I want to review your blog — if you let me.

I want to interview you and understand why you launched it, why you continue to maintain, and answer any blogging questions you have about it along with sharing my constructive feedback on how you can improve the site and its content. Over 6,500 unique people read my digital media explorations every month and I want to introduce all of them to you.

Maybe you have specific questions for me to answer. Maybe you think nothing is wrong but are curious what I have to say.

To continue, add a comment below. Confirm your blog’s URL is correctly entered in the website field so it links to your name. This prevents duplication of the address in the actual comment.

No requests are barred, regardless what question you have or what your blog is about. I will review one blog a week for as many weeks necessary. Blogs will be reviewed in the order you comment below. Thanks!

Please write a comment at How I Can Help Your Blog if inspired.

Ari Herzog offers services in digital media auditing, marketing, and training. Hire Ari and sign up to receive his blog by email.

Two recent studies from the Pew Research Center and the New York Times indicate the typical American has 245 Facebook friends and knows 600 people both on and off the social network. In other words, if you’re a typical American, 355 of your peeps don’t use Facebook.

I have a lot of friends who choose to not be found online. I don’t mean they have accounts and don’t use them (though I know people in this category) but they don’t have accounts at all. They never did and they don’t want to join. None of my friends would define me as typical. I’m anything but.

I met a woman today who works in the marketing industry but cannot be found on Google. Sarah isn’t on Facebook, doesn’t tweet, shares nothing but her name and title on LinkedIn, and search engine results for her name (minus that LinkedIn link) are for someone who shares her name. She’s OK that nobody can find her. That is, if you know Sarah you can call her or email her. If you’re googling for her name, you clearly don’t know her at all. And that’s how she wants it.

When did it become normal to befriend people you don’t know?

And, I’m not specifying Facebook. How many of the people you follow on Twitter are people whose phone numbers are stored in your phone? How many of your LinkedIn connections are people whose email addresses are in your rolodex? Because if you’ve never called someone or emailed that person, how do you qualify being connected to the person? What does a connection truly mean? Facebook fucked up the definition of a friend — and if you remove Facebook from your life, your friends are probably not the people you see in that newsfeed.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not implying the telephone or the electronic mail address is the holy grail — but if you remove yourself from social networking sites, if you’re not there, then wouldn’t it be the phone and the email that connect you to the people you care about, the people you trust, and the people who want to be around you?

Look at me.

If you follow my digital personas but never interact through comments, tweets, posts, pokes, whatever, I’m hardly your friend. I’m just some guy you’re following and you are free to decouple that relationship at any time. Many of you have gained insights from my blogging over the years and followed me on Twitter, sent me friend requests on Facebook, and invited me to join your LinkedIn networks. I usually said yes — especially on LinkedIn.

But, as Phil Gerbyshak suggests, if you’ve never interacted with me since that first contact on LinkedIn (or any other social networking site), you owe it to yourself to remove that connection. Kill your online relationship. Set yourself free. Because neither LinkedIn nor Facebook tell me if you unfriend me, I’ll never know about it unless I happen to randomly visit your profile and see we’re now second or third degrees apart.

I don’t suggest killing me off if we frequently comment, like, or share each other’s updates. But if there’s no interaction since whenever we became online friends, take control now and unfriend us.

Once you understand unfriending and accept that others are doing it, you owe it to yourself to join them.

Please write a comment at Unfriend, Defriend, Kill Your Friend if inspired.

Ari Herzog offers services in digital media auditing, marketing, and training. Hire Ari and sign up to receive his blog by email.

You might recall reading about my blog’s 6th birthday this month.

You may not know that day was also the 18th anniversary of my father’s death.

I started this blog on May 14, 2007 at ariwriter.blogspot.com.

Dad died on May 14, 1995.

This photo was taken that year. He sits in the middle, flanked by other attorneys in the law office he founded south of Boston.

He was 46.

I’ve blogged about him many times, most notably when I elaborated our connection to technology and why Dad’s the reason you’re reading this sentence.

Today is May 31. Today would have been his 65th birthday. I think about Dad every day I write a new blog post. He is the reason I blog.

Within weeks after his death, my mother and sister and I created a scholarship fund in his name. It’s given annually to graduating high school seniors in my hometown of Canton, Massachusetts. Three years ago, I bought BudHerzog.org and created a fundraising mechanism for people to donate to this fund. You can donate as little or as much as you want. If you have a dusty dollar lying around, you can donate that. All donations are tax-deductible.

If you enjoy reading my blog, I humbly ask you to donate a little something to my Dad’s scholarship fund. It helps keep his name alive and helps those off-to-college kids with financial assistance. Visit BudHerzog.org. Do it today. Thanks.

Please write a comment at Why I Blog if inspired.

Ari Herzog offers services in digital media auditing, marketing, and training. Hire Ari and sign up to receive his blog by email.

Because of my Klout influence (and the jury is out whether it’s good or bad), I have the opportunity to virtually meet the cast of Graceland!

This should be exciting.

But, it’s not.

I only subscribe to basic cable stations and the USA Network isn’t one of them. So, why would I care to meet a television show cast when I’ll never watch the show? Yeah, yeah, I know I could watch Graceland on Hulu but that requires a monthly $8 fee. I already pay for Netflix. I don’t need Hulu. I don’t need TV that bad.

I thank USA for taking notice of my Klout score (currently at 59) but it’s a meaningless perk for me. I wonder if I can give it away to someone else.

Please write a comment at Woohoo, a Klout Perk for Graceland if inspired.

Ari Herzog offers services in digital media auditing, marketing, and training. Hire Ari and sign up to receive his blog by email.

I was a dedicated Flickr Pro. I paid annual dues since 2007, most recently at $24.95 a year, for the privilege of uploading an unlimited quantity of photos and viewing zero ads on the Yahoo-owned photo sharing site. I uploaded 2,030 photos.

The bulk of my photos are from the first year under an older account. My newer uploads — over the past 12 months, anyway — are predominantly copies of photos that began on Foursquare or Instagram.

Compare my Flickr and my Instagram portfolios and you’ll observe lots of similarities.

Despite my Flickr usage waning in recent months, I was still willing to be a Pro member. No more. With the latest announcement of a new design and that every Flickr user gets 1 terabyte of storage, I asked myself why I needed to pay them anymore.

Do you see the above photo (which you can click to visit it on Flickr)? It is approximately 240 kilobytes.

The basic math is
1,024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte
1,024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte
1,024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte

In other words, imagine a single page in a magazine can store 5,000 characters. A single terabyte is about 220 million pages.

Why was I paying for unlimited storage when I could have a terabyte of storage for free?

I looked at the new site and, while I commend the Yahoo engineers for bringing it into 2013 to resemble Pinterest, MySpace, and other photo-rich sites, a lot of the simplicity I used to take for granted has been stolen away from me.

I wasn’t alone.

Gary Marshall elaborates:

Users are complaining about basic usability, unwanted infinite scrolling, slow loading, the removal of titles (they only appear on mouseover now), problems finding stuff, the ability for someone else’s glamour shots to dominate your front page, the complete impossibility of clicking links in the front page footer… you get the idea.

Most of it sounds like the sort of teething problems you encounter when a free service undergoes a radical revamp — but for its most loyal users, Flickr isn’t a free service. It’s something they pay for, and have done for a long time.

Jennifer Van Grove used to pay Flickr but she pulled back some time ago. She wonders if even a terabyte of data is enough to sway away folks who upload photos to Facebook where there are no storage limitations.

Yahoo’s real pitch seems to be one of practicality. Upload to Flickr. Store forever. And you can still share to Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr in the process, even when you’re on an iPhone or Android. But who actually thinks like that? Certainly not Instagram users who have gravitated to the app because of its speed and simplicity. And where’s the fun here? At least Google+ launched a photo experience with funky photo extras.

Flickr’s approach is more mature. It’s for the grownups out there. It’s not sexy enough to motivate most people, youngsters in particular, to change their behaviors — or their preferred photo-sharing network.

My mind was made up.

I logged into my Flickr account.

I looked at the differences.

I canceled.

I am free.

It is bittersweet.

Gary says it best:

[E]ither Yahoo has completely lost its mind or Flickr doesn’t want the pros any more.

The smart money’s on the latter. Pros may have made Flickr what it is – and kept it alive during Yahoo’s long years of neglect — but they’re not a great demographic for ads, and that’s what Flickr is chasing now. Flickr used to beg photographers to go Pro. Now, it seems, it wants the pros to go.

P.S. Here’s a great resource to learn and read more about the Flickr changes.

Please write a comment at Why Flickr Lost Me as a Pro if inspired.

Ari Herzog offers services in digital media auditing, marketing, and training. Hire Ari and sign up to receive his blog by email.

How many of my 2,474 LinkedIn connections do I really need?

It’s common for me to search the site locating people at certain companies — or people to connect me with those targets — and I find I’m connected to Toms, Dicks, and Harrys and I’m clueless why we’re connected.

I then scrounge the person’s profile seeing if we share more than 30 mutual connections (a likely reason we connected) or if we’re in the same state (a likelier reason we connected) or if I made a note once upon a time tagging the person in a curated category (possible).

Should my network be tight enough that they can recommend me without asking who I am and what I do? If we’re only connected because of a shared interest or geography, is that enough of a reason to sever the weak link?

When I last blogged about the professional networking site, sharing 10 productivity tips to use it, I was connected to 2,436 people. That was on April 9. I added 38 people in a month? Blimey!

How do you know if you’re connected to too many people or too few?

Lend me your thoughts….

Please write a comment at How Many LinkedIn Connections Are Too Many? How Few Are Too Few? if inspired.

Ari Herzog offers services in digital media auditing, marketing, and training. Hire Ari and sign up to receive his blog by email.