April Fools — with emphasis on the fools!
Online Life
Stealing is Still Stealing, Even if It’s Easy
There has been a disturbing increase in theft online lately, of True and other material.
I’m Being Watched
The Online Journalism Review (published by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication) did an interesting story on “Value-added email: A Publishing Alternative to the WWW”.
Fork U!
I was apparently the first “Guest Columnist” on the interesting web-site-quality-really-needs-improvement site, “Fork in the Head” (“Because flawed web sites deserve a fork in the head”), which offers lessons in improvement called, yep, “Fork University”. I (let’s hope) supplied some words of wisdom about appealing to a wide audience.
Virtual Friends
I was chuffed (as one of my Australian subscribers would put it) this weekend to meet another early online publisher, Cathie Walker, formerly the Head Honcho of the super-popular Centre for the Easily Amused web site, who was in Denver briefly on business from her home in Canada.
A Moment for a Serious Issue
I was quite honored last week to get a copy of the new Breast Cancer Resource Guide of Massachusetts, which lists This is True as a leading Humor Resource for victims of breast cancer. They sent it to me for a very special reason.
Another Myth Dispelled
This is Not an Emergency: I’ve had quite a few hysterical people send me an ‘urgent’ notice that “we” “must” flood the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in order to make it known that we Do Not Want to allow the telephone companies to be able to charge by the minute for Internet access.
Don’t Say I Didn’t Tell You So
I had spoken about spam here and there in True, but in this issue I published the first installment of what would become my Spam Primer — a warning that unsolicited email advertising was now officially a serious problem on the net.
No Looking Back
My business plan for True predicted I’d be able to quit my Day Job two years after launch and work online full time.