Every month, the good folks at Facebook send me 10 bucks for no good reason

Right from the start of today's post, it's important to mention two things, at least one of which you already know:

(1) This blog is an exceedingly small part of the Internet and is read by only a handful of exceedingly smart individuals (that's the part you already knew).

(2) I am fully aware of this fact and harbor no illusions of the blog's reach and influence.

Having established that, I will also tell you that every month, without fail, the Facebook people send me $10 or so for being a "digital creator." And since 90% of my Facebook posts are blog links, they're basically paying me for driving traffic here to 5kids1wife.com

This is funny to me for several reasons, not the least of which is that I would be doing the same thing even if they didn't pay me. It's also funny because I'm sure there are powerful cyber-influencer types to whom Facebook (actually its parent company Meta) pays hundreds and probably thousands of dollars.

What I get is chump change, and deservedly so.

Still, the fact is I get it, which means the engagement I create on Facebook must be worth something to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

I don't know why Mark finds my traffic to be of value, but he is, if nothing else, pretty savvy when it comes to making money.

The actual amount I receive depends on how many Facebook likes, comments, clicks, etc. I generate in a certain month. It varies from as low as $8 to $12 or more. I just say $10 because it's an even number and it sounds good.

Until I started receiving these payments from Meta, I didn't know this is how the Internet works. The more traffic the better for these giant digital platforms for whom more eyeballs on advertisements means more revenue.

You will be glad to know I invest these monthly stipends back into the blog to make it better, which is to say I usually buy coffee with them. Coffee motivates me to write, which keeps all of you graciously coming back, which keeps 5kids1wife.com going.

So every time you click on one of my blog links, or like or comment on one of my Facebook posts, you are stimulating the economy, which feels like a very patriotic and admirable thing to do.

In the end, your engagement doesn't really benefit me so much as it benefits you and our whole economic infrastructure.

So keep being a virtuous person and click/like/comment to your heart's content. You are an upstanding and high-minded citizen.

Yeah...that's it. 

The dilemma of the unjust Facebook ban

A screen shot from my apparently illegal Olympic field hockey video

Last month while in Paris, I took a short video clip of an Olympic women's field hockey match and posted it on Facebook. It was less than a minute long and showed the Netherlands team on the attack against Great Britain.

The idea was to share this unique experience with family and friends. Watching an Olympic event live, particularly a sport with which I was only passingly familiar, was thrilling.

I wanted others to be able to enjoy it, too, if only vicariously.

No big deal. People post video from live sporting events all the time.

Yet within a day or two, I received a notice from Facebook that my clip "violated community standards" and was an infringement of copyright owned by the International Olympic Committee. I filed a formal appeal and requested an explanation as to why my short personal clip, shot on my iPhone, was in any way violating the IOC's copyright.

I never received a response.

I tagged Meta (Facebook's parent company), Facebook itself, and the IOC on Twitter to see if they could explain the situation to me there.

Again, no response.

Being banned from Facebook for four days isn't the end of the world, I realize. I rely on FB to drive most of my blog traffic, but it's not like I'm making a living from this blog anyway.

It was more the principle of the thing.

Nowhere on our tickets or in our official Olympic emails did I find a ban on videography or photography. The ban notice from Facebook even admitted it was discovered "using our technology" (i.e., a bot) and that no human had actually reviewed the video.

The whole thing seemed patently unfair.

Yet I might argue it was also necessary.

As both a content creator and a content consumer, as well as a corporate communicator and former newspaper journalist, believe me when I say I get the need for tight enforcement of copyright law. People who write, photograph, shoot video and otherwise provide the stuff that makes the Internet interesting need to have their content protected if we expect them to continue doing what they do.

It's impossible to police copyright over the entire vast universe of the Internet manually, so bots are needed. There aren't enough people available to do it the old-fashioned way.

I'm guessing the vast majority of what the bots find really is copyright violation, which is good.

But as my own experience suggests, they also get it wrong sometimes. Or at least, they got it wrong in my situation as far as I know. I may simply not have seen a sign prohibiting the taking of video when we entered Stade Yves-du-Manoir for the field hockey match.

This might just be a case of having to break some eggs if you're going to make an omelet. Some people will be unjustly banned, and that may be unavoidable. On balance, automated copyright enforcement is probably effective the vast majority of the time.

So I'm torn.

In the end, I don't believe I did anything wrong. And a four-day ban from being allowed to post, comment or even "like" someone's Facebook content is absolutely no big deal.

There's no foolproof way to protect copyright online, or even to stop the spread of blatantly untrue political and social content. So if a relatively small percentage of us get the shaft, that's probably a fair tradeoff.

That doesn't mean I'm not still annoyed by the whole thing, though.

My greatest Facebook fear is using the wrong reaction button

 

I've always liked the fact that Facebook offers a wide range of reactions you can click in response to someone's post or comment.

"Like" and "Love" simply didn't offer a sufficiently broad palette of sentiment. They have been augmented over time by Care, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry.

Together, these little clickable emojis are like the Seven Dwarves of Emotion, and I use them liberally.

The only potential pitfall – and it's a big one – is ensuring I choose the correct reaction to any given post or comment.

Specifically, my biggest fear is that I'll choose the wrong one on someone's heartfelt post and immediately continue scrolling without realizing my error.

Every time someone posts about the death of a loved one and I click on a reaction (often in addition to leaving a comment), I check, double check and triple check that it's the correct reaction.

I have nightmares that a friend posts their mom's obituary and I mistakenly click on "Haha!" in reaction to the news, rather than the little heart-toting Care button.

It almost feels inevitable that this will happen eventually, and it hangs over me in ways that Mark Zuckerberg and team can never prevent.

Anyone who knows me will automatically understand it was done in error, but that doesn't take away the shame of appearing to laugh at someone else's tragedy.

"Your mom died? That's hilarious!"

Like I said, it's only a matter of time before it happens, no matter how diligent I am.

After 13 years on Facebook, I guess I'll stick around

There is a certain cool factor these days to walking away from Facebook. People give any number of reasons for why they dislike the platform, from censorship and wonky algorithms to privacy concerns and the very existence of Mark Zuckerberg.

There is merit to each of these. Facebook is not without its (deep) flaws.

When I joined in 2009, it was at the suggestion of my wife. As I recall, she said something like, "You would know a lot of people there, and it's interesting to see what everyone posts."

And she was right, I did (know a lot of people on Facebook) and it is (interesting to see what people post).

Every morning I use the Timehop app to look back on the things I've published on various social media sites over the last decade-plus. It cracks me up when I see my early Facebook posts from 2009, because they all looked like this:

"...is boarding a plane for Wichita, Kansas."

Not "I'm now boarding a plane" or "I'm heading to Wichita." Everything I wrote during my first month or two on Facebook followed the same format: ellipsis-verb-object.

As I recall, that was because the prompt in the Facebook posting box in those days was something like, "What are you doing right now?" I somehow assumed it would automatically post my name, and that all I had to do was provide the rest of the sentence.

I was naïve. I still am, but I was particularly Facebook-naïve. By the end of 2009, Facebook had changed its prompt to "What's on your mind?" I believe it stayed that way for many years until recently, when they started using variations of "How's it going?" and "How are you feeling?"

Anyway, I've been a regular FB user for 13 years and I don't see myself abandoning it any time soon. My 1,800 connections include far-flung family, friends and former co-workers, many of whom I would almost never hear from if it weren't for the 'Book. That's just a fact.

I'm also endlessly interested in people's opinions on various topics pertaining to religion, sports and politics. I almost never engage in debates on any of these subjects (I've found that most people are going to believe what they want to believe, even if it's demonstrably untrue), so I end up being more of a lurker than a participant.

And honestly? I genuinely want to see pictures of that new puppy you brought home. And your kids. And your vacation. And even what you're having for dinner.

Even if I don't comment – even if I don't throw a "like" your way – please know I'm reading and looking. Even if it's an artificially idealized version of your life, I still want to see what you're up to and generally know how you're doing.

There are other ways of achieving this, I understand, but Facebook is fun and efficient. And I don't find it to be nearly as impersonal as many others do.

You also can't beat the price, which remains $0.00 a month. I don't think I would be willing to pay for the privilege of seeing someone's uninformed opinion that, for example, the Cleveland Guardians should have started Shane Bieber over Aaron Civale in Game 5 of the American League Division Series (because it wouldn't have made a difference...I know I'm right about that despite any factual evidence to the contrary, which makes me the perfect Facebook user.)

Facebook has put a big dent into class reunions, and maybe that's not a bad thing

One of the biggest mistakes I made in high school was running for and holding a class officer position.

I was treasurer of our class for, I think, three of the four years of high school. This turned out not to be the best move because (a) I wasn't especially dedicated to the job, relative to the other activities in which I participated, and (b) It came with a lifelong commitment to organize class reunions of which I was wholly ignorant.

There are high school reunions that get planned and executed by non-class officers all the time. But more often than not, I would say, the officers are at least involved if not outright leading the effort.

Thus, once every five years I start hearing from classmates asking if we're going to have a reunion for that particular post-graduation milestone. I think we've done something, formal or informal, at every 5-year increment since we left Wickliffe High School in 1988.

The last one we did was our 30th in the summer of 2018. Attendance was so-so, but those of us who were there had a great time.

There are many reasons why people don't attend reunions, not the least of which is that they didn't particularly enjoy their high school years or their classmates, or both. Others really don't like the way they look or have other motives for staying away, which is obviously perfectly fine.

The most common thing I hear is, "I keep up with the people I want to keep up with and don't really need to see anyone else."

Which, again, is completely fine.

Another big factor in lackluster reunion attendance is social media, and here I'm thinking specifically of Facebook.

At least half if not more of my 160+ classmates are on Facebook, and those are generally the people whose lives I know the most about.

I enjoy the opportunity to sit down and talk with them face to face, but it's not like I need that time to find out if they're married, if they have kids, what those kids are up to, where they've living, where they're working, etc.

For the most part, I already know that stuff thanks to Mark Zuckerberg's online creation.

If people want to continue having face-to-face get-togethers every half-decade, the other class officers and I will continue to arrange them.

But if we get to the point that everyone decides they've had their fill of the folks whose photos are next to theirs in the yearbook, I'll admit having one less thing on my plate – even if it's very occasional – isn't the worst thing in the world.

I used to have an attention span before smartphones came along

I recently took my son Jack to get his second COVID vaccine. Afterward, as we were sitting in the observation area, I looked at the people around us.

At one point, every single person in that room except me was looking at their cell phone. And it's not like this was a room of relatively young people. The two nurse volunteers sitting up front both had to be well into their 60s, possibly their 70s, and their gazes were trained squarely on iPhones.

I don't say this to claim any sort of moral superiority, by the way. The only reason I wasn't on my phone at that moment was because I recently became aware of how addicted to this device I was, and I've been making a concerted effort to just sit and "be" during quiet moments, rather than checking Facebook or playing my Yahtzee app.

Because, you see, there used to be a time when we as a society were all pretty good at just sitting still and waiting. Before smartphones, you were often in situations when there was absolutely nothing to do for a period of time, for whatever reason, whether it was because you were sitting in a doctor's waiting room or were finished taking a test in school.

Somewhere along the way, though, I lost the ability to just patiently wait. All spare moments were spent on the phone.

Even now when I get a quiet moment, there's a real itch to grab my phone. So very often, I purposely resist the itch and just sit there.

I've found some benefit to this. Our brains tend to go go go all the time these days, and they're not necessarily wired for that. They need time for reflection, contemplation, and inward thought. Collectively, we're starving them of this sort of lower-level activity.

So I'm trying. Really, I'm trying.

The urge is still there to go on Twitter whenever I manage to free up a spare 37 seconds. And while I'm not sure if and when it will go away, I'll admit I'm really enjoying returning to the 1990s for short bursts of time.

You know, back when I possessed some modicum of patience.

I give entirely too much thought to my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn bios

I have come to the conclusion that the only two types of people who click on your social media profiles are:

(1) Yourself

(2) People who read a comment you've made and want to know more about this idiot who has no idea what he/she is talking about

Other than that, nobody cares.

Yet I've changed my Twitter bio at least eight times in the last year. I'm almost certainly the only person who is aware of these carefully-thought-through edits.

As of this writing, my Twitter bio (which is limited to 160 characters, so you have to be strategic about it) reads this way:

Dad of 5, husband of 1, corporate communicator, PA guy. The only Ottawa @Senators super fan in Ohio. I play the saxophone every day, though perhaps not well.

My hope is that people look at it and say, "Well, that's a witty and interesting person!"

And maybe they would, if anyone actually looked at it.

But nobody does. Because again, nobody cares. They're too absorbed in their own stuff to notice.

On LinkedIn, at least, I can argue that the bio makes a difference. Because I was in a job search for two months, I was very, very deliberate about how I populated that particular bit of digital real estate.

My LinkedIn "headline" (that's what they call it) is this:

Strategic Communicator | Executive Counsel | Reputation Architect | Relationship Builder | Marketing Leader | Crisis Manager | Podcaster | Blogger | Harnessing the Power of Words

The idea there is to use keywords that might come up in searches conducted by potential employers, recruiters, etc. It's also to give the people who find you in other ways a quick taste of who you are and what you're all about.

But again, the only person who has ever given this more than three seconds of thought is me.

All of which makes me question the value of the inherently narcissistic beast we call social media. If no one is going to read my bio and immediately ask me to come to their house and play the sax, then why do I check my phone 114 times a day?

You'll forgive me if I lack the energy to be outraged by whatever it is you believe I should be outraged about

Social media is, on balance, a good thing, in my opinion.

It's also a place that many people and organizations use to try and get you to do something, whether it's buying a product, contributing to a cause, or adopting a particular political philosophy.

Heavy on that last one. Really heavy.

I have said this before and I mean it: You have every right to use your social media platforms to espouse your political views, and I don't care which platform it is. Some people feel Facebook is supposed to be about sharing pictures of your family and your pets, but who's to say what it's really "supposed" to be about?

If you want to post daily on Facebook (or anywhere else) about your views on politics, have at it. More power to you.

Please understand, however, that most people aren't likely to respond how you might want them to respond.

Many are already firmly entrenched in their politics, and little you have to say, no matter how brilliant or persuasive it may seem, is likely to move them. Most people (including you) are going to believe what they want to believe. That's just how it is.

Then there are others like me. I may or may not agree with you, but it doesn't matter. I'm simply not going to get wound up by something you bring up on social media. I'm just not.

That's no reflection on you at all. In fact, it's more a reflection on me. It does not represent any sort of moral superiority on my part, but rather a core laziness, I suppose.

I am tired much of the time. It's a "good" tired in that it stems from the fact that I get to devote all of my energies to supporting my family and engaging in leisure-time activities I enjoy. But it still means that, at the literal end of the day, I'm spent.

I have almost no spare mental or emotional capacity to devote to getting angry over whatever person, thing, or situation is annoying you. The result is that I will glance at your post and then almost immediately keep scrolling.

I apologize for this. I know you put a lot of time, effort and even passion into saying whatever you want to say. But...please forgive me for saying this...I sort of don't care.

That's bad, isn't it?

I'm not going to lie, though. I simply don't care. No matter how many times you tell me to "wake up" or stop being "a sheep" or whatever, I'm just going to move on.

Again, I'm so sorry about that. There are other things to which I've decided to devote my energies, and your candidate or cause happens not to be on the list. That's doesn't mean he/she/it is unimportant in a larger sense.

They're just unimportant to me personally.

Or at least, they're not sufficiently important for me to get mad about.

Which I suppose is kind of the same thing.

Why I don't use Facebook (or this blog) for political and religious debates

I like my daily interactions on Facebook because, for the most part, they're fun. I enjoy them.

What I'm not so much into on Facebook are arguments over politics and religion, insulting elected officials (whoever they may be and whatever party they may represent), and just generally adding to the unpleasantness of the world.

So I tend to keep Facebook light. And Twitter, too, for that matter. Occasionally I'll express an opinion, because I do have them. But mostly, I'm not looking for anything much deeper than jokes and here's-what's-happening-in-my-life updates from friends on social media.

That said, I have no problem if you ARE someone who wants to argue online. That's totally your right, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It's just not something for me.

That's OK, right? We can agree to use these social platforms for different reasons. Just because I don't use them the same way as you doesn't mean that:

(A) I'm not passionate or serious

(B) I'm unable to take sides on major issues

(C) I'm embarrassed about my opinions or my faith

That last point bears some elaboration. I am a Christian. I attend church virtually every week not because I'm any better than you, but for the same reason that a sick person goes to the doctor. I need to be there. So far this year I've managed to read the Bible every day. I feel like I'm much better off for having done so, but I'm a heck of a long way from perfect.

I am not ashamed to say that I follow Jesus Christ. And that I believe him  to have been (or more accurately to be, present tense) the Son of God. And that I believe him when he says that he is the way, the truth and the life.

As a Christian, I am called upon to spread the Gospel message, and I try to do that in private interactions. In conversations I have with friends and family. In the way I act. I don't always live up to the standard I should, but I do try.

I choose not to use Facebook as the stage from which I preach. I use it for fun and jokes, and occasionally to lament the sad fact that I am a Cleveland Browns fan.

If Facebook is your religious or political stage, again, that's cool. More power to you. But it's not mine. And while I tend to care way too much about what others think of me, I'm fine if you don't agree with my philosophy. I hope you do, but it's OK if you don't.

Maybe I'm wrong about this, at least from the standpoint of faith. Maybe I'm wasting an opportunity to "let my light shine" by not expressing myself on certain matters via social media. I don't know. But if I am, I definitely know one thing:

It's entirely Obama's fault.

Here's what I use social media for

FACEBOOK: Posting incoherent thoughts and occasional pictures of my cats. And news of family deaths, I guess. Oh, and also bragging any time my kids manage to do something that can be construed as the least bit positive, which includes going entire days without burning down the house or destroying any of our personal property.

TWITTER: Reading and favoriting uninteresting tweets from professional athletes and the journalists who cover them. And sending out links to these blog posts for the three or four of my Twitter followers who care.

INSTAGRAM: Posting highly edited pictures of smoothies.

LINKEDIN: This is basically Facebook for Professional People in that you spend most of your time bragging about yourself. This would work well for me if my greatest accomplishment was something other than appearing on two game shows and was relevant to my job and my worth to potential employers. So while I have a lot of connections and my profile is pretty good, my use of LinkedIn is minimal.

PINTEREST: I don't use Pinterest because I am a man. This is generalizing, I realize, and I'm sure someone has a Pinterest board of "Photos of Daddy Bloggers Who Make Sexist Comments." But according to one online report I read that I'm choosing to believe, 80% of Pinterest users are women, and 90% of all "pins" are created or shared by women. And I don't know exactly what that last part even means.

TUMBLR: Honestly? I'm not sure what Tumblr is. It's apparently a "blogging platform," but it's inhabited by people who are, in essence, not me. So I ignore it.

REDDIT: See "Tumblr."

GOOGLE PLUS: HAHAHAHAH! No, seriously, what's next?

GOOGLE PLUS: Oh, you were serious. Well, I'm ON Google Plus, at least in the sense that I have an account there. Beyond that, though, I have no idea what it does, nor whether it's even real. Its existence could be an elaborate hoax and I'm one of millions of victims.

FLICKR: Looking at pictures of myself from 2005.

VINE: Wasting my life away, six seconds at a time.

The time suck of social media

I always thought that once I bought an iPad, I would become one of those social media ninjas who tweet 75 times a day, comment on 47 friends' Facebook statuses, upload eight photos an hour to Instagram and still find time to create a community of persimmon lovers on Pinterest.

I bought an iPad about a month ago. Want to know what I do with it?

I read newspapers, mostly. Or electronic versions of newspapers. And I also browse the web and scan Twitter, but my actual contributions to the social media world have not increased a whit.

(NOTE: I love that word, "whit." It's one of those words that seems like it should stand for something more common in the English language and therefore be more widely used, but it isn't. It's of Middle English origin and means the smallest part or particle imaginable. You know what other word I like? Skosh. It's similar to "whit" in that it means, simply, "a little bit." My dad used to say it all the time: "Move over a skosh." You pronounce it with a long "O," by the way.)

Sorry. The other thing for which I often use my iPad is looking up the definitions of archaic words. That's worth the $500 price tag right there!

Anyway, these people who take full advantage of social media for business and/or personal reasons amaze me.

Like, for instance, where do they get the time? All of the social media books will tell you it doesn't take a lot of time to reap the benefits of Facebook, Twitter, etc., but this is clearly a lie. Of course it takes a lot of time. They're not fooling anybody.

And I know many of these social media gurus. They are talented professionals who are very dedicated to their actual paying jobs. So again I ask, where does the time come from?

And now that I'm thinking about it, what's the real payoff? Networking? Sure, OK. Business promotion? Uh huh, to an extent, depending on how you do it. The satisfaction of quality social interactions? Yeah, that can be achieved by, you know, actually talking to people.

Don't get me wrong. I like surfing social media channels. It's fun. But that's just it. "Fun" is pretty much the only real benefit for me. I've never earned an extra dollar nor been hired on the strength of social media.

I have an army of LinkedIn connections that I have never really mined for professional gain. All I do with LinkedIn is accept requests to connect.

I'll connect with anybody on LinkedIn. And on Facebook, too. Just send me a request and you and I can be fast friends. Even if you're one of those (this is true, I get these all the time) scantily clad young women with whom I share no mutual connections who suddenly want to befriend me on Facebook. Sure, we can be friends! Just let me make sure it's OK with my wife first.

Incidentally, I'm not so naive that I don't realize that Nicole from Ottawa, the Victoria's Secret model look-alike who reaches out to me on Facebook, is actually Boris, a hairy-backed oil rig worker from Latvia. I choose to believe that Nicole is real and is deeply interested in me.

And I don't care one whit whether it's true or not.

Why, back in my day we...pretty much did the same things kids do today

You know what makes me laugh?

When people my age post things to Facebook about how our childhoods were so much better and kids today are lazy and they're disrespectful and blah blah blah.

This makes me laugh, because I'm not quite sure exactly what childhoods they're remembering.

I knew a lot of these people as kids, and I don't remember them being especially:

a) Industrious
b) Respectful
c) Polite

A good chunk of them were, without a doubt, terrible little demons. Just like a certain percentage of kids today are terrible little demons.

Just like a certain percentage of kids 100 years ago were terrible little demons.

Are you following me here?

I realize the world has changed, but I just don't think we were necessarily raised any better than today's kids are being raised.

I think it's just a case of many of us now being parents and really noticing how badly suited some people are to being mothers and fathers.

Those same bad parents existed 30 and 100 and 1000 years, you know.

Maybe it's just me, but when someone posts that one item about "I didn't just grow up, I was RAISED," I am tempted to remind them of the time they were suspended for three days for throwing things at a teacher.

But I don't.

The reason, simply put, is the utter futility of arguing on the Internet.

95% of Internet denizens have no real interest in reasoned debate. They are interested in stating their ill-formed opinions, the facts be darned.

They are interested in visiting nut-job, off-brand "news" sites to have these opinions validated. Again, without letting facts and reason get in the way.

So for the most part, I keep quiet.

Not that I don't have ill-formed opinions, by the way. I am probably as misguided as the next person. It's just that I have learned the advantages of silence. Something to do with that old Mark Twain quote about keeping your mouth closed and letting people think you're a fool rather than opening it and removing all doubt.

And let me say that I am in no way attempting to slander my fellow Generation X'ers. It was great growing up in the 70s and 80s. I had a ball.

But this sudden feeling of superiority over the current generation (Millenials? What do we call these kids?) is not our most becoming trait.

Seriously, that guy really did get suspended for throwing things at a teacher. Was he "raised" to do that?

Apparently I'm supposed to hate the snow

I have lived my entire life in Northeast Ohio. More specifically, I have lived my entire life in one small city in Northeast Ohio.

You can say a lot of things both good and bad about the place I call home. But the one thing out-of-towners always mention is the snow. And they don't say it in a kind way.

"Cleveland? Oh....You guys get a lot of snow, don't you?"

Yes, I suppose we do. The annual snowfall totals vary drastically (less than 40 inches some years, over 100 others), but the average is about 57 inches a year. Multiply that by 43 (my age), and you get roughly 2,450 inches of snow that have fallen here in my lifetime. That's more than 200 feet. That's a lot of snow.

And I love it.

Very rarely do you hear me complain about snow. I am a graduate of the school of thought that says, "It's Cleveland. In February. Snow is going to fall. If you don't like it, go someplace else."

A lot of people do just that. It's fashionable for Ohioans to head south in the early months of the year. Some even have winter homes down in Florida, where they flee for several weeks until the snow (mostly) goes away, then they return.

These are not, in my estimation, real Ohioans. At best they're honorary members of the state. You're an Ohioan - and more to the point, a Clevelander - only if you stick it out winter after winter. Anyone can live here in July when it's 80 degrees every day and we get relatively small amounts of rainfall. That's enjoyable. But if you scurry off to Tampa at the first flakes, then you're not really one of us. Sorry, that's just the way it is.

Our precipitation totals are padded every year by what meteorologists call "lake effect snow." It has something to do with the moisture from the relatively warm lake being swept up into the atmosphere and adding a few inches to every snowfall.

But honestly, we still don't get nearly as much snow as they do three hours east in Buffalo or the rest of upstate New York. Syracuse averages 115 inches a year. When we get that much (which is rare), we act like we've survived a nuclear holocaust.

The snow really only affects my life in two ways:

(1) A few times per winter, it makes my drive to work (you know, when I actually am working) a little slower

(2) About 10 times per winter, I have to go outside and snowblow and/or shovel it away

And really, that's about it. I don't think that's too much of a reason to complain. But complain we do. Oh my goodness, people here whine and moan about snow like it's some completely new and entirely unexpected climatic phenomenon. Can you believe it? FROZEN WATER FALLING FROM THE SKY? WHAT?!? NO ONE SAID ANYTHING ABOUT THAT!

I get especially annoyed by people who used to live here and post snarky comments on Facebook like "It's 85 degrees here in Phoenix! Hope you Ohioans are enjoying the ice and snow!"

Guess what? I am enjoying the ice and snow. And I really don't care how warm it is in Arizona. Or Florida. Or South Carolina. Or whatever southeastern and/or Sun Belt state you moved to. I've chosen to live here. I have the means to live virtually anywhere I want, but I want to live here. I like it here. It's nice here.

Because it really is. Cleveland is a great place to live, despite what you may have heard. The people are friendly, the change of seasons is enjoyable, the amenities are nice, etc. I've traveled to a lot of different places, and I've liked nearly all of them. But you couldn't pay me to live anywhere else.

Yet societal expectations dictate that I should complain about a weather pattern that established itself here centuries ago and is not likely to drastically change anytime soon (even with the warmer winters we've been experiencing). It is what it is, people. Deal with it.

My, my, I am cranky today, aren't I? Must be the cold and snow that's making me irritable...

Facebook as a validation of human worth

I just checked how many "friends" I have on Facebook. The number was 751.  The average number of friends for a Facebook user, according to Facebook itself, is 190. Does this mean I'm four times more likable than the average Facebook user?

Obviously not. My wife will tell you it just shows I'm a sucker who can't say no to any Facebook friend request. I like to think I'm more discriminating than that, but I suspect she's probably right.

I put "friends" in quotes because not all of these people are my friends, in the best sense of the word. They're all people with whom I'm acquainted in one way or another, of course, and I would genuinely enjoy having conversations with 99% of them. But "friends?" Not really.

With the advent of social media has come a variety of ways to measure one's "influence" in the online world. I put that in quotes, too, because there are so few people whose online personas are truly influential, in that they drive others to buy certain things or make particular changes in behavior.

I think measures of online influence exist solely to cater to our collective egos. The most obvious ones are the number of Facebook friends and Twitter followers you collect. But there's also this service called Klout that aims to measure "social influence" by tracking your activity on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc.) and assigning you scores in "True Reach," "Amplification," and "Network Impact."

I think Klout is silly. I also log on to Klout virtually every day to check my score.

I am embarrassed even to admit this, because I really do think Klout is silly. But it actually matters to me when my Klout score falls from 55 to 54. What did I do wrong? How come it dropped? Maybe I need to make my blog posts funnier. Or maybe I need to Tweet more...even though I really don't have anything all that interesting to say.

It IS a lot more satisfying to blog when I write something that gets a lot of page views the day it's posted. I can log on to Blogger.com and find out instantly how many people have read a particular post or looked at the blog in general. Sometimes it seems random to me which posts will get read and which ones won't.

I did one recently on my interest in military history that didn't get a lot of readers. Seventy-five people looked directly at the post itself, while another 150 or so people went to www.theystillcallmedaddy.com that day. Typically, a new post will get 90-120 visitors the day it's posted, and the website will see additional traffic of 200-300 people.

The headline I assign to a post obviously has a lot to do with whether viewers will click through and take a few minutes to read it, especially among those I don't know. People that come to the blog via The News-Herald Community Media Lab are generally the ones who will make or break the relative success of a post, since they're not clicking through as a favor to me but rather because they're really interested in the topic du jour.

Still, there are some widely read posts that have caught me by surprise. The most successful post in the not-even-five-month history of this blog was one I did called "The Art of Dadness." Nearly 400 people have clicked directly to the post itself, while several hundred others went to the main blog page the day it was put up.

"The Art of Dadness" was a heartfelt expression of my views on modern fatherhood and how it can improve, but I didn't think that much of it when it was written. And the thing is, I still have no idea why it has nearly quadruple the readership of other posts I've done.

Another popular post was about our experience hosting two Brazilian students for 12 days in January. That one sort of went "mini-viral" among the Brazilian ex-pat community and employees of the Council on World Affairs. So yeah, I know why those numbers were high. But other posts? It's a shot in the dark sometimes.

By the way, let's keep all of these numbers in context: I'm thrilled when 400 people read something I wrote. There are hundreds and hundreds of bloggers to whom a post that only drew 400 readers would be cause for despair. A lot of people can draw 1,000 readers simply by posting 50 random names from the phone book. I am not one of these bloggers, nor will I ever be.

The point is, there is almost no reason to derive any sort of self-satisfaction from how many online "friends" you have or how many people click on your half-hearted attempts at blogging. Regardless of how far technology advances, it's your relationships in the real, physical world that really matter and that help create a fulfilling existence.

Not that I'm going to stop checking my Klout score. Maybe if I just write about my tiny hands a few more times, I can push it as high as 56...

(SEMI-RELATED NOTE: Since we're being self-referential here, you may have noticed over the last couple of months that ads have begun appearing on the blog. This was by choice. Google will pay you to post ads on your blog based on how many people view and/or click on them. Want to know how much money I've made in two months of doing this? $2.92. That's right, not quite three bucks. Not that it matters much to you, nor should it. But if any of the ads you see are the least bit appealing or touch on something in which you're interested, a click-through to add a few pennies to my kids' college fund would be appreciated. Thanks!)