Tag Archives: Internet

Online Advertising Blues

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Or how to lose half a day in front of a computer.

I am the owner of a small business, Flying M Air, LLC. I do just about everything for the company except maintain the aircraft: schedule flights, preflight the aircraft, fly, take payment from passengers, manage the drug testing program, work with the FAA, meet with clients, negotiate contracts, arrange for special events, hire contract workers, record transactions, handle invoicing and receivables, pay bills, create print marketing materials like business cards and rack cards, etc. I also handle the online presence for the company, including the company website, Facebook, and Twitter.

(You might wonder how I have the skills to do all this stuff. The truth is, I have a BBA in Accounting and lots of business training from college. I also wrote books about computers for 20+ years, including several about building websites and using Twitter. Sadly I never studied helicopter repair.)

Today, I lost half a day to marketing and related online chores that were mind-bogglingly time consuming.

You see, I scheduled an event with a local resort, Cave B Estate Winery & Resort in Quincy, WA. Cave B is one of the destinations I take people on winery tours, although I admit I don’t go there very often. For the same price, folks can go to Tsillan Cellars in Chelan, which they seem to prefer. Cave B has a better restaurant and a more interesting atmosphere in a beautiful place. Tsillan Cellars is also in a beautiful place, but it’s a bit touristy for my taste. I actually don’t care which one I fly to since I can’t drink wine at either one. I just like to fly people to wineries.

But the new manager at Cave B Resort is very eager to get the helicopter onsite as an interesting activity for guests. So we set up a 6-hour event there for Saturday, July 2. I’d land in the field as I usually do and offer 15-minute helicopter tours of the area for $75/person. While that might seem kind of steep, it’s pretty much in line with my usual rates. Besides, the folks who stay at Cave B aren’t exactly cheapskates. (I just looked into booking a room for my upcoming birthday and decided that it was a bit too rich for my blood, at least this year. I think I’ll settle for a spa day.)

Setting up this event required me to complete a bunch of tasks on my computer:

  • Tour Flyer
    I threw together this flyer based on a template in Microsoft Word.

    Create a flyer in PDF format that could be used at the resort to let guests know that tours were available that day. I cheated: I used one of the Templates that came with Word 2011 (which I’m still using on my Mac). I already had pictures; I just had to put in the text and make it fit. It took about 30 minutes to complete and I had to make one change after sending it to Cave B’s manager. They’ll print it out on a color printer and, hopefully, put one in each room on Friday.

  • Use Square‘s item feature to set up an item for the tours so I could easily charge passengers for the flights and sell them online. I’ve been experimenting with online sales lately as a tool to get impulse buyers to buy in advance in certain predetermined time slots. So setting up the item also required me to set up the time slots and then create an inventory feature to prevent me from overselling a time slot. This took another 30 minutes or so. This had to be done before I finished the flyer so I could include the URL in the flyer.
  • Use bit.ly to create a custom short URL for Flying M Air’s online store. No one could remember the regular URL; maybe they can remember bitly.com/FlyingMAir. This took about 5 minutes. Of course, this also had to be done before the flyer was done so the URL could be included.

  • Tour Announcement
    Here’s the top part of the web page I created to announce the special event.

    Create a “blog post” on Flying M Air’s website (which was built with the WordPress CMS) to announce the event, provide details, and include the link for buying tickets. Once the post was published, I had to go back and add a featured image so it would appear in the slideshow of items at the top of the Home page. I also had to add an expiration date so that it would stop appearing as a “special” on the site after July 2 at 5 PM. Doing all this took at least another 30 minutes. My WordPress site is designed to automatically post a link to new items on Twitter for both Flying M Air and my own personal account, so at least I didn’t have to fiddle with Twitter.

  • Create a new event on Facebook for the Cave B Tours. That meant using pretty much the same photo, description, and link I’d put in the flyer in a Facebook form. Because Facebook requires a “Category” for each event and they’re not very creative with the category names, there’s now a “Festival” at Cave B that day. (Sheesh.) This took at least another 20 minutes.
  • Share the event with my friends on Facebook. Why not, right? Five minutes.
  • Post details on Cave B’s Facebook page for the event. I got lazy and put in a screen shot of the flyer. 5 minutes.
  • When I realized that I could probably sell the flight to and from Cave B that I’d have to deadhead for the event, I created a “Be Spontaneous” special offer on Flying M Air’s website, offering up the roundtrip flight for half price: $272.50. That’s less than my cost and a real smoking deal for anyone who wants two great helicopter flights and six hours at Cave B. (I’m thinking lunch, tasting, and a hike.) This took about 30 minutes.
  • I also had to set up an item in Square for this offer so I could make it easy to charge for or sell it online. No special URL was required, but I did have to put the link to the item in Flying M Air’s online store in the special offer post. Twenty minutes.
  • While I was fiddling with my website, I checked the Special Offers category and discovered a whole bunch of expired offers. So I recategorized them as Expired Offers. Then I spent some time adding a subscription form to the Special Offers page and made sure that page appeared in the slider at the top of the Home page. Anyone who subscribes automatically gets new posts by email; this is a great way to learn about special offers as they become available. I know I spent at least an hour on this.

Of course, while I was working on this, I was also taking calls from a potential client (in the U.K., of all places), texting back and forth with photographers that could help me close a deal with her, and writing reminders for the other things I needed to do at my desk: order wall mount display cabinets from Ikea, choose a garage door opener option (after researching the three options), and send out invitations for a outing on my boat the next day. So I wasn’t 100% focused on the tasks at hand.

I was only mildly surprised when I looked up after that last task and saw that it was after 1 PM.

The whole morning was shot. (No wonder I was hungry.)

But this is typical when I sit in front of my computer — and is why I spend a lot less time in front of my computer these days. Business tasks need to be done and I’m the one that has to do them. It’s a fact of life and I’m not complaining. Just trying to point out that marketing a business isn’t as easy as putting up a website and waiting for the phone to ring — especially with so much social media to deal with.

Nine Years on Twitter

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Twitter LogoAn unexpected anniversary.

This week marks the 10 year anniversary of the social networking site, Twitter. It’s been getting a lot of press and there are a lot of tweets from Twitter highlighting events throughout its history. I read through a bunch of them yesterday and remembered more than a few.

That got me thinking of how long I’d been on Twitter. I went to my profile page, and saw that I opened my account in March 2007. Almost exactly nine years. But what day in March? Had I missed my anniversary?

I Googled “Twitter anniversary date” and discovered Twitter Birthday, a site that exists solely to tell you when a twitter account was opened. I put in my user name. And I discovered that my account was opened on March 20, 2007. Exactly nine years before.

Twitter Birth Certificate
My Twitter “birth certificate,” retrieved exactly nine years after my account was opened.

Over the past nine years, I’ve been very active on Twitter, posting more than 57,000 tweets. I’ve formed good friendships with many people from all over the world that I’ve met on Twitter, including Andy Piper (the first person I ever followed, who now works for Twitter), Miraz Jordan, Ruth Kneale, Barbara Gavin, Shirley Kaiser, Michael T. Rose, Mike Muench, Esther Schindler, Jonathan Bailey, Chuck Joiner, Mike Meraz, Greg Glockner, Daniel Messier, Bob Levine, Ann Torrence, Bryan William Jones, Patty Hankins, April Mains, Debbie Ripps, Pam Baker, Terry Austin, Kirschen Seah, Jodene, Amanda Sargent, Ryan Keough, Steven Pass, Bill Evans, Derek Colanduno, Derek Bartholomaus, Bonnie Pruitt, Arlene Wszalek, Marvyn Robinson, and others.

I’ve met several of these “virtual friends” in person, including Andy (who lives in the U.K.), Shirley (California), Esther (Arizona), Mike Muench (Florida), Mike Meraz (California), Daniel (Arizona), Ann (Utah), Bryan (Utah), Patty (Maryland), Terry (Texas).

Barbara (Massachusetts) and Jodene (Washington) have gone on helicopter rides with me and Amanda (Washington/Louisiana) has actually flown my helicopter in Washington while I was tending to some divorce-related business in Arizona.

I wrote a book with Miraz (New Zealand) and was interviewed once by Marvyn (U.K.) for his Inspired Pilot podcast and multiple times by Chuck (New Jersey) for his MacVoices video podcast.

I’ve also used Twitter to keep in touch with people I already knew from my personal and business life. And organizations that tweet information that interests me. Those lists are too long to recite here.

Twitter has changed my life in another important way, too. In 2009, I authored and recorded the first of several video courses about Twitter for Lynda.com. This turned out to be a real contributor to my income with impressive royalties year after year as the course was regularly revised. (Sadly, I no longer do this course for Lynda and can’t recommend the current version.)

I blogged about Twitter and my relationship to it. My very first post about Twitter concerned then presidential candidate John Edwards using Twitter way back in 2007 to attract voters. That’s not a big deal today, but it was huge back then. Another post from 2007 titled “Reach Out and Meet Someone” covered my thoughts on social media and meeting people online. I felt as if I needed to explain it — it was that new. I also blogged “Four Steps to Get the Most Out of Twitter,” which, nine years later, is still valid. You can read more of my posts about Twitter by following the Twitter tag.

Nine years after joining Twitter, I’m as enthusiastic about it as ever. While it’s true that I’m not thrilled about some of the changes I’ve seen — notably the preponderance of “promoted tweets,” the Moments feature, and the algorithm now used (by default!) to sort your timeline — Twitter has remained unique enough to make it an important component of my social networking efforts. It’s still my “water cooler,” the place I turn to get social when I need a break from my daily activities.

While I lot of people just “don’t get” Twitter, I’m pretty sure that I do. And I expect to be using it for a long time to come.

You Can’t Go Back

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A note in response to a bulk email from an old colleague.

It may be hard for some blog readers to believe, but for a while in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was “famous.”

My fame was limited to a group of people who bought my books and read my articles about using computers. I started writing in 1991 — as a ghostwriter for a John Dvorak book — and was soon writing my own titles. I learned early on that if you couldn’t write a bestseller, you had to write a lot of books. So I did. And then, in the late 1990s, two of my books became best sellers. Subsequent editions of the same book continued to be best sellers. For a while, I was making a very good living as a writer. At the computer shows where I was a regular speaker, people actually asked for my autograph.

I’m not an idiot. I knew that my good fortune could not last forever. So as I continued to write, turning out book after book and becoming well known in my field, I invested my money in my retirement, assets that could help extend (or at least securely bank) my wealth, and something that I thought would be a great hobby: flying helicopters. I learned to fly, I got hooked on it, and I bought helicopter. I started my helicopter charter business in 2001 — it was easy to fit flights in with my flexible schedule as a writer — and bought a larger helicopter in 2005. Building the business was such a struggle that I honestly didn’t think I would succeed. But fortunately, I did.

Mountain Lion VQS
My most recent book was published back in 2012. I don’t call it my “last book” because I expect to write more. They likely won’t be about computers, though.

And it was a good thing, because around 2008, my income from writing began declining. By 2010, that income began going into freefall. Most of my existing titles were not revised for new versions of software. Book contracts for new titles were difficult to get and, when they were published, simply didn’t sell well.

Around the same time, my income from flying started to climb. Not only did it cover all the costs of owning a helicopter — and I can assure you those costs are quite high — but it began covering my modest cost of living. By 2012, when I wrote my last computer book, I was doing almost as well as a helicopter charter business owner as I’d done 10 years before as a writer. And things continued to get better.

I was one of the lucky ones. Most of my peers in the world of computer how-to publishing hadn’t prepared themselves for the changes in our market. (In their defense, I admit that it came about quite quickly.) Many of these people are now struggling to make a living writing about computers. But the writing is on the wall in big, neon-colored letters as publishers continue to downsize and more and more of my former editors are finding themselves unemployed. Freelance writers like me, once valued for their skill, professionalism, and know-how, are a dime a dozen, easily replaced by those willing to write for next to nothing or even free. Books and magazine articles are replaced by Internet content of variable quality available 24/7 with a simple Google search.

So imagine my surprise today when one of my former colleagues from the old days sent me — and likely countless others — a bulk email message announcing a newsletter, website, and book about the same old stuff we wrote about in the heydays of computer book publishing. To me, his plea came across as the last gasp of a man who doesn’t realize he’s about to drown in the flood of free, competing information that has been growing exponentially since Internet became a household word.

I admit that I was a bit offended by being included on his bulk email list simply because he had my email address in his contacts database. But more than that, I was sad that he had sunk so low to try to scrape up interest in his work by using such an approach. Hadn’t he seen the light? Read the writing on the wall? Didn’t he understand that we have to change or die?

So after unsubscribing from his bulk mail list, I sent him the following note. And no, his name is not “Joe.”

The world’s a different place now, Joe.

After writing 85 books and countless articles about using computers, I haven’t written anything new about computers since 2012. I’m fortunate in that my third career took off just before that. Others in our formerly enviable position weren’t so lucky.

Not enough people need us as a source of computer information anymore. All the information they could ever want or need is available immediately and for free with a Google search. There are few novices around these days and only the geekiest are still interested in “tips.” Hell, even I don’t care anymore. I haven’t bought a new computer since 2011 and haven’t even bothered updating any of my computers to the latest version of Mac OS. My computer has become a tool to get work done — as it is for most people — a tool I don’t even turn on most days.

Anyway, I hope you’re managing to make things work for yourself in this new age. I’m surprised you think a newsletter will help. Best of luck with it.

And if you ever find yourself in Washington state, I hope you’ll stop by for a visit and a helicopter ride. I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am that I invested in my third career while I was at the height of my second.

Maria

Is it still possible to make a living writing about computers? For some of us, yes. But we’ll never be able to achieve the same level of fame and fortune we once achieved. Those days are over.

On Addictive Games

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I get sucked in, too.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, most computer-based games are a complete waste of time.

They require you to sit pretty much stagnant and, though keystrokes, mouse clicks, or finger swipes, manipulate what’s going on onscreen, 12 to 18 inches from your face. You can spend hours doing this and not even realize how much time has gone by. And, if you get sucked in badly enough, the game moves will invade your unconscious, causing you to dream about them or even just think about them when you’re away from the game.

Desktop Computer Games

Solitaire on Windows is a perfect example. How many hours have you or a friend or family member wasted looking at that green background, dragging virtual cards around? I’m fortunate in that I was never a Windows user and wasn’t tempted. (Macs come with Chess, which is far less addictive for most folks.) But I’ve seen that screen enough times to know how addictive it apparently is.

I’ve seen other people hooked on computer games. My mother plays something with colored shapes that she apparently has to match to clear off the screen. (Is this Candy Crush? I never asked.) Even when I visited for two weeks at Christmas 2012, whenever she was out of sight during the day, I’d track her down in the little TV room at the front of the house, playing this obnoxiously noisy game with the volume turned down. It looked kind of juvenile, like something a 4-year-old might play.

I tell people that I don’t play games on my computer. For the most part, that’s true. I don’t have any game apps installed on my desktop or laptop computers (other than the aforementioned Chess, which I’ve actually never even opened on any of my current computers).

Of course, that doesn’t stop me from playing Web-based games in my browser. More on that in a moment.

Mobile Games

I do have games on my iPad — although I have far fewer now than I did.

I was hooked on Words with Friends, a Scrabble-like word game you can play with others via the Internet, for well over a year. At one point, I was playing eight games at a time, sometimes two or three of which were with the same similarly addicted person. I finally got burned out and simply stopped accepting new game requests. Then I deleted the app from my iPad and haven’t looked back.

Then there was W.E.L.D.E.R., a very addictive word game that I could play solo or against a friend via the Internet. I can’t begin to count the hours of my life thrown into that game. I suspect I played that one for at least two years, although it could be longer. (I may have started playing it when I was married, possibly as a relief to the boredom of home life with a man who’d prefer to watch TV than have an intelligent conversation.) I found it challenging and, of course, addictive. Solo play meant I didn’t have to wait for my game partner to move; I could play any time for as long as I liked. Deleting that from my iPad last year was difficult, but after a few days I didn’t even miss it.

Crosswords app
Crosswords is a digital crossword puzzle app, nothing more.

Of course, Crosswords, a true tablet-based crossword puzzle, was my first iPad game and it remains on my iPad to this day. It enables me to play crossword puzzles from a variety of sources. I could load up dozens per day, but instead I subscribe to just two Sunday puzzles: Newsday and Premier. These are big, beefy puzzles with hundreds of boxes. I don’t find crossword puzzles addictive — and that’s probably why this game remains on my iPad. It’s there when I need something to occupy my mind, but it’s not calling out to me constantly, begging to be conquered.

Notice a pattern here? All three of these games have one thing in common: they’re word games. Yes, I’m a word nerd and the kind of games I prefer are word games.

The other game that remains on my iPad but hasn’t been opened in some time is The Room, “a physical puzzler, wrapped in a mystery game, inside a beautifully tactile 3D world.” It was the rage among my computer geek friends back in early 2012 (I think) and the buzz was so loud from people I respected that I bought a copy and tried it myself. It reminded me of the classic Mac OS game Myst in that it requires you to navigate through a 3D world and manipulate objects to get clues to solve puzzles. Solving each level’s puzzles take you to the next level. These games are beautiful with creepy sound effects and haunting music, but can’t be played a few minutes at a time. They’re the kind of thing you reach for when you’re stuck in bed with a cold and can’t do much else than read, watch TV, or fiddle with an iPad game. I played through it once back in 2012 and have saved it to play through again. (My memory is so shoddy that it’ll likely be new to me.) I just need a down day when I have time to waste. And now I see that there’s a sequel: The Room Two. So now you know what I’ll be doing the next time I’m stuck in bed with a cold.

The Room
The Room is hauntingly beautiful, but can’t be played a few minutes at a time.

Wasting Time

And that’s what games are for, aren’t they? Spending time you have to waste.

I do most of my game playing one of three times:

  • Right before falling asleep. Although I have a television in my bedroom here in the mobile mansion, I never did at home and won’t in my new home. I got into the habit of reading, doing crossword puzzles, or paying games on my iPad until I’m ready to sleep. Most nights, that means about 10 minutes.
  • Overnight or first thing in the morning. When I was having sleeping problems — which have, for the most part, gone away — I turned to books or games on my iPad to get me sleepy enough to go back to sleep. I also occasionally turn to them if I wake up earlier than I want to get out of bed.
  • Stuck waiting someplace. Whether I’m in a doctor’s office waiting room, sitting in my helicopter waiting for passengers to return to the landing zone, or sitting at a restaurant sipping a martini while waiting for dinner to arrive, books and games on my iPad are a good way to keep my mind busy.

If I’m alone and don’t have anything else to do, why shouldn’t I turn to a diversion I enjoy? That’s the way I justify it. More on justification in a moment.

Web-Based Games

The other day, one of my Facebook friends, Carla, posted a link to a game called 2048. This is a web-based number puzzle game that is incredibly addictive to anyone who likes number puzzles. What makes it even worse is that it’s also extremely simple, so it has the potential to suck in people who don’t even like math. Really.

Carla warned us that it was addictive, but I clicked anyway. And I got sucked in. In the middle of the day.

That’s the problem with web-based games. Since I’m normally sitting at my computer when I’m using a web browser, I naturally discover them in the middle of the day. When I should be working.

(You could argue that I shouldn’t have been on Facebook in the middle of the day, either, and frankly, I can’t argue with you. That’s another additive time suck.)

The trouble with this game is that I was pretty sure it was possible to beat and I was equally sure that there was a “trick” to beat it. Yet I couldn’t beat it or find the trick. So I kept trying. Over and over.

2048 Solved
2048 solved.

I finally got back to work. But later, I tried again. And when I discovered that I could play it via swiping in the browser on my iPad, it became my bedtime addiction. And my lounging in bed before coffee addiction.

Fortunately, after a few days, I finally beat it. I was pretty sure I had figured out the “trick,” too.

After proudly posting this screen grab on Facebook, however, I started wondering if I could do it again. Whether my “trick” was foolproof. And I got sucked into yet another round. I haven’t beaten it again.

Justification

And that brings me my friend Keith’s comment when I posted the screen grab on Twitter

You are playing games after telling everyone to stop playing games and get a life? LOL!

He’s referring to my repeated admonishment of Facebook friends who invite me to play Facebook games with them like Farmville, Candy Crush, Mega Casino, etc., etc., etc. I ignore all requests I get and, whenever possible, set Facebook so it doesn’t allow me to be invited again. I think these games are a complete waste of time and really wish people would find more constructive things to do.

And then he catches me posting game results, exposing me as a hypocrite.

No doubt about it: I was embarrassed. I responded:

YES! That’s the tragedy of it.

In my defense, it is a THINKING game. Supposedly will help ward off Alzheimer’s.

Also in my defense, I do it in bed as a way to get tired enough to fall asleep. (Not having many other options these days.) Also puzzles first thing in the morning, when it’s too early to get out of bed. I don’t do it in the middle of the day.

I do crossword puzzles, too. Same thing: last thing at night or first thing in the morning.

So I admit that I’m just as foolish as the people I ridicule for playing games and then attempt to justify it as a thinking game that’ll work my brain.

And there is truth to that. The Alzheimer’s Association’s page about Brain Health lists mental activity — specifically crossword puzzles — as a way to keep your brain healthy. While the National Institute of Health wasn’t so certain (at least not back in 2010), it certainly can’t hurt.

I justify my playing of these games by saying they help me get drowsy so I can sleep or they keep my mind active. People can justify any kind of irrational behavior to make them feel better about their seemingly stupid decisions. (Hell, I can only imagine the way my wasband has been justifying all the wacky things he’s done over the past two years so he can sleep at night.) It’s part of what makes us human.

What’s the Difference?

But are the games and puzzles I admit to doing any more brain-challenging than my mother’s seemingly mindless colored shape game?

I don’t think anyone can argue that crossword puzzles or games like The Room aren’t challenging. They really make you think. Crossword puzzles draw on your knowledge of words and understanding of puns. W.E.L.D.E.R. and Word with Friends also required good vocabularies.

But 2048? On the surface, it seems like a math game, but when you look at it objectively, it’s clearly a simple matching game — match two numbers and they become a new number. You don’t really need any math skills to play — although, admittedly, good addition skills are necessary to form a strategy and win.

So what’s the difference between that and matching colored shapes?

Damned if I know.

Avoid the Addiction

Wikipedia defines addition as:

Addiction is the continued repetition of a behavior despite adverse consequences, or a neurological impairment leading to such behaviors.

Wasting hours of every day playing a computer game does not necessarily mean you are addicted. But thinking about that game when you’re not playing it or wanting to play it more and more seems like an addictive behavior to me.

Adverse consequences? How about the ticking away of your life’s clock in a trivial pursuit?

But who’s to say that it’s trivial?

I know that time is not as important to some people as it is to me.

I’ve dealt with my addictive game behavior by removing the games I played too often from my iPad. It’ll be a bit tougher to deal with 2048, but I assume I’ll get tired of it soon enough. (Maybe just one more win.)

I guess what I’m hoping is that the folks who do spend a lot of their time playing games on their computer try to look at the time spent objectively. Is there a real benefit? What are you missing out on? Can you spend your time a better way?

That’s for you to decide. Just try to think clearly when making that decision.

Twitter and Writing

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Some thoughts on a New Yorker essay.

Twitter LogoI read an interesting essay on the New Yorker magazine’s website yesterday: “The Ongoing Story: Twitter and Writing.” It was one of those pieces that, as you read it, you realize that you and the author are sharing the same thoughts about something that you thought you were alone in thinking. As I read through the piece, I found myself wanting to highlight different passages of it — the parts of it where the author put into words what I’d been thinking or feeling for a long time.

So I figured I’d blog a little about it to store those thoughts here.

For example, the author of the piece, Thomas Beller, writes:

Most great writers could, if they wanted to, be very good at Twitter, because it is a medium of words and also of form. Its built-in limitation corresponds to the sense of rhythm and proportion that writers apply to each line.

And that’s the challenge of Twitter. Sharing a complete thought in 140 characters. I wrote about that back in October 2010 (was it really that long ago?) in my blog post titled “How Twitter Can Help You Become a More Concise Writer.” After all, anyone can write a string of tweets to tell a story. But how many people can convey that story in just 140 characters? How many people can be interesting, funny, provocative, witty, sarcastic, ironic, or insightful?

Yes, it’s true: I do tweet photos of some of my meals. (Don’t we all?) But occasionally I get more serious. Occasionally I dig deeper and come up with something witty or profound, something that other people find worthy of retweeting or, better yet, favoriting.

(Ever wonder how the word favorite became a verb? I did, too. Then I asked all-knowing Google and it pointed me to this article that explains it. It shouldn’t surprise you that Twitter is involved. But once again, I digress.)

And sometimes — just sometimes — I can paint a visual picture with those 140 characters that’s as clear as a glacial stream on a spring day.

Two more passages touch upon why and how I use Twitter:

Does a piece of writing that is never seen by anyone other than its author even exist? Does a thought need to be shared to exist? What happens to the stray thought that drifts into view, is pondered, and then drifts away? Perhaps you jot it down in a note before it vanishes, so that you can mull it over in the future. It’s like a seed that, when you return to it, may have grown into something visible. Or perhaps you put it in a tweet, making the note public. But does the fact that it is public diminish the chances that it will grow into something sturdy and lasting? Does articulating a thought in public freeze it in place somehow, making it not part of a thought process but rather a tiny little finished sculpture? Is tweeting the same as publishing?

And:

I had always thought of Twitter as being a good place to work out ideas: a place to mull things over in public, and a way of documenting a thought to make it more likely that I would remember it. But is it like a conversation or is it “talking it out?” Is it a note to oneself that everyone can see, or is it, like iPhone photos, an attempt to offload the responsibilities of memory onto an apparatus that feels like an extension of ourselves because it is always in our hands? I sometimes wonder if I might ever be accused of stealing my own idea.

And that’s how I use Twitter: as a sort of running list of my thoughts and the things going on in my life. (That might explain why I’ve tweeted more than 44,000 times since I joined Twitter back in 2007. I think a lot and keep pretty busy.) It’s easy to whip out my phone or iPad and tweet something that’s on my mind — or to save a picture of what’s in front of me in a place where it’ll be forever (or at least a long time). It is an offloading of information so I don’t have to remember things.

Mr Beller wonders whether articulating a thought in public freezes it in place somehow. It does. It freezes it in the Twitter archive, which I can download for my account and search at any time. (How do you think it was so easy for me to come up with the tweets you see here? Imagine that archive in the hands of a paranoid and delusional stalker!) That makes it possible for me to go back in time, to see what I was thinking and doing on a specific date since my first tweet in March 2007.

I can’t think of any easier way to make life notes. Stray thoughts can be captured before they drift away, to be pondered at my leisure. And sometimes — just sometimes — they become the seeds for blog posts or conversations with friends.

Twitter was introduced as a “microblogging” service and that’s exactly how I use it. I assume other writers do the same.

But is tweeting the same as publishing? I don’t think so. It’s more like standing on a soapbox in a crowded park, making random remarks. Some folks who know you’re there and find you interesting might be there to listen. But otherwise, your words go mostly unheard. You can argue that the same can be said for publishing, but publishing seems to be a more legitimate form of communication. Or maybe that’s just old-fashioned thinking on my part.

Managing the anxiety of composition is an essential part of writing. One must master the process of shepherding the private into public. There are bound to be false starts, excursions that turn out to be dead ends. But these ephemera—notes, journals, drafts—are all composed in a kind of psychic antechamber whose main feature is a sense of aloneness. They are the literary equivalent of muttering to yourself in a state of melancholy, or of dancing in front of the mirror with music blasting when you are alone in your room. Both of these are best done when no one is home.

I’ve never found it difficult to write; there is no anxiety for me. That’s not to say that I don’t have false starts and wander down to dead ends. Or, more often than I’d like to admit, write crap.

There is an aloneness to all writing, including Twitter. And yes, tweets are like talking to yourself, but with the very real possibility that (in my case) 1600+ people are listening and may respond. No one is home here except me — I’ve been alone for a long time, even when I supposedly wasn’t.

Almost everybody who is a writer these days gets, at some point, a lecture on the necessity of being “on” Twitter and Facebook. It’s a tool of selling and career building. It is, for writers of all ages and stages, not so much required reading as required writing.

I also got this lecture from one of my publishers. I didn’t need to be sold on Twitter — I took to that like a bird takes to the sky. It was Facebook that I avoided for as long as I could. So long, in fact, that I lost a contract because I wasn’t involved enough in social media. Imagine that! An early adopter of Twitter with tens of thousands of tweets not being involved enough in social media.

Twitter gives writers the ability to put ourselves out there for the world to see. Does it help my writing career? Perhaps — to a point. It certainly helps attract blog readers and give me a steady stream of intelligent people to communicate with.

After five years and more than 44,000 tweets, I know one thing for certain: Twitter has become a part of my writing life.