Daniel Greene

Tag: advertising

  • Sexting revisited

    I just saw a video of Dan Savage’s thoughts on sexting, and it reminded me of my blog post on sexting that was published in a book on the subject. One funny thing that has come up since then is the Anthony Weiner (not Wiener) sexting story, in which — contrary to Savage’s forecast — there is a big deal made about a guy sexting his dick. I wonder if Savage is right that everyone will have a “dirty picture of themselves” online some day. I don’t know. Will we, as Savage predicts, elect a president who has a pornographic photo of themselves online? I don’t see why not. Eventually things get out of control and no one cares anymore.

  • Why don’t we call ourselves interpreters for the Hearing?

    I mean, Hearing people are the ones who hire us, right? Hearing people need us to interpret for them because they are not fluent in sign language, and most of the time, Hearing people foot the bill. So why do we so often side with our Deaf consumers? We signed-spoken language interpreters probably all have our “Stupid Hearing People!” stories, but where would we be without them? (And remember, for the majority of us who are not CODAs, we used to be Stupid Hearing People ourselves.) Hearing people may be naïve about signed language, deafness, and Deaf culture, but most of them mean well. Hearing people who hire spoken-signed language interpreters want what we want: (more…)

  • A flash of ASL but no captioning? Oh, the irony.

    https://twitter.com/#!/danielgreene/status/177537181559169024

  • How I lost money trying to make money on this blog

    I tried to monetize this blog with ads, and it backfired. Here’s how.

    I used to earn about $100 a year in AdSense revenues on this blog when I self-hosted it. It took too many hours of my time to do manual updates, so I moved my blogs from WordPress.org to WordPress.com even though I knew I was giving up the right to have AdSense on my blog. Not having to bother with installations freed my time, and for months I was happy. Then I started getting more page views than ever on my blog posts–maybe because the ease-of-use allowed me to blog more–and I resented not making money. I was happy when WordPress announced WordAds, but I got tired of waiting for them to materialize. (more…)

  • The dilemma of self-promotion

    Tonight, after posting the participant’s review of my workshop this morning, I see that there are no comments on the blog post and no “Likes” or comments on the Facebook post. My first thought is “people thought it was obnoxious.” Self-promotion can be a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t proposition. You want to win people over, but you risk turning them off in the process. I don’t know if I ever strike the right balance when it comes to talking about my accomplishments or promoting my work. Lately, I fear that some of my status updates have been boldface brags; e.g., “New blog post: Rave Review for my Vague Language Workshop http://bit.ly/zWrno” (tweet), “I’m happy that 24 people came to my workshop in Phoenix, five of them all the way from Yuma and four of them all the way from Tucson.” (tweet), and “New blog post: Speak & Spell II a Successful Workshop http://bit.ly/171bC9” (tweet), especially the fact that I shared my teacher evaluation scores. Ugh.

    What may or may not be apparent is that I have felt shame and failure in my life, and there have been a few times I doubted I’d ever achieve anything. When I do manage to do something good, my feelings of past failure and inefficacy drive me to shout my achievements from the rooftops. “See! I’m not a complete failure! I DID something!”

    Perhaps it is the fact that there have been so many times in my life when I have felt paralyzed into inaction. I’ve wanted to do many things that I didn’t do because I didn’t believe in myself. Now, when I finally do things that I’ve only been dreaming of doing for years, I feel… well… vindicated! Especially when other people didn’t believe in me, either. It’s like, “How do you like me now?!” Well, maybe not very much, I fear.

    What good does it do to shove my success in the faces of people who doubted me? Are they really going to “like me now”? Or are they just going to resent me for rubbing it in their faces that I succeeded in spite of them? My fear is that they are going to resent me as much as I resent them. Resentment begets resentment. The thing to do is forgive everyone for everything, starting with myself.

    (more…)