@hg47's Blog: The Tweet & The TakeAway, page 7

GoodReads Best Social Science Fiction list

My novel DAUGHTER MOON is #46th on GoodReads Best Social Science Fiction list. http://bit.ly/W17QFb You thought I only did #TwitterArt?

I don't understand GoodReads lists yet, much less GoodReads, or even the Internet. But this tweet has a bit of a history (in Internet years, would 6-days old put it in the Paleozoic Era or the Mesozoic Era?). Just a throw-away brag, this tweet was on the #TwitterArt TOP TWEET list after about 2 hours (I know that one: the Internet Pleistocene Epoch). At most, it had 1 RT & maybe 2-3 faves at that obsolete outdated time. I should mention that #140art and #TwitterArt tags are moderated: actual humans choose which tweets make the TOP cut, and which tweets get dumped from the tag altogether.

Circa 2/10/2013 5:42 AM this tweet is still on the #TwitterArt TOP list (the TOP list is the default, what searchers see if they search the tag, when they are then presented with other options for expanding or restricting their search). Now, at 7 RTs and 15 faves, there is some justification for the tweet being on that hashtag's TOP list. But it is sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy: Someone put it on the list, so it got the stats to stay there because of all the extra people who saw and read the tweet.

@hg47

And now for my hashtag P.S.

Did you know that half the ads during the Super Bowl carried Twitter hashtags?

http://www.digiday.com/brands/brands-...

All those tags . . . the system obviously wasn't ready for it . . . This Explains The Super Bowl Power Failure! Hashtag Overload!

Make Art that most people don’t want

Make Art that most people don’t want.
That’s your starting point.
Then you may discover
that some people hysterically NEED your Art.

In "Real Estate" the rule is "Location, Location, Location."

On the Internet the rule is "Niche, Niche, Niche."

10 Rabid over-the-top fans trump 1000 lukewarm Facebook Likers.

@hg47

Are You Connected?

The Web doesn’t separate the Exceptional from the Average, it supercharges the CONNECTED.

Jimi Hendrix: "Are you experienced?"

@hg47: "Are you connected?"

Go read Kevin Kelly's NEW RULES FOR THE NEW ECONOMY for "10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World." Copyright 1998 and still State-of-the-Art in 2013, IMHO, on the issue of CONNECTION.

http://www.amazon.com/New-Rules-Econo...

On the Internet: Quantity Of Networking Kicks Ass And Takes Names While Quality Of Product Lies Bruised & Bleeding.

If you are a blogger, you're not writing for people anymore; you are writing for search engines.

It's not just favstar starback buddies and Facebook likeback buddies and blogger linkback buddies or eBook author reviewback buddies. It's the 90% promotion versus 10% actually-create-art ratio that bugs me about 2013's superhero artists. Actually, it's much worse, because today's Artist Superheroes create art only if it is positioned as a marketing device; if the marketing isn't built into the art, why bother?

My "internet presence" is a train wreck, an SEO's nightmare of unsearchable and unfathomable [insert expletive with alliteration]. For http://a47.info/ I had to dedicate a mirror site http://hg47.blogspot.com/ just to activate the ability of readers to make comments on my posts.

Blogspot is all about the stats. One winning strategy on the Internet is to chase the statistics: if something you spew gets an avalanche of hits, specialize Baby! Do a hundred different riffs on that theme! Of course, a year later, you will be someone else, your thoughts will be those the SEO marketplace directed you to think. You will have adapted. The world will own you. You will be just another tool.

Internet writers don't use words, they use keywords. Case in point. My top Blogspot post is nearly two order of magnitudes greater in hits than my average post. It is just a throw-away drunken-rant as I imagined Amazon plunging into social media.

Post Title:
WHEN AMAZON ADDS THE FOLLOW FEATURE (Watch Out, Facebook!)

Post Text:
WHEN AMAZON ADDS THE FOLLOW FEATURE

Discussions. Threads. A ready database of eBook authors & readers. Not to mention everyone who has an Amazon account & buys stuff.

What will happen when Amazon adds a “Follow” or “Friend” button to Discussions & Threads so that the reader can find the interesting (to that reader) writers posting to Amazon discussions, and have all posts by that person & other interesting persons compiled together for easy viewing?

I sense a new social network here.

And if I were Amazon I wouldn’t call it Following or Friending.

When I clicked on the link, it would say: AMAZED.

@hg47

If I analyze the words in the above post and the above title, I find keyword heaven.

But I'm getting seriously off-topic here. While it may be possible to "connect" with search engines in your writing, that's not the type of connection I really mean.

[insert quotation from Mario Puzo's THE GODFATHER on Friendship]

@hg47

The Seeds of New Dreams

Tears from my eyes fall into the soil where my dying Dreams gasp and expire; this moisture seeps down, activating the seeds of new Dreams.

In a changing world Scratch That. The ancient Greeks—B.C., Baby—had a saying, something like, "Judge no man happy until he is dead." This may have been a reaction to a Sophocles play, but thousands of years later the point is still valid, even if you don't kill your Mother by mistake and accidentally marry your Father.

I was going to do a riff on the exponential growth of technology and change. But, hell, before Christ the Greeks were already bitching about that high-tech sundial device, about how it was hacking their lives into wretched little pieces, and compelling them like slaves before their new Master: Time.

Only little dreams work the first try. Big dreams are only actualized after multiple Death/Rebirth Cycles, which are, in my experience, excruciatingly painful.

So cry a little.

And then try again, differently.

@hg47

GoodReads

Facebook:
“58 Cocktails your friends will love! Please LIKE!”

Twitter:
“Just gimme the hard stuff. No ice. No glass. Now get lost!”

GoodReads:
"Books are my drugs. Reading gets me high. Books are my movies. Reading puts me there living it out; I am the hero, I am the heroine. Books are my news. Reading gives me news that stays news, behind-the-scenes news that will still be news in another 500 years. Now where did I put my reading glasses?"

@hg47

The Third Option

Your Choice: Distinguished Or Extinguished

Actually, there may be a third alternative: WTF?

Projecting an Eminence Front can yield measurable results. But there is something to be said for being unable to refusing to play the standard game. Besides, I don't think I'll ever be able to compete by turbo-charging my prose with keywords. And it's so cute when SEO Experts send me URGENT! eMails on how to "fix" my website.

Contrast.

If everyone else is FULL-COLOR…go B&W.

If everyone else is shouting and screaming and jumping up and down in promotional mode…go slow-motion mime.

If all your marketing is wrong…then wear wrong like a scarf. @hg47

minimalist #TwitterArt

In Feb 2010 I found a hack to do minimalist #TwitterArt …Twitter just shut down my exploit. Never date & break-up with a Twitter Admin!

Guy Vincent - https://twitter.com/Guy_Vincent - discovered sometime early in 2010 an em-width space, that when you put a bunch of them together, Twitter would treat as a word, meaning the group of spaces wouldn't break. This made it possible for a tweet to be several lines high with just a few visible characters.

Then I discovered that I could start a line with a hard-space, but that the non-breaking space could not be copy/pasted, but had to be entered into the composition window by the Alt-0160 code. What I hadn't appreciated until recently was that this procedure made my antics on Twitter difficult to reverse engineer. Anyone who copy/pasted my tweets trying to steal them, would get non-functional tweets, because Twitter treats the hard space when pasted as a soft space.

Anyway, we're in a new era. Twitter's recent upgrade went to an active composition window, that changes a lot of things, and the hard space no longer functions (or if it does, I haven't found a way to use it yet). I found a temporary work-around of limited value. I don't really understand the new composition window; but I shouldn't feel bad, different browsers don't seem to understand it too well either; the rendering differences between Firefox & Chrome just got a lot more varied. Call me paranoid, but I suspect Twitter will soon shut-down my work-around. Cheers! @hg47

Links to my early #TwitterArt:

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/twit...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/mini...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/worl...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/art-...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/cate...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/in-t...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-t...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/obam...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/deve...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/play...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/turb...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/pre-...

Reevaluate The Choices You Have Made In Life

If you are reading this Blog Post it may be time to reevaluate the choices you have made in life.

How To Become A Better Writer:
read 100,000,000 awesome words;
write 1,000,000 original words.
How To Succeed As A Writer:
haven’t a clue.

I can always tell when one of my tweets gets on favstar's 10-star leaderboard because it gets a big bump in stars and ReTweets. Not because the tweet is actually better, but because a lot of extra people see it and react to it.

What I really want to do is write the first draft of my next novel. What the world wants me to do is spend all my time drawing attention to what I have already written. (When I say, "What the world wants me to do," I mean that's where the rewards are, the fruit the world dangles to entice me, just out of reach.)

Unfortunately, not only do I not know how to aim attention at my writings, I hate even thinking about it. So, why are you still reading this post? I am not any kind of role model, and I have no answers.

@hg47

Who's the Boss?

My soul doesn't just grab the steering wheel of my body and stomp on the gas.

My mind likes to think that it's the boss, but I'm not so sure. Sometimes I feel like a backseat driver, shouting directions, while my addictions and compulsions are fighting over the steering wheel and my emotions are popping the breaks or accelerating pedal-to-the-Electroshock-Therapy-electric-accelerator-approved-floormat.

My Life: Should I stay seatbelted going the wrong way too fast, or throw myself out the passenger door? @hg47

Islam

Want to know about Islam? Get an autobiography of a former Muslim who quit the religion & had members of his own family try to kill him.

Don't get me started on Islam. I get it that any religion is by default THE GOOD and that anyone who attacks any religion is by default BAD.

But I am suspicious of a religion that demands the death of any member who tries to quit. I am suspicious of a religion that demands death for anyone anywhere who criticizes the religion. I am suspicious of a religion that legally, morally and ethically codifies the inferiority of women such that it is impossible for a Muslim male ever to be convicted of rape in any Islamic country.

Last I checked, Pew Research in late 2010, I think, showed that the majority of Muslims in the world believe that the laws of whatever country they are living in must allow for the death of any Muslim who quits Islam. Yes, there are "moderate" Muslims; but most Muslims are not "moderate" by infidel standards of moderation.

But I've already written too much. It is dangerous to talk or write negatively of Islam. One might be accused of hate speech, which is punishable in Western Countries by imprisonment. One might be targeted for assassination.

So, I'll just give you my Reading List.

WHY I AM NOT A MUSLIM by Ibn Warraq

THE MYTH OF ISLAMIC TOLERANCE edited by Robert Spencer

CRUEL AND USUAL PUNISHMENT by Nonie Darwish

STEALTH JIHAD by Robert Spencer

ISLAM AND TERRORISM by Mark A. Gabriel, Ph.D.

THE POLITICALLY INCORRECT GUIDE™ TO ISLAM (AND THE CRUSADES) by Robert Spencer

I have no clue what to "do" about Islam. I do not advocate any particular agenda, except caution. The whole "Arab Spring" thing looks more to me like "Islamic Implosion." I will shut up now. @hg47