The Real Lance Brown

Michael at B-Sides Narrative posted this tweet after I helped him work out an issue with the way his WordPress blog posts were being handled by Facebook:

@freeWPadvice You're a rock star, man. The work you did on my template fixed the Facebook-sharing problem. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

3/10/2011 8:48 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@BSidesNarrative

Michael

I help people out with WordPress for free on Twitter at @freeWPadvice. Send me a message there if you need help, and I might be able to get you squared away just like Michael!

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.

@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!

@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.

@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!

@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.)

In an extremely unexpected turn of events, I have launched a site dedicated to jokes about the new Republican National Committee chairman with the funny name, Reince Priebus. The site is called (surprise!) ReincePriebusJokes.com. It’s mostly based off of tweets that I have skimmed off of the Internet – some 250+ jokes have been re-tweeted at the Twitter account @jokesonreince, and 150+ of them have been copied over to ReincePriebusJokes.com. (Technical difficulties have made the others not get copied over, but you can see them all at the Twitter page. I will get them all on the site soon enough.)

I take at least a little pride in the fact that the new site was the #1 result at Google for “reince priebus jokes” within 24 hours of launching. Unless something weird happens, I expect it will hold that spot for a long time to come. That’s part of what made me decide to go ahead with launching the site (after it loosely crossed my mind, when I invented the idea of the site in a tweet about all the Reince Priebus jokes from the day). I may discuss the reasons behind the site’s genesis more soon. In the meantime, feel free to check out the jokes, join in the fun, follow the site on Twitter if you want, and certainly pass the word to anyone who you think might enjoy this strange combination of comedy, wordplay, politics, and social media.

I have no idea where this might go. My goal is to automate it as much as possible, or maybe to delegate to folks who want to keep building the library and the community around it. We will see. I do know that as long as Reince Priebus is a national political figure, there will be Reince Priebus jokes, and as long as there are Reince Priebus jokes, there will be ReincePriebusJokes.com. Unless I get bored with it or sell it for hush money. (Big hush money, any of you hush-money dreamers.)

Here are the tweets that led up to the site’s formation… Read more…

I’m looking to push myself to write more short stories, and the best way I’ve found is to be given basic guidelines/parameters for the story. Namely, a word limit and some sort of jumping off point. It could be a characters, a scenario, a phrase or sentence, or a combination of those or whatever else. (Yes, even a picture, potentially.) Anything to build a story on.

In the spirit of the social media age, I’m asking my Twitter “tweeps” to send me suggested story prompts in the form of tweets. If all goes well, I will solicit ideas each Friday, then spend the weekend working on the story, which I’ll post and announce on Monday (or earlier).

At this point, I’m going to pick my favorite from each Friday’s submissions, and write that story. In the future, I may devise a more random way to choose the “winning” prompt.

And by winning, I mean you win the fact that my story will be based off of your suggestion. Not a huge prize to say the least, but it doesn’t take much to “enter” either. :-) Plus I’ll give you props via tweets and such, and a link with the story if/when I post it on my site. (I may want to submit it somewhere instead.)

So here are the guidelines:

1. Tweet your suggestion on Friday to @FreelanceLance, in a normal-length tweet.
2. Aside from “@FreelanceLance”, your tweet has to include a number between 200 and 2000–the word limit– and a story seed of some sort. That part is up to you.
3. I’ll take suggestions until late night Friday night (PDT), and will announce my pick then and in the morning.
4. At this point, more than one tweet/suggestion is fine, as long as you don’t mind competing with yourself. ;-)

Sound good? I really appreciate you playing along and helping me scratch my creative itch. I hope I can do your ideas some justice!

You can fire off a tweet to me via this link.

Thanks so much! If you have any questions, just post a comment here or send me a tweet.

The mission:

To compile a list of three hundred and eleven 311 fans who are on Twitter, and make it easy for other 311 fans to find and follow them!

Options:

• There is a site called NinjaFollow that will let you mass-follow folks, if they are in a comma-separated text file. (Though I don’t know if they are trustworthy; we may need to seek out another way to do bulk following.) So if we get all the usernames, we can make a text file so people can literally follow all 311 311 fans in one shot.
• We can also make a list that links to each person’s profile individually, if people want to explore the 311 that way.

The toughest part will be collecting the 311 311 fans (with them preferably being good people for other 311 fans to follow). The simplest way to collect them is for 311 fans to self-identify and ask to be on the list. (The more complicated ways involve searching 311 Tweets, and using Twitter search, etc.)

So let’s make this easy – send the 311 lovers you know that are on Twitter here. And if you are a lover of 311, post a comment letting us know your Twitter username or Twitter URL. If you get on the list, we’ll send you a tweet when the “Twitter 311 311″ reaches 311, so you can follow your fellow fans en masse. :-)

Thanks for your help!

Be well, be free,

Lance Brown
@FreelanceLance on Twitter

The Twitter 311 311 so far (not in any particular order):

1. FreelanceLance
2. prettcooljewel
3. mavro311
4. DeannasLuvn311
5. KarenAnn311
6. jessLove311
7. gus311
8. Dubmatic311
9. ExcitableJen311
10. charleen311
11. travis311
12. j311stp
13. appliedscience
14. WILLYloves311
15. MikeO311
16. * You? *

Add yourself by posting a comment below with your Twitter username or a link to your Twitter profile.

NOTE: 311 fans with public Twitter accounts may get added to this list without being asked at times; if you want to be taken off the list just let me know  at lance@lancebrown.org.

P.S. – Please don’t ask to be added to this list if you’re not really a 311 fan, or if you intend to spam the people that follow you. Thanks!