Marketing and Strategy Consulting
It’s really nice to see traditional rivals like Apple and Microsoft working together on something as important as accessibility. Hopefully this partnership is fruitful and the two companies (along with other tech industry leaders) continue to work to make computers and technology more accessible for those with different kinds of impairments.
— Read on www.engadget.com/2018/05/31/microsoft-apple-usb-if-accessibility-braille-display-standard/
This is going to bite a number of nonprofit, church, and community org sites hard when Google’s Chrome browser switches how it defines http sites as insecure…
Plus, in July 2018 in Chrome version 68, Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as “not secure.”
Source: Google’s Chrome browser to drop secure label for all HTTPS sites – Search Engine Land
🤯
This is beautiful. Why didn’t I know this already?
Fingerprints are formed by friction from touching the walls of our mother’s womb. Sometimes they are called “chanced impressions.” By Week 19, about four months before we are issued into the world, they are set. Gorillas, chimpanzees, and koalas also possess exclusive prints.
— Read on www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/15/the-surprising-history-and-future-of-fingerprints/
It’s more the fetus touching the amniotic sac combined with genetics, but it’s still a striking thought. Here’s a helpful video I found on the topic.
In a letter dated May 10, 2018 to Baker, church leaders say the congregation voted 131 to 40 to take down the work because community members view it as “Catholic in nature.” “We understand that this is not a Catholic icon, however, people perceive it in these terms,” the letter said, “As a result, it is bringing into question the theology and core values of Red Bank Baptist Church.”
Poor guy…
A man managed to escape the first eruptive fury of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., only to be crushed beneath a block of stone hurled by an explosive volcanic cloud, new excavations at the site suggest.
— Read on www.cnn.com/2018/05/29/health/pompeii-victim-crushed-rock-eruption-intl-trnd/index.html
Lots of good updates today for your iPhone and iPad, but Messages in iCloud is definitely something I’ve been looking forward to since it was announced last year. Better late than never.
Messages in iCloud is also now available as part of iOS 11.4. This feature lets you keep messages across devices in sync sort of like modern email. If you delete a message on one device, it will go away on all your devices. And if you set up a new device from scratch, your messages will appear without needing to do a full restore from an iCloud backup.
— Read on 9to5mac.com/2018/05/29/ios-11-4-airplay-2-homepod-stereo-messages-icloud/
I often shock potential small business or nonprofit clients by knowing their home address or cell phone number during our first or second call. It’s easy if they have already purchased a domain. I don’t do it as a scare tactic, but as an educational moment about the need to plan ahead and think through security issues.
By the time someone or a business or group has come to me with an idea for a new website or marketing strategy needs, they’ve purchased or at least thought about a domain name. There are copious services out there that will sell you a domain for a range of prices. GoDaddy is perhaps the most popular due to its marketing over the years. Unfortunately, GoDaddy has a reputation in the tech world of being the Monarch of UpSells. You can go there to buy a domain but you have to wade through the other options of website hosting, email addresses, security services, and a fee to protect your domain name privacy.
That last one is something that has irked me for a while about GoDaddy and similar domain name sellers (including Google) that don’t offer free domain privacy and private registration. Again, many of my clients are shocked when they find out their home addresses are now public records tied to their great idea for a domain or their business’ domain.
Before private individuals started buying domains and GoDaddy / Squarespace / Wix / Weebly (all who will sell you a domain) started marketing how “easy” it is to build a website, it made sense that domain information would and should be public. Most domains were bought by agencies or companies tied to specific interests. However, that has all changed and domains should include domain privacy when purchased in 2018.
People are more and more becoming interested in privacy and security matters, and this only makes sense for everyone. Stop upselling it.
Good move from Namecheap.
When you register a domain, ICANN requires registrars to provide them with your contact information (such as name, email, address, and phone number). This is then added to the Whois database. This database lists the owners of every domain name online, and it can be searched by anyone on the Internet.
You have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and KEEP THEIR IDIOT MOUTHS SHUT about it, because it is much more important to sound intelligent when talking to your friends.This post was STUPID.
Source: Roko’s Basilisk: The most terrifying thought experiment of all time.
I’ve owned a couple of Apple Watches in the past and always appreciated the design and constant alerts. But after a while, I would look at the Watch on my bedside charger in the morning and think “Do I need to wear you today? Nah.”
So, I’ve been skeptical about the Apple Watch and thought of it as little more than a constant buzzer to keep you tuned in to the latest Trump tweets or emails from Staples. But all that changed recently.
I’m turning 40 this year, and I realize it’s cliche and pretentious to write such things on the internet being a privileged white male who has a relatively comfortable life… but, I wanted to hit 40 in stride and in good shape rather than having a George W. Bush hangover-inspired epiphany after an all-nighter. As a result, I’ve dabbled in diets and moderate exercise and even keeping of track of my steps with Fitbits and an Aria Wifi scale and using MyFitnessPal on my phone(s) over the last year or so. None of those stuck. I’m fickle and it takes a lot for anyone or anything to make their way into my life as a steady constant.
I picked up an Apple Watch Series 3 back in March on a whim (don’t @ me… I acknowledge my privilege as I’ve said and these things are tools I use in my career) not thinking much would come of it. However, Merianna had been saying good things about hers and I was intrigued by the cellular communication since it meant I could take calls, listen to music (with AirPods), and have a number of functionalities without having to carry my phone everywhere. Little did I know it would be those damned rings, not the cell connection, that would win me over.
About a month ago, I really started taking Apple’s Activity app on the Watch and iPhone seriously. I looked at the calendar and realized I only had a few months left to go in my 30’s and I needed to make the most of them. It started innocently enough with occasional jogs around the living room at night to close the Exercise Ring or parking at the far end of the lot on yet another trip to the grocery store or hardware store to get more action on my Move Ring. Then I realized the Stand Ring was actually helping me be more productive as I tend to go down deep rabbit holes with a client site or marketing strategy and I can completely overspend my time budget without noticing it. The Stand Ring has become a sort of egg-timer of “getting things done” as silly as that may sound. Little by little, the rings have crept into the Congress of voices that fill my head and speak very loudly and authoritatively throughout the day and drown out the “but I don’t wanna go for a jog or do another P90x workout!” detractors.
It’s really been something of a revolution in my head.
I’ve always been a sporadic eater and frequently skip breakfast. Merianna has been an amazing partner with her choice of meals and prep work to keep me honest with my food and drink as well as putting up with my late night exercise sessions (potty training a 2.5-year-old and running your own company will severely limit your time to work out during the day, I’ve found but I’m working on that as well). My next goal is to turn those late night sessions into early morning ones.
I would go into a deep dive of which apps I use, but I’ve included a screenshot here at the top of the article and Frederico Viticci has done a much better job outlining his similar experience than I ever could. You should go read this in all of its entirety:
I suppose it’s only natural that a renewed commitment to getting back in shape eventually led me to completely reevaluate the role of the Apple Watch in my life. After just a few months of daily commitment, I’m now at the point where I get irritated if I don’t dedicate at least 30 minutes of my morning to working out. I’m constantly keeping an eye on my rings to make sure I hit all three goals every day, and I’m always thinking of new ways to push for harder workouts and mix them up with different exercises.
Source: Second Life: Rethinking Myself Through Exercise, Mindfulness, and Gratitude – MacStories
I’ll report back in a few months to see how things have progressed. I’m down 10 lbs within a month already just by a few lifestyle changes. I know that pace won’t continue, but my body is giving me positive feedback already with my endurance and mind/body relationship.
These agricultural feats managed to extend the life of the Egyptian empire about half a century longer than it might otherwise have lasted, according to the archaeologists. The lesson for our own civilization — which is likely to face increasingly severe droughts as humans change the climate far faster than nature has ever done — is to plan ahead, Dr. Finkelstein said.
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/climate/egypt-climate-drought.html
A majority of S.C. Republicans — 52 percent — said Trump was “godly.”
— Read on www.thestate.com/news/politics-government/article208990104.html
What a time to be alive.
It is unconstitutional for public officials, including the president, to block Twitter followers who criticize them, a court ruled today in a legal dispute over President Trump’s account.
— Read on www.theverge.com/2018/5/23/17385298/trump-blocking-twitter-unconstitutional-court-ruling
I’ve spoken at numerous events and conferences on the topic of web hosting and security and I’ve been quoted in the New York Times about that same topic over the years. Website security is something near and dear to my heart and I made sure to bake that into the very essence of every website build I’ve done since 2004 and since the founding of Harrelson Agency back in 2012.
The last few years have presented incredible challenges for website hosting companies and developers (and those that care about online security). Just think… applications like Bleachbit and terms like “private email servers” and “DNS hacks” and “SSL” have gone completely mainstream due to the 2016 Presidential election here in the US and high profile hacking of celebrities’ personal iCloud accounts. Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s oversight of American citizens’ online privacy as well as the ongoing drumbeat of news regarding the manipulation of Facebook and Google to sway news consumption around the globe has put online security in the crosshairs of attention.
I didn’t realize just how much Harrelson Agency would grow into a website host when we first fired up the servers six years ago. But over the years, our insistence on ethical website hosting as well as transparent and ultra-secure hosting have become one of our selling points with clients. It’s why we get so many nonprofits and churches and political groups coming to us for both hosting and consulting as well as website design work. We sweat the small details and it’s fun to work with a team that gives a damn about protecting our customers and clients. Seriously, I never thought website hosting would be something that would be a big chunk of our revenue but it’s becoming more and more a larger piece of the pie as groups, companies, politicians, and religious organizations realize the need for quality over something cheap like … well, those “start a free website today!” ads you see during the Super Bowl.
So, I’m proud to announce that we’re now a “Certified Partner” with Cloudflare. I personally trust and use Cloudflare on all of my sites (this one included) as well as our home’s DNS. It’s a fantastic service and I couldn’t be more proud to work with such a great group of people who are as passionate as I am about online security. Plus, their solutions are fast.
Here’s the email I’m sending out to our clients tomorrow in our newsletter with some words from the Cloudflare team:
“Harrelson Agency is excited to announce our partnership with Cloudflare, the website performance and security company.
Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) that increases the performance and security of every website on its network, protecting from a broad range of threats and attacks. Over 7,000,000 websites run on the Cloudflare network—ranging from individual blogs to e-commerce sites to the websites of Fortune 500 companies to national governments. Cloudflare powers almost a trillion monthly page views—more than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga, AOL, Apple, Bing, eBay, PayPal and Instagram combined—and over 25% of the Internet’s population regularly passes through our network.
Cloudflare increases the speed and security of your website and delivers faster web performance
Cloudflare was designed to take a hosting platform like Harrelson Agency’s and make it more fast, secure, and reliable.
Cloudflare runs 151 data centers strategically located around the world. When you sign up for Cloudflare, we begin routing traffic to the nearest data center.
As your traffic passes through the data centers, we intelligently determine what parts of your website are static versus dynamic. The static portions are cached on our servers for a short period of time, typically less than 2 hours before we check to see if they’ve been updated. By automatically moving the static parts of your site closer to your visitors, the overall performance of your site improves significantly.
Cloudflare’s intelligent caching system also means you save bandwidth, which means saving money and decreases the load on your servers, which means your web application will run faster and more efficiently than ever. On average, Cloudflare customers see a 60% decrease in bandwidth usage and a 65% in total requests to their servers. The overall effect is that Cloudflare will typically cut the load time for pages on your site by 50% which means higher engagement and happier visitors.
Broad web security
At the beginning of 2016, Cloudflare experienced and mitigated against some of the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks ever seen. As attacks like these increase, Cloudflare is stepping up to protect websites.
Cloudflare’s security protections offer a broad range of protections against attacks such as DDoS, hacking or spam submitted to a blog or comment form. What is powerful about our approach is that the system gets smarter the more sites that are part of the Cloudflare community. We analyze the traffic patterns of hundreds of millions of visitors in real time and adapt the security systems to ensure good traffic gets through and bad traffic is stopped.
In time, our goal is nothing short of making attacks against websites a relic of history. And, given our scale and the billions of different attacks we see and adapt to every year, we’re well on our way to achieving that for sites on the Cloudflare network.
We’re proud that every day more than a thousand new sites, including some of the largest on the web, join the Cloudflare community. If you’re looking for a faster, safer website, you’ve got a good start with Harrelson Agency.”
Wow, this is quite something and a good example of why you should always run your own blog instead of relying on a blog network. Same with podcasting.
What a strange turn of events. Patheos was at the center of the Mars Hill Church and Gospel for Asia stories and now they host Mark Driscoll and K.P. Yohannan. All of the those Patheos links about Mars Hill and GFA are now erased. The content is here and archived elsewhere but admittedly, it will be harder to find.
— Read on www.wthrockmorton.com/2018/05/22/the-blog-at-patheos-is-410-gone/
There’s some really helpful advice here for small businesses, nonprofits, and / or churches looking to get a start on SEO basics. You can take a course on Lynda.com or watch some YouTube videos to learn more about what SEO can mean for your group, but the fundamentals here are pretty spot on:
SEO isn’t just for big business. As a small company or a local business, there is actually a lot you can do yourself to get good results from search. This ultimate guide for local and small business SEO will help you get the most out of search by finding your niche, optimizing your pages and using social media.
I often get the question from clients of why I mostly recommend having your own website on WordPress or a self-hosted platform in the age of Facebook. As companies who built their businesses and traffic flow on the back of Facebook over the years have found out, that can be a very precarious decision. Audience and perceived impact are good, but long-term value is much better. Don’t cheap out and build your house on someone else’s property.
For instance, Medium is an interesting platform for bloggers and writers. We see everyone from politicians to celebrities to tech pundits using it as the place of record for their writings. While there is an audience there, or on Facebook, we’re already seeing Medium making changes to the way it handles its publishers in an attempt to figure out monetization (something which its founder Ev Williams knows about since he also founded Blogger and then went on to co-start Twitter… both of which faced their own monetization issues). This is going to be a constant and something you or your business or your non-profit should take notice of before you let your roots get too deep in a particular platform can change its EULA at any time.
Owen Williams writes the excellent Charged newsletter (you should subscribe) and makes this point about Medium, Facebook, and web presence in general that I highly agree with:
All of this is to say: Medium is great, but be wary! Owning your own platform is important, and valuable, even at this point in the internet’s maturity cycle. It’s a bit more work, but you are no longer at the mercy of the platform, a lesson we can learn from Facebook all too easily.
Source: #167: Medium.com feels like it’s forever. What if it isn’t?
I don’t know… this feels a little like Henry Ford’s “if I had asked what people wanted, they would have said a faster horse” approach to utilizing tech to save humans time…
Like Google, we envision a future that’s based on collaboration between humans and machines. Where we seem to differ is that we believe a human handoff is essential when initiating a conversation between an AI assistant and a human. This human acknowledgement of AI preserves the human to human relationships and makes resuming the non transactional parts of the conversation much more natural. With their policy reversal, it sounds like Google has realized that you need to at least let people know they’re interacting with AI.
Fun post that highlights many of the concerns I hear from clients and friends when I encourage them to blog.
Blogging and newsletters are still incredibly impactful for businesses, churches, nonprofits… or just sharing what’s on your mind.
Get out there. Be yourself. It’ll be ok.
You think that you are a terrible writer. No one wants to read your blogs, and if you look at the blog posts you wrote a few months ago, you cringe. You have convinced yourself you absolutely cannot write. So put yourself (and all your readers, they’ll thank you) out of their misery. Just quit.
Source: Caroline’s Corner: Why you should quit your blog now • Yoast
When scientists search for meaning in quantum physics, they may be straying into a no-man’s-land between philosophy and religion. But they can’t help themselves. They’re only human. “If you were to watch me by day, you would see me sitting at my desk solving Schrödinger’s equation…exactly like my colleagues,” says Sir Anthony Leggett, a Nobel Prize winner and pioneer in superfluidity. “But occasionally at night, when the full moon is bright, I do what in the physics community is the intellectual equivalent of turning into a werewolf: I question whether quantum mechanics is the complete and ultimate truth about the physical universe.”
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/books/review/adam-becker-what-is-real.html
Blogging is still a great way to get the word out about your business, church, nonprofit, cause, or interests. It’s a slow grind in the sense that it can take many months of consistency to build up an audience and see any sort of response that might make you feel like the endeavor is “worth it.” However, it is worth it.
Whatever your professional capacity may be, you should spend time blogging rather than just posting on social media if you’re looking to reach out…
Writing blog posts can be great fun. But for some of you, blogging can be quite a challenge as well. What should you write about? What do you do if you’re out of inspiration? How do you get engagement on your blog posts? And how do you market and monetize your blog? This ultimate guide covers everything you need to know about blogging.
The theological lens through which we might view these questions is incarnation. In an age of increased engagement with disembodied digital assistants, what might it mean for the church to counterweight this with insisting on and facilitating in-person fellowship? In an era of disembodied conversation, my prayer is that the church might be a contrast society to model a more excellent way of fully-embodied community and in-person presence.
Source: Thanks for your help, Siri. But what about that human connection? – Baptist News Global
I fundamentally disagree with John Chandler here regarding the notion that smart assistants (such as Siri or Alexa or Google Assistant or Cortana or Bixby or M or… well, there are many more) lead to more antisocial behavior or the dangers of people not interacting with other people.
Chandler also invokes the (in)famous Nicholas Carr article Is Google Making Us Stupid? from 2008. One of my favorite rebukes to that article comes from a review of Carr’s subsequent book on the topic, The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read, and Remember:
Perhaps what he needs are better strategies of self-control. Has he considered disconnecting his modem and Fedexing it to himself overnight, as some digital addicts say they have done? After all, as Steven Pinker noted a few months ago in the New York Times, ‘distraction is not a new phenomenon.’ Pinker scorns the notion that digital technologies pose a hazard to our intelligence or wellbeing. Aren’t the sciences doing well in the digital age, he asks? Aren’t philosophy, history and cultural criticism flourishing too? There is a reason the new media have caught on, Pinker observes: ‘Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not.’ Without the internet, how can we possibly keep up with humanity’s ballooning intellectual output?
Socrates feared the same fears of antisocial behavior and intellectual laziness that we project onto television, music, and now the internet in regards to books and admonished Plato to stop writing them.
Smart assistants such as Siri or Alexa do pose a whole new world of possibilities for developers and companies and groups to interact with the connected world. In just a few short years, many of us (our household included) now use these assistants to do everything from schedule events on our cloud-based calendars to turn the lights off before bed. I also stream music, play audio books, ask questions, and crack riddles with Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant on a daily basis.
While we fear the inevitability of a bleak future as depicted in the movie Her from 2013 in which human beings are completely subsumed into relationships and reality driven by their own personal digital assistants and rarely interact with others, I don’t think that’s the reality we’ll see. There’s a simple reason for that… antisocial behavior is a part of our own internal psychologies and neuropathies. Projecting these fears onto tools such as Siri is misplaced. I’d argue that positioning the church to be anti-tool to encourage incarnational relationships is misplaced as well.
This isn’t the same as arguing that “Guns don’t kill people; People kill people” although that’s an easy leap to make. But no, what I’m arguing here has to do with coming to terms with the ongoing revelation we are making and receiving about the very nature of human thought and how our brain and nervous systems work in tandem with our concept of consciousness. Understanding that newspapers, books, radio, TV, internet, and now Siri don’t make us any more or less lazy or antisocial is an important step in understanding that the core issue of incarnation relies on relationality between humans and the universe.
I do agree with Chandler that the church should be anti-cultural in the sense that it provides a way for exploration into the concept of incarnation. But positing that experience as anti-tool or anti-specific-technology seems to undercut the very notion of the incarnation’s theological and ongoing event in history (call that the kerygma or the Christ event or God Consciousness etc).
Yes, technology can be addictive or exacerbate issues. But let’s address the fundamental issues of culture and personal psychologies that the church is led to do with a healthy and holy notion of inter-personal and inner-personal relationships.
In fact, research shows that there isn’t a high correlation between reading time and social sharing.
As you can see from the graph, the high read time doesn’t translate to shares. Just because someone clicked a share button, it doesn’t mean that they were engaged with the content.
Source: How to Effectively Manage Engagement for Stronger Influence
Not April 1…
Tide-to-Go will partner with Google Chrome to provide a downloadable extension that will allow users to remove negative content from their social media newsfeed – helping to make more than just clothes a little bit brighter.
Here’s a free and good course on SEO basics. Whether you’re a business, church or nonprofit, you should have some basic understandings of what SEO means to your website and how just a few tweaks can really make a big difference.
I went through most of the course and there’s some good info here, especially for beginners:
– Get quick wins to make your site rank higher in Google, Bing or Yahoo
– Have a solid basic understanding of search engine optimization and how search engines work
— Read on yoast.com/academy/course/free-seo-course-seo-for-beginners/
“Nearly all marketers (83%+) who’ve been employing social media marketing for 1 year or longer report it generates exposure for their businesses.”
I’m skeptical of these sorts of reports generally, but SME does a good job of presenting digestible data. There are certainly some good takeaways here for businesses of all sizes, nonprofits, and churches looking to do more with their social media profiles.
The PDF download is free.
In our tenth-annual social media study, more than 5,700 marketers reveal where they’ll focus their social media efforts.
Source: 2018 Social Media Marketing Industry Report : Social Media Examiner
The broader question is the tradeoff between privacy and advertising. While a tempting noun, most people don’t really *want* privacy, let alone understand what that means. It’s definitely not an unattainable goal, but it does require work… which is something many of our fellow citizens are reluctant to pursue when it comes to such technological conditions.
Third, Google and Facebook’s advertising advantage, already massive, is going to become overwhelming. Both companies generate the majority of their user data on their own platforms, which is to say their data collection and advertising business are integrated. Most of their competitors for digital advertising, on the other hand, are modular: some companies collect data, and other collect ads; such a model, in a society demanding ever more privacy, will be increasingly untenable.
Source: Open, Closed, and Privacy – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Good read:
So many of us who create technology, or who love the ways it empowers us and improves our lives, are struggling with the many negative effects that some of these same technologies are having on society. But perhaps if we start from a set of common principles that help us understand how tech truly works, we can start to tackle technology’s biggest problems.
CGP Grey has produced a thought-provoking adaptation of Nick Bostrom’s 2005 paper (available here Journal of Medical Ethics, 2005, Vol. 31, No. 5, pp 273-277). There are themes and ideas presented here that are deeper than they first appear, especially in regards to concepts such as ethics and mortality.
Like all artificial intelligence, the software will improve over time, as it digests more text. Even more exciting, the general strategy of In Codice Ratio—jigsaw segmentation, plus crowdsourced training of the software—could easily be adapted to read texts in other languages. This could potentially do for handwritten documents what Google Books did for printed matter: open up letters, journals, diaries, and other papers to researchers around the world, making it far easier to both read these documents and search for relevant material.