I had my name appear in boldface type below a photo of me on Wednesday (at the bottom of a recap about a book party I attended Tuesday), and on Saturday I finally ended my long streak of not posting any video clips on Twitter’s Vine service. Otherwise, it was a pretty quiet week, with much of my efforts going into stories that won’t surface until next week or later.
7/8/2014: When You’re Tired of Being Mad at Facebook, Remember the NSA, Yahoo Tech
The outsized attention paid to Facebook’s 2012 experiment with manipulating the News Feeds of some users seemed misplaced after the Washington Post’s scoop Saturday that the National Security Agency has been not just collecting but keeping personal data about potentially hundreds of thousands of innocent Internet users. I was pretty confident that mentioning these two controversial topics in the same piece would yield hundreds of comments, but that did not happen.
7/13/2014: Delete it: How to free up space on your phone, USA Today
This column, meanwhile, did not strike me as telling people things they didn’t know–aside from, maybe, that an update to Twitter’s Android app fixes a horrendous storage-eating bug unmentioned in its eight-word release notes. And yet it’s gotten a ridiculous amount of Facebook shares, without the benefit any push from USAT’s own Facebook page. I’m not saying this to brag so much as to admit that sometimes, I have only a foggy idea of what motivates people to read or skip my stuff, much less recommend it to others. I should remember that the next time I’m thinking an editor’s suggestion for a story topic won’t attract an audience.
Rob Pegoraro 