I recently published an article for The Wesleyan Argus on Fat Prejudice at Wesleyan University, a competitive liberal arts college in Middletown, Connecticut. I am sharing it with you here because I feel like it is important to increase awareness on this issue.

Please feel free to share this with friends or family or share your comments below.

Photo by borman818 on Flickr

The law has been described as “the most sweeping social legislation enacted in decades” by the NYT, “biggest expansion of federal health care guarantees in more than four decades” by CNN and the “culmination of a yearlong struggle with Congress to make good on the central issue of his administration’s domestic policy agenda” by NPR.

Whether you agree or disagree with Obama’s policies, it is important to know how this bill will affect you. Here are eight ways that the Health Care Reform could affect you as an independent artist:

4. Reform will prevent insurance companies from placing annual or lifetime caps on the coverage you receive.

This is especially important for individuals, both children or adults, with chronic conditions that will require lifetime medical support. Lifetime caps will be banned immediately and annual caps will be reduced until 2014, when they will be banned as well.

5. All new insurance plans will include preventative care and doctor checkups without a co-pay.

Also, reform will require plans to cover basic pediatric services, as well as dental, vision, and hearing needs for children.

Hopefully this gives you a little better understanding of how the health care reforms affect you personally. If there is something that I missed or a specific question that you have, please feel free to comment and I will do my best to respond with useful information.

No one cares how good you are if they don’t know who you are. For this post, I collaborated with my colleague and friend (oh, and brother), Teague Hopkins, MBA student at Babson’s Graduate School of Business to show creative-minded people how to get their own website.

Plot of Land

Just like you need a plot of land to build a house on, the physical space where you store the files that make up your website is your web host. Some domain registrars also offer web hosting, and while the integration may be appealing, it can make it more difficult to switch if you should have problems with either in the future. Web hosts come in a variety of flavors, but most small sites just getting started will choose shared hosting. Shared hosting simply means the web host is using one server to host multiple sites. This makes it less expensive.

By Olof on Flickr

A couple of businesses that offer shared hosting are BlueHost and DreamHost. Shared hosting for either of these runs about $6/month, and may require a one- or two-year contract. While both of these companies offer unlimited bandwidth and storage space, you should check these two numbers if you choose to find a different host. Storage or hosting space is the equivalent of our square footage, and simply governs the amount of stuff that you can put on your web host.

Bandwidth doesn’t have a direct analog in our physical building analogy, but in talking about web hosts it is a measure of the amount of data transferred to and from your web host in a given month. A large number of people downloading large files from your website will use a lot of bandwidth.

Once you have both a host and a domain name, you can log into your registrar’s control panel to point your domain to your new host.

Merchandise

Once your building (CMS) is up and running, the last step is to move in. Add content to your site through your CMS and check out your new website! Tell all your friends. Add links to your website to your profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

There are limitless possibilites for what to do next, but this is the extent of this primer. If you have questions about anything you read here, please leave a comment and we’ll try to answer it or point you to some more comprehensive resources. I hope you found this introduction helpful and send me an email once you’re moved in!

Thanksgiving Spread by CarbonNYC on Flickr

Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday. Who doesn’t love gorging themselves on tryptophan-filled meat and fatty casseroles (actually, common misconception: tryptophan doesn’t cause drowsiness. Your body just burns so much energy trying to digest the disgusting amount of food and drink we consume that you feel tired after.)

But Thanksgiving isn’t just an excuse to eat and sleep a lot. It is an opportunity to use your built-in network (family) to your advantage. And you don’t even have to use any awkward icebreakers like you do at networking events, because you know that every single aunt and uncle is going to ask you, “So, how’s school/class/work/job/life going?” or the dreaded “What are you going to do when you graduate?”

Don’t throw away this opportunity! You might be tempted to respond with a simple “Good” or “I’m not sure” and wander your way back over to the gloriously delicious bowl of stuffing, but try to actually have a conversation. These people are resources to be tapped and bonus: they actually care about you.

So, here’s your checklist:

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

not quite clear on the concept by WWWorks on Flickr

It’s easy to find ourselves stuck in the grind of everyday.  We get into the same weekly routine and take little time to think about what we are actually doing (how many times have you thought to yourself: “Wow, where did the day/week/month go?”)

Are you growing?  Are you pushing yourself forward?  There is a question that I ask myself at the end of every week.  It is simple:

What did I learn last week?

The secret to moving forward, in life, in school, in a job, anywhere, is that you have to be constantly learning and growing, and be aware of that learning and growth.  Some things to think about when you ask yourself this question:

Credit: The Life of Bryan on Flickr

In my last post on Facebook for the Over 40, I showed you how to change your privacy settings to keep your profile safe. Now that you are protected, let’s talk about interacting with friends and family. Here are a few tips for getting the most out of your connections.

1. Don’t be offended when your family members don’t friend you back.

Either you have already experienced this or you will. You friend your favorite nephew and, oh no!, they don’t accept your friend request. Do not take this personally. They probably have not cleaned up their online reputation yet.

Many facebook users, especially younger users, have their entire lives on facebook (they shouldn’t). Instead of feeling rejected, why don’t you point your family member to “How to Create an Exclusive Friends List”. That way, they can friend you and keep their profile private.

2. When responding to a wall post, respond on the other person’s wall.

So, someone wrote on your wall! Great! Now, how do you respond?  Maybe this tip seems obvious to you, but I’ve seen a surprising number of people respond to a wall post by writing on their own wall. This is like receiving a letter and addressing your responding letter to yourself. They will be looking on their wall for a response, not on yours.

When you receive a wall post, click “See Wall to Wall” in the bottom right corner of the box. This shows you the conversation between you and your friend. Now you can type in the response box and the comment will go directly to their wall.

3. Control your feed so you can hear from people you actually care about.

Most people don’t know that the main feed on the facebook homepage is fully customizable. Unless you really want to see everything your 40 random high school friends from 1970 are doing, let me show you how to customize your feed to show you the activity of the friends you really what to hear from.

Now, when you login, your feed will be populated with activity from the people in your exclusive friends list, saving you time sifting through random updates from people you don’t really care about.

4. Create a facebook group for your family.

Facebook groups, while often used to idolize Britney Spears, are also a great tool for families looking for a communal space online. Create a group for your family and start sharing pictures, videos, links, stories, or anything else your family would find interesting.

Credit: Jordan Brock on Flickr

You might still think of Facebook as “that social network for college students” but in the past few years it has become much more than that.  Over 2/3 of Facebooks users are out of college and the fastest growing demographic of users is those 35 years or older.  What does that mean for you?  Well, if you are a college student, you probably have received (or will receive) a friend request from your mom, and if you are a mom, you’re probably feeling like you are missing out on your child’s life.  With 13.9 billion minutes spent on Facebook in April alone, you might have reason to feel like you’re missing something.

There are plenty of guides online for beginners using Facebook. Facebook for Beginners has a good list of guides available online.  If you are looking to do something specific, just type your question into Google and chances are you will find an answer.  I don’t want to regurgitate basic how-to’s that you can find online.  Instead, let me tell you:

The default privacy settings that you want to take a look at: (1) Profile, (2) Search, and (3) News Feed and Wall.  Of the three, you are probably most worried about your Profile Settings.  This area controls who can see you and what specific people can see about you.  Let’s start there!

1. Profile Privacy

The default privacy settings for Facebook allow for everyone to see your information.  You probably don’t want this.  Go through and change the drop-down menu to “Only Friends”.  You have to select this for every element of your profile.  Facebook calls this “increased customizability”, I call it “annoying”, but whatever. Make sure to changes the settings for your contact information as well.

Quick Tip: Still unsure whether your profile is actually private?  Test it!  Type a friend’s name next to the “See how a friend sees your profile” box and Facebook will show you how they would see your profile.

2. Search Privacy

Search visibility depends a lot on the purpose of your facebook account.  Take a minute and ask yourself: why am I on facebook?  Through Search Privacy, you can control who can find you in a search.  I often recommend being searchable, just not viewable.  That way, people can find you if they want, but you control what they see.  Here are the settings I suggest:

3. News Feed and Wall

The last section of your privacy settings, News Feed and Wall, gives you some control over what your friends see on their Feed (their Facebook homepage).  I unchecked all of the fields on my account, but it is really your choice.

So let’s talk Twitter.  Twitter is a free micro-blogging tool that allows you to create messages of 140-characters or less.  It is a great tool for community building, self-promotion (yes those are two different things), and actively engaging fans in your brand.

1. Broadcast promotional material.

Twitter was not created as a Press Release System.  Some users employ twitter as a tool for one-way broadcasting.  Please don’t do this.  Social media is about creating a relationship with your community.  I want to connect to you, not promo tweets written by your marketing team.

Interact with people on Twitter that are interested in you, your product, or your field.  Use @ replies and Retweets to build relationships.  People often wonder “why is no one tweeting me?” or “why isn’t anyone writing on my wall?”  The answer is almost always because you haven’t invited them to.  Ask a question.  You’ll be amazed.  No one is going to interact with you without being invited to, unless your audience is 13-year-old-girls… and you are the Jonas Brothers.

2. Use a username with “gurl”, “hot”, “boi” or any variation thereof.

This isn’t your AIM screen name from high school, so resist the temptation of a “prettypony6794” or “monkeysRcrazy4242”.  Be consistent with your brand and choose something that people will easily identify as you.  You can change your display name in Settings without creating a new account. (acceptable options: your name, band, gallery, company, etc.)

Internet rural (Credit: Caliaetu on Flickr)

3. Only tweet at night.

Most artists work weird hours.  But keep in mind that a high percentage of Twitter users are on a 9-5 work schedule and that is when you are going to get the most visibility.  This doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything at night, but save a large percentage of your tweets for the day, when you will be most likely to elicit a response.

4. Tweetflooding.

Also known as spamming.  Your 30 tweets about The Real Housewives of New Jersey are unappreciated and unnecessary.  Overtweeting is a good way to get unfollowed.  Also, people are less likely to want to interact if you are overwhelming them.  Think before you post.  Exceptions: If you are live-blogging an event like a conference or breaking news story, it is acceptable to tweetflood as long as you use #hashtags.  Find out what hashtag other people are using and add it to your tweets to help connect with other people talking about the same thing.

5. Miss out on conversation.

I see this all the time and it kills me.  If someone is talking about you or something that you are knowledgable and passionate about, you should be right there in the conversation.

• Use Twellow to connect to other people in your industry.
• Set up alerts on Tweetbeep and Google Alerts so that you know whenever someone mentions you, your brand, or something you are interested in.
• Check out Tweetmeme for what links people are most talking about.

PStar (Credit: ewphoto on Flickr)

P*Star Rising is a documentary by Gabriel Noble that follows the growth (literally) of a 9-year-old female rapper from Harlem named Priscilla Diaz, stage name: P*Star. While I don’t know if I would have picked a name for a 9-year-old that produces google searches about the adult entertainment industry, I was instantly won over by this little girl’s wittiness and extremely apparent charisma. The film recently premiered at Tribeca Film Festival. Check out the trailer.

We can all learn a few things from P*Star, the artist, and Priscilla Diaz, the girl.

Connections make you or break you. P*Star wasn’t born rapping (although that would be pretty sick). She didn’t get signed by a record label because of her musical genius. She got signed because her father, an ex-rapper from the 80s, knew the right people.

While most of us aren’t lucky enough to be born into families with connections in the field of our choice, we can use social media to forge connections with people that will help advance our career. Start seeking out people on Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter that will provide you with an outlet for your work. Maybe it is a museum curator, or a record producer, or an employer. Join the communities that these people are part of and start a conversation. Make a connection by asking questions or establish yourself as competent by answering other people’s questions. The questions can lead to an email, the email to an interview or audition. Most successes don’t come from luck; they come from someone saying “Hey, I know this great person you should hear about.”

You can’t do it alone. There are going to be hard times. Really hard times. I don’t care how strong you are, you can’t believe that you are going to make it without some support system. Whether it is monetary or emotional support, you need someone that will always be stable, because there will be times when everything else is not.

Have an interesting story. The thing I like most about P*Star is that she has a story. She grew up in poverty with a heroine-addicted mother and cocaine-selling father. Her father cleaned up his act and took her in, teaching her how to rap. She had her first gig when she was 6, was signed to a record contract at 10, and now has a leading role on PBS’s revival of The Electric Company. Find some things, or a series of things that make people go, “Cool!”

Originally published on StillIndie.com