#the first half of this post is a critique of instagram (and other sites but insta is my main art one)

[muirneach]

one of the inifinite problems with posting art online is that people are looking at it on phone screens. when i’m drawing on my tablet it’s at least a little bigger and i can zoom in really close. after i post it and i’m looking back on it on my phone it’s just no good. it doesn’t look nearly as a good and zooming in on instagram sucks. and of course people just look at it for a few seconds and move on. which like me too i’m not saying stare at it forever but it’s weird to think that i spend hours or days on a piece only for about 30 people to see a 2x2 inch version of it for a few seconds. it feels odd.

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Syntax6

Syntax6 has 17 stories at Gossamer, but you should visit her website for the complete collection of her fics and to see the cover art that comes with many of the stories (and to find her pro writing!). She's written some of the most beloved casefiles in the fandom. I've recced literally all of them here before. Twice. Big thanks to Syntax6 for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

I’m delighted but not surprised because I’ve written and read fanfic for shows even older than XF. Also, I joined the XF fandom relatively late, at the end of 1999, so there were already hundreds of “classic” fics out there, stories that were theoretically superseded or dated by canon developments that came after them, but which nonetheless remained compelling in their own right. That is the beauty of fanfic: it is inspired by its original creators but not bound by them. It’s a world of “what if” and each story gets to run in a new direction, irrespective of the canon and all the other stories spinning off in their own universes. In this way, fanfic becomes almost timeless.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it? What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

(I feel these are similar, at least for me, so I will combine them here.)

First and foremost, I found friends. There was a table full of XF fanfic writers at my wedding. Bugs was my maid of honor. I still talk to someone from XF fandom pretty much every day. Lysandra, Maybe Amanda, Michelle Kiefer, bugs…these are just some of the people who’ve been part of my life for half my existence now. Sometimes I get to have dinner with Audrey Roget or Anjou or MCA. Deb Wells and Sarah Ellen Parsons are part of my pro fic beta team. I have a similar list from the Hunter fandom, terrific people who have enriched my life in numerous ways and I am honored to count as friends.

Second, I learned a lot about writing during my years in XF fandom. I grew up there. Part of this growth experience was simply due to practice. I wrote about 1.2 million words of XF fanfic, which is the equivalent of 15 novels. I made mistakes and learned from them. But another essential part of learning is absorbing different kinds of well-told tales, and XF had these in spades. Some stories were funny. Others were lyrical. Some were short pieces with nary a word wasted while others were sprawling epics that took you on an adventure. The neat thing about XF is that it has space for many different kinds of stories, from hard-core sci-fi to historical romance. You can watch other authors executing these varied pieces and learn from them. You can form critique groups and ask for betas and get direct feedback on how to improve. It’s collaborative and fun, and this can’t be underestimated, generally supportive. The underlying shared love of the original product means that everyone comes into your work predisposed to enjoy it. I am grateful for all the encouragement and the critiques I received over my years in fandom.

Finally, I think a valuable lesson for writers that you can find in fandom, but not in your local author critique group, is how to handle yourself when your work goes public. Not everyone is going to like your work and they will make sure you know it. Some people will like it maybe too much, to the point where they cross boundaries. Learning to disengage yourself from public reaction to your work is a difficult but crucial aspect of being a writer. You control the story. You can’t control reaction to it. It’s frustrating at first, perhaps, but in the end, it’s freeing.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

I participated in ATXC, the Haven message boards, and the Scullyfic mailing list/news group. For a number of years, I also ran a fic discussion group with bugs called The Why Incision.

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I started reading XF fanfic before I began watching the show. I had watched one season two episode (Soft Light) and then seen bits and pieces of a few others from season four. I’d seen Fight the Future. Basically, I’d seen enough to know which one was Mulder and which one was Scully, and which one believed in aliens. An acquaintance linked me to a rec site for XF fanfic (Gertie’s, maybe?) so that I could see how fic was formatted for the web. I clicked a fic, I think it was one by Lydia Bower dealing with Scully’s cancer arc, and basically did not stop reading. Soon I was printing off 300K of fic to take home with me each night. I could not believe the level of talent in the fandom, and that there were so many excellent writers just giving away their works for free. I wanted to play in this sandbox, too, so I started renting the VHS tapes to catch up on old episodes (see, I am An Old). After a few months, I began writing my own stuff.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to The X-Files. I’m not a sci-fi person by nature. I think my main objection is that, when done poorly, it feels lazy to me. Who did the thing? A ghost! Maybe an alien? I guess we’ll never know. You can always just shrug and play some spooky music and the “truth will always be out there…” somewhere beyond the story in front of you. You never have to commit to any kind of truth because you can invent some magical power or new kind of alien to change the story. I think, by the bitter end, the XF had devolved into this kind of storytelling. The mytharc made no kind of sense even in its own universe. But for years the XF achieved the best aspects of sci-fi storytelling—narrative flexibility and an apotheosis of our current fears dressed up as a super entertaining yarn.

What eventually sold me on the XF as a show is all of the smart storytelling and the sheer amount of ideas contained within its run. At its best, it’s a brilliant show. You have mediations on good versus evil, the role of government in a free society, is there a God, are we alone in the universe, and what are the elements that make us who we are? If Mulder and Morris Fletcher switch bodies, how do we know it’s really “them”? The tonal shifts from week to week were clever and engaging. For Vince Gilligan, truth was always found in fellow human beings. For Darin Morgan, humans were the biggest monster of all. The show was big enough to contain both these premises, and indeed, was stronger for it. The deep questions, the character quirks, the unsolved mysteries and all that went unsaid in the Mulder-Scully relationship left so much room for fanfic writers to do their own work. As such, the fandom attracted and continues to attract both dabbling writers and those who are serious craftspeople. People who like the mystery and those who like the sci-fi angle. Scientists and true believers. Like the show, it’s big enough for all.

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

I look at it like an old friend I catch up with once in a while. We’ve been close for so long that there’s no awkwardness—we just get each other! I love seeing people post screen shots and commentary, and I think it’s wonderful that so many writers are still inventing new adventures for Mulder and Scully. That is how the characters live on, and indeed how any of us lives on, through the stories that others tell about us.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

I ran the Hunter fandom for about five years, mostly because when I poked my head back in, I found the person in change was a bully who’d shut down everything due to her own waning interest. A person would try to start a topic for discussion, and she’d say, “We’ve already covered that.” Well, yes, in a 30-year-old show, there’s not a lot of new ground…

Most other shows, Hunter included, have smaller fandoms and thus don’t attract the depth of fan talent. I don’t just mean fanfic writers. I mean those who do visual art, fan vids, critiques, etc. The XF fandom has all these in droves, which makes it a rare and special place. But all fandoms have the particular joy of geeking out over favorite scenes and reveling in the meeting of shared minds. It will always look odd to those not contained within it, which brings me to the part of modern fandom I find somewhat uncomfortable…the creators are often in fan-space.

In Hunter, the female lead joins fan groups and participates. This is more common now in the age of social media, where writers, producers, actors, etc., are on the same platforms as the rest of us. Fan and creator interaction used to be highly circumscribed: fans wrote letters and maybe received a signed headshot in return. There were cons where show runners gave panels and took questions from the audience. You could stand in line to meet your favorite star. Now, you can @ your favorite star on Twitter, message her on Facebook or follow him on Instagram. In some ways, this is so fun! In other ways, it blurs in the lines in ways that make me uncomfortable. I think it’s rude, for example, if a fan were to go on a star’s social media and post fanfic there or say, “I thought the episode you wrote was terrible.” But what if it’s fan space and the actor is sitting right there, watching you? Is it rude to post fanfic in front of her, especially if she says it makes her uncomfortable? Is it mean to tell a writer his episode sucked right to his face?

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

I own the first seven seasons on DVD and will pull them out from time to time to rewatch old faves. I’ve shown a few episodes over the spring and summer to my ten-year-old daughter, and it’s been fun to see the series through her eyes. We’ve mostly opted for the comedic episodes because there’s enough going on in the real world to give her nightmares. Her favorite so far is Je Souhaite.

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

I don’t have much bandwidth to read fanfic these days. My job as a mystery/thriller author means I have to keep up with the market so I do most of my reading there right now. I also beta read for some pro-fic friends and betaing a novel will keep you busy.

Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors?

I read so much back in the day that this answer could go on for pages. Alas, it also hasn’t changed much over the past fifteen years because I haven’t read much since then. But, as we’re talking Golden Oldies today, here are a bunch:

All the Mulders, by Alloway I find this short story both hilarious and haunting. Scully embraces her power in the upside down post-apocalyptic world.

Strangers and the Strange Dead, by Kipler Taut prose and an intriguing 3rd party POV make this story a winner, and that’s before the kicker of an ending, which presaged 1013’s.

Cellphone, by Marasmus Talk about your killer twists! Also one of the cleverest titles coming or going.

Arizona Highways, by Fialka I think this is one of the best-crafted stories to come out of the XF. It’s majestic in scope, full of complex literary structure and theme, and yet the plot moves like a runaway freight train. Both the Mulder and Scully characterizations are handled with tender care.

So, We Kissed, by Alelou What I love about this one is how it grounds Mulder and Scully in the ordinary. Mulder’s terrible secret doesn’t involve a UFO or some CSM-conspiracy. Scully goes to therapy that actually looks like therapy. I guess what I’m saying is that I utterly believe this version of M & S in addition to just enjoying reading about them.

Sore Luck at the Luxor, by Anubis Hot, funny, atmospheric. What’s not to love?

Black Hole Season, by Penumbra Nobody does wordsmithing like Penumbra. I use her in arguments with professional writers when they try to tell me that adverbs and adjectives MUST GO. Just gorgeous, sly, insightful prose.

The Dreaming Sea, by Revely This one reads like a fairytale in all the best ways. Revely creates such loving, beautiful worlds for M & S to live in, and I wish they could stay there always.

Malus Genius, by Plausible Deniability and MaybeAmanda Funny and fun, with great original characters, a sly casefile and some clear-eyed musings on the perils of getting older. This one resonates more and more the older I get. ;)

Riding the Whirlpool, by Pufferdeux I look this one up periodically to prove to people that it exists. Scully gets off on a washing machine while Mulder helps. Yet it’s in character? And kinda works? This one has to be read to be believed.

Bone of Contention (part 1, part 2), by Michelle Kiefer and Kel People used to tell me all the time that casefiles are super easy to write while the poetic vignette is hard. Well, I can’t say which is harder but there much fewer well-done casefiles in the fandom than there are poetic vignettes. This is one of the great ones.

Antidote, by Rachel Howard A fic that manages to be both hot and cold as it imagines Mulder and Scully trying to stay alive in the frosty wilderness while a deadly virus is on the loose. This is an ooooold fic that holds up impressively well given everything that followed it!

Falling Down in Four Acts, by Anubis Anubis was actually a bunch of different writers sharing a single author name. This particular one paints an angry, vivid world for Our Heroes and their compatriots. There is no happy ending here, but I read this once and it stayed with me forever.

The Opposite of Impulse, by Maria Nicole A sweet slice of life on a sunny day. When I imagine a gentler universe for Mulder and Scully, this is the kind of place I’d put them.

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

Bait and Switch is probably the most sophisticated and tightly plotted. It was late in my fanfic “career” and so it shows the benefits to all that learning. My favorite varies a lot, but I’ll say Universal Invariants because that one was nothing but fun.

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

I never say never! I don’t have any oldies sitting around, though. Everything I wrote, I posted.

Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

I write casefiles…er, I mean mysteries, under my own name now, Joanna Schaffhausen. My main series with Reed and Ellery consists of a male-female crime solving team, so I get a little bit of my XF kick that way. Their first book, The Vanishing Season, started its life as an XF fanfic back in the day. I had to rewrite it from the ground up to get it published, but if you know both stories, you can spot the similarities.

Where do you get ideas for stories?

The answer any writer will tell you is “everywhere.” Ideas are cheap and they’re all around us—on the news, on the subway, in conversations with friends, from Twitter memes, on a walk through the woods. My mysteries are often rooted in true crime, often more than one of them.

Each idea is like a strand of colored thread, and you have to braid them together into a coherent story. This is the tricky part, determining which threads belong in which story. If the ideas enhance one another or if they just create an ugly tangent.

Mostly, though, stories begin by asking “what if?” What if Scully’s boyfriend Ethan had never been cut from the pilot? What if Scully had moved to Utah after Fight the Future? What if the Lone Gunmen financed their toys by writing a successful comic book starring a thinly veiled Mulder and Scully?

Growing up, I had a sweet old lady for a neighbor. Her name was Doris and she gave me coffee ice cream while we watched Wheel of Fortune together. Every time there was a snow storm, the snow melted in her backyard in a such way that suggested she had numerous bodies buried out there. How’s that for a “what if?”

What's the story behind your pen name?

I’ve had a few of them and honestly can’t tell you where they came from, it’s been so long ago. The “6” part of syntax6 is because I joke that 6 is my lucky number. In eighth grade, my algebra teacher would go around the room in order, asking each student their answer to the previous night’s homework problems. I realized quickly that I didn’t have to do all the problems, just the fifteenth one because my desk was 15th on her list. This worked well until the day she decided to call on kids in random order. When she got to me and asked me the answer to the problem I had not done, I just invented something on the spot. “Uh…six?”

Her: “You mean 0.6, don’t you?”

Me, nodding vigorously: “YES, I DO.”

Her: “Very good. Moving on…”

Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?

My close friends and family have always known, and reactions have varied from mild befuddlement to enthusiastic support. My father voted in the Spookies one year, and you can believe he read the nominated stories before casting his vote. I think the most common reaction was: Why are you doing this for free? Why aren’t you trying to be a paid writer?

Well, having done both now, I can tell you that each kind of writing brings its own rewards. Fanfic is freeing because there is no pressure to make money from it. You can take risks and try new things and not have to worry if it fits into your business plan.

(Posted by Lilydale on September 15, 2020)

[writingquestionsanswered]

Tips: How to Start Your Author Journey

Anonymous asked: My dream is to be become an author. but i dont know how to start... Can you help?

The moment you realize you want to be an author can be both exciting and daunting.Here are some tips and general information to help you begin your journey.

Things to Know

1. There’s Not Just One Path

There are many different paths to being an author. First, you may choose to pursue traditional publishing or self-publishing, or you may do a little of both. Even within those paths, there are alternate routes. You’ll learn about potential paths as you go, and odds are you’ll try a few different paths before finding one you know you want to stay on. Even once you’ve chosen your path, you never know when an unexpected path will open up.

2. Be Patient and Be Strong

This isn’t going to be a fast or easy journey. Most authors write, revise, and query for years before they are published. Even if you choose to self-publish instead of pursuing traditional publishing, it takes a lot of time and effort to make sure your first book is publishing quality.

3. Don’t Compare Yourself to Others

One of the best things you can do for yourself on this journey is avoid comparing yourself to others. Not only is the path to publication different for every writer, what happens along the way can be different for everyone. It doesn’t make anyone better or worse, or make one way better than the other, so never feel like what you’re doing isn’t right because it went differently for someone else. Follow the path that’s right for you the best way you’re able to follow it.

Things to Do

1. Read. Read, Read, Read

I cannot stress this enough. The number one best thing you can do if you want to be an author is read and read a lot. Read books in the genre/s you want to write in. Read books in other genres. Read adult books. Read YA books. Read middle grade books. Read classics. Read books that are super popular. Read books that draw a lot of criticism. Read banned books. Read short stories. Read fan-fiction. Read poetry. Read screenplays. Read graphic novels. Read comic books. Read essays in magazines and online journals.Read newspaper articles. Read EVERYTHING.

2. Consume Stories in Other Ways

Reading is super important, but so is consuming stories in all their other formats. Watch movies. Watch TV shows. Watch plays and musicals. Listen to story podcasts like This American Life, Serial, RadioLab and Snap Judgment. Ask your family members and friends to tell you stories about things that happened to them. As older family members to talk about their childhood memories and what it was like growing up in a long past era. Read non-fiction books about people and events that interest you. Watch documentaries. People watch. Listen to music. Pay attention to your dreams and keep a dream journal. Ask people to tell you dreams they’ve had.

3. Start a Writer’s Notebook

Find a notebook you like (or decorate a plain one) and turn it into your writer’s notebook. Use this notebook to jot down everything that tickles your writer brain. Interesting words, potential character names, interesting settings, plot and character ideas, snippets of dialogue, potential story titles, inspiring quotes, helpful advice... anything!

4. Start Learning Your Craft

There are all sorts of “rules,” ideas, and universal truths about writing, how to do it well, and what readers like and don’t like. A lot of it is opinion-based, some of it is tried and true. It’s super important to learn as much as you can. There are lots of excellent writing craft books you can read. You can find these on Amazon or at your local library. There are also lots of great web sites, blogs, and vlogs that offer excellent writing advice. Learn everything you can and put it into practice by writing.

5. Write. Write, Write, Write

One of the most unhelpful myths among new writers is that the first thing you write will be the thing you publish. This is because you often hear that someone’s debut novel was “the first book they ever wrote,” but that is almost never actually true. It may be the first complete, fully revised, properly critiqued and queried book they ever wrote, but there will most certainly be a long trail of half-finished books, short stories, essays, fan-fiction, stories written for school, and maybe even professional writing leading up to that book. No one sits down and writes something for the very first time, hands it off to the publisher, and has a successful book on their hands. That’s just not how it happens. So WRITE!!! Write a lot. Write short stories. Write fan-fiction. Write novelettes. Write novellas. Write half-finished novels. Write finished novels. Do NaNoWriMo. Do Camp NaNoWriMo. Do writing prompts. Journal. Just. Write.

6. Start Building Your Author Platform

Your author platform is essentially your online presence, your real world presence, and your fan base. Mission critical: a social media presence. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the big ones. Tumblr is great for writers. Many aspiring authors have vlogs on YouTube. Blogs are also great, and many (like WordPress) allow you to make an actual web site to go with it. Create your pages, start engaging with the community. Share pretty graphics with neat quotes or tips. Share a little bit about your writing journey. Look at the social media of other aspiring authors to get ideas for the kinds of things you should be posting. When you feel ready, you might even choose to share snippets of your writing or short stories you write just to share with your fans. When you start working on a WIP that you intend to publish, you can pump up your fans by posting snippets, quotes, and aethetics.

7. Start Researching the Industry

Learn about the traditional publishing industry. Learn about indie publishing (aka self-publishing.) Find out how it all works. My post To Self-Publish or Traditionally Publish? will give you a little overview of both.

8. Begin Writing “The Book”

Eventually you’ll have a book idea and you’ll know this is the book you want to publish. So, get it written. Don’t rush it. Improve each draft. Get feedback from an alpha reader, critique partner, and beta readers. Make it the best you can make it. Polish it up. 

9. Research the Specifics

You’ll actually do this while you’re working on your book, probably, This is once you’ve decided which path you’re going to take: traditional or indie. Now you need to figure out how to get your book, once it’s all polished up, through the next stage. For traditional publishing, that’s going to mean finding agents to query, writing your query letters, and actually querying them. For indie publishing, that’s going to mean finding an editor, finding a book cover artist (or buying a pre-made cover), finding a formatter, and looking at different publishing platforms like Amazon’s KDP, IngramSpark, Smashwords, etc., and learning about their process and requirements.

10. The Home Stretch

Whether you find an agent to help you traditionally publish, or you find a platform where you can self-publish, you’ll be provided with specific guidance from here on out. Your agent will walk you through anything else you need to do, and platforms like Amazon’s KDP will have guides that tell you how to actually upload your book, as well as information about what you need to have ready to go.

————————————————————————————————- Have a question? My inbox is always open, but please make sure to check my FAQ and post master lists first to make sure I haven’t already answered a similar question. :)

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, December 2019

Welcome to my latest summary of recent news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & ecommerce! This covers articles I came across since the October report, although some may be older than that.

I am also missing a lot here, but pared it down somewhat to make more readable. The lead up to the holiday shopping season was a lot crazier than I expected 🙃

Given the time of year, please do not expect another report until January. However, I will do brief posts of important news/blog posts in the interim as needed.

There are going to be big changes to this report coming in 2020. Have any suggestions or feedback?  Leave a comment below, email me through my website, or send me a message on Twitter.

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES

You are going to need to add Etsy’s tax ID to customs forms on New Zealand orders as of Dec. 1. Etsy’s ID is: 122-669-18.

FTC issues huge fines for selling fake likes & followers on social media, and for posting fake reviews online. “The [likes and followers] case could pave the way for further legal action on the same grounds, using the Devumi case as precedent. Indeed, shortly after the initial finding by the NY Attorney General, Facebook announced that it was moving ahead with legal action against several providers which it had found to be dealing in fake social media engagement.”

Everyone should read this article, if only to learn what not to do: Using “priming” to convert more buyers/users is a crucial marketing tactic.”Priming works by using associations made in our subconscious, and are almost always unnoticeable to the subject.” Example: “During a study, researchers approached customers in an electronics store, who’d entered to buy a new laptop.Half of the customers were asked what their memory needs were, and the other half were asked what their processor needs were...The group who were asked about memory, bought computers with higher memory and the group who were asked about processor speed, bought computers with much higher processor speeds.”

Etsy removed the word “Bugs” from the Bugs forum, & admits they will only will be monitoring it from 9-5 Etsy time (ET) Monday to Friday. They won’t be replying, but expect “hundreds of sellers” to do that job for them, unpaid. If you have an issue, you will now need to email through the Contact page, use the new 24 hour live chat, or phone them. [Note the parts they aren’t mentioning - Support is taking over a week to reply to emails right now, live chat will only be able to help with the simplest of questions (e.g., how do I change my email address?) & it is possible to spend over an hour on hold when you phone. You could spend quite a bit of money on long distance fees, especially if you are in a country that doesn’t have its own phone number, all for something you used to be able to get for free in the forum, sometimes on the same day. This is Etsy’s definition of “major improvements”.]

Check out this proposed US legislation, which wants large internet companies [yes, Etsy fits their definition] to reveal their algorithms & offer visitors a version with no “filter bubble.” You might not like Etsy search now, but I can guarantee it would become impossible if they removed all of the algorithm factors. [This editorial is a bit over the top, but does cover some of the key questions.]

ETSY NEWS

Items have been disappearing from a small number of Etsy searches since July, & Etsy still won’t tell us what is going on. If you discover you are affected, please let me know.

There have been a few threads on Etsy sending threatening emails about shops being below Etsy’s customer service expectations, often for just a few bad feedbacks or cases, which has shocked many long time sellers (even though they have been sending them for years; it appears they have decreased the number of “problems” you need to have to get an email.) Without announcing anything, Etsy released a page of “seller service level standards” that can help explain what they are looking for, namely cases & 1-2 star reviews, as well as the exact formula they use. I started a discussion thread here, & in case Etsy deletes comments in the thread, here is the dashboard showing your score. (Some people cannot make that link work; Etsy says only shops that received a warning can see it.) My blog post is here.

I summarized the 3rd quarter report here, and Etsy summarized it here. The stock market is not happy with management at the moment, with Morgan Stanley this past week stating that they expected Etsy’s 4th quarter to be worse than originally predicted, due to state sales tax laws and Etsy’s reduction in its Google Shopping ad buying. Note Etsy removed the “priority placement” for US free shipping about a week after the 3rd Q report, without any announcement, probably due to the blowback about it reducing first page conversions. (They didn’t announce anything; it just disappeared.)

Cyber Week traffic on Etsy was more than double what they saw on the average summer day.

They did a Q & A thread on the new stats, which wasn’t particularly useful. They admitted they intentionally removed the keyword & other data prior to November 2017 because “older data periods are less comparable to current stats”. [I believe that is code for “we’re too cheap to pay for the storage; investors need their payouts.”] They did finally add YOY comparisons back in a few weeks ago.

Etsy has again changed a few category & attribute options, including more baby stuff.

They did a holiday gift shopping promotion where people could call Etsy & get suggestions for gifts on Nov. 5. All gifts shipped free, so non-free shipping shops were not included. “It could also be a case study for personalization efforts to come from the long-running handmade marketplace.”

You’ve probably already noticed that Convos are now called Messages, but here is the announcement with the details just in case.

Etsy ran an Etsy search critique thread on November 13; the thread wasn't particularly useful, as almost all the staff who do the critiques aren’t experts in search. Basically, they say to use all of your tags, avoid repeating words in tags & titles, have 3-4 short phrases in your title, use commas in your titles (”Buyer research shows that using commas instead of dashes helps titles appear more clean and readable”), offer free shipping, and use all of your photos. The big takeaway for me was - they think we all have unlimited photography budgets, models, and time to do different modelled photos for every listing (including at the beach! LOL), photos of each of our different pieces in progress, photos of us working, & photos of each type of packaging. Needless to say, none of those things are bad if you have gobs of time or the money to pay someone to do all of that. But if you are like me and are a one-person business, live in a small condo, don’t have the strength to take photos all day, don’t have an abundance of people to model when I am taking photos (i.e., people I know have real jobs & aren’t around when I work on photos), and don’t have anyone to take photos of me making things, then this is pretty laughable. I wouldn't even consider doing all of this for my 5 best selling listings, never mind all 430+. YMMV. [The repeated mentions of process photos makes me worry they will be requiring those for everyone at some point …but I am sure I am just being paranoid.] One notable error was telling someone to use “color” (the US spelling) instead of “colour” (the proper English spelling) because the shop’s language settings were US English - Etsy currently treats these both the same, so there is no issue at the moment. Are they trying to give us a hint about something?

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

Introducing BERT: Google’s new technology to help organic search process natural language better. This isn’t likely a change you can optimize for, but it should help searchers get more relevant results for complicated queries. “Here is an example of Google showing a more relevant featured snippet for the query “Parking on a hill with no curb”. In the past, a query like this would confuse Google’s systems. Google said, “We placed too much importance on the word “curb” and ignored the word “no”, not understanding how critical that word was to appropriately responding to this query. So we’d return results for parking on a hill with a curb.” Moz’s Whiteborad Friday covered the basics. [warning - some bits are advanced. Just skip those if you need to.] A study said BERT still isn’t very good at understanding “not” and other negatives. The NY Times may be one of the sites that is affected.

If you were disappointed when keyword research tool Keywords Everywhere became a paid tool, a new alternative has been released. Note that Keyword Surfer is still in beta. I’m going to try it for a bit and write up a short report if I think it is worth using. (The traffic estimates are way off, as in almost 10 times too low, for the sites I have info on.)  If you try it, let me know what you think!

While we are on the topic, here’s 13 keyword research errors you don’t want to make. Short takeaways - not every high volume keyword phrase will work for your specific product, don't ignore long tail, and make sure you look at the search results for any keyword before you decide to use it.

Here’s another keyword and topic research tool that compiles questions people search along with a relationship tree so you can see how ideas are connected.

More common SEO problems with ecommerce sites.

If you code your own website, check out the new Google instructions on writing your organic search snippets. Note this is supposedly only about display & not about ranking.

Improve your Instagram traffic with 8 SEO tips for your profile and posts.

Which is better for SEO - Squarespace or WordPress? The results are likely skewed by the fact that “platforms like Wix and Squarespace tend to attract less SEO-savvy people than WordPress.” They agree with what I have been saying for a while: if you know what you're doing, Squarespace sites can rank just fine.

Excellent tips on how good SEO also helps you comply with US disability access laws.

The latest on Google updates - there was apparently one around November 7. This one may have hit affiliate websites more than other types.

The Wall Street Journal wrote an article claiming Google manipulated search results to favour its interests & those of its advertisers, including eBay. [The original article is behind a paywall; the link is in that news coverage.] However, many in the SEO community - most of whom are not usually reluctant to criticize Google when they are behaving poorly - feel the article is way off base, & demonstrates a fundamental lack of knowledge of how Google works. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land & Search Engine Roundtable even did interviews with t WSJ staff for the article, and was amazed at how much they got wrong. “Even a basic understanding of the difference between organic listings (the free search results) and the paid listings (the ads in the search results) eluded them…[Glenn] Gabe told us that not only were his conversations with the paper off-the-record but also that he was misquoted”

CONTENT MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails)

Here’s something I don’t see discussed much: using templates (& other consistent branding) in your social media, blog and website posts.

Content hubs are a very useful way to increase your search engine traffic for a core topic while providing a landing page for social media, ads etc.

Good primer here for beginning social media marketing for your business. You’ll need to do more research depending on your target market and what platform/s you choose, but it is definitely a good overview of getting started.

If you think influencer marketing is right for your business, here are 10 places you can find influencers to work with.

Your email subject lines can change the open rates; here are 19 tips to make them more clickable.

Instagram started testing hiding “likes” on posts in the US as of November 11th, & then announced plans to try it out globally. A study on previous tests showed that there may be some effect on influencer engagement.

Facebook has introduced its own payment system, currently in the US only, for limited situations only at the moment.

Reddit is an often overlooked social media platform to use for business but the traffic is strong, so check out these tips on asking it work for your business. [infographic]

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS)

Pay for online ads (outside of Etsy) but don’t know what negative keywords are? Here’s how to use them with Google.

Hubspot continues their massive rush of “ultimate guides” with everything you wanted to know about Amazon ads.

Facebook now allows you to have different text in the same ads, which can be adjusted for different groups of users.

Amazon is predicted to continue cutting into Google’s online ad dominance through 2021; Google currently has 73% of money spent on online ads in the US.

If you are interested in long term brand building in your advertising, you might be interested in this article, where Adidas admits it was ignoring brand ads & pushing instant returns for too long.

Just in time for the holidays, Google Merchant Center rolled out a bunch of upgrades.

Buying TV ad time is losing popularity; it will be less than 25% of all advertising spend in just a few years, while digital spending is now over 50%.

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING

Facebook changed how they count page impressions.

Everything you want to know about the Google Search Console. Oh, and also everything you want to know about the Google Search Console. Which one do you like best? [If you have your own website or freestanding blog and are not using the Console, you probably should be reading both of those. Seriously, just set the darn thing up, then learn how to use it later.]

Also, the Console now features a speed report, and has changed how they send you messages.

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS

Trend alert: many struggling or failed retailers sell clothing. “This sector is saturated with supply and is arguably over-stored.” … “For younger shoppers, as they choose which apparel brands do get their attention, sustainability and other cultural issues are often at the forefront.”

US sellers can now get discounted UPS rates through Shippo.

A bug is keeping suspended Amazon sellers from being reinstated.

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE

Don’t use these common customer service lines. ...“there are studies that support the use of positive language in customer service. Instead of focusing on what you can’t do for a customer, focus on what you can do. No one likes to be told no.”

Another article on the psychology of colour; beware that some of this is a bit simplistic, as there are always exceptions.

Holiday shopping will push further into December this year, with half starting around Cyber Monday (Dec. 2). 62% of “high spenders” (over $2100 spent on the holidays) will shop on their smart phones. 25% of respondents to this survey said they already started shopping in September. It turns out most people want gift cards, among other stats. Nearly half of US shoppers are more likely to shop with companies that are socially responsible. Mobile shopping is expected to beat desktop shopping for the first time this season. And yes, most Americans expect to add to their credit card debt before January, men more than women.

US retail sales fell 0.3% in September; online sales fell the same amount.  

MISCELLANEOUS (including humour)

Trend alert - apparently Generation Z is not big on makeup, and it is affecting large companies’ profits.

Google’s co-founders hand the parent company Alphabet over to the current CEO. They still work for Google and will focus most of their time there.

Google Webmaster spokesperson John Mueller tackles the controversial question - is a hot dog a sandwich? [humour]

[digitalartbycorrah]

Blog Post 3: Websites

My Website

In order to secure my domain, which is digitalartbycorrah.com, and subsequent email address, I used 1&1, and paid a small fee of just £1.20. I was then able to port my domain over to Adobe Portfolio, the website builder that I am using.

Website 1: Sabato Visconti (www.sabatobox.com)

Sabato Visconti covers a range of different Digital Art Themes such as:

· Glitch Art

· New Media

· Photography

· Illustration

Visconti displays his work by what theme is work comes under:

· Glitch Photography/ Post-Photography

· Glitch Video and GIF Art

· 3D Art and Animation

· ROM Corruption and Video Game Art

· Glitch Design and New Media

· Traditional Photography

· Illustration

· Curatorial Projects

At the bottom of the navigation list for this website is:

· About

· Press and Exhibitions

· Contact

· Store

Interface Features of Sabato Visconti’s Website:

Visconti sets out his website in a 4 row and 3 column display, however he doesn’t have a header bar in his website, instead he utilises the side navigation, and on mobile, the button of the hamburger menu that opens up on the left hand side of the screen, sits on the right.

The website does not harness a bottom navigation and Visconti’s social media links are listed in the side navigation, he also lists the insignia of the Creative Commons and the dates for when his website was founded and when it was last updated, being 2011-2021.

Pages and Collections

I studied two of the collections on this website, I studied the layout to check for continuity, as well as other features. The first of the collections that I decided to study is Glitch Photography and Post Photography.

At the top of the page, Visconti uses too much text to explain the section, and doesn’t not utilise a legible font face, the text actually takes up half of the collection page. The amount of text at the top of the page could actually drive people to look away for Visconti’s website.

The Ghosts of Brimfield Collection

All images used in this collection have the Red hover-overs with magnifying glasses on them in order to zoom in on the images in the collections. The grid system in place across the rest of the website is in place on this page, giving consistency to the general CSS of the website the grid System in place for the collections as a great mixture of sizes to display all the different parts of Visconti’s work. This gives a good sense of dimensionality and depth to Visconti’s collections.

Illustration Collection

In the Illustration collection, the same features regarding layout and also shows a huge depth in collection, there is no set theme for example, in this collection has aminated illustration as well as standard illustration.

Throughout Visconti’s website, formal language is used, giving the correct kind of tone and desired level of professionality. The layout of the website is exceptionally good and has a fantastic structure, and this structure gives a grounding for a huge amount of content to be displayed on the website, proving that content is king.

Website 2: Kelly Cooper Photography (www.kellycooperphotography.com)

This website is not as well laid out as Sabato Visconti’s website. There is not a huge amount of structure to the website.

A particularly good example of this is the fact that the website has a header, but it is not a sticky header, meaning that there is not constant navigation through the website. In the header, the logo is placed centrally in the header and below it, the other pages of the website are listed as follows:

· Gallery

· Business (ABOUT ME)

· Fashion & Editorial

· Photo Blog

This website has the contact details of the photographer listed at the bottom, however a huge similarity to Visconti’s website, is that both of them have no link to the CVs of either Cooper or Visconti. She has not listed her phone number in the 5-3-3, meaning it is not clearly listed.

The Photographer has not listed a professional email, e.g., an “info@_________________.com”, a Gmail email address has been listed, which is not hugely Professional.

They have used a small social media icon in order to list a link to the Instagram account associated with the website.

On the home page, the photos used are in a grid, but they need to be downsized, so as to make more room for content or so the page is not as vast.

About Page:

She uses a profile photo of herself and it is a good photo of her. Her about me section however is far too long. A good and catchy about section should be around 30-50 words, rather than 3 paragraphs. However, in the navigation in the header bar, the about me section is actually listed as business.

She lists her experience and location in the Business/About Me section. However, in fitting style to the rest of the website, all of the pictures used in the Business/About Me Section are overly large yet perfectly aligned. The size of the pictures causes too much space to be taken up by the photographs. However, the contact details and social media account are listed in the footer.

Full Site Critique

Across almost the whole website, all of the photograph’s used are far too big and could do with a downsize, so as to make more room for more content…. Unlike Visconti’s website, the space hasn’t been used wisely and content in this website is not king. Content being king in this website is non-existent, what this website does is show off a few pictures, in a neatly aligned grid, but it needs to show off more in the neatly aligned grids that she has used, not just 3 or 4 in a row. However, these grids give for fantastic organisation.

In a difference to nearly the rest of the website, the photo blog page actually uses a decent grid, and all of the photographs are all of a decent size and there is room for more on the page. The blog also carries relevant posts, with the surrounding theme being the work of the photographer.

The overall CSS of the website is pure white and is not hugely aesthetically pleasing, there are also no user interface features, not like Sabato Visconti’s website, where he has colour hover-overs implemented on all images and there are colour changing hovers on all of the titles on the navigation. In Kelly Cooper’s website, on the header navigation, there are white hover overs on the page headers.

The Gallery is no where near as organised on Kelly Cooper’s Website, as it is on Sabato Visconti’s website. Even though Kelly Cooper’s website does not hold as much content as Sabato Visconti’s website, but it requires the same level of organisation.

The way in which Sabato Visconti organises his website, is how I should aim to organise my own as my work comes under many different themes and can’t just smash them all together in to one page, I have to ensure that all of my work is organised in to the right theme so that it is clear that my work encompasses a myriad of different things, not just one. I need to show my versatility throughout my website and not just make myself look like a boring cookie cutter digital artist.

[dipulb3]

$200,000 streaming rigs and millions of views: inside the cottage industry popping up around SpaceX

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/200000-streaming-rigs-and-millions-of-views-inside-the-cottage-industry-popping-up-around-spacex/

$200,000 streaming rigs and millions of views: inside the cottage industry popping up around SpaceX

Beyer, a Los Angeles-based photographer and contributor to the space news site NASASpaceflight.com, had by that point been staying at a South Texas hotel for a month, watching and waiting and filming as SpaceX prepared to launch the prototype — an early iteration of Starship, the spaceship that company founder Elon Musk envisions will one day land the first humans on Mars — on a doomed test flight.

On this particular day, Beyer had his camera up on his car roof, pointed at engineers and construction workers as they tinkered with the rocket or prepared to pour concrete to expand the vast launch site.

The size and passion of Musk’s fandom means people like Beyer can earn decent money doing that job. They may have to spend thousands of dollars on camera equipment, but in return they get access to hundreds of thousands of doting fans, and millions of YouTube views.

That Saturday it seemed like there might be only a couple of days left before the rocket prototype, which was known as SN11, was launched on its test flight. Ultimately, though, Beyer had to remain in Texas for two more weeks before the launch actually happened on March 30.

The early morning launch proved to be a dud as far as visuals went: An early morning fog rolled in and obscured any chance at clear views of the launch site. Beyer watched the launch from a nearby park as the cameras rolled.

Then, at some point during its landing, SN11 exploded.

On another day, the explosion could have been good — if disappointing — footage for the NASASpaceflight team and others documenting the launch. But the fog meant that NASASpaceflight’s stream, which stayed live, offered only brief glimpses of smoke and flame. Worse, shrapnel from the explosion nearly knocked out thousands of dollars of camera equipment. One of the solar panels Beyer uses to keep the equipment running, was knocked out by the blast, but, luckily, the rest of the rig was spared.

A few days later, the NASASpaceflight team was already livestreaming the assembly of SpaceX’s next prototype — SN15.

Beyer said a local resident, who goes by the name “BocaChicaGal” online, is the linchpin of NASASpaceflight’s video operation. She began recording SpaceX’s operations near her home, which is sandwiched between SpaceX’s launch pad and manufacturing facility, before the news outlet began conducting regular livestreams, and she now works as a NASASpaceflight contributor. She declined an interview with Appradab Business.

Beyer said the channel’s contributors are paid for their work, though most of them keep side gigs to pay the bills. But lately, Beyer has made it a full-time job.

“It’s not a full-time job in terms of…I don’t get a salary or anything. I don’t get like health benefits, right? That’s normal,” he said. But lately he’s been working 40 to 80 hours a week on SpaceX-related content, and his online profile has grown to the point where he has a steady stream of donations and monthly income from Patreon, which allows fans to donate directly to their favorite online creators.

“It’s an insane amount of hours, but I will work my fingers to the bone. I don’t care,” he said. As a lifelong space fanatic, Beyer said, he would rather be in a dusty Texas town watching rocket prototypes explode than anywhere else on the planet.

NASASpaceflight is prolific. The team, which has about 10 contributors, is known to spend up to nine hours hosting livestreams as they await test flights. One NASASpaceflight stream of SN11 rolling down the street toward the launch pad, for example, got 1.5 million views in two months.

The contributors to NASASpaceflight aren’t the only ones doing this. Tim Dodd, who uses the moniker Everyday Astronaut, has amassed nearly 1 million subscribers on his YouTube channel. He began streaming the launches SpaceX conducts out of Florida and producing educational videos in which he delves into the physics of and design choices made for modern rockets.

Dodd previously worked as a photographer, shooting weddings all over the world, until he began airing his love of spaceflight through a series of Instagram posts in which he donned an old Russian flight suit. That evolved into a full-time YouTube career. He’s now set up a new studio space just a few miles from SpaceX’s South Texas launch pad, where a rear balcony gives him a clear view of SpaceX’s prototypes glinting in the sun. Though an Iowa native, Dodd has stayed in Texas for months tracking the company’s progress through a few previous rocket prototype launches.

Dodd has more than 5,000 Patreon supporters, and the donations roll in regularly during his YouTube livestreams — $5 here, $50 there. One subscriber sent a $250 gift with the note, “dinner is on me tonight.”

Though he pays producers, editors and other collaborators to help, Dodd mostly runs a one-person shop. He describes himself as an audio-visual perfectionist: He’s put more than $200,000 toward the cameras and equipment he uses to livestream the test launches, including new gear he recently ordered that will allow him to webcast in 4K.

“That’s where every dollar is going,” he told Appradab Business. “Scarily, every penny that I’ve ever made is in this right now.”

His efforts have paid off. He’s won the support of Musk himself, who frequently replies to Dodd’s questions on Twitter, has been repeatedly photographed wearing Everyday Astronaut merchandise, and has sat for interviews for Dodd’s channel.

Musk has also tuned into a 24/7 livestream of SpaceX’s South Texas operations that was set up by Louis Balderas, an IT consultant who lives on South Padre Island in South Texas, Balderas told Appradab Business. Balderas has for more than a year kept several high-end security cameras, which he said are together worth about $50,000, perched on nearby buildings or empty land. He uses them to stream an endless picture of SpaceX’s launch and manufacturing facilities on his YouTube channel, LabPadre.

“[Musk] said it’s easier for him to get an update on what’s going on rather than to pick up the phone,” Balderas said of what Musk told him about his stream during a 2019 meeting.

(SpaceX has not responded to interview requests or inquiries from Appradab Business in nearly a year.)

Last month, Balderas said, SpaceX employees took down a key camera — the one capturing the closest view of the launch pad — just before SpaceX’s SN10 rocket prototype was slated to lift off. The camera was perched on a piece of property he used to lease, but SpaceX had taken it over, and it took down the device without telling him beforehand. Then some of Balderas’ fans complained on Twitter, and power tweeter Musk personally intervened.

“First I’ve heard of this. We’ll fix the situation,” Musk tweeted at Balderas. Within a day, SpaceX had given him his camera back and replaced the rig he used to keep it elevated, and the feed was back up, Balderas told Appradab Business.

SpaceX and Musk rarely share their own updates about what’s happening at their South Texas facilities, which lie less than half a mile from a public beach called Boca Chica. That’s made streamers like Everyday Astronaut, NASASpaceflight and LabPadre an essential source of information about the operations.

When a prototype rocket is ready to launch, the YouTubers post feeds captured through remote cameras often set up days in advance. They go live hours before launch — long before SpaceX publicly confirms such tests are even happening.

Dodd, Beyer and other NASASpaceflight contributors keep their feeds filled with nearly constant analysis. Even without guidance from SpaceX, they’re able to post estimated countdown clocks ahead of launch solely by tracking observable changes to SpaceX’s fueling tanks and ground systems.

Unofficial livestreams of the SN10 prototype launch, which saw the vehicle soar about six miles high before landing upright on a nearby ground pad, wound up being key. SpaceX had wrapped its official livestream before the rocket exploded just a few minutes after landing, while independent streamers kept rolling, capturing the sudden eruption.

Musk himself said nothing until hours later, cryptically acknowledging the blast by posting a tweet that read “RIP SN10, honorable discharge.”

If it weren’t for the webcasters, the public — and many journalists who routinely cover SpaceX — might not have known until Musk tweeted that SN10 had exploded.

The cottage industry of SpaceX observers have gained new prominence on social media platforms at a time when the space community — mirroring political Twitter — is more divided than ever. There’s constant infighting among space fans, many of whom come in the form of anonymous accounts that rally around SpaceX and Musk as diehard defenders, levying threats or insults at those who critique the company. And there’s an emerging counter-movement, which is known to accuse SpaceX fans of being sycophants.

Dodd and Beyer both said they try to keep their heads above the fray. Their goal is to rally excitement around space exploration and to educate the public. They rarely mention the SpaceX controversy du jour. But the online “toxicity” does occasionally seep into the streamers’ comments sections, Dodd said.

“It sucks,” Dodd, who has nearly 400,000 Twitter followers, said. “I hate division. I hate tribalism. And I’m witnessing it happen more and more every single day…I don’t want to be thinking about negative things. I want to be excited about the future. And for me, that’s space.”

Evidence of the super-fandom the SpaceX YouTubers feed is visible on days when Boca Chica beach is open and rocket fans come by the carload, pulling off on the narrow roadway to snap pictures of the rocket.

On that Saturday last month, the fans flooded in, cameras at the ready. Brothers Matthew and John March said they had flown in to Austin and then drove nearly six hours south to stand beneath the massive steel vehicle. Philip Bottin, who lives in Washington State, said he drove practically from the top of the country to the bottom — his second pilgrimage to SpaceX’s South Texas launch site — to get a glimpse at the SN11 rocket and the remaining scraps of SN10, which were still visible near the landing pad.

Beyer said that after SpaceX’s first high-altitude test flight in December, which ended with prototype SN8 smashing into its ground pad and erupting into a ball of flames, there were maybe five people that drove out to the beach to get a glimpse of the wreckage.

After the test flight of SN10, however, “there was like 50 or 100.” Beyer said he’s even started having fans recognize him by the sound of his voice. (NASASpaceflight contributors provide audio but don’t appear on camera.)

“I say to people when they come up to me, ‘I’m so glad you’re excited about this because if people weren’t, there’s no way we’re going to Mars,'” Beyer told Appradab Business.

Getting to Mars is something Beyer, a lifelong space fanatic, hopes to do before he dies. But whether or not SpaceX is ultimately successful is only part of his motivation.

“There’s only going to be one moment like this in my lifetime, and this is it right now,” he said. “You have to strike while the iron is hot.”

[enos1olkklbc]

Add These 10 Mangets To Your BigCommerce

I just read Michael Fox’s post on Australia needing more engineers that are software Mitchell Harper’s SMH opinion piece regarding the deficiencies of our university system for teaching software engineering. Interesting. I’ve done a bunch of hiring of engineers in Sydney over a number of years, so I’ve an impression in these areas too. Curious about I quickly scanned the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations skill shortage lists, but this didn’t reveal any particular shortage in IT generally if it was an accepted statistical fact. Anecdotally and through my own experience, recruiting engineers could be difficult, but we’ve also never had a shortage of applicants, even for niche roles. Most of the difficulty arises to locate top notch talent, not finding individuals to interview. And so the issue just isn't volume, but talent, and it is a skills shortage. We now have the social people, however the people don’t have the abilities. This makes sense: people in software engineering are well paid, and move on to do interesting, challenging work, so there is not any doubt so it’s an role that is attractive. Understanding that you want to work with software engineering and having desirable skills are a couple of separate things. Does university teach how exactly to be a software engineer that is good? Reflecting by myself education that is undergraduatestudying Information Systems during the University of New South Wales), the computer science curriculum was geared towards fundamentals. The first year course was taught in Haskell, that I think many professionals would agree is a superb introduction - it makes prospective engineers think in functions and side effects and it is an ideal teaching language. The sum of these subjects is a great background in computer science, not an industry developer that is ready. Right now (review the curriculum here), the focus is certainly caused by on core computer science and mathematics. You'll find nothing pertaining to industry that is practical, or web development, or best practices for organising work and teams. Reviewing Stanford’s computer science curriculum shows a remarkably similar group of subjects, so I don’t believe it is restricted to Sydney or Australia if we have a problem. What's the role of university anyway? The big, age old question is if it is the role of university to get ready students for industry? For Harper, the answer is "yes": "Australian universities are not producing engineers" that is workplace-ready. While in my estimation it’s not the job of university to organize "workplace-ready engineers" (I’m associated with the opinion that the basic principles and theory perspective is the proper focus for 90% of a qualification, and that a vocation ready engineer will establish at work), i really do think that there ought to be some degree of preparation, and the right amount of preparation will be relatively simple to deliver to students. A couple of semester long courses on industry practices would be give an undergraduate student a head start that is good. The truth is there will never be plenty of time in an undergraduate degree to completely prepare a student for industry (my suggestion of just one or two semester long courses will have to take a very good opinion on languages and operations, and would you should be the beginning). Harper says that "They’re quite simply not being taught the right languages, methodologies, processes and problem concepts" that is solving but even to instruct the "right" languages into the "right" way would take such a chunk of a student’s time that there’d be precious little time left for the true science to be learnt. Indeed, for Harper’s BigCommerce, the right language would be PHP, and would most certainly be counter-productive for young engineers to learn. I’m surprised to learn Harper saying that they’re not being shown problem solving concepts at university, and I’d want to learn more exactly what he means by that. Students are being taught to be engineers, but mostly industry is interested in half-engineers, half web-developers. The web developers that are best have built on fundamentals, the sort of fundamentals a student learns at university. Some good web developers have self-educated rather than attended university, and also for the right individual there isn't any doubt you can find probably few careers that accomodate the self taught so well. You will find precious shortcuts that are few learning those fundamentals though. So, industry wants graduate engineers who are able to hit the ground running and can deliver value straight away aided by the particular languages and processes that a company that is specific chosen, and has no time to build up individuals with potential. Why blame universities for not catering for this kind of demand? University needs to deliver timeless knowledge built on science and learning, not focus on the whims of a quick paced industry, attempting to predict every fad which comes along. Companies can complain, but there’s a quick method to solve this problem: take students with potential and train all of them with your languages, your processes, your engineering ideals. This is certainly also the way that is slow solve the problem, but hey, much better than complaining.

Communicating these ideas and implementing them not merely builds brand credibility, but customers feel much safer and there’s no bigger conversion killer than when a person does feel safe n’t. Being in several channels may work well for your needs, but as long as you can measure results. Make sure to ensure that analytics is a major section of your omnichannel plans! That’s the way that is only have the ability to get the 80/20 of what exactly is working together with your marketing. Tracking cross-channel impacts of advertising is quite challenging. Don’t try to get it perfect, use data to get trends instead. Don’t make any assumptions. Perform some ongoing work to comprehend who your customer is (buyer persona), what they want, and how they research/buy. Retail, especially online retail, is getting to be an even more place that is crowded every day passes. Be really, REALLY clear about your metrics and who your target customers are! What exactly is your average customer lifetime value? What exactly is your acceptable cost of acquiring a new customer? What exactly is your customer persona and what do they care about? Make every decision with those three things in your mind. Concentrate on the buyer’s needs and journey first and then align your teams, data and systems to generate a seamless and customer experience that is integrated. A lot of people do so within the reverse order and then wonder why they have experience gaps. Take the time to sit down with your team and actually map out (1) your customer personas and (2) how these personas flow during your user acquisition channels (i.e. FB ads, Instagram, Google, etc.) and (3) where they end up buying your product (in other words. website, brick and mortar, mobile app, Amazon, etc.). You possibly can make it interactive using this method on a wall in your office and using color coded post-it notes for every step regarding the journey. Don’t undervalue the free stuff. Search, influencer coverage, product reviews, industry directories, coupon/deal sites: they all play a subtle and role that is interrelated’s tough to attribute, but that’s precisely what means they are a simple yet effective usage of spend. In economics terms, that uncertainty is exactly what means they are an marketplace that is inefficient. Most purchases require multiple marketing touches. You can verify it for your brand within the Time Lag or Path Length reports in Google Analytics. Product critiques, search engine results, blogger coverage, social strategy, all frequently play a shared role in a single sale. Try to avoid applying the same goals to every channel and instead consider how each channel can contribute to your strategy.

· SEO-readiness. Provides for the greater data promotion in search engines

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Automated Email Marketing

BigCommerce's stock nearly triples during the open, and keeps rising

4:42 a.m. Sept. 6, 2020

You may use Amazon to get time that is first, a brick and mortar retailer like 7/11 to boost brand awareness, and then drive all of this traffic back to your D2C online storefront where you earn nearly all your margin. Cannibalization of sales from multiple channels is a real risk but it requires to be weighed against the benefits these channels offer. Continuously optimize and test to achieve your goals. You never know what channel, message, time of day, or means of engagement will work best unless you test it. Before entering into new channels, spend some time looking into how competitors or brands that are similar utilising the channel. The intent and expectations across channels varies greatly. For example, somebody scrolling on Instagram is very different than somebody searching for your product on Google Shopping, while the expectations that are post-click costs will differ as well. Omnichannel isn't just having things work technically across channels - it is about providing an incredible experience across channels. Just because customers are functionally in a position to do what they should do does not imply that you’re providing an amazing customer experience across channels. Make sure you’re emotionally connecting with customers at every opportunity. Talk to the consumer. You can’t completely understand the journey or the issues you’re not speaking to the customer to find out how they’re experiencing it in it if. Online focus groups, visit tracking software, reading feedback, actually calling them and asking them! You can’t do a job that is good of if you don’t speak to them. We mistake a buyers journey by convinced that customers desire to control it. This is simply not the scenario in terms of creating a connection that is customer/brand. It has to produce sense towards the Brand and contains to build a memorable journey that’ll be noticeable in the buyer’s mind specially when the internet space is becoming over crowded with options. Aside from channel, customer experience has to be a top priority. You'll have the website that is best or the fanciest retail location, if the service is lacking, you’ll lose customers. Expectations are greater than ever, and modern consumers won’t tolerate lower than stellar experiences. Also, make content for buyers at all stages of it is needed by the journey-customers! One-size-fits all does not always work. Increasingly, consumers expect the retailers they do business with to offer a omnichannel experience that is seamless. The fact is consumers have endless choices of where (and how) to search these days, and if you don’t meet their expectations and gives convenient solutions, they will find one of the competitors that will. Omnichannel is a way that is great brands to simplify the direction they connect with customers through different marketing platforms.

These 5 Simple BigCommerce Methods Will Pump Up Your Gross sales Nearly Instantly

In an effort, to become an even more effective brand and still touch differing people in every kinds of channels you must think like a consumer. My biggest advice is to brand is ensure it is easier not complicated. Developing an omnichannel strategy is a uniquely-tailored process with customer-centric goals. The main focus should be on how your visitors wish to experience shopping online, and that focus should really be supported by the infrastructure partners who is able to help to hold that customer’s experience to the highest standards. Ensure that you have an answer with a hub and spokes that function seamlessly to allow your brand image and promise to shine across channels no matter where your customers decide to engage with you. Most importantly, don’t assume or think you know your customers expectations and desires, but really do the job and research to make sure you are aware, and this will enrich the omnichannel experience you deliver. Think about the buying experience from your perspective. Years back, you would buy in-person only. At some time you started online that is shopping and sites like Amazon. But these worlds are starting to blend and you’re more and much more prone to take a look at something in-person but online buy it. The key as a merchant is to be in a position to accommodate your customer and however take their order they would like to give it. Individuals are almost certainly going to purchase when you present them with an offer that’s personalized for their needs. Studying your data and getting very granular together with your audience segmentation allows you to deliver a highly-personalized promotion that is on-site is more prone to convert. Anticipate to serve your shopper whether this woman is into the awareness, consideration, or decision phases regarding the customer journey. For example, shoppers do not know always what they would like to buy, or perhaps know and cannot verbalize it. Along with great visuals and superb design, brands should always have search, filters, and buy buttons ready for shoppers moving from awareness to consideration, and decision. The same across all channels to make channel switching easy for customers, make sure your brand FEELS. And remember, buyers say they want three things: their desired outcome and an experience. Whatever they really would like is an experience that transforms them. People purchase from people. Be consistent, be approachable and start to become relevant. Smaller brands are more malleable and certainly will adjust and innovate quicker than larger, established brands. Trends change so quickly and often that you need to constantly innovate. Create an omni-channel experience that aligns in what your brand stands for. Stop thinking when it comes to channnels and start thinking in terms of the engagement that is entire irrespective of transactional outcome.

You know more regarding the branding than other people, so make sure you have consistent, accurate branding across as numerous online and offline channels. Don’t let random resellers control your branding. Because over fifty percent of all U.S. Automate whenever possible. Checking up on Amazon, eBay, social media marketing, your internet site, and just about every other channels you’re a part of can quickly get overwhelming. Automation may help things run smoothly without sucking all your time. The things that can’t be automated should be delegated as much as possible, unless it’s a thing that only you can certainly do. Hiring & training the people that are right imperative to scaling your organization without working 80 hour weeks. Really, this really is just good business advice. Nonetheless it’s a lot more true whenever you branch out into multiple platforms. Integration is key. Only 7% of marketers can deliver omnichannel in real time, all the time. To get close, brands need to adopt a strategy that is holistic loops in every avenue of customer engagement. The necessary data to drive the next interaction in the customer journey in theory, each channel should be able to talk to each other and leverage. This level of integration promotes consistency across all touchpoints and offers customers with a experience that is seamless’s channel-agnostic. A brand name that may make this happen could have the benefit over its rivals. It all starts with data management. It’s the inspiration for a successful omnichannel approach. Whether it’s through a PIM (Product Information Management) solution your very own custom built one, you will have to establish a workflow to improve product data to generally meet the various requirements for the various channels. Don’t leave any stone unturned! Test all the channels you might think could "speak" to your web visitors. Just be sure that selling across multiple channels does not take your life over. Automate just as much as you can - which means that your business runs smoothly. The key is customer experience. Brands need to understand the importance of various touch points that impact a consumer’s decision to move forward with them today. Depending on their sales force can be as important as holding a good reputation that is online review sites. In fact, the social media marketing presence and engagement also form important KPIs that impact a customer’s choice. I really believe that brands must up their game in all these areas and approach their customers then as per proper segmentation techniques. Brands that succeed in omnichannel don’t just think about how exactly to sell on different devices, they’re also thinking about how precisely consumers use different devices and channels to see a purchasing journey. Many brands appear to believe omnichannel performance is governed by happenstance.

[queenforanight]

Jessica At DragWorld UK

If you’ve been paying attention over the last few weeks (or if you’ve been on my Instagram at practically any point yesterday) you would have known that I went to DragWorld UK yesterday. Needless to say I had a blast, but I want people to have a more in-depth view on why I enjoyed it and why I would recommend it for any crossdressers or trans people who are looking to build confidence in themselves.

Let’s go through this picture by picture then.

The Journey.

This was the first picture of the day, the train ride up to London. This was, by far, the most nerve-wracking experience I have ever had. I’ve been out as Jessica before but only during the evening/night time; going out during daylight hours meant I was a much easier giveaway as a guy in a dress and wig.

Fortunately there was no trouble, and I had my friends around me if there was, but there are a few things we did to make the trip as easy as possible:

1. Plan a route, then plan a backup route.

Obviously you need to know where you’re going and how to get there, but it’s important to have a fallback plan too. This way if your original route doesn’t work you know exactly what to do, rather than standing around wondering what to do while also trying to hide from prying eyes.

2. Wear sunglasses.

I wanted those sunglasses because I thought I looked good in them, but they helped so much with travelling too. Hiding your eyes makes you more difficult to recognise, so it doesn’t matter if people know you’re a bloke in a wig since they can’t tell who you are.

It also means you can look around without people knowing, which is really handy for the next point.

3. Don’t go looking for trouble.

I’ve mentioned this before but it’s worth repeating: people will notice, people will stare. I am by no means flawless; my voice has the pitch and subtlety of a tuba and I’m constantly forgetting to keep my legs closed like most other women do when wearing skirts.

People knew, most people stared, some people talked and a couple even asked me. Apart from the couple that approached me (they were really nice by the way) I completely ignored the rest. The sunglasses meant I was aware of them but I didn’t need to react, just to keep an eye on them.

Reacting to stares and comments would have only made the situation worse and, at the end of the day, their meaningless glares and whispers made no difference to me.

4. If possible, travel at ungodly hours.

My friends were complaining most of the morning that we had to leave at 6 in the morning, but they completely understood why. Travelling earlier meant that fewer people were awake and on the trains, meaning it was significantly less likely for anyone to start anything.

Like I said, there were glares and whispers, but no-one could really be bothered to do anything about it that early in the morning.

Arriving At DragWorld.

Sorry about the grumpy face here; I’m not the biggest fan of queuing. 

I’ll be honest, when we arrived I was quite disappointed on the lack of men in drag on arrival. I think in total I saw 3, maybe 4 while we were queuing to get in; obviously this is no fault of the convention producers, just something I thought I’d comment on.

The best thing, however, was that by this point any confidence issues I had while travelling had completely disappeared. The sunglasses were off, the heels were on and the conversations began.

There was not a single bad vibe in the entire building, and no one had a problem with throwing around compliments on anything they could (my heels were popular, JustFab better send me some commission for the amount of advertising I did for them in that queue).

There’s not much else to say at this point; I mean, it’s queuing... not exactly exciting content to comment on.

Finally We’re Fucking Inside.

Ok in all honesty the queue wasn’t that long, I just really don’t like waiting.

The first thing we did was run straight to the DragWorld sign for a group picture, and it is by far my favourite picture from the convention (despite the fact that standing amongst 3 beautiful women only emphasises the fact that I’m simply a falsely-glorified crossdresser).

The muscle-definition on those legs though... If the magazine fails I’ll just model socks instead.

Inside was genuinely overwhelming. Despite having all day I felt like there was so much to do without much time to do it. Makeup shops, wig stand, drag queens... it was hard to know where to start and what I wanted to do the most.

At this point I should give some kind of recommendation on what to do, but to be perfectly honest I wouldn’t know what to say! I spent about half an hour just gushing followed by another half an hour making sure my makeup was perfect (I’m a vain creature leave me alone).

The only advice I can give is to take it easy. It was extremely easy to get overwhelmed by everything and want to visit it all NOW. It’s all going to be there all day, just take your time and make your way through one stall at a time. You don’t need to rush anything.

Holy Shit Everyone Here Is So Nice What’s The Catch?

Fuck me I am the definition of glamour and class...

I’m gonna be down to earth here. I’ve worked on conferences and conventions before (both as a volunteer and for a full time job) and I can easily say this was the friendliest and most welcoming audience I’ve ever experienced.

Everyone only had nice things to say about each other, even when in disagreement. I saw two people debating over the best winner of Ru Paul’s Drag Race and it was a genuine debate, not a heated argument.

Every single person I spoke to only had nice things to say about my look. Even when I forced them to give some kind of critique or something for me to work on (believe me, it was difficult to get people to say something negative) everything was said in a constructive manner and was still backed up by some kind of compliment.

I met a lot of people; men, women, queens, kings, and everything in between. I’m so glad I got to make new friends and even got to meet someone who, for some unknown reason, was a fan of this blog (if you’re reading this; hi there! hope you ended up getting Katya’s autograph).

I know this is obvious, but I still want to mention it for the more cautious reader. By this point, there was not a single confidence issue in the entire building. Some people were outspoken and others were more shy, but not a single person was felt uncomfortable about their appearance. I think that’s extremely important and certainly something I would’ve loved to have known 7 years ago when I started this blog.

Some Last Advice.

I could go on all day about my time at DragWorld, but I’ve got an appointment with my bed and it’s not good practice to kill your audience through boredom.

I’m going to be uploading a photodump of the remaining pictures from DragWorld at some point during the coming week, but I just want to leave you Queens with some final advice on what I’d recommend at conventions like this:

1. Get involved.

There was a fair amount to do at DragWorld, and I went for as much as I could. Dress up booths (the hat above is unfortunately not mine), makeup stands, even meeting other Queens; there was so much to do and it was all worth doing.

I’m not telling people to jump out of their comfort zone (they had lip-synch battles and there was no way I’d be joining in on that), but try to push yourself. I’m not an overly charismatic person (shocker I know) but simply talking to other guests was such an enriching experience.

2. Don’t Worry Too Much About Your Appearance.

When I first saw another Queen in the queue my first thoughts were something along the lines of “holy shit they look amazing/why did I leave the house this morning looking like a bin bag smeared with lipstick?”

There were plenty of Queens who looked so polished; some where working the convention and some were guests. I could’ve spent the entire day worrying about how I didn’t look as good, or I could just enjoy myself (I took the latter).

The second I stopped mucking around with my makeup was the second I started to actually enjoy myself. By the end of the day I had completely forgotten I even had makeup on and didn’t top my lipstick up until I accidentally left a mark on some poor guy’s face (sorry about that!)

3. Bring Flats Holy Blistering Fuck Bring Flats.

I like to think I’m a strong-willed Queen with a high pain threshold (I’m not, but I’ll go on pretending), but I am so glad I bought flats with me.

I managed to last half the day in heels, but by 1pm(ish) my feet were ready to fall off and I was walking like I was trying to avoid dog shit in the park. Needless to say it was not a glamorous look.

After switching into flats the walking became a lot easier to handle, and I got just as many compliments on my flats as I did on my heels. No one really cared that I had switched, and anyone I spoke to about it completely agreed.

Well... I did say I could spend all day talking about DragWorld. I’ve got so much more to talk about however I need to save some material for the magazine.

By the way, the magazine now has a site and I’m aiming to go live in September! I’ll announce on both this blog and my Instagram when the first issue is out, or you could subscribe now and get an email notification instead.

Just a heads-up though: I’m paying for this magazine out of my own pocket and I need it to be self-sustaining through subscriptions to justify keeping up. If I can’t see that happening after the first month I may have to take it down, possibly for good.

If you’re looking to do me a favour, subscribe sooner rather than later and don’t leave it to others. I’ve made the magazine quite cheap (especially in comparison to other magazines) and it’s already lined up with tonnes of content from myself and other fabulous crossdressers.

Thanks for reading this beast of a post. Like always if you have any questions please send them my way, and make sure to follow me on Instagram if you haven’t already!

- Jessica Blaise x x

[micaramel]

Kacey Musgraves has been accused of cultural appropriation after performing in an áo dài, a traditional Vietnamese dress, on October 11.

The garment is a form-fitting dress typically worn with loose pants underneath. Musgraves didn't wear pants with the ensemble and added a decorative Indian headpiece that does not have ties to the áo dài. 

Musgraves posted several images of herself wearing the dress on her Instagram story, leading many on social media as well as some prominent Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American figures to critique the outfit choice.

"Please don't further degrade this key part of Vietnamese culture and put on some pants like everyone else that wears áo dài," wrote poet Mai Nguyen Do on Twitter.

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Grammy-award winning country singer Kacey Musgraves is under fire after performing in a traditional Vietnamese dress.

During a concert in Dallas, Texas, on October 11, Musgraves wore an áo dài, a form-fitting Vietnamese dress with high slits on the side. While áo dàis are typically worn with loose pants underneath, Musgraves wore her dress without pants and added a headpiece to her ensemble that is not traditionally worn with the garment.

After Musgraves posted images of herself wearing the dress to her Instagram story, some social-media users accused her of cultural appropriation

Critics argued Musgraves' lack of pants was disrespectful.

One Twitter user seemed to feel that Musgraves disregarded Vietnamese traditions surrounding áo dàis, citing other stars who, in her opinion, have worn them more respectfully. 

  naomi campbell has worn an ao dai by a vietnamese designer while in vietnam. tyra banks wore one while in vietnam for antp. there’s ways to do it respectfully—unfortunately, kacey’s wasn’t one of them

— elise (@eIisenguyen) October 13, 2019

"Naomi Campbell has worn an ao dai by a Vietnamese designer while in Vietnam. Tyra Banks wore one while in Vietnam for antp. There's ways to do it respectfully—unfortunately, kacey's wasn't one of them," she wrote. 

Prominent Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American figures also took to social media to criticize the outfit.

"When people do things like this, all it does is contribute to the dangerous notion of Southeast Asian femininity as inherently sexual out of subservience," wrote poet Mai Nguyen Do on Twitter, pointing to stereotypes that hypersexualize Asian women. 

Hey @KaceyMusgraves, I assume you’re not protesting the imposition of pants on Vietnamese women by the Nguyễn dynasty as a mode of Sinicization, so please don’t further degrade this key part of Vietnamese culture and put on some pants like everyone else that wears áo dài. https://t.co/DyGrYA4c7k

— Mai Nguyen Do (@DoNguyenMai) October 12, 2019

  "Please don't further degrade this key part of Vietnamese culture and put on some pants like everyone else that wears áo dài," she added.

Likewise, influencer Michelle Phan commented on the dress. "Imagine seeing your national traditional dress being disrespected on stage," she wrote on her Instagram.

And actress Ngo Thanh Van, who also goes by Veronica Ngo, made a statement on Facebook, writing that "it is wrong for the singer to wear a traditional costume of another country without understanding it."

The áo dài, according to the tourism site Vietnam.com, is "a contoured top flowing over loose-fitting trousers that reach the sole of the feet" and is designed to hit the floor. "The dress style virtually drapes the whole body in soft flowing fabric," according to the Vietnamese travel site, which notes that "having splits in the gown extending above the waist makes movement easy and comfortable."

The website notes that Vietnamese culture generally favors conservative dress, and the áo dài fits into that by exemplifying "grace, modesty and beauty."

Others took issue with Musgraves wearing an Indian headpiece with the dress

The headpiece appears to be a maang tikka, a traditional decorative headpiece that Indian woman may wear for the first time at their wedding — which is not related to Vietnamese culture. Some have taken issue with the addition of her headpiece for this reason.

kasey musgraves wearing an ao dai WITHOUT pants with a maang tikka is NOT a move... put that coochie away and learn how to not appropriate other peoples culture https://t.co/iiT6r0omnP

— julie 🥀 (@toricurlyy) October 13, 2019

  "The nature of white ppl to pick and choose (half of ao dai and whatever is on her head??) pieces of Asian culture honestly repulses me," wrote one Twitter user. 

Kacey Musgraves is an incredible human, but the self-awareness in this is lacking to say the least. The nature of white ppl to pick and choose (half of ao dai and whatever is on her head??) pieces of Asian culture honestly repulses me. https://t.co/rUqXJxFFrC

— Melanie Liu (@MelCLiu) October 12, 2019

  Kim Kardashian West also received backlash for wearing a maang tikka in April. Although the headpiece is typically reserved for Indian wedding ceremonies, Kardashian West wore it to one of Kanye West's Sunday Services, leading to criticism from fans. 

  Read more: Kim Kardashian has been accused of cultural appropriation again after wearing an Indian headpiece

Representatives for Musgraves did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

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NOW WATCH: How these fair-trade hair extensions are helping women in Vietnam

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[inkofamethyst]

December 20, 2018

GUYS GUYS GUYS GUYS GUYS

I GOT IN I GOT IN I GOT IN I GOT IN

I GOT INTO MY CHOICE 3

WITH 30K ANNUALLY IN MERIT AID BC IM SMART AND JAZZ

THAT’S LIKE OVER HALF OF THE TUITION

IT’S MY FIRST FINANCIAL AID PACKAGE TOO

AND IM SO SO SO HAPPY

On a lesser note (lol) I got a minor role in the musical so there’s that.  I didn’t post on callbacks day because I got in late and I was tired.  But callbacks were okay.  There were twenty of us (including J-dude) and we all were told that we were guaranteed a featured role at minimum if we didn’t get a lead.  I don’t think that I did particularly amazing, if I’m honest.  This audition just wasn’t all that great.  But I’m in, and my friends are in, and even still...

I GOT ACCEPTED TO MY THIRD CHOICE!!!

AND THEY OFFERED ME A WHOLE LOT OF MONEY TO ATTEND!!!

AND TOMORROW IS THE FRIDAY BEFORE BREAK!!!

So today I went and got my essays critiqued and the biggest thing was that I needed to add some sort of narrative to all of my essays, even the tiny 200-word ones.  So I’ll work on that Saturday, I think.  And then I might be able to submit my choice 1 application on Saturday or Sunday at the latest.  The supplemental essays are all done, I just need to work on the big, basic one.

Still, I GOT IN TO A SCHOOL THAT ONLY ACCEPTS A THIRD OF ITS APPLICANTS YO!  It’s out of state and a private school and a decent size and full of nerds and geeks and in a city, and the people are nice, and the campus is nice, and there’s lots of research going on and all I need to do is get enough private scholarship money to make up the difference between what’s offered, what my parents have saved, what my parents plan to pay, and the loans that are offered for at least the first two years, I think.  I’m also planning to apply for the school’s scholarships by crafting a few essays over the break.

I also need to check fastweb and other sites so that I can line up scholarships to apply for in the coming months.

OH OH OH OH OH AAAND when I checked my application portal for my choice 3, they, you know, had the nice little letter, and at the bottom, they had a cute little personal PS note that really made me feel special.  Highkey I downloaded that letter and saved it to my harddrive.  This school definitely goes out of its way to attract and maintain students (though I have had a few administrative issues with them).  Has the wait been worth it?  ...Yeah.  If these past few days increased my merit aid or something like that, it was worth it.  Also, finding out earlier would’ve made me into a mess.  Now I get to enter Winter Break with all of this happiness.  I’d have to say that this timing was excellent.  I’m super excited to potentially go there now.

Still, I have applications to fill out, ahem, choice 1.

I’m sure I can manage to rack up $10k-$20k before May 1, right?  Yeah!

I really hope that I’m going to have to make a difficult decision.  I hope that all of my schools offer enough money and opportunities to make me seriously consider all of them.  I know that for my choice 1 and 2, it’s looking pretty all-or-nothing at this point, so I really have to impress in these applications.

...Uhhh, the instagram account for my choice 3′s EMS just requested to follow me?  Odd, but okay.

Anyway!  We doin’ good out here right now!  That breakdown on Monday?  Ha!  Never happened!  It be like that sometimes.

Today I am thankful for this third college acceptance.  Now that I’m only applying to seven schools instead of ten (don’t worry, rankings are staying where they are you just won’t see choices 5, 6, or 10 anymore), and I’ve already applied to six of those seven, I feel so much calmer.  Maybe I’ll discover a school with a late application date or something and apply just for fun but only if I really actually like it, feel me?  Anyway back to this acceptance, I’m feeling good, having a grand last couple of hours, ‘bout to do the Spanish homework that I totally should’ve done earlier but hey lol whatever am I right?  I’m going to college my friends!!  College!!!  I was so worried about getting in because I was afraid that they were gonna defer me in the name of yield protection, but maybe they saw that I was down to demonstrate interest and other jazz, so like, ayyyyyy.  We rollin’ good okay?  g o o d .  Life is grand.

[lodelss]

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 |  9 minutes (2,261 words)

The image that struck me most was the empty piazza. That Italian square — I believe it was in Venice — with no one in it. Maybe a bird or two. It looked inviting but also wholly unnatural. A city square is made for people, lots of people, people from everywhere. If people aren’t there, does it cease to be a square? I wondered the same thing about the Louvre and its tens of thousands of objects with no one to look at them — is it still a museum, or is it just a warehouse? I wondered about all those Berlin concert halls with no one to hear their music, all those Indian cinemas with no one to watch their films, all those crumbling ruins everywhere, standing there with no tourists to behold them or to record that beholding for everyone else. At this particular point in history, does art exist if we aren’t sharing it? 

By sharing I mean not only sharing a moment with the art itself, but also sharing the space with other people, and more literally, sharing all of that online — posting updates on Facebook, photos on Twitter, videos on TikTok, stories on Instagram. This kind of “sharing” is constriction rather than expansion, regressing back to the word’s etymological root of “cutting apart.” This contortion of a selfless act into a selfish one is symptomatic of a society that expects everyone to fend for themselves: Sharing online is not so much about enlightening others as it is about spotlighting yourself. It’s impossible to disconnect the images of those now-empty spots from the continuous splash of reports about the coronavirus pandemic gouging the global economy. In America, the economy is the culture is the people. Americans are not citizens; they are, as the president recently put it, “consumers.” And on the web, consuming means sharing that consumption with everyone else. That the images suddenly being shared are empty exposes the big con — that in reality, no one has really been sharing anything. That social distancing is nothing new.

* * *

Even before Hollywood started postponing all of its blockbusters and talk shows started filming without audiences and festivals started to dismantle and bands canceled their tours and sports seasons suspended indefinitely, the public was turning on cultural institutions run by a subset of morally dubious elites. In December 2018, protesters at the Whitney Museum of American Art burned sage (“smoke that chokes the powerful but smells sweet to us”) and forced the departure of the board’s vice chairman, Warren Kanders, the CEO of the company that manufactures tear gas that has reportedly been used at the border. Two months later, artist Nan Goldin, who had a three-year opioid addiction, led a “die-in” at the Guggenheim over the museum’s financial ties to the Sackler family, the Purdue Pharma founders who many hold responsible for the opioid crisis. In the U.K., the Tate Modern and Tate Britain also dropped the Sacklers, while climate activists pulled a Trojan Horse into the courtyard of the British Museum to protest the sponsorship of an exhibition by oil and gas company BP. As performance artist Andrea Fraser, known for her institutional critiques, wrote in 2012, “It is clear that the contemporary art world has been a direct beneficiary of the inequality of which the outsized rewards of Wall Street are only the most visible example.” 

If that recent exhibition of impressionist paintings seemed oddly familiar, or that ballet you just saw appears to keep coming back around, or that one classical musician looks like he’s hired nonstop, it’s not your imagination. It’s a function of that exclusive control, of the same artists, the same works, the same ideas being circulated (“shared”?) by the same gatekeepers over and over and over again. “Far from becoming less elitist, ever-more-popular museums have become vehicles for the mass-marketing of elite tastes and practices,” wrote Fraser in Artforum in 2005. Which is why certain names you wouldn’t think would cross over — from contemporary artist Jeff Koons to art-house filmmaker Terrence Malick — are more widely known than others. According to The New York Times in 2018, only two of the top 10 all-white art museum chairs in the country are women. And almost half of the 500-plus people on the boards of the 10 most popular American museums have become rich off the finance industry, while many others owe their wealth to oil and gas; the small group that is responsible for exploiting the world is the same group that is responsible for its enlightenment. They determine which pieces of art are bought, how they are curated, and how they are disseminated — theirs are the tastes and practices we are sharing.

With this “increasingly monopolized market and increasing parochialism,” German artist Hito Steyerl explained last year, “a sense of international perspective gets lost, which is a wider sign of rampant isolationism.” And this doesn’t just apply to high arts, but “low” arts as well; movies, music, television, theater, books have all been corporatized to the extreme, with huge amounts of money going to a few while the majority lose out. This is how you get a never-ending Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Leslie Harris — the first African American woman to win a Dramatic Feature Competition special jury prize at Sundance for writing, directing, and producing her 1993 film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. — still can’t get a second feature off the ground. 

While public funding for the arts has plummeted since the ’80s, however, the web has increasingly encouraged public sharing of its consumption on social media. Online, we look more traveled, more cultured, more inclusive than ever before. And it’s difficult to argue that wider access to art, that our increasing proximity to foreign cultures, could be wrong. But if you look closer, you notice that all this connectivity is largely superficial — it is heavily prescribed and strongly overlaps. The latter-day bourgeoisie all travel to Portugal at the same time, all visit the same Marina Abramovic exhibit, all watch the same Agnes Varda films, attend the same Phoenix tour. They clamor less to immerse themselves than to record and reproduce everything they have experienced, their distraction expressed by the ever-growing collection of imagery memorializing all the different experiences they’ve had — the same kind of different as everyone else’s.

“An idea of progressive internationalism,” Steyerl told Ocula magazine, “is progressively abandoned or gets snowed under constant waves of affect and outrage manipulated by monopolist platforms, and solidarity is swapped for identity.” In other words, all of this supposed sharing is really a tech-sanctioned performance of capitalism to showcase one’s value in a toxic din of competing consumers. The more photogenic the better, which means the less nuance, the better; think the Museum of Ice Cream, which costs almost 40 bucks for access to photo-friendly adult playgrounds — “environments that foster IRL interaction and URL connections” — like a “Sprinkle Pool” of multi-colored biodegradable bits you can’t actually eat. And the more recognizable the look (see: the retro aesthetic of any teen Netflix show), the more heady words like “nostalgia” become a proxy for depth that isn’t actually there. As we speed online through Steyerl’s distracted fragmentary so-called “junktime,” we quickly compound what she dubs “circulationism,” propagating images with the most power, giving them even more power. Standing next to the Mona Lisa, for instance, offers greater token currency among a wider set than standing next to anything by Kara Walker, who speaks to a more immersed but smaller audience. Either way, online, currency is king.

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Culture has, above all, become a mark of personal wealth. When Americans share their experiences on social media, they are sharing their cultural capital with a neoliberal society that defines them by it. This is a result of the culture war Fraser recognized several years ago, which “has effectively identified class privilege and hierarchy with cultural and educational rather than economic capital.” But, again, economics ultimately rules. While the poor may be allowed to briefly occupy the space of cultural capital, it is the rich who own it, who offer it up for limited consumption.

Yet the desperation to share, to express one’s value in a world that is so intent on devaluing us all, is deeply human. Which is why you get people Photoshopping themselves onto famous backdrops, which, from a cultural capital perspective, is no different from being there — on social media a photograph is a photograph, and the real Sistine Chapel looks the same as the Etsy wallpaper reproduction. People have always consumed art partly for the cultural capital rather than just the personal enrichment, but now the goal is to broadcast the enrichment itself to the public: sharing one’s consumption of the aura has priority over one’s actual consumption of the aura. Though a hierarchy persists even here. The authentic art consumer, the one who actually experiences the work in person, looks down upon the forger. As Walter Benjamin wrote, the aura of a piece of art is tied to its presence, which can’t be replicated. Which is to say the essence of art can only be experienced through the art itself — a picture can’t recreate it, but it does make its shared image more valuable. 

It’s apt that right now, in the midst of a pandemic, the popularity of a cultural site can kill and that virtual tours are being encouraged over actual ones. What better way to illustrate that our increasingly insular art world has not in fact connected us at all, but has done the opposite? As Steyerl noted in e-flux magazine in 2015, the Louvre, that model of national culture, was a “feudal collection of spoils” before revolutionaries turned it into a public museum, “the cultural flagship of a colonial empire that tried to authoritatively seed that culture elsewhere, before more recently going into the business of trying to create franchises in feudal states, dictatorships, and combinations thereof.” Those with the means flock to symbols of elitism like this, not to widen their perspective in solidarity with the world, not to connect with a community of strangers, but to bolster their own value locally by sharing the encounter online. This is not globalism; this is the neoliberal stand-in for it.

All of that foot traffic, all of that online diffusion, is an expression of how we have commodified the individual consumption of art to the point that it looks like we are sharing it with others. We aren’t. We are instead dutifully promoting ourselves as valuable consumers in the capitalist community we are complicit in perpetuating. “It’s not a question of inside or outside, or the number and scale of various organized sites for the production, presentation, and distribution of art,” wrote Fraser in Artforum. “It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution.”

* * *

One of the last movies I saw in the cinema before they started closing down was The Invisible Man. It was a perfect example of how a public screening can tell you what streaming cannot — in real time, you can gauge by the reactions around you whether or not it will be a hit. As with certain art installations, you are experiencing not only the art, but also simultaneously others’ experience with it. In that theater, we screamed and laughed and sat agog together. It was a spark of community that extinguished the moment the lights lifted. A few weeks later, these same strangers who shared that moment of emotion together, headed to supermarkets to empty out toilet roll aisles, buy up all the disinfectant, and clear out the fresh meat despite a collective need for it. These same strangers who in concert cheered on an oppressed heroine, went on to unashamedly side-eye the Asians in their community. Individuals in North American society can occasionally partake in a cultural experience with their neighbors, but in the end it’s to exhibit their own counterfeit edification. It’s telling that the big tech these individuals ultimately share their consumption on — Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr, Instagram — rarely funds the arts.

Which brings us back to those empty images from the start of this essay. Proliferating photographs of abandoned culture, of objects ignored, confront the hollowness of online sharing. Social media implies connection, but the context of its shares is as important as the context of art’s production and neither can be divorced from the hierarchies in which they reside. No wonder our meagre individual expressions of value dictated by capitalist enterprise fit perfectly within a capitalist enterprise that profits off our inability to ever sate ourselves. The only way to really share — with art, with each other — is to remove sharing from this construct. The only way to really connect — to support a collective of artists, to support a collective of human beings — is to distance ourselves from the misguided values we have internalized.

“At its most utopian, the digital revolution opens up a new dematerialized, deauthored, and unmarketable reality of collective culture,” writes Claire Bishop in Artforum. Under a worldwide pandemic, we see a move toward this — individuals freely leaking their cultural subscriptions, artists offering performances for nothing, even institutions waiving fees for access to their virtual collections. While the vulnerability spreading across America right now is ordinarily framed as weakness in the landscape of capitalist bravado, it is central to real sharing and offers a rare chance to dismantle the virulent elitism that has landed us here. It’s unfortunate that it takes a dystopia, a global interruption of the systems in place, to see what a utopia can be — one in which sharing is about the creation and cultivation of community, a reality that only exists outside the one we have built.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

[blogwebbuzrush]

Comprehensive Internet Media

The issue we familiar with you can ask was just what are the 6 styles of Detailed Online world Media channels?

However, as the forms of Comprehensive Internet Media and its definitions have expanded over the years, we think it’s time we update this teaching resource.

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1. Social Media Sites

Examples: Fb, LinkedIn

A social network sites website is a social websites website that allows you to connect with individuals who have identical backgrounds and interests. , and Instagram are a trio of that is favored forms of a social media online site.Twitter and Facebook

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Examples: , DiggsPinterest and Flipboard

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3. Newspaper and tv Showing

Samples: , VimeoYouTube and Pinterest

Newspaper and tv posting sites will allow members to share with you unique variations of press, because of the two main models truly being image expressing and movie hosting webpages.

These types of online websites offer sociable qualities, like the power to develop information and the choice of leaving comments around the uploaded graphics or video clips.These platforms primarily boost individual-produced subject matter in which anybody can set up, curate, and reveal the creativity that talks on them or ignite dialogues.

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Instances: Flickr, Facebook or twitter

These are exactly what they seem like, internet websites which allow users to post their simple created entries, which may feature links to service and product web sites, in addition to inbound links for other social sites websites. These are definitely then shared over the ‘walls’ of everyone who has subscribed for that user’s account. The foremost frequently used microblogging web page is Tweet.

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Good examples: , FourSquareYelp and TripAdvisor

What’s one of the primary factors you see when you plan to get a totally new solution or explore a new eatery? If you are anything like us, you will first head to the reviews.

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[womenofcolor15]

Gabrielle Union Breaks Her Silence Amid Rumors Of Her Being ‘Fired’ From ‘AGT’ For Wearing ‘Too Black’ Hairstyles + D. Wade Also Chimes In

Gabrielle Union breaks her silence amid rumors that she was fired as a judge on “America’s Got Talent.” New reports say they gave her the boot because she was wearing “too black” hairstyles. Gabby’s husband Dwyane Wade also chimes in. Everything inside…

  Over the last few days, Gabrielle Union was in the headlines as rumors about her being fired as a judge on “America’s Got Talent” were circulating. In fact, both Gabby and fellow Julianne Hough are exiting the competition series after one season.

It was first reported Gabby was fired from the NBC show for speaking out about “problematic” racism, which involved an incident with Jay Leno, and sexism going on behind-the-scenes at the show. And it was rumored “AGT” judge/executive Simon Cowell was the one who supposedly had her fired.

Then, Variety reported the 47-year-old exited the show due to its “toxic culture” that included “excessive notes” on her appearance. A source told Variety the “Being Mary Jane” actress was given feedback about her physical appearance, which included critiquing the hairstyles worn by Gabby that were considered “too black” for viewers. She is said to have received this note from producers “half a dozen times.”

As for the incident with Jay Leno, it’s reported the late night talk show host made a racist joke during a taping of the show.

“Leno made a crack about a painting on display in a hallway of Simon Cowell, the show’s executive producer and judge, surrounded by his dogs,” a source told the site. “Leno joked that the pets looked like something one would find ‘on the menu at a Korean restaurant.'”

Many Asian staff members – and others – found the joke offensive and it ended up being scraped from the episode when it aired on August 6th. Gabby reportedly spoke out about the incident and sough to have it reported to the Human Resources department, however, nothing was done despite the incident being brought to an executive on the show.

NBC denied the claims and issued a statement saying the show “has a long history of inclusivity and diversity in both our talent and the acts championed by the show. The judging and host line-up has been regularly refreshed over the years and that is one of the reasons for AGT’s enduring popularity. NBC and the producers take any issues on set seriously.”

It’s unclear if Gabrielle Union was fired or if she left the show. What we do know is, she isn’t coming back. The 47-year-old actress hopped on Twitter to break her silence amid all of the drama.

"So many tears, so much gratitude," she tweeted. "THANK YOU! Just when you feel lost, adrift, alone... you got me up off the ground. Humbled and thankful, forever."

Before Gabby broke her silence, her husband/former NBA superstar Dwyane Wade addressed the “AGT” drama.

"'Men lie, Women lie, numbers don't" over this past year I've been approaching by many people saying that my wife @itsgabrielleu is the main reason they've started watching #AGT or that they love her insight and sincerity on the show," he tweeted. "So when I got the news that my wife was being fired—my first question was obviously why!? I am still waiting on a good answer to that question," he continued.

"But if anyone knows @itsgabrielleu or have heard of her you know she's an advocate for our community and culture." "As proud as i were of her being selected as a judge on #AGT— Iam even more proud of her standing up for what she stands for and that's US.”

Peep his tweets below:

          View this post on Instagram

                  #GabrielleUnion’s husband #DwyaneWade speaks out about her being fired from #AGT!

A post shared by TheYBF (@theybf_daily) on Nov 27, 2019 at 3:33pm PST

  You’ll recall, a similar situation happened with former “AGT” host Nick Cannon as well. Nick made claims that he was threatened with termination by executives over a joke he made about NBC on a Showtime stand-up comedy special. They forced his hand after he hosted 8 seasons.

  Several celebs have tweeted support for Gabby including sports newscaster Jemele Hill, "Hamilton" creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, singer Ariana Grande, and 2020 presidential hopeful Julián Castro:

  This is called standing on your square. So proud of @itsgabrielleu for standing for what is right when a lot of people would have just been silent to maintain their own position.

Also: How many black women are labeled “difficult” for merely seeking respect and decency? https://t.co/Z6ooDzVi1L

— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) November 28, 2019

    Team @itsgabrielleu, always.

— Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) November 28, 2019

    thank you for this @EllenPompeo. be better @nbc. we’re with you @itsgabrielleu. https://t.co/UMfcqJZ46w

— Ariana Grande (@ArianaGrande) November 28, 2019

    Corporate America tells employees and consumers they take racism and sexism seriously.

But often the person reporting the problem is hurt by management. Kudos to @itsgabrielleu for having the courage to speak out. Still waiting for answers from @nbc. https://t.co/TgLxtimG8J

— Julián Castro (@JulianCastro) November 28, 2019

  The TIME's Up movement also tweeted their support:

  Thank you @itsgabrielleu for speaking up for what's right. https://t.co/g3LYIvXd5H

— TIME'S UP (@TIMESUPNOW) November 28, 2019

  Thoughts?

      Photos: DFree / Shutterstock.com

[Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2019/11/29/gabrielle-union-breaks-her-silence-amid-rumors-of-her-being-%E2%80%98fired%E2%80%99-from-%E2%80%98agt%E2%80%99-for-wearin

[party-hard-or-die]

In India, Facebook’s WhatsApp Plays Central Role in Elections

MANGALORE, India — Waving a giant saffron flag, Pranav Bhat last week joined a political rally for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India’s ruling party here in this sweltering port city on the southwest coast.

Milling on a vast field with his college buddies, Mr. Bhat, 18, cheered for Mr. Modi and his Hindu-oriented Bharatiya Janata Party, which was trying to wrest control of Karnataka state from the more secular Indian National Congress in legislative elections.

Yet the most intense political campaigning was not taking place on the streets. Instead, the action was happening on WhatsApp, a messaging service owned by Facebook that has about 250 million users in India.

Mr. Bhat, a B.J.P. youth leader, said he used WhatsApp to stay in constant touch with the 60 voters he was assigned to track for the party. He sent them critiques of the state government, dark warnings about Hindus being murdered by Muslims — including a debunked B.J.P. claim that 23 activists were killed by jihadists — and jokes ridiculing Congress leaders. His own WhatsApp stream was full of election updates, pro-B.J.P. videos, and false news stories, including a fake poll purportedly commissioned by the BBC that predicted a sweeping B.J.P. win.

“Every minute, I’m getting a message,” said Mr. Bhat, a college student.

Facebook’s WhatsApp is taking an increasingly central role in elections, especially in developing countries. More than any other social media or messaging app, WhatsApp was used in recent months by India’s political parties, religious activists and others to send messages and distribute news to Karnataka’s 49 million voters. While many messages were ordinary campaign missives, some were intended to inflame sectarian tensions and others were downright false, with no way to trace where they originated.

In the run-up to the May 12 vote in the state — the results of which are set to be announced on Tuesday — the B.J.P. and Congress parties claimed to have set up at least 50,000 WhatsApp groups between them to spread their messages. At the same time, many others — their identities are unknown — distributed videos, audio clips, posts and false articles designed specifically to rile up the area’s Hindu-Muslim fissures.

Right-wing Hindu groups employed WhatsApp to spread a grisly video that was described as an attack on a Hindu woman by a Muslim mob but was in fact a lynching in Guatemala. One audio recording on the service from an unknown sender urged all Muslims in the state to vote for the Congress party “for the safety of our women and children.” Another WhatsApp message exhorted Hindus to vote for the B.J.P. because “this is not just an election. This is a war of faiths.”

Like the rest of India, Karnataka is a Hindu majority state. A staple of electoral politics here is pitting Muslims against Hindus, and various Hindu castes against each other.

Ankit Lal, a top strategist for the Aam Aadmi Party, which fielded 28 candidates for Karnataka’s 224 legislative seats, said WhatsApp has become the most important tool in digital campaigning. “We wrestle on Twitter. The battle is on Facebook. The war is on WhatsApp,” he said.

The role that WhatsApp plays in influencing voters has received far less attention than that of its sister services, Facebook and its photo-sharing platform, Instagram. Both Facebook and Instagram have come under intense scrutiny in recent months for how Russian agents used them to manipulate American voters in the 2016 presidential election.

WhatsApp has largely escaped that notice because it is used more heavily outside the United States, with people in countries like India, Brazil and Indonesia sending a total of 60 billion messages a day. And unlike Facebook and Instagram, where much of the activity is publicly visible online, WhatsApp’s messages are generally hidden because it began as a person-to-person communication tool.

Yet WhatsApp has several features that make it a potential tinderbox for misinformation and misuse. Users can remain anonymous, identified only by a phone number. Groups, which are capped at 256 members, are easy to set up by adding the phone numbers of contacts. People tend to belong to multiple groups, so they often get exposed to the same messages repeatedly. When messages are forwarded, there is no hint of where they originated. And everything is encrypted, making it impossible for law enforcement officials or even WhatsApp to view what’s being said without looking at the phone’s screen.

Govindraj Ethiraj, the founder of Boom and IndiaSpend, two sites that fact-check Indian political and governmental claims, called WhatsApp “insidious” for its role in spreading false information.

“You’re dealing with ghosts,” he said. Boom worked with Facebook during the Karnataka elections to flag fake news appearing on the social network.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has pledged to curb the abuse of Facebook and Instagram by people seeking to secretly influence elections. But he has said nothing about WhatsApp, which Facebook bought in 2014 for $19 billion.

WhatsApp officials said they are concerned about misuse of the platform, whose terms of service forbid hate speech, threats of violence and false statements. A few weeks ago, its systems detected an attempt by someone in Karnataka to create dozens of groups very quickly using automation. After some people reported getting spam from these groups, the company blocked them all. WhatsApp declined to say who it suspected was behind the group creation.

“We’re working to give people more control over groups and are constantly evolving our tools to block automated content,” WhatsApp said in a statement, adding that it was stepping up education on its safety features and how to spot fake news and hoaxes.

India’s Congress party, which has ruled the country for most of the period since independence, has lost control of the central government and several key states but has held on to power in Karnataka. If the B.J.P. wins the state when votes are counted on Tuesday, it would give Mr. Modi’s party crucial momentum ahead of India’s 2019 national elections.

How much the WhatsApp barrage affected the final election results in Karnataka may never be clear. While WhatsApp has largely replaced text messages and email here, old-school campaign tactics such as rallies, television and newspaper coverage, door-to-door canvassing and outright vote-buying remain prevalent.

Neelanjan Sircar, who was in Karnataka last week studying electoral behavior for the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, said the flood of WhatsApp messages probably did not change voters’ political views. But they did push emotional buttons and increase turnout in areas with strong caste or religious divisions.

“What it does do is get people out on the street,” Mr. Sircar said. State officials said voter turnout was 72 percent, the highest level since 1952.

Four years ago, during India’s national parliamentary elections that swept Mr. Modi to power, the primary digital tool was Facebook. But as smartphone use in India has exploded over the past year and a half, WhatsApp became the country’s default communication mode — and the preferred medium for distributing campaign messages.

In state elections in Uttar Pradesh in early 2017, for example, the B.J.P. created more than 6,000 WhatsApp groups to get its messages to every district and village. Its landslide victory there prompted the Congress party to mobilize its own WhatsApp army.

So when the time came to gear up for Karnataka’s state elections, the parties turned to the same WhatsApp playbook.

“WhatsApp works like a nuclear chain reaction,” said Randeep Singh Surjewala, the Congress party’s chief spokesman.

U.T. Khader, an incumbent member of Karnataka’s legislative assembly, experienced the WhatsApp effect firsthand. Just before the election, Mr. Khader, a Muslim in the Congress party, was the target of what Mangalore police said was a disturbing new type of WhatsApp attack: a series of profane audio messages purporting to be an escalating exchange of threats between Hindus and Muslims over his candidacy.

In one recording, which was supposedly a phone call between two Hindu political activists, one voice harangued the other for putting a saffron-colored shawl, which the B.J.P. views as a Hindu symbol, around Mr. Khader.

“Why did you put a saffron shawl on Khader? Do you love your life or not?” the first voice said. “If I shove a knife into you, do you think Khader will come to your support?”

Later messages sounded like they came from Muslims threatening to kill the first voice in response. “Son of a prostitute, I’m warning you,” said one. “I’ll take you out.” The messages were sent to various WhatsApp groups, so they were heard by many voters.

Mr. Khader, who has represented the area for more than a decade and won with a large margin last time, said the alleged conversations were fake and recorded in a studio.

He said WhatsApp has a social responsibility to stop such hate speech, but he also believed the negative messages backfired, increasing the support he got from his constituents, half of whom are Muslim. And WhatsApp has been useful for his campaign in other ways.

“TV channels and newspapers largely tend to ignore me,” Mr. Khader said. “WhatsApp has helped me reach my supporters without the help of the mainstream media.”

Mr. Bhat, the college student and B.J.P. youth leader, said WhatsApp has been effective for him as well. After the polls closed on Saturday, he said the messages he shared with the 60 voters assigned to him had helped persuade 47 of them to vote for the B.J.P., including 13 who were previously uncommitted.

“I was successful in making them vote for B.J.P.,” he said.

Sudipto Mondal contributed reporting.

Follow Vindu Goel on Twitter: @vindugoel.

The post In India, Facebook’s WhatsApp Plays Central Role in Elections appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2wMFooq via Breaking News

[dani-qrt]

In India, Facebook’s WhatsApp Plays Central Role in Elections

MANGALORE, India — Waving a giant saffron flag, Pranav Bhat last week joined a political rally for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India’s ruling party here in this sweltering port city on the southwest coast.

Milling on a vast field with his college buddies, Mr. Bhat, 18, cheered for Mr. Modi and his Hindu-oriented Bharatiya Janata Party, which was trying to wrest control of Karnataka state from the more secular Indian National Congress in legislative elections.

Yet the most intense political campaigning was not taking place on the streets. Instead, the action was happening on WhatsApp, a messaging service owned by Facebook that has about 250 million users in India.

Mr. Bhat, a B.J.P. youth leader, said he used WhatsApp to stay in constant touch with the 60 voters he was assigned to track for the party. He sent them critiques of the state government, dark warnings about Hindus being murdered by Muslims — including a debunked B.J.P. claim that 23 activists were killed by jihadists — and jokes ridiculing Congress leaders. His own WhatsApp stream was full of election updates, pro-B.J.P. videos, and false news stories, including a fake poll purportedly commissioned by the BBC that predicted a sweeping B.J.P. win.

“Every minute, I’m getting a message,” said Mr. Bhat, a college student.

Facebook’s WhatsApp is taking an increasingly central role in elections, especially in developing countries. More than any other social media or messaging app, WhatsApp was used in recent months by India’s political parties, religious activists and others to send messages and distribute news to Karnataka’s 49 million voters. While many messages were ordinary campaign missives, some were intended to inflame sectarian tensions and others were downright false, with no way to trace where they originated.

In the run-up to the May 12 vote in the state — the results of which are set to be announced on Tuesday — the B.J.P. and Congress parties claimed to have set up at least 50,000 WhatsApp groups between them to spread their messages. At the same time, many others — their identities are unknown — distributed videos, audio clips, posts and false articles designed specifically to rile up the area’s Hindu-Muslim fissures.

Right-wing Hindu groups employed WhatsApp to spread a grisly video that was described as an attack on a Hindu woman by a Muslim mob but was in fact a lynching in Guatemala. One audio recording on the service from an unknown sender urged all Muslims in the state to vote for the Congress party “for the safety of our women and children.” Another WhatsApp message exhorted Hindus to vote for the B.J.P. because “this is not just an election. This is a war of faiths.”

Like the rest of India, Karnataka is a Hindu majority state. A staple of electoral politics here is pitting Muslims against Hindus, and various Hindu castes against each other.

Ankit Lal, a top strategist for the Aam Aadmi Party, which fielded 28 candidates for Karnataka’s 224 legislative seats, said WhatsApp has become the most important tool in digital campaigning. “We wrestle on Twitter. The battle is on Facebook. The war is on WhatsApp,” he said.

The role that WhatsApp plays in influencing voters has received far less attention than that of its sister services, Facebook and its photo-sharing platform, Instagram. Both Facebook and Instagram have come under intense scrutiny in recent months for how Russian agents used them to manipulate American voters in the 2016 presidential election.

WhatsApp has largely escaped that notice because it is used more heavily outside the United States, with people in countries like India, Brazil and Indonesia sending a total of 60 billion messages a day. And unlike Facebook and Instagram, where much of the activity is publicly visible online, WhatsApp’s messages are generally hidden because it began as a person-to-person communication tool.

Yet WhatsApp has several features that make it a potential tinderbox for misinformation and misuse. Users can remain anonymous, identified only by a phone number. Groups, which are capped at 256 members, are easy to set up by adding the phone numbers of contacts. People tend to belong to multiple groups, so they often get exposed to the same messages repeatedly. When messages are forwarded, there is no hint of where they originated. And everything is encrypted, making it impossible for law enforcement officials or even WhatsApp to view what’s being said without looking at the phone’s screen.

Govindraj Ethiraj, the founder of Boom and IndiaSpend, two sites that fact-check Indian political and governmental claims, called WhatsApp “insidious” for its role in spreading false information.

“You’re dealing with ghosts,” he said. Boom worked with Facebook during the Karnataka elections to flag fake news appearing on the social network.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has pledged to curb the abuse of Facebook and Instagram by people seeking to secretly influence elections. But he has said nothing about WhatsApp, which Facebook bought in 2014 for $19 billion.

WhatsApp officials said they are concerned about misuse of the platform, whose terms of service forbid hate speech, threats of violence and false statements. A few weeks ago, its systems detected an attempt by someone in Karnataka to create dozens of groups very quickly using automation. After some people reported getting spam from these groups, the company blocked them all. WhatsApp declined to say who it suspected was behind the group creation.

“We’re working to give people more control over groups and are constantly evolving our tools to block automated content,” WhatsApp said in a statement, adding that it was stepping up education on its safety features and how to spot fake news and hoaxes.

India’s Congress party, which has ruled the country for most of the period since independence, has lost control of the central government and several key states but has held on to power in Karnataka. If the B.J.P. wins the state when votes are counted on Tuesday, it would give Mr. Modi’s party crucial momentum ahead of India’s 2019 national elections.

How much the WhatsApp barrage affected the final election results in Karnataka may never be clear. While WhatsApp has largely replaced text messages and email here, old-school campaign tactics such as rallies, television and newspaper coverage, door-to-door canvassing and outright vote-buying remain prevalent.

Neelanjan Sircar, who was in Karnataka last week studying electoral behavior for the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, said the flood of WhatsApp messages probably did not change voters’ political views. But they did push emotional buttons and increase turnout in areas with strong caste or religious divisions.

“What it does do is get people out on the street,” Mr. Sircar said. State officials said voter turnout was 72 percent, the highest level since 1952.

Four years ago, during India’s national parliamentary elections that swept Mr. Modi to power, the primary digital tool was Facebook. But as smartphone use in India has exploded over the past year and a half, WhatsApp became the country’s default communication mode — and the preferred medium for distributing campaign messages.

In state elections in Uttar Pradesh in early 2017, for example, the B.J.P. created more than 6,000 WhatsApp groups to get its messages to every district and village. Its landslide victory there prompted the Congress party to mobilize its own WhatsApp army.

So when the time came to gear up for Karnataka’s state elections, the parties turned to the same WhatsApp playbook.

“WhatsApp works like a nuclear chain reaction,” said Randeep Singh Surjewala, the Congress party’s chief spokesman.

U.T. Khader, an incumbent member of Karnataka’s legislative assembly, experienced the WhatsApp effect firsthand. Just before the election, Mr. Khader, a Muslim in the Congress party, was the target of what Mangalore police said was a disturbing new type of WhatsApp attack: a series of profane audio messages purporting to be an escalating exchange of threats between Hindus and Muslims over his candidacy.

In one recording, which was supposedly a phone call between two Hindu political activists, one voice harangued the other for putting a saffron-colored shawl, which the B.J.P. views as a Hindu symbol, around Mr. Khader.

“Why did you put a saffron shawl on Khader? Do you love your life or not?” the first voice said. “If I shove a knife into you, do you think Khader will come to your support?”

Later messages sounded like they came from Muslims threatening to kill the first voice in response. “Son of a prostitute, I’m warning you,” said one. “I’ll take you out.” The messages were sent to various WhatsApp groups, so they were heard by many voters.

Mr. Khader, who has represented the area for more than a decade and won with a large margin last time, said the alleged conversations were fake and recorded in a studio.

He said WhatsApp has a social responsibility to stop such hate speech, but he also believed the negative messages backfired, increasing the support he got from his constituents, half of whom are Muslim. And WhatsApp has been useful for his campaign in other ways.

“TV channels and newspapers largely tend to ignore me,” Mr. Khader said. “WhatsApp has helped me reach my supporters without the help of the mainstream media.”

Mr. Bhat, the college student and B.J.P. youth leader, said WhatsApp has been effective for him as well. After the polls closed on Saturday, he said the messages he shared with the 60 voters assigned to him had helped persuade 47 of them to vote for the B.J.P., including 13 who were previously uncommitted.

“I was successful in making them vote for B.J.P.,” he said.

Sudipto Mondal contributed reporting.

Follow Vindu Goel on Twitter: @vindugoel.

The post In India, Facebook’s WhatsApp Plays Central Role in Elections appeared first on World The News.

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[cleopatrarps]

In India, Facebook’s WhatsApp Plays Central Role in Elections

MANGALORE, India — Waving a giant saffron flag, Pranav Bhat last week joined a political rally for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India’s ruling party here in this sweltering port city on the southwest coast.

Milling on a vast field with his college buddies, Mr. Bhat, 18, cheered for Mr. Modi and his Hindu-oriented Bharatiya Janata Party, which was trying to wrest control of Karnataka state from the more secular Indian National Congress in legislative elections.

Yet the most intense political campaigning was not taking place on the streets. Instead, the action was happening on WhatsApp, a messaging service owned by Facebook that has about 250 million users in India.

Mr. Bhat, a B.J.P. youth leader, said he used WhatsApp to stay in constant touch with the 60 voters he was assigned to track for the party. He sent them critiques of the state government, dark warnings about Hindus being murdered by Muslims — including a debunked B.J.P. claim that 23 activists were killed by jihadists — and jokes ridiculing Congress leaders. His own WhatsApp stream was full of election updates, pro-B.J.P. videos, and false news stories, including a fake poll purportedly commissioned by the BBC that predicted a sweeping B.J.P. win.

“Every minute, I’m getting a message,” said Mr. Bhat, a college student.

Facebook’s WhatsApp is taking an increasingly central role in elections, especially in developing countries. More than any other social media or messaging app, WhatsApp was used in recent months by India’s political parties, religious activists and others to send messages and distribute news to Karnataka’s 49 million voters. While many messages were ordinary campaign missives, some were intended to inflame sectarian tensions and others were downright false, with no way to trace where they originated.

In the run-up to the May 12 vote in the state — the results of which are set to be announced on Tuesday — the B.J.P. and Congress parties claimed to have set up at least 50,000 WhatsApp groups between them to spread their messages. At the same time, many others — their identities are unknown — distributed videos, audio clips, posts and false articles designed specifically to rile up the area’s Hindu-Muslim fissures.

Right-wing Hindu groups employed WhatsApp to spread a grisly video that was described as an attack on a Hindu woman by a Muslim mob but was in fact a lynching in Guatemala. One audio recording on the service from an unknown sender urged all Muslims in the state to vote for the Congress party “for the safety of our women and children.” Another WhatsApp message exhorted Hindus to vote for the B.J.P. because “this is not just an election. This is a war of faiths.”

Like the rest of India, Karnataka is a Hindu majority state. A staple of electoral politics here is pitting Muslims against Hindus, and various Hindu castes against each other.

Ankit Lal, a top strategist for the Aam Aadmi Party, which fielded 28 candidates for Karnataka’s 224 legislative seats, said WhatsApp has become the most important tool in digital campaigning. “We wrestle on Twitter. The battle is on Facebook. The war is on WhatsApp,” he said.

The role that WhatsApp plays in influencing voters has received far less attention than that of its sister services, Facebook and its photo-sharing platform, Instagram. Both Facebook and Instagram have come under intense scrutiny in recent months for how Russian agents used them to manipulate American voters in the 2016 presidential election.

WhatsApp has largely escaped that notice because it is used more heavily outside the United States, with people in countries like India, Brazil and Indonesia sending a total of 60 billion messages a day. And unlike Facebook and Instagram, where much of the activity is publicly visible online, WhatsApp’s messages are generally hidden because it began as a person-to-person communication tool.

Yet WhatsApp has several features that make it a potential tinderbox for misinformation and misuse. Users can remain anonymous, identified only by a phone number. Groups, which are capped at 256 members, are easy to set up by adding the phone numbers of contacts. People tend to belong to multiple groups, so they often get exposed to the same messages repeatedly. When messages are forwarded, there is no hint of where they originated. And everything is encrypted, making it impossible for law enforcement officials or even WhatsApp to view what’s being said without looking at the phone’s screen.

Govindraj Ethiraj, the founder of Boom and IndiaSpend, two sites that fact-check Indian political and governmental claims, called WhatsApp “insidious” for its role in spreading false information.

“You’re dealing with ghosts,” he said. Boom worked with Facebook during the Karnataka elections to flag fake news appearing on the social network.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has pledged to curb the abuse of Facebook and Instagram by people seeking to secretly influence elections. But he has said nothing about WhatsApp, which Facebook bought in 2014 for $19 billion.

WhatsApp officials said they are concerned about misuse of the platform, whose terms of service forbid hate speech, threats of violence and false statements. A few weeks ago, its systems detected an attempt by someone in Karnataka to create dozens of groups very quickly using automation. After some people reported getting spam from these groups, the company blocked them all. WhatsApp declined to say who it suspected was behind the group creation.

“We’re working to give people more control over groups and are constantly evolving our tools to block automated content,” WhatsApp said in a statement, adding that it was stepping up education on its safety features and how to spot fake news and hoaxes.

India’s Congress party, which has ruled the country for most of the period since independence, has lost control of the central government and several key states but has held on to power in Karnataka. If the B.J.P. wins the state when votes are counted on Tuesday, it would give Mr. Modi’s party crucial momentum ahead of India’s 2019 national elections.

How much the WhatsApp barrage affected the final election results in Karnataka may never be clear. While WhatsApp has largely replaced text messages and email here, old-school campaign tactics such as rallies, television and newspaper coverage, door-to-door canvassing and outright vote-buying remain prevalent.

Neelanjan Sircar, who was in Karnataka last week studying electoral behavior for the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, said the flood of WhatsApp messages probably did not change voters’ political views. But they did push emotional buttons and increase turnout in areas with strong caste or religious divisions.

“What it does do is get people out on the street,” Mr. Sircar said. State officials said voter turnout was 72 percent, the highest level since 1952.

Four years ago, during India’s national parliamentary elections that swept Mr. Modi to power, the primary digital tool was Facebook. But as smartphone use in India has exploded over the past year and a half, WhatsApp became the country’s default communication mode — and the preferred medium for distributing campaign messages.

In state elections in Uttar Pradesh in early 2017, for example, the B.J.P. created more than 6,000 WhatsApp groups to get its messages to every district and village. Its landslide victory there prompted the Congress party to mobilize its own WhatsApp army.

So when the time came to gear up for Karnataka’s state elections, the parties turned to the same WhatsApp playbook.

“WhatsApp works like a nuclear chain reaction,” said Randeep Singh Surjewala, the Congress party’s chief spokesman.

U.T. Khader, an incumbent member of Karnataka’s legislative assembly, experienced the WhatsApp effect firsthand. Just before the election, Mr. Khader, a Muslim in the Congress party, was the target of what Mangalore police said was a disturbing new type of WhatsApp attack: a series of profane audio messages purporting to be an escalating exchange of threats between Hindus and Muslims over his candidacy.

In one recording, which was supposedly a phone call between two Hindu political activists, one voice harangued the other for putting a saffron-colored shawl, which the B.J.P. views as a Hindu symbol, around Mr. Khader.

“Why did you put a saffron shawl on Khader? Do you love your life or not?” the first voice said. “If I shove a knife into you, do you think Khader will come to your support?”

Later messages sounded like they came from Muslims threatening to kill the first voice in response. “Son of a prostitute, I’m warning you,” said one. “I’ll take you out.” The messages were sent to various WhatsApp groups, so they were heard by many voters.

Mr. Khader, who has represented the area for more than a decade and won with a large margin last time, said the alleged conversations were fake and recorded in a studio.

He said WhatsApp has a social responsibility to stop such hate speech, but he also believed the negative messages backfired, increasing the support he got from his constituents, half of whom are Muslim. And WhatsApp has been useful for his campaign in other ways.

“TV channels and newspapers largely tend to ignore me,” Mr. Khader said. “WhatsApp has helped me reach my supporters without the help of the mainstream media.”

Mr. Bhat, the college student and B.J.P. youth leader, said WhatsApp has been effective for him as well. After the polls closed on Saturday, he said the messages he shared with the 60 voters assigned to him had helped persuade 47 of them to vote for the B.J.P., including 13 who were previously uncommitted.

“I was successful in making them vote for B.J.P.,” he said.

Sudipto Mondal contributed reporting.

Follow Vindu Goel on Twitter: @vindugoel.

The post In India, Facebook’s WhatsApp Plays Central Role in Elections appeared first on World The News.

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