes why they’re stealing underwear, and they point out their master plan, which reads a lot like:

1. Steal all of the underwear

2. ????

3. Profit

Yep, that seems to be the consensus of everyone who talks about success as a writer in the e-book market. Somehow, you are supposed to go the same way:

1. Write a novel and e-publish it.

2. ????

3. Profit!

Yeah, I don’t see any logic behind it either. What seems to be missing is how do you actually market yourself as an e-book writer? How do you get traffic to your blog so that people pay attention to you? Whenever I read a book on marketing your blog, it says to first create interesting content and then moves onto capitalizing on that traffic that will then come. Now, I’ve talked to a lot of people who do read my blog, and they tend to agree that I create interesting content, but at the same time, the masses aren’t showing up to read it. A few people do, and a shitload of spam also seems to be paying attention, but that’s about it. Somehow, I’m missing a step here, and I can’t seem to figure out what it is.

It is that same step I believe I’m missing that somehow makes it possible for e-books to actually be attractive to people and sell the mass load that everyone seems to think will happen “naturally”. Well, I’m still working on that one, and I haven’t come up with a solution yet.

So, if real people actually seem to be following this blog, PLEASE COMMENT ON THE BLOG at my actual blog, and I’d love to hear from you. But right now, I get nothing but spam comments (do keep in mind my blog gets imported to Facebook and Open Salon, so if you’re commenting that you actually read it, I’m not talking about those places; I’m talking about my actual blog…the one linked here). It’s really frustrating. I mean, REALLY frustrating.

What is the Future of Government in a Twitter/Facebook World?

Economics, Politics, Social Networking, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We keep hearing stories of how governments are being toppled by people armed with Twitter and Facebook accounts. While these accounts keep forgetting to point out that you need more than Twitter or Facebook to topple an oppressive government, what we should take from these examples (like Egypt, Tunisia, currently Libya and possibly a future Iran) is that revolutionary movements have been assisted by these social networking technologies. And that’s no small deal.

What doesn’t get addressed is something I find even scarier, but seems to be completely off the radar (or gps) of everyone involving this issue. What these technologies definitely do is provide immediate access to higher up entities than have ever been experienced before. What do I mean? In the olden days, a king communicated with his people by throwing up broadsheets that people would read by wandering out into the village square where they were posted. If they were lucky, a town crier would yell out the messages to people as well, which mainly assisted a population that was generally illiterate. As education has emerged and moved from the upper class to the middle class and now finally to all of the classes, people are capable of reading their own messages, so that town cryer is no longer necessary. And because technology has emerged alongside this development, people are now able to receive instanteous communication from higher-ups. This was the paradigm that brought us up and through the 19th and 20th centuries

But Facebook and Twitter also do something else that 19th and 20th century technology did not allow. Instead of just reading messages from leaders, we now have the innate ability to communicate BACK to our leaders. Add email to the mix, and our ability to actually speak to a previously untouchable leader has completely evolved into something kings and queens never imagined (and certainly never wanted). Today, we are moving from a receptive community to a community that is able to push rather than just receive.

What are the implications of this? Well, for one, it means that our need to rely on government is quickly diminishing. In the old days, we had government developed for us because basically we weren’t smart enough to maintain affairs on our own. That’s not the case today. In an enlightened society, or one that may soon be one, the need for government is minimized, which means that those people who have gained access to the halls of power are now seen as oppressive entities rather than those who serve the public good. Right now, we have a debate going on between Congress and the President of the United States as to whether or not government is even necessary (they’re thinking of shutting it down because they can’t pay their bills). What no one is addressing is the reason why this is happening. Those who advocate big government are pretty much behind the idea of needing government to take care of every need and desire, and I’d argue they’re not wrong in that a lot of people DO need government, but there is another segment of society that is slowly divorcing itself from the constraints of government, and unknown to a lot of average people, a whole bunch of them were actually elected to national office. We call them the “Tea Party”, and even though progressives use them as the butts of their jokes. a real movement is taking place right now in this country that should be seen as very dangerous to the natural order. If you want to understand why a lot of Republicans believe that government should be shut down, perhaps people should actually listen to the Tea Party instead of just making up jokes about them and figure no one takes them seriously.

Personally, I think the message that is being put out by the Tea Party is premature, in that I don’t believe the country has moved to that level of sophistication yet. Yes, believe it or not, I actually see their arguments as highly sophisticated; unfortunately, the ones receiving the majority of attention are the most unsophisticated ones imaginable, which is ironic just on that level alone. Only about 70 of them are in power right now, and that’s nowhere near enough of them to make the impact they want to make, so all they’re capable of doing right now is disrupting government, rather than shutting it down.

But what should be seen is the longer term implications from ideas that they do espouse. Our Twitter and Facebook technologies have actually developed movements that coincide with this attitude of the people believing themselves to be superior to government. Granted, another irony is present as well, as most of the Tea Party thinkers are usually way behind the learning curve when it comes to emerging technology, but that’s really for criticism and derision more than an argument. What we should be focused on is that that these types of movements (the usage of technology in its ability to supplant government rather than supplement it) tend to grow, not go away.

My more important question is the one that fronts this entire essay: What is the future of government in a Twitter/Facebook world? In other words, if we finally reach a point where people feel they are on the same level as government, rather than recipients of messages from government only, do we present a new paradigm for the future? Essentially, does this equal status present a situation where people can finally rise above government, believing themselves to be superior, and thus, believe government should be eliminated, or at least changed drastically to reflect the submission of government to the people, as was originally intended by the Founding Fathers? Or do we end up becoming the enemy of government, which will hold onto its last grip of power until finally removed by those who have deemed it no longer worthy?

Personally, I don’t think anyone is thinking this way yet. That’s okay. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Although it was destroyed in one.

What it All Comes Down to

Computer Games, Economics, Memoirs, Movies, Politics, Social Networking, Television, Writing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I guess it’s time for another update on what’s going on, what’s on my mind, and where I think things are going.

1. My Readership. I suspect I really don’t have anyone reading this blog (my main one). It gets printed also on Open Salon, which might grant me a few readers there, but even there it’s a crap shoot as to whether or not anyone actually reads (or cares about) anything I have to say. I also import my blogs to my Facebook profile, and even though I have a bunch of “friends” there, I suspect practically no one reads anything I have to say there either.

It’s a real problem for a writer who wants to be taken seriously when no one reads anything he has to say. It gets really frustrating. I mean, Snooki can write a book and it becomes a bestseller based on her outrageous behavior alone, but a consistent writer generally has to kill someone in order to get anyone to read his stuff. And they wonder why so many literary types kill themselves before they ever become famous, often discovered after they blew their brains out over the frustration of trying to actually make it as a writer or an artist.

This means when I post my blog, I get tons of traffic, but I suspect it’s a bunch of bots that are trying to get people to buy their shit rather than actual people reading my blog. My spam filter logs dozens of spam messages a day, which are all the type that say something like: “Read your posting, and I completely agree with you. You should try out this new version of sex medication which can be found at….” Yeah, it gets really annoying and frustrating.

But just because I suspect one of my stuffed animals might be reading this by tapping into my wifi at home, I’ll continue….

2. Snow. I really hate it. I do. I’m not from Michigan, even though I live here. I’m from California, and if I could afford to live there or could have ever found a job there, I would be there right now. I hate the snow. I hate the cold. I turned on my heater two nights ago for the first time (been using an electrical set of heaters all Winter long), and it was so much nicer than just being able to heat up one small room, and not very well either. Even though my electrical heater could get the room up to about 70 or so, it felt like it was 45. I’m now using my real heater, even though it’s expensive as hell. But I can’t take the cold any more. I really hate it here.

3. The Whole Nook vs. Kindle Debate. I’ve written a few articles on this because I bought both a Nook Color and the $189 Kindle 3G + Wifi. I’ve completely given up on the Nook. I had two subscriptions to magazines with the Nook Color (Consumer Reports and the New York Times Book Review). I gave up trying to get the Nook to download Consumer Reports. It would start to download and then just stop. I would check the wifi signal, and it would register as fine. After three days of trying to download a magazine I already paid for, I gave up, cancelled my subscriptions and I will never use the Nook again. Contest over. The Kindle wins. It might not look as nice, but at least I can actually get content onto it. The Nook Color is a piece of shit that should never have been sold to people. I will never recommend it to anyone ever again.

4. Egypt. Things are probably going to get really interesting now that Mubarak went on the air and basically told the protesters: “I hear you, but I just wanted to say go fuck yourselves. Have a nice day.” He’s decided that even though people are out in the streets risking their lives, he’s not leaving. The Army has now backed him, which means that one of two things are probably going to happen. They’ll crack down on the protesters, and this will be one of those sorry moments in human history that people try to forget when talking about how great a people we are, or the people are going to end up going the way of the French Revolution, overthrowing the government and killing Mubarak if he doesn’t escape out of the country first. If you’re a dictator, and you pretty much give the finger to your people when they demand you step down, you really don’t have a lot of options that can play out from that moment on. I mean, all sorts of things can happen, but right now, it’s going to be a slaughter of people unless a whole lot of people back down, and when people are backed into a corner, they usually strike back instead of back down. Unless they’re Americans. Then they either sue you or back down and say that they want to spend more time with their families.

5. Relationships. I don’t know anything about this subject. I’m not in one. I don’t recognize one when I am in one. I don’t even know what women are, although I see movies with them in it, so I do believe they might exist, although I can’t verify it in person.

6. Politics in the USA. We’re going to be heading towards another presidential election with no electable people in the Republican Party, a current president who has done nothing to be reelected, other than make arousing speeches that don’t translate to actual action, and a whole lot of self-important politicians who think they deserve to be the next leaders of the free (in theory, at least) world. Right now, the front runners for the Republican Party seem to be Sarah Palin (the joke that keeps giving), Newt Gingrich (a pompous airbag that comes installed as standard equipment), a just-announced “I’m seriously considering it” Donald Trump (another rich buffoon who thinks that being rich translates to leadership potential), and a bunch of other people no one knows, has ever heard of, or cares one iota about whatsoever. So, right now, I’m calling it a boring presidential election where we reelect Jimmy Carter, um, Obama.

7. The Academy Awards. A bunch of movies I didn’t see, don’t want to see, and don’t care about, are competing for the top honors this year. As you can guess, I’m holding my breath in anticipation.

8. SyFy Becomes Shark Attack Channel. I don’t know when this happened, but my favorite channel (I remember actually asking a television station provider if they carried the SyFy Channel and not caring about any others) went from being a station with original science fiction programming with shows like Stargate SG1. Atlantis, Warehouse 13, Eureka, Battlestar Galactica (then Caprica), some variation of Star Trek, and lots of that sort of stuff. Now, it’s Man-Killing Shark and really bizarre movie of the week crap that stars Erik Estrada as a small town sheriff who is fighting a shark that has grown feet and chases people on the beach, but Estrada, who plays Skip William, is afraid of sharks because a shark killed his family in a drive-by shooting in Compton. Okay, that’s not a real show, but it should be. Who stole my SyFy Channel?

9. The Federal Budget is Out of Control. Um, when has it ever not been? We’re approaching the debt ceiling in February, when they told us that if we didn’t do things right, we’d be hitting that debt ceiling by September. Um, it’s FEBRUARY and we’re already arguing for having to increase the limit. And this is the government that’s trying to FIX the economy? Really?

10. Facebook Went Public. I laughed my ass off when I heard it was going to happen. If ever there was a bubble corporation that has absolutely no value whatsoever being sold for so many billions, I couldn’t find one. At least GM makes cars. At least Microsoft puts out a browser or operating system every now and then. But what does Facebook actually produce? Your content. Your friends. Your information. In other words, not a damn thing. Yet, they’re bad boy of leadership is now a multi-billionaire, and they’ve been launched as a fake IPO (a real one wasn’t done because the SEC would have hit them with all sorts of legal injunctions, which should automatically tell everyone something’s not on the up and up, but even that doesn’t cause people to take notice). Yeah, I use Facebook, but it’s such a non-entity in the grand scheme of things and is really only as important as it is at any one moment, knowing that it can go the way of Myspace in a second. Or like AOL, which still tries to regain some importance. Or sadly, like Blockbuster, that sad commentary of a video rental store that hasn’t realized it was obsolete ten years ago.

11. Verizon’s iPhone. Finally. Not that I want an iPhone on Verizon, but now I don’t have to read 10,000 stories manufactured by CNN about how great it would be to have the iPhone on Verizon. It’s there now. Leave me alone and stop hyping the stupid thing on your news site. Nobody really cares, as we discovered when no one lined up at the early Verizon Store openings that day, letting the event come and go without much fanfare. Nobody really cared.

12. Groupon’s Super Bowl Ad. All of the people who are upset about this incident don’t want to even deal with the ramifications of what really happened. First off, they all got upset at the ad where Groupon poked fun at itself by using the controversy of China and Tibet as its canvas. Well, here’s what they’re not getting, won’t get, and especially won’t ever own up to. The humor went over their heads. Not that they didn’t get it. It went OVER their heads, meaning they had to be smart enough to realize what was going on. Consider the source. It came from the direction of Christopher Guest, who is well known for creating comedy that not everyone gets, mainly because it pokes fun at people who are on stage and represents entire groups of people who when they watch it don’t always realize they’re being seen as the morons they really are because they’re so locked into their own little worlds that they are incapable of realizing the rest of the world sees them as ridiculous. It was the exact same humor used with Groupon, and of course, the people watching it were not Christopher Guest fans. They were Super Bowl fans, which I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we’re talking about two completely different intellectual mindsets here. Fill in the blanks to figure out which one I’m probably insulting here. I don’t really care. I’m not selling ads. Those people just didn’t get it and went nuts against Groupon. Why am I not surprised? I’m also not surprised that no one else is either.

13. Lindsay Lohan’s Theft Charge. Okay, I’ll admit it. I enjoy reading about the many demises of Lindsay Lohan. I don’t know her, I’m not a fan, and I probably shouldn’t care. But it’s like watching a train wreck happen in front of me. I probably should call 911 for help, but I can’t stop watching. I don’t get the same trill out of Charlie Sheen. Nothing about him fascinates me, nor does his drama. Lohan’s, on the other hand, completely fascinates me because I keep thinking that ir probably won’t get any worse, and then it does. I don’t even think she stole the thing, but that’s not even what keeps me interested. What keeps me interested is how someone can take her fame and continue to destroy her career, her future and any support from the community that she might ever have. Just the other day, her legal team says that it’s not going to deal with the allegations in public; they’ll deal with it in court. Then the first day of the trial, Lohan tweets her whole ordeal to the public, trying it out in the public again, even though that’s exactly what they said they wouldn’t do.

I can’t stop watching.

14. Writing. I’m taking a break from my current novel and working on a screenplay. Then I’ll be working on a word text game app that I’m designing for the android platform. I realized recently that there aren’t a whole lot of word text games out there any more, and I think it would be fun to create a new one. I remember how fun they were to create back when we were first designing computer games for the early systems, before graphics took over the industry.

That’s really it for now. If you’re actually reading this, let me know. I’d really like to know that there are people actually reading the blog.

Time for Another Round of Current Events and Happenings

Economics, Memoirs, Movies, Politics, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

1. The Assassination Attempt in Arizona. Okay, there’s really no way of walking around this topic without having to address it head-on. It’s pretty much the main story of what’s going on in the country, and like most current events, it’s yet another one of those that seems to be so out of context practically everywhere it gets reported. What everyone can agree on is that it was a tragic event, and most of us wish such a thing had never happened. However, I suspect that it’s only been a matter of time because there are a lot of crazy people out there, and if John Lennon’s death wasn’t a warning decades ago, we really should have been paying a lot more attention.

You see, there are a lot of people who are not playing with a full deck out there. We run across them each and every day. If you live in a big city, you can’t step over enough of them without running into another. Some are homeless, who stand on the street corners and do all sorts of bizarre behavioral activities, like yell at you, try to pee on you, beg from you, and pretty much anything else you can and cannot imagine. We had to be nuts ourselves if we honestly thought that they’d stick to their little corners and not start to bother the rest of us. I teach at a community college, and in the years that I’ve been teaching, you run across a lot of people who sometimes don’t seem like they’re all there. And you get really worried and concerned. But for the most part, no one really cares, because as long as it doesn’t affect them, why should they care?

The event turned into a bit of a surreal experience when suddenly people thought it was supposed to be a wake-up moment for the problems that have been occurring in our society. There’s a lot of anger and hate speech going back and forth between the different sides of the political spectrum, and for some bizarre reason people actually thought that this event might lead people to talk about these problems and do something about it. Not going to happen because no one wants to admit there’s anything wrong. Well, at least not with themselves. They’ll point fingers and say something’s wrong with YOU or someone else, but never with themselves. But that’s been the problem from the start, and as long as we’re never going to engage that, we’re never going to change the hostile discourse happening in this country.

Sure, it’s easy to blame Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck or (pick any politician or pundit), but the odds of actually opening up a real dialogue so that people actually listen to each other is practically impossible. It’s a nice pipe dream, but pipe dreams are just that. Dreams.

2. Verizon is Getting an Iphone. Good for them. I had one with AT&T and I’ve been very upset with AT&T and Apple for awhile now because of the fact that I can’t stop people from calling me, especially when they’re people I don’t want calling me. Neither Apple nor AT&T were very helpful here. So I left and joined Sprint, adding on a Samsung Epic phone instead. Pretty happy with it. Be happier if it had a battery life like the iPhone, but you take what you can get. Now that Verizon has an iPhone, I don’t really care. It’s still a phone from Apple, and Apple requires that it maintain control over its walled garden. Not a selling point for me.

3. Golden voice Ted Williams. I saw this coming a million miles away. The media jumped on this rags to riches to rags to riches story and thought he was the next best thing to sliced butter. Well, I kept wondering, “when is the other shoe going to drop” meaning when is the media going to turn against him? Well, now he’s kind of gone of the deep end because of personal problems, which no one could have ever expected would happen with a guy who has been living on the streets after throwing away his previous life. I mean, who would have thought something like that could happen? Anyway, sarcasm aside, he’s now heading to rehab and was arrested in Los Angeles. We’ll see how this story plays out, but I’m not expecting a lot of happy endings.

4. Unemployment has gone up again. Of course it has. And last month, it went down. The month before, I think it went up. We need to stop reporting these numbers and then providing commentary after it. Each time they do it, some pundit makes an argument that fits his world view of what he thinks should happen, rather than what is really happening. We’re in a recession right now. The market is going to be flying all over the place on a month to month basis. Stop trying to figure out long term strategies based off of short term notifications. It never works. Which brings me to my next one:

5. The Stock Market Fluxuates. Yes, it does. But one thing that needs to be constantly brought up, and it never is, is that the stock market really has very little connection to what’s really going on. It’s the Las Vegas for rich people. People buy based on speculation, and they think they have an idea of how the market is going to change in the short term. NONE OF THESE FIGURES has anything to do with what’s really going on. Companies are selling products, people are working for these companies and get paid whatever wage they normally get paid, and then some people buy some of these products. But because the stock market price of a company went up or down does not always reflect what’s going on in the real world of that particular company. Quite often, these fluxuations come because some executive did something stupid, like embezzled money, or had dinner with a celebrity. If the stock market goes south over the span of a week, it may not really mean anything to the real world as an implication. It may just mean a whole bunch of people panicked because they stopped living in the real world and see the market as the real world. Man, I hate the stock market.

6. Middle East Talks Aren’t Going Well. They never are. The two sides of that conflict are probably NEVER going to get along. Each new administration comes to the table convinced it’s going to make a difference but rarely ever does. That’s because the two sides hate each other. They have no incentive to be friendly to each other. Each side wants the other dead. That’s their international policy towards the other side. And it’s been that way for so long now that generations of their people grow up hating people they may never have met. If you want to fix the problems there, you have to do it generationally, and you have to do it by a completely different set of characteristics than our current process of diplomacy allows. Tit for tat and carrot diplomacy does not work on countries that live their entire lives to kill each other as their one foundational value. I could go at length on what would work, but NO ONE CARES OR LISTENS, so I’m going to stop caring, too.

7. Tablets Are the New In Thing. I’ve said this before, but it requires repeating. Tablets aren’t new. When the iPad was announced, suddenly a whole bunch of people who never wanted a tablet suddenly thought they needed one. We were like Eskimos being told we needed freezers and refrigerators by Don Draper and whatever fictional agency he might be working at. But shortly before this announcement, tablets were already out there trying to get us to buy them. And we didn’t. Why not? Because we didn’t need them, and they seemed kind of stupid to have. Well, now we all need them because Don Draper Steve Jobs told us we needed one. So now every other company under the sun is now releasing their tablet computer to compete with the Ipad. And I won’t be surprised if we start buying them this time around. We’re such sheep.

8. Myspace laid off half its staff. So what? Myspace has been irrelevant for years now. It used to be the “in” thing, and then Facebook came along and turned Myspace into an ugly sister of the hot cheerleader. Ever since Facebook, Myspace has been struggling to appear relevant. But its not. There’s nothing about Myspace that causes people to care. When it was told to sit at the kiddie table of technology, they tried to appear relevant again by pretending that it was the place to go for music. But Facebook was already there doing that, so Myspace continued to become even more irrelevant. At one point, I thought I might use it to hype my writing, but then realized that they were really only interested in doing so if I was already big time famous, which I wasn’t. So it wasn’t useful to me. And then I figured that if I was already big time famous, I probably wouldn’t need them. I’d just have a million facebook friends instead. Then, add to the mix that no one seems to be using Myspace anymore, and you realize why it’s probably going to be sold one of these days to someone like Murdoch who keeps buying up properties that are already irrelvant and trying to somehow make it seem like he bought a very relevant purchase.

9. Seth Rogen is Upset About the Hate Towards his Green Hornet Movie. So what? It’s a movie, not anything relevant. Make a really good movie that causes people to take notice, and maybe it won’t get the hate. Just saying. Then again, no one’s actually seen the movie, so perhaps the condemnations are a bit early.

10. Two of my novels are now on Kindle and the Nook. Innocent Until Proven Guilty, my first novel, is available on the Kindle.  Thompson’s Bounty, which is a science fiction, time-travel novel I wrote involving pirates, is available on the Barnes and Noble Nook, and it is available on the Kindle as well. I would not be very upset if you chose to read my novels. Really.

11. The people of Haiti still seem to be suffering, even though most of the world has left this area because it’s not a photo op any more. Just saying. Some people gave up on it because they don’t like how the Haitians are continuing to follow corrupt leaders who continue to cheat them out of international aid. Some people gave up on it because they only have the capacity to handle concern for a certain amount of time (usually the time between football season and American Idol finalist run-offs). And then some people just don’t care.

That’s all I have for today. My stuffed animal Brucoe thinks people should do more to care about other people, but he’s just a stuffed animal, and what does he know?

My Take on the Really Important News Stories Currently Happening

Economics, Memoirs, Social Networking, Stickman, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The post isn't about the movie, but the picture definitely works

As I know I’m the one everyone turns to for on topic news reporting, I thought I’d give some opinions on what’s currently happening. Okay, no one reads me, so I’m ranting to the wind, but it’s my blog, so I’m going to do it anyway.

1. Obama Takes Credit for Lame Duck Victories. Um, okay. It seems that our current president seems to think that he has done great things by using the lame duck Congress to get a lot of legislation pushed forward before the end of the year. A couple of thoughts: First, Obama didn’t really do anything. The lame duck members of Congress did. So it was really them that succeeded in doing what they did. Second, while it’s wonderful that a lot of gridlocked legislation got pushed through (DADT, Bush Tax Cuts, START treaty, Adoption of Stickman as Ambassador to Iceland [okay, the last one didn’t happen, but it really should have]), when the new year starts up, we’re back to where we were before, except now we’re going to have a lot of pissed off Republicans who still think they have some kind of mandate to provide gridlock to the presidential agenda. Basically, the Democrats rammed through a whole bunch of legislation that required them to use their majority that is going to disappear at the start of the new year. That can’t lead to positive relations in Congress for the next year. Expect a lot of political partisanship to get much worse in the very near future, all of it blamed on the lame duck stuff. Lesson: You really don’t get a free ride when the odds are stacked against you for the future. Even the Bush Tax Cuts, which the Republicans are all happy about being passed, are going to be seen as Obama’s lame duck stuff that will cause immediately cause Republicans to blame Obama and the Democrats for anything that comes out negative, even as Republicans use the money to fuel their own desires.

2. Rahm Emanuel is Cleared to Run for Emperor of Chicago. Or Mayor, or whatever it is he’s running for. Basically, an Obama Administration guy is running on that name connection alone, even though everyone who had anything to do with Obama was thrown out of office during the last election. Supposedly, this might work in Chicago, which is Obama’s former backyard. But how does this affect the rest of us? It doesn’t. It means absolutely nothing to us. For all I know, he’s probably going to lose because he’s not actually Obama. The people of Chicago aren’t voting for Obama; they’re voting for some guy who once worked for Obama. He has to run on that. No one outside of people who might gain from any connections to this guy really cares in any way, shape or form. So, everytime I see an article about this, which is practically every day even though I don’t subscribe to any papers that have anything to do with Chicago, I want to claw out my eyes with a rusty spork. Please make him and his personal desire to be god of Chicago go away. Please, even if it’s just for the children.

3. Steven Spielberg is not going to advise Democrats on how to win over the voters. Thank God. It’s not that I don’t like Steven Spieldberg. His movies are great. But they’re movies. And as we learned from World War II, when a movie director like Kapra is making movies for the country, they’re not movies; they’re propaganda. Having a famous filmmaker try to change the perception of Americans about the Democrat Party is a disaster just waiting to happen. What’s wrong with the Democrats right now is that they’re constantly running on a platform of being for the people when they’ve been so out of touch of what the people want and need that they need education, not propaganda. But they’re not going to get that education because they don’t seem to realize what’s wrong. People are pissed at the Democrats right now because they came in with a plan to give the people what they wanted and then and went and did things that politicians have been doing for decades (filling their own pockets). We saw Rangel and Conyers and all sorts of shenanigans that benefited none of the people, but only the people in power. THAT is what they need to fix, and trying to get a famous movie director to advise them to change their public image is never going to work because it’s not their public image that needs fixing. It’s their actions they conduct in the name of the public interest. But I doubt they’re going to figure that out because the people who advise them are the same people who have been advising them while they were holding $1000 a plate fund-raisers to get elected.

4. Facebook is a networking program, not a lifestyle. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg was voted as Time’s person of the year. I really don’t care. He’s a rich, elitist, misogynist who happened to be at the right place at the right time to steal the right idea at the right time. Ever since then, he’s been trying to become important, but he heralded the creation of a platform for people to find their old friends and keep touch with their current friends in ways bordering on stalking, but only if the victim was sending texts to her stalker to announce where she’d be going next. Yes, I have a Facebook account. But it’s not my only means of oxygen or survival. It’s an interesting tool. And that’s it. For me, the person of the year would have been Julian whatever his name is who was running Wikileaks. That person really made an impact last year. Facebook didn’t. Neither did that rich billionaire, irrelevant sack of shit owner of Facebook either. It’s almost as if Time went out of their way to create the easiest winner of the award, realizing that if they chose the guy who should have got it, the government would have actually shut down Time Magazine as a threat to the country. I honestly don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to realize that this had to have been part of their discussion the night before they made their decision.

5. 2010 Kindle Sales will reach 8 billion. So what? Oh wait, I mean 8 million. Whatever. I mean, it’s kind of cool that Kindle will sell that many, but as expected, this kind of announcement fails to mention what’s really important: How many books are being sold, and how many are available? You see, it’s one thing to sell a bunch of devices, like Barnes & Noble is doing with the Nook Color, but when they don’t tell you how much information is available for the device, it’s really doing a disservice to the buying public. An example: I bought a Color Nook from B&N, and I’ve been nothing but pissed about my purchase ever since. I bought it, expecting the market to be represented in books, magazines and newspapers, but so far the selection has been abysmal at best. I have yet to see a justification for the color device because the magazine selection for the device is horrid. I have yet to see any new magazines sign up, other than really crappy ones that I would never flip through at the bookstore for free. When they start getting the marketplace to respond to their product, I’ll be happy. And don’t get me started on prices. The price for practically every book I’ve seen with the Nook has been either exactly the same price as the Kindle or much higher. Computer books are ridiculous in that they’re sometimes more expensive for the Nook version than they would be if I bought it in a physical copy. Not a good sign if they’re trying to capture a market. Or even tap into one.

This is the same problem, I have with the Kindle. The prices for books just don’t seem to justify the device itself. When books are $9.99, it might be worth it, but there’s a mindgame being played here that they don’t want to own up to. A lot of these books are now out in paperback and available from some retailers for much cheaper than $9.99. Yet, the price for these books doesn’t go down. They remain at $9.99 or recently, $12.99, which seems to be some bizarre sweet spot the book companies think they can get. In other words, they’re making the market reliant on the hardbook, brand new price model when most people haven’t even really been reliant on that model in the real bookstore of the past. I bought a few books that were “discounted” at the $7.00 range, and I realized while buying them that I could probably get these books for less than $5.00 because they’ve been out in paperback forever. Kindle is trying to take the Apple approach of “people are suckers who will pay anything for something digital, and if we capture that market, they’ll always pay us full price”. Kindle started out well with their price model, but then they caved in against the book publishers, and that bit of working together has managed to screw the average customer who is now faced with paying stupid prices or going back to the old model of waiting for physical books to go down in price. Without even trying, the e-reader market is doing a good job of killing its own future marketplace.

6. The iPad. The hype over this product has completely overwhelmed me. Not enough to buy one, but enough to cause me to wonder if people really are that daft. I mean, it’s not like the technology was really all that new. We’ve had tablets on the market for a few years now, but they never sold because people didn’t see a need for them. And then Steve Jobs announced the iPad during his yearly announcement meeting, and suddenly everyone had to have one. I’ve looked at it, and almost even bought one, because I’m a stupid Internet geek who buys stupid things like the Nook Color. But I waited a day and then realized I didn’t want OR NEED one. It didn’t do anything I couldn’t already do with devices I already had. I mean, it’s got a bookstore so I can read e-books. They’re more expensive than any other store, because it’s Apple, and I already have a Kindle and an Amazon Nook. Not worth it. It does some word processing. So does my laptop. Much better, too. It looks like a Star Trek datapad. That’s cool. But that’s about as useful as it gets. It doesn’t actually do anything my iPhone doesn’t do. It’s just that my iPhone is smaller.

7. Which brings me to my iPhone. I bought an iPhone when they were first released. And it rocked. Back then, I had a crappy cell phone that was not very smart, and the move to a phone that did everything was great. But it’s been some years since I first bought that phone, and the marketplace has finally caught up to it. You see, there are some things that the iPhone won’t do, mainly because of Apple and because of AT&T. I have been getting a lot of phone calls from telemarketers lately, including one that calls me every day. I can’t block their calls because AT&T won’t let me do it without paying for a special service that does just that. Apple won’t let me get an App to block calls because for some reason Apple just doesn’t seem to think that’s a good App. So I’m left having to be innovative and work around my phone in order to get my phone to do what I want it to do. So a few days ago, I bought an Android phone that lets me do all of the things an Apple phone won’t let me do. And I’ve been really happy with it since. I had to move to Sprint PCS instead, and well, it’s working out like a first date with a supermodel who only orders off the children’s menu to watch her weight. Apple managed to push itself out of my market when I used to say nothing but wonderful things about them and their phone.

8. The Spiderman Musical. Now, as much as I love a train wreck like everyone else, I’ve kind of hit my saturation point with this story. Okay, they tried to make a musical that was too innovative to actually be done successfully. Fix it or move on. It doesn’t really matter to me.

9. Sony launched a model to compete with iTunes. Yeah, good luck on that one. You’re a day too late with a model that’s not innovative. Sprechen Blockbuster versus Netflix?

10. South Korea is trying to rile up North Korea with live fire exercises. Um, poking a tiger is not always the best way to entertain the kids. But what do I know?

That’s all for now. Have fun and avoid eating the yellow snow. Just cause it looks like lemon flavoring doesn’t mean it’s going to work out that way.

Facebook Is Lawsuit Happy & Trying to Rule the World

Social Networking, , , , ,

Eventually it had to happen. A company becomes so powerful that it decides it pretty much owns the world. Just the other day, a teaching company attempted to file a trademark for the name Teachbook, which pointed to its online identity as a company that provides lesson plans and other teaching related materials to teachers. Well, of course, this was obviously a ploy designed to steal the identity of Facebook, because they turned around and sued them, stating that

“If others could freely use ‘generic plus BOOK’ marks for online networking services targeted to that particular generic category of individuals, the suffix BOOK could become a generic term for ‘online community/networking services’ or ‘social networking services.”

This can loosely be translated to: “We use the word book in our name, so we own it forever and ever, and we’ll sue the crap out of you if you think otherwise.”

Not surprisingly, we visited this topic a short time ago with the brilliant mind of Paris Hilton, when she trademarked the phrase: “That’s so hot” or something as stupid as that, indicating that the phrase was never popular until she came along. As if.

But Facebook is doing something much more dangerous because it’s attempting to pretty much shut down the use or specific words that have any similarity to the one they use in their title. But the process of trademarking also involves the concept of “intent” and I seriously doubt that Teachbook was really planning to steal market share away from Facebook. I’m waiting for the inventor of the netbook to sue Facebook and stop them from using their name. Not going to happen because most other people, aside from Facebook, AREN’T STUPID enough to do so.

Well, the sad part of this is that because Facebook has gazillions of dollars to spend and Teachbook is a small launch with two employees, Facebook may just use its corporate clout to completely clobber them in legalese, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it because no one really backs the underdog except to cheer and say “attaboy”. So, if they go down in this fight, that just means that we’ve made the demon that much stronger.

It’s only a matter of time before Facebook turns around and says that everyone must stop using the word “.com” in their titles, because Facebook uses it and Facebook is much bigger than they are. It’s not that much different than forcing people to not use the word “book”. Think about it because soon that may be all you can do.

What Really Bothers Me About Facebook

Social Networking

Surprisingly, privacy is not one of the things that actually bothers me about Facebook. Sure, it concerns me at times, but I understand Facebook is a business that really wants to make money. That people, including me, are stupid enough to give them all of the information to profit of our identities should really be the concern of those “concerned” about privacy. But I digress.

No, here are some of the things that cause me to use Facebook so little these days, almost to the point of where I sign on just to check to make sure my friends are still alive, and then I go do something else.

1. Annoying Games. These Facebook games bother me the most. Sure, I can avoid playing them, and that’s what I do, but they’ve managed to become equally annoying by incorporating themselves into every friend update that occurs within Facebook. I don’t care that someone adopted a virtual pig and it’s hungry. I really don’t care. Let it starve. Or become bacon. Or whatever virtual pieces of shit do when they die. Stop bothering me with that crap. The problem has gotten to the point where I’m seriously thinking of dumping friends that spam me more than once with this nonsense. I haven’t done it yet, but it’s on my dashboard of things I’m about to do because it’s practically made Facebook’s ONLY redeeming feature completely useless. By redeeming feature, I mean the ability to see what’s going on with my friends. It makes it so that on some days any useful information has been relegated to cyber oblivion because so many updates have come across from people about their new farm, their new virtual make up store concession, or latest mob hit. I don’t care. And if that’s all Facebook ends up being good for, then it’s not good for anything further.

2. The machinery of Facebook. For the longest time, one of the positive things about Facebook was that no matter how stupid the rest of the site got, contributed to by the stupid people who use the site (yes, including me), at least the site ran well. Recently, my blog posts have taken to showing up WEEKS after I post them because something in Facebook wants me to physically remove my blog posts and then reset them again, so that it will start pulling blog posts. That’s just stupid. That’s like buying a brand new cell phone so that you can walk to someone’s house and talk to them in person. Unfortunately, this is caused by the fact that Facebook is more interesting in trying to figure out how to make money off of its members than actually making the system work best for those members. If this doesn’t get fixed soon, anothe reason to dump the service.

3. Fake friends. This is one of my pet peeves that I’ve pretty much fixed by turning down practically all people who send me a friend request. Way too many people send me a friend request, and I’ve never heard of them before. I accept and then next thing I know I’m getting plastered with their friend messages that are designed to be continuous spam. Now, this is going to be a problem for me because my main reason for having a Facebook account is no longer to keep up with friends, but to promote my writing business should that career ever get jumpstarted. I’m going to have zero ability to stop this from happening in the future, so unless they set up some feature to only allow specific message to come through, Facebook will make itself irrelevant for known celebrities. And if that’s the case, I won’t close my account, but I’ll stop signing on forever.

4. Friends stop communicating. This is a footprint of the system itself that I see as being caused by the phenomenon of Facebook itself. A person starts posting stupid comments as status updates (“went to Chiptotle to eat. Yum yum” or something irrelevant of this nature), so they actually stop communicating with their real friends because they start to think that they ARE communicating with their friends. I have one friend who has stopped calling me completely, who used to talk to me on a weekly basis. I guess seeing a status update is supposed to be the replacement for that. What really happens is the friend stops being a friend, and it’s only a matter of time before we both unfriend each other because we don’t communicate any more. Sad, but that’s a footprint of how this sort of social media works.

5. Overall detachment syndrome. As people tend to recognize each other from only their Facebook postings and updates, they stop communicating with each other. But because they think they’re actually “communicating”, they don’t realize that they’re slowly eliminating their network of friends.

6. Groups you can’t get rid of. There’s a group I joined back when I was in grad school that was an organization that focused on a specific social issue. That issue was fought and lost in California. But for some reason, this group won’t die. It’s membership turned nutty, and I no longer care what they’re sponsoring these days. I even pulled myself from their membership. But that doesn’t stop them from continuing to send me messages. I don’t even know how they do it as I thought that once I was out of their group, I’d be off their list. Nope. Not the case. Happened with a couple of shows that I used to watch. With those, I”m still a fan of the show, like Monk, but the show ended. Yet, every now and then they want to tell me about something that’s going on concerning that show. But the show ENDED. So NOTHING is going on with that show. But the company that made it still thinks that they’re relevant, which they’re not. Yeah, I can probably remove myself from that list, but I’m still a fan of the show, so I always thought it was nostalgic by keeping my name on that list. Didn’t realize that I’d never stop hearing from them over really stupid pieces of information that aren’t important or interesting to anyone, even to people who used to be strong fans.

Part of the problem for me with Facebook is that it’s one of those social venues that wants to be a lot cooler than it really is. The thing that makes it cool is the people who inhabit it, but honestly I’m not that cool, so anything that has anything to do with me, really isn’t going to be all that cool. So Facebook serves to continue to remind me of that because it tries to treat my uncoolness as being somewhat cool. And that’s just depressing.

When a Gaming Company Jumps the Shark

Computer Games, Social Networking, , , , , , , , ,

Years ago, I used to be a seriously addicted Ultima Online fan. I played it every day. I became a counselor in the game, which meant I officially worked for EA as one of the in-game special operators who helped other people who were having problems in the game. I ran community events that were quite popular. I mean, I lived and breathed the game.

Then EA decided to do something really stupid. The game population was having problems at the time due to a segment of the population that was preying on other players. The forum community was in an uproad, demanding something be done about it. There were all sorts of alternatives EA could have taken, including to continue to ignore the problem. But they decided to take the easiest route, which was to create a completely “safe” environment in the game by completely duplicating the entire world and then making that “new” area safe. Oh, sure, you could stay in the dangerous area, or you could go to the completely safe area and eat candy canes with the rest of the safe population. And that’s what everyone did. And the old lands died out because no one went there.

But something else happened, too. People stopped playing the game because it became too easy. You couldn’t be killed, and suddenly the game seemed like a joke of its previous existence. So people left in droves. And then new games appeared, like Everquest, so that became the new stomping ground. UO died out. Oh, sure, it’s still around, but it’s a shadow of its once great self.

To me, the reason was that the owners of the game listened to the players, and then when it came time for really listening to the feedback, they decided to take the easier path and then stopped listening. The players, pissed, and practically screaming at the developers, kept begging them to listen to what was happening to the game. The developers not only didn’t listen, but they closed down the forums, figuring that as long as they didn’t have to listen to the complaints, then the problems didn’t exist.

So a LOT of people just dumped the game. I did as well. I realized they weren’t paying attention to the players any more, so I went and found another game.

Fast forward some years to Star Wars Galaxies, and wow, it’s like they didn’t learn a thing. What’s even funnier is that some of the same names were there making the same mistakes. When the game started going down hill, instead of listen to the player base, they went ahead and completely changed the game to one they thought players would want to play. Boy, were they wrong. The player base disappeared overnight. Realizing they made a mistake, but refusing to admit it, they made another abrupt change, causing the few remaining players to say “screw you” and leave. The game is less than a shadow of its former self. To this day, they refuse to admit they did anything wrong, but in all areas where they discuss how to screw up a game, Star Wars Galaxies is ALWAYS mentioned as the showcase of an example of what NOT TO DO EVER.

Well, fast forward to today, and we have the most popular game on the planet for MMORPGs: World of Warcraft. Yesterday, they made an announcement to do something that has me shaking my head because it’s like I’m reliving those two previous examples over again.

You see, some weeks ago, WoW decided that it was going to implement this new feature called REALID, which meant that in order to group with your friends, you had to present your real identification and play as yourself, not as a character name. If someone wanted to know who you were, they would know. This pissed people off, but Blizzard, the maker of WOW, said that you don’t have to use REALID if you don’t want to. Then they announced yesterday that in order to use the forums for WOW or their new game coming out called Starcraft 2, you have to use REALID. What they didn’t really mention is that as their parent company Activision is now partnered with Facebook, this is more about giving identification information to Facebook than it is in presenting a new way to socialize in the game. People are pissed. People don’t like having their ID out there when playing a game.

To prove how dangerous this is, one of the trash-talking employees for Blizzard stated it was no big deal and put his own information out there. In no time, all of his private information was out there, and suddenly his phone was ringing off the hook from angry players, and his Facebook account had to be shut down because of the onslaught of attacks. The problems he’s experiencing are still going on. Blizzard’s response wasn’t to realize they made a mistake but to unofficially announce that its employees wouldn’t have to comply with REALID, just the players would.

This has started a nightmare of bad publicity for Blizzard, which is treating it like the old ad business, thinking that as long as people are talking about Blizzard, it must mean good business.

I’m starting to hear A LOT of people talking about dumping WOW because of this. And that’s interesting because up until now I’ve always believed that the only thing that could ever destroy WOW would be WOW itself. I just didn’t think it would happen by allying itself with the scuz bucket that is Facebook.

This should play out to be a very interesting situation. I’ll be watching this closely.

Why Facebook Isn’t Blinking

Social Networking,

There’s been a lot of recent talk lately about how Facebook has gone over the line concerning privacy. This talk has devolved (or evolved) into a lot of conversation about deleting Facebook accounts. May 31st is even supposed to be an “official” date to delete your Facebook account, if that’s your perogative. Yet, for some reason, Facebook doesn’t seem to be all that much concerned about what’s going on. You’d think with the way that people jump ship on the “in” thing, Facebook should be concerned. I mean, look what happened to Myspace, which is now extremely irrelevant in the face of pretty much everything else out there these days, although Myspace is trying really hard to become relevant again.

What’s probably important to realize is that there’s a simple impetus behind what Facebook is and isn’t doing, and that’s the realization that there’s nothing out there yet people are ready to jump to. There’s no huge “new” thing right now where everyone else is at, causing people to jump ship, so the power brokers within Facebook probably feel they have nothing to fear from any backlash. They’re probably thinking to themselves, “so what? Where are you going to go if you leave us?” And they’re probably right. If you delete your Facebook account, it is pretty difficult to keep in touch with a lot of people you magically found again after all of these years. Sure, you could go to email, but who really is going to keep that up as a communication process? I mean, it took Facebook to get back in touch again because nothing else seemed to do it before.

The fear for Facebook is if something else comes along. But until that does, they probably think they’re safe enough to do anything they want to you and your private information. Granted, some people will leave regardless, but unless they become a wave of lots of people, Facebook doesn’t care. It doesn’t see any of us as “customers”. It sees us as data, and there’s lots more if we disappear. When the masses start impacting their budget, they’ll care, but so far, nothing has really happened to threaten that.