Tool of convenience, or harbinger of doom?Image via Wikipedia
Yesterday I was selling iPhones at work and striking up conversations with the customers. One couple had a one year old with them. He just kept giving me this huge, toothy grin. At least, it would have been toothy if he had more than four teeth! I just couldn’t stop looking at his giggling little self, so I said, “You look awfully happy! Is this going to be your new toy?”
“Noooooooo.” the father quickly replied.
“It won’t be long.” I said. “Leap Frog makes a baby blackberry.” (They do. Check it out!)
As a Daddy Blogger, I’ve gotten frustrated lately that it’s fairly hard to find fellow Daddy Bloggers. Every few months or so I Google ‘Daddy Blogs‘ for something interesting. Today I hit the mother, er, fatherload:
Dad-blogs.com is an online community designed for and by bloggers who happen to be fathers. I really enjoy this site and am proud to be a member of it. I can really see the potential for dad-blogs to become THE central hub for daddy bloggers online. In just a couple of months, they’ve already attracted the likes of Wayne Parker, daddy blogger from about.com, so you know they’re gaining clout!
Waay back in 2008, I blogged about the dangers of Twitter. In that blog, I made the case that it’s possible to pollute your favorite social media sites with compelling entries such as “I’m eating a burrito.” I thought that this could be off-putting to the people you could be trying to attract to your blog/online business by tweeting.
As we look to a bright new year, many of us are looking back at the year we just had. Then we look forward to the year ahead. I am doing the latter with a vengeance. This does not come without the required retrospective, however.
The past year has been very busy for me. I moved twice, continued to try to sell my home in Missouri, worked overnight and days, considered a second job, started several blogs, discovered Facebook and Twitter while growing increasingly impatient with MySpace, and somewhere in there tried to figure out how to get family and ‘me’ time.
Lately I’ve been doing some soul searching about my responsibility to the online community. I recently became a fairly heavy Twitter user. Any time I am at my computer, Tweetdeck is running. At work, I have Tiny Twitter running on my phone.
Interested in monetizing wesites and blogs, I decided to give Magpie a try. I decided to have them post an ad in my tweet stream after every five tweets. I then tweeted things like what I had for breakfast, the weather outside, whatever was on my mind. I literally started to think in 140 characters or less. (‘This just happened, how would I tweet that?’) I was trying to earn some cash from Magpie!
It seems like any blog you look at these days raves about Twitter. Well, let me join the crowd! Twitter is a social networking tool that allows users to quickly send out messages to keep in touch, communicate, pimp their blog, or whatever else they feel like selling/doing. I have blogged previously about how a tweet got one of my favorite Star Trek novel writers to comment on my blog. Today, I used it as a form of text support. Using Tweetdeck I sent out a cry for help.
What my plea for assistance looks like on tweetdeck
Today was really crappy. Super crappy. I mean, it couldn’t have gotten worse if Murphy himself showed up, slapped me around a bit and screamed his law in my face. It was seriously that bad. I was so depressed and mopey when I got home that my wife, empathic soul that she is, immediately felt depressed and mopey too. A few minutes before Heroes started, my wife got a phone call and left the room. Not wanting to watch one of my favorite shows without my favorite companion, I hit record, changed the channel on the T.V., and sulked some more.
As a Daddy Blogger, I’ve gotten frustrated lately that it’s fairly hard to find fellow Daddy Bloggers. Every few months or so I 
Waay back in 2008, I 
Check out his 
