Tim McDonald needs a live liver donor, could it be you?

For some of you reading this, this may seem like an odd statement; Mike, I only have one liver, how can I donate it? Let me explain.

When most people think of organ transplantation, they think of an entire organ – a heart, a kidney or even an entire liver. However the liver is a unique organ in that you can actually donate a part of your liver to someone else, and it will grow in them and yours will regrow as well. I learned all about the liver from my volunteering for and support of the American Liver Foundation after I lost my Mom to an autoimmune liver disease. Through this association I met people who themselves were recipients of live liver donations. The stories they told were nothing short of amazing in how just a part of someone else’s liver gave them a new lease on life.

So when I learned Tim is looking for a live liver donor himself, and I myself am not a match, I couldn’t help but share this with as many people as possible through my humble blog. Especially as this humble blog is related to how I know him.

Couldn’t Have Happened to a Nicer Guy

Back in the late 2000’s when social media was in its infancy, there was a large culture of people in Chicago who worked in social media or were simply active in it. This is how I know Tim, as he was one of those people I was connected with. Interestingly we only met a few times, but especially in those early days, that wasn’t a detractor to truly connecting with people.

Now years later, neither of us are in Chicago but we are still connected, albeit not as much as before due to my own choices to quit Facebook and quit Twitter (and Instagram too, but I digress – back to Tim). When I saw his post on LinkedIn, at first glance I didn’t think it was about him himself. When I looked further into it, I was sad but hopeful that he can find a donor.

Tim has created a Web site aptly named TimsLiver.com where you can learn more about him, the specifics of who could be a match as well as the overall process. As this is major surgery that will take time to recover, he is looking for a true angel to make this donation.

Please share his Web site to your friends and networks – there’s a PDF on the site that has all of the details as well.

Thank you for reading and sharing this, and I am praying for you Tim!

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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Once again, my daughter is selling Girl Scout cookies. And once again, you my dear reader can have the unique opportunity to support her and the girls in her troop in their learning and developing in scouting, all the while enjoying these tasty cookies!

Whether you go down the traditional path with Thin Mints, Caramel deLites, Shortbreads, Peanut Butter Sandwiches and Peanut Butter Patties, or try the newer varieties including Caramel Chocolate Chip, Lemonades, Toast-Yays and Adventurefuls, you can’t go wrong! Some of these are even gluten free and vegan. All can be shipped directly to the comfort of your own home, wherever you are.

Even if you don’t want cookies but want to support her troop, you can buy “Cookie Shares” where boxes of cookies are donated to worthy causes.

To buy, simply click on the bug red button below:

If you don’t see the button or if the link doesn’t work, click here to Buy Girl Scout Cookies Now!

My daughter thanks you in advance for the dozens of boxes of cookies you will be buying! The proceeds of the sales that go to her Girl Scouts troop will help subsidize the activities and badges they are earning throughout the school year as well as Girl Scouts summer camps, which have all pretty much opened back up to normal.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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I guess if a month goes by without any posts here at The Hot Iron, then that next post should have some significance to it. It just so happens that today, December 30, marks the anniversary of this humble blog going live. And December 30, 2021 marks 15 years since that first Hello World post.

Thank you to all who are reading this now, and to those who have read what I have written here over the years. Where I don’t often hear from readers, stats say people are reading, so I don’t feel like I am talking to myself. I sometimes equate this to my days in college radio when I would do a great show and ask for requests, yet the phone would never ring. However when I would run into people on campus or out on the street, they would tell me they listen, and even mention songs I played so I knew they were sincere. Of course the balance of sharing information and my ego are heavily in play when I write.

What will this 15th year of blogging have in store? We’ll see.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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This past weekend I did something I have contemplated for a while but couldn’t get myself to do. I deleted my Twitter account.

Some of you may be surprised, especially those who knew how much I promoted Twitter over the years. Others may not be, especially as I haven’t been actively using my account for well over a year and a half. Though I deleted the app from my mobile phone and stopped checking it several times daily back in March of 2020, I was hesitant to drop it altogether.

But I did, and I am great with that decision. Allow me to indulge why I did, but first how I engaged with social media and its positive and negative impacts on my life.

The Good Ol’ Days... in 2007

Social media in the mid-to-late 2000’s was not completely new, as I had a MySpace page and this blog you are reading was also new to me. As I grew followers and made connections with both platforms, I learned about Twitter, and thanks to my friend and fellow improvisor Christopher, I got an account.

But at first, I didn’t get it. What the heck could I say in 120 characters? And who would want to read it? I slowly started following and connecting with people, and using it as a way to promote my blog. Twitter inspired me to build a Web app that is resting in my project graveyard but even then, I wasn’t using it all that much.

For me, it took seeing Twitter in action – literally – to believe in it, and that didn’t happen for another year when I went to Helsinki, Finland as a participant in Nokia OpenLab. There I met people from around the world who were heavy users of Twitter and other social media channel, and I experienced for the first time a group of people tweeting each other as they sat together. Where that latter fact was not what made me the true believer in Twitter that I became, it was continuing the connections with these people who brought me to the platform and kept me there.

Behind the short messages were people, and I got to know people not only around the world but around the corner as well. People who were interested in meeting those whom they only saw an avatar of would host Tweetups – in person meetups of Twitter connections. There are several people from tweetups I still keep in touch with today.

Beyond Shiny to a Utility

As I evolved my use with Twitter, the platform evolved as well. Business, traditional media and more individuals were coming on board, and the “invention” of the hashtag made the platform even more useful. It was becoming my primary source for news, as I could follow networks, stations, newspapers and especially the reporters of those outlets. One example of the power of Twitter was one early evening in Chicago when I saw Blackhawk helicopters flying around the Loop. I immediately took to Twitter, and right away people were chiming in on their own sightings and the media was also on the case. It was a Chicago Tribune reporter who then found an obscure mention on the city’s Web site about a Blackhawk training exercise and shared it. Shortly afterwards it made the paper’s Web site.

Twitter became a customer service channel as well, which truly embraced the collaboration that was a hallmark of social media. Starting with Comcast Cares, an account run by a Comcast employee on his own, customer service evolved on the platform, slashing through obnoxious telephone menu trees to get to the people who could make a difference. This extended beyond business, as my former Alderperson in Chicago was an active user – one day on the way to work I tweeted her a picture of a downed tree in my neighborhood, and on the way home it was gone.

The ability to connect and communicate with people you normally couldn’t or wouldn’t be able to connect with was another uniqueness to Twitter. One time I tweeted to Jack Welch, the infamous former CEO of GE. It happened to be at the time the New England Patriots were in the playoffs, and Welch, who was a Boston-area native, replied to me, “Go Pats!” Though not an intellectual conversation to say the least, it was a pleasant surprise. As I was writing book takeaways here at The Hot Iron, I was able to connect with authors and publishers to share my thoughts, as well as the occasional newsmaker and reporter covering them.

What’s Offline is Online Too

Twitter was not in its own world, as it’s obvious it was made up of those from the “meat space.” Over time I saw Twitter conversations becoming more political and divisive. As this was not just impacting Twitter but other social platforms such as Facebook, driving me to quit that platform years ago. Despite this exodus, I still held hope that Twitter could be different and more tolerable to me.

Over the last 5 years though it was really off the rails for me. I would often joke that, though not a financial advisor, I strongly recommended investing in heels, as people were simply digging their heals in and holding their ground and shouting at others. This was far, far from the Twitter I remembered from almost a decade earlier, and one I was not liking. I went as far as deleting all of my old tweets (after backing them up, for some reason) as who knows what I had said in a short message years ago that I didn’t want to come back to haunt me. Over time I was checking the platform less and less.

The Final Straws

As the lockdowns were taking effect in early 2020 and people were at home, angry, scared, or whatever they were feeling, the tweets were reflective of this. It got to be too much, and I deleted the app from my mobile device. Granted I did not shut down the account, but not having Twitter literally at arm’s length for most of my day was actually refreshing. I would check it maybe once a week from a Web browser, then every couple of weeks, then maybe once a month. As Twitter was also a way for friends to connect with me, I was sharing with them over direct messages, or DMs, my decision and my phone number and email if they didn’t already have it. I didn’t make a big deal publicly of my cutback on its usage though.

In between those checks, I really didn’t miss Twitter. I was still on LinkedIn and starting to experiment with Mastodon, an open source, federated (or shared) protocol of connecting individual social media instances together. I was also blogging more, going back to my “roots” of social media – look at my early posts, and I had many commenters, many more than I do today.

Over the weekend I happened to check Twitter and the only mention I had in the month since I last checked it was a tweet from a complete stranger asking me to DM him about a business opportunity. I paused for a moment, and said to myself this was it. It had been almost 18 months since I retreated, and I really didn’t miss it at all. Sure, the ol’ days were good – heck, even great – but today Twitter has lost its luster. Note that in what I have said so far I haven’t mentioned de-platforming, algorithms controlling what you see and don’t see, and the useless testifying of Twitter’s and other social and tech CEOs in front of Congress. Where these certainly played into my thinking (like not believing Twitter is a public square, rather a private space off of it) I had enough reasons to delete my account, and my proof is with the screenshot at the top of this message.

Will I return? I do have access to other Twitter accounts for organizations that I have helped manage, but personally I don’t see it. But never say never, and who knows what else is right around the corner.

Deconstructing Deleting Twitter

Social media was and continues to be a game-changer for how we communicate in the world, for better or for worse. The opposite of social media is not anti-social, rather I see it as returning to the roots of collaboration that the Internet is. My decision to quit Twitter was personal, but not entirely unique, as I have known others who have quit other social media platforms. Where everyone has their own reasons, there is a common thread of the negativity that is gnawing away at the good that social media enabled. It’s this good that I seek, whether on another platform or with a simple hello to someone, online or in-person.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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My last post at The Hot Iron, Lower the Minimum Age to Work, was the one-thousandth post I have written for my blog over the almost 15 years since I started it.

I say that calls for acknowledgment and some reflection.

Where It Began

Over the years I have often mentioned why I started and have continued this blog. In short, I had a client of my Web business who asked me to stop building them a Web site and build them a blog first using specific software. After building theirs, I realized I had no “showcase” blog to use as an example to future clients. I had registered the domain name thehotiron.com years earlier, as I thought a play on “strike while the iron is hot” was a good name for a blog. At the end of 2006, what you are reading this from was born.

I slowly got into writing, namely as I wasn’t much of a writer previously. Some posts were things on my mind, others were on what was bugging me, and others were a way to promote myself and my business. Types of posts emerged over the years, such as mobile phone evaluations, book takeaways and What I Learned for the previous week. No matter what I wrote, I tried to contribute something unique to the global conversation. Looking back on random posts as I am writing this, I think I did a good job at keeping to this mission.

1,000 Could Have Been Sooner, Thanks Social Media

There’s no doubt on the impact on social media in the world. A little closer to home, it certainly impacted what and how often I wrote on my blog. Something that was bugging me could easily be boiled down to 120 characters in a Tweet or a little longer in a Facebook post. Over time however those social accounts have gone away or ground down to a halt, as I have preferred to write in longer form in a platform I control. Am I anti-social? No – I certainly do share links on social media to my blog posts. However it’s nice to have my collection of written thoughts in one place, making The Hot Iron the center of my digital presence – something I have written about before and will continue to in the future. Judging by the little bit of observing I do of hits to the blog, others do find me here and keep coming back.

What’s Next

A grand of posts down, another to go? We’ll see, as I stopped making predictions here a long time ago. A little celebration to go along with this reflection... now that’s something that will happen for certain.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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