If you blog, post comments on blogs, Twitter, or post on Facebook, inevitably you will face criticism for something you post online.

The easiest route is just to ignore all criticism, but in doing so, you will give the impression that you are above reproach, which is a fast way to lose respect. Besides, by listening to your critics, you could actually learn something.

I don’t think you should listen to all criticism, especially in these cases:

• The criticism consists mainly of attacks against your intelligence and/or character. That’s not really criticism, that’s an insult. Determine if they are criticizing the information, or the person posting the information. Attacks leveled at the person should always be ignored.
• The critic makes no effort to explain their position. A good critic should use established facts and/or relevant experience to validate their claims. If they can’t do that, it’s not worth it to listen.
• The criticism is an obvious emotional reaction, obviously because these rarely contain any intellectual value.

How should you respond to valid criticism?

• Read carefully. Be sure that you have not misread or inferred meaning where there was none.
• Resist the urge to react emotionally. Strong emotional reactions to criticism will impair your ability to analyze it. Never respond to the critic with an emotional backlash. You will regret it later.
• Determine if the criticism is constructive. Is there something that you can take away from it that you can improve upon?
• Try to see the other person’s perspective. It may not change your mind, but it will allow you to think outside of your normal viewpoints, which will improve your ability to empathize with others.
• Disagree? That’s okay too. Criticism will not always bring you to change your mind, and people rarely agree on everything. We should be able to respect another person’s viewpoint, without agreeing with them.
• Always respond positively. Thank the critic for their input. Even if you still disagree, do it respectfully, without insult, and based in facts and/or relevant experiences; not on emotion alone.
• Never take it personally. Don’t invest too much of your self-worth into how well you are received online.

Most importantly, don’t feed the trolls. Some people are just trying to get attention by posting critical and usually insulting responses on blogs, message boards, and the like. Ignore them.

How do you deal with criticism? Do you have any advice to share?

I ran into an internet problem some time ago.  My network kept losing contact with my ISP’s (who shall remain nameless) DNS servers.  For the nerdically-challenged, DNS servers are important because they translate the web addresses we use from the text address into the actual numeric internet protocol (IP) address for the server that is hosting that domain.  No DNS server, you get a lot of “cannot contact web server” errors in your browser.

I was fed up with the continuous issues I was having with my ISP’s DNS servers, I set out to find some other servers I could use that may be more reliable. In my research, OpenDNS came highly recommended, and as a bonus they have other features that are very valuable.

And you can use OpenDNS for free. Yes, free. They also have for-pay services that appeal more to businesses or power users, but the free service gives me everything that I need.

Why I use OpenDNS:

• Their DNS servers are fast and reliable. Since I’ve switched, I’ve not had one DNS issue.
• They offer free internet filtering. You can use their DNS servers without signing up for an account, but creating an account allows you to turn on their filtering solution, which gives you four levels of filtering, no filtering or custom filtering(by site category). Their servers can filter out adware sites, phishing sites, botnets and pornography. This is one of the best ways to protect your personal information, and keep porn off of your network, without installing filtering software on your computer.
• It’s easy to use. Updating your home network router (or your computer, for single computer networks) with their DNS server addresses is all you need to do to use their DNS servers. If you are using their filtering service, you’ll need to install a client program on one of your home computers that keeps your home IP address associated with your settings. They have clients for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.
• You can blacklist and/or whitelist domains (up to 25 on the free version) in case your filtering level blocks a site you need to visit (whitelist) or doesn’t block a domain you need to block (blacklist).
• You get reports (for the past two weeks on the free version) of the top domains accessed on your network, and the blocked domains requested, all available through the web dashboard at the OpenDNS website.
• It’s Free!

Even if you are not having issues with your ISP’s DNS servers, you might benefit from the services OpenDNS provides, especially the free filtering. There are several software packages that you can install on your computer that do internet filtering (I recommend this one, if that is what you need), but you have to install that software on every computer that you own, and due to licensing restrictions, that may be prohibitively expensive. And in my experience, filtering software tends to drag down the performance of your computer (especially on older hardware). Using OpenDNS filtering allows you to filter all devices on your network, even laptops or smartphones that others bring into your home, without installing software on all of them.

Any questions? Ask me in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer all of them.

I am an information addict.  There, I said it.  I’m not afraid to admit that I have a problem. I come by it honestly, though, as one of my hobbies as a child was reading encyclopedias (mostly because we didn’t have a television, but that is another blog post).

The Internet is an enabler for someone like me.  Anytime I want to know more about a particular subject, I can google it or hit the wikipedia (which in many cases leads me down a rabbit trail of information discovery).

In way, its not all that bad, because I am continuing to learn, and learning is a key to keeping the brain active and healthy.

Where it did become a problem for me was that a lot of that information came to me in the form of RSS feeds in Google Reader (of course I DID subscribe to them).  I was easily getting upwards of 2000 entries in my Google Reader feed everyday at one point.  Combine that with following several very active twitter users, and I was hitting information overload.

With all of that information capitalizing on my time, just getting through it was taking away from the things that I want to do more, like blogging, for instance.  It was also stressful for me, because an unread item in my feed was to me an undone task on the to-do list. Getting that additional time and lowering the stress level of my life were enough of a motivation to reevaluate my habits.

So I took some steps to start cutting down on the noise.  I realized that there were hundreds of entries that I was never looking at, outside of scrolling past them in the feed. There were several hundred more that were really of no informational value at all (funny pictures or videos, and the like).  And there were several blogs with multiple posts per day, that I was not actually reading, other than skimming through them.  It was wasting my time to bother even scrolling past them.

It was somewhat painful, but I eventually made some very large cuts.  The first thing to go was the junk.  Sure, it was entertaining at times, but not always useful.  Next, I cut out the blogs I wasn’t reading regularly.  I also trimmed down my news feeds to only the top stories from two major sources.

Now, the majority of my feed subscriptions are from people – bloggers that I actually read and interact with through comments – who I feel are making positive impacts, and are sparking valuable conversation.

I’ve also made a personal commitment to continue to fine-tune my information gathering, to make the best use of my time going forward.  It’s an ongoing process, but I am already seeing the results, and if you’re reading this, you are too.