Blog Entries
Blog entries, here and from elsewhere.
#cttu – Aldon Hynes, Internet Novelist
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/12/2010 - 09:46It’s five o’clock on a Thursday and the usual crowd is driving to the CT Tweet Crawl. It is a diverse group of people that gather every so often who are united by little more than their common use of Twitter. I’ve been going to Tweet Crawls, Tweetups, and other social media gatherings for years. It used to be much more geeks talking about some wild idea for a new website. The content producers started showing up, the bloggers, podcasters, and videobloggers. Finally, the marketing people caught on with their nice suits and a chance to exchange business cards.
I’m listening to All Things Considered on the radio as I drive up. They are talking about William Faulkner and I think about novel writing. Every year I give National Novel Writing Month a try, and one year I completed the novel, but never got around to editing it.
I’m thinking to myself, “What do I have to say to this upcoming gathering? What do they have to say to me?” I anticipate the first question I will hear from many people, “So, what do you do?” I eat, I drink, I sleep, sometimes I write or manage to find interesting technology projects that pay the bills, but that isn’t concise enough for this crowd and people won’t want to swap cards with me. I could say that I’m quick with a joke, or to light up a smoke but people would then assume that there’s some place that I’d rather be.
Years ago, I spoke with my daughter’s kindergarten class about what I do. It occurred to me that the best way to describe what I do is to say that I “help people tell their stories online.” With this in mind, the words of William Faulkner rattling around in my head and a little Billy Joel somehow slipping in, I decided on my new job description. “I’m an Internet Novelist”.
Yeah, it’s a little different from Bill’s friend the Real Estate Novelist. I’ve had time for a wife, although she may sometimes get frustrated at the amount of time that I am online. So, at the TweetCrawl, I use the phrase. I get polite nods as people seem to get it, exchange business cards and move on. Only one person seems to object. He points out that novels are supposed to be long form fiction. A lot of social media is very short form, and by novel standards, even a long blog post is short form. In addition, social media people are supposed to be writing about what is really going on, not some fiction.
While I’m a big advocate of truth and authenticity online, it seems as if a good social media presence is concerned with the narrative, with taking all the bits and pieces of life and weaving it into an interesting story. Hopefully, the story isn’t fiction, but becomes true in the telling of the story.
So, there you have it. I’ve told my story of being an Internet Novelist, and hopefully telling this story makes it a little bit true. It certainly made the discussions at the CT Tweetup more interesting. On the way home, I listened to Fresh Air as Terry Gross interviewed Loudon Wainwright. He talked some about his father being a journalist for Life magazine and how he had bought into the notion that you need to write a book to be a serious writer. Maybe I’ll end up buying into the same notion, but until then I’ll keep up my various forms of internet writing and hope to weave them into interesting stories.
Cheating at EntreCard and Finding Real Top Droppers
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 12:44Yesterday, Martin at Corneymans Money-Blog wrote a blog post about EntreCard members getting scammed. Specifically, he noted that even after he removed the EntreCard widget from his website, several people continued to drop cards on that website.
For those not acquainted with EntreCard, it is a system where you have a widget on your site with an advertisement for another participating member. EntreCard members that visit your site can ‘drop a card’ on your site by clicking on the widget. Every time they do this, they get a credit, and then use the credits to put up advertisements up on other people’s sites.
Martin wondered how people could drop cards on a site that doesn’t have a widget. He accused people who have done that of ‘cheating’. I suggested that while this shouldn’t be happening, it is a bit of a leap to call such people cheaters. It could be a bug with EntreCard or something else we don’t fully understand.
Martin went on to provide an example of how people could cheat on EntreCard by posting just the part of the widget necessary to drop a card. It appears as if EntreCard has fixed this part of the problem since that now shows up as ‘Invalid’. However, it does not address the bigger part of the problem. In theory, anyone could post anyone else’s widget on their own site. They could even set up a page with the widget of the top hundred sites they wish to drop on. It may well be that EntreCard has come up with some code to address this, but I didn’t want to do extensive testing and end up setting off triggers at EntreCard.
Whether or not people have been dropping cards on people without widgets as a form of cheating, because of some bug, or simply using some dropping tool they don’t fully understand, it does seem that the number of drops, and the drops in the inbox are not as accurate as we would like. So, what can be done about this?
Using Google Analytics, I checked out the traffic coming to my site from EntreCard. Specifically, I went to Traffic Sources, Referring Sites, and clicked on EntreCard. I found that the top two pages where from the Category Browser, and from my details page. The remaining 370 pages were from people’s inboxes.
For obvious security reasons, you cannot go to other people’s inboxes. However, if you use their userid, you can get to their details at http://entrecard.com/user_details/nnnn where nnnn is their userid. As an example, my user detail page is http://entrecard.com/user_details/11692. With that, and a little poking around I could find out who came to my site and visited the most pages from their drop in box. It is worth noting that this is not necessarily related to how often they drop on me. In some cases people would come from their inbox to my site a couple times a day. Some would visit multiple pages on each visit. To me, this is much more interesting. These are the people who are engaged with my website.
With that, let me highlight a few of them. At the top of the list was Doctor Faustroll Writes the Wrongs.. Coming in second was First Door on the Left, which is a blog I love to visit as well. Third was One World Realty. In fourth was Moms Lifestyle. Rounding out the top five was The Last Bear.
This was a surprising and interesting list to me and I expect I’ll spend more time visiting sites that rank high on the page visits instead of how many cards they drop on me.
Am I concerned about possible cheating at EntreCard? Yeah, a little bit. I would much rather have visitors that come and read what I’m writing, than those who drop cards on me, perhaps without even visiting my site. However every card dropped on me does boost my popularity on EntreCard, so even those visits are not completely meaningless.
If there is cheating going on, I hope the folks at EntreCard fix it so it stops. More importantly, I hope people read my blog and that I continue to find other interesting blogs to read.
What do you think?
Bloomers and Lingerie
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/05/2010 - 09:44Every day, I try to visit a wide variety of blogs to get a sense of what people beyond my own geographic, political, socio-economic cohort are thinking. Sometimes, it is fairly clear what people are thinking, other times, you just have to ask yourself, “What were they thinking?!”
Yesterday, I stumbled across two very different viewpoints that I thought I would juxtapose. The first is an article, Selling Sex To Little girls, Miley’s 9-year-old sister launching a lingerie line for kids. “What were they thinking?” seems to be a common response. Some have asked how this is different that little girls in tutus and leotards in their ballet classes, or three year olds in the Dora the Explorer undies. Others have said that it looks more like Jon Benet Ramsey. What were they thinking? Perhaps all that they were thinking was, “Cha-ching”
It made me think of one of the blogs I often visit. Penny Raine describes herself as a “born again, spirit filled, blood bought, Christian” and asks on her Facebook page, “Is what you are living for worth Christ dying for? While we were still sinners Jesus died for us.” This is also reflected in her status, “know that if you are a Godly parent desiring to raise Godly children that you have an enemy, he seeks to steal and destroy your children, he is a big bad, wants to eat your lunch enemy, and he will stop at nothing, but ... not to fear cause we serve a Jesus who has overcome the world and we will overcome here too!”
On her webpage, she describes herself this way:
Let me see, to introduce myself. Well obviously my name is Penny Raine, I am momma to 8 youngins, 1 with Jesus, the rest still here all in one house, that is until last year when the oldest got married. Now she has a husband and they have a home of their own and a baby on the way. I am wife to minister hubby known locally as “jumpin Jim” we have been married since ‘86, goodness how many years IS THAT? We all live on a horse farm in Mid TN where our favorite thing to do is worship the Lord.
With that, she shows a picture of her family leaning against an old blue pickup truck, with three of them wielding guitars. I suspect that Jumpin Jim puts on a real different show than Miley Cyrus does and I suspect that I probably have some strong disagreements with Penny and Jim on politics and theology. But I also suspect that Penny and Jim are much closer to being my kind of people than the Cyrus family.
One of the things that Penny promotes on her blog is Jumpin Bloomers which sells “modest clothing for girls of all ages”. The outfits are cute and remind me of the clothing some young Mennonite girls would wear to Sunday School when I visited their churches in Ohio back in my college days. It also made me think of the sort of clothing I always imagined Laura Ingalls Wilder would wear as she moved from big woods to the prairie.
One of the things that many of the bloggers do is have various contests to build traffic. Penny is having an Apron Giveaway contest to promote her blog and jumpinbloomers. I had read about the contest and initially decided not to enter. I usually don’t go for these sorts of contests. I’m not likely to write a review of a blog for a one in a hundred chance of winning an apron or some other little trinket or treasure.
However, the contrast between Jumpin Bloomers and Noah Cyrus’ lingerie was just too great to leave this without a comment. So, shake your head at the Cyrus family’s latest venture, but don’t stop there. Join with others to promote young girls clothing that glorifies childhood instead of glorifies sexuality.
Why do we blog?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/04/2010 - 13:06It is an old question that comes up now and again, “Why do we blog?” For some of us, it is an important chance to write about things that are important to us. It might be personal or family stuff. It might be politics. It might be local news. It might be technology, or any other subject that captures a writer’s attention. For others it is part of an effort to earn money by blogging. I suspect that for many, it is a little bit of both.
Yet there is another important aspect of blogging that too often is overlooked. Blogging can be a great way of improving ones craft, improving ones writing. I remember writing classes in the past that stressed the importance of keeping a regular writers journal. I do not focus on the writer’s journal aspect of blogging that much, however, the other day, I received an email from a dear friend who is starting to blog, and seems to be approaching it very much from the perspective of improving her writing.
She goes by the name NativeBee and has simply entitled her blog Writing. I would encourage you to visit her blog.
As I thought of welcoming her into the community of blogs about writing, I tried to think of some other blogs that I would recommend to her. A good starting point is Subjective Soup and Communications Exchange, both written by a woman named Patricia. She describes herself as a recently retired teacher, and she often has great comments about writing.
Another blog that I like from a person focusing on their writing is All Stace, All the Time. In her look back at 2009, she writes
What did you do in 2009 that you'd never done before? Got serious about my writing and actually applied for writing jobs.
Jennifer at Writing to Survive also often has great explorations into the craft of writing. A few other blogs come to mind when I think of people working on the craft of writing, whether or not they talk about that much in their blogs. These include Redhead Ranting and The Junk Drawer. Another writer that two different blogs that are worth reading, although perhaps even less focused on the craft of writing is Lidian. She writes Kitchen Retro and The Virtual Dime Museum.
I hope you will all visit NativeBee’s blog, welcome her to blogging, and I hope she will get a chance to visit a few of the blogs I’ve mentioned. Are there other blogs that you like that focus or illustrate nicely the craft of writing?
2009 in Review, a Blogging Perspective.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 12/31/2009 - 12:49Outside, the snow is gently falling as I think back over 2009. A lot has gone on this year, but for a moment, let me look at it strictly from the perspective of this blog. This is the 523 entry I will post in my blog this year. I have written over 280,000 words on my blog on a wide variety of topics.
The most popular blog posts I wrote during 2009 in terms of the number of times they were read were about technology, and technology posts took up the majority of my top ten blogposts. Graphviz and Matlab were the top technology topics.
Coming in third was a blog post I wrote about bills before the Government Administrations and Elections Committee. Another Connecticut focused blog post about bringing Colin McEnroe back to the airwaves was also in my top ten most read blog posts. Colin is now back on the air on Connecticut Public Radio. Even more locally, my blog post about the future of the Woodbridge Country Club made the top ten.
In terms of what I wrote, I wrote most often on politics, Connecticut news, technology, the future of media and social networks. I have been trying to make better use of categories and encouraging people to read or subscribe to those categories that are most in their interest.
According to Google Analytics, I have had over 70,000 unique visitors this year, visiting over 107,000 times, and viewing over 141,000 pages. The majority use Firefox and stay on the site for around a minute. People have visited from 167 different countries. The United States accounts for the most visitors, followed by the Philippines, Canada, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, Netherlands, India, Singapore, Indonesia, and Germany. Within the United States, Connecticut accounts for the most visitors, followed by California, New York, Texas, and Pennsylvania.
Sites like EntreCard, Adgitize, Blogexplosion and CMF ads have brought a lot of visitors. Other social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Disqus and TableTalk were also important.
For Connecticut sources, the Journal Inquirer, CTNewsJunkie, CTWeblogs, The Courant Blog, CoolJustice Report, CTLocalPolitcs and the Journal Record’s blog page have brought many visitors.
In terms of topics that people have searched on, Graphviz was the most popular, followed by ’25 things about me’, ‘Smoking Jacket’, ‘Colgate Smile Second Life’, and the ‘Woodbridge Country Club’ were all popular searches. Another important set of popular searches have been names of people that I’ve written about including Kenneth Ireland, Sergey Aleynikov, Colin Mcenroe, Jim Amann, and Richard Roszkowski.
So, that’s a brief view of my blog for 2009. With all of this in mind, I’ll start preparing for 2010. How about you? How was your year? Do you blog? How did your blog do? What topics were popular and which weren’t? Share your ideas and let’s look forward to a great 2010.
