Just kidding. After pouting for a good five minutes (bad words may have been said), I got over it. A few hours later, here I am. I have decided that if people do not want to hire me, perhaps it is a sign from the universe that I am meant to be in business for myself. Very early in 2009, my partner and I started our own business doing web development and marketing/PR work. We failed to follow through on doing anything, as always. It became our favorite pastime some time in 2008 to start projects on a whim whenever bored and never follow through. MNP Hoppal was only one of these projects.

However, with much meditation, and sensing a sign from the universe, I have decided to return to business for myself as a web designer and a writer (a la Jen Lancaster). Sure, the pay is not great. And perhaps I should still be finding a day job (goodness knows I probably won’t have much luck there). But for now, I think freelancing it may be my best bet for both developing skills and qualifications and for paying bills.

I’ve already recently met with a client, and when I return to Ruidoso from Denver, I will begin soliciting business. Wish me luck.

As always, if you find me particularly awesome (I know I do), I can be contacted for work at michael@hoppal.com.

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For my first entry, I have chosen rule #796, which concerns writing on the Internet and spam.

Anybody who reads the Internet frequently and has even the most passive interest in writing, promotions, public relations, marketing, or earning revenue online has probably read approximately 14,000,000,009,321* top 10 lists of social networks which promise to boost viewership and get omg so much money for you. Around 99.8%* of these lists mention StumbleUpon at some point, mostly as #3*.

* Fact-checking is for pansies and newsroom directors.

Twitter version: StumbleUpon allows users to click a button and view a random article submitted by anybody.

Marketers seem to think this is the holy grail of viral promotion.

I think this is nonsense.

Two things here: I am an almost-daily StumbleUpon user. I don’t like spam.

Sometimes, there are many interesting things. Sometimes, the articles are trite and overdone and give a sense of, “Didn’t I read this already? Yes, I did. Five times. On five other sites.”

Sometimes, however, a website has little readership and its author has a hankering for some attention. A would-be innocent article comes up. The author clicks the “Thumbs-up” on this website, and so opens a theoretical can of worms exposing the topic to thousands overnight. Something to note, however: this doesn’t usually happen. SU has done well to narrow stumbles to specific interests of users. If they aren’t interested, they don’t thumbs-up, and the article dies off relatively quickly, especially if nobody picks it up within the first few days.

Now, the effort behind marketing is to generate interest and eyeballs, so I won’t name any names here, as their purpose would be served and they would continue their abuse. All I will say is I’ve seen an increasing number of spam-tastic sites which are so blatantly commercial even Aphrodite would want to hit somebody. I report them as spam. Most people just hit the Stumble button again. Few are banned, but the ones who are serve as a good lesson: don’t spam.

But rule #796 is not about the spammers. It is about the marketers and the authors of those would-be innocent articles: Don’t encourage them.

Spammers are stupid. They take a very niche or otherwise useless product, fail to get any juice behind it, and then decide it will be brilliant to send a million emails to nobody in particular, hoping even one will buy a $350 Kirby vacuum cleaner hose cozy.

Spammers don’t come up with ideas on their own. They desperately search Google hoping even just one page will give them the magic answer. More and more, the answer is becoming social media.

SU can be used for great promotion, as long as the promoter has truly taken the time to target an audience, meld the content into something genuinely useful for the audience, and successfully reach said audience (and only said audience).

Don’t encourage them. Keep my service clean and useful. And for spammers, if you didn’t come up with the idea on your own, you probably can’t execute it correctly. You are wasting both my bandwidth and your own. Stop.

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I recently introduced my parents to Linux.

I don’t use Linux regularly. I have Vista installed on my fancy new HP laptop. I have Ubuntu installed in a virtual machine. I use it for… well, nothing right now. (This is a tangent:) I installed it so I could test out code for desktop apps to ensure cross-platform working-ness. I spent about five hours installing, updating, fixing, etc. and haven’t written a single line of code yet. So much for productivity. I failed to install LFS three times. I also tried Gentoo. And Open SUSE and Fedora. And Mint…

Anyways, I introduced my parents to Linux, which I installed on my old, not-often-used desktop. After a quick, “This is what you click to check online banking and watch youtube,” introduction, away they went. Well, I should say away my step-dad went, because my mom is technophobic enough using Windows that she isn’t allowed to touch anything after warranty.

Four months and a Windows XP laptop later, and my step-dad is convinced he doesn’t actually have any business installing anything that won’t run natively on Linux. As an aside, their old desktop was bought in 2000, still has Windows ME on it, and was loaded to the point of “Not enough memory/disk space” for any little thing due to his nasty habit of clicking on banner ads and installing whatever it suggests, especially if that is a poker application.

So he was browsing and finding his comfort zone, and he “heard about this awesome application that boosts productivity, looks awesome, runs on Linux, is fully customizable, makes dinner for you, changes diapers” etc. Well, maybe not all that, but along those lines.

My ears perked up because I am lazy and thoroughly enjoy things that will double my output while halving my input (and proving him wrong with my jaded sarcastic ‘wit’ isn’t bad, either). “Oh, really? What was it?”

“It was a foot.”

There was no “and.” There was no explanation. A friend suggested I provide context. That’s it. He must have lost his ability to interpret my facial expressions, because even with the supreme “Huh?” pasted on my forehead, he continued to stare blankly waiting for me to respond. After much deliberating, I sufficed:

“Huh?”

“Do I need to say it again?” he responded.

It was a foot…

It was a foot…

It was a foot…

It was a foot…

“Huh?”

You see, humans are commonly known to be driven by symbolism. We want things to be represented by a sign or symbol, because they’re “easy to remember.” A red light means stop. A red circle with a line through it means, “No.” We should all recognize the USB symbol (context may be required), or the sign for hazardous materials.

But sometimes, we get it wrong. Sometimes, we start a business, we’re making business cards, and we just want a symbol, so we open up PhotoShop and use random bits of letters in various fonts to make one. Sometimes, like in the case of the triquetra, a symbol means any number of things. The fleur-de-lis, while beautiful, means nothing to all but a handful of people who study heraldry.

If you want a logo, it must:

• Be simple
• Be original
• Be related
• Be memorable
• Be recognizable

“The Foot” appeared to be a symbol, based on the previous statement of humans, and a few eliminating questions.

It was simple, I suppose. We can all agree a foot isn’t too complicated (podiatrists not included) . It was obviously memorable. And probably original, unless Procter and Gamble decided to make a new logo for a very specific cream.

But was it related? Or recognizable?

Upon finding the answer, it was absolutely not related:

GNOME

Yes, it was GNOME.

Anybody familiar with Linux will know that symbol immediately, so it is the golden arches or check mark of Linux desktop environments.

However, it should apply in all situations.

Is there any American over the age of, say, 10 who won’t immediately think McDonald’s and Nike when reading those two? If I just say, “Some chain that claims they’ve helped a lot of people… It was a big yellow M,” won’t you be able to narrow it down pretty quickly?

I can’t do that with GNOME, and I certainly can’t do it for well over half the symbols I’ve seen.

If you want a symbol, make it apparently related in some capacity. No funny story, unless the symbol is representing the funny story behind creating the symbol for the story (I use recursion here simply to please any would-be disappointed nerds).

GNOME fails that test. Do you?

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