It’s Facebook!  It’s Stumbleupon!  It’s Flickr!  It’s WHAT IS HOT!

Two months ago I had not even heard about Pinterest.  Today I can’t turn-around without reading more about it and according to Alexa, (a decent barometer of website traffic) Pinterest is going through the roof!

The Pinterest terms don’t allow outright spamming and I doubt the spammers would be successful anyway because nobody would follow them – but if done properly Pinterest can be a good way to increase your brand recognition especially if your brand/product/website is visual in nature.

Don’t miss out on the next big thing, jump in before it’s too late!

You all may remember the eBook I wrote in 2007 about how I first started GrownUpGeek.com and the things I did that made it a success. For those that don’t remember: I sold approximately 1,000 copies of the .PDF version at $10 each. About two years later I made an HTML version available here in the blog for free.

Well now my incredibly popular (back then at least) eBook is now available for FREE in the iTunes iBook store!  If you have an iPod, iPad, or iPhone running iOS5 or newer, you can download and enjoy it all over again!  CLICK HERE TO PREVIEW or DOWNLOAD

With Apple’s release of the free iBooks Author app, easily creating interactive eBooks/iBooks and publishing them to the iTunes store is a great way to reach millions of potential readers.  My eBook has only been in iTunes for 4 days and it’s already been downloaded nearly 100 times – I might just have to squeeze-out another ebook!

Opting out of Google’s new privacy policy and data collection is really not that difficult: http://grownupgeek.com/opt-out-googles-privacy-policy

This week I posted an ad at the DP Forums looking for a news-writer.  This is the second time in two years I’ve made such a post and since the type of responses I got were nearly identical both times I feel that I owe it to the world of potential content writers out there to give some tips on getting work:

1. READ THE FUCKING AD!!  If the ad says “send me a private message”, don’t reply with a public question.  If the ad says “I DO NOT WANT XYZ TYPE OF A WRITER” do not send me a PM (or worse, post publicly) that you a very good “XYZ” writer and ask me how much I’m going to pay you for all your great XYZ writing!
2. Don’t bother me if based on the very few requirements in the ad, you are not even close to being qualified!  If the ad says “you must be able to write in near grammatically perfect English” don’t send me a message written in Pidgeon English at the grammar level of a 7 year old asking how much I am going to pay you
3. When sending an example of your work, make sure it is your BEST work!  And OMFG, if that is your best work, please refer to #2
4. Don’t send a clearly ‘canned’ response that really has nothing to do with the ad/request that I posted.  You are supposed to be a professional writer, right?  At least put in some effort and WRITE a response.. and for God’s sake, don’t send something that has been re-written by some kind of 10 year old “keyword rewriting” program
5. Don’t make ME work – Don’t make me go searching some spam-farm looking for  your samples of work, or make me beg multiple times over multiple emails to see examples of your work.
6. If you can’t read, can’t speak/write english, have the IQ less than 9 year old encephalitic, or worse, all of these things combined, then please, leave me alone and just keep writing for eHow.com – you two will go well together.

Fortunately out of the 100 or so responses I received, there were 2 or 3 that actually met my requirements and will have some work waiting for them should they choose.