Bringing Back Personal Blogging

Sam Harrelson on January 8, 2023

Anyone who has read my writings and ravings here since 2006 will know I feel this exact way.

Buy that domain name. Carve your space out on the web. Tell your stories, build your community, and talk to your people. It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t need to duplicate any space that already exists on the web — in fact, it shouldn’t. This is your creation. It’s your expression. It should reflect you.

Bring back personal blogging in 2023. We, as a web community, will be all that much better for it.

Source: Bring back personal blogging – The Verge

Good read.

I had something happen along these lines when I lost my Instagram and Facebook accounts after being compromised through a connected service with a bad password. There was no recompense or way to gain access to those networks that had been built up and maintained over years and years. Luckily, I had backups of the actual content, but all of those connections and gardens of interaction were immediately plowed up. I had been gardening on someone else’s land.

It’s yet another reason I’ve been focusing more on content and actual thoughts here and using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc, for more tertiary purposes. This domain and blog are my canonical place on the web.

Go and do likewise.

Planning Out Social Media in 2023

Sam Harrelson on December 30, 2022

I’m constantly on the fence about pre-planning or pre-scheduling too many marketing posts ahead of time on social media. It’s handy, for sure. However, given that events happen without warning, there are real risks that could make whatever you’re trying to do look incredibly out-of-touch.

However, there is a benefit to having a month (or week) long agenda of posts to help keep you or your team on track. Social media is a platform that often rewards spontaneity, and you should be building that into marketing efforts. But it would be best if you had a foundation on which to grow, and a good plan can get you there.

For example, I stumbled upon a free monthlong planner for social media posts in January 2023 from Plann. There is any number of these out there. Still, the benefit is that these calendars take away the guesswork and produce dozens of content pieces that can be used across social networks, promotional materials, videos, recaps, etc. 

So spend some time thinking and planning while allowing your marketing efforts to remain responsive and flexible in 2023!

Twitter Could Just Bring Back Track

Sam Harrelson on July 14, 2021

I’m not saying Track was the best thing that Twitter ever released, but it was probably the best thing Twitter ever encouraged early on with its open API (before the Dark Times when Twitter decided to pivot to an advertising company).

Say goodbye to Fleets, the row of fullscreen tweets at the top of the Twitter timeline that expire after 24 hours. The ephemeral tweet format is shutting down due to low usage after launching widely just eight months ago.

Source: Twitter is shutting down Fleets, its expiring tweets feature – The Verge

Facebook Advertisers Panicking over Apple Tracking Options

Sam Harrelson on July 14, 2021

Retargeting was fun while it lasted, right? … interesting time for online marketing.

Facebook advertisers, in particular, have noticed an impact in the last month. Media buyers who run Facebook ad campaigns on behalf of clients said Facebook is no longer able to reliably see how many sales its clients are making, so it’s harder to figure out which Facebook ads are working. Losing this data also impacts Facebook’s ability to show a business’s products to potential new customers. It also makes it more difficult to “re-target” people with ads that show users items they have looked at online, but may not have purchased.

Source: Facebook (FB) Advertisers Impacted By Apple (AAPL) Privacy iOS 14 Changes – Bloomberg

Trying Out Neeva

Sam Harrelson on April 29, 2021

“…advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”

– Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in a 1998 research paper while they were doctoral students at Stanford

I’ve been trying out the search engine service Neeva lately. You can read more about the founding of the company by ex-Googler Sridhar Ramaswamy here (it’s a fascinating story).

I come from the time when the web was still in its primordial stage. Thought technologies such as web browsers and search engines were still young and completely exhilarating. I paid for Netscape (and I was amazed when I got to college in 1996 and walked into the computer lab with 8 machines running Netscape, WordPerfect, Office, and the Corel suite). Browsers and search engines and minute-based access to the web were something you paid for (unless you stockpiled AOL disks like I did).

Neeva is definitely a different service. I’m still wrapping my head around it, but it feels like a good mix of “old school web” and what we’ll eventually get to once we exit this period of advertising-based “free” services that have been the predominate business model on the web for the last 15 years.

The search interface is clean and fast. There are no ad trackers. The company is looking to make money by offering subscriptions. That’s intriguing for me. I’ve never been a big fan of the saying “if you’re not paying for a service, you’re the product” and all, but it does ease my mind to exchange money for what I consider valuable services on the web (Pinboard for bookmarking comes to mind).

Google is such an intimate part of all of our lives, whether we care to admit it or not. Our memories, correspondence, social graphs, birthday reminders, calendars etc are all wrapped up in the service (at least… much more than that for “power users” like myself). But we need alternatives.

I’ll continue experimenting with Neeva to see if it’s one of the dandelions that pops up to spread seeds across the ecosystem of the web or if it’s just a one-season deal. But it “feels” like it has staying power. And for that, I’m excited. Will report back here about my usage as it accumulates in the coming weeks.

Listen to Your Spotify within Facebook

Sam Harrelson on April 26, 2021

I’m always annoyed when I open Waze on iOS or Android and there’s a persistent widget asking if I’d like to listen to Spotify within the app while navigating. I’ve never said yes.

Now that experience is coming to … Facebook.

In a way, this makes perfect sense for Facebook (and Spotify). Facebook is looking for more engrossing engagement from younger demographics but current efforts have proven unsuccessful. Having Spotify “built in” to Facebook presumably would encourage more of that while young people doom scroll to Post Malone or Ariana Grande.

This also makes sense for Spotify as it continues to position itself as the ever-present soundtrack of our lives with its own engrossing soundtracks and clever attraction-marketing that engenders constant interaction with the service (whether in a standalone app, website, desktop app, widget, or through other services).

While many of us may turn our nose up to this sort of thing, it will be very successful for both Facebook and Spotify (especially podcasts)… however, I just don’t think it’ll get the young people to spend more time on Facebook these days.

“Facebook announced last week an expanded partnership with streaming music service Spotify that would bring a new way to listen to music or podcasts directly within Facebook’s app, which it called Project Boombox. Today, the companies are rolling out this integration via a new “miniplayer” experience that will allow Facebook users to stream from Spotify through the Facebook app on iOS or Android. The feature will be available to both free Spotify users and Premium subscribers.”

Via TechCrunch

WordPress vs Wix

Sam Harrelson on April 19, 2021

Finally catching up on this (latest) dust-up between WordPress and Wix…

First, go get them, Matt. Good points here as always. As someone who buids websites for clients (especially our nonprofit, community group, and religious organization partners), it’s always frustrating when a group comes to us after trying to build their site on Wix and spending way too much money and time on that platform.

Second, it’s good to see these old-fashioned blogger battles again. Let’s make the blogosphere great again with drama and self-hosted call-outs.

Wix is a for-profit company with a valuation that peaked at around 20 billion dollars, and whose business model is getting customers to pay more and more every year and making it difficult to leave or get a refund. (Don’t take my word for it, look at their investor presentations.) They are so insecure that they are also the only website creator I’m aware of that doesn’t allow you to export your content, so they’re like a roach motel where you can check in but never check out. Once you buy into their proprietary stack you’re locked in, which even their support documentation admits:

Source: Matt Mullenweg – Unlucky in Cards

Signal’s Crypto Problem

Sam Harrelson on April 7, 2021

Similar thoughts on Signal’s cryptocurrency announcement yesterday to Diehl’s post here… (side note: I wish more people still used blogs as their social outlet for these types of thoughts):

Signal users are overwhelmingly tech savvy consumers and we’re not idiots. Do they think we don’t see through the thinly veiled pump and dump scheme that’s proposed? It’s an old scam with a new face.

Via Stephen Diehl – Et tu, Signal?

We Need Local Newspapers Again

Sam Harrelson on January 27, 2021

But Nextdoor has gradually evolved into something bigger and more consequential than just a digital bulletin board: In many communities, the platform has begun to step into roles once filled by America’s local newspapers. “Anecdotally, Nextdoor has gone from being kind of sub-Facebook to actually being the main platform you hear people discussing as a vector for local news and events and discussions,” says Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.

— Read on onezero.medium.com/nextdoor-is-quietly-replacing-the-small-town-paper-ca583962c15a

“Persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false…”

Sam Harrelson on January 1, 2021

Must read here. I won’t summarize the article as you need to read the entire piece for yourself, but the implications for things I care about very deeply (such as marketing, politics, technology, religion, and education) are serious.

Take some time and read:

Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.

Source: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds | The New Yorker