(Updated) Don’t build your web presence on free platforms

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December 18, 2018

There’s been some bit of drama over on the Twitters lately that causing folks to look for other alternative social platforms that might better suit them and their internet web presence.

It didn’t take long for the trouble on Twitter to get other alternative social media platforms to come crawling out of the woodwork. Some of these platforms have been around a while (since 2015), while others are currently being put together on-the-fly even as I write this.

It’s hard to have a true internet web presence if everything you do is on social sites. If the bulk of your work resides on a social platform, or somewhere off in the cloud, what happens when these social platforms, or cloud operations update their platform terms, or, as in some cases, close entirely, taking all of your hard earned work and effort with them.

Twitter terms (tap or click image to enlarge)

Even as I write this the rules over on Twitter are changing so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. I guess after today, you aren’t allowed to post a link to your other social platforms because if you do, you’ll get banned from the Twitter platform. It’s somewhat Orwellian but that’s just the way it is .. at least on Twitter at this point. Who’s to say that other platforms won’t start doing this sort of thing in the future? It’s always best to own your own first before jumping off into the realms of social.

Some platforms will let you download your work, but then what? Here you have your work with really no place to go with it. Also, never mind that your work still resides out there somewhere on a server in some obscure archive.

Never trust the terms or the security of an internet web property that you don’t own outright. Crackers and Script Kiddies are constantly at the door of social platforms, jumping at the slightest opportunity to take the social platform, and you — down — in an instant. Owners of the social platform may for some reason, just decide to shut it all down, or sell to someone else who would shut it all down.

Everything that you load to a social platform, whether it be Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest, to name just a few .. ceases to be your intellectual property. All of your thoughts, ideas, and good effort becomes owned, and legally, by which ever social platform you choose to load to. None of your “stuff” belongs to you, truly exclusively, the second you load it to a social platform.

I received an email the other day from a guy in Scranton PA wondering why I don’t post more of our direct business related materials to our Facebook Fan Page. What I do here doesn’t belong to Facebook — it never will belong to Facebook, because I’m not going to load it to Facebook.

If you are curious about what goes on here directly then you’ll have to actually visit this site I’m afraid. We don’t post intellectual property to social platforms, and neither should any of you. If I happen to have a good idea, or something that might be particularly useful, it gets posted in this blog, and only this blog. I post a link to the idea or useful item to the social platform that points to this blog. If the social platform goes away, all I lose is a link and that’s it — our property remains ours.

From your personal weblog, to your art galleries — Nothing is going to be as protected, copyright wise, as hosting them on your own internet web domain. If you post a picture on your domain, and for some reason it ends up being posted to Facebook — then you can legally have it removed from the platform — because after all, it’s yours. It doesn’t belong to anyone else but you. If you post that piece of art to a social platform, it immediately becomes the property of that platform, and you don’t have a leg to stand on with regard to getting it removed — they own it — because you gave it to them.

Don’t think so? — Read on ..

Here’s what Facebook says:

“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.” – Facebook

Here’s the hook — Facebook deletes nothing when you close your account with them. Facebook is included with “the others” in it’s statement. Your stuff will remain in storage on Facebook forever.

In a nutshell, anything you do on Facebook, doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to Facebook. Your social web presence isn’t really yours after all.

Content is king, and has been since the beginning of the internet. Content drives ad sales, as both Google and Facebook have proven time and again.

These new social platforms understand every bit of this and are screaming for their new users to provide as much content as possible.

Without content they can’t exist.

Here’s what Post.News has to say about content:

Post.news announcement (tap or click image to enlarge)

“We would love to have your content on Post. You can share your writings as a link but if you use the Composer and share it on-platform, the reading is much easier and faster. Just copy and paste your blog or newsletter content into the Composer, format, and post.”

“You can also share your premium content and add a paywall yourself. The Post economy is built on Points but the conversion rate is 1pt = $0.01. You get 100% of whatever price you add to your content. This way, people can read your premium content without having to commit to a subscription.” – Noam Bardin — Chief Poster

Sure, you can put your content on Post for pennies on the dollar, but what kind of ad revenue will Post be making for themselves as a result of you posting your content to the platform? Don’t think for a minute that platform admins won’t circumvent your paywall and use you to garner ad dollars for the platform as a whole, because they will.

If you are serious about establishing a solid and authoritative internet web presence, don’t start out on social media — do it on your own. Use your own registered domain. Only upon after establishing your internet web presence on your own domain, should you be wandering out into the social web to market your wares, your talents, your abilities.

Use the social platforms for teasers and loss leaders — Use the platforms to drive traffic to you.

From where I sit, places like Facebook, Twitter, and even Post are no different from each other … all cut from the same cloth.

Your social initiatives are extremely important — but building your business on a platform (domain) that you own is even more important than that.

You should never use a social platform as the primary hub for your business. By making your business website the center of all your online marketing activities, you can use as many external marketing entities that you want, as long as it all leads back to your own website.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra – Promises to Keep

By

Alan

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November 11, 2018

In keeping with decades of beautiful and melodic Christmas music, this is “Promises To Keep” from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra debut album.

Myspace tries to lure old members back with embarrassing photos

By

Alan

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October 22, 2018

Remember those terrible photos you posted on Myspace ten years ago?

Well, Myspace does -– and they might send you some to refresh your memory.

The company is emailing former members their old, embarrassing snapshots in an attempt to lure them back to the social network, popular in the early 2000s.

The email reads, “The good, the rad and the what were you thinking…” and includes a link to the user’s old profile, Mashable reported.
“Myspace has been reaching out to current and past users to re-engage them through a personalized experience,” a spokesperson told the website.

Myspace has been pushing for a comeback.

In 2011, Justin Timberlake and Specific Media bought the company from News Corp. for $35 million. It soon unveiled a new, modern look and became a popular space for bands to post new music and connect with fans.

Last year, the company reportedly spent $20 million on an ad campaign to get users excited about the new Myspace.

While social media users compared the old-photo tactic to blackmail, it at least serves as a reminder to users to be careful about what they post online. Myspace has 15 billion photos of users in its database, according to Mashable. That’s nothing compared to Facebook, which has said it has more than 250 billion user photos.

Dairy industry filing to hide Aspartame in new definition of milk

By

Alan

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October 20, 2018

Guest post by Arushi Kapoor

Milk has always been something we’ve bestowed our blind faith in. And whenever we pick up a carton from the grocery store, we almost always assume we’re getting the wholesome goodness that has been promised to us by the label. But this is all about to change as the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) are lobbying towards changing the milk labeling laws.

The IDFA and NMPF have recently filed a petition to change the labeling laws in such a way that milk would be able to contain artificial sweeteners like aspartame and not be liable to print it on the package. Soon, unsuspecting milk enthusiasts all over the country will unwittingly be ingesting chemicals that can cause potential damage.

While the move sounds strange to anyone with half a brain, the milk industry apparently has a reason for making this move. In a statement, an industry representative said that the change would, “promote more healthful eating practices and reduce childhood obesity by providing for lower-calorie flavored milk products.”

According to them, children are so averse to consuming natural products that benefit them that they constantly need to be duped into having it. Further, they stated that sweetening the milk — whether naturally or artificially through aspartame — can get children more attracted to its taste and increase the chances of them consuming and relishing it.

According to the Federal Register, “The proposed amendments would assist in meeting several initiatives aimed at improving the nutrition and health profile of food served in the nation’s schools. Those initiatives include state-level programs designed to limit the quantity of sugar served to children during the school day.”

Although aspartame is still widely used in diet beverages and food, it is still rife with negative health implications that few are aware of. Research shows that aspartame consumption can lead to digestive problems, dizziness, obesity, and many more serious conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and even cancer.

The new labeling laws will certainly make it hard for people to make an informed choice when they’re looking for the item they want and it will create a great deal of confusion among consumers. Nutritional information is already extremely tedious to decipher, the new law will make things even worse.

The IDFA and NMPF have stated, “consumers can more easily identify the overall nutritional value of milk products that are flavored with non-nutritive sweeteners if the labels do not include such claims.” But it doesn’t change the fact that milk companies will be getting away with selling us mild poison masquerading as a healthy product.

Source: http://itrustnaturalcures.com

Arushi Kapoor

A feminist, a superhero geek, and an amateur musician, who spontaneously melts at the sight of puppies and kittens. Her superpowers include making food instantly disappear and being a human pun generator.

Petrified Forest National Park

By

Alan

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June 6, 2018

In some of our recent travels we had the opportunity to pay a visit to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.

Driving up from Texas we couldn’t resist the temptation to stop and look at what once might have been a lush, green, and growing forest, that now is made of rock upon after being buried in some sort of natural or otherwise celestial calamity that befell the area many years ago.

Meteor Crater (also known as Barringer Crater) on Earth is only 50,000 years old (tap or click image to enlarge)

Not being a geologist by any stretch, I pretty much surmised or came away with the notion that this particular area of the forest had been decimated as a result of a meteor that hit just west of it’s location.

I think rather that instead of the petrified forest being buried slowly over thousands of years, it was buried at once, under extreme pressure and heat. Accompanying burn marks on the petrified wood may testify to that fact.

All in all, the area is desolate and barren, lending to the total destructive nature of the meteor impact. I’m also pretty sure that the climate in the region was somewhat forever changed as a result of all of the upheaval.

Petrified log extends from among soft Limestone (tap or click image to enlarge)

I’m pretty sure that if there were no erosion, our earth would look just like the moon. We are, after all, floating about in space, just like the moon, but our atmosphere and our instances of erosion makes any meteor strikes somewhat less obvious. The fact that the meteor crater is still so well defined even today, might lend a bit of credence to the fact that it’s occurrence is fairly new in geological time.

When we look at just how quickly the Mt St. Helens area recovered after the eruption of 1980, I’m somewhat of the opinion that the meteor crater happened closer to thousands of years ago instead of millions of years ago. The meteor that struck and decimated the now petrified forest in Arizona could have easily polluted a large area of the region, thus preventing the regrowth of any of the native or natural vegetation that might have once existed there before. As far as the existing climate is concerned, just imagine how the climate in the region might be now if the meteor event had never happened.

Just my opinion of course.

Though there were many different bits and pieces of petrified wood laying about out in the open, we still visited a gift shop in town and purchased a few pieces of petrified wood for Dustin’s little collection.

It was an excellent trip to say the least. If you’ve never been to Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, I would highly recommend that you go …

To learn more about what asteroids might do when they strike, check out this Asteroid Damage Visualization Map

Native Petroglyph Rock (tap or click to enlarge image)

The National Park Service had stationary binoculars set up to view petroglyphs up close, but these were worn and blurry, so I found the petroglyphs to be best viewed through the telephoto lens on my camera. These rocks sort of represent the information age of their time as native peoples used them to communicate back and forth to each other.

The context of each image is extremely important and integral to its meaning. Today’s native people have stated that the placement of each petroglyph image was not a casual or random decision. Some petroglyphs have meanings that are only known to the individuals who made them. Others represent tribal, clan, kiva, or societal markers. Some are religious entities and others show who came to the area and where they went. Petroglyphs still have contemporary meaning, while the meaning of others is no longer known, but are respected for belonging to “those who came before.”

How do you petrify wood fast?

It involves soaking a section of wood in hydrochloric acid for two days and then in either a silica or titanium solution for another two days. After air-drying, the wood is placed in an argon gas filled furnace and slowly heated to 1400° Celsius over a period of two hours.
If our modern science can create petrified wood in under a week, then it wouldn’t be that much more of a stretch to think that mother nature could likely create it in under a month.