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Twitter is getting ambitious. In fact, it’s recent changes show just how ambitious . . . and just how much they want to be like Facebook. A couple of recent changes include: The Twitter Header – you can now upload your own unique header on your account. I like this feature because if you take advantage of it (and use it right) your readers and visitors will quickly know what you’re about.

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By Jan Willer

Social media and other technologies have changed how we communicate. Consider how we coordinate events and contact our friends and family members today, versus how we did it 20 or 30 years ago. Today, we often text, email, or communicate through social media more frequently than we phone or get together in person.

Now contrast that with psychotherapy, which is still about two people getting together in a room and talking. Certainly, technology has changed psychotherapy. There are now apps for mental health issues. There are virtual reality treatments. Psychotherapy can now be provided through videoconferencing (a.k.a. telehealth). But still, it’s usually simply two people talking in a room.

Our psychotherapy clients communicate with everyone else they know through multiple technological platforms. Should we let them “friend” us on social media? Should we link to them on professional networking sites? Is it ok to text with them? What about email? When are these ok and not ok?

Some consensus is emerging about these issues. Experts agree that psychotherapists should not connect with current or former clients on social media. This is to help preserve the clients’ confidentiality. Emailing and texting are fine for communicating brief messages about the parameters of the session, such as confirming the appointment time, or informing the psychotherapist that the client is running late. Research has shown that emotional tone is frequently miscommunicated in texting and email, so emotion-laden topics are best discussed during the session.

How do we learn about new people we’ve met? In the past, we’d talk directly to them, and maybe also talk to people we knew in common. Now everyone seems to search online for everyone else. This happens frequently with first dates, college applicants, and job applicants.

Again, contrast this with psychotherapy. Again, two people are sitting in a room, talking and learning about each other. When is it ok for a psychotherapist to search for information about a client online? What if the psychotherapist discovers important information that the client withheld? How do these discoveries impact the psychotherapy?

No clear consensus has emerged on these issues. Some experts assert that psychotherapists should almost never search online for clients. Other experts respond that it is unreasonable to expect that psychotherapists should not access publicly available information. Others suggest examining each situation on a case-by-case basis. One thing is clear: psychotherapists should communicate with their clients about their policies on internet searches. This should be done in the beginning of psychotherapy, as part of the informed consent process.

When we’ve voluntarily posted information online–and when information about us is readily available in news stories, court documents, or other public sources–we don’t expect this information to be private. For this reason, I find the assertion that psychotherapists can access publically available information to be more compelling. On my intake forms, I invite clients to send me a link to their LinkedIn profile instead of describing their work history, if they prefer. If a client mentions posting her artwork online, I’ll suggest that she send me a link to it or ask her how to find it. I find that clients are pleased that I take an interest.

What about the psychotherapist’s privacy? What if the client follows the psychotherapist’s Twitter account or blog? What if the client searches online for the psychotherapist? What if the client discovers personal information about the psychotherapist by searching? Here’s the short answer: psychotherapists need to avoid posting anything online that we don’t want everyone, including our clients, to see.

Ways to communicate online continue to proliferate. For example, an app that sends only the word “Yo” was recently capitalized to the tune of $2.5 million and was downloaded over 2 million times. Our professional ethics codes are revised infrequently (think years), while new apps and social media are emerging monthly, even daily. Expert consensus on how to manage these new communications technologies emerges slowly (again, think years). But psychotherapists have to respond to new communications technologies in the moment, every day. All we can do is keep the client’s well-being and confidentiality as our highest aspiration.

Jan Willer is a clinical psychologist in private practice. For many years, she trained psychology interns at the VA. She is the author of The Beginning Psychotherapist’s Companion, which offers practical suggestions and multicultural clinical examples to illustrate the foundations of ethical psychotherapy practice. She is interested in continuing to bridge the notorious research-practice gap in clinical psychology. Her seminars have been featured at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and DePaul University. 

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By Luciano Floridi

When we use a computer, its performance seems to degrade progressively. This is not a mere impression. An old version of Firefox, the free Web browser, was infamous for its “memory leaks”: it would consume increasing amounts of memory to the detriment of other programs. Bugs in the software actually do slow down the system. We all know what the solution is: reboot. We restart the computer, the memory is reset, and the performance is restored, until the bugs slow it down again.

Philosophy is a bit like a computer with a memory leak. It starts well, dealing with significant and serious issues that matter to anyone. Yet, in time, its very success slows it down. Philosophy begins to care more about philosophers’ questions than philosophical ones, consuming increasing amount of intellectual attention. Scholasticism is the ultimate freezing of the system, the equivalent of Windows’ “blue screen of death”; so many resources are devoted to internal issues that no external input can be processed anymore, and the system stops. The world may be undergoing a revolution, but the philosophical discourse remains detached and utterly oblivious. Time to reboot the system.

Philosophical “rebooting” moments are rare. They are usually prompted by major transformations in the surrounding reality. Since the nineties, I have been arguing that we are witnessing one of those moments. It now seems obvious, even to the most conservative person, that we are experiencing a turning point in our history. The information revolution is profoundly changing every aspect of our lives, quickly and relentlessly. The list is known but worth recalling: education and entertainment, communication and commerce, love and hate, politics and conflicts, culture and health, … feel free to add your preferred topics; they are all transformed by technologies that have the recording and processing of information as their core functions. Meanwhile, philosophy is degrading into self-referential discussions on irrelevancies.

The result of a philosophical rebooting today can only be beneficial. Digital technologies are not just tools merely modifying how we deal with the world, like the wheel or the engine. They are above all formatting systems, which increasingly affect how we understand the world, how we relate to it, how we see ourselves, and how we interact with each other.

The ‘Fourth Revolution’ betrays what I believe to be one of the topics that deserves our full intellectual attention today. The idea is quite simple. Three scientific revolutions have had great impact on how we see ourselves. In changing our understanding of the external world they also modified our self-understanding. After the Copernican revolution, the heliocentric cosmology displaced the Earth and hence humanity from the centre of the universe. The Darwinian revolution showed that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through natural selection, thus displacing humanity from the centre of the biological kingdom. And following Freud, we acknowledge nowadays that the mind is also unconscious. So we are not immobile, at the centre of the universe, we are not unnaturally separate and diverse from the rest of the animal kingdom, and we are very far from being minds entirely transparent to ourselves. One may easily question the value of this classic picture. After all, Freud was the first to interpret these three revolutions as part of a single process of reassessment of human nature and his perspective was blatantly self-serving. But replace Freud with cognitive science or neuroscience, and we can still find the framework useful to explain our strong impression that something very significant and profound has recently happened to our self-understanding.

Since the fifties, computer science and digital technologies have been changing our conception of who we are. In many respects, we are discovering that we are not standalone entities, but rather interconnected informational agents, sharing with other biological agents and engineered artefacts a global environment ultimately made of information, the infosphere. If we need a champion for the fourth revolution this should definitely be Alan Turing.

The fourth revolution offers a historical opportunity to rethink our exceptionalism in at least two ways. Our intelligent behaviour is confronted by the smart behaviour of engineered artefacts, which can be adaptively more successful in the infosphere. Our free behaviour is confronted by the predictability and manipulability of our choices, and by the development of artificial autonomy. Digital technologies sometimes seem to know more about our wishes than we do. We need philosophy to make sense of the radical changes brought about by the information revolution. And we need it to be at its best, for the difficulties we are facing are challenging. Clearly, we need to reboot philosophy now.

Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. He was recently appointed as ethics advisor to Google. His most recent book is The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality.

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Image credit: Alan Turing Statue at Bletchley Park. By Ian Petticrew. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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I’ve made an uneasy peace with becoming a product sold to advertisers. Now it seems I’ve been a lab rat, too.

The AV Club reports:

Scientists at Facebook have published a paper showing that they manipulated the content seen by more than 600,000 users in an attempt to determine whether this would affect their emotional state. The paper, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” was published in The Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences. It shows how Facebook data scientists tweaked the algorithm that determines which posts appear on users’ news feeds—specifically, researchers skewed the number of positive or negative terms seen by randomly selected users. Facebook then analyzed the future postings of those users over the course of a week to see if people responded with increased positivity or negativity of their own, thus answering the question of whether emotional states can be transmitted across a social network. Result: They can! Which is great news for Facebook data scientists hoping to prove a point about modern psychology. It’s less great for the people having their emotions secretly manipulated.

I uploaded this picture last night, intending to write my usual sort of daily-chronicle post. Then my eye wandered from the rainbows inscribed on the bubble to the blunt, browned ends of the grass and I got distracted by the ruthlessness with which we shear off the fertile edges of nature. I wandered off to bed, musing, leaving the post unwritten. (Huck’s finger is much improved, was the gist.)

This morning, after reading the article quoted above (about a different kind of bubble, a ruthlessness altogether unsurprising but disgusting nonetheless), I came back here and found the photo waiting. And now I see that I’m in the picture too, there inside the bubble, taking a photo of the green world on the other side of the film. You could work up quite a metaphor there, obvious, clumsy, but apt: the insubstantial bubbles, the world outside, the illusions of people that aren’t the persons themselves.

But my frustrations aren’t philosophical (of course Facebook was always going to exploit us in every way possible) but practical. The reason a billion people have handed over their (our) data to Facebook is, at heart, a practical one: it’s the most efficient platform anyone has yet come up with for letting us keep in touch with a large number of friends and family at once. We failed at writing letters. Good phone conversations, while satisfying, take immense chunks of time. If you want to keep up with each other’s daily lives, the little things, you have to talk every couple of days (at the least) or else there’s too much ground to cover and you must out of necessity abridge.

Yahoogroups worked, for a while—you could engage in meaningful discourse or chummy banter with a good-sized group of people at once. But generally most of those relationships were new, were forged because of the group, by means of the group. I made some lifelong friends that way (hello, TAMs! hello, Karen!) but (I don’t like that ‘but’; it sounds like a devaluation of the friendships on its left, and that isn’t what I mean at all)—but—but my high-school friends didn’t form a Yahoogroup. My college friends didn’t. We kept to our phone calls, our occasional letters and visits. I read letters six times and treasured them, and didn’t write back, or did but didn’t stop for stamps.

After a while, most of the Yahoogroups I was part of morphed into discussion boards (more efficient, because they allowed for topic-sorting; less efficient, because they required administration and management) or faded into disuse. I think I’m still signed up to forty-odd lists. I get mail from three, and read one and a half. It’s years since I logged into a discussion board.

Then came blogs. Those of us still doggedly blogging for personal reasons look back on 2005 and 2006 with nostalgia: we remember what it was like in those days, less than a decade ago, when we were for the first time opening our front doors and saying here’s my house, come in. We shared too much, made friends, celebrated art and nature, got in fights, copied one another or got furious about being copied—all the same things we’d done on AOL in 1995 and in email groups in 1999, only now with photos of our children. We formed new and very real friendships: real and strange, because we knew (know) so much about each other and have watched each other’s children grow up, and yet we live so far away some of us may never meet. When one of us goes silent for a while, the others worry. Sometimes I’ll think: if she dies, I might never know what happened.

That’s if she isn’t on Facebook. Because that’s what Facebook does better than blogging—connects wide groups of people and spreads news they wouldn’t necessarily publish on any other website—and Facebook is why only a fraction of my friends-who-blogged are blogging still. Facebook IS blogging. It’s everyone blogging at once on the same platform, a platform cleverly managed (manipulated) for purposes we all agree are greedy at best, and not guided by principles that put our best interests remotely near the top of the priority list.

I love Facebook. I hate Facebook. I have loved and hated it since the day I joined. Facebook gave me back friends I had lost: that’s the sum total of my reason for loving it, and it’s immense. All those other platforms brought me new friends. Facebook reunited me with old ones. I don’t need to dress it up in metaphors. I’d lost touch with some of the people I loved best, and Facebook gave them back to me. It gave me what blogging didn’t: daily contact with beloved cousins and old school friends. Every day, it gave (gives) me photos and anecdotes of their lives, their children, their pets, their loved ones, their work. How can I measure the value of that?

If all the people I loved were inclined to blog—to blog about their personal lives, no less—I wouldn’t need a platform like Facebook. Somehow, Facebook accomplished the miraculous feat of convincing all these old friends to blog as we were doing, with oversharing and our children’s faces and outrage and sorrow and delight. And commenting is easier there, it just IS: fast, efficient (it always comes back to efficiency), and rewarded by a heartening LIKE. And—significantly—more conversational. You can reply back and forth quickly, in real-time like chat. Don’t blog comments feel more formal somehow? They didn’t use to. I feel like we used to chitchat more in the combox, but maybe that’s nostalgia. It’s probably just the time delay. If I reply to your comment here, it’s probably a day after you wrote it, and who knows if you even see the reply.

It’s strange, actually, the way we feel safer about sharing our personal stories on Facebook. We know we’re the product there; the evidence is thrust before us every time we open the tab and see a sidebar ad for a book we looked at on a different website the day before. We rail about the way they keep resetting the news feed from ‘most recent’ to ‘top stories,’ we fume at each sneaky privacy-policy change, we wince each time another website wants us to log in via Facebook before we can leave a comment.

But we go back, because that’s where our friends are posting photos of their their babies, their travels, their graduations. Because it’s a mini college reunion every time one of us posts and all our classmates chime in, laughing over an old shared joke. Because we have history together, and we care about one another’s present-day lives. Because if something serious happens, you’re going to tell your Facebook friends before you put it on a blog.

To leave, or to make the decision never to go in the first place (for reasons I respect and with a resolve I may at times envy a little), is to cut yourself off from a certain flow of information. There’s plenty of nonsense and trivia on Facebook, as there is in all forms of human interaction, including some of the best phone calls I’ve ever had. But there’s a great deal of the Real, the Good, the True there too, and it’s that—not simply the dopamine hit, as many theorists would have us believe—that brings us back. It’s genuine curiosity. It’s, to be blunt, love. I love you and I want to know how you’re doing. If Facebook is where you’re showing me, how can I stay away?

I would pay for an ad-free social connection site with no data-mining and no gross user manipulation of the sort revealed in the newly published study described in the article above. (You can click through from the article to the study itself.) But—here’s what I know. I know it’s unlikely a critical mass of my friends and relatives would too. Facebook caught us because it was free, and because there was a numerical tipping point: so many of us are there now, you really are missing something if you aren’t. Which isn’t to say anyone should be there who doesn’t want to be: I wouldn’t presume. As I said, I respect and admire their reasons for staying away.

But I’m a practical person, and I know what I’ll miss out on if I leave. I’m 46 years old and I’ve lived in a lot of places. I love a great many people. As I said on Facebook this morning when I shared the link above—my last act before logging out for a breather—”But how will I get my YOU fix?”

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Ok. I think every author concerned with reaching out with their readers, networking with other authors and selling more books is either engaged on social media or has at least thought about it. The two (in my opinion) heavy weight entities with regards to social media are Facebook and Twitter. These two networks have their fans.

I have to admit that I used to be a big fan of Facebook as it was easy to migrate from having a personal account to a fan page. I understood how it worked and I could apply what I was doing on an almost daily basis on my Facebook Personal account to my Fan page. On the other hand, this Monster called Twitter, just didn’t make sense. I mean wasn’t the whole concept of Twitter similar to shouting in a market place?

It just didn’t make sense and I avoided it…until sometime last year when I read a book titled How to Get Followers on Twitter: A Simple Guide on How to Optimize Twitter and Hootsuite by Denice Shaw. I started applying some of the things I discovered in this book and my Twitter following has swelled from less than a hundred to more than 500.

Now it has to be said that the amount of your followers does not determine how influential a person is on any social network. I have seen Facebook fan pages with thousands of fans but only a handful currently engaged with the posts on that page. An effective social media network should do at least one of the following:

1. Help you to easily find people interested in your passions and interests.
2. Facilitate easy connection with people who share your passions and interests.
3. Enable a conversation with people that share your passions and interests.

Now with the algorithm changes at Facebook, it has become almost nigh on impossible to do any of the above. Can you think of a painless way to get discovered by people on Facebook who like the books you like? Most authors (and I’m one of them) no longer see the same traction Facebook once provided.

However, Twitter provides the three benefits I highlighted above. Central to the ease of seeing and being seen on the Twitterverse are little things known as hashtags. If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably seen someone leave a message like this

‘Can’t wait to read the latest #mystery #novel by Harlan Coben.’

The symbol ‘#’ before the words mystery and novel render them as hashtags. Anyone on Twitter who is interested in mystery novels can search for those hashtags, find your tweet and either retweet (that is broadcast your tweet to their followers), favourite (similar to liking a post on Facebook) and/or reply to your post. As an author, I usually use the hashtags below:

#IndieAuthor

#novel

#Mystery

#WritingTip

#Kidlit

#MGLit

#Kidlitchat

I’ve found it humbling and exciting when people who don’t even follow me either retweet, favourite or reply to my tweets simply because I have included a hashtag that relates to something they’re interested in. I have made many new friends and acquaintances this way. I have had the parent of a student at a school where I did a reading reach out to me on Twitter. I’ve had a few New York Times Best-selling authors retweet, favourite and/or like my tweets. This week, I had a lovely lady reach out to me on Twitter and share a picture of her grandson with one of my books. The possibilities for connecting with your fans and other book lovers really is bountiful on Twitter. I’d like to encourage you to join Twitter today and join the conversation. There’s a certain group of people who are speaking your language and will gladly welcome you into their fold as to share with you and have you share with them.

I’ll still keep using Facebook but my main stop when I think of social media is Twitter.

I’d highly recommend Denice Shaw’s book as it contains many useful tips, etiquette, resources to help you understand and use Twitter well. Get it at the link below

How to Get Followers on Twitter: A Simple Guide on How to Optimize Twitter and Hootsuite

Are you still finding joy on Facebook? Or perhaps Twitter still doesn’t make sense to you. Or maybe you use LinkedIn or some other social media network that you’d highly recommend. I really would like to hear your thoughts and comments, so drop a line or two in the comment box below and you can follow me on Twitter @davidchuka

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Okay, this is a bit off topic for an art and baby blog. But if you know me, you know I am a HUGE Leo DiCaprio fan! I always was!

I decided to start a Leonardo DiCaprio fan page on Facebook earlier this year, because I have folders upon folders upon folders (you get the point, lol) of Leo pictures that are just sitting on my hard drive, and it would be selfish not to let others enjoy them as well. And I'm not selfish. Nope, not selfish at all! Unless we're talking about chocolate....

So if you're a Leo fan, click on over to Facebook and click the LIKE to see We Love Leonardo pics in your news feed, DAILY (or almost daily)!

I thought I'd mention this because I do share my blog posts on my Facebook pages (I have several) and I have a Leo DiCaprio board on Pinterest as well! You know, if you have any Pinterest interest. =)

Thanks for dropping by today!

Disclaimer: I am NOT affiliated with Leo! I don't know him. Please do not send me any mail for him, etc.! This is a fan page only! Just for fun! Enjoy the pics!

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Welcome to our holiday hop!

We are so excited about our latest book, The Christmas Owl, that we are giving away two prizes to one lucky winner.  Our prize is a 5-inch stuffed owl and a signed hardcover version of The Christmas Owl.  This story follows a Barred owl becomes injured and must ask others for help. He promises to give back to those who have a generous heart and he is true to his word.  This colorful holiday tale is perfect for children aged eight and under.

                  

This giveaway ends on December 13th at midnight so ENTER today.

Click to see the other blogs participating in our holiday hop hosted by Youth Literature Reviews and Mother Daughter Book Reviews.

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So it seems I hit a little blog lull, quite unexpectedly. I write posts in my head every day, all through the day (it’s why I began blogging in the first place, you know: thinking in narrative is the way my brain has always, always worked)—but lately I seem prone to tossing a thought or a quip or a link onto Facebook instead of chronicling here. And yet I recoil, actually, from the idea of handing over one’s mental activity to the data-miners and the the rushing update stream. I have this looping conversation with myself over and over. If you blog and are also active on Facebook, I bet you know exactly what I mean.

On Facebook, people leave comments: that’s one point in its favor, part of its great appeal. And let me back up and say how much I love certain aspects of Facebook! I champion it often, when people are running it down for being shallow or negative. Facebook gave me what no other medium has: daily contact with my faraway cousins, my old school friends, my coworkers from jobs long past. Very precious contact, actually. Friendships rekindled and deepened. Road trips made merry (and potentially safer) by en route updates, with friends keeping tabs on us and inviting us to stop and stretch our legs as we made our way across the country and back. There are things Facebook can do that this blog cannot.

But: vice versa! Such riches I have tucked into the archives here—family treasures, I mean. Stories I’d certainly have forgotten, had I not recorded them here. A diary of sorts of our homeschooling journey. An annotated reading journal. A commonplace book, with pictures. Oh, I love this blog, what it’s given me. Including the friends: no small matter, that. Facebook reconnected me with old friends. Blogging gave me new ones, and I count those friendships as very real and rich indeed.

I don’t comment on your blogs nearly often enough. I’m still probably among your most faithful readers, though, did you know that? I find myself reaching for the like button to let you know I’ve appreciated a post, am nodding my head at your insight or smiling at your joke. On Facebook people snark about the superficiality of ‘likes.’ I understand why, it’s quick and glancing, it’s not saying anything meaningful, it sometimes suggests an unfortunate endorsement of the wrong half of a sentence. (“I got an offer on a YA novel today! But then I fell and broke my leg.” Er, like? No, wait!) But that silly like button serves a purpose. I means I’m here, I’m reading this, I took note of what you said, I’m glad you shared. If I could click a button on Feedly to let you know I’d appreciated a post, you can bet I would. Clicking through to actually comment, now…oh, I wish I were better about it. Sometimes it’s captcha that deters me, or login technicalities. (Blogger gets very grumpy with me when I don’t want to comment as Melissa Wiley’s Official Data-Providing Google Account, which I loathe doing on friends blogs because I’m just Lissa to you, right? And I can never remember my WordPress login on blogs that aren’t mine.) But other times, a friendly comment is an easy click away and I still don’t take the time, because I’m probably reading your post on my phone, and I really really hate typing with my thumbs.

A Facebook update is much more likely to generate discussion these days, at least for me. Of course, Facebook is such a combustible stew of people from all one’s different worlds and walks of life—sometimes I cringe, seeing all my people jumbled up together that way. I’ve tried separating my personal and professional worlds there but it’s flat impossible. Colleagues become friends, and then what do you do? Make them switch accounts? Who can keep up with multiple accounts anyway? Not I.

All of this is musing without agenda: I simply thought I’d try thinking aloud here the way I did in the olden days of blogging. You know, way back in 2006.

For my own amusement, a few of the topics I’ve posted about on social media recently:

• geocaching, which has become our favorite pastime, and I could talk about it ENDLESSLY for HOURS (see one diabolically clever hiding place in the photo above—oh how we shrieked!)

• how I’ve started writing serious poems again, and I really miss my old grad-school poetry workshop mates and the close readings we used to do of our own poems and others

• Coursera classes I’m taking (alone or with various kids), and many many thoughts about how we use Coursera—and actually I have a long post half-written on that subject. It began here (is still in drafts) and spilled over to Facebook, and judging from that conversation I actually have a lot of practical information to share on the topic.

• related: gossip as a vital tool for human survival—one of the many fascinating points of discussion in the Coursera “Brief History of Humankind” class I’m taking, about which I have LOADS OF THINGS to say

• also related: the Coursera “Modern and Contemporary Poetry” course is wonderful and is going a long way to satisfy my ache for close readings, since each week’s lesson consists of video discussions (grad students and professor) of several different poems—one poem per fifteen(ish)-minute video, perfect for diving into in small chunks of time, which is all I have

• a mocking gripe about my internet service provider, not worth recording

• links to various articles, all of which I’ve shared in the sidebar here anyway

• my delight over the first sketches for Inch and Roly #3

• a picture of The Greatest American Hero, which generated more comments than anything else I’ve posted this month

• the sudden realization after all these years that in the Magic School Bus theme song, the guy is not actually saying “Make a sacrifice on Mars.”

• and in the comments of the above, the revelation that “the guy” is none other than Little Richard!!!

• an adorable photo of my boys

• Overheard, 7yo to 4yo: “I’m going to teach you three things. The first one is Pounce, and it goes like this.”

Which is, it turns out, kind of a lot.

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Retired soccer player David Beckham‘s new memoir is coming out next week and to help promote the new book, he’ll be doing a reading live on Facebook on October 30th, the day that the book comes out.

Beckham announced the news on his Facebook page.

In partnership with Facebook, I want to do a truly global signing to coincide with the launch of my new book. If you are in London, New York, Sao Paulo or Hyderabad you can enter to win a ticket to take part in these events and receive a personalised digital signature from me via ground breaking technology. If you’re not in those cities, you won’t be disappointed as you can take a seat in the Facebook Digital Stadium to watch a live Q&A session where I will answer questions from fans around the world.

AppNewser has more: “Beckham didn’t explain which technology he will be using to provide digital autographs with.Autography is one option. The platform lets authors digital books digitally and deliver them to the pages of eBooks.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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WRITE your slice. SHARE your link. GIVE some comments to (at least three) other slicers. If you’re leaving your comment early in the day, please consider returning this evening or tomorrow to read… Read More →

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Romance novelist Jackie Collins will answer questions from fans on Facebook this afternoon from 3:00pm until 4:00pm in EDT, hosting a live chat on her Facebook wall about The Power Trip.

It could be an interesting interaction tool for writers–so far more than 160 readers say they plan to attend the online event. Here’s more from the post:

Got questions for me? Join me on Thursday, October 3 for a live chat on the Facebook wall. Get ready … definitely a lot to dish about when it comes to The Power Trip!

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Social Media, what works for you?

Relationships. It’s all about relationships. Social media is just our virtual pub or café or bookstore or our neighborhood park. It’s about introducing yourself, & maybe your dog and making friends. That’s really all it is for me. I try and help people out and people help me out all the time. When I have questions about things I get great advice and when someone has some good news we all celebrate.

I hang out where I feel the most comfortable, like in real life. Social media really isn’t any different. The cool thing about it is that you can make friends and even keep up a friendship that starts at a conference or vacation…where ever. It’s pretty cool to have friends all over the world and really cool to discover and read stories I might never have had the chance to without social media.

As an author, I’m most comfortable using Twitter ( @Laurawriting ) and Facebook. Facebook is a little harder for me. I’ve got two pages…one for my personal life and one for my readers and I try to keep them separate, but it’s a little like trying to take the chocolate out of a banana split LOL. So that confuses me a little, to be honest. I do love Pinterest because it’s so visual. My favorite boards are book swag I love, food that I love and of course the YA Indie Carnival  I wish I knew how to converse with my Goodreads fans better. I have an automatic feed which posts my blog posts there, but I find it a little more challenging to have a dialog with my fans there. I love discussing books and so I look forward to people who post with questions/comments about my books or reviews.

Social media is just the modern word of mouth. And that’s the way books have been recommended to readers for hundreds of years. It’s just more exciting now. But it is super confusing sometimes, especially for authors who are just getting into it. At UtopYA, I can’t remember the author, but she was so sweet and walked up to me and said she just didn’t know where to begin. I hear that a lot. The advice I gave when she asked me is the advice I heard when I was getting started. Pick one place, it doesn’t matter where, if Facebook feels good to you pick that, if it’s easier for you to post in 140 characters then use Twitter, if you’re visual maybe Tumblr or Pinterest is for you. Just pick one and use it and start to meet people the old-fashioned way in a high tech pub/café/bookstore/park Twitter confused the heck out of me when I first used it…I was like what is this thing? But it’s been a great way to meet amazing friends, whether they’re dog lovers, book bloggers, readers, other writers, artists, screenwriters…you name it. (hint: it’s all about the # hashtags )

I sat in on one of the panels and the fabulous Kallie Ross, an awesome YA Fantasy writer/incredible panel mediator/one smart cookie, mentioned that youtube is the most searched place on the Internet. So it’s a great place to make friends. I have a channel there and post videos I use in my research and my book trailers and follow channels that make me laugh, have something to do with food and books too. I definitely could do more with my channel. Click here to swing by sometime if you want to see how I use it.

Wattpad is another site that Amanda Harvard, talented author/incredible musician/and all-around fun person, talked about on one of the UtopYA panels. Loads of authors and readers love that site. I might get my feet wet there next. But, enough about my take…what works for you?

See what the other amazing carnis have to say about it too And check out YA Author Club for upcoming carnival topics!

1.	Laura A. H. Elliott	2.	Bryna Butler, author Midnight Guardian series
3.	T. R. Graves, Author of The Warrior Series	4.	Suzy Turner, author of The Raven Saga
5.	Rachel Coles, author of Into The Ruins, geek mom blog	6.	K. C. Blake, author of Vampires Rule and Crushed
7.	Gwenn Wright, author of Filter	8.	Liz Long | Just another writer on the loose.
9.	Ella James	10.	Maureen Murrish
11.	YA Sci Fi Author’s Ramblings	12.	A Little Bit of R&R
13.	Melissa Pearl	14.	Terah Edun – YA Fantasy
15.	Heather Sutherlin – YA Fantasy	16.	Melika Dannese Lux, author of Corcitura and City of Lights
17.	Author Cindy C Bennett

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Hi folks! I am giving away a copy of Being Frank on June 14th! Here are the rules for the giveaway: 1. In the comments section below, share a time when you were too honest for your own good OR when someone was too honest with you (keep it family friendly!) 2. Share this post …

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Looking for a new book? Visit our new Coming Attractions page, a growing list of books written by GalleyCat readers.

We’ve sorted the list alphabetically, but you can search for your favorite genre inside the growing collection. Click here if you want to download a copy of the spreadsheet (CSV file) and sort the information yourself. We will update this spreadsheet frequently and highlight some of the books in our weekly Coming Attractions post.

Click here to submit your book to our permanent database of new books. Please fill in all the blanks and keep your descriptions brief. Authors, publicists, editors, and readers can all make use of this new section, but use the author’s name in the blanks. As always, you can also post literary events on our Facebook wall. (Image via Flickr user IaasB)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Why do some Americans feel nostalgic for a culture “where everyone knows his place?” Cultural critic Mark Dery tackled that question for Thought Catalog, publishing an e-single on American Anglophilia called “England My England.”

We took the opportunity to republish Dery’s Morning Media Menu interview from last year, covering everything from Facebook etiquette to Christian comic creator Jack Chick.

Press play below to listen on SoundCloud. While talking about best Facebook practices, Dery also outlined a version of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game that could be played with New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Do you ever stop learning? I don’t. I may be able to teach a number of things and bring out the best in my students, but for myself, I keep learning.

Here are some things I’ve learned lately.

• Ban yellow highlighters! Highlighting is a poor learning strategy. Instead, stop ever so often and ask: Why is this true? How does this relate to things I already know? What do I still not know?
• I know way too little about writing comedy. But here are three great books on the topic that are making me work and work VERY HARD (Hurrah!):
  1. John Vorhaus, The Comic Toolbox
  2. John Vorhaus, The Little Book of Sitcom
  3. The Eight Characters of Comedy: Guide to Sitcom Acting And Writing by Scott Sedita
• I run faster when my music has the right beat. Try the Cruise Control app: Cruise Control: Run – Cruise Control.
• Flourless Chocolate Cake tastes good and is a great Valentine recipe.




• Pinterest is becoming one of the major sources of traffic to my site. The visual medium of book covers and other related imagery piques people’s interest. Follow me on Pinterest.
• If your name is Pattison, your name might be confused with Pattinson these days. Miserable vampires.
• Life would be more interesting if YOU were part of the Fiction Notes Facebook group and if you asked and answered lots of questions there. Please come join us.

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In the December 4, 2012 issue of Shelf Awareness, in an article on YA authors and their social media platforms, Andrea Cremer (author of Nightshade and its sequels) admits she started out with a blog, but "now finds that medium too slow and relies primarily on Facebook and Twitter." 

She also says her "social media activity takes up three to four hours of her day." And that's without blogging!

Further evidence that blogging is losing its appeal: several of the authors I follow have essentially stopped blogging. The last time Maureen Johnson (Name of the Star) posted to her blog was five months ago. Yet you can find the Queen of Teen on Twitter nearly every waking hour of the day.  Laurie Halse Anderson also hasn't blogged for five months. Mike Jung (Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities) is another author with a Twitter empire. His last blog post was Feb 23, certainly recent enough. Yet the one before that was Oct 7, 2012!

What does this mean?

I think it means the future of blogging is Twitter and Facebook! The internet is changing our brains and the way we process information. People simply don't have the patience to read long blog posts anymore (Go on, admit it, you've skimmed more than one of my longer posts -- and yes, I've probably skimmed one or more of some other blogger's posts. Not yours! No!).  And it's possible that LinkedIn, Google+, Tumblr and especially Pinterest also vie for a portion of your allotted social media time. When does anyone have time to write or read books?

Wait until Facebook buys out Twitter and they'll be the same thing.  Then it will be one looming tower of babble.

What do you think?

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By José van Dijck

In 2006, there appeared to be a remarkable consensus among Internet gurus, activists, bloggers, and academics about the promise of Web 2.0 that users would attain more power than they ever had in the era of mass media. Rapidly growing platforms like Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006) facilitated users’ desire to make connections and exchange self-generated content. The belief in social media as technologies of a new “participatory” culture was echoed by habitual tools-turned-into-verbs: buttons for liking, trending, following, sharing, trending, et cetera. They articulated a feeling of connectedness and collectivity, strongly resonating the belief that social media enhanced the democratic input of individuals and communities. According to some, Web 2.0 and its ensuing range of platforms formed a unique chance to return the “public sphere” — a sphere that had come to be polluted by commercial media conglomerates — back in the hands of ordinary citizens.

Eight years after the apex of techno-utopian celebration, a number of large platforms have come to dominate a social media ecosystem vastly different from when the platforms just started to evolve. It’s time for a reality check. What did social media do for the public — users like you — and for the ideal of a more democratic public space? Do they indeed promote connectedness and participation in community-driven activities or are they rather engines of connectivity, driven by automated algorithms and invisible business models?  Online socializing, as it now seems, is inimically mediated by a techno-economic logic anchored in the principles of popularity and winner-takes-all principles that enhance the pervasive logic of mass media instead of offering alternatives.

Most contemporary social media giants once started out as informal platforms for networking or “friending” (Facebook), for exchanging user-generated content (YouTube), or for participating in opinionated discussions (Twitter). It was generally assumed that in the new social media space, all users were equal. However, platforms’ algorithms measured relevance and importance in terms of popularity rankings, which subsequently formed the quantifiable basis of data-driven interactivity wrapped in “social” rhetoric such as following, trending, or sharing. In this platform-mediated ecosystem, sponsored and professionally generated content soon received a lot more attention than user-generated content. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook gradually changed their interfaces to yield business models that were staked in two basic variables: attention and user data. By 2012, once informal social traffic between users had become fully formalized, automated, and commoditized by platforms owned and exploited by fast growing corporate giants. Although each of these platforms nurses its own proprietary mechanisms, they are staked in the same values or principles: popularity, hierarchical ranking, quick growth, large traffic volumes, fast turnovers, and personalized recommendations. A like is not a retweet, but most algorithms are underpinned by the norms of popularity and fast-trending topics.

The cultivation of online sociality is increasingly dominated by four major chains of platforms: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. These chains share some operational principles even if they differ on some ideological premises (open versus closed systems). Some consider social media platforms as alternatives to the old mass media, praising their potential to empower individual users who can contribute their own opinions or content to a media universe that was before pretty much closed to amateurs. Although we should not underestimate this newly acquired power of the web as a publishing medium for all, it is hard to keep up the tenet that social media are alternatives to mass media. Over the past few years, it has become increasingly obvious that the logics of mass media and social media are intimately intertwined. Not just on the level of platforms mechanics and content (tweets have become the equivalent of soundbites) but also on the level of user dynamics and business models; YouTube-Google now collaborates with many former foes from Hollywood to turn their platform into the gateway to the entertainment universe. Newspapers and television stations are inevitably integrated in the ecosystem of connective media where the mechanisms of data-driven user traffic determines who and what gets most attention, hence drawing customers and eyeballs.

This new connective media system has reshaped the power relationships between platform owners and users, not only in terms of who may steer information but also who controls the vast amount of user data that rushes through the combined platforms every day. What are the larger political and social concerns behind deceptively simple interfaces and celebrated user-convenient tools? Where in 2006 the notion of user power still seemed unproblematic, the relationship between users and owners of social media platforms is now contentious and embattled. In the wake of the growing monopolization of niches (Facebook for social networking, Google for search, Twitter for microblogging) it is important to redefine and reappraise the meaning of “social,” “public,” “community,” and “nonprofit.” The ecosystem of connective media has no separate spaces for the “public”; it is a nirvana of interoperability which major players argue for deregulation and which imposes American neoliberal conditions on a global space where boundaries are considered disruptions of user convenience. Common public values, such as independence, trust, or equal opportunities, are ready for reassessment if they need to survive in an environment that is defined by social media logic.

José van Dijck is a professor of Comparative Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam; her latest book, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media has just been published by Oxford University Press (2013).

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Image credit: 3D little human character X9 in a Network, holding Tablet Computer. People series. Image by jojje9999, iStockphoto.

The post Social media and the culture of connectivity appeared first on OUPblog.

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Does your Twitter or Facebook profile look unbalanced?

The strategic communication company Cerebra has created an infographic outlining the ideal image sizes for photos on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Social Times has more information:

In February 2012, Facebook updated the look of its Timeline for Pages to include cover photos and featured posts, among other changes. Twitter’s December 2011 redesign, “Let’s Fly,” included new backgrounds for profiles. YouTube has changed quite a bit in the last year. The latest channel redesign, which will bring branded banners to all users, was announced a couple weeks ago. But it’s only available to select partners right now and is not reflected in this chart. Check YouTube’s channel art guidelines for updates.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Yesterday, in response to a query from Ilie Ruby, I posted a few lines from a novel in progress and then invited all my Facebook writer friends to do the same. I wanted to shatter, for that one day at least, the loneliness that can stem from writing. I wanted to celebrate those who had published and those who will soon publish—to make it clear that we are all of the same yearning community, no barriers between us.

The response was enormous. Friends told friends told friends, and Facebook became a map of beginnings, a crest of awe, a wild fire net of encouragement and surprise.

Late in the day, my husband and I headed down to the city to take place in another act of essential community—the memorial service for Gerald M. Cope, the theatrical and compassionate leader of the architecture firm (Cope Linder Associates) where I worked as a new graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and where I met my husband before he left (within a handful of weeks) for graduate work at Yale. We had made enduring friendships at this place. Gerry, and his son Ian (who now leads the firm) would come to our wedding. My husband would return to work at the firm for many, many years more. Yesterday, at the Union League, we saw these old friends again for the first time in a decade, more.

Those who spoke at the memorial service—Gerry's children, his brother, his friend, his wife—brought Gerry back to tangible life, reanimating this glorious man who was committed to engendering joy. Gerry understood, one person said, that it wasn't what you said that would be remembered, or what you did. It was how you would make others feel. Gerry Cope had a way of making us all feel charming and charmingly important. He united us, and yesterday we were again all friends once more.

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Create Your Writer Platform: The Key to Building an Audience, Selling More Books and finding Success as an Author -- Chuck Sambuchino

www.chucksambuchino.com

I’ve read several books on author platform but have to confess never fully grasping the term until reading Chuck Sambuchino’s CREATE YOUR WRITER PLATFORM. At its simplest level, a platform is an author’s visibility and reach -- the framework an author has and continues to build that let’s others know of his or her work.

Sambuchino describes his book as “a guide for all the hardworking writers out there who want a say in their own destinies.” Though there is no one-size-fits-all approach to establishing a platform, Sambuchino says the need for platform cannot be ignored, even for those of us who write fiction. The book is divided into three sections: The Principles of Platform, The Mechanics of Platform, and Author Case Studies. At the end of each chapter, literary agents weigh in on the chapter’s topic, giving readers perspectives outside of the author’s. One of the most helpful aspects of the book is the Case Study section, where twelve different authors from a variety of genres (memoir to self help, fiction to reference) reflect on the choices they made in building their platforms -- what worked, what they wish they’d done differently, what they believe makes them stand out from others in their field.

Sambuchino is also quick to say “this is a resource for those who realize that selling a book is not about blatant self-promotion.” It is more about relationships, the sharing of expertise, and supporting others along the way. Though written for the aspiring author, a lot of things resonated with me, a newly published author, such as the wisdom behind an author newsletter, establishing an “events” page on my blog, and always, that kindness and generosity go a long way.

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Rascal, when she's being good!

Dogs in books are quite popular, especially to me, since I've owned one dog or another for many years. Some of you may already know about my current dog, Rascal, a pit bull, who may yet show up in one of  my books.

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When Facebook rolled out its new promote button a few months back, it also quietly changed a part of the Pages features. In the past, every Page you "liked" was guaranteed to show up in your Newsfeed.

Not any more.

1. Open a Page (May B.'s Facebook page is a great place to start!).
2. Hover over the like button until the pull-down menu appears.
3. Click Get Notifications.
4. Voila! You'll never miss another post from your favorite Pages.

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