- The 562 Links I Tweeted This Week: 3/7 – 3/12
In case you missed one, or some, or just don’t even try to keep up with all the links I tweet throughout the day every day, here is this week’s list of links for your weekend reading and review. Listed purely in the order I tweeted them and no other type of organization, you will find topics such as technology, social media, web and graphic design, freelancing and more. Please leave a comment if you find this list useful so I will know that it’s helping someone out. Enjoy!
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- Pro Bono and Free Services: Is It Possible To Give Too Much?
Last Thursday I was taking part in a weekly discussion among designers called DCTH (Design Community Twitter Hours) and this question came up: When do you draw the line between pro-bono & just helping for free? A very interesting discussion followed and it got me thinking about my own experience with offering my design services pro bono or for free. In this post I want to share some of those experiences with you and how they have influenced my business approach as well as the impact this has had when I began applying it to my social media interaction.
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- True Art
Those works created from solitude & from pure & authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim & social promotion do not interfere – are, because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of professionals. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully & so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade. (Jean Dubuffet)
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- All The Links I Tweeted This Week: 3/1 – 3/5
I have tried to share the links I tweet in several different formats on this blog, just in case someone would benefit from it. It got to be a bit much work, and then the automated searchable database of links that I had running started doing weird things, so I kind of stopped. But I thought I would try another route, and simply keep a copy of every link I tweet throughout the week, then simply make the list available here. It’s not sorted by category or anything like that. It is just plain and simply the links in the order I’ve tweeted them, from Monday through this morning. Social media, SEO, freelancing, web and graphic design – all here and probably a few other things as well. On the weekends there are significantly less articles published, so maybe if you are looking for something to read this will give you some options.
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- Surprise!!! Social Media (and Life) Is NOT A Competition
Spend a few minutes browsing through recent headlines about social media and you will most likely be left with the impression that all of the networks are in a fierce competition with each other. Facebook is the king, with more paticipants than any other. Twitter recently boasted that its users are posting an average of 50 million updates a day. Google Buzz burst onto the scene and the pundits immediately pitted it against the others in comparisons and contrasts. The list goes on and on, with countless also-rans and quickly-developed newcomers waiting in the wings, all hoping to compete for your membership and usage.
Zoom in and take a closer look within the individual social networks and you will witness users clamoring for significant increases in followers and friends, regularly checking numbers and trying a myriad of techniques to grow their counts to what those who are paying attention might call ‘respectable’. Tools that rate, rank and grade feed the frenzy and give us all the ability to measure our success in order to insure that we are doing things ‘correctly’.
A few weeks back I got involved in a conversation on Twitter in which another user (identity to remain anonymous) was tweeting complaints to TwitterGrader (a tool that ranks users based on an algorithm that goes beyond simple numbers). This person was upset because they have almost twice as many followers and updates as I do, yet TwitterGrader listed me in the top 5 in my city while leaving him somewhere further down the list. I told him it really didn’t matter and that this whole thing is not a competition, to which he responded vehemently, “EVERYTHING is a competition! LIFE is a competition!”
Really? Is that the world we live in?
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- Google Buzz (Kill) Has Driven Me To Social Media Self-Examination
What I need is to continue to get better at giving and sharing and interacting with others who have similar interests, interesting viewpoints and intelligent discussion. Not another social media tool.
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- Where Has The Art Of Customer Service Gone?
Call me old fashioned, but I have this crazy idea that businesses should provide at least a minimal amount of human element in the customer service they offer to their paying clientele.
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- A Social Media (and Life) Lesson I Learned From My 12-Year-Old
Today is my son’s 12th birthday.
It seems like only yesterday that he was without a doubt the cutest toddler on earth, and as the youngest in the family it is definitely with much melancholy that we approach the incoming teen years with him, never to steer through the early childhood years again. From day one he has been his Mom’s “baby”, the youngest and only son and more-than-willing recipient of all the benefits that are a part of that special mother-son bond. So it is probably most difficult of all for my wife to watch him grow into a young man. Still, we are proud of who he is becoming, and it is part of this that I want to share with you in a simple but profound lesson I have learned from him.
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- Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Radical Color Theory Redesign
I possess an unusual characteristic I want to share with you: I am color blind.
Not in the literal sense of the term, which would make it extremely difficult to be a designer, but from an early age my life experiences have developed in me an almost inability to identify people based upon the color of their skin.
Even more remarkable may be the basis for this writing: because of my own experience, I truly believe it is possible for all of humanity to shake off generations of racial stereotypes, prejudices, and perceived ethnicity-based differences to instead inhabit and embrace the amazing dream of a most amazing man whose birthday we recognized in America yesterday: Martin Luther King, Jr.
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- Is “Good Design” In The Eye Of The Beholder?
I’ve seen quite a few articles and blog posts recently discussing “good design” and “bad design”. It got me thinking about the concept, along with the various categorizations and judgments we who operate under the title “designer” place so easily on the work of others. Is not the determination of whether or not an object of design is deserving of the title “good” a subjective one, formed by preferences and/or opinions? Or is there, in fact, a set of standards or guidelines written in stone somewhere that all design can and should adhere to?
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