Tag: Twitter

Days twenty-nine, thirty, and thirty-one: Reflections on trying to blog every day for a month

Ryan SholinLeave a comment

I didn’t blog every day for a month. I didn’t miss by much, but it’s definitely easier to be disciplined about it at home than it is on the road.

I thought it would be a good experiment, writing slightly longer, compared to a tweet, and it often felt satisfying to mash the publish button. The daily pressure was noticed, though, and reminded me of the year I did one of those one-second-per-day videos. Sometimes you just need to point the camera at the sky; sometimes you just need to jot down some thoughts about jotting down thoughts.

I’m writing this on my laptop on a plane — not on my phone, where I wrote all (I think?) the other posts this month.

Maybe writing those posts didn’t help me separate myself from my phone, but it did give me an outlet for the spare energy of rattling-around thoughts, pithy ideas, and rambling about platforms and projects and photos and it was fun to pull some old file art off my phone.

About Not Tweeting Or Posting On Facebook

Um, many people have spit many hot takes on this topic, and there’s not much I can add. It felt like I was measurably reducing my daily anxiety by not spending much time on Twitter this month. When I did check in from time to time on my laptop during the week (or, admittedly, stealing down to the basement once or twice a day on weekends to get my fix), it was nice to see a joke or two, or someone’s Personal News, and there was that day I unfollowed more than a thousand people, that felt pretty good.

I was still checking news sites multiple times a day on my phone, to feed the “has anything blown up overnight?” monster in my brain, but if you feel overwhelmed and like maybe you need a break from the unrelenting wash of news, then yes, indeed, I would recommend cutting down on Twitter.

And Facebook, sure, although checking in there less was a good reminder that I’ve done a decent job of curating my friends and my feed there, so more often than not, looking at Facebook on my laptop a couple times a day made me feel good.

I kept Instagram on my phone, and although the babies and kids and dogs and meals there have a lot of overlap with my FB feed, I’ve been enjoying Stories.

What now?

Am I going to keep aiming to write a blog post every day? Uhhhhhhmmmmmm hmmmm errrrr… How about I just try to blog whenever I feel like it, whenever I have a thought longer than tweet-length, whenever there’s one of those empty cans making a lot of noise in my head, whenever I want to, more or less, without the long-gone pressure of worrying about my brand or how my work responsibilities and personal opinions (usually about future-of-news stuff) might not always be in alignment.

Am I going to start tweeting again?

Ehhhhhhhhh probably. But I’m going to keep curating pretty hard. I definitely have the thought of making my account private, and/or deleting my old tweets.

It’s tempting to just leave it behind.

Fish tacos, El Pescadito, Mexico City, 2019
Fish tacos, El Pescadito, Mexico City, 2019

An update on the reading list you assigned me in March 2012

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Storify is over. I’m old enough to remember working for a startup that built tools to curate social media posts into news articles before Storify did a much, much better job of it. 😉

I remember hearing about the idea for Storify from Burt Herman at ONA in San Francisco in 2009, which of course seems like a thousand years ago now. I had the chance to congratulate him on the acquisition by Livefyre a few years later, and raised my eyebrows from afar when Adobe picked them up and rolled pieces of it into their own suite of marketing products.

So today, I had to check. Do I have any Storifys (Storifies?) worth saving?

I found one of the most important Twitter threads of my recent life, from 2012, where I asked for some fiction reading recommendations, preserved in a nice clean Storify.

Y’all came through!

I’m going to recreate the Storify here, using the modern technology now available to us all in 2017 which will surely never become outdated.

Embedded tweets. And my comments below each tweet.

I enjoyed this one, then switched to Neuromancer and read the first two of those. I’ll come back to these, maybe at the beach sometime.

I ended up reading the first 2.05 books of the Baroque Cycle. It took a minute. Still haven’t picked up Cryptonomicon, but I will. Snow Crash looks light, though!

I read it once.

This ended up being the most important book to me on this list. It was wildly ahead of its time on AR/VR, the future of interfaces, fake news (!), self-driving cars, gaming, guilds, and maybe a dozen other things. I. Think. About. It. All. The. Time. Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End.

https://twitter.com/amandabee/status/180103470127394816

I tried Kavalier and Clay. Didn’t work for me.

I have library-stalked Universal Baseball Association continuously but never stepped up and ordered a copy for myself. I really need to read this one, because dice baseball.

Max Barry ended up being one of my favorite beach-read authors. Jennifer Government, Lexicon (oooooooh Lexicon), and Machine Man so far.

I have no idea who that is, so I assumed I assumed Hartnett was trolling me with some 16th century poet or something. [NARRATOR: He wasn’t.]

No thank you.

And I’m putting this one on my to-read list now.

Oh, man. I loved this book. And I hated it. I loved the parts I hated. I felt guilty about the parts that I loved. It’s amazing and you should read it.

My wife gave this one five stars on Goodreads, so I should probably read it.

I feel like The Underground Railroad might have made this one a moot point.

Assuming for a minute that Joel wasn’t trolling me with a book that starts with a suicide attempt after I said “nothing too depressing” twice, this could be fun.

Sounds dark. Maybe I can handle it now.

I’m not reading about circus elephants unless they’re stomping everyone and running free, Danya.

Now I have.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a linkdump

Ryan Sholin2 Comments

At the risk of doing what I’m best at — overstating the obvious — you might have noticed that I don’t use this blog much anymore.

Actually, I do use it, maybe once a year or so, to communicate the fact that I don’t write many blog posts these days, and you should just follow me on Twitter or somewhere else if you’re interested.

But that’s barely true. I don’t “talk” about “media” stuff much on Twitter, although I sort of do, depending on how you feel about reading between the lines, but sometimes a GIF is just a GIF.

That’s the end of the preamble.

This is a linkdump.

I’ve been using Pinboard (again) for a couple months now to “save” links to “read” later. (Is there an Emoji for air quotes? Wait, I’m going to tweet that, brb.)

The air quotes are because I haven’t really used these tools for anything other than reducing the amount of guilt I have over not reading the entire Internet.

Really, who reads everything they save to “read later?” Nobody. It just sits there, festering. I used to share first, read later, but in modern times, it often feels silly to re-share something everyone has already shared, so I’ll just “like” or “favorite” and let that be a passive form of sharing, rather than crafting a shiny new headline and point of view around some interesting article, where “interesting” equals “this caught my eye and it seems important.”

So, instead, I present this unscheduled, imperiodic link dump of a bunch of stuff I’ve saved. Maybe I’ve read it, maybe not. Maybe it’s useful, maybe not.

You be the judge. An ordered list in no particular order follows, although it might end up in chronological order, we’ll see.

  1. Matt Waite for Source on the hey-wasn’t-this-hotly-debated ethics of a mugshot news app.
  2. 10 years of NFL play-by-play data, in CSV form.
  3. A List Apart article on small-screen (iPhone, for example) navigation patterns.
  4. Software to help humans figure out if that pic was ‘shopped, marketed to insurance companies.
  5. “Don’t learn how to code; learn to make things.”
  6. A painfully basic lesson for product managers and entrepreneurs: Solve Existing Problems
  7. If you’re going to have meetings, Always Be Capturing, so you don’t have to have more meetings to review what you decided in the previous meeting.
  8. On the perils of including edge case legacy functionality in your application to satisfy power users: Checkboxes That Kill Your Product
  9. Hey guys, remember when Netflix was a useful social network?
  10. Solid notes on *how* to measure audience engagement in news apps, although I would argue that *what* to measure is critical.
  11. For the completely uninitiated, a perfect explanation of the (current) state of open graph tags and making content shareable.
  12. Lorem Ipsum for avatars.
  13. The accidental limerick detector.
  14. The year-old Zeldman-approved recommended replacement for the ol’ -9999px trick.
  15. “Could you make a list of cute animals that gets 5 million views?”

 

 

Wanted: The Unfollowemator

Ryan Sholin1 Comment

As a Twitter user, I want a way to automatically unfollow users who mention specific terms with a certain sentiment, so that I can easily filter out people with which you just can’t argue.

Acceptance Criteria:

  1. This tool should use the latest version of OAuth to allow the user to connect their Twitter account to the application.
  2. This tool should allow the user to enter a keyword or keywords into a text field, then choose an emotional state (probably limited to positive/negative in the first iteration) to filter on.
    • For example, a user might search for positive mentions of “McRib”
  3. The tool should display a few example tweets, and a paginated list of users that will be unfollowed.
  4. The list of users to be unfollowed should include checkboxes, allowing the user to uncheck any box before confirming their unfollows.
  5. After confirming, the user should be presented with an option to automatically unfollow all users who match this query in the future.

Is Dan Sinker’s book making me angry?

Ryan SholinLeave a comment

20111011-072632.jpg

Well, no, of course not.

In fact, the Epic Quest makes me happy every time I pick it up. I’ve caught myself pages deep, on the couch with my four-year-old who is impatiently reminding me that she has a book of her own in mind, and hey, why is there a duck on your book, and then I snap out of it and Quaxelrod heads back to the end table, where he sits perched atop an unfinished Clay Shirky tome that is infinitely more relevant to my day job.

Anyway, the funny thing is, I don’t curse on Twitter. Or if I used to, I don’t now. I keep it clean. Maybe an “effing” from time to time, which is a word I never speak away from a keyboard. Ever.

But reading in my imagination’s flavor of @mayoremanuel‘s voice has led me into the habit of narrating mundane things like my honestly-not-bad-lately commute in a similar, profane fashion.

And now I’m trying to decide if it’s therapeutic or sociopathic.

But I’m not trying that hard.

A short list of things you might find useful

Ryan SholinLeave a comment
  1. A proposed new standard for semantic metadata in, say, online news stories.
  2. Michael Donohoe’s bucket list of things the New York Times could do, delivered shortly after he moved on to a new gig.
  3. If you’re not following Richard Koci Hernandez on Instagram, you’re missing out on a hypercreative stream of possibilities.
  4. A short instruction manual from CNN for success on the Web: Strengthen your core, then stretch yourself.
  5. On Wikipedia, all roads lead to Philosophy. And data visualization.
  6. The first rule of Tweet Club is exactly what you think it is.
  7. A book about responsive web design.
  8. How and why the Financial Times built a no-app-store-required HTML5 experience for tablets, and also, the future.
  9. The New York Observer redesigns online to showcase #longreads and scoops. (See also Stock and Flow.)
  10. Google ties together “rel=me” and authorship of things like news stories with a new bit of metadata.

Now, go build something useful.