Internet

Having Friends Can Damage Your Career

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

What are we to make of this?

Business networking website LinkedIn has published a series of guidelines to help prevent users damaging their careers by mixing professional contacts and friends online.

That’s from an article in today’s Guardian. Much of what it says is quite sensible. If you are a policeman, don’t write on your blog that you love your job because it means you get to hit people with sticks. But I also think that it is very naive in several ways.

Firstly, if there’s stuff you don’t want public, don’t put it online. It will be found, and it will come back to you, if it is out there.

Second, it seems to me that LinkedIn is stuck in a very 20th Century concept of full-time employment and a fixed career path. In contrast many of the people I have connections to on LinkedIn are self-employed and have more than one career. LinkedIn makes it very difficult for people like that (and I’m one too) to use their system.

And finally, the whole idea of having a private life being damaging to your career is also (hopefully) outdated. It is pretty much still the case that being a well-known science fiction fan will scupper any chance I might have of getting a job in the UK in the area where I have most expertise. But the world shouldn’t be that way. One of the academic energy economics blogs I follow today boasted a post from a contributor enthusing about the Police gig she went to, because she is a huge fan of the band. To me that makes her more of real and interesting person, not someone who is damaging her career by admitting to interests outside of work.

Another One Goes Live

~ Cheryl

I’m feeling slightly more awake today, so I’ve been able to get yet another web project live. This one is for the SF in SF Readings series. Many thanks to the excellent Mike Dashow for the fabulous artwork, and of course to Jacob and Rina for asking me to do it in the first place.

(Sharp eyed people will notice that the site is currently on a re-direct to the SFSFC site, where the new site is being hosted. I’ll be moving the domain when I get back from Worldcon.)

Mewsings on Facebook

~ Cheryl

Facebook has a new application for managing blogs which seems to be quite good. I now have a page up for this blog. If you are on Facebook and would like to add this blog to the list of those that you read, you should be able to do so here.

And if you have a blog of your own registered, please let me know.

Economist on Blogger Pay

~ Cheryl

I doubt that anyone at The Economist reads SF book review blogs, but this post may be relevant to one of the current panics in our little corner of the blogosphere. For those of you who can’t be bothered to click through, here’s the final paragraph:

And finally, it’s a sad truth that not everyone can get paid to do what they enjoy doing. Professional footballers get paid to play football. Millions of others love playing football and would love to get paid to do it. But there is the market for amateur footballers is limited, and so payment is not forthcoming. Happily, playing football brings joy to those millions of athletes, and so they play anyway. And so many will blog anyway. Good for them.

Progress of a Sort

~ Cheryl

I’m a sucker for online surveys. I figure that if I don’t give people feedback then their products will never get any better. The good news on this is that I’m seeing an increasing number of surveys that are looking to ensure that they get feedback from LGBT folks so that they can, if necessary, tailor products accordingly. The bad news is that these almost always assume that the terms “heterosexual”, “gay”, “lesbian”, “bisexual” and “transgender” are mutually exclusive. Still a long way to go, I guess.

Bloggasm on Publishing Email

~ Cheryl

Simon Owens of Bloggasm has an excellent post that draws together the recent William Saunders flap and the rather more high profile one going on at Pharyngula. I’m sure I have said this before, but if you are a high profile blogger you have to be very careful what you post, because if you post something negative about someone then some of your readers will go after that person, and they will behave in ways you find deplorable (and for this reason I think that publishing links to negative reviews of your books is a bad thing, even if you think you are just acknowledging the reviewer’s opinion.). Most of the hate mail I got while I was publishing Emerald City did not come from authors, it came from fans who were offended on behalf of the favorite authors (often by rather mild reviews).

But actually the thing that struck me most about Owens article (and like him I’m going to be careful about how much is actually proven) is that if the stories about the 1-800 Flowers hate mail are true, what kind of stupid and cowardly idiot uses his wife’s work email to hide behind when sending out hate mail?

Way To Go

~ Cheryl

Mike Glyer has pointed me to this MSN obituary for Olive Riley, the “world’s oldest blogger”. At 108, Olive was a shining example of what can be achieved if you are not afraid of opening your mind to new challenges. Somehow I doubt that I have any chance of living that long. Indeed, I probably won’t get much past half way. But I hope that while I am around I will continue to keep my mind fresh, just as Olive did.

And to save Justine the need to point it out, Olive lived just north of Sydney, which I’m sure proves the superiority of Sydney women over all other beings on the planet. For now.

Another One Goes Live

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been doing a lot of web site work of late. The most recent one to go live is an upgrade to the SFSFC web site. It is now WordPress-based, which will make it much easier for Kevin and subsequent Secretaries to update it. Also if you want to keep up with the doings of this “great fannish powerhouse”, there’s a handy RSS feed that you can subscribe to.

Pay Per Click?

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Still on the subject of online journalism, Tim Anderson ponders whether freelance journalists will soon be paid based on the number of unique visits their work receives. Actually I suspect it is already happening. A freelancer who has a long term contract might be fairly comfortable, but if you have to sell each article to your editor (which I believe the folks on the Guardian Book Blog do) then I’m pretty sure that the number of visits your previous posts got, and the number of comments on those posts, will be taken into account when you propose a new column.

Is this a good thing? Well, I’m always happy to be paid by results, provided that I’m happy doing what needs to be done to get those results. Tim says:

If writers are paid per view, clearly they will have more incentive to do such things. Best tread carefully though. Link seeding done badly is spamming. Encouraging comments done badly is trolling.

And therein lies the problem, because guess what gets the most traffic for your blog?

Well, yes, taping bacon to your cat. But beyond that, controversial posts aimed at winding people up tend to get far more traffic than a calm, reasoned and well-researched argument. It is a difficult line to tread. Tabloid newspapers have already proved the point. At some point I think you have to say, “I don’t care about the money, I don’t want to have to write like that just to get traffic.” Which, of course, is why I don’t make any money out of blogging.

Entering Wonderlands

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Not through a rabbit hole, though it feels a bit like that right now. Wonderlands is a new Ning-based social networking site for the fantasy fiction community. I found out about it from Mark Newton, and it appears to be UK-based as it only has 19 members and I can see John Jarrold, Debbie Miller, Neil Williamson and Darren Turpin amongst the usual suspects. So I have gone and signed up and now I’m waiting to be approved. I’ll let you know if that happens.

In the meantime I’m none too impressed with the software. Maybe it is just a theme that someone did for it, but the sign-up screens are pretty much impossible to read. Also when I clicked on “My Page” I got a message box that managed to tell me that my account was both pending and approved.

Anyway, I am now apparently approved, so I’m off to chat to people there. Feel free to come and join us.

Update: Now 50 members, and a whole lot of US people joined as well. Word is getting around.

Update 2: Debbie Miller appears to be the person who started this. Who knows what it might turn into, but thus far I have discovered a new fantasy convention due to take place in Chester next June. It is called Aetherica, and the GoHs will be Peter Beagle and Joe Abercrombie. Aside from John Wilson, the committee are people I don’t know, and that is good news because it means new con-running blood. Sadly I have to be in San Francisco for this, but I hope the con goes well and that they manage to make it a regular event.

CT on Blog Readers

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Over at Crooked Timber Henry Farrell trails a paper he and some colleagues have been writing about the nature of people who read (and presumably comment on) blogs. I haven’t read the entire paper yet, but this comment caught my eye:

First – blog readers seem to exhibit strong homophily. That is to say, they overwhelmingly choose blogs that are written by people who are roughly in accordance with their political views. Left wingers read left wing blogs, right wingers read right wing blogs, and very few people read both left wing and right wing blogs. Those few people who read both left wing and right wing blogs are considerably more likely to be left wing themselves; interpret this as you like. Furthermore, blog readers are politically very polarized. They tend to clump around either the ‘strong liberal’ or the ‘strong conservative’ pole; there aren’t many blog readers in the center. This contrasts with consumers of various TV news channels, as the figure below illustrates. All of this suggests that blog readership is unlikely to be associated with the kinds of deliberative exchange between different points of view that some political theorists would like to see.

I’m not entirely surprised, but it is rather depressing.

What I Did on My Weekend

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Well, lot of things actually, most of them to do with paid work, which I’m not at liberty to discuss. I did, however, spend a few hours getting a web site up and running. Kevin and some other folks at SFSFC have drawn the short straw and have bravely offered to bid to run a Westercon in 2011 – a year in which there is expected to be a west coast Worldcon sucking up much of the available talent. So, in my role as technical consultant to the SFSFC Board, I helped them put together a bid web site. I see that Kevin has credited me with doing the “heavy lifting”, but this sort of thing isn’t really that hard once you know what you are doing. Still, it was useful to be able to use Skype and LogMeIn to work together. It was almost like being in the same room, but without the cuddles…

I note from elsewhere that people are paying between €550 to €1500 to have WordPress sites built for them. That’s not bad money for a few hours work. However, I suspect that what they are actually paying for is the sort of thing that Tony does. People are always prepared to pay more for something that looks spectacular. The sort of thing that I do with WordPress is mainly behind the scenes code. Even when that’s quite complex – for SF Awards Watch, for example – it isn’t immediately visible so it doesn’t seem impressive. Still, that’s the way the world is – there’s no point moaning about it.

RSS R US?

~ Cheryl

Interesting article here about the future of newspapers. Slowly but surely, people are starting to understand RSS, but it will take a very long time, I think, for established businesses to catch up.

Meta Conversation

~ Cheryl

A few links about the Internet, long tails and the like:

Megan’s piece cheered me up no end as I now feel a lot less guilty about not knowing who the modern music stars are. And danah’s perhaps explains why I steer clear of a lot of the flame wars these days.

We Can Haz Cafe!

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I have email from Alan Beatts of Borderlands Books. Planning permission for the cafe has been granted. Alan says:

The online petition was a great help and I really appreciate you doing it for us. The help and support we’ve received from the community has been just wonderful.

And many thanks from me as well, as I will enjoy using that cafe quite a lot. Well done, blogosphere!

The Highs and Lows of Internet Marketing

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

A while back I noted that I get a fair amount of traffic from people searching for the phrase “tentacle porn”. I’m rather amused at how disappointed most such people will be when they find postings about squid. But not all such data is amusing. My top search engine phrase over the past month: “robert asprin”. Sometimes being a news site is not much fun.

Ah well, I did get a bunch of referrals from the phrase “lesbian albatross”.