With every click online, we’re giving a piece of ourselves away. This sentence just cost me a little chunk of my humanity. The next few will bleed me further. It is happening to you too. Soon we’ll only be measured by our digital profiles, our search records baking in un-erasable cookies forever. Google will own [...]
Jeff Johnson sent me a website I have not seen before. He is like a Google bot when it comes to rooting around the Web. It was featured on Holy Kow, Guy Kawasaki’s content aggregation site. The site purports to analyze your writing style and tell you what author you write like. It is exploding [...]
Harvard’s Institute of Politics has released a poll indicating that young people are worried about the future – and not so positive about their chances in it. The pessimism ranges from financial concerns to doubts about their ability to afford health care.
We’ve all done it. Filled the little square on Facebook with vacuous gibberish, then hit “comment.” I won’t use any examples here, go to your Facebook page and you will see for yourself. No shortage of mindless ramblings that serve the basic intent of saying, “Hey, I’m alive. I made it through this crummy day. [...]
Sail Cat Road, the sequel to No Good End, continues below. It is being posted tweet-by-tweet daily on Twitter (http://twitter.com/ttaylordude). I will post each chapter here (in chronological order). Thank you for your time.
A breeze raked a fallen pine fan across the roof. In the distance, beef cooked on a grill, the aroma following the [...]
Is it just me, but on Facebook, there seems to be a lot of fan pages, but not a lot of active fans? Your friends are pretty engaged. They post stuff and make comments and toss pics up. But on fan pages, there seems to be less engagement. Perhaps it is because everyone wants to [...]
Chapter 16
Popping sounds came from relaxing metal under the pecan tree. Jimmy and Gus found no more drivers licenses. Gasoline soaked the earth.
“You’ll want to walk back to the truck,” said Jimmy. “I’m going to roast some pecans.”
Gus walked back to the truck knowing what he meant. Jimmy did not smoke, but he always carried matches [...]
Blogs are usually short, pithy, quickly-read, Seth Godin-ish snippets of 400 words or less. If the blog goes longer than that, experts advise you to break up your verbiage with subheads or lists. The things I mostly write here would often be considered short stories instead of blogs. And while most of these stories are [...]
The Web is a churning ocean of endless information. That is hardly news. Insightful companies have posted some pretty telling numbers about what people think and what we’re doing about it. Edelman’s Trust Barometer alone is enough to make you wonder if your customers will be your customers tomorrow.
Twitter is not the salvation of your branding. There. I said it. Even though I spent a lot of time on Twitter in the last 3 months, writing a novel and a short story Twitter will not save your business from the lack of a story. But it can help you tell your story.
On June 19th, I started doing something crazy: writing a novel on Twitter. Not about Twitter, on it, line by line, chunk by chunk.
Watching people in Iran tweeting news out of their country when the press was shut out inspired me. So I just started writing a Southern crime story, not that those two are [...]
In a conversation with Geoff Stone the other day (we were trying to come up with names for a product and Geoff had launched a particularly funny one), a word wandered in from the cold and stuck in my head. I started laughing and said, “Hockulator.”
I have never really celebrated birthdays. Getting older seems like our job as humans, not something to celebrate. It is, at the very least, something unavoidable, so why celebrate it? I don’t.
When I signed up for Facebook, I never gave much thought to my birthday. I randomly tossed a date out and never thought about [...]
How many blogs do you read a day? A week? How about Twitter? YouTube? Facebook? Myspace? Skype? You catch that show on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, the game on ESPN? Jon Stewart, House, American Idol? Wait, sorry, I have to respond to this text; just a sec. My Social calendar is a wasteland of social media. [...]
You have heard this before. Newspapers are dying, if not dead. No one reads books anymore. The Internet is going to images and words are being left in the digidust. Ironically, the written word’s obit gets rewritten every day. The latest news concerns how Google’s image search will soon replace word search and eventually, we’ll [...]