Facebook’s Automated Censorship Kerfuffle

If you’ve been anywhere near where I’ve been over the weekend, you’ll have seen this article on Dangerous Minds about Facebook removing a photo of two men kissing. From the article: [...] it seems that the sight of two fully-clothed men kissing was too much for Facebook, or too much for some redacted [...] who complained [...]

The Needs of a Personal Platform

When you’re starting out online, it’s easy enough to dig into everything a little bit, and keep your agility by not building a routine. However, as you do more and more work – more writing, more tweeting, more status updates – you’ll begin to look for ways to reduce the emotional overhead on working your networks. Tools, [...]

How to Master the Power of Voice and Become a Blogging Muad’Dib

Who's Your Mahdi? - Alec Newman as Paul Atreides from Frank Herbert's Dune

The Voice Must Flow! The power to be in many places at once. Perfect memory. The ability to see the future. None of these count for anything without the power to inspire action with just a few phrases, delivered with perfect pitch, modulation, frequency and poignancy. Anyone who knows anything about science fiction will know about [...]

A Thought About iTunes Ping

Recently, Apple announced the new version of iTunes – iTunes 10. It’s got a lot of upgrades from previous versions – a tweaked, cleaner UI, some nice small changes to layouts and organization – all of these things are good. Yes, even the new icon, which has gotten bashed a bit for being generic and [...]

Notes from #blogchat – Anonymity vs Identity for Corporate Bloggers

The major question of tonight’s #blogchat is one that keeps coming up all over the place – how should corporate bloggers identify themselves – by name, or should they remain anonymous? It’s a difficult question to answer. The web both embraces and despises anonymity in equal measure; identity and obfuscation both have their uses, if [...]

The Very Near Future

FictionPress WordPress Theme

In the very near future, this site will be changing. I’m about three-quarters of the way through developing a new wordpress theme for my site – it’s been a long process mostly because I haven’t been able to nail down what I need out of a theme’s functions. I’ve been wanting to do more than [...]

How To Break a Social Network

I’ve had to reconsider how I use social networks lately, because I think some of the people who are connecting with me are doing it wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I love making connections. I’ve met some very interesting people mostly through Twitter and blogs. In some instances, this is clearly fanboy level connection – [...]

Children's Games and Social Media

I was always crap at Simon Says. I was the kid who could only ever think of three things to have people do – stand up, sit down, run in place – and I’ve learned to mark this down to both an inability to develop internal go-to lists, and a dislike of having to issue [...]

Personality Thieves – The War for the Identities of the Internet

Robert Scoble posted an interesting discussion topic on his Facebook wall, asking the deceptively simple question: Who will win the Identity war in 2010? The question was asked with specificity towards tech platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Google and so on, but it’s an important question to ask of ourselves: to whom are we giving the [...]

Do We Need Networks for Everything?

I’m not asking a question about speed here; I worry that with the profligate new networks like Twitter (and its environs in the form of apps, API [ab]users and tools), LiveFyre (with its massive potential for both quality content and for trolling), and FourSquare and Gowalla along with other location-based get-off-the-computer social networks… I worry [...]