Internet

Gwyneth on Politics

~ Cheryl

I’ll have more to say about Spirit by Gwyneth Jones when I have finished reading it. However, I would like to share a small section of it with you now.

The book is set in the same universe as the Aleutian Trilogy, but many years later after the Aleutians have left Earth. Our planet is now ruled by the Chinese, who still have an obsession with bureaucracy and correctness of thought. The heroine, Bibi, is being interviewed by her boss, Verity, on Bibi’s first day at work as a Social Practice Officer in Baykonur.

“I have a question for you, Bibi,” said Verity, level-eyed. “You should know the answer. What is the difference between a rebel and a Reformer?”

“Rebels are just attention-seekers,” answered Bibi. “Their aim is self-aggrandisement through destructive tactics; they are parasites on the system, offering no genuine opposition. Reformers are sincere. They believe they can change the world, for the good of others, and will always work to that end, even at great cost to themselves.”

Her supervisor didn’t smile but she nodded, looking mollified. “You may go. Think about getting a soc’. It would be a great help to you.”

Bibi sped away full of energy, scorning the elevator tubes, flying down the abyssal, plunging stairwells: mentally completing her response to Verity Tan’s test question, adding the conclusion she had tactfully withheld.

And therefore rebels, who can easily be paid off, are harmless or even useful to the State: although sometimes they have to be destroyed, as you’d rid a dog of fleas. Whereas Reformers are truly dangerous fanatics, high minded enemies of order, reason and humanity —

It occurs to me that this is very relevant to the way in which political discussion is generally conducted on the Internet.

By the way, a “soc'” is an eye implant for your computer system. Bibi was tactful about her answer because Verity is a supporter of the Reform movement, and also because Bibi’s family were rebels whom the State found it necessary to destroy.

The Economics of Free

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

There is an interesting article by Chris Anderson in the WSJ. It is mainly trailing his new book, but the subject matter is concerned with business models in an online world where so much is given away free.

One thing that the article has confirmed for me is that Twitter has no business model. It might be the fastest growing phenomenon on the web right now, but it has no idea how to make money from the service it provides.

The basic idea of freeware is, of course, that if you give away enough free stuff then you will connect with some people who are prepared to pay for what you do. This might be in terms of paying for a premium edition of your service (e.g. The Economist), or simply donating money (e.g. WordPress plugin developers, or Clarkesworld). But the problem there is attracting enough people. My usual rule of thumb is that for every 100 online readers you have, only 1 will be prepared to pay you any money.

Advertising doesn’t help. Anderson is right on the money here:

Running Google’s Adsense ads on the side of your blog, no matter how popular it may be, will not pay you even minimum wage for the time you spend writing it. On a good month it might cover your hosting fees. I speak from experience.

So basically everyone needs more readers, except that to get more readers you have to broaden your appeal, and that moves more and more into the territory of the big providers who already dominate the market.

Still, if making money was easy, everyone would do it.

Media Overload

~ Cheryl

There was a little Twitter storm here this afternoon as the American Library Association announced their Youth Media Awards. The ALA was right on the ball, having a live video feed from the awards ceremony, and coverage on Twitter, Facebook and Second Life. Being caught up in work I didn’t quite twig when Colleen Twitted (Tweeted?) that the ceremony was starting, but thankfully I was paying attention when the news came in that Neil Gaiman had won the Newbery.

The ALA’s web site went through a period of extreme overload shortly thereafter and I was unable to get full data (though I did get confirmation of Neil’s win from his own happy Tweets). I have since discovered that their Twitter feed crashed during the ceremony as well. It looks like Twitter is clearly the way to get news out, at least to the new media generation.

So now my ambition is to generate enough interest in the Hugos that my live coverage and the Hugo Twitter feed go down during the ceremony.

twhirl – initial thoughts

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

So far so good. It is one less browser window to have to keep open, and the alerts do not appear to be annoying. When I’m busy working I don’t notice them come in, especially if I have sound muted.

twhirl adds a number of useful things to the basic Twitter tool set, including a URL shortening tool, automatic querying of Twitter and a search engine. It does seem to slow the machine a little when I have a lot going on, which may be the fault of Air rather than twhirl. I really need two computers – a work machine and a communications console. Anyone tried using twhirl on an Asus?

Last night I got to watch a whisky tasting happening live on Twitter. I’ve got a bit of stick on Facebook for doing this, mainly because I didn’t actually have any of the whiskies being tasted, but for those who did it appears to have been a very successful event. People were logging in from all over the world giving their opinions.

When you have a live event like that you do need to up the frequency of your interrogations. I was getting new tweets every 4 minutes or so, and I’d get them in batches of 6 or 7 at a time. twhirl allows you to configure how often you query, which is useful.

On the other hand, I think it would have been better using the live-blogging technology I used for the Hugos. You couldn’t easily see the whole event yourself. With a search you can actually see a lot of it (see here), but that relies on people tagging posts correctly and not everyone did. (Also a few Americans consistently mis-spelled “whisky” which didn’t help.) In addition the live-blogging system doesn’t require any messing with querying – new posts appear automatically.

But there you go, Twitter is the technology tool du jour, and all the cool kids are using it. As with other software tools, functionality takes second place to popularity. If Twitter gets you the audience then Twitter is the tool to use. And you can use it more easily on mobile devices.

Update: More info on the whisky tasting here.

Two New Blogs

~ Cheryl

Here are a couple of interesting sites that came to my attention today.

The first one is a bit of a blast from the past, being about the philosophy of role-playing games. I don’t have time to pay much attention to such things these days, but Jack Philips sounds like my sort of gamer.

The other one is a news blog about science fiction-related events in New England. I won’t be following it, but those of you in the North East probably should. I was particularly pleased to see that a theater in Massachusetts is staging Rossum’s Universal Robots.

Twitter Fears Confirmed

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

So, inspired by the comment by Mulluane I finally devoted some time to looking for Twitter tools. I think Mulluane is using TwitKit, but my friend Mr. Google took me to this article, on the basis of which I think I am going to try twhirl.

Why? Because twhirl happens to include a search function. So I did a quick search for @CherylMorgan and, lo and behold, I found people Twittering away at me and wondering why I hadn’t acknowledged them. With twhirl it looks like I can find them and respond without having to follow their entire tweet stream. This would be very good.

Next I need to set up a Google Alert for @CherylMorgan. And no, that is not ego-scanning. It is looking for people trying to get my attention.

Social Networking Madness

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

As you may have noticed, Twitter is the online phenomenon of the year. Usage is growing very quickly, and as a consequence I’m seeing a lot of “how to” articles explaining what you need to do in order to get rick quick by tweeting. The last one I read contained this piece of advice:

Try to have a balance between people you follow and people that follow you. If 1,000 people follow you and you only follow 10 folks, you will be seen as selfish and snob. If 10 people follow you and you follow 1,000, you will be seen as a spammer.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Really, no. I’m following 30+ people at the moment and already it is starting to seem a bit much at times. Twitter is full of one-to-one conversations. Many of the people following me are folks I have never heard of. I don’t want to be obliged to wade through all of their chatter to find things of interest to be just to avoid being seen as snobby.

I already have a bunch of people I have “friended” on LiveJournal that I don’t know and whose posts I generally skim past because of that loaded word “friend”. I suspect that hundreds of the people I am “friends” with on Facebook are people I don’t know, or have met in passing at a convention, or who once read Emerald City. With Facebook this doesn’t matter much, but with LJ I’d like to reduce the length of my FList to make it easier to read, but I’m reluctant to do so because people take “unfriending”, and even refusing to reciprocate friending to be a serious insult. I had hoped that Twitter would be better. At least it avoided the F word.

And what about those who use it to keep up with celebrities, or for entertainment? I have a sneaking suspicion that people who are celebrities, even minor ones like SF writers, actually want to be followed, and really don’t care much if the people following them don’t have many followers. Twitter could certainly do with some better tools for finding out if people are trying to talk to you when you don’t follow them, but that should be easily solved.

So this is basically a plea for a bit of social networking sanity. Most people have to work for a living. Sometimes that work involves using social networking sites to reach your audience. Such people will inevitably have more followers than followed, have more people wanting to be their friend than they can possibly actually be friends with. Let’s be realistic about that, OK?

The Web as an Agent?

~ Cheryl

The purpose of agents in the great publishing scheme of things is to read lots of books (or at least book ideas) and filter out the really good ones, which they then hawk around publishers. Because editors really don’t have time to read everything that comes in.

But what if you could post your shiny new novel to a web site, have loads of people read it, and get them to vote on whether it was worth editors looking at it? Well, that’s what authonomy.com does. And according to GalleyCat HarperCollins editors are reading the top-ranked books and even buying some of them.

I had a quick flick through the books looking for SF&F and I have to say that on the basis of the tag lines I wouldn’t read any of them. But then maybe the whole point is to find books that actually match the sort of idiot blubs publishers put on them.

Science and Politics

~ Cheryl

There is a particularly sad post on danah boyd’s blog today. Basically danah has run up against the problem that if the results of your research are deemed politically unacceptable you’ll be told to go back and do it again until you get the “right” answer.

I’m used to folks dismissing qualitative work because they don’t understand it, but I’ve never before witnessed so many people reject solid quantitative studies done by reputable organizations that are replicated with different sampling techniques across different studies. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect someone to say to me, “Go find other data.” More frequently, as if in a refrain, folks are trying to reject the studies in this report as “old” and “outdated” even though the report makes it clear that the findings paint a consistent portrait and unreleased data show similar patterns. It’s as if nothing would satiate critics who can’t imagine that the real dangers are different than have been portrayed over the years.

And what are these hideously unacceptable results? That the Internet does not, in fact, get kids into trouble, it just makes it easier for us to see that they are in trouble.

Go read the whole thing yourself. It is a salutary lesson in the way the world works.

Update: Gary Farber blogged about the report last week and nailed what’s going on pretty well.

Ada Lovelace Day

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Here’s something I found through Facebook.

I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.

Can’t be too hard, eh? Except that the campaign was launched on January 5th and it still only has 774 people signed up (775 when my pledge gets authorized). I suspect this is because it was started by someone in the UK and consequently hasn’t hit the female IT community in the USA yet. So let’s get moving, eh? I’m sure that I have a lot of tech workers amongst my readership.

Oh, and if anyone knows of specific people you think I should write about, let me know. It might help give other people ideas too. While this started in IT it doesn’t have to be limited to programmers. Any technology field will do.

The campaign’s web site is here, and the Facebook event page here. Go to it, people. And spread the word.

Feed Fodder

~ Cheryl

Via Darren Turpin I have found this long list of blogs about SF&F novels, courtesy of Alltop.com. This is especially useful for people who are not good with RSS feeds because basically what Alltop does is decide which feeds on a given topic you ought to be reading and syndicate the lot of them. So you don’t even have to be able to subscribe to a feed for yourself.

I am perversely proud not to be listed. After all, this blog is special. You have to find it yourself.

I can’t see me using Alltop myself. I’m perfectly happy with Google Reader. But it does list a number of blogs that I don’t follow, so when I’ve got time I will check some of them out.

Options for LJ Refugees

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

I see from LiveJournal that a mass panic is going on following a substantial numbers of layoffs at the LJ offices in San Francisco. Personally I can’t see LJ going away. They still have their Russian operation, which is the head office, but I guess they may be less responsive to English-language customers in future.

Anyway, if you are looking for a new place to blog, one of the easiest options is to sign up at WordPress.com. You’ll get a free blog with vastly more functionality than LJ, and better free themes as well. The free blogs do have some ads, and a wordpress.com address, but if those things irk you then there are premium account features available. Alternatively, if you are web-savvy and already have a site of your own, you can download the software for free and manage your own blog.

I’ve been using WordPress for several years, and I’m very happy with it. If you have any questions about it, please ask.

Link Farming Goes Mainstream

~ Cheryl

Those of you who have blogs will have doubtless noticed those annoying commercial sites that specialize in linking to articles on a particular subject. So, for example, if I mention rugby in an article, or Britney Spears, within minutes some software bot will have picked that up and created a link to my article on a site that offers “all things rugby” or “all things Britney”. I’ve often wondered whether it was a workable business plan, and it seems that it is because the Boston Globe (owned by the New York Times Company) is rolling it out in earnest.

What the Globe is doing is creating a whole set of sub-pages that farm articles about particular parts of their catchment area and create a “local newspaper” from those links. As this Guardian article explains, this is getting up the nose of people who actually create those local news stories, because they see the Globe potentially siphoning off all of their advertising.

Now of course the Globe isn’t actually stealing content. If you want to read any of those news articles then you have to click through to the original provider. Therefore the Globe‘s site could be seen as driving traffic to these other sites. But what I think it is actually doing is risk avoidance.

As I see it, the Globe is resurrecting the old idea of the “portal site”, except whereas Yahoo tried (and failed) to become everyone’s gateway to the entire Internet, the Globe simply wants to be the gateway to all things Boston. If it then sends people off site to a variety of other local news sources, that’s OK provided that everyone who wants to know about Boston starts with the Globe. Because if they do, then the Globe will be the natural place for the bulk of the advertising.

It will be an interesting law suit. I very much hope that it gets heard by someone who knows a bit about how the Internet works.