The Real Lance Brown

The New York Times did an investigative piece on how JCPenney.com was able to cheat Google for months, giving it top-ranking listings in dozens of widely-varied commercial terms: Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets. Depending on your perspective and whether you like dangerous shortcuts, this is either an inspirational or cautionary tale about using “black hat” tactics in your search engine optimization efforts.

(NYT tends to phase out free access to their articles over time, so I can’t promise that article will be available forever. If it’s not, you can try a Google search for the article’s title; someone has probably archived a copy of it.)

It would be outrageous to claim that I have somehow opened up a channel of clairvoyance to the world of show business. So I’m not going to claim that. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

Consider this:

On January 12, actor Josh Malina was bemoaning his career woes on Twitter (a recurring theme for the Backwash anti-hero). And for some reason, I came to a specific conclusion about a solution to his problem, and tweeted the following:

@JoshMalina Been considering your twilemma, and have a perfect solution: a recurring guest role on #TBBT! Let me introduce you to @billprady

1/12/2011 7:38 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@FreelanceLance

Lance M. Brown

Some clarification of terms:

“#TBBT” is a hashtag referencing The Big Bang Theory, one of the most popular sitcoms on TV today–and being nerdy and quirky, a pretty good fit for what Josh Malina has become post-West Wing. (See: his guest spot on Psych, his series Backwash, and his Twitter feed.)

“@billprady” is the Twitter account of Bill Prady, co-creator of The Big Bang Theory, who tweets regularly.

Get ready for the spooky part: Guess who was on last week’s (Feb. 10) Big Bang Theory? Me! No wait, that’s not right. Josh Malina was though! (And well positioned for a recurring guest role, no less.)

Did I mold reality and make that occur? I don’t believe so; the timing is too tight. But clearly I bore witness to some sort of intra-state portal of insight on that fateful day in January.

Mere lucky coincidence, you say?

Consider this:

On Feb 5, I tweeted the following…

Hey @DougBenson, are you averse to having a band's members as guests on "Doug Loves Movies"? @pnut @nickhexum hint hint @311

2/5/2011 8:09 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@FreelanceLance

Lance M. Brown

Clarification: @DougBenson is a comedian who has a podcast I enjoy called Doug Loves Movies. @pnut (P-nut) and @nickhexum (Nick Hexum) are two members of the band 311, a favorite band of mine that is based in LA (as is Doug’s podcast). The only connection I knew of between the two was that they both are known to be fans of the reefer (a.k.a. the demon weed), and I had seen P-nut tweet a couple of innocuous fan-type messages to Doug Benson recently.

The rest was just me embracing my amazing new power…because, unbeknownst to me (but knownst to my inner clairvoyant self apparently), 311 has arranged for Doug Benson to be the onboard comedian on their “311 Cruise” this year. He announced it on his Doug Loves Movies podcast which came out today (Feb 12th).

Again, the timing is too tight for my tweet to have been the inciting factor in this occurrence. And it’s not 311 appearing on Doug Loves Movies, it’s the other way around. But mark my words–well, technically, I’m marking them for you right here, but remember them–members of 311 will in fact appear on Doug Loves Movies before long–making my tweet both clairvoyant and prophetic, if I’m not mistaken. Which I’m pretty sure I am.

What entertainment industry happening will my clairvoyant unconscious stumble upon next? What other celebrity matchmaking will I manifest as 2011 unfolds?

No one knows…but it seems to be surfacing via my tweets, so your best bet is to follow me on Twitter.

I entered the Outside the Beltway Thursday Caption Contest this week. I’m hoping the prize is like a million dollars or something, but regardless of any money or fame that may come from my entry, I achieved “first commenter” status for sure. And no one can ever take that away from me.

Once I win, all of America will of course know my winning caption, and it will be taught to schoolchildren around the world, but if you want to get ahead of the curve, you can find it at the top of the pile here.

There may still be time to enter (if you’ve got the guts); I’m not sure if it’s Thursday only or what. (Or if there is a prize, or anything else about the contest, for that matter.)

The winner is announced Monday. Then: glory, fame, and all my dreams come true. One would assume.

Subscribing to my blog’s feed is more accessible and easier than it has been in the past. First, I added a more prominent RSS icon, which you can see over to the right. Then I added a Feedburner-based email subscription signup form. So now it’s easier than ever to set yourself up with regular updates from me, via your favorite feed reader, or via your inbox. Which is awesome, because remember how you were wanting to subscribe to my blog but didn’t know how, or were too lazy or something? And here we are working it out!

Nothing like solving problems–especially important problems like you not getting up-to-the-minute updates from my site. I’m breathing easier already, and as far as I’m concerned, so are you.

Clare Lancaster at ProBloggingTools has been nice enough to compile a simple checklist of the 9 most straightforward ways to draw attention to your social media accounts. The short answer is: “promote it in various places”, but Clare has nailed the most important places, and explains why they are important quickly and concisely.

Print Clare’s list out if you must and use it as a checklist; make sure you are taking advantage of most of these methods, or you can’t say you are seriously supporting your own social media efforts: 9 Practical Ways to Start Attracting an Audience to Your New Social Media Account.

Today on Twitter I posted a link to an old blog entry of mine, originally from my presidential campaign site, called “The USA-PATRIOT Axe”.

Since Congress is currently in the process of slithering through another renewal of some the lamest parts of that law, it seems like a great time to visit that old post of mine, which I think still holds up pretty well after about 8 years. So here you go:

The USA-PATRIOT Axe

May 25, 2003

This article (“Patriot Raid”, by Jason Halperin) gives the “USA-PATRIOT” Act some perspective — a first-person one. He experienced a raid while eating dinner at a restaurant in New York City, where the agents involved claimed the “USA-PATRIOT” Act as the legal cover for the raid and their conduct during it.

If you know anyone who says, “Don’t worry about the Patriot Act…it only applies to terrorists and immigrants…if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about…the Patriot Act is just providing law enforcement with the tools it needs…”, make them read this article. Twice if necessary. Make them acknowledge the reality of it. If they want to continue thinking the above thoughts, fine. But they need to make sure they aren’t playing fast and loose with Pastor Martin Niemoller-style excuses and evasions.

The USA-PATRIOT Act means machine guns in your face, and boots kicking in doors where you are, doing your innocent and ordinary things. Not just the terrorists and the guilty, not just the immigrants and the minorities…you. You, sitting there in a restaurant eating dinner. …

Read the whole entry here.

Call me a cheapo whiner, but I find paid dating sites to be a pain. In a lot of cases, it’s not entirely clear who can message who in such a situation–i.e., it’s possible that you as a paid member are able to message someone, but they as a non-paid member can’t write you back. Which just means that paid members are effectively serving as salespeople, with each communication providing a chance for the site to tease the intended recipient: “You’ve received a message! Sign up for our paid membership so you can read it!” Or: “You’ve got a message! Go ahead and read it. Now, want to reply? Sign up for our paid membership!”

Pardon my language, but that’s bullshit. And that’s exactly how some of the paid dating sites work. Even the paid members get jacked. Some sites are more clear about this than others, but…hey, wait a minute! Who cares? There are 3 perfectly-functional and well-populated dating sites that let you communicate openly for free. One of them is even pretty good! So why not just use them, and leave the Match.coms of the world behind?

Here are the three sites, with my least favorite first:

Plenty of Fish
POF is plenty big and works OK, but I find their interface to be clunky and non-intuitive (it most likely still looks a lot like the site did when it started in 2001). I also don’t like their attitude toward vices (drugs, etc.), and they have been increasingly pushy about forcing you to answer certain profile questions just to keep using the site. Overall, I would say that if PlentyOfFish.com was a person, he would be kind of a dick, and annoying to deal with. I’ve been phasing out my usage of that site. That said, there are plenty of people there, and communication is free–if a bit censored. (Example: mention “OK Cupid” (see below) in a message to someone, and POF changes it to “another dating site” without telling you. Like I said – kind of a dick.)

DateHookup
DateHookup.com has a vibe kind of like what you might imagine from its name – though the people seem earnest and aren’t just looking for “hookups”. It’s just got a loose, social, slightly meat-markety feel to it. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The profiles here tend to be pretty short and sweet, and stylistically, there is a bit of a myspace-like decorative feel to some profiles. (Probably less so if you’re surfing guys’ profiles, I assume.) You will probably get the highest percentage of bathroom-mirror pics at DateHookup compared to the other two.

OKCupid
OKCupid is really great. I have nothing bad to say about it so far, and it has a lot of features that make it stand out from other dating sites, paid or free. It’s pretty aggressive in terms of trying to introduce people to each other, both directly via email match alerts, and indirectly via suggested profiles that run alongside the person you’re viewing. The interesting thing about these suggested folks is that OKCupid characterizes them in comparison to the person you’re viewing, with things like: “more conservative”, “more desiring”, “less spiritual”, “more adventurous”, “less organized”, “more pure”, “sloppier”, and so on. I’ve never seen anything quite like that, on the 10 or so dating sites I’ve scoped out over the past decade. Pretty neat. I’ve been using this site the least amount of time, but I’ve been more impressed, and have gotten more responses, than with any other site.

I could describe more of what makes OKCupid stand out, but it’s easier just to go and get a feel for it yourself. They seem to have tapped into the next wave of online dating sites in some way. Exactly the opposite of where Plenty of Fish is at. (with DateHookup being almost exactly between the two on that spectrum.) However, all three sites do have active memberships, with some overlap but not a ton. And OKCupid can’t match you up with someone if they are only a member of one of those other sites. So you might want to just try all three anyway. I’d be curious to see what happened if someone signed up for all three at once with the same exact profile–how the responses would compare. If anyone has a clean slate and tries that out, please let us know how it goes.

Do you of another good free dating site? Post a comment and share it!

I’m all about learning, and not so much about school, which means that online education is good cheese by me. I seldom go so far as to absorb whole courses online, but I’ve been educating myself on the web for 15 years now. And I’m pretty brilliant. So there’s that.

A site called Bachelor’s Degree Online has been kind (and savvy) enough to compile 100 Free and Useful Open Courseware Classes for Web Workers–full-blown courses on a fairly comprehensive range of subjects, grouped into the various disciplines that a web worker might need to tackle.

About 75% of these courses are from MIT, which has been putting courses on the web for a while now. You may have heard of MIT. It purportedly does not suck.

So go get educated then already! And I don’t expect to hear “I’m bored” from you for at least a year.

Got more free education for our readers? Drop some knowledge in the comments!

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>

Various things ranging from technical difficulties to the fact that yesterday’s blog post was inordinately huge are keeping me from getting a solid blog post done within this calendar day, but I will definitely (retroactive edit: almost definitely) have two for tomorrow. I have a new comic that’s been ready to get made for days now; I’ll (retroactive edit: probably) have that out tomorrow, plus at least one more post.

In the meantime, how about going over and “liking” the Facebook page for my One Minute of Nature project? Thanks!

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.

Mini-mountain, yes...but self aware? Not yet-- maybe.

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!

Predecessor to the salad that will eat your family

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…

My latest column is up at Project Simplify…

The Not-So-Simple Life: The Liberating Loosening of Losing Loose Ends

I need to address something right off the bat, because it’ll be bugging me this whole time if we don’t talk it over.

I’m something of a word nerd. A word nerd, a spelling aficionado, and an editor. And in this modern age, my fellow word nerd brethren and I (if I can speak for us all) are increasingly concerned about the ongoing decline of written English language usage. On their behalf, please allow me to briefly tilt at one small windmill:

While “loosing” is technically a word, it’s almost definitely not the word you mean. You mean “losing”. I totally get why you might be thinking it’s “loosing”, but it’s not. That sounds like “loose-ing”, and if you say that out loud, you’ll agree with me that it’s not what you meant. You meant “losing”, which sounds like “looz-ing”.

So no more “loosing”. Alright? Alright.

Now that we’ve clarified that, let’s talk about the liberating loosening of losing loose ends.

Loosely speaking, losing loose ends can really lighten your load, and lead to a rather lovely liberating loosening. If you’re feeling lost in life, it may be that you’re losing yourself in loose ends, and what you really need to be doing is losing those loose ends, so you can loosen up.

Did I lose you?

(continued…)

Read the rest at Project Simplify.

(photo credit: Loose Ends by Quinn Dombrowski)

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.

Elliot Grove over at Raindance has 10 low-budget filmmaking tips that seem like great advice. Though he kind of cheats on #10, so let’s call it 9-point-something filmmaking tips. Which is still pretty good.

Grove calls his tips “Zero Budget” filmmaking tips. but he is clearly speaking to folks who have at least some budget. His article could best be described as tips on how to get the most bang for the bucks that you do have, or how to reduce your budget as low as possible while still producing something people will want to see. Though if you truly do have a budget of zero dollars, Grove’s tips will certainly help you get as much bang from that non-buck as you can.

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.