Doug Haslam

I like being a curmudgeon. How much? This much: When new ideas, phrases, and tools come out in the social media world, I am not normally the first to jump aboard. In fact, the more people who get out their pompons and cheer the latest unproven tool or idea, the grumpier I get. That doesn’t [...]

Having been in PR and social media for many years now, I have witnessed up close the love/hate relationship my profession has with buzzwords. I define “love” in this instance as “laziness,” of course. In my tech PR days, among the most reviled buzzwords were “solution,” “scalable” and “robust.” Here’s the thing about buzzwords: They originally [...]

As a Twitter user, I have never been a huge fan of promoted hashtags. I get that it is a way to buy exposure and discussion around a topic or a brand, and I certainly get that Twitter deserves to try to make money, but I always found the anchor Tweet pinned to the top [...]

I decided I would refuse to be “too busy” to write this blog post… For a while, I have seen friends and others struggle with the Productivity Question: are they too distracted by email, Facebook, Twitter et al to actually get something done? As someone who likes to have 27 things going on at once (and [...]

If you bother to check out my blog regularly (thank you), you’ll notice a couple of odd posts recently. The first was in some ways an accident. Being a smartass, I decided to react to some random subscriptions to both of my Posterous blogs with a post telling people not to subscribe there. There’s no [...]

My “Buzzword Radar” is oversensitive, honed over years in the PR profession, where the temptation to go the lazy route “”leading provider of robust, scalable solutions” was often too great (or driven by inexperienced managers and less sensitive clients) to resist. This is a great example of a web site from the 1st Internet bubble [...]