Been working on my Facebook Author Page.

Because if I don’t, who will? Feel free to take a look, and tell me what it needs. I took some advice offered because it sounded sensible (basically boiled down to ‘make it look like you actually care about how it looks’), but further input would be welcome. Aside from everything else, I need somewhere to put the logo*.

Moe Lane

*I have been told, in multiple occasions, that it’s better to use my own hobbit-like visage for images than a company logo. I can’t quite understand why this would be, but the advice is too varied and repetitive to let me not take it seriously.

So, I tried a Facebook Ad for the Kickstarter.

I am… not convinced that it did a single blessed thing for me. Now, getting a link on Skin Horse on Sunday? That lit things up for the TINSEL RAIN Kickstarter. I am not sure if the problems I have with Facebook ads (or Amazon ads, for that matter) are because of the ads, or me – but I’m pretty sure that they are problems; and I don’t really know how to fix them. I’ve looked up possible solutions, but they invariably involve me buying some service that will magically make everything awesome. Yeah, I don’t believe that one either. And double yeah: I can see where the money’s being made there.

Ach, well, it could be worse. Plenty of self-published writers out there would love to have my situation, I know. I should be more grateful about it.

Quote of the Day, Facebook Does Not Lack For Chutzpah edition.

This is not the Quote of the Day:

[Facebook] unveiled an ambitious plan Tuesday to create a new digital currency similar to Bitcoin for global use, one that could drive more e-commerce on its services and boost ads on its platforms.

This is:

Facebook claims it will keep your personal data separate from your financial information when you use their new cryptocurrency, and holy crap I managed to type all that without my eyes rolling out of my head


Continue reading Quote of the Day, Facebook Does Not Lack For Chutzpah edition.

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Facebook planning to double-dip monetizing other people’s content.

Saw this, ironically, on Facebook:

Facebook will drive a hard bargain with influencers and artists judging by the terms of service for the social network’s Patreon-like Fan Subscriptions feature that lets people pay a monthly fee for access to a creator’s exclusive content. The policy document attained by TechCrunch shows Facebook plans to take up to a 30 percent cut of subscription revenue minus fees, compared to 5 percent by Patreon, 30 percent by YouTube, which covers fees and 50 percent by Twitch.

Continue reading Facebook planning to double-dip monetizing other people’s content.

Is Facebook really going to autorun videos with sound?

It’s not happening to me, yet. Or maybe it did happen to me, months ago — and then I screamed, button-mashed my way into settings, turned that feature off, then carefully suppressed my memories of the experience in order to keep the trauma from eating my soul.  It’s hard to tell; either way, I’d be still feeling this faint mix of nausea and horror. Auto-sound does not make it easier to enjoy video, Facebook. Quite the opposite, really.

I mean: really, Facebook?  REALLY? Who told you that this was a good idea?

Jeez, my Facebook page is AWFUL. As in, I am apparently doing Facebook wrong.

I mean, it’s almost as if I haven’t touched it in several years and didn’t know what the heck I was doing when I did maintain it. The feed is unreadable, I don’t know half the people on it, I’m not sure how to read anybody else’s stuff in a meaningful and sensible way, and apparently people can get upset if you post blog posts on your feed. I’m half-considering deleting the whole thing: not out of pique, but because I can’t figure out how to untangle it, so just junking the account then starting over seems, well, easier.

But I’m guessing that would be bad.  Anybody got any suggestions?

How Ed Snowden helped Russia get a good choke hold on its own online dissidents.

‘Inadvertently.’  How droll. How abso-[expletive deleted]-lute-ly droll.

Let me set the scene: Russia – which has comfortably settled back into the patterns of bureaucratic autocracy that has more or less been its operating methodology for a millennium – has a problem.  It’s that pesky Internet, which was created by those pesky Americans, and our pesky stubborn insistence that people have rights and needs that trumps the State’s. Worse, an American’s instinctive response to foreigners insisting the we shut up on the Internet traditionally involves a bodily function, a rope and directions on how do the former upon the latter. You can do that, when all the servers are on your soil. Sooo

For Russian President Vladimir Putin, this was intolerable. In his mind the solution was simple: force the platforms — Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Apple among them — to locate their servers on Russian soil so Russian authorities could control them.

The challenge was how to do it.

Continue reading How Ed Snowden helped Russia get a good choke hold on its own online dissidents.

The New York Times needs to get all of their people off of Facebook.

All of them: the rot has set in. To summarize… Marc Cooper, a journalism professor at USC (Annenberg), asked on Facebook what seems to be a fairly reasonable question: if the New York Times doesn’t think that Islamist fanatics killing a dozen people over the publication of satirical cartoons justifies showing said cartoons… hold on a minute.

charlie

Moving on… Marc Cooper asked: if the current number of murdered cartoonists, staffers, and cops weren’t enough to justify the NYT doing its job, then just how many murder victims would be sufficient? – Apparently, this question cooked off the NYT’s executive editor Dean Baquet, because Mr. Baquet went on Facebook to literally call Mr. Cooper an a*shole. Continue reading The New York Times needs to get all of their people off of Facebook.