Great Truths that Came to Me This Week

1) The best seat in the house for clipping your toenails is the toilet. It puts you right close to your feet.

2) Second runner-up is a bucket in the garage. Minus points for being in the garage in colder weather, but plus points for not having to dispose of the clippings.

3) If your wife hands you something and says "Give this to me for Christmas," it's probably a good thing to hide it rather than leave it in plain sight on your desk all week. Wives are known to get testy.

4) Smart dogs are the ones who can remember you've been around for more than five minutes so they don't have to give you a heartfelt greeting every time they see you throughout the day.

5) Rufus, the main dog of Brian and Jana Porter, is a smart dog.

6) The Porters have an emergency backup dog named Hurley. I'm not going to say he's any smarter or dumber than Rufus, but I am going to say that "emergency backup dog" is a great phrase. Thank you Dave Barry.

7) Finding a salted in-shell peanut in the bag of unsalted in-shell peanuts you bought from WinCo can turn an otherwise pleasant night into a night of wild taste sensations.

8) Forget about being in an echo chamber when it comes to news and commentary on the Internet. The real echo chamber is the "suggested video" column at YouTube.

9) It's hard to imagine how I wasted time before the Internet.

10) Rick Redfern had great insight today as to why the life of a blogger is not as glamorous a life as one may be led to believe.

11) Wiener dogs who want Dad to go sit on the couch and read are persistent little cusses. Not that she wants to read, mind you, but she wants a warm body to sleep on.

12) Getting caught putting up Halloween lights in the tree in front of your house is almost embarrassing as getting caught putting up Christmas lights in the tree in front of your house.

13) Suggesting it might just now be cold enough to begin playing Christmas carols will incite ire and indignation on Facebook.

The Photographic Paradigm Shifts

Stop reading this blog post right now and go here, for a fascinating article at Slate.com on a former Baltimore Sun photographer who turned his talent in photography, a buyout from the newspaper industry and a free lighting seminar into a business that’s grossed $1 million in ticket sales for a 29-city photography tour.

Yeah, this is another one of those Horatio Alger Internet stories that could never happen to you in real life because, well, it just doesn’t happen.

Except it did. And it does.

Read it now.

David Hobby is bringing his photographic skills to the masses, and for cheap. In fact, according to Slate, the most popular item on his blog is a free course on photographic lighting.

He’s connecting with amateur photographers hungry to become better. He’s networking with other photography enthusiasts who are “very enthusiastic about sharing their knowledge,” passing all of that knowledge on to others.

Sound familiar?

Yeah, that’s what Uncharted wants to do.

Except he’s doing it for free.

How?

Networking, networking, networking. Getting out, talking with people, getting them to visit his blog, getting them to contribute, getting them to help, getting them connected with people who want help. And he’s not forcing everyone under one roof, i.e., his own.

He’s thinking in a new media way: collaboratively.

Here’s what I like, and what old media – including, in some ways, Uncharted, is finding frightening. And, I hope for Uncharted, opportunistic:

How Hobby went from being a workaday newspaper photographer to an internationally recognized guru is a story tied up with seismic changes in the photography profession. By teaching a horde of novices the skills necessary to shoot photographs of a quality that was until very recently only within the grasp of an elite few, Hobby has played a significant role in the transformation of the profession. In the last few years, the market rate for many types of professional photographs has dropped by as much as 99 percent.

Amateurs becoming better and taking over. Scary Idea No. 1. At least for those used to and comfortable with the status quo.

To get a sense of just how bad things are for professional photographers right now, the story of Robert Lam is instructive. When Time needed a photo to illustrate its "New Frugality" cover story in late 2009, it purchased Lam's image of a jar of change from stock-photo agency iStockphoto. The going rate for a Time cover had typically been $3,000 to $10,000. Lam was paid $31.50. Nevertheless, Lam declared, "I am happy"—the payment was more than he'd expected the photo to generate, and he was delighted to have a Time cover in his portfolio. Veteran professional photographers were livid, calling Lam an "IDIOT," among other unkind words.

Scary Idea No. 2 here, or the idea of amateurs being pleased to exchange a portfolio addition and a token payment versus professionals who want and expect handsome pay – and are loath to welcome into their ranks those who buck the system.

And finally:

That sentiment is alien to the old guard in the professional photography world, where, Hobby says, "there's a lot of information-hoarding, and [a sense that] if I teach this person how to do this, he'll become my competition." Once the dust settles from all the change he's helped bring about, Hobby thinks there will still be legitimate careers for professional photographers. "You'll have fewer rock stars, and a much larger middle class," he says, a group of photographers who will find ways to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack.

Scary Idea No. 3: The rising professional middle class, supplanting and usurping the professional class.

This all reminds me of something else that I read from a fantasy novel by Harry Harrison, of all people. Go here and search on “Mark Forer” for a description of the economic model on the planet Chojecki, where people work using the talents they have and the abilities they enjoy using for “wirrs,” or a “work hour,” the planet’s unit of exchange. Because everyone works at what they enjoy and because to live comfortably only a few wirrs a week are required for basic shelter, food, and other necessities, the people of Chojecki enjoy their lives living much as David Hobby does, working on what interests them, not having to worry about money, being happy for a “minimal” reward on a project well done because all that’s required is a minimal reward . . . but that’s getting off the subject.

(I haven't gone all radical on you; the "anarchy" the above link refers to is the libertarian ideal of direct democracy, not the Molotov-cocktail sort.)

Paint My House

So, maybe this is a dumb thing to do. I mean, there are probably ordinances in Sugar City against this kind of thing. But you know what? I’d do it if the right advertiser were involved.

Do what, you may ask? Well, this.

Yes, I’d turn my house into a billboard for three months, or a year, in order to have this company – desperate, it seems, for media exposure – pay my mortgage for the time my house was a billboard.

Desperate, you say?

Hopeful, I’d retort.

We could use that money for some other projects – notably replacing windows on said house and remodeling the kitchen. A year’s worth of mortgage payments is $7,200 in our neck of the woods. Even if we took some of that cash and made extra principal payments, we’d come out ahead. Yeah, the neighbors would have to put up with a billboard in town for three months to a year, but it wouldn’t be an obtrusive billboard – most of the front of our house is brick, you see. That may work contrary to my hopeful whim to be chosen, but you never know.

Besides, we need the house painted anyway. Why not get paid a year for a wacky job, then go stucco, like we’re thinking?

The Tweet Heard 'Round the World

Here's something else the internet is doing: It's making revolutions easier.

SHUT . . . DOWN . . . EVERYTHING

General Madagascar, we may be in serious trouble.

Yeah, it’s been kind of a panicky week here at Mister Fweem’s Blog Inc., what with two of my blogs going private and all out of fear of losing forever the first use rights to the novels I’m writing (and posting first drafts of here). So reading this story about a Las Vegas-based law firm (and you KNEW that sleazy city was going to come into the story quickly) snapping up copyrights to viral material and then going on to sue anyone and everyone who even thinks about posting their stuff online.

This kind of stuff is why I’ve been more circumspect, as of late, in trolling the Internet for images to use on my blogs. I’ve cut down a lot, and have included many, many links to the source material and noting when things are out of copyright or under creative commons licensing and such.

And I’m still nervous about it.

I’m not the only one.

There are many people out there on the net tracking what Righthaven is going, including this site.

There are many people out there offing false hope of legal remedies to protect oneself against the kinds of thing Righthave is doing, including this misleading advice from wired.com. (Misleading because the safe harbor protection offered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 offers protection for web hosts, ISPs, and other such big boys against copyright infringement lawsuits, not the individuals that Wired insinuates can get protection by filing a $105 form with the federales.

So the reactions are to re-do the DMCA, learn about it (using such sites as this) read it in its entirety (and fall asleep, drooling on the keyboard, thanks to sites like this) or, in the case of Good ol’ General Madagascar:

The AOL No Way

This photo (of urban blight in Camden, New Jersey, is used under a Creative Commons license.

Okay, so the AOL Way really is all about the numbers.

It can’t be about hiring more writers and encouraging current employees to write more original content, because if it were, AOL wouldn’t be buying the Huffington Post for $315 million, as announced today.

The Post is, at best, a news aggregator. An aggregator which, in more simple terms, is Internet parlance for a site that copies the work of other sites on its own to generate hits, eyeballs, ad revenues and whatnot. The Post does create some original content, but the vast majority of it is simply rebroadcasted material.

The AOL Way, a leaked document which purported to show how AOL was going to put the fear in its own writers and editors to squeeze every last drop of revenue-generation out of each piece produced – and to produce between 5 to 10 pieces a day, concentrated a lot on numbers. AOL wants to see the average unique visitor number to each of its pieces of content climb to 7,000 a month – an astronomical number.

Huffington has this to say about the deal, per CNN Money:

Huffington said that among her goals for the deal is "to do so much more in the living space especially for women, (and) to do more and more original reporting telling the stories of our time and putting flesh and blood on the economic data."

AOL and the Post are obviously planning some synergistic explosion of buttery Internet goodness, per the New York Times:

One of The Huffington Post’s strengths has been creating an online community of readers with tens of millions of people. Their ability to leave comments on Huffington Post news articles and blog posts and to share them on Twitter and Facebook been a major reason the site attracts so many readers. It is routine for articles to draw thousands of comments each and be cross-linked across multiple social networks.

Mr. Armstrong and Ms. Huffington say that AOL’s local news initiative, Patch, and its citizen journalist venture, Seed, stand to thrive when paired with the reader engagement tools of The Huffington Post.

This shows, obviously, that AOL doesn’t want to take the time to generate such synergy on its own, but rather wants to buy an already-existing network of folks with whom they can buddy up with.

Problem is, the Internet is really, really cliquey. The Post, which sags heavily to the left, may not really like the idea of an AOL corporate partner barging into the room and ordering drinks. But it’s obvious AOL hopes the Post’s ability to generate commentary and a loyal following – not necessarily its original writing prowess – will spread into AOL’s products, from Patch to Seed to whatever else. Again, this says more about getting eyeballs and page hits than writing original quality content that people will want to read.

Says the New York Times:

While AOL has invested heavily in creating content through enterprises like Patch, the initiative meant to fill the void in areas where struggling local newspapers have cut back on reporting, much of their writing and news gathering is not up to the standards of what consumers get from their traditional news sources.

The Huffington Post, too, has faced criticism over its content, much of which is aggregated from other news sources. But it has started to invest more in original reporting and writing, hiring experienced journalists from The New York Times, Newsweek, and other traditional media outlets. By acquiring The Huffington Post’s reporting resources, AOL hopes to counter the perception that it is a farm for subpar content.

As readers of the subpar content of this blog know, having a lot of subpar content really doesn’t drive the eyeballs. Improved content is better, but AOL shrewdly knows that buying into an already existing and vibrant network is the way to get people coming. Of course, now they run the risk of people coming to their other properties and ventures and seeing a Detroit-style urban blight.

Internet Behemoths

Taken from Laughing Squid's Flickr profile, used under Creative Commons licensing.

Back when the Internet and I were first introduced, the Internet was kinda cute.

Using server space provided by the University of Idaho, and encouraged, by of all people, a rather dyed-in-the-wool French teacher, I put together some very simple web sites including, of course, the inevitable mid-1990s "home page." It looked like this (thanks again, Wayback Machine). I had the obligatory self-promotion. The obligatory pop culture references. And, eventually, the obligatory fan boy pages (for more, go here).

It was all hand-built. I learned by sneaking peeks at others' source code, and then by copying and tweaking.

But you know what, today's Internet ain't the Internet of my youth.

We're now in the age of Internet Behemoths. Sites like, say, Amazon, Facebook, Reddit, which just recently joined that exclusive club of sites with a billion page views a month. That would have absolutely broken the little "visitors meter" I had on my page for decades, and which you can still find on pages in odd little corners of the web where the Aughts have never seeped.

And we're now in the age of rebellion against these behemoths -- and not merely against those who became behemoths thanks to bricks-and-mortar money.

Soon, I predict, there will be preservationists on the web interested in protecting mom-and-pop Internet ventures against the big boys who want to swallow them whole. And not necessarily because mom and pop are more willing to protect personal data -- there is no privacy any more -- or react in a more agile fashion than their ginormous competitors, but simply because of the romance of the Lycos Age, (who knew they were even still alive?) the Bronze Age of the modern Internet. There will be people who prefer to surf a web walled off from modernity, a Wayback Machine-level net where Lycos is king and everybody has a site visitor counter and where e-mail was about the only way to keep up with your distant e-mail compatriots because no one had even fathomed the idea of allowing people to make live comments on the stuff you were posting. Guestbooks were about as sophisticated as we got back then.

I'm not saying Web 1.0 was better. But then again, since I used that technology to build my own web sites, rather than merely using someone else's technology to babble on about my inadequacies, maybe it was better. I certainly knew more HTML back then. It's a pity I didn't keep up with it. Then again, I don't have to pay for server space here at Blogger, so let's not take the nostalgia too far, shall we?

CNN Flubs an Easy One

 

Oh, I feel their pain.

I’ve done this: Turned in what I thought was a simple story I thought was just fine. Then, when it appeared in print, its flaws magically appeared.

CNN.com is taking a lot of guff today because of a flub in their report on Punxsutawney Phil (emphasis mine):

(CNN) -- Groundhog Punxsutawney Phil emerged from his hovel Wednesday and saw his shadow, which -- according to tradition -- means that spring will come early this year.

Phil, whose first name comes from the Pennsylvania town where he lives, emerged at 7:20 a.m. ET and hung out with the well-dressed gentlemen presiding over the event without retreating inside.

Tuesday's Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney marked the town's 125 celebration of the annual event.

Phil's prediction is likely welcome news for residents in the path of a monster snow and ice storm stretching from Texas to New Hampshire.

Of course, anyone who’s familiar with groundhog weather predictions or the film “Groundhog Day” knows that when Phil sees his shadow, it’s six more weeks of winter (as verified by Phil himself).

Phil, of course, didn’t see his shadow this morning, meaning that spring will come early. CNN got it wrong. Oops.

The AOL Way

“Double the taxes! Triple the taxes! Squeeze every last drop out of those insolent – musical – peasants!”
Prince John, from Disney’s Robin Hood

What I find interesting about all the Internet blather about “The AOL Way,” a leaked document that outlines how the gigantic content company plans to increase the amount of content it produces while optimizing its use and discoverability through search engine optimization is that the reactions to it are pretty much summed up in one paragraph written by Anthony Ha over at venturebeat.com:

Not surprisingly, this document has provoked a lot of comments from the VentureBeat editorial team. A couple of writers are dancing a happy dance that we’re not working at AOL or an organization with similarly straitlaced guidelines. But my boss Owen Thomas reports that he’s taking copious notes.

Both reactions are easily understandable and demonstrate some of the difficulties that many media companies are facing as they either try to shift their focus from print to online, or are trying to build a profitable online enterprise in conjunction with or independent from any print operation.

In a nutshell, AOL’s “way” includes increasing the number of articles their in-house writers write, from what number I don’t know to 5 to ten “quality” posts per day. Find me any newspaper or magazine writer willing to churn through that much copy in a day and you’ll be presenting me with a very short list – and thus the exultation on the part of Ha and his cohorts that they’re not currently employed by AOL.

But looking at how AOL wants to optimize its content and ensure profitability for whatever is produced – to the point that they won’t authorize an article that’ll cost $250 to produce if it can’t produce at least $500 in income – combined with a drive to push in-house writers and freelancers to think more along the lines of current topics, revenue potential with each story, and the potential to drag in more eyeballs with each and every story and you can see why Ha’s boss is taking “copious notes” from the document.

All of this number-crunching, of course, is going to scare the hell out of the average writer. When a story has to be pitched – and pitched quickly – with not only editorial considerations in mind but also revenue considerations and a ballpark estimate on how many eyeballs the story will attract – and it can’t be just a number pulled out of a hat; AOL has fancy algorithms they’ll churn any story idea through to ensure the numbers are right – writers are going to be thrust out of their zones of comfort and, likely, zones of ability. They’ll regard such efforts – well, most of them, some might rise to the challenge – as akin to Disney’s Prince John squeezing the peasants for more money just because he can.

Dan Mitchell, writing at fortune.com, has a more scathing assessment of “The AOL Way”:

[T]he company seems to care far more about appealing to search engines than it cares about appealing to readers, and that it is desperate. So desperate that it's instructing editorial managers to increase traffic by eye-popping amounts in a very short period of time.

"The AOL Way" sounds a lot like "The Bloomberg Way" – the set of heuristics the business-news service has operated from for years. But the similarities stop with the title. While Bloomberg has a reputation for its highly disciplined and demanding (some would say despotic) approach, "The Bloomberg Way" is mainly aimed at producing high-quality business journalism. "The AOL Way" is mainly about ramping up volume and, largely through technological manipulation, squeezing out as much profit as possible from each "piece of content," regardless of its quality.

His criticism may be a little harsh, focusing too much on the drive for numbers and not for the “quality/integrity” that AOL also mentions in the document. He points out that Bloomberg uses a similar approach, albeit one that focuses on quality business journalism. There’s nothing to say AOL couldn’t take a similar approach. Then again, he quotes a New Yorker piece by Ken Auletta that criticizes AOL’s current content as “piffle.” Then again, AOL is investing heavily in citizen journalism, at the same time the crown prince and the court jester of our new anyone-can-publish Internet Age.

But consider what most people go to their local papers for: chicken-dinner journalism. That means they want the basics, they want to know when the fire department is holding their chicken-dinner fundraiser, what the scores were from the local high school games, who is dead, who crossed lines with the police, and such. A lot of the rest of what goes into your average paper goes through a story pitch, but it’s hit and miss as to whether readers will read any of it at all. I’m reminded of the “megaturds” that Dave Barry writes about: the stories that editors and publishers love because they win journalism awards, not because their readers love them.

So the idea of inventing a successful process that gauges the expected profitability and appeal of each story pitched in balance with the writer’s desire to do the story has got to be attractive to editors. Editors can immediately turn to the numbers to show writers that they’ve got to do what they’re being asked, because what they’re being asked to do is going to help them earn their paychecks.

As both a writer and an editor, I can see the advantages and disadvantages to what AOL wants to do.

The Daily -- The Future of Tablet News?

(Borrowed from Electronista.)

Here's how one of my tech-happy, Apple-centric cohorts put it:

We are witness to history.

Watch and learn as Apple DOES what everyone's been talking about for years: Making big money selling digital fishwrappers (Also known as online news).

At 99 cents/week, there are more than 15 million iPad users out there who will be able to view The Daily.

If 10% of iPadders subscribe for one year, that's $700 Million. More than enough to pay the bills. And then there's ad revenue... Should be at least a $1Billion/yr business.

It's projected there will be 30 million more iPad users by year's end. I'll be one of them, so I see this working out well.

It will be fascinating to watch what happens. Every online news organization will be watching closely and taking notes.

I'm not sure, personally, how much of this will pan out, not knowing the specifics beyond what's been blabbed online, and not having an iPad – nor the inclination to subscribe for 99 cents a week for that matter. But what my friend says in his last sentence is absolutely true: This'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

We've all seen how newspapers and magazines have struggled in transitioning their products to the online realm, so I'm not really holding my breath on this one.

What may be the saving grace of this effort is that by targeting iPad users through Apple's App Store, they're hitting an online, mobile community that is -- and this is very important -- warmed already to the idea of paying for online content.

But there are lots and lots of questions.

Will this be cross-platform? If I buy a non-Apple tablet, can I subscribe? And given that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is behind this effort, that right there will scare off some potential subscribers. But then again with News Corp behind all this, this is one company with extremely deep pockets and lots of reporterial resources. I'm not sure they can count on brand loyalty as we've seen with the online-only versions of the Christian Science Monitor and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer with the iPad's current audience, but they've certainly got the journalistic chops to pull it off.

How advertising-intense will the product be, and will users support the advertising? Yes, they don't have the overhead of printing presses, paper, and such -- but staffing and salaries have always been the most expensive parts of news production. To pay one staffer a salary of $60,000 (admittedly high in the journalism biz) will take 60,000 subscribers if the $1 a week is their only income.

One great challenge will be to ensure that content produced for The Daily is unique to The Daily – because it's been proven time and again that if readers can find what they want online for free, they're not going to go behind any paywall, no matter how flashy the content behind that paywall may be. The presser says a companion site will offer about 10 percent of The Daily's content for free, but will retain the rest for its paying customers. That's well and good. But for this to work, The Daily not only will need unique content, but content that's valuable enough to its readers to make them fork over the 99 cents a week. That sounds odd in an industry where people already fork over for subscriptions, but we've seen how well subscriptions have done online. There's so much free stuff out there, the reasoning is why pay for stuff?

Lots of questions. It WILL be fascinating to see what happens.

Anything Overload

Here’s something to think about, and I believe it goes far beyond what Clay Shirky originally intended: When we suffer from Anything Overload, it’s not because something’s happened to the Anything that’s suddenly overwhelming us, but because the filter we’d been using to shelter us from the Anything just broke.

Here’s the video:

In this speech, given last year at an Internet exposition in New York City, Shirky focuses on the phenomenon of information overload, but insists – successfully, I believe – that we’re not in an information overload situation because of the words, images, video and sounds flooding out of our Internet ports and televisions, but because the filters we’ve had in place to prevent such floods have broken, whether by ourselves or by others.

He gives some excellent examples:

First, he maintains that we’ve been on information overload since the advent of the printing press. Up until then, he argues, publishing anything was so time-consuming and cost-prohibitive, the great unwashed masses were protected from it all. When Gutenberg came along, suddenly the cost to publish diminished incredibly, as did the cost of buying the end product.

There’s one filter broken.

Other filters, however, suddenly came into being. Publishing, he says, came with a certain amount of risk. The printer had to print a bunch of copies at a time unless he wanted to go through the process of laying the type again, so the publisher had to risk that what was printed would be bought. So in came an economic filter that judged what was being printed by quality – not everything that came into the print shop, or the publishing house, got printed, because not all of it was worth the risk of printing up.

Then came the Internet, which reduced the costs of publishing astronomically. “There’s no economic logic that says you have to filter for quality before you publish,” Shirky says of the Internet.

There’s another filter broken.

Here’s one I thought about:

About a week ago, I wrote a post about the Gabrielle Goffords shooting, and some of the trouble that occurred with the media putting out bad information as the story broke. In the post, I quoted an Associated Press story which quoted Dan Rather in this context:

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather said that if he were covering the story in the 1970s and 1980s, he would not likely have gone with the NPR report. But if he were in the anchor chair in 2011, he probably would have.

“The pressure is immediate and almost crushing on you and your news organization to match that,” he said. “Mostly what you hear are sets all over the world going to your competition and computers, handheld or otherwise, going to a different site.”

Back in the day, I’m sure, they got bad or incorrect information fed to them at the national news desks – certainly there was lots of confusion, say, about the assassinations of the Kennedys, riots at the 1968 Democratic convention, and other events, but Rather implies they had filters back in the day that helped them curb their enthusiasm.

Bad and incorrect information still flies into the newsrooms today, but, again, Rather implies today it would have gotten out. Not because something in the information changed, but because the filter used back in the day broke.

So what’s the solution?

Here’s what Shirky suggests: We don’t ask what has happened to the information we’re getting, but we do ask ourselves what filter just broke. We look to see what can be done to replace the filter.

Identifying broken filters sounds easy, but I’m fairly certain it isn’t, and fixing them is going to be even more challenging.

With the economic logic gone with Internet publishing, we see that anyone can publish pretty much anything – as evidenced by about 99 percent of the content of my blogs: Trash. And that’s okay. I’m the principal audience of this blog, and if getting some of the trash out of my brain helps the good stuff flow out, then I’m better off, right? Perhaps what I – and most other bloggers – need to do is establish some other kind of logic to replace the economic logic that no longer makes sense in the I Can Publish Anything model.

Replacing economics with quality seems iffy, but that’s a start. I’ve already shelved several pieces that I realize were just too hair-brained to put anywhere. And frankly, I’ve seen the quality filter can be pretty porous – there are plenty of writers out there getting published who write like I do: Not well at all. (Maybe that’s evidence of yet another broken filter.)

Privacy as a filter, as Shirky points out, isn’t much of a driver any more either.

So I don’t know how to fix it. I’ll give it some thought. But don’t expect much.

Verdict: Guilty!

I have four boxes full of books stuffed into the closet under the stairs.

We have at least 70 linear feet of shelving in the study, also stuffed with books. There are books in the upstairs closet. There are books on my desk. And there are books on the shelves and on the desks and under the beds in our childrens' rooms. And I've got at least a hundred books on my iPod Touch.

We're rich with books.

The authors who write them, not so much.

I'm not one of those pirates we hear about, stealing books left and right. The ebooks on my iPod Touch are all in the public domain; I got them legally, for free. Every book in the house has been paid for by someone or other.

But most of them are used. I'd say less than ten percent are new. So that means for the 90 percent left over, the authors haven't seen a dime from us.

That's how it's always been though, right? Somebody buys the book new, reads it, then sends it on its merry way, either to a thrift store, a used book store, or other such outlet. And people like me buy them, and rarely pass them on, because people like me hoard books and are loath to see their collections shrink.

But, I have to ask myself, am I a parasite?

I read earlier today an excellent screed on the evils of downloading unpaid for ebooks, and how this newest type of copyright infringement is literally stifling the careers of some writers. The writer of this post writes with some experience, saying that even when the print demand for her book has slowed, the illegal downloading hasn't. Her fans are literally taking money out of her pocket, and gleefully tell her so.

This author shares some statistics that are pretty sobering and show the breadth and impact e-book piracy can have on an author, and his or her future success:

I’ve been very open about the money I’ve made and not made, to help give the writing community some perspective. So I’m going to be very open about money today. I’ve told you before that I made a $15,000 advance on SHADOWED SUMMER. In two years, I’ve managed to earn back $12,000 of that.

It’s going out of print in hardcover because demand for it has dwindled to 10 or so copies a month. This means I will never get a royalty check for this book. By all appearances, nobody wants it anymore.

But those appearances are deceiving. According to one download site’s stats, people are downloading SHADOWED SUMMER at a rate of 800 copies a week. When the book first came out, it topped out at 3000+ downloads a week.

If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list.

That's some pretty serious impact. She's literally being paupered by her fans who see nothing wrong in praising her without actually paying her.

Worse yet, it doesn't end there:

And let me tell you guys… the sales figures on SHADOWED SUMMER had a seriously detrimental effect on my career. It took me almost two years to sell another book. I very nearly had to change my name and start over. And my second advance? Was exactly the same as the first because sales figures didn’t justify anything more. I don’t blame my publisher. There’s weak demand for my books, according to my sales figures.

Meanwhile, 800 copies of my book (worth about $1200 toward my advance, if everyone paid for a copy,) are being downloaded a week.

Yes, her fans who won't pay up are stifling her career.

This is serious business. This is why newspapers are up in arms about protecting their content and taking it behind paywalls. This is why the MPAA and other organizations are so serious about monitoring illegal copying and distribution of music and films.

And those who pirate and see nothing wrong with it just don't get it: They're thieves, they're hurting other people's careers, and they are, frankly, everywhere.

I glean two important bits of information from this post:

1) Unless you're a Terry Pratchett or the like, you're not going to make scads of money writing books. I'm okay with that. It's the writing, not the payment, that's really fun for me. But still, I'd like to be recompensed if people read and enjoy the stuff I'm writing. I don't want the moon, but I'd like to collect some of that astral dust, if you see what I mean.

2) I might be the pot calling the kettle black. I haven't bought a new book in years. I make no attempts to keep up with current fiction. My view of the writing world is incredibly narrow, despite the sheer tonnage of books we have in the house. And I don't really feel any modicum of guilt. There's too much out there for me to keep up. And I can't afford it, anyway.

Oversharing

See that vaguely dingy brown squarish rectangle to the left of “Fremont” in Fremont Avenue? That’s my house. If you squint, you can almost make out the driveway. You can see the sidewalk that goes from the back of the house to the alley, though the shed on our lot’s southwest corner just looks like a blotch of poorly-watered lawn. That’s the sidewalk our youngest learned to ride his bicycle on. That’s the yard where we set up the inflatable pool, where I mow and sing They Might Be Giants songs, where I once set the grass on fire trying to barbecue.

View Larger Map

Here’s the best street view one can get on Google of my house. Look beyond the mounds of snirt on the side of the road and if you squint your eyes just right, you can see the pine tree that’s completely blocking my home from public view.

View Larger Map

When, I have to ask, will Google bless Sugar City with an aerial view map that doesn’t render our town as Blotchville in the closest view? When, I have to ask, will we see the glorious day when a Google vehicle will trundle down North Fremont Avenue to give the world a view of my house with the sagging rain gutter, cracked driveway, pathetic flower garden, alligator paint job, and mounds of dog poo contributed daily by the neighbor’s Pomeranian?

Probably not going to hold my breath on this one.

Not even on the dog poo. Because what I really should be doing is mounting a 24/7 webcam on the front of the house and streaming it live to the web via this blog – or another blog solely dedicated to the camera – so that the instant that damn dog comes over to take a dump the entire world knows it and with me seeks vengeance.

Or, I could just find the courage to talk to my neighbors pleasantly and in a non-confrontational manner about the dog and his droppings. But that’s not the way we do things these days.

Unless, of course, I believe what Mark Dery, writing at True/Slant says about our propensity for oversharing and believing that the world cares about every tweet, blog post, family vacation, rambling thought, novel installment or whatever amount of digital detritus we can produce.

And I do believe it. And I do believe that only a very, very narrow slice of the people I broadcast to on Facebook, Twitter, my stable of blogs, Good Reads, Uncharted and other sites really care to know what I’m doing.

Writes Dery:

When [web guru Steven] Johnson argues that his “valley of intimate strangers” is “a much richer and more connected place than the old divide between privacy and celebrity worship was,” he’s forgetting that connection doesn’t always equal intimacy, that exhibitionism is a form of social dominance, and that we fetishize fame more than ever.

Isn’t that the motivation for much of what we call oversharing, online? Ours is the age of nanocelebrity: broadcasts created by us and, too often, for us and us alone. How many YouTube videos and blog posts and Flickr sets languish, their discussion threads registering a melancholy zero comments, their feature attractions playing to a spellbound audience of one? We’re all Norma Desmond, ready for our close-up.

Or, to carry a quote of Clay Shirky, another Internet guru, to its obvious conclusion: The Web, Chirky says, has brought us from the era of “Why should we publish this?” to the era of “Why not publish this?” Now it’s quickly taken us to the era of “God in heaven, why did they publish that?”

But that’s okay. Because nobody’s really listening anyway. Or if they are, it’s only because they’re pausing for breath before they let loose with another bit of their own “detached, bite-size yippety-yap.”

It’s just as Darin in the video and Dery writing say: “Friends don’t just randomly shout into the darkenss and hope someone’s listening.”

Here’s what Dery says:

Johnson argues that “something is lost in not bringing” our private selves—for example, “the intensities of sex and romantic love”—into the online space between “privacy and celebrity,” a liminal zone that Johnson calls “the valley of intimate strangers.” Taking the private public enriches our souls, he implies, and makes the public sphere a better place. “Somewhere in the world there exists another couple that would benefit from reading a transcript of your lover’s quarrel last night, or from watching it live on the webcam. Even a simple what-I-had-for-breakfast tweet might just steer a nearby Twitterer to a good meal.”

This is so reality-challenged, so head-in-the-data-cloud it’s effectively its own rebuttal, at least to anyone not lifecasting, 24/7, live from Laputa. What, exactly, is the benefit, to a pair of strangers, in reviewing the unredacted transcript of last night’s reenactment of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, starring me, my wife, and the better part of a bottle of Rumple Minze, let alone watching the whole sordid affair on a webcam? Undoubtedly, someone somewhere would watch this, and maybe even claim to “benefit” from it. But there are those who claim to benefit from 2 Girls 1 Cup. Have we no sense of decency, sir, at long last?

As for the argument that we must Always Connect so that some passing Twit can have a “good meal” through our Random Act of Kindness, oh, ick.

Oh, ick, indeed.

Ron Rosenbaum, writing on a similar vein at Slate.com, reiterates what Dery and others are saying about oversharing.

So why am I still here, shouting into the darkness and hoping someone is listening?

It might be worth dwelling for a moment on the panopticon, because I believe Jeff, who has not demonstrated much familiarity with history before Google or philosophy before Zuckerberg, perfectly illustrates the shallowness of many of today's Internet gurus. Futurists who have no time for the past are now running "integrated marketing J-schools" and "entrepreneurial" programs rather than giving journalism students the deeper understanding of society, history, culture, and humanity that places like Columbia's J-school and Harvard's Nieman fellowship still care about.

And if he is aware of the panopticon and its implications, it's all the more shameful that he doesn't see the kind of digital totalitarianism he is shilling for.

But what grates most is his increasingly shrill and hysterical (in both senses of the word) advocacy of imposed, involuntary "publicness" on everyone. He seems unable to understand the difference between the virtues of transparency when it comes to powerful closed worlds of government and corporate power, and the perils—and invasiveness—of transparency when it comes to individual people.

Well, someone is listening. Me. I’m my audience, for the most part. And I’m okay with that. This blog is a minisec of ideas for me, principally, and for those who stumble upon it, secondarily. This blog gave me a place to monitor my own progress in writing my first complete novel. Whether or not anyone came along for the ride is only a secondary concern of mine. That I used this blog as a tool to help me complete a task I’ve long wanted to complete is good enough for me.

We Need to Merp the Merp to Avoid A Merpity-Merp

If you’ve ever opened your Facebook feed and just found it too overwhelming to read all of the updates you’re getting from your friends, the folks at TigerLogic have something for you.

Or, conversely, you could be just like me and wonder: “Just how hard is it to read a Facebook feed?”

Yes, I’m on Facebook. And on Twitter. I’m a member of – and part-owner of – www.uncharted.net, a social network that focuses on travel, writing and photography. I run six blogs and read about two dozen others on a regular basis. I’m what you might call a bit overstimulated, atechnologically, at least when words and such come into play.

But I manage it all.

Oh, I don’t read everything. I skim a lot. That’s just part of the Internet territory. And I use one of my blogs as kind of a central input spot for everything, so all my other links are just a click or two away. I’ve also got a mobile device I can check while in bed, on the potty, et cetera. I do fairly well, thank you very much.

But the TigerLogic folks, they want to make things easier for folks like me. That’s why they’re offering “PostPost.” A newspaper/newsfeed whatchamacallit that lets you pre-program whose Facebook updates you want to read and presents them in a tight, concise little package. You know, kinda like Facebook.

I love the Internet. This social networking thing is starting to grow on me. But do I really need a service to help me read my services more efficiently? Can’t I do that already in Facbook, either manually or by limiting the number of friends I have?

Or do I really need PostPost, whose architects – or at least press agents – demonstrate a keen grasp of the relevant buzzwords:

Under the hood, PostPost employs jQuery Masonry, created by David DeSandro, to make efficient use of page space and organize posts in tight columns for quick reading. Additionally, PostPost is integrated with TigerLogic's yolink search-enhancing technology to help readers search PostPost's vast real-time content and return actionable search results with key terms in context.

Literally, bodies are hitting the floor as they try to plow through this news release. (And whenever I hear the phrase “news release,” I just have to add: “Engineer finds cure for cancer while saving baby from burning building.”

And, frankly, I think they’re going to hear from the folks at the New York Times and the New York Post and have to explain some of the design coincidences PostPost shares with those publications.

What I’m waiting for is a service that integrates all of my various social media feeds, needs, and wants. Oh. I’ve got that already: this blog. Thanks Santos.

The Rewards -- and Dangers -- of Internet Publishing

In his book "Here Comes Everybody," Clay Shirky makes it a point to say that with the Internet, the question of whether to publish something has transformed from "Why publish this?" to "Why not?" This is supposed to be a liberation of the realm of publishing from the bottlenecks and gatekeepers of traditional publishing, opening up the world to anyone with a website and a message to send out.

That's good, right?

It has a serious drawback: It opens up the world to anyone with a website and a message to send out.

Now getting published means one of two things: Getting published in the traditional sense, as in via some kind of entity with editing and quality controls and a method for paying the producer a little bit of money for the trouble, or the kind of publishing you're not reading on this blog now since this blog has a worldwide audience but NOBODY is coming here.

My gosh, what a choice.

It's liberating, yes, to realize that there are so few gatekeepers and bottlenecks between me and my audience. It's disheartening, however, to realize that, as of right now, my audience doesn't exist. And you know what, now that everyone can publish, the traditional publishing houses that give you money rather than fifteen picoseconds of Internet fame, they're trolling Oh yeah, they're trolling. But if you don't have a built-in audience now -- one you've had to work for, of course, through your labors -- they won't touch you. The playing field hasn't been leveled, it's just been digitized.

Not that we shouldn't have audiences we hand-build. That's the great advantage of the Internet age. But to "get published" in the traditional sense, you'd better have a hot commodity and the audience to back it up. You can't just have a good book now -- it seems you've got to have a following. It's like the publishing houses have seen the light and realize that maybe they can save a little money by choosing commodities from the flotsam of the Internet that already have a following so they've got a built-in audience for their product once it starts rolling off the assembly line. So it's pretty much what the Amigos did in "Shootin' for Love."

Is the Internet Built for Pessimists?

I suppose this all goes back to the old newspaper adage: We don’t report on the plane landings. Just the crashes.

But I have to wonder: Does the instant media access/frenzy combined with the easy anonymity of the Internet make the Internet perfect for pessimists? I think so. Try to make a positive comment – especially in the realm of human behavior – and you’re going to be called a rose-tinted-glasses-wearing Pollyanna wannabee, at least on the sites I visited over the weekend.

Jack Cafferty – and his forehead – are but one example, wherein Mr. Cafferty trots out the typical media litany of bad Black Friday behavior, then shakes his head while asking the question “What’s happened to us?”

Well, Jack, nothing really. The media are still focusing on the bad behavior while ignoring the behavior that’s acceptable to exemplary. You’re feeding the pessimism you see in life without realizing there’s so much to admire in humanity. But I know that the Pollyanna attitude doesn’t drag eyeballs to your blog, so hey, I understand.

It's an old trick, and one I played a few times as a journalist. But the stories that I did which I remember with the most fondness are the ones that maintained a positive approach because, well, the news was positive: Two individuals with Down syndrome marrying each other, a local expert in wilderness survival getting to help out with the film "Cast Away," and any other number of stories I wrote. I miss doing those kinds of stories. The bad news/pessimist I gotchas, I don't miss much at all.

Fark.com as well has been a deep well of negative-vibe merchantry as of late. The collapse of a roof at a Salvation Army center in Colorado really brought out the ugliness.

Then again, it could be me. I call myself an optimist, but maybe -- just maybe, mind you -- the pessimists' posts are more interesting to read. Though interesting not in the "I agree with you" sense but interesting in the "wow this guy/gal must be a real train wreck and a ball at parties" sense.

I, for one, will continue to look on the positive side of things. Humans may have their failings, but that doesn’t mean humanity is of itself intrinsically evil. I’ll even look for the good among the media reports I see – though that task is a bit harder to accomplish.

My Brain Hurts -- An Exploration into the Business of Cheating

It appears I went about getting my masters degree in English the wrong way.

Here’s how I did it: When a professor gave an assignment, I read books, magazine articles, did a lot of Googling, then sat down at the computer and wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote and wrote some more. Then I’d get feedback, from the professor and my peers. Then I’d go research and read and write some more. I eventually would get to a point where I’d decide the paper was finished, good enough, and ready to be submitted. And when I got the grades I got and read the professor’s comments I could see, yeah, that’s about right.

I earned my masters degree with a 3.96 GPA.

My wife – who is now in the same program I finished in July 2009 – is also doing it wrong. She’s doing her assignments the same way I did them. She’s got one advantage, if you can call it that: She knows a recent graduate from the self-same program whom she can consult for advice, work with as a sounding-board and otherwise check in with when she’s got a question.

But she’s not taking my papers and using them as her own. The only things we’re sharing are textbooks, the notes I scrawled in the margins, and conversations as we take our weekend walks.

But according to Ed Dante, writing this week for the Chronicle of Higher Education, the way my wife and I approached our education is entirely outside the norm, or at least the norm he sees.

Dante (using a fake name for this article) writes essays for an online “custom essay” company, where students desperate for a grade can go to find folks like him to write their papers, their graduate theses, their business proposals, the entries into the seminary, for them.

Both his article and the comments that follow it are enlightening. And kinda scary.

He sees students come to him from three categories: Those learning English as a second language, lazy rich kids, and students he describes as “hopelessly deficient,” and given some of the e-mails he reproduces in this article, it’s clear to see what they’re deficient in, unless they happen to have sent all of the messages to him on International Talk Like A Pirate Day. (An example: “You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?”)

Dante insists these students desperately need help in learning how to learn, and it amazed that more of his stable of cheaters aren’t caught in the act:

You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students' writing. I have seen the word "desperate" misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn't write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren't getting it.

For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?

Responses in the comments range from “Nobody ever gets by me” to “Online courses are cash cows, cheating considerations go out the window” to “Just roll with it.” I’m not sure I buy into any of those responses.

What’s eerie about Dante’s work is that, frankly, anyone with a modicum of writing and researching skill and a complete lack of moral compass could do this, easily. I’m reminded of the saying “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” Or as Mr. Dante says, just lie about your expertise and know just enough to fake it:

Customers' orders are endlessly different yet strangely all the same. No matter what the subject, clients want to be assured that their assignment is in capable hands. It would be terrible to think that your Ivy League graduate thesis was riding on the work ethic and perspicacity of a public-university slacker. So part of my job is to be whatever my clients want me to be. I say yes when I am asked if I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I say yes when I am asked if I have professional training in industrial/organizational psychology. I say yes when asked if I have ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered time machine and documented my efforts in a peer-reviewed journal.

The subject matter, the grade level, the college, the course—these things are irrelevant to me. Prices are determined per page and are based on how long I have to complete the assignment. As long as it doesn't require me to do any math or video-documented animal husbandry, I will write anything.

There is part of Dante’s story that I find a bit laughable and yet at the same time a bit chilling. He is, obviously, a highly-motivated writer, one who wants to write for a living and to be recompensed at the level of effort he’s willing to put in. He tells this story of his college years:

Although my university experience did not live up to its vaunted reputation, it did lead me to where I am today. I was raised in an upper-middle-class family, but I went to college in a poor neighborhood. I fit in really well: After paying my tuition, I didn't have a cent to my name. I had nothing but a meal plan and my roommate's computer. But I was determined to write for a living, and, moreover, to spend these extremely expensive years learning how to do so. When I completed my first novel, in the summer between sophomore and junior years, I contacted the English department about creating an independent study around editing and publishing it. I was received like a mental patient. I was told, "There's nothing like that here." I was told that I could go back to my classes, sit in my lectures, and fill out Scantron tests until I graduated.

Soon thereafter, he recounts, eh fell into writing papers for fellow students, and then for complete strangers who contacted him for help:

I didn't much care for my classes, though. I slept late and spent the afternoons working on my own material. Then a funny thing happened. Here I was, begging anybody in authority to take my work seriously. But my classmates did. They saw my abilities and my abundance of free time. They saw a value that the university did not.

It turned out that my lazy, Xanax-snorting, Miller-swilling classmates were thrilled to pay me to write their papers. And I was thrilled to take their money. Imagine you are crumbling under the weight of university-issued parking tickets and self-doubt when a frat boy offers you cash to write about Plato. Doing that job was a no-brainer. Word of my services spread quickly, especially through the fraternities. Soon I was receiving calls from strangers who wanted to commission my work. I was a writer!

In other words, rather than pursuing his novels (and here, maybe I’m uninformed; he may have published his novel, but given the story he tells in this article, I doubt it) he takes the easy writing path, one that let him immediately benefit from his skill, rather than one that led him gradually to success. He does exactly what he chides his clients for, and what he rolls his eyes at academia for doing: He takes the easy path and doesn’t count on getting caught, or, indeed, doesn’t see much wrong in what he’s done, though he says in the article he plans on “retiring” from the business.

Unfortunately, there are those who read this article and respond in the comments, basically passing along the message that, like Dante’s students, they just don’t get it as well:

THIS ARTICLE IS just f*** awesome. You are such a great writer, the delivery is just great, and I could have read a whole book of it.

Is it weird that I find your amorality just inspiring? (there is no irony there--I'm serious).

This was just such a good read. If you are interested, I'd love to interview you on my blog [redacted].com. I don't endorse ghostwriting, but your writing was the best thing I've read all month.

If you are interested, take a look at my blog or follow me on twitter @[redacted]

And another:

For those troubled by the phenomenon, consider what sorts of assignments you ask students to complete. Consider how long you spend grading.

Term paper writers are cranking out BS--the author is very clear about that. That's how he writes so much in so little time without reading or researching--just using google and amazon reviews!

The fact that students are passing courses while turning in shoddy work is the fault of instructors. Again, it's clear that the term paper author is not concerned about quality.

And for everyone whining and crying about the pseudonymous writer, well, I'd rather make 66K a year with no benefits than 28K a year as an adjunct (with no benefits)! Sign me the f*** up!

Some do, however, understand the problem, and think they know how to solve it:

There is a sure-fire way to put Ed Dante and others like him out of business. I know, because I've done it. You supervise every piece of student writing from first draft to final submission. Along the way you actually teach people instead of complaining nonstop about their ignorance. You will have to (gasp) give reasons for rejecting this or that piece. Yes, you do have to read reams of not-very-good writing. And you do have to fail the truly incompetent. That will make you Not-The-Students'-Best-Buddy. But perhaps all this sounds too much like real work.

And another:

I wonder if professors and teachers ever read their students' non-academic writing. If they did, they'd probably be horrified at how many American college students (our "best and brightest") can't write coherent sentences, spell, or correct their own typos. And they'd likely be wondering if the passable papers they're seeing are actually written by these students or by a professional.

I say this because until recently I was involved in accepting (and usually, heavily editing) student submissions for news articles at our college paper. The humorous examples of incoherent e-mails that "Dante" has peppered his article with, are not so funny. They are absolutely the way most students really write. Do professors know this?

In all, it makes one weep for the species.

Still, through it all, I look to Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac for inspiration on how I’d like to achieve my status as a writer:

Ay, and then?. . .
Seek a protector, choose a patron out,
And like the crawling ivy round a tree
That licks the bark to gain the trunk's support,
Climb high by creeping ruse instead of force?
No, grammercy! What! I, like all the rest
Dedicate verse to bankers?--play buffoon
In cringing hope to see, at last, a smile
Not disapproving, on a patron's lips?
Grammercy, no! What! learn to swallow toads?
--With frame aweary climbing stairs?--a skin
Grown grimed and horny,--here, about the knees?
And, acrobat-like, teach my back to bend?--
No, grammercy! Or,--double-faced and sly--
Run with the hare, while hunting with the hounds;
And, oily-tongued, to win the oil of praise,
Flatter the great man to his very nose?
No, grammercy! Steal soft from lap to lap,
--A little great man in a circle small,
Or navigate, with madrigals for sails,
Blown gently windward by old ladies' sighs?
No, grammercy! Bribe kindly editors
To spread abroad my verses? Grammercy!
Or try to be elected as the pope
Of tavern-councils held by imbeciles?
No, grammercy! Toil to gain reputation
By one small sonnet, 'stead of making many?
No, grammercy! Or flatter sorry bunglers?
Be terrorized by every prating paper?
Say ceaselessly, 'Oh, had I but the chance
Of a fair notice in the "Mercury"!'
Grammercy, no! Grow pale, fear, calculate?
Prefer to make a visit to a rhyme?
Seek introductions, draw petitions up?
No, grammercy! and no! and no again! But--sing?
Dream, laugh, go lightly, solitary, free,
With eyes that look straight forward--fearless voice!
To cock your beaver just the way you choose,--
For 'yes' or 'no' show fight, or turn a rhyme!
--To work without one thought of gain or fame,
To realize that journey to the moon!
Never to pen a line that has not sprung
Straight from the heart within. Embracing then
Modesty, say to oneself, 'Good my friend,
Be thou content with flowers,--fruit,--nay, leaves,
But pluck them from no garden but thine own!'
And then, if glory come by chance your way,
To pay no tribute unto Caesar, none,
But keep the merit all your own! In short,
Disdaining tendrils of the parasite,
To be content, if neither oak nor elm--
Not to mount high, perchance, but mount alone!

Derp Redux, Plus Beam Removal

So Cooks Source has officially closed up shop, at least temporarily, to deal with the imboglio of a few weeks ago.

Looks like they did so Nov. 4, after their Facebook page got hijacked, after their local advertisers got harassed. Their website is now home only to a rather glib statement that's half apology, half shame-on-you to the people who did the hijacking and harassment.

To their credit, they did apologize to Monica Gaudio, the writer whose piece they used without her permission:

Last month an article, “American as Apple Pie -- Isn’t,” was placed in error in Cooks Source, without the approval of the writer, Monica Gaudio. We sincerely wish to apologize to her for this error, it was an oversight of a small, overworked staff. We have made a donation at her request, to her chosen institution, the Columbia School of Journalism. In addition, a donation to the Western New England Food Bank, is being made in her name. It should be noted that Monica was given a clear credit for using her article within the publication, and has been paid in the way that she has requested to be paid.

Note they don't admit to any systemic abuse or plagiarism, though that was an accusation lobbed at them. I don't know whether it's true or not. But I also don't know whether this article was used "in error," that it was "an oversight of a small, overworked staff." Sorry. Don't buy that. You may have a small staff, and you may be overworked, but that doesn't mean you can't take a few minutes to try to contact the author of an original piece before you decide to not only publish it yourself but also offer a rather stupid explanation for why you did it.

It's true that people upset at what Cooks Source did should not have hijacked the site's Facebook account or started up a bogus Twitter user to further harass the company. And while I'm not exactly sure what these same people might have done to harass the magazine's advertisers, I certainly don't think it's outside morality to contact an advertiser and say you're not pleased with the outfit where their ads appear.

But my wife had the following discussion earlier today: Do we sometimes treat the Internet as public domain? I had to answer that yes we do. Sometimes I'll search the net to find a photo or illustration to go with a blog posting here, and I don't ask permission. I use YouTube clips that no one asked the original copyright owner if they could use them. I can try to shield myself behind the feeling that since I'm not making money on this blog, I can use what I please, but that still doesn't feel right. Cooks Source statement, ironically, makes for good reading on this subject:

This issue has made certain changes here at Cooks Source. Starting with this month, we will now list all sources. Also we now request that all the articles and informational pieces will have been made with written consent of the writers, the book publishers and/or their agents or distributors, chefs and business owners. All submission authors and chefs and cooks will have emailed, and/or signed a release form for this material to Cooks Source and as such will have approved its final inclusion. Email submissions are considered consent, with a verbal/written follow-up. Recipes created in the Cooks Source Kitchen are owned by Cooks Source and as such approval is given for chefs and cooks in our area to use them. Artwork used is created by our staff, or is royalty-free or purchased “clip-art.”

However: Cooks Source can not vouch for all the writers we have used in the past, and in the future can only check to a certain extent. Therefore, we will no longer accept unrequested articles, nor will we work with writers or illustrators unless they can prove they are reputable people, provide their sources, and who, in our estimation, we feel our readers and advertisers can trust and rely on for accuracy and originality. All sources will be listed with the articles, along with the permission, where necessary.

So, dare I make some of the same pronouncements: Use only in-house art and such for this blog, or stuff that I've paid for or at least asked permission to use? And where and how may I apply the following principles:

• The fair use doctrine?
• Things that are truly, legally, in the public domain?
• And what about Creative Commons items?

And what would I do if someone whose stuff I'm using without permission came to me and said, cease and desist? Well, ceasing and desisting, with a sincere apology, would certainly be first and foremost on my mind.

So, expect to see more original illustrations here.

These are issues that anyone on the Internet needs to be aware of, wary of, and ready to react to as necessary. And finding the beam that's in our own eyes while we clamor for the removal of the mote from the other's eye is equally as important.

Still, part of our discussion this morning also went like this:

My wife does a fair amount of scouring the web for Cub Scout stuff. She finds a lot. She uses a lot. She always cites sources and gives credit where credit is due, but she's never asked anyone permission to use what she's using. Should she have to? Isn't the intent of putting stuff on the Internet that it be read and used and observed and enjoyed by others? Do we only cross a line when we get paid when we use someone else's stuff without permission? Current copyright law argues against that notion. Even the use -- outside of the vagaries of the fair use doctrine -- constitutes theft. All the victim has to do is claim harm, not merely that the profiteer profited off the pilfering.

To App or Not to App

A few weeks ago, I posted the following to Uncharted’s blog:

From what I hear, smartphones are all the rage. They’re the latest thing. They’re – I think the word is – keen.

I’ll tie an onion to my belt and take your word for it. And John Milligan’s. He successfully used his Android smartphone to take a photo and upload it to his personal profile at www.uncharted.net.

Big deal, you say. Folks have been doing similar things since the time we called nickels bees and could say nonsensical things like “Gimme five bees for a quarter.”

But this is significant.

We want our Explorers to use our website through a mobile world. Why be tethered to a desk to make an update to your profile, upload a photo, or even a story, if you’re good at touchscreen or itty-bitty keyboard typing? We expect our Explorers are mobile now, and will only get more mobile as the future unfolds.

John’s shown us it can be done. Huzzah for him, I say. He makes me want to replace our circa 2001 T-Mobile cameraless cell phone with that nifty little bowling game on it for something newer. Tell me, do they make a smartphone with dials now? I like to make sparks when I place a call . . .

Maybe that last sentiment is more true than I thought.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project (and I’m really beginning to enjoy Pew’s I&ALP for the treasure-trove of information that it is) revealed today that even though social media sites like Foursquare are all the rage among the brainy types, nobody’s really checking in through social media mobile apps.

I have to wonder about that. I check in using Facebook, Twitter, and Good Reads apps, but then again, maybe I am one of the mediocre 4 percent of adults age 30 to 49 who do so.

And it’s not exactly a game for the young, either, for only 8 percent of those ages 18-38 – Uncharted’s principal audience – checks in using apps.

Here’s what the study says:

In its first report on the use of “geosocial” or location-based services, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project finds that 4% of online adults use a service such as Foursquare or Gowalla that allows them to share their location with friends and to find others who are nearby. On any given day, 1% of internet users are using these services.

This is the second survey of the Pew Internet Project to ask about such “geosocial” or location-based services. The current number shows little change from the first time this question was asked, in a May 2010 survey, when 5% of adult internet users said they had used such a site.

Uncharted isn't exactly location-based, but we do use the buzzword "geosocial" in our talk, so it's probably wise to heed the results of the study, or at least take them into consideration as we figure out what to do as we allocate our scarce resources.

Does this mean outfits like Uncharted shouldn’t make smartphone apps? No. But it does mean that as we want to build audiences, we need to look at our users’ behavior and find out if they’re among the few who are eager to use location-based apps, or if they’re content to access our site via other means. If they’re app-hungry, then we direct our resources in that direction. If not, then we take a step back from app-land to see instead what we can do to make our website more user-friendly.

This is especially pertinent for us as even though we do have a programmer on board now, we do not have an app developer. We’d either have to find someone willing to build an app for us for free, or pay for the privilege. As it is now, we may be better served by having our in-house programmer work on making the website better.

So once again we need to go to our users to find out what they’d like before we decide what they’d like before asking them.

Beware Payola

This is actually an idea we’ve pondered at Uncharted: Finding a person, place or thing willing to pay us to promote them as, say, a wonderful place to visit, an outdoor guide/guru/shaman/whatever, or an altogether excellent bit of gear that is essential for any Explorer to have.

Seems we have some homework to do on it, as the Federal Trade Commission says this is a no-no, unless one says in highway-style lettering that said content is bought and paid for.

According to Forbes (via CNNmoney.com) this is a big issue for social media folks like us who are all gung-ho on making money but dumb enough not to think clearly about the legal implications.

The gist of these stories is that disclosure – easy enough to accomplish on a blog posting, or, say, on a story at Uncharted – isn’t as easy to do with limited-character social media like Twitter and Foursquare. Still, the whole concept bears keeping in mind as we ponder what we have to outline as policy at Uncharted in order to stay on the right side of the law.