American in Spain

Theories about information flow are particularly fun when they arrive to your brain through the very mechanisms they are explaining. Recently several of my Facebook friends, a couple people I follow on Twitter, and two of my favorite podcasts started reporting on a new concept from Eli Pariser called The Filter Bubble. The general idea goes like this: as search engines and social media sites use smarter and smarter algorithms to better serve what they determine our needs to be, the less and less we are exposed to opposing viewpoints.
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Lately around the internet, I’ve been noticing more and more sites, serious respectable magazines and important blogs, switching their comment mechanism to use Disqus. My only experience with Disqus in the past was using it as a disgusting javascript hack to allow comments on a Tumblr blog. It seemed like a strangely useless service, but it has matured a lot in the three years since my initial evaluation. Let’s evaluate the pros and cons of using Disqus on a WordPress blog like this one.
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As my knowledge about social networking and online marketing has grown, I have attained a better grasp of how Facebook should be used, or at least how Facebook wants us to use it most effectively. The most important dichotomy to understand is that between Facebook accounts and Facebook pages. These have evolved over the years I’ve been using the most popular social networking site, and they will continue to evolve. Let’s look at the differences…
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Over the past several weeks, as a project for his own personal blog, a colleague of mine, Cole Watts, has been interviewing me about my blogging over email. It was a fun experience, as I’ve never been interviewed as if I knew something about anything, well, almost never. I suspect many of my readers might be wondering these exact questions about me, but perhaps not. Here, reproduced with permission, in its entirety, is Cole Watts’ interview of Erik Rasmussen, blogging expert.

Most of us daydream about traveling but many of us will often not leave the United States. I’ve recently had the opportunity to be a coworker of Erik Rasmussen, who took the idea of traveling and ran with it. Erik currently resides in Spain and is known to some as an American in Spain.
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Spammers can be really clever sometimes. Apparently there is some way to game the Facebook “Like” button such that any click on a webpage can be sent to Facebook as if you had clicked the “Like” button. So what people do is they bait you with a juicy looking webpage, and then once on the page, when you click to view a video, or sometimes they pop up a dialog saying “To verify that you are human, click here!”, and that click gets registered as you “liking” that webpage. With the change last week where there is now no longer much difference between “liking” and “sharing” in how a web page shows up on your Facebook wall, this technique is gaining even more steam. From what I can tell, they aren’t doing anything particularly malicious other than tricking people into posting salacious looking crap to their wall.
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The state of interconnectivity between social networking these days is a bloody nightmare. For me, anyhow. I’ve been trying for months now to find the right balance and how to use each service to best connect me to my peeps, allow me to share things I find and ideas that pop into my head and little things I do that don’t warrant an entire blog post, but I’ve been unable to strum the right chord.

All the services I use can connect to one another and “cross post”, except for Facebook, which, in its ironic privacy, only receives information. Twitter can post to Tumblr and Facebook and Google Buzz; Tumblr can post to Twitter and Facebook; Flickr can post to Facebook and Tumblr; Instagram can post to Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Facebook; etc. etc. etc.
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Rant alert! I’m really sick and tired of seeing “[Your Name] likes I’m against children getting cancer and dying painful deaths on Causes” on Facebook. Really? You really thought that you needed to share that with me? Thereby implying that if I don’t click “like”, that I am, indeed, in favor of childhood cancer, or domestic violence, or female genital mutilation, or rapists, or serial killers, or autism, or cerebral palsy, or pedophiles, etc. Good freakin’ grief, people! What good does it do to post that you are in favor of a morally unambiguous “cause” on a social network? What? Tell me!

And another thing…while I’m on my high horse…
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As Facebook slowly catches on here in Spain, I’ve been faced with a dilemma: my Spanish friends want to be friends with me on Facebook, but they don’t understand anything I post. And I understand them perfectly. I have some friends that post things in Polish, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Hungarian, and Greek, and it is a little annoying to be excluded from their communication by my ignorance. Possible solutions to my problem that I see are:
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We had a nice Christmas celebration. My Spanish family does a big Christmas celebration with aunts and uncles and cousins on odd numbered years, and the big get together on New Years Eve on even numbered years, so this year was a small Christmas celebration with just my wife’s parents, sister, and grandfather. As with most holidays, tradition rules, so the meals are pretty similar every year. Jumbo shrimp, stuffed eggs, paté, and gildas are the usual appetizers. We also had a fun time making a racket singing traditional Spanish Christmas carols.
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It’s that time of year again. Time to walk through the chilly air from bar to bar in Laredo, Spain, eating elaborate tapas, called pinchos, and imbibing fine wine. This is the third year, and it seems to be getting better every year. The Semana del Pincho is one Christmas tradition I could definitely get used to. Before we get to the mouthwatering photos, I’d like to quote myself from last year about why I like this event so much:
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