Internet Archives - Page 9 of 17

A Chanukah Lesson In Standing Up To Bullies

December 20, 2011 TechyDad Bullies, Internet

Everyone gather round. It’s story time. Today, we’re going to hear the story of the Maccabees. You see, a long time ago, the Syrians ruled the land of Israel. The Jews were allowed to go about their business until Antiochus Epiphany came to power. Antiochus decided that the Jews should all worship the way *HE* told them to worship. Or else.

Some of the Jews went along with the order. They dropped their old religion and began worshiping Zeus because it was easier than standing up to the king (and his army). The Maccabees, though, refused to change their beliefs simply because someone threatened them. They believed that they had the right to worship as they saw fit and they were willing to fight for that right.

And fight they did. The Maccabees gathered a group of Jews who believed similarly. They were outnumbered and outgunned (in a manner of speaking – guns weren’t used back then), but they had the advantages of surprise and knowledge of the terrain. They used these to drive the Syrian army away and reclaim their religious freedom.

This story is chock full of lessons. Usually, people take the obvious moral of religious freedom from it. The Syrian king was wrong to impose his religious beliefs on others. People should be able to worship whatever god they want (or no god at all) however they choose. Recent events, though, have led me to take a slightly different lesson from the story: Don’t back down to bullies.

Antiochus was a bully, albeit one with an army at his disposal. He wanted to set the rules for others to follow and, if they didn’t follow it, he demanded they be punished. He couldn’t stand to see people doing things that he personally didn’t approve.

Many of the Jews, when faced with the bully, backed down. They gave in and just did what the bully told them to do. This is the quick and easy path. (Sorry, the geek in me couldn’t help quoting Yoda.) The Maccabees didn’t give in, though. They stood up to the bully. They refused to let the bully silence them or dictate the terms of their lives.

As a victim of bullying growing up, I promised myself that I would never let myself be silenced by bullies again. Once I became a father, I knew that I wanted to teach my sons not to back down to bullies also. This doesn’t need to mean physical violence, but it also doesn’t mean you should cower in fear.

Recently, I found myself sitting in silence. A bully that had targeted me in the past had turned her attention to others and I didn’t want to speak up lest she turn her eye back to me. I wasn’t cowering in fear, as this particular bully has no power over me. Still, I just didn’t want to have to deal with her antics again . Then it struck me: Would the Maccabees have done this? More importantly, do I want to teach my sons to keep quiet when someone is bullying someone else? The answer to both is a resounding NO!

Over the past 18 months (off and on), I’ve been the target of a bully. I won’t go into her history too much. You can read about that elsewhere. Instead, I want to talk about her current activities. She’s begun targeting bloggers, specifically review bloggers as well as blogger networks like MomCentral, MomSelect, Business2Blogger, and MyBlogSpark. She’ll claim that they are fakes, will demand they take down their blogs, and will try reporting them to companies. Amazingly, some companies are listening to her!

In this woman’s mind, all of these blogs and networks are run by a group of 4 or 5 people to steal products. Her evidence? She was told this by God. Yes, she is a self-proclaimed prophet of God.

You can read more about her here:

http://blogs.babble.com/momcrunch/2011/12/19/bloggers-targeted-by-woman-claiming-gift-of-prophecy/

http://mombloghate.com/9/bully-profile-dawn-gordon/

As I said before, I’m through staying silent. If you’ve been threatened, please speak up. If you haven’t been threatened (yet), please send this information to every blogger you know. Spread the word. Let’s send the message that we bloggers don’t take kindly to bullies and will protect our fellow bloggers if threatened.

My No-Longer Super Secret Twitter Application: FollowerHQ

November 1, 2011 TechyDad FollowerHQ, Internet, Social Media, Twitter, Web Development

For quite awhile, I’ve teased on Twitter that I was working on a big Twitter application. I didn’t reveal the name except to a select group of beta testers. Well, today that “select group” is widening. Today, FollowerHQ launches.

First, some history. As I gained followers on Twitter, I would get e-mails that Twitter would send to me letting me know about my new follows. Some people decide to automatically follow back, but I’m not of the opinion that this is useful. I tend to be more selective in who’s tweets appear in my timeline. So I would open up each e-mail, open up the link to the person’s profile page, examine the last few tweets as well as the person’s information, decide whether or not to follow the person, and then move on to the next person. This was fine when I’d get 20 new followers in a week.

Unfortunately for this process, though, I began getting more and more people following me. It became more and more of a pain to manage these new followers and I fell further and further behind. Of course, the more people I needed to go through, the less I wanted to spend the time pouring through page after page. I wondered if there was an easier way. Being a programmer, I decided to build an easier way.

Thus, FollowerHQ was born.

What FollowerHQ Does:

FollowerHQ will, after you authorize it, check who is following you. It will compare this list to the people you are following. You will then see 4 tabs: You Aren’t Following Back, Not Following You Back, Dropped Friends, and Ignored. There is also a fifth tab called Export.

You Aren’t Following Back – These are people who follow you, but you aren’t following back. You can choose to follow these users or ignore them on a case-by-case basis.
Not Following You Back – These are people you follow, but who don’t follow you back. You can keep following them or stop following them.
Dropped Friends – I’ve seen this happen quite a few times. Someone realizes that they aren’t following someone anymore. They didn’t unfollow the person. It just happened. FollowerHQ will compare your following list against the list of people you were following the last time you logged in. Any dropped follows will be listed here. These might be people you decided to stop following or they might be mistaken drops. You can re-follow these people or continue to not follow them.
Ignored – These are people from the first queue who you’ve chosen to ignore. You can stop ignoring them or just leave them in the listing.
Export – I’m a big fan of keeping your data yours so this tab lets you export your user lists to import into your favorite spreadsheet program.

In each tab (except for Export), you can search and sort through the listings. You can even take actions on multiple users at once. For example, if you spot a bunch of spam bots following you, simply check them all and click the “Ignore Checked” button. They will all be moved to the Ignore queue.

FollowerHQ Pricing

For now, FollowerHQ will be free. I’m not going to rule out setting up some pricing scheme in the future. Should FollowerHQ become popular and/or require more time and effort to maintain, I would need to offset the time/money spent on it, of course. (Let’s face it, I’m *hoping* this becomes popular.) However, even if there is some sort of payment plan in the future, I’ll always keep a free version around.

Enough talking, though. It’s time for everyone to go play with FollowerHQ. In case you haven’t already guessed, you can find it here: http://www.FollowerHQ.com/. I’ve also registered the @FollowerHQ Twitter account.

Enjoy and let me know what you think of it in the comments below!

NOTE: I also want to thank my beta testers for all of their work finding bugs, suggesting new features and putting the application through its paces: Alena29, blogdangerously, CutestKidEver, dadofdivas, DadStreet, geekbabe, Kissyfur19, LindaCarmical, SandraFoyt, simplycathi, slpowell, and TheAngelForever.

Yom Kippur and PR Apologies

October 10, 2011 TechyDad Blogging, Holidays, Internet, Judaism, Twitter

On Thursday, I wanted to go to sleep early. I was tired and NEEDED my sleep. But I didn’t. I was too enthralled with watching the reactions from the fallout between Brand Link Communications and TheBloggess.

In case you are the single person online who hasn’t heard about it yet, TheBloggess was pitched by PR firm Brand Link Communications to run a piece about one of the Kardashians in pantyhose. Now, TheBloggess’ blog is many things, but it is not about celebrities and what they wear. This wasn’t the first bad pitch she’s gotten. In fact, she gets so many that she has a dedicated page to send them to.

Normally, PR firms will either not contact her back or will apologize and/or remove her from their lists. This time, however, they replied in a bit of a snippy manner. At this point, I’m sure TheBloggess would have just shrugged and gone on with her life. She would have, that is, had Jose from Brand Link not hit reply all and used quite a colorful phrase to describe her. From this point on, the situation spiraled out of control and not in a positive way for Brand Link Communications.

What does this have to do with Yom Kippur? On this Jewish holiday, we realize that we’re going to be judged for the things we’ve done in the past year. To make amends, we traditionally apologize to people we’ve wronged. An apology doesn’t always make everything better, but it can go a long way towards repairing all sorts of relationships. However, these apologies need to be sincere. Just saying “I’m sorry, but I’ll do it again” or “I’m sorry if you were offended” isn’t enough.

When Jose realized his mistake, his response should have been an unequivocal apology. Something along the lines of: “I’m sorry. I messed up both in my language and in the match between the original pitch and your blog’s content. I’ll look into ways to better target pitches so that you receive pitches that your readers will actually find useful.” This would have helped smooth things over and we would likely have never heard about the interaction (a good thing in hindsight).

Instead, Jose sent an “I’m sorry but…” reply. He even went so far as to blame TheBloggess for starting the mess and to tell her that she should be thankful that they send content her way. As if, without PR firms, TheBloggess would be a nobody with nothing to write about.

TheBloggess replied with soon-to-be-immortal (and hopefully emblazoned on a shirt) words: “Please stand by for a demonstration of relevancy.”

What happened next was quite a demonstration. TheBloggess blogged about the situation and many of her 160,000 followers on Twitter started tweeting about it. The story was picked up on by none other than Wil Wheaton (1.8 million followers) and Neil Gaiman (1.6 million followers), and Perez Hilton (3.9 million followers). Obviously, there’s likely some overlap in followers, but needless to say that this story had millions of people worldwide viewing it. It was a very public affair and very bad for Brand Link.

At one point, Jose (who has since deleted his Twitter account), tried defending his actions as trying to defend Wil Wheaton. Then he claimed his account was hacked and finally, he mentioned that he had apologized to TheBloggess.

Could this have been avoided? I was thinking about this during Yom Kippur and realized there were many times that Brand Link could have apologized and made it all go away. After the original pitch and TheBloggess’ response, they could have apologized. (And not had someone commit Reply-All-icide.) After the Reply All, Jose could have been proactive, realized what he did and quickly followed it up with an apology (and not just a “I’m sorry if you were offended, but…”).

Once TheBloggess posted her blog post, however, the quiet person-to-person apologies needed to be big public apologies. At that point, they didn’t need to satiate one angry Bloggess, but a few thousand (if not hundred thousand or million) folks. There are many lessons to be learned from what happened between TheBloggess and Brand Link Communications, one of the big ones is how *not* to apologize.

Animation Lesson

October 4, 2011 TechyDad Comics, Internet

Few people know that, at one time, I wanted to be a cartoonist. I even had a highly successful comic strip that I drew during college. If you define “highly successful” to be “one of my friends liked it” and if you define “drew” as “It was about planets because I could draw circles and that was about it.” Another career option cruelly cut short due to small details like lack of talent.

Fast forward to the present day. I’m a big fan of web comics and love seeing the drawing talent that people possess. One of the people I’ve most recently found, is JC of TheAnimatedWoman.com. Head on over and see some of the wonderful posts and drawings that she’s done. On second thought, read the rest of this post first and then go there. I guarantee that, once you’ve browsed to her site, you’ll spend hours laughing at her wonderful posts and drawings.

A few months back, she posted a “how to draw” that involved lines. Then, on Sunday, she followed this up with another one-liner post. Inspiration struck. So here is my attempt to follow her instructions. Sure, my lack of skill might have gotten in the way a bit, but I couldn’t at least give it a try.

First, I started out with some lines.