A blog is a lot like a baby. You can’t really express to someone who doesn’t have one what it’s like and, despite all of the reference material about how to nurture one, you don’t really begin to figure it out until you’ve had one for a while.
I wrote my first, brief entry here about ten months ago with a plan to simply share articles that I found interesting and to comment briefly on them. Occasionally I did write some longer pieces which were mostly original content, but these have been rare.
Last night I started a Tumblr and experienced an epiphany; I need to write more from personal experience, not from content I find on the web. While I will now let that Tumblr page die, I will generally and loosely incorporate its theme here.
An unchronological diary of personal photos and thoughts without any URLs or content aided by web search.
This realization has been emerging for several weeks but I was pushed to action by Louis Gray’s excellent write-up today, Growing Grumblings on Tech News Don’t Address Incentives.
One of the easiest things for tech blogs to do is repeat updates from the official blogs of interesting companies, add a few internal links to previous coverage they have done on that topic, add a paragraph or two of analysis, and hit the post button.
It’s not just tech blogs that do this, you’ll find this practice across many blog genres. I’ve done it many times as well even though I’ve tried to offer sincere analysis and a thoughtful perspective on the items I’ve referenced.
The Starnes is now starnes.com and this site’s transformation began with the previous entry, Childhood Memories Of A Nudist Beach.
I will still cover some of my favorite subjects like space, physics, tech and the future of everything, but will also share some of the things I have learned over my brief forty-three years. If I do it right, each post will offer something meaningful and maybe something you’ve never considered before.
The One Thing Not To Do On Facebook
Hanging out with friends on any social network can become like living with them in a phone booth. (For the younger readers, there was a time when humans did not carry phones around, and wired phones in small transparent enclosures were common in most any city or town.)
It should not be surprising that spending a lot of time with anyone in any setting can turn otherwise harmless and slight acts by one into a source of acute mental irritation for the other. If you are married or have ever been married you are intimately aware of this phenomenon. Remarkably, the person who initially turned you on in every conceivable way may become the one who sends you into a raging fit because they don’t close the cap on a shampoo bottle.
Social networks like Facebook are really just virtual extensions of the old-fashioned reality (“OFR”), therefore some issues in the OFR become issues in the cyber. This explains the large number of articles about “What Not To Do” on Facebook or Twitter. Usually these articles are written by folks who have themselves become bothered by certain on-line behavior. I suspect these articles are just about as effective at getting folks to stop posting about bowel movements as they are in getting people in the OFR to close the toilet lid.
What these “What Not To Do” articles really say about the authors and sympathizers is that they are helpless, lazy sacks of water and carbon.
While it can be a challenge to manage OFR friends, family and lovers, it’s a cinch on social networks. On Facebook, stop complaining about your high school friend’s constant quips about their romantic relationship by taking control of your own emotional reaction or by simply blocking their updates — it just takes one mouse click. This will likely preserve your on-line relationship and OFR friendship.
The one thing not to do on Facebook is tell people what not to do on Facebook.
Each of us use social networks in different ways. Attempting to create a virtual world that suits your specific needs by demanding that others behave in a certain way is silly. Don’t be silly, take control.
The more clever of you will have already recognized the meta-irony herein. For you, I recommend not reading this article.