I’ve sworn off micro.blog social media chatting, as I was wasting way too much time and had one especially bad experience with it. One of those goes a long way! But I still scan through my Timeline, because sometimes I find something useful. I do it as a form of binge reading. I follow over 400 people on the platform, but I can still scan through tons of postings pretty fast. That’s because I’m mostly looking for what I think of as real blog postings, not the twitter-like short ones, which on micro.blog are mostly about Apple devices, apps, and fiddling with Manton’s dozens of configurable features (for web engineers and experts). That is, I’m looking for the longer postings, where the writer knows something about a subject, has something to say and so she/he writes something informative and interesting about it. Being longer, a Manton hosted blog requires these postings to have a title and then the reader has to click on a link to read the article. Of course as Dave Winer pointed out a long time ago, people don’t click on links. I find this insanely ironic, because the key invention with the Internet was hypertext, meaning you could click on a link and go somewhere else entirely! This was a major turning point in my life when I discovered it. But I guess modern people these days like to scroll, rather than clicking links.

Anyway … in my blog scanning, one that I nearly always stop to read is Brad, another Midwesterner like me. His stuff nearly always requires a click, but I still remember how to do that from the old days. Brad is my Blogging Scout. He’s really good at finding & testing out all kinds of services for blogging, and he doesn’t focus on Apple stuff, so he might find something I could use. I don’t have the patience or technical chops to try out things for myself, like he does. And now after trying everything except the kitchen sink, he’s using a Manton hosted blog, which is how I started out here and never dared to change!

One day I’d like to have a Blogging Technical Adviser, someone I pay to setup my blog with Manton features I like, instead of just a Scout. Intuit set up a network of QuickBooks ProAdvisors in their early days, and that’s how they came to dominate the bookkeeping industry for small businesses.

I even sent a long email to Manton suggesting this could be another source of revenue for him. His robot immediately thanked me for sending my email to help. Then nothing at all from him, for weeks. I noticed others run into this problem, then send a public message to him on micro.blog, then he quickly responds and they get their question answered. I’m not gonna do that. Maybe I’m old and ornery. I’m a tax accountant and get lots of emails from clients. My policy is to respond to their emails within 24 hours. That’s a pretty universal standard used in the tax accounting business.