"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."
- Peter Drucker
Welcome friends, old and new, who have made your way here purposefully, for the first time and those who have fallen down the rabbit hole.
For those of you who are naught regular visitors, please note the proviso located in the header of this weblog...
ATTENTION: The author accepts no responsibility for your spontaneous anger, personal outrage, blurred vision, headaches or any Post Traumatic Stress Disorder you may experience related to your visit.
I'm in the relationships business, a facilitator of success who helps people solve their problems and achieve their goals.
In my business, a boutique business consulting practice, I don't offer a product for sale; I offer my abilities, knowledge, skills and experience.
Service and a track record of success is what has allowed me to build my practice, over 20+ years, to a point where I'm able to pick and choose what customers I work for, to put me in a position where I'm able to take on new customers only when they come by referral.
My clients trust me to do the right things to help them get to where they want to be and know I can do exactly that.
I published the first post in this weblog on 29 October, 2005.
Long before that I had several friends encouraging me to become a blogger. It was during a trip to Cape Cod that I decided to take the plunge, after discussing the ins and outs of blogging with the woman in my life, TheSpecialOne, my best friend, The Master Baiter.
There was a time when the only people reading this weblog were my friends. As the years have gone by the number of visitors, new, returning and/or incidental, has fluctuated.
I've never been willing to pander to an audience. It's strictly come as you will and take what you get. Not a formula people use to build a huge and loyal following.
I am, at times, purposefully provocative, incendiary, insensitive. Connecting on a human level, bringing people joy and providing a reason to think are all well and good, but, then, sending people screaming into the night can be fun as well. Ho Ho
Don't kid yourself. I don't run posts featuring photographs of beautiful women now and then and, recently, erotica I've collaborated on with women simply because I enjoy looking and love the pleasures of the flesh. No, it's partly to make (some) people squirm in their chair.
An open mind and a sense of humor are required to read this weblog with any regularity.
I published a post late last year titled The Life We Live Comes From The Choices We Make in which I stated, "As for being popular or looked at as prominent, neither are important to me and I couldn't care any less. What is important, the only things that are important, are to have fun and to feel my time has been well spent."
That brings me to the reason I chose, more than a month ago, to write this post.
I consider blogging to be the ultimate social media platform. Without bloggers, in my opinion, there would be no Facebook, no Twitter, no Flickr and no need for sites like StumbleUpon, Digg or any other that involves rating the quality of web content.
There would be, I'd say, no social media if there was not blogging.
I'm of the opinion that social media has cheapened the concept of friendship. Be my friend, all you have to do is click this button. Follow me on Twitter...because I'll follow you back and that will make both of us appear to be more popular.
It's not the broad spectrum of social media that I wish to discuss, though. The point of this post is to address issues related to bloggers, those who read blogs and members of the StumbleUpon community.
In regard to readers, I know how to attract readers to a blog and, just as well, that you can't force them to stay for any length of time or to ever return.
That's it.
Why is it that some people visit this blog with regularity? Why is it that they have stayed with me for an extended period? Those are questions I don't have answers to, questions I haven't spent a second considering, because whatever they might be, it is not going to impact my behavior or cause there to be any adjustment in content.
People who are not engaged and those who lack insight speak of social media simply as an activity; some discuss it as a concept separate from life when, in both instances, it is, in fact, an extension of life.
As for bloggers, some will be helpful while others will not, some will cooperate and others will refuse, some will be reasonable and others will lack touch with any sense of reality you can imagine. Selah.
That makes it easy, in any case, to understand why some blogs carry links and others do not, why some have a long, long list of links and others have very few.
It further explains why you have people who will act like a friend to gain a link in your blog, who will help you as long as it benefits them and who will then drop your link when you're not looking, without saying a word.
Uh huh and that's the ugly part of social media.
All too often people will help you as long as they feel it benefits them, but when someone needs help, when it requires that person to act in a human way, they show their true colors, those of a user and a loser, and they are nowhere to be found.
Let me be clear about one thing, if you carry a link from my blog and/or if you have me as a "friend" in social media I don't care that you drop me. I do expect you, though, to stand up and take responsibility for your action.
You see, I don't take well to being jerked around and being used pisses me off. I make a great friend and, if I choose, an enemy you would never want to have, eh.
And with that we have reached the point of this screed, a brief StumbleUpon Rant.
Early on in The Last Road Trip one of my StumbleUpon "friends" sent a note (through share which leaves no paper trail as it were) saying I'm using Hunter S. Thompson's image to attract visitors to this weblog, but I don't do any Gonzo writing and I should be ashamed of myself.
What the nitwit doesn't understand is that anyone who tries to write like Hunter S. Thompson is doomed to fail from the outset. I'm not an idiot, you see, so I make no effort to rip off The Good Doctor.
Yes, I thought of calling out a few of these jokers specifically, by their SU user name, but decided any mention would be more than they deserved.
I'd have to say the son of a bitch who sickens me more than any of the others is a guy who is involved in a fairly new business where people set up online stores.
Scott runs a blog where he posts a piece of original content just about as often as there's a blue moon, otherwise he posts videos that he picks up from YouTube and other sites. Either way he sends out something to his friends every weekday to be stumbled and on some weekend days as well.
He's one of those guys who doesn't have a problem sending out stuff, but, at the same time, just can't find the time to clean out his Inbox. Cry me a river you fucking pinhead, no wonder you've been identified more than once by numerous people as a spammer. Oh, yes, but you've concocted an effective defense, haven't you, attacking anyone who nails you to the wall for your bad behavior?
What's most interesting, though, is he told me more than once he didn't care whether I stumbled what he sent me or not because he sends stuff out to 300 people. Yes, it's good to know you have people to take advantage of and not have any regard for them otherwise, eh.
There's a whole lot more I could say about this dipshit, but he's already received more of my time than he's worth.
One lame dick bastard who draws stick figure cartoons and sends them out to his friends to be stumbled, while far too often not stumbling shares sent to him, wrote me to say he's on SU "to have a good time" and "laugh at funny shit" and couldn't be bothered with any concern as to whether he was stumbling my stuff while I was out looking for a place to spread the ashes of my friend.
What is there to say to someone like Jon? That is other than the fact his mother would have been better off to have an abortion than bring someone like him into the world?
There are more I could comment on, but I think you get the picture.
There is one person to whom I want to send a shout-out, George Angus whom you may know as Tumblemoose. Wanted to make sure you pick this up on Google Alerts, George, that's why I also referenced Tumblemoose. Right.
George lacked the spine to say anything to me directly when he dropped me from his list. He did, though, tell my buddy that I can fuck myself; that he's tired of my bullshit and snide remarks.
You pig fucker, you confide in me that you're making less money than you ever have and you come hat in hand asking for help. Then you don't have the good sense to accept and act on advice you couldn't afford to pay for.
I laughed at your experiment to see what success you could have to expand your sphere of influence in social media. When you don't understand how to deal with people how do you expect to gain anything that resembles success?
What do you think you're going to do to "inspire writers" through a blog, you cretin, when you fail to produce interesting content? As for providing writing services, let me tell you...you need to pay someone to write posts for your blog.
It's a good thing I waited a month to write this post, it could have gotten ugly. Ho Ho
Photographs by Kilroy_60
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