Chris in Washington asks:
Randy: you’ve mentioned Twitter a couple of times, and I see you have a link on TRUE’s home page to your Twitter page. I’ve looked at Twitter a couple of times, and I just don’t get it. Do people really care that their friends (or favorite celebrities) are “Waking up to face the day.” or “Eating a bologna sandwich for lunch.”? Why?
I got a note from a Premium subscriber saying he had clicked on an ad on my Jumbo Joke site. He noted, “I used a throwaway email address to access the site and now get between 100 and 300 spam messages per day (my ‘real’ email gets 5-10 spam messages per day). I’m so glad it’s not my primary email address, but how many of your readers don’t know any better?”
When I talk about how independent sites like True need your direct and ongoing support, I’ll often emphasize that all independent sites need such support; if you like “them” (whoever “they” might be), you need to support them so they can continue. And indeed one of the oldest, most venerable content sites has stopped publishing and is in very real danger of failing completely.
Episode #14: “How Embarrbutting!”, from True’s 7 August 2008 issue.
Last week I announced a major disaster, and asked for your help in getting the word out about True to help reverse the problem. A good number of you listened, and helped. Thank you. While the threat isn’t gone, this newsletter will be able to continue.
Note: This is long-since solved, but leaving the page up for context, since many sites linked to it. -rc
I’ve given up trying to work with Yahoo, which represents the largest domain subscribed to True. There are more than 20,000 addresses within the Yahoo.com domain on True’s distribution (plus a couple thousand more on variants such as yahoo.co.uk, yahoo.ca, etc.)
Something fairly funny happened with a recent video, which was about a homophobe politician running for re-election while under the cloud of felony indictments over his first election.
What is it with men who want to fly under balloons? I don’t mean hot air balloons, I mean toy balloons. This one’s a priest — he just wanted to get closer to God, I guess. From True’s 27 April 2008 edition:
Two stories this week have photos: the sexy mayor of Arlington, Ore., and the idiot robber using a bottle of cologne as a weapon.
First, the moron.
Hey, look at this! Only 14 years after I put it into practice, WIRED magazine’s Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail) has fully grasped my business model: making money by giving away something of value for free.
Verizon subscribers have had quite the go of it the past few weeks. Three weeks ago their spam filter tripped on a single word in the issue, so the Premium edition was blocked from everyone at Verizon (and their subsidiaries, like GTE.net) — even if you had followed my recommendation and put thisistrue.com and lyris.net aweber.com in your personal “whitelist.”
There’s a group of friends I hang out with online, all of us online entrepreneurs. One sent a URL around urging us all to “take 8 minutes to watch the video,” adding “if you care about such things, please consider blogging about it and/or passing it on.” What things? Our kids. Or, more accurately, the education of our kids. The world is a very, very different place than it was when we were kids.
(Heh! When I hit ‘Save’ on this entry, there was a net.burp and, for the first time ever, I got a duplicate post. Figures it would happen with that title, eh? 🙂 )
Sometimes I Delight In finding two or three weird stories in a short amount of time, and running them all together in the same issue. It happens more often than you might think (especially if you’re not a Premium subscriber, and don’t see all the stories).
Today I got a copy of the new book Be Unreasonable: the Unconventional Way to Extraordinary Business Results by small business coach Paul Lemberg. In the book, Lemberg uses me and True as an example of starting a business in an “unreasonable” way (in his chapter on “Unreasonable Thinking”).
Well of course I have the photos of the bikini-clad fireman. But first things first — here’s the story:
There’s an interesting update on the story and discussion last week about the NFL’s fight against churches — the NFL warned churches not to show the Super Bowl game to parishioners due to copyright restrictions.
I’ve been warning about spam in True since 1996 — ten long years. My warnings have been summarized in my Spam Primer, which is now on its own site. As I predicted more than 10 years ago, it’s gotten worse — much worse. And the stakes are much higher than just clogging your inbox: your life savings are at risk.
For the first time in years, someone featured in a This is True story has complained about it.
It took Samuel Saraiva nine years(!) to learn about the story where he’s featured and call me on the phone with the complaint.
Less spam? For the first time ever (in my experience, at least), I’m getting noticeably less spam. My spam load — the vast majority of which my server catches for me and reports in a nightly email — is down to a “mere” 350 to 450/day!
In 1999, after I had been working full-time on True for awhile, I found I really missed having peers to chat with, as I did when I had a Day Job. So I started a little group of online entrepreneurs to network with.