Just saw this on a post from CNN.com’s Facebook page:

I poked around a little for see if it’s tied to CNN.com for the actual comments on their site, but this appears to not have a corresponding article yet (“breaking news” being the main piece). I also looked at other pages on FB – none of them had 4million fans like CNN.com, but they also didn’t appear to have the “Reply” option for each comment.

So I’m curious – is this new? Is it something special for CNN? Is it a good thing necessarily?

Rick Stilwell

You’ve probably heard or even participated in some of the uproar around Instagram’s policy moves over the past few weeks. In a nutshell, they updated the site’s Terms Of Service/TOS to include wording that made it look like they could sell/use/profit from users’ photos without attribution or recompense (unlimited stream of pictures would be a positive for IG). Meanwhile, users would continue to be sole owners of their own content (potential negatives if legal matters flare up).

Ryal posted a link to an article:

Reading: Can the Instagram brand recover? bit.ly/TwhF26 <– interested to hear reaction from @rickcaffeinated @flashnick etc.

— Ryal Curtis (@ryalcurtis) December 26, 2012

I’ve had lots of thoughts over IG in the past months, but the TOS changes are at the bottom of that list. If these latest changes and/or changes back to the original (that’s debatable, whether they really backtracked or just better clarified their intentions), then I’d have no real beef at all. It’s a free service. Facebook has been doing much the same, at least offering an “opt-out” on their privacy settings. But I’d be okay with it if this was the only thing I saw as screwy.

But wait, there’s more…

1) Instagram has lost sight of why most of us like IG: SHARING
When first appearing on the iPhone, IG became a sensation for the social aspect of it all. Taking pictures was fun, and adding filters was fun. Heck, most of the top photo apps in the App Store probably owe their existence to Instagram being a success and giving amateur photographers the inspiration to do even more with their photos. But it was the sharing that kept us around. It’s the social part of social media that has allowed this wave of new tech and new connections. And it was the liking, commenting and following that made IG such a huge hit. Other apps have tried to reinvent the filters and to tap into the social – but in my opinion, none of them have hit on it as simplistically and stylistically well-played as Instagram has.

2) For everyone else, Instagram is a photo album
For those who aren’t in it as much for the liking/commenting, IG is also a good, solid and easy to use repository for mobile photos. It’s a good app for taking a shot, applying a little edit/filter, and saving off to share on other networks or just pull up later. For me, the design changes over the past couple of updates have made it bulkier, clunkier and that store/share aspect has probably lost out. Also, the Twitter/Instagram back and forth adds extra steps and keyclicks to what was formerly so easy and appealing.

3) Spam sucks
With all of the work that appears to be going on behind the scenes, especially since bringing out the Android app, there’s nothing in sight to deal with the overwhelming amount of spam. Fake accounts and copycat imitations are all over the place. If I get 30 new follows in a week, 25+ will be non-people. It’s annoying, and it makes me wonder how much IG’s numbers might be inflated if a large percentage of these accounts aren’t actual breathing sentient beings.

4) Didn’t I say clunky already?
It’s just not as simple, just not as pretty, just not as easy to get around and do what you want to do anymore. My thought is that if Instagram came out today as the next big thing, I don’t think I’d be as impressed as I was when it really was the next big thing. The extra crop screen is a terribly unnecessary step – you used to not be able to have portrait photos without using another app, but now landscape photos aren’t allowed without intervention either. The filters have always been a nice addition, but they’ve been rearranged – meaning users who have been doing things one way now have to figure out new paths or swipes and taps. Honestly, it looks like it’s little things that bug me more than most others. But it’s annoying when it doesn’t work, and now when it’s just not working as well as it once did.

I’ve got time and resources invested in IG for my own benefit, so I’m in for the long haul – at least for right now. But I’m also looking to form new habits of posting and sharing online and on mobile. I love the Flickr app updates – more than just adding filters, they seem to have pulled in some of the old IG playbook (I’m wondering if it will take some of the load overall from IG, and how that might affect Flickr’s decisions/updates going forward).

None of the other social photo apps are doing it for me. Instagram set its own bar so high in my mind that they just fall short, much like IG is by making boneheaded and wrongminded changes.

Rick Stilwell

I ran back to where I had started more than 90 minutes earlier… and it hurt. All the way. Not every step, but definitely every mile. I started walking a bit every few minutes. My pace was now more than ten minutes per mile, slower than I’d prefer under ordinary circumstances, but this time I didn’t care. All that mattered was: Just keep going.
via Chris Guillebeau, The Art of Non-Conformity » Perseverence (AKA “No, It’s Not OK To Quit”).

There’s something about hard work that just feels right. By nature I am lazy, and I have a superpower called procrastination. But I’ve found that if I’ll just do the thing – if I get something out of the way, do it well, move on to what’s next – then I feel better about life, the universe, everything.

This isn’t a perfectionist bent, trust me. Look at this site (insert smiley face emoticon here) – I tinker here and there, play with the widgets on the sidebar, post occasionally (really need to step up my game on that, huh?), and overall don’t get bogged down on having the perfect blog or the properly SEO’d website. Instead, I do things that I think will look good, will add value, and I move on.

It’s more about a mindset that will just. press. through. no. matter. what.

And it’s not about beating my head against the wall just because it’s there and my head has nothing better to do. Perseverance in something that isn’t worth the time in the first place is a bad idea. Pressing through should mean you can make things better, that you can work towards higher goals and richer dreams. Even in a seemingly dead end job, working hard for the sake of good work well done is better than just huffing and puffing through the workday because there are bills to pay.

Press on because it’s a good thing to do. Press on because that’s the best way to something better ahead. Press on because the stuff there now will not go away on its own. Press on because momentum is a better wall-buster and obstacle-overcomer than just sitting around and waiting for it.

Rick Stilwell

My first confession is that while I’ve loved my iPhone experience over the years, I wasn’t blown away by the prospects/design of the new iPhone 5. I started with a 3G four years ago, upgrading iOS when available and skipping the 3GS before upgrading to the iPhone 4 when it was available and my contract would allow. Then we skipped the 4S and now find ourselves on the brink of the new iPhone 5… and like I said, just not feeling it. Maybe this was the time to spread out a little, to try new UIs and see what I was missing on the other side.

So I took a look at a couple of Android devices (thanks, Scott) – pretty, functional, liked the feel, but I think it’s too close to the iOS UI for me to get into it and appreciate. If I’d have started on ‘droids, I’d be a fan on that side. As it is, I didn’t get much more out of that than the experience I had over this time also jailbreaking my iPhone 4 – it was pretty, but it didn’t really add anything and I was left with what was missing more than what I might’ve gained.

Then I got a Samsung Focus Windows Phone from Will (thanks!) – and really liked it for it’s simplicity. The Windows 7.5 UI is really different – vertical/list design elements on a simpler framework. I could live with that – and with Windows 8 coming out and the new +Nokia Lumia 920 looking really smart, I was willing to wait it out on the pricing news still to come.

Then I plugged it in and used the Focus as my phone for a few days. While I still liked all the things from before, now I was missing things that hadn’t come into play. I only had the one charger cord – yes, I could buy more, and I’d have to since it died during the day at work and would need to be recharged before going home to the one cord I had. Little things like I Heart Radio not working like I wanted; the +YouVersion Bible app not having the sermon notes; Instagram not on there (yet! – no confirmation on whether it was really coming or not for Win8); and having to buy apps AGAIN since I’d already purchased them once on the iOS platforms – it was the little things about the experience, what I was missing while it was in my pocket, that pushed me back to Apple. That, and the +HTC presser for their new Win8 phone that was 25 minutes of “look at our square design and shiny colors and CURVED GLASS, people, CURVED glass!” that made me want to ask, “huh?”

So I sit here today with a new shiny iPhone 4S – like I said, I wasn’t as impressed with the shininess and newness of the 5, but I still needed a new phone and the 4S is cheaper and perfect for my fat fingers and Instagram-loving personality.

Rick Stilwell

Rick Stilwell

NOTE FROM MANAGEMENT: this post is for me more than anything. feel free to read along, but my “audience” today is fairly narrowly defined. – thanks, the Editor

The first thing I wrote online that morning: a call to prayer to our email list. In another email later that night, 9:33pm – “But for now, I’m just numb, I think – and praying for the Spirit to Comfort the people…”

One year later, I took a “media fast” to avoid the talk – everywhere on television news for weeks around the anniversary. I had only just started blogging.

Again a year later, two years after – a few more words, but not much.

In 2004, a new blogsite and not really a mention of the anniversary on the date: just musings here and here (I blogged a lot more before Twitter, I think). My own catastrophe of sorts had happened, and was mostly dealing with the “what next” that follows most of life’s big devastating moments.

The next year, I posted on music and on losing at fantasy football (some things never change). But the day before those I wrote/quoted something that I really like on passing down to our kids:

Better Answer
I had this question on the 3′s post earlier this week: What is the most important thing you want your children to tell you they learned from you when they grow up? I think I found a “better” answer, something that might be true of my kids and I, and anyone else paying attention:

… And truthfulness, like the strange world of the Bible, was a subject of which my father understood himself to be a learner, not an authority, and certainly not a professional. He was notoriously impatient with people who thought or spoke otherwise of themselves. He didn’t always know how to have a conversation with people who didn’t seem too well acquainted with the criminals under their own hats. Like Columbo, he was a little embarassed for them and a little frustrated.

This frustration had a lot to do with the hope and comfort he derived from what we might term Waffle House Conversationalism, the open and folksy dynamic of people sitting and talking over food and drink in a boisterous public place. What could be more exciting and egalitarian? No appeal to the court of fact has more resonance than another, everybody has to let everybody else finish speaking, and nobody’s allowed to talk too terribly loud, because people are trying to eat in peace. You’re welcome to bring the Bible or the president into it, but if you don’t keep you ego at a reasonable volume, you can take your conversation elsewhere.

(David Dark, The Gospel According To America, p. xi)

In 2006, I was in still another new site (this time it was Typepad, but I bailed on them after awhile and moved the posts to hosted wordpress). This was the first year I think I really tried to put something positive and growth-focused in my writing for that anniversary time. It’s the story of Edward James Day, a firefighter who died in service to everyone in need. The photos in the post were lost when I left typepad, but I’m going to fix that – just seems like the right thing to do.

I posted someone else’s words again in 2007. I did a teacher’s essay assignment in 2008. I posted a thought spurred by Seth Godin in 2009. In 2010, I posted pics of our niece born a couple of days before. There wasn’t much last year, more linking-to-older-posts. And this year…

Well, this year I am documenting the documentation. I’ll keep this to look back on, to add to, to share with progeny what was going through my growing challenging changing experiential mind this past decade plus. And I’ll remember – if nothing else, I’ll remember that it’s indeed important to remember and to move forward because of it all.

Rick Stilwell

Do you want to write?

Call this your first introduction to the true craft of writing. Not talking about writing or theorizing about words. Just writing. Let’s get started.

via The Writing Class You Never Had | Goins, Writer.

Click through to read Jeff’s post, but do that after we think about a couple of things.

What’s keeping you from writing? I think everyone has a story. Everyone has learned something the others could stand to hear and understand. All of us are capable of blowing someone’s mind with the words inside us.

And I’m not exaggerating.

Maybe you’re reading this while wanting to be a better writer. Maybe you’re looking for ways to promote your business or share someone’s product with the world. Maybe you’ve been looking for a way to use online whatever to build your own personal whatchamacallit. Maybe you’re lost, and google led you wrong…

But I’m betting in the middle of it, you’ve wanted to be a writer. You read blogs and articles and tweets and ebooks and you think, “I could do that”… or you think, “I can’t do that”.

Yes you can. But you have to… just write.

Write. That’s it. Just write. Write lots. Write lengthy. Write well. Write big words, little words, proper grammar, essays full of…

Listen. Just write. Whatever it is, however bad you think it might be. You’re a poor judge of your own work, so don’t do that. But if you start writing how, and stop at some point after now – and you do that kind of exercise over and over – you will not be able to keep yourself from getting better. You will be a better writer. But it starts with writing right now.

If you don’t start, you won’t get better.

Start with your story. Tell it with your words, maybe with only yourself as an audience. Write about the how of your morning, the where of your vacation, the what the —-?? of your afternoon commute. Write about your favorite TV show, your most hated rival, your biggest pet peeve. Write about anything that pops to mind, or about nothing popping to mind.

Just write, right?

Rick Stilwell

Innovation is often the act of taking something that worked over there and using it over here.
via Seth’s Blog: Analogies, metaphors and your problem.

I have a problem with the quote and the short article from whence it came. It’s just too easy – well, no, that’s not it. But it’s around there.

I’ve seen too many people try this, not too few. Too many folks look at what happens for A – thinking, “wow, that’s amazing, let’s do that for B!” – and then doing the exact same thing for B without the amazing results.

But A != B – they are not the same, no matter how much we might see them as such. There’s different things going on at A that can’t be spontaneously combusted at B. There are different people with different gifts and different mental traumas and different day planner software… it’s different from A to B.

So folks try to replicate A at B. It works okay maybe, but then success doesn’t look exactly the same – so it’s dropped. Or it doesn’t work at all – so it’s dropped. Or it works magnificently well, and everyone’s happy, and it keeps going in this mode… and stagnates because no one bothers to pay attention to A anymore, where they still had to grow and change and maneuver, and now no one at B knows what to do other than to keep doing what’s now old-A. And that flops over time because there’s no change. And it’s dropped.

The problem is that folks rely on the surface things being done without spending the time, brainpower and sweat to figure out the principles that are at work underneath. Over at A, the principles are what’s driving the success, not the particular acts themselves. And the principles don’t change, even though the way they play out is constantly under pressure and adaptive stress.

If the folks at B watching A were to study the principles, the tendencies, the underlying whys so that they can apply their own hows – then we’ve got something to be proud of, something that will be an actual success.

Until the next time we need to change it up based on principle more than the facts of the case study.

Rick Stilwell

How can you build some buzz and share meaningful information with your audience, with the people you want to reach? Here’a a few things you can do today to get the word out that you’ve got something to say, something to sell, something to share with the world:

• Post something. Anything. That’s not entirely true, but it is. When you post something about who you are, what you do, what you’re offering to the world around you, that can become an anchor point for folks to find you. Bu if you’re not posting, you might as well not be there. There’s not much for anyone to find – at least, nothing from you, while others beyond your control might be posting about you, too.
• Post pictures. Post videos. We humans are strange – we prefer image and moving action over black text on a glowing screen.
• After you post on your site, your blog, your tumblr, on whatever site you’ve chosen – after that, share it on the other platforms that make sense for your intended audience. Tweet about it. Share it on Facebook. Send it to your email list. Digg/Reddit/Tumblr it. Use your main post as a starting point and radiate it outwards where the people are.
• Interact with the folks who join you in the sharing. When people comment, write back. When they share, thank them. When they repost, go click on them and their stuff as well. It’s the mutuality of this cycle that makes the most difference for others, building conversations around you and your product/service.
• HARDEST PART: After all that, do it again – consistently, again and again in a way that makes sense and isn’t spammy.

Any questions?

Rick Stilwell

Being in the business I’m in, doing the things I do – watching for and experimenting with social media and online marketing trends – with all of the above going on, I often notice people doing it right.

But mostly, I see folks doing it wrong, thinking they’re doing it right but not asking questions, not trying to make adjustments, not trying to do it better.

One key in the ones doing it right: they are ALWAYS trying to do it better.

I’ve got a working theory that most people do not do their tasks the best way – rather, they lock in on the first way it made sense. Whatever that “this makes sense” way is, that’s the thing that we follow with the tasks on our to-do list. It’s at work, at home, in our community involvement. “The way we’ve always done it” is more about “this made sense”.

That’s why it’s so hard to change. That’s why it’s hard for folks to see that a different, better way to get things done might be possible.

But people who are doing it right, whatever “it” is, are looking for ways to streamline, looking for new methods and new ideas.

• They’re watching for new metaphors, new stories that can be applied to explain better what’s happening.
• They look for new books, new writers who’ve thought through the same things and come to different conclusions.
• They ask questions. The look for answers that then lead to new better questions.
• They stop and look at the current processes and ask, why are we doing it t his way again?
• They have fun doing all this, getting excited about, instead of stressing out on, the prospect of change.

What about you? Are you living out your workload today “the way we’ve always done it, the way it makes sense”? Or rather, are you looking for something new, something better, something more fun and exciting for your day?

That’s what the cool kids do when they’re doing it right.

Rick Stilwell