communication. community. cognition.
Consider those ads warning you of hair in “unsightly places.” Are we providing too much information in our profile? Or is there a deeper conspiracy to scan the words we use when chatting and posting…
No, I’m not going back to television.
But I will be a guest on “BSide with Alan Hunter and Dr. Josh“ tonight on Live 100.5.
Alan Hunter is, well… he’s Alan Hunter. Yeah, that one.
Dr. Josh Klapow is a psychology professor here in Birmingham who I had done a number of interviews with in the past, and is an all-around pretty cool guy.
This time, I’ll be the subject of the interview questions. From 6-7 p.m. (Central time), I’ll be talking with them about the past, present and future of what we call Social Media. Maybe even get a plug in for the new #bhamchat Twitter events on Tuesday nights, and the upcoming Social South conference and soiree.
It ought to be fun, and you don’t have to be in Birmingham to listen. Live 100.5 streams on the net.
Three thousand, six hundred and fifty-three days ago…
…at this moment…
..married.
Happy Anniversary, Sweetie!
{{myquote|In the postmodern age, Tactical Laziness has replaced Necessity as the Mother of Invention.}}
{{myquote|You can’t stick your head in the sand without showing your ass to the world.}}
As you know, the Facebook platform has posted such astonishing growth, I would look really stupid posting a number here that would be dated and quaint a month from now. Likewise, the platform’s stability is something to behold, as evidenced by this past weekend’s “land rush” for custom Facebook urls. (You can find me here, by the way…)
Given the tremendous opportunity to see significant reach, I felt it was time to share a gem of a secret about how to make your Facebook ad really shine.
First, let’s look at the ad as it appears on most Facebook pages:
The ad itself does not, at first glance, seem to have any miraculous mojo. You might have noticed it sitting idly on the right-hand edge of your page, and if you didn’t pay any attention, that’s just as well.
It’s a simple DIV, with three sections: the top line, meant to resemble other clickable links; the picture; and the teaser copy, with the voting arrows on a line break below.
The hidden markup is what makes this so interesting.
If you look at the actual code, and strip away the < deception > < /deception > tags, you get a very different (and more truthful) result:
With the < deception > markup missing, we see the real result of clicking on the advertisement. < deception > has been buried within HTML since the early days of the web, and is robust enough that Internet Explorer – even in its worst incarnation and configuration for meeting web standards – could still render it flawlessly.
< Deception > is one of the few rarely-used tags in little danger of being deprecated. It is too useful for those who employ it. The < sarcasm > and < irony > tags are often used on blogs today, although the comments section often turns those off inadvertently.
Extremely clever marketing, though.
The issue here was a plugin, one that tries to minimize the load on servers by relying on Javascript libraries housed at Google.
The “Use Google Libraries” plugin needed updating, and that new version arrived tonight.
We will return you soon to pithy quotes and unusual perspectives. (Provided you have a computer monitor compatible with the new Digital Occam signal from this past weekend’s transition…)
I used multiple instances for showing feedburner stats and other things of interest. They also stored my analytics codes, so I am rather blind at this point as to who exactly is visiting me.
Fortunately, not all of my sidebar text was in standard Text widgets. I am a big fan of the Ad Rotator plugin, which is essentially a text widget with a randomization function built in. (That’s how, for instance, you see different endorsements from people each time you refresh the browser.)
So, not all is lost. But a lot is. For now.
Anyone else have a solution? And WordPress people out there also missing their Text Widgets after the jump to 2.8?
