Source: I'm a human. I wrote it.
544 karma · joined October 8, 2008
Email: mail [at] velvetshark [dot] com
Source: I'm a human. I wrote it.
I agree with most of it, but I also don't see why all blog posts have to be serious. I had fun researching and writing it, and I don't pretend it's a scientific masterpiece.
Whenever I create something, either for work or personal, I add it to a "Featured" section on my website's homepage. Over time, it became such a nice and comprehensive list that I now use it every time when talking about past projects or whenever a "Can we see some examples of your past work or appearances?" comes up.
It has different types of work and is exhaustive enough that whoever asks, can find what they're looking for. I had a lot of positive comments from prospective employers about it.
What started as a mini project for me to collect all the scattered links for myself so that I don't forget or lose anything, became a great asset that keeps on giving.
Here's the link that I send when asked about "examples of your work": https://www.velvetshark.com/#featured It's an anchor link of my homepage that scrolls straight to the Featured section.
Oh, just to clarify: the "Featured" section is not the only thing that people find interesting. Once they're on the page, they can browse around and find articles that are of interest to them. That helps too.
Since its publication it even got featured in a Spanish textbook, and I get tons of traffic to it all the time. The topic seems very much valid for the last few years, with no sign of change.
The main reason seems to be to look good (or even readable) on mobile, but it seems that it's more of a bandwagon than a proven good strategy.
My most popular article, featured on HN (and even got into a Spanish textbook) is "Why do so many brands change their logos and look like everyone else?" https://velvetshark.com/articles/why-do-brands-change-their-...
There are many, MANY versions of images from my article on Twitter, with attribution cropped. I wanted to have a subtle and small contribution and to not be obnoxious. It seems that it's not a good idea. Too easy to crop, post as your own and sound smart.
It's even worse on LinkedIn. There were multiple posts with cropped images, literally tens of thousands of likes, and zero attribution, then not even addressing direct comments and calling them out.
David Perell used one of the cropped images but he didn't know the source. When I commented on it, he added the article to his Twitter thread, with proper attribution.
The article doesn't answer how many, so I've counted.
It takes 1298 GNU/Linux users to change a light bulb.
Including the father of the first user, excluding the 6 that complained, and then complained again (they're counted only once). And also, assuming there's no overlap between all the groups, which is probably unrealistic.
Example: https://freelancember.com/excuses-for-not-raising-your-rates... - how to deal with raising the rates and not ending up stuck at the bottom level.
At some point I was even a paid flickr customer. Last uploaded photo was from 2009 I think. Or 2011? Can't remember now because when I want to check I see the photo mentioned above.
What if I know I'm bad at something and decide to hire someone who's a professional in this area? And this person does an amazing job. I want to endorse this person to acknowledge the obviously great skill he possesses. But I can't. My skills are not similar.
"With Gmail, you can send and receive messages up to 25 megabytes (MB) in size."
M-F 9am-6pm = 4 x 9
So if you have all your friend on VK AND you have all the entertainment stuff there - why switch? Unless Facebook comes with some interesting strategies to pull the users, the status quo will remain as is. And from what I hear and see, FB is putting a significant effort into this. It'll be interesting to watch in the nearest 1-2 years.
Take a look at this paragraph.
"As you can see the Windows Live Network have done their best to make the privacy tools simple and easy to use and yet provide you with a sense of control over who can see what is happening in your activity streams."
It is just beneath the graph that is absolutely unusable and too hard to comprehense for well over 90% of the users. If Facebook had such privacy controls - everybody would bash them for making it overcomplicated.