I always say that the real success of Wine Library wasn't due to the videos I posted, but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward, making connections and building relationships.
We live in such a gullible world. Anything that's written, anything that's posted, anything picture that is interpreted one way is taken as truth.
Some people ask why we don't just wait until we have the whole story before posting. The fact is that we sometimes can't get to the end story without going through this process... When a story is up and posted, it's amazing how many people come out of the woodwork to give us additional information... And readers love it.
For a fortnight nobody at all emailed me, or posted a follow-up. Doesn't anyone care, I thought? It turned out my newsreader was broken, and hadn't posted at all.
Compliance with the Stop Online Piracy Act would require huge overhead spending by Internet companies for staff and technologies dedicated to monitoring users and censoring any infringing material from being posted or transmitted.
The once inviolate frame within which programs or commercials were displayed on television - always separately - has been violated to a pulp. Program content is seen increasingly as a mere backdrop on which ads are posted like billboards on a fence.
I never exceed the posted speed limit.
When the Haiti earthquake happened, I registered with UNICEF to set up an account, and posted to Twitter for people to donate to it. In a matter of a couple of hours, $30,000 had been donated. That, to me, was eye-opening.
More and more, the things we do in real life will end up as Facebook posts. And while we may be consoled by the fact that most of this stuff is being posted just to our friends, it only takes one friend to share that information with his or her friends to start a viral chain.
The two things I was positive about in life were that I was going to be a teacher at a boarding school or an operative with the CIA posted abroad. I could write a book about all the things I was sure about.