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!)

We then had a conversation about the dangers of the internet, and more importantly, how you can become anyone you want to be on the internet.

Now, for the most part I think I do pretty well with just being myself online. I’m pretty much the same boring, run-of-the-mill person I’d be of we met face to face.

But for some reason, I feel the need to show off my online life and how I use different apps to achieve excellent daddy blogger status. Any suggestions on how to streamline this process would be greatly appreciated!

Obviously, I write this blog. When I post a new entry, I head over to ping.fm and announce it, which automatically updates my twitter, facebook, and MySpace to let everyone who cares and some who don’t that I just blogged today.

I also write ‘Kids Play On The Net‘. This is a weekly column about kid-friendly websites for education and entertainment over at dad-blogs.com. I can’t pimp that site enough. It’s truly a great place for dads and moms to hang out. When they post my column, it’s back to ping to let everyone know.

MySpace is dead to me. The only thing I do over there is look every once in a while to see if ping updated it. MySpace is targeted at teens, and as far as I’m concerned, they can have it. I still have a couple of friends over there that haven’t come into the light of facebook, so I still have a profile there. Meh.

Facebook is crazy. Not only have I reunited with long-lost friends there, but I’ve also had conversations with writers and artists and people I admire. These are people I’d just stammer at in public. But on facebook it’s just easier. OK, so maybe I am a little different online.

Twitter. What have I not already said about twitter on this blog? Twitter has truly become an addiction. I check it constantly on my phone. I enjoy ‘live tweeting’ my days off and family activities. I enjoy it so much that I created a daily segment on this blog through twitter tools called ‘Twitter Tittelations’ that gives you my daily tweets in digest form. Daily. Is that annoying? Let me know! I thought it was a great way to post daily without typing an entire post, but I may just be fooling myself.

I also have friendfeed, stumbleupon, technorati, and digg accounts, but I still haven’t devoted enough time to those to figure out how to use them.

That’s it in a nutshell: the tools that this daddy blogger uses. Any more I should get into? What do you use?

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:

I found dad-blogs.com.

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!

I’ve enjoyed exploring this site today.  The Comments section says ‘Write a Comment Slacker’. The $100 giveaway that’s going on right now is advertised by saying, ‘Win beer money!’ In other words, the target audience is definitely men! Women are allowed in too because, let’s face it, someone has to keep us in line!

There are plenty of activities to keep you busy such as a forum and groups to join or create if you want to dig in to a topic a little deeper. They just introduced a feature called ‘DB Investigates’, where they ‘take a hard look at a subject matter from all angles in order to spark debate and find solutions to a wide range of topics.’ Up first for the month of March? Well, we are men, so we’re talking about sex. (I’ll take bets right now on whether or not that’s the topic for next month too! )

If you’re a daddy blogger looking for a place to share ideas, or just a daddy looking for advice and a sympathetic ear, dad-blogs.com is the place for you!

Today, I watched this video on johnchow.com:

Wow, this video makes a compelling case that “I’m drinking a cup of coffee.” Is something people might actually want to know!

Hmmm….

There’s only one conclusion.

If you want to tweet about your online business, do it.

If you want to share information you think is valuable, by all means.

If you want to tweet that you just let loose the juiciest fart of your life, absolutely, why not?

But…

I don’t have to read it.

Here’s the thing: I’ve seen a lot of people that don’t like Twitter because they think it’s a fat wad of wasted time. That’s cool. But, it is possible to use Twitter effectively. 

Tim Ferriss uses Twitter to post information, alert readers of his latest blog entries, etc. At the time of this writing, he has 13,605 followers. How many people does he follow? Zero. I’ve seen blogs that say this means he must be a spammer. This is absolutely not true. He’s using Twitter very effectively to spread information that he feels is important. But, he has different avenues of research, etc. so he doesn’t even want to wade through the endless tweets to find information.

Myself, not being a respected, published author who is perfectly at ease hanging out with CEO-types all day, I use Twitter and Tweetdeck to ask for/ferret out information. I find this useful, so I have cut down on my “I just blew my nose” tweets, and instead, post my latest blog entries, link to favorite sites, news stories, etc. Usually, if I can’t attach a link, I don’t tweet.

I suppose the point of all this is that social media is what we make of it. I don’t tweet unless I can provide a link because that is the aspect that I enjoy. There’s not much you can say in 140 characters or less. You can, however, say just enough to entice readers to click on that link.

AND

If you find yourself following someone who incessantly tweets that they love pie, you can simply unfollow them.

Welcome to 21st century friendship!  ;p

You can find more useful videos like this one at commoncraft.com

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.

So, looking forward to a year of building my online presence and finding ways to escape ‘the old grind’, I decided to  call in a few experts. What follows are excerpts from emails I sent to several authors and bloggers to find out how they balance family, life, and technology. How do they make the pieces fit?

My first questions went to author and blogger Dayton Ward:

You maintain another job along with family and writing. How do you make
the pieces fit? Do you not sleep, sir?

I sleep more than you might think, but less than I’d like, or which some
folks might consider healthy. Between the dayjob, family, and writing, I
average between 4-5 hours of sleep a night during the week. On weekends, I sometimes am able to squeeze in another hour or, on very rare occasions,
sneak in a nap. It all depends on the schedules my wife and I are keeping
on a given weekend.

You also maintain a website and blog as well as MySpace and Facebook. How
many hours a week do you think you spend on those things?

I don’t really keep track of that sort of thing. I spend far less time on
MySpace and Facebook than I do my LiveJournal blog, which I try to update at least once a day. I have no real agenda when it comes to the LJ; I post about things I observe, things that piss me off, updates about my kids or the writing, or jokes and assorted detritus I find amusing. As for Facebook and MySpace, in all honesty, I only really maintain a presence there as a gateway to my LJ and website, but I’m also looking for ways to keep those pages up to date and relevant. I’ve set up Facebook to get feeds from LJ automatically, and I’m looking into doing the same thing with MySpace. I don’t really go in for all the little applications and little cutesy things you can do with MySpace or Facebook, but I do participate in some of it as time permits. The trick is to just not allow them to become bottomless pits of wasted time.

Now, if I may, I’d like to add a second voice to the discussion, Dayton’s partner on many works of fiction and commentary, author Kevin Dilmore.

You also use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. How many hours a week do you think you spend on those things?

I spend time on FB and Twitter because it helps me a lot with my work. As a
writer and marketer for Hallmark, I absolutely NEED to know how people will
connect socially in the 21st Century. The future of my business depends on
it. So, I use them to learn about them.

Back to Dayton:

George Lucas said that there’s an old saying about how films are never
finished, they’re simply abandoned. Do you feel that way about your books
and stories?

I think every writer feels that way to some degree about at least some of
their past work. Aside from fixing obvious errors or things of that nature,
would I go back and correct, revise, or update everything I’ve ever
written, given the opportunity? No, but there are a couple of select pieces
I’d either refine or expand if I had the chance. In those instances, I’ve
reread the story and thought “Gee, I could have gone this way, rather than
what I did,” or “I should’ve fleshed this out more.” For the most part,
however, I’m okay with leaving my past work as is. In the case of one
particular short story, I became so enamored with what I considered to be
untapped potential behind it that I plotted out a novel-length prequel to
the thing. How crazy is that?

Kevin?

Hmm … actually, with the writing and rewriting and editing and re-reading
and everything, I’m pretty finished with them by the time they hit
print! >

Author/editor Kevin J. Anderson had this to offer:

The blog, the website presence, the e-mail accounts, they’re all like a hungry monster, always demanding to be fed. Authors are expected to have a web presence these days, but maintaining everything is a constant chore, taking away time that I really should be using to write. For the time and word count of the blog posts and e-mail I did last year, I could have written at least another novel!

I am extremely grateful to everyone who contributed to this blog. It’s nice to see that it’s not just we amateurs that struggle with this! I hope you have gleaned some insight as I have from these responses. I leave you with one final thought from prominent blogger John Chow:

“Family is the foundation of growth. No matter how hectic things may get, you must always take time out to enjoy what it most important.”

How many moments like this do we get in our lives, really?

—Who are these guys?—

Dayton Ward is the author of many media tie-in novels and short stories as well as original works. You can find his complete bibliography and other great tiddly-bits at daytonward.com

Be sure to read his LiveJournal blog!

Kevin Dilmore is also a media tie-in author and conjurer of worlds. Check out his stuff at amazon.com!

Kevin J. Anderson is an author/editor whose name has been associated with little known universes such as Star Wars and the Dune series of novels. Check him out at wordfire.com and dunenovels.com.

John Chow makes money online by telling people how much money he makes online. See how at johnchow.com.

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!

My addiction truly hit home when I followed @SarahJL, and her automatic ‘thank you’ message had a link to ‘You Know You are too Popular on Twitter When…’. It might as well have been entitled ‘You Have A Problem and May Consider Finding Help’ because I could actually identify with much of what was being said.

I then came across ‘Using Twitter… ‘The Smart Way‘ by Darren Rowse. It was finally sinking in: I’ve got to back off. Around this same time, I get this message from @dungeekin: ‘@howefitz: Thanks for the Follow. I would follow back, but you appear to have Magpie tweets in your stream.’ Insult to injury, I also received from @magpiers: ‘rt: @howefitz: Thanks for the Follow. I would follow back, but you appear to have Magpie tweets in your stream. http://is.gd/aPGz’. The link takes you to the Magpie site. As near as I can tell, @magpiers is a bot that follows all tweets about magpie and retweets them. What possible good could this serve anyone? So I immediately discontinued Magpie with the total sum revenue of something like fifty cents. Fifty cents that I will never see, since they don’t send a check until you hit fifty bucks. Meh. It’s not worth losing followers to make a couple dollars. I would much rather monetize my own blog and earn money on the quality and merit of what I say than on spam.

So I will not tweet that it’s snowing in Avon, CO. If you haven’t heard of Avon, CO then you don’t care. If you have heard of it, then you know it’s snowing, because it’s Avon, CO! No one cares what I’m eating for lunch. My Twitter is set to update my Facebook, so I’m polluting that network with my crap too. I tweet out my new blog posts, but they get buried with all my other natterings before anyone has time to click the links. I say thee NAY! From now on, it’s more conservative twittering for me.

I would urge all fellow tweople to do the same!

What my plea for assistance looks like on tweetdeck

I was trying to insert Google adsense into my blog and was having a hard time of it. Luckily, @Frumph saw my tweet and answered the call! If you scroll to the bottom of my blog, you will see:

Ta-Dah!

So thank you, Frumph, and thank you Twitter! Obviously, I need to work on my design and integrating the ad a little bit, but I’m sure there’s a Twitterer out there who can help me when the time comes!

Cheers,

-Justin

-Justin

After my wife got off the phone, I opened my laptop, knowing full well that my little ol’ blog would not have any comments, and that I would just be blogging some sappy entry about my horrible, no good, very bad day and no one would get past the first line.

My WordPress dashboard loaded.

I blinked.

I had 1 comment.

I clicked it.

It was from Kevin Dilmore!

I was shocked. I was amazed! I was stupefied.

For anyone not ‘in the know’, Kevin Dilmore has written many Star Trek novels and e-books alone and with Dayton Ward. You can find a list of their works here.

I friended Kevin and Dayton on Facebook after entering the now discontinued ‘Strange New Worlds’ Star Trek short story contest. In the course of looking for some advice, I discovered Dayton’s site and blog. I’ve been a fan of Dayton and Kevin ever since. I never really expected either of them to actually notice me on Facebook, I was just a fanboy following around a couple of my favorite writers.

Fast forward to a couple of days ago. I have been experimenting with social networking and blogging. I wrote a silly little blog about the new Batman cartoon, Batman: The Brave and the Bold. You can read that blog here.

I am on Twitter. (Just follow howefitz) I’ve set up Twitter to automatically update my status on Facebook. So when I completed my Batman blog, I announced it on Twitter, which also announced it on Facebook! I can only imagine this is how Kevin saw it, and felt compelled to comment!

And that is how the very first comment on my modest little blog came from one of my heroes. This is social networking at work, folks! Thank you Twitter and Facebook! And I especially thank Kevin Dilmore. You’re the man! You single-handedly pulled me out of my funk today, and my wife and I thank you!

-Justin