Tag: Internet

Cory Doctrow: You should be using an RSS reader

Carl Setzer
man standing inside library while reading book

I just got to reading Cory’s post from yesterday, Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader (16 Oct 2024). I appreciate being reminded of the existence of these tools. I used several over the years, culminating with Google Reader (RIP). After Google killed this app, RSS readers just fell by the wayside.

This article prompted me to Google RSS readers. The first article was the Verge’s “Top 5 RSS Readers“. And the first on that list is Feedly. Well, I remember Feedly, as I set up an account ages ago…and then forgot about it. But I was able to log in and off I went. I have some curating to do, but it’s not really that bad. And I see several sites that I’d stopped tracking in all the mess of email updates. So, that’s a win.

I intend on unsubscribing to gobs of email blog updates, cleaning up my inbox quite a bit. Also, I need to use the “feeds” feature, where I can segment my different feeds.

Do you use an RSS reader? Have a favorite one? Let me know!

What is SEO?

Carl Setzer
SEO Graphic

This quarter I studied SEO techniques, mainly working off of Moz’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO”. Let’s take a look at some of my main takeaways. Today, let’s start with the basics: What Is SEO?

  • SEO is otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization. Essentially, this is a technique to strategize your website’s content to place better in the search results of Google and Bing. This requires deeply understanding your target demographics, what they are interested in, what sorts of things they search for, how they search, and the way they structure their searches. Also, you need to understand how search engines work. They crawl the internet, creating indexes of the content they find. Ultimately, SEO is about creating better organic search results, as opposed to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. SEO has 20 times more traffic opportunities than PPC (via both mobile and desktop). SEO also pays off over a longer time.

Edit: corrected the link to Moz’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO”. 

Some Thoughts On Followers: “Fake followers are hard to shake”

Carl Setzer

I just read “Fake followers are hard to shake” over at AdAge. Yeah, buying followers is tempting. Sure, it might look good on the surface, to have hundreds or thousands of followers. I’ve had many, many people ask me about buying followers. I think is a waste of money.

  • First, why? If your social media efforts are for a business, fake followers aren’t going to come to your store. They don’t engage. They don’t add any value.
  • Then there are all the recent efforts to purge fake accounts. If your follower count drops massively after one of the follower purges, you’re outed
  • Lastly, as this article points out, there are fairly straightforward ways to determine how many fake followers you have. If your goal is to become an influencer, or gain business leads, tools are coming that will out the buy followers tactic.

I expect that, in the not too far distant future, the various algorithms will easily detect copious numbers of fake followers. And I expect that will hurt you, whether via SEO hits from Google or Bing, or social media feeds devaluing your content. I firmly believe this is coming soon.

So, don’t opt for the lazy and fast. Build your brand slowly, carefully and organically. Engage other folks, post good content, and be your unique self.

Wil Wheaton, The 21st Century and Trollish Sucky People

Carl Setzer

I’ve been following Mr. Wheaton’s blog about as long as he’s had it. Went from the first page, to Wil Wheaton in Exile (when his site got gummed up and he migrated to a WordPress hosted site), and so forth. I’m a Trek fan who really appreciated Wesley Crusher. And I appreciate his openness in regards to his struggles with clinical depression.

Recently, there he crafted a blog post expressing his disappointment with Lego. They launched a Next Generation line of characters. Wesley Crusher is crying. I thought that was pretty petty of them, and was remarkably unimpressed with a company that, I feel, has done a great job in so many other areas. He and I agree, his fans had a wide variety of responses. What you should expect.

Today he posted an update to the situation. So, some crappy bloggers took his post, misrepresented him, and then invited the loathsome hoards to descend upon Mr. Wheaton. I’ve seen this so many times, and truly hate it. It’s a wearying exercise, trust me. In my decade+ of blogging, I’ve dealt with this myself. Fortunately (at one level), not at the scale he’s dealing with.

Sucky, crappy people seem to have the run of the internet and we have little-to-no recourse, save blocking and deleting each turd left in our blog’s yard. It’s annoying enough to deal with the petty negativity. Lately, this crap has been filled with violent threats, racist vitriol, rape threats, threats against families and children. This simply frustrates me to the point of near rage.

What to do? Well, we can report those who cross the legal lines (threatening to rape or kill some is a crime, dumbasses!). But, how often does anything come from that? I’ve long recommended ignoring them, yet that doesn’t seem to work all that well.

That’s the deepest frustration: our powerlessness to stop this nonsense. Not without damaging the free-speech quality of the internet. At least, I’ve failed to see a viable solution emerge. I’ve mostly abandoned comment-threads. There are days I want the old internet back. Where people were (much more) decent to one another. Maybe that’s me hearkening back to time that didn’t exist. But I will still wish for a world where people interact with respect and dignity. So I dream.