What, how and when are “participate in the Internet”, “using a computer” and “all the fucking time”.

We normally assume that visitors to the Big Bad Blog are fully-immersed in the Mr. Topp experience. You must all be lusty stalkers who know our most intimate details, right?

The several hundred “first time visitors” that visit the site each day put the lie to that. Unless a lot of you clear out your cache and cookies very often (or buy new computers daily) — or a very dedicated single visitor — some of you may not know the who, were or why of your resident blogger.

You probably don’t care, but … tough shit. I’m the one writing here.

Who

I am Mr. Stephen Topp, proprietor of the Big Bad Blog.

A Canadian, I now live in England — London to be more exact — with my French fiancee and triple-citizen daughter. I work a normal-ish sized amount on a normal-ish type of schedule, in an office. This blog – and my Internet activity, in general — is not about that.

These are my random brain-droppings. And my brain can be a strange place, sometimes.

Where

As should be obvious, The Big Bad Blog is my main home on the Internet. I blog here every weekday — most days twice.

I am also an avid photographer, and you can see my photographs over on Flickr. Current constraints on my schedule mean that it is mostly full of the Maggie-A-Day project, at present. We are hoping that as Maggie becomes slightly more independent, a broader range of photographs will make themselves known.

We are also on Twitter. We sometimes tweet too much, if one can tweet too much. I think it means that we think we’re clever or something.

We have started a Tumblr, because we bookmark far too many things for inclusion in the Morning Coffee than we can realistically put there. Some of these things end up on Tumblr. We thought we would hardly use it, but appear to have been wrong. While you probably shouldn’t assume anything I do is “Safe For Work”, the Tumblr contains more boobs than the other bits. Because it’s Tumblr, home of boobs.

Why?

We have no idea. Blame the hat.

Twitter is a very strange beast.

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we were a bit late to Twitter, for the simple reason that the official interface is horrific, and the original (pre-smartphone) concept which ties it to text messaging on mobile phones seemed archaic.

But Twitter has transformed itself into pretty much the best bit of social media around. It is mobile and public by design, and simply feels right to use, in a way that other platforms do not (at least to this blogger). They have also stolen wisely: retweets and replies originate with third party developers.

So when Luke Dicken suggests that Twitter has jumped the shark, my initial reaction is to scoff. His point is that its new strategy of discouraging third-party applications will mark the beginning of the end for Twitter.

After a bit of thought, however, the only beef this blog has with any of Dicken’s arguments is the suggestion that the practice is new. Witness Twitter’s purchase of Tweetie, once my iPhone Twitter client. Twitter is trying to own the interface, not just the service, and the latest announcement is just the latest bit of strategy along those lines.

Dicken makes many important and valid points regarding the diversity of those using the Twitter service, pointing out that a single interface is not a recipe for success. He also points out that these same third-party developers are the ones who were responsible for creating many of the better features of the service.

Dicken does, however, miss the most important observation: Twitter is horrible at creating user interfaces.

Their website is awful. Many people do not use their website, but prefer a Desktop (or mobile) application — compare to the legions who log in to Facebook’s actual website, or gMail.

Their iPhone application is not one developed internally, but is the result of having bought out an already-popular application. And Twitter’s own changes to that application have ruined it — here at the Big Bad Blog, we are now actively auditioning replacements. Others apparently hate it as well, though perhaps we are alone in our continued vehement disappointment in the new product following a quick update in which Twitter fixed the reading portion of the application (but not the writing portion).

It is this persistent belief at Twitter, that they are capable of designing an interface that users will enjoy, that will be the downfall of the service.

They have yet to show that they can do so; their confidence is misplaced.

All of which leaves the Big Bad Blog wondering: what is the micro-blogging service that will replace them?

We might as well start using it now.

The Fail Whale cake is by Mariana Pugliese of Buenos Aires. The photo is from the 99c Blog.

On December 20th — nearly two months ago to the day — the photography blog Pixiq published a profile on self-portrait artist Lauralyn Wilkins. Her story was interesting, her photographs fantastic, and her kit set-up minimalistic. I was an instant fan, and began following her blog, The Big Ugly.

Over the weekend, I read Lauralyn’s latest blog post, where she basically declares that she is quitting the usual channels artists use to interact with their fans on the Internet — Twitter, Facebook, Flickr.

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we don’t care much. The blog (which we read) will go on, so we will presumably see her photos in our RSS feed. Social media is best used for fostering a virtual sense of community amongst widespread people that you might not otherwise interact with. It gets too much credit (for instance, for revolution in the Middle East) and too much blame (for instance, for the decline of our youth). I follow some artists on Twitter, despite not liking their art, and avoid following others whose art I quite enjoy. Twitter is a strange place.

What does get our metaphorical panties in a bunch, however, is the things that get Ms. Wilkins in a huff as she disappears from these places. Some samples:

I couldn’t really see where I was reaping great returns from perpetually plastering my pics. all over the internet

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we wonder — what kind of a “return” did Ms. Wilkins expect to receive? The general tone of the post is that Ms. Wilkins expected some combination of Twitter, Flickr and Facebook to give her fame and fortune.

This seems to be a blatant misunderstanding of how these platforms — and perhaps, the world — works. It is not enough to be both involved and good; the social media route to fame depends almost entirely on luck.

Not that it does not happen. For instance, Rosie Hardy was randomly contacted by Maroon 5 to do the cover art for their most recent album. The important thing to remember is that being randomly discovered is just that. Getting large exposure via Flickr is about as likely as getting on the cover of Playboy magazine by going to a football game.

It may happen, but you will probably have more luck buying a lottery ticket.

I still don’t know for sure if the limited response to most of my contributions to FB and Twitter – was because my stuff isn’t worthy of being acknowledged, or if people in general, aren’t inclined to help or even encourage each other. Could it be, they don’t wanna see anyone else get more than they have?

A suggestion of conspiracy? People are not promoting Ms. Wilkins’ self portraits (for free), because … why?

There are a lot of “social media gurus” out there, and here at the Big Bad Blog, we are not going to pretend to know (or care) what they say. But the key word in “social media” is “social”. Brand-management via Twitter can be used to engage your fans — but this does not create fans.

If somebody views your artwork on Flickr, it is because they want to view your artwork. If somebody follows you on Twitter, it is because they want to read your tweets. The mediums both allow interaction — allowing the artist to further engage with their audience.

Expecting that audience to then do you favours seems a little bit lot ridiculous. Not that it’s impossible, but — like all relationships — it needs to be built.

The wonderful Pixiq article that benevolent stranger – Haje Jan Kamps – wrote about me and my self-portraits, is an example of how social networking can be a positive thing. As soon as it went live, I waited anxiously, wondering if the article would trigger my big “break”. But after a flurry of interest and only about a week’s worth of time, the article seemed to have all but vanished from the site. Good god…was that my fifteen minutes of fame?!

And here we reach the point where we decided to post to the Big Bad Blog.

Pixiq is a lot more popular than we are here — according to Buzz My Stat (which may be completely unreliable), they appear to get about twenty times our traffic. We get so little traffic here, however, that twenty times more is not that much.

Assuming twenty times an average day at the Big Bad Blog (in late December) makes for 6-8,000 viewers via Pixiq. Not bad. And what does Ms. Wilkins’ do with the exposure? Leverage it? Share Pixiq with her fans? Try to provoke commentary on the piece? Republish some of her favourite work to show it off to her new viewership?

No. She waits anxiously and hopes for the best.

Ms. Hardy writes about exposure here, and while she (unfortunately) does not provide a nice short blurb for us to quote anywhere, the message is clear: gaining exposure is hard. It is incremental. And you need to put effort into it.

These are three things that Ms. Wilkins seems to have issue with. She is leaving social media because it is hard — people do not simply give you fame and fortune because you write a tweet and post a photo. She is leaving it because it is incremental — when somebody did decide to hand her some exposure on a platter, despite the improbability of it all, she had trouble dealing with the fact that it did not catapult her to fame. She is leaving because it takes effort. Luckily for those of us who like her work, it sounds like she is putting that effort elsewhere.

Twitter is overrated, after all. We may simply find Ms. Wilkins’ photos coming to us through a different channel. That channel, however, is likely to be filled with people who do not wish to promote her for free, exposure is likely to come a little at a time, and only after much effort.

Here’s hoping that Ms. Wilkins is OK with that.

Photos by Lauralyn Wilkins

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we often like to point out that your favourite free websites are not free at all — you are paying for them with your content. We most often like to say this about Facebook, as they are the most blatant offenders, but this is also true of Twitter, Google, and most of the other services you likely use.

Twitter is not valued at $10 billion just because they spend a lot of money providing a free service with no benefit to their investors.

Anyways, we just wanted to say that we saw Backpacking Dad say something similar the other day. Thanks for that, Mr. Backpacking Dad. If more people would start realising this, the Internet would (we think) become a much odder place.

And we like odd things.

Photo is Did someone say hentai?, by Merrick Monroe.
Webcomic is XKCD by Randall Munroe.