Being Positive

"You -" said someone in an email a while back "-never seem to post negative reviews of your stuff on your blog.  Suppose that's what happens when you get paid to review stuff"

I was a little surprised to read it.  Someone I didn't know, making an accusation AND an assumption - both of which were wrong - and emailing it to me.  Not that I'm surprised.  When you put stuff on the web, it's free for anyone to read, and to respond to.  I get negative feedback fairly often, but ignore it.  After all, it's not like I am making money, getting paid or anything like that...

I state, categorically right now, that this blog is done off my own back, on my own time, and I receive nothing from it.  Well, aside from the occasional poke, prod, punch or smack for making sarky-arse comments about people.

I've never had a company send me a product for review, I've never received an item for free to review, I've never been paid to write anything - let alone a review of something.  The things I get are more often than not, something I've bought, and I don't go out, see something and just buy it.  Take my mobile phone.  For MONTHS before my contract ended, I was looking at what was available, making decision and checking out other reviews.

My point, is that there are things that I don't like.  If you want a bad review, Simplaris Blogcast on Facebook.  For those of you that see my posts on my wall - that's Blogcast posting them.

When it bloody works, that is.

If I click the Manual Publish button on there, you Facebook users get a message saying "Dan has written some shit" and you can click that to read the whole post.  Cool beans.  It has an Automatic Feature too.  Sometimes - like this post - I write a day or three in advance, time it to post at Xam on the Yth of Month, and it appears.  Currently, it's 8pm on Wednesday, but you won't see this till Friday or so.

I digress.

The automatic feature does NOTHING.  Yes, it "blogcasts" my post, but it doesn't publish it to my wall.  I've fiddled with settings and buttons and knobs, but no dice.  I've written on the wall of the Application, and a few others have said "Same here" but nothing from the developer.  I've messaged the developer directly several times, but I've never even had so much as a fart of a reply.

Don't get me wrong, I couldn't write software to do ANYTHING, let alone something useful.  But surely if you have a problem with software, you'd expect the person in charge would try helping fix it.  But no.

And the most annoying thing, is I can't find anything similar on Facebook to do the same sort of thing.  So it's a sort of use it as is, or use nothing at all.

Thumbs down for that one.

More? Well, aside from Movies, TV Shows, Music, People.... What else is there?

At the end of the day, if I WERE receiving items to review, if I WERE being paid to write reviews, and if I WERE being read by tens of thousands of people... I would STILL state if something were good or crap.  If someone handed me, say, a Nokia N900 to review, I would ignore all the bad press, and the fact that even a friend of mine has one that is always breaking down (which, I should add, is a great source of comedy for me!), I would use it and review it from MY point of view.  If it did to me what it does to him, then it'd get a shit review.  If it worked better than my phone, it'd get a great review.

I'm not a journalist, I'm not a reviewer.  I'm just a normal blog with a little blog, posting whatever passes over my grey matter.  If you think I'm biased or not following some journalistic moral code, feel free to press that little [X] top right of your browser window.  I don't make anyone read, I don't make anyone come here, I don't make anyone stay.


Sidenote:  If through some miracle the creator of Simplaris Blogcast finds his or her way here, feel free to mail me, but I stand by my "review" until then.

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2 Responses to “Being Positive”

Nancy Jensen said...

YOU, getting money for YOUR blog? bwahahahaha! You have written time and time again how you write your blog for yourself. If people happen to read it, fine. If not, fine. What an idiot to email you such nonsense. What's it to him, anyway? (or was it a her?) It doesn't matter. You write what you want. I DARE anyone try to MAKE Dan write something that he doesn't believe. pfft!

I'm not totally against people getting paid to write in their blogs or sent items to review on their blogs, but to just assume that you do so is.... well, asinine. hhmmm.... seems that the word asinine should have another "s". lol

So ramble on, Dan and ya know what? I don't like Blogcast. I've fiddled with it and it says it can't verify that I own one of my 2 blogs that I keep. I also have it set to automatically post to my fb wall when I do publish a blog post on the one blog that Blogcast actually recognizes is mine... and it won't. If you have any suggestions, I'm open to them. As you know, I am online at odd hours and sometimes (often) and not at my best mentally (shhhh) ya know, being tired (and old). So I may have missed something right in plain sight but I've fiddled with it several times to no avail. It's frustrating to me that it claims it can't prove that I own MY blog.... but the other one I do. WTHeck?

jenny said...

You know, I am with Nancy (although I might not have said WTHeck, as I am the one who began the #wtfnebraska tag on Twitter) on this, and would think (knowing what I do of you Dan) that you would always speak your mind (snarky-arse and all).

Remember, the thought you are posting here is not a new one-people have been paid for a while now to give an opinion, whether it's true or not. I would think most of advertising is crap, but who would think you were trying to advertise anything but yourself here? And, if you have found a way to get paid to advertise yourself (aside from illegal/immoral activities), let me know.

Besides, it seems to me so much of the Internet is just self aggrandizement. I mean, we all get on here, post what we think, and tell the whole bloody world they can like it, lump it, or take it down the road and dump it.

I mean, it's what I do. It is what you do, isn't it? ;)

I need to read your stuff more often, Danny 'ol boy. You make me laugh, and these days, I need it.