The Real Lance Brown

I listen to quite a few comedy podcasts, all of which are included in Joe Berkowitz’s A Seriously Comprehensive Guide to Comedy Podcasts.

His guide starts out with a lot of detail, and then the size and depth of the reviews shrink as you get nearer to the end. I’m assuming this is because for Joe to truly listen to and fully review all these podcasts would take a great deal of time. As it is, I’m sure his guide is a work of passion that has eaten up at least a few minutes of his day. Because it really is seriously comprehensive. (Though I don’t see the Onion News Network’s hilarious podcast there, so it’s not completely comprehensive. Just seriously.)

I haven’t listened to most of these podcasts, so I hesitate to suggest my favorites as preferable to what may be equal or better alternatives on the list. I will say that I look for and look forward to new episodes of the following regularly: WTF w/Marc Maron, Doug Loves Movies, Pod F. Tompkast, Never Not Funny, The Nerdist, and most newly, Judge John Hodgman. All of which are linked to in Joe’s guide. (And the Onion News Network, of course, which as of this writing is not. Which doesn’t make my first sentence here false, BTW, because the ONN podcast is a video one, and I said all the ones I listen to are in Joe’s list.)

<demystifying>A “podcast” is simply an Internet show (audio or video) that you download, or view or listen to on the Web. The name comes from the fact that they originally grew popular via iPods, but they are just regular .mp3 files, usually. </demystifying>

I’m definitely not one of those people who sticks my nose up at folks posting relatively ordinary occurrences from their day on Twitter.

I’ve been on the Internet for a long damn time, and one of the things that makes it great is its ability to bridge the invisible divide that has grown between “strangers” in the world. (And between the haves and have-nots, and the powered and the powerless, and so on.)

As we become more distinctive and narrowed in our daily lives–honing in on what we know and love, and excluding the rest–it’s more important than ever to remember that we’re all still human beings, and we all have a lot in common. Including mundane things, like eating, dealing with traffic, flying on planes, watching TV, whatever.

Especially with the flattening power of social media, where people who were formerly at a mythical distance from us are sharing themselves directly with fans and followers on a daily basis, it’s the mundane commonalities that help us to restructure our thoughts in a way that helps demystify the unhealthy societal hierarchies of the past. (Reality TV does the same thing in a way, but we’ll save that for another time.)

Put plainly, it’s a hyper-extension of the old mantra “we all put our pants on one leg at a time”. While I don’t know if there is a social media site yet that focuses on that specific mundane activity, people are sharing so-called “boring” details, vignettes, pictures, and snippets from their lives all the time…and while it’s popular and easy to sneer at such sharing, it’s also short-sighted and snobbish.

So don’t let anyone tell you that what you’re having for dinner, and how you feel about it, isn’t important. It is. I’ll explain more why that’s so as the year goes on, but for now, just trust me. You go ahead and share whatever the hell you want, and screw the haters. Send your frustrated partner, friend, or parent here if they have a beef with it. (If you’ve been sent here in accordance with that instruction: I know better than you about this stuff, and the person who sent you here is right about the sharing. Get off their case!)

Wow…I had no idea what was going to come out when I started to introduce my salad tweets from today, and the salad of which they spake. And I ended up creating a bridge of healing for divided couples everywhere. You never know what you’ll get when you tap into the Lance well!

Anyway…I’ve been on a major salad jag lately. I’ve always been a big fan of vegetables–I was one of those kids who was easy in that regard–but as a marginally-domesticated bachelor, I haven’t always managed to get salad into my life as much as my tastes would seem to support.

But, having decided to go the salad way for a while, I have been plunging in with earnest dedication–almost to a fault. (If we want to blame someone–and let’s assume we do–we should probably blame Robin Mallery and her call to create “6-color salads”.)

It takes about an hour to whip up one of my super-salads these days, and until today I was using a normal-sized wooden serving bowl and just ridiculously over-filling it, to the point where trying to serve from it, or toss or stir the salad, became a messy ordeal. And with my escalating madness, I was reaching the point where I ran out of space before I ran out of ingredients, so I’d end up with a giant-but-incomplete salad, with any new ingredients just spilling off the sides pointlessly.

So today I bit the bullet and went with the big plastic bowl–which, if I end up over-filling the way I did its predecessor, will be holding a salad that could potentially threaten a mid-size city, or more.

Such was the subject of a series of tweets from me today, as I realized the full consequences of my descent into Frankensteinishly hazardous food-preparation shenanigans.

WARNING: This is your last chance to back out before I pull away the curtain to expose the sad truth behind the inevitable hellscape future that I have unintentionally set into motion. You can still remain blissfully ignorant of your impending doom if you back out now. Read more…

Not much to be said here…Diana Adams at Ink Rebels has compiled a tremendous list of prompts to help you get unstuck if you ever don’t know what to blog about: 100 Sources of Blogging Inspiration

I’ve been planning on writing one of these “things to post about” posts myself, but it’s becoming increasingly unnecessary. Between Diana’s awesome list and the resources I linked to in this blog post here, the pool of potential content ideas is growing very wide and very deep. We may need to reclassify it as a pond soon.

Here’s a tip: bookmark this post, so you can find Diana’s list as well as my other post with three other lists on it. That should keep you busy for a while…unless you’re posting like 10 times a day or something (in which case you probably don’t need our help coming up with ideas anyway).

I hate to be a stickler here, but before I praise Heidi Cohen’s excellent list of affordable ways to pervasively promote your local business blog, I have to take issue with her title:

24 Ways to Promote Your Blog With NO Budget, NO Time & NO Resources

A reasonable person could think from reading that title that the “24 Ways” mentioned could be achieved with no budget, no time, and no resources. But that reasonable person would be getting deceived by hype. And upon discovering, after briefly suspending disbelief enough to think the title’s promise could be true, that in fact it is the exact sort of hyperbolic overstatement that the reasonable person quietly suspected it would end up being, the reasonable person would have his mass-media-cultivated shell of righteous cynicism hardened by at least one additional layer.

I’m the reasonable person in that scenario, by the way. As are you. And we shouldn’t be toyed with. That’s all I’m saying.

The reality of that title is as sad as it is obvious: there’s not a single one of those 24 things that can be done with NO budget, NO time, and NO resources. Each item on the list involves an action verb–which, as an editor, I applaud. But, as an amateur scientist, I can tell you that nothing which involves an action verb can be accomplished without using either time or resources, or both. “Make”, “Use”, “Work”, “Write”, “Offer to help”, “Place a computer”…these are not things that do themselves.

So I deduct major style points for the over-the-top hyperbolic title, and for reinforcing the cynicism of an already-cynical generation. It puts an unfortunate cloud over things–but I still think the list itself is worth checking out.

The true promise of the article is stated in the second paragraph, which has the more grounded and accurate heading “24 Low cost tips to promote your blog”:

“The most important step is to start looking for low cost/no cost promotional opportunities for your blog. It’s easy but it’s not always obvious. Here are twenty-four low cost ideas to help you get started.”

Low cost. Not zero time or money, which is impossible, but low cost, which is both possible and desirable. (But which does not make for as exciting a headline, unfortunately. Stupid boring reality!)

OK, good-natured (but serious) ribbing aside, Heidi’s article has some really great ways to up the ante on your blog promotion efforts. A lot of them involve putting a promo blurb about your blog in places you might not have thought of,  some others involve local outreach and partnerships, and still others deal with squeezing more win-win juice from your existing customers and foot traffic. They are 24 solid suggestions…and while every single one takes time or resources, and most of them will cost at least a little money (unless you own your own print shop), they are all definitely in the low-to-no cost range. And some require as little as a pen and a piece of paper.

Pick a handful of those things to do now, and make sure all the print-material-related ones get worked into your next print shop order, and you’ll have a lot less to worry about when it comes to promoting your web site locally.

Have more low–or-no cost ways for local businesses to promote their blogs? Might as well post them in the comments at Heidi’s post, since I’m suggesting we all go check that out anyway.

I might go post a comment about linking to your neighbors and getting listed in the web business directories, both of which I posted about here recently.

If you want to comment here, you could chime in on article titles that overstate their promise. Do you think I’m being too hard on Heidi regarding her hyperbolic title?

As long as it conveys something useful, informative, entertaining, or otherwise engaging, a blog post doesn’t necessarily have to be a full-length article.

It’s OK to post a short blog post sometimes.

Just a quick post to mention two resources I bumped into recently: MoreofIt and SitesLike. Both sites do basically the same thing, which is suggesting sites that are similar to the one you provide. I first stumbled onto MoreofIt when looking for alternatives to ToonDoo, the online comic creator that I use to make my comic The Little Things. (Turns out that Toondoo appears to be as good as the others, as far as I can tell. If you have a favorite online comic creator tool, let me know what it is and why you like it, please.)

I lost track of MoreofIt later that week (and didn’t remember the name), so I did a Google search to try and find it again–and that’s how I found SitesLike, which does essentially the same thing. Come to think of it, you could presumably find more of similar-site finders by entering either of these sites into the other one. ;-)

Aside from finding sites with these tools, if you have a website, there is another action item you can take: SitesLike has an add site tool.  (I couldn’t find one at MoreofIt; if you know of one for them, please let me know.) So you should probably take a second to add yours, if there’s a chance it might not be in there already.

David Garland at Small Business Trends has a nice succinct post about becoming a new kind of “celebrity” – the entrepreneurial niche celebrity (or “trusted resource”, which he suggests as a less hype-driven descriptor).

It’s funny – I’ve gotten so used to the list-style articles that are so popular these days, that when I discovered that David’s list ended after 3 items, I felt like it was abrupt or short. But when I looked back at the piece I realized he covers a lot of ground in his “short” list–each item has a lot of sub-points, especially the first two.

I read (or skim) so many articles these days that if I shared them all it would be overwhelming for both of us. So I’ve started using a rule of thumb that I’ll only post articles that taught me something, or moved me to action. David’s article gave me the final push to get my picture up on my site, and to work on infusing a little more Lance into things. (Stuff I tell all my clients to do of course, but you know, do as I say…) So maybe his quick run-through will give you a needed kick in the pants too…or provide you with a starting blueprint for your own rise to “celebrity” in your niche.

Author Julie Isaac put together the 2011 S.H.I.N.E. Online Blogging Challenge to help inspire bloggers to post more–so that they in turn inspire their readers. (Julie is the founder of the WritingSpirit Book Writers Community, so inspiring writers is right in her natural zone.)

I bumped into the S.H.I.N.E. challenge via Twitter, and it fit right in with the accountability festival I was drumming up early this month. In fact, I came up with the term “accountability festival”, which ended up being the title of one of my columns, when I was posting in the comments section of Julie’s blog about joining in on the challenge. Funny how things come about from small moments and coincidences. It’s synchronicity, or serendipity. It’s synchrondipity! (Which, sadly, is also the name of a chewing tobacco targeted at teenage drummers.)

Thanks to Julie and the WritingSpirit folks who are joining us in the 111-day challenge. I’ve only blown it one day so far! :-)

I was thinking about linking to all the other bloggers in the #SHINE2011 challenge, but there are a LOT of them. You can find them all in the comments section of the main 2011 S.H.I.N.E. Online blog post.

I have a pretty absurd amount of Twitter accounts at this point. Most of them are dormant–accounts I started tentatively, in association with a project that I have planned (or that is nominally underway). Having dealt ad nauseam with the frustration of searching for domain names and finding them taken, I have become pretty aggressive in staking out usernames and other official addresses for projects I have a vested interest in. (I have nearly as many inactive Facebook Pages as I do Twitter accounts–probably almost a couple dozen of each.)

I do have a few Twitter accounts that are actually doing something as of this writing, and I figure it was time to get them together and start promoting them. I will add new accounts as they become active enough to justify doing so.

I’m subdividing myself into these various channels because I recognize that different folks are going to be interested in different aspects of what I’m doing or saying or putting out there. It goes both ways, really…I don’t expect that people who have an interest in just one of my niches will necessarily find the other things I’m doing all that compelling. And I also don’t think all the people who follow my main personal tweets want to deal with playing receiver to every single thing I put out into the world. They already deal with an awful lot of random output from me.

So here’s the breakdown. Please follow whatever accounts you think will be of value to you. (Click on the account name to visit the profile page and follow it.) I look forward to seeing you there!

@FreelanceLance – Lance Brown

This is my first and main account. Despite the username being drawn from my business name “Freelance Lance”, these tweets aren’t official business.  They are so not official anything that I can’t really advise you of what to expect. I’m not a one-note, “value provider” type tweeter, who is obsessed with getting followers and retweets. Or I should say I am obsessed with those things, but I’ve adjusted to the fact that my best bet is to just do what feels right for me, and the rest will come when it does.

The result is that I will say almost any damn thing on my Twitter account, and am known to veer in many directions. But I try to always be entertaining, informative, or thought-provoking. At my best, I’m all three.

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@1minuteofnature – One Minute of Nature

This would be a good account to follow for your health. One Minute of Nature aims to calm your harried mind. OneMinuteofNature.com is a site that is gathering short videos of soothing and otherwise fascinating nature footage from individuals all around the world. (Once I figure out the submission process, that is.) The slogan is “Bringing you back to nature, one minute at a time.”

It’s a newer project of mine–though, like a lot of my stuff, it has been percolating for some time now. I finally have videos up, and the site and Twitter account both are not shamefully incomplete anymore. (Great promo, eh?) And the YouTube channel is fairly stylin’, actually. The Twitter feed will consist mostly of links to new short nature videos, as they are posted. Follow and retweet…unless you hate nature!

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@FreeWPAdvice – Free WP Advice

I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked with the awesome website software WordPress since it first came out in 2003. I fell in love then, and have only fallen deeper with each year since. Now, WordPress is the hottest thing since pepperoni pizza, and I’m kind of an elder statesman of people who’ve been using it. So I know it pretty well.

The FreeWPAdvice Twitter account is part of my effort to give back to the WordPress community, and to help others get to know and love the software that has become one the true foundations of the modern Web. Ask and you shall receive free WordPress advice. I’ve been planning on more coordinated stuff, like a day-long workshop or something, but I need to get some followers on this account first. I’ll be doing mini-tutorials via tweets in the meantime.

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@jokesonreince – Reince Priebus Jokes

The official Twitter account of America’s greatest hope for childish ridicule, ReincePriebusJokes.com. I still can’t fully articulate to myself why I started this site and Twitter account compiling jokes about the oddly-named RNC Chair, but there it is. It’s quite an array of humor…I’m not sure there are many other topics that have had such a wide variety of different kinds of jokes made about it, especially in such a short time.

Eventually, most or all of these various Reince Priebus jokes–of which there are hundreds, or more–will be catalogued on the site (which as of this writing is crushing the Google results for “reince priebus jokes” ;-)). A couplefew hundred  have already been posted at that Twitter account. At this point, expect a few more a day, unless Reince Priebus hits the news some more (or the site hits the news). There may be a contest or voting down the road as well. (There probably will be.) Priebus!

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Honorable Mention:

@ActivistStories – Activist Stories

This is the Twitter account for my planned podcast, Activist Stories. It will be a series of very personal interviews with activists of all sorts. From one activist to another, I aim to dig in deep and find out why we activists are the way we are, and why we do what we do. Both the Twitter account and website for this are skeletal right now, but Activist Stories is on my 2011 mindmap, so progress will be made on it this year. If it sounds interesting to you, you can get in on the ground floor by following now. (If you pass, don’t come complaining to me years from now, when we’re all rolling in billions of dollars from the Activist Stories IPO and you aren’t.)

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The active ones above are featured in a widget in my sidebar too now, in case you aren’t ready to take the plunge yet.

Jeff Bullas has created a nice simple guide to getting started advertising on Facebook:

How To Advertise On Facebook In Ten Minutes For Less Than $10 A Day In 10 Simple Steps

I don’t have anything to add really, other than that it made me want to get started advertising on Facebook! :-)