Prayer to the Idaho Internet Gods

I got this e-mail from my friend Alan in Utah late last night:

OH IDAHO INTERNET GOD!

WE PRAY THEE TO

WATCH OVER OUR UPLOADS

AND TO HELP US

WATCH VIDEO AT THE

VERY LEAST IN SLOW MOTION

PLEASE BE KIND TO US

IN THIS OUR HOUR OF NEED

He says this only half in jest, as there have been many times when our good ol' "Idaho Internet" has made Skype calls and photo transfers and even simple e-mails a rather difficult thing to accomplish. That has been so thusfar this weekend, with the Internet basically pooping out on us last night and the night this morning and even part of my knee.*

So last night I did the stupid, standard things I have to do to try to ensure the problem isn't on our end. That involves the industry standard of unplugging everything, waiting a few minutes, then plugging everything back in again. Didn't work. So then I ran virus scanners on both computers, found problems on both, cleaned them up, then tried again. No luck, except for now, obviously. I think, given that the service pooped out at night and at about the same time each night, that they're doing some kind of work on the network locally. Or all those schlubs at BYU-Idaho are streaming their Netflix and hogging all the bandwidth.

But now everything is working again. Not sure if they network fixing is done, if the students have stopped the streaming, or if the prayer to the Idaho Internet gods worked. I'm putting my money on the prayer, actually.

*"As the Stomach Turns," episode I'm not sure. You have to watch BOTH PARTS.

Story Genesis: Orderville Pants Rebellion

I don't confess to reading a lot of so-called Mormon lit. I do enjoy Jack Weyland's short story, "The Phone Call," but it's more for the goofy film than for the fact that Weyland wrote it.

But I've got the genesis for my own little Mormon lit novel. Here it is, or at least the opener:

If Pa tells me one more time about how hard it was living on the Big Muddy, I'm going to Moab.

If Pa tells me more time we've got to be like the people of Ammon, I'm going into the canyon and I'm never coming back.

And if Pa tells me I can't have a new pair of pants, I'm jumping the train at the depot and not getting off until Ogden. Or maybe even Pocatello. I can't take it any longer.

And here's the inspiration.

I just think this could be a fun story. Not that I like the idea of the United Order being toppled by one kid wanting a new pair of pants when the community decided they couldn't afford it. Okay, so I do like that angle. But of all the things to get wound up about -- a pair of pants.

Sunday Limericks

Oh the things parents will do to cajole their children.

I wrote the following three painful limericks last Sunday in an attempt to get Liam over a big case of the grumps. It did work:

Liam has a scowl on his face
To his mood he's taken a mace
Wants to do something fun,
But the calendar says "Sun."
That scowl is just frozen in place.

Liam's trying real hard not to smile
His hands on his lips he doth pile.
He sits there and giggles.
Gives the bench a good wiggle.
A good mood he seeks to revile.

Now Liam is happy again
On his face a watermelon grin.
His eyes all a-sparkle
Face bright, not so darkle
The mood battle his Daddy did win.

I know. Niles Crane would be appalled.

DOOMED, Part II

So, what do you do as a writer if, as we discussed yesterday, you're already DOOMED?

Well, according to my publishing acquaintance, this:

The situation will be specific to the publisher and author negotiation. I would advise disclosing it since later discovery could be a contractual violation that would seriously impact not only that contract but future possibilities. (We are a pretty tight group and we do talk to each other about authors--especially problem authors.)

I would advise to not continue the habit. If he needs to put it up on a blog to develop the ideas, he should restrict the blog to only credible evaluators--a very small number--basically an online writing group. Then he would not have to disclose it being out in the public.

That right there, friends, is why this blog and the Targhee Writers Blog went private yesterday. I know, classic case of closing the barn door after the cows have already gotten out. But better to stop the potential damage now than let love lie bleeding.

As you can tell, I've done a lot of nervous reading of the Internets over the past few days, trying to sort this situation out. Te advice I'm getting from my publishing acquaintance is pretty much in line with the vast majority of what I'm reading, so the walls went up. If you're reading this, obviously, you're part of that "credible evaluators" group, so if anyone like, you know, the FBI and such, call you up to ask, that is exactly what you tell them.

The disclosure thing seems to make perfect sense. Better to hear it from the author than for the publisher to find out for themselves. That goes with a lot of things, from publishing to the workplace to marriage. So if Michelle is suddenly talking about some startling revelations on her Facebook page, you'll know what's up.

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:

Doomed. DOOMED!

(This video clip used for commentary purposes under the fair use doctrine. And I’m also advertising FedEx.)

Yes, part of me thinks I’m doomed. I have – against all common sense and decency, it appears – used up my first rights of publication, never to be resurrected, by posting the bits and pieces that make up the first draft of my novels on this very blog.

This is what the landscape of the doomed looks like: Deleted pages. Soon-to-be-deleted posts. And what’s left? The shallow shell of a man doomed – doomed, I say – never to publish, or at least never to publish the drivel that has been published here.

At least at premium prices.

Maybe.

Here’s some advice from a fellow in the publishing business (emphasis his):

"This is a good place to mention the hazards of e-publishing. Publishing is a lot like buying a car. First-time rights are the most valuable rights you have--just as a new car drops significantly in value the moment it's driven off the lot by a new owner.

If you publish ANY part of your manuscript on the Internet--even a private blog--and the publisher finds out about it, you are considered to have used up your first rights and they can cut the value of your manuscript by a ton.

Obviously this is a contentious area but I've seen it over and over again. I strongly recommend that if you are planning to submit something for publication you do not publish it on the Internet even for review by your writing group. Send it as a Word attachment in e-mail. Do not even put up snippets on your blog or FB."

Help this author! For he is doomed.

Or maybe not.

Here’s another perspective:

Many posts have been written about whether or not to share samples of your unpublished work on your site. Here’s my take on it. I believe it’s okay to post something you’re revising if you’re looking for feedback as long as it’s clear that’s what you’re doing. You don’t want anyone to think that jumble of words represents a final product. This includes query letters and a chapter here and there. However, I wouldn’t post a synopsis or a large chunk of one manuscript on your site unless it’s a part of your promotional material from your published novel (and your publisher has given you permission to do so.)

[From a comment on said post] Unfortunately, I haven't read an actual explanation as to why publishers won't touch something that's been "published" on a blog. I have a few guess[es] though. Editors want writers to have an online presence because they believe your followers will buy your book. Now, if these same followers have already been exposed to parts of the book, maybe they wouldn't buy it because the "new book factor" isn't there. Of course, you can flip the coin and say maybe they would buy the book because they are excited to see how it ends or they enjoyed what they'd read so far.

So, what could it be then? Is it that publishers simply want to control what material their authors put out there because it not only affects the author's brand, but the publisher's as well? I'm really not sure.

So perhaps I’m only semi-doomed?

Part of me has to wonder if this isn’t a knee-jerk reaction on the part of publishers, feeling threatened by the Internet age, as are many traditional word outlets. Because surely this kind of situation can’t be unique to the Internet. True, the Internet does make it painfully easy to be published – and thus become doomed – than any other publishing method, but surely authors have passed around unpublished excerpts and manuscripts in the hopes of getting feedback without running into the loss of first use publication. And that’s the primary goal of me putting my stuff on this blog: I’d like input from others on how to make it better.

As I have mentioned, the manuscript to “Considering How to Run” has been severely edited, and none of that edited material has been “published” on this blog. Am I to lose out on first publication use of my novel because I put the first draft of it up, in installments, on this blog, in the hopes of finishing it first of all, second of all, getting outside help to make it better?

And I have to wonder: What’s all the fuss? I feel like Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP when stereo store owner Del asks out loud how the radio station can afford to do a remote at his store for such a cheap price. Johnny responds: “You’ll understand when you see the response you get.” It’s quite possible people have read the manuscripts and postings I’ve put here. But Google Analytics tells me only on random occasions are the visits to my blog prompted by my writerly postings, and most of the visits to the excerpt and manuscript posts and pages are bouncers anyway. Perhaps analytics can be the author’s friend (and foe) if a publisher demurs at publishing because the first rights have been used. The doomed one could show, through analytics, that the posts weren’t all that popular. And then the publisher can use that as more evidence to pass on the manuscript as well.

Doomed it is. Doomed!

Search Engine Boobization

I follow a fellow on Twitter who goes by the monicker “Seaslug of Doom.” One of Seaslug's Twitter schticks is to, once and a while, post a tweet featuring three words that are “unlikely to get auto-followers.” Some of his word lists have included:

angelet, annelid, and anthropogeny

andrology, anemotropism, and anenterous

For a while after I started following him, and after I started laughing at his tweets – because I've noticed that when I used some trigger tweet terms, I'd get followers that would quickly disappear when they realized I wasn't tweeting constantly on their pet subject – I pondered setting up a string of fake Twitter accounts to indeed follow him for his extended vocabulary. But I'm generally a lazy soul, and gave up on it.

But that brought to the fore the interesting world of search engine optimization. Learning to seach engine optimize is, of course, the wave of the future for the Internet. Search engine optimization, (SEO), when you get right down to it, helps optimize your Internet searches so when people search the Internet for topics that interest them, say, from search engine optimization to optimizing their website for search engines, they find you.

That paragraph is, of coure, my poor attempt at emulating the stilted language you find in articles that are search engine optimized. Farhad Manjoo over at Slate.com does a much better job of it than I. (So good, in fact, his article shows up on Page 1 when I searched for "Search Engine Optimization" in Google. But more on that, and my penchant for Slate.com articles, later.)

At Uncharted, we don't officially use SEO in our articles. I frown upon it, because of the stilted, silly way it makes articles sound. About the closest we get to such shenanigans is in the title or subhead to our articles, we try to include the name of the place we're writing about. I think that's fair and natural.

And, hopefully, so does Google. Because as Manjoo points out, there may be sites who know SEO, but if the writing isn't there to back up what the searchers are searching for, they won't stay at a site long. I can look at the Google Analytics for my own stable of blogs and see how many new visitors simply bounce out of my site when they realize that their search has led them to the infantile backwaters my blogs inhabit.

Anyway, on to Manjoo:

Search engines' algorithms are getting better at detecting keyword gaming, they're beginning to learn searchers' preferences, and they're using social-networking signals to figure out what you, personally, might consider a good or bad article. The other problem for the new AOL-HuffPo is the rise of social networks as a replacement for search engines. Did you go to Google to search for a story about the Huffington Post's purchase, or did you see the news on Facebook or Twitter? Those social networking links are becoming a bigger share of every news site's traffic; as one of my Slate colleagues pointed out, in the Twitter age, "optimizing for Google results is a little like going out and buying the best VCR on the market."

I'm not quite to the search engine stage in finding trigger material – I do tend to go to Twitter, Facebook, and the bigger news sites (and to aggregators) to find what interests me. I will do searches, however, to find similar information, or articles on a similar topic by a number of authors. And like the bouncers from my blog, I'll bail quickly on a site that isn't offering the information I want.
What's even more frustrating are the sites that use SEO in a way that's hidden. They want to show up in any search, so their SEO data is embedded somewhere the average Internet idiot like me can't see, so when I click on a page that's supposed to be helpful according to Google, the term I'm searching for doesn't even show up on the clicked page.

And I'm not a big fan of the content farms that are using SEO to clutter Google with poorly written information. If I want poorly written stuff, I read my own blog, thank you very much. But places like eHow and About.com just drive me nuts. I'd rather use Wikipedia.

Good news is, according to Manjoo, search engines may quickly be able to learn what sites I prefer and thus not show me results from sites I don't frequent:

The answer is … it depends. All Google results are personalized—that is, links you see in response to a specific query may be different from the ones I see for the same query. They differ according to a number of variables—what sites I favor, where I'm located, what device I'm using, and other secret factors. At the moment, search engines' personalization algorithms aren't fine-grained enough to give everyone their ideal article in response to a query like "worst cell phone on earth," but there's no reason to believe they won't get there: In the future, Google will know whether you favor Slate over HuffPo, or whether you like original articles versus summaries, or whether you're a fan of slide shows more than text, and it will serve you the article that's most appropriate for you. And as this happens, Google will surely diminish the weight it now gives to the keywords HuffPo jams in its articles.

That's both good and bad. Good in providing me better information, per my point of view. Bad as in it proved me information per my point of view, perhaps limiting my perspective on the subject (especially in topics that tend to have a slant such as politics, climate change, et cetera). So maybe getting the raw results of a search is better than a personalized result. Which is why Seaslug of Doom's tweets just entertain me so: He probably piques the interest of at least one twit per word.

Something

NOTE: Not quite sure what this is yet. Or where it fits.

We haven't lived through everything yet
As to the universe, we are young
Only empathy can substitute for time
Time is easier to master

A Pool Prediction

I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction.

But first, a little discussion:

There seem to be “a lot” of people upset about the pool soon to be finished in Rexburg. I’m not exactly sure from where the upset stems. Some of what I’ve read is that people are mad that the city is building an outdoor pool complex during an economic downturn. Some are also mad the pool isn’t an all-season pool. Some are also mad that the pool is being built through a local improvement district or some such urban renewal finagling.

A blogger for the local paper has basically read the writing on the wall from all the people telling them the pool is bad, a bad, a baaaaaaad idea and condemned the city for pursuing the pool over the reasoned voices of the Pappy O’Dan’l constitchency. The blogger, Robert Patten, cites a lot of anecdotal information, from letters to the editor to “nonscientific” polls conducted on the paper’s website.

So the cranks who write the letters and the people who follow the old Internet adage of “vote early and vote often” are the reasoned masses behind this quasi-official rancor?

I find it funny that the pool naysayers insist they haven’t been listened to. Various groups within and without the city government have been proposing and exploring how to pay for a new pool since at least the early 1990s. The naysayers are simply not getting exactly what they want, so they claim they’ve not been listened to. That’s one of the oldest public-outcry tricks in the book, second only to making the outcry known to the local paper. Yeah, we got trouble, right here in River City.

And maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe the majority of folks living in Rexburg are as upset about the pool or its various orbiting mini-scandals as Patten says.

Nevertheless, here’s the prediction: When the pool opens, it’s going to be crowded. And remain crowded. And the summer after that. And the summer after that. Those who use the pool probably won’t remember what mayor or city council members pushed the project through – though, rest assured, there will be a self-congratulatory plaque put up somewhere – but they’ll be pleased the pool is there for them to use.

Used under the fair use doctrine for commentary purposes.

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.