Internet

Interesting Spam

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

Well, here’s a new development (all sic):

SOMEONE YOU CALL YOUR FRIEND, WANTS YOU DEAD.

I felt very sorry and bad for you, that your life is going to end like this if you don’t comply, i was paid to eliminate you and I have to do it within10 days. Someone you call your friend wants you dead by all means, and the person havespent a lot of money on this, the person also came to us and told us that he wants you dead and he provided us your names, photograph and other necessaryinformation we needed about you.

The email goes on like that for some time, eventually demanding $12,000 in return for considering sparing my life. I’m pretty sure it is a general spam because it is sent to “undisclosed recipients” rather than me personally. It purportedly comes from an email address in Poland, but there’s also what appears to be a legit gmail address in the message. Anyone got any ideas who are the best people to report this to?

SMOFcon 26

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Via Kevin I discover that SMOFcon 26 has a web site at last. It is a little light on details (I’m sure they have more than three members), but at least it looks professionally put together. Progress. And Kevin also reports that there are plenty of good places to eat nearby.

Of course even competent web designers can make mistakes. Is it really a good idea to have your header graphics so large that most people have to scroll down to see any content at all? (What, you mean that ordinary people don’t have massive screens like I have on my development machine?)

Window on the World

~ Cheryl

Via Kathryn Cramer (on Facebook) I found this article in the New York Times about the pros and cons of revealing all about your life in your blog. Morbidly fascinating, it is. I was particularly struck by the comments on the difference that having a very high profile blog made to your comment thread. With only a couple of hundred readers, your commenters tend to be generally supportive. With thousands the only sane thing to do is to not read the comments.

I also note that Kathryn and I have 94 Facebook friends in common. Yeah, 94.

Flames Over Middle Earth

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

It is now a well established theory of popular journalism that the best way to get lots of eye tracks for your web site is to get someone to write something manifestly stupid, and hopefully offensive, and then sit back and wait for the flame war to develop. I’ve been busy running economic models all morning, but the helpful Will Plant has pointed me at the latest exercise of this type over at The Guardian.

The basic plot is as follows: because some male persons have said unkind things about JK Rowling, this is proof positive that the literary world is dominated by Evil Male Critics who will stop at nothing in their tireless quest to put down everything ever written by women in the history of the universe, Evah! You can guess how the comment thread goes. This is, I’m afraid, one of those articles that will be quoted again and again when men want to prove what pathetic, selfish idiots feminists are.

On the plus side, it has given people the opportunity to mention a whole raft of wonderful women writers who might not otherwise have got their names in front of the great book-reading public. If it leads to a few book sales down the road that will be a good thing. I’m sure there are more names that could be dropped, if you fancy popping over there and can stomach the pile of righteous outrage in the comments.

What I can’t understand, though, is that there are people who are surprised at the description of the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings movies as a “big burning vagina”. Isn’t it obvious?

Sticky?

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Web stats are weird and wonderful things. Visitors come, visitors go, and often it isn’t clear why. When I got to strut my stuff on Whatever around 300 people dropped in here to see what I do. Almost none of them came back the next day. The mention of the DSM petition on Making Light brought around 500 people here. Looking at the stats, it seems like 50 or so might have stuck around. Or it might be that the effect of the spike has been spread over several days. I don’t know. And I’m not going to worry about it much. This is never going to be a high-traffic blog, and if I wanted it to be one I certainly wouldn’t be writing about cricket so much. On the other hand, if you did come here from Patrick’s link and are planning on sticking around, it would be nice to know. You can look on this post as a blog equivalent of that thing people do on LiveJournal where they say, “a whole bunch of people have just friended me, please introduce yourselves.”

Free Money

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Thanks to an LJ friend I have just signed up for a new Internet payments system. It is called Revolution and it is run by First Bank of South Dakota. As Danjite points out, doing financial business with a real bank is rather safer than doing it with PayPal. And from my point of view the fact that Revolution doesn’t charge you to receive money is very attractive indeed. Besides, as an economist, I thoroughly approve of competition.

Now of course it will take quite an effort to break PayPal’s stranglehold on the market, but Revolution has come up with a good gimmick to get started. They are offering everyone who opens an account $25. Yes, $25 for free. Unfortunately you have to have a US address and social security number to sign up, but nothing’s perfect. And if you go to their site via the button below, they pay me a $10 referral fee too. (Or you could click through to Danjite’s LJ and get him the $10.) Sadly the offer is only valid today, but it is only just gone lunch time on the west coast, so California folks have plenty of time, right?

Update: Someone who tried to sign up tells me that they demanded faxes of his driving license and a utility bill. It sounds like the site may be doing background checks on applicants. I figured I’d better warn you.


Refer A Friend using Revolution Money Exchange

Phantom Reviewing

~ Cheryl

Mike Glyer discovers that he is quoted as thinking a book is “brilliant”, despite never having heard of the book or the author before. Tsk, tsk. Do not make false claims on teh intrawebs, folks, for surely Google Alerts will find you out.

Spike!

~ Cheryl

The data I was getting in on links suggested that not a lot of people in the blogosphere picked up on the child psychiatry post. Many thanks to those of you who did, but I was still mildly disappointed. Then I looked at my Google Analytics stats for yesterday. Spike! Over 600 readers. WTF? Well, not all links get reported back to you. Clearly someone was sending traffic. And lo, turning up in my referrals data, almost 500 people from a one-line mention on Making Light. Thank you, Patrick!

More Experimentation

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

This blog has just been upgraded to support Gravatars (Globally Recognized Avatars) in the comments thread. Check the comment below to see what I mean. If you would like your own Gravatar, you can register for one here. (Note, however, that they have no means of deleting an account. You can remove all your pictures, which has the same effect, but I know some people get unhappy about services that won’t let you go.)

Other People’s Experiences

~ Cheryl

I tend to avoid blogosphere blow-ups these days. The fact that they are a huge waste of time and energy is one good reason for doing so, but one of the things that gets me most wound up reading them is that so many people’s arguments boil down to some variant of, “Your personal experience must be wrong(*), because my personal experience contradicts it.” For some reason we humans find it very hard to understand that the world can be very different for people who are not us (and Goddess knows I’m sure I have been guilty of this myself many times in the past). However, we can strive to do better, and for a little help along the way here is Kelley Eskridge being amazingly sensible and constructive about the whole thing.

* Yes, I know, on the Internet no one is ever just “wrong”, they are always “WRONG!!!”

LinkedIn Craziness

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

If ever there was proof that LinkedIn is really a social networking system for people in full time jobs, this is it. I added a job of “freelance journalist” to my profile. I also noted that I was self-employed. LinkedIn then came back and told me that there were 12 other people who worked for that company on their system that I might like to connect with. (And interestingly one of them was David Levine.)

LinkedIn has managed to put me back in touch with various people that I’ve lost touch with from previous phases of my life, so it does have its uses. However, I think I’m going to take a look at Biznik. From what they say, they seem rather more in tune with the modern world.

Post-Weird Thoughts

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

No, not mine, theirs. Post-Weird Thoughts is a new blog from Jacques Barcia and Fábio Fernandes. It promises thoughts on weird fiction in English by Brazilians. As you know, I’m all in favor of building bridges to SF&F communities in other countries. I wish the new blog well, and I hope you will all enjoy reading now.

One of these days, I want to go to a convention in Brazil.

Spikes and Tails

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

Cory Doctorow has an interesting new article up on the Locus web site (which I probably should have read on paper but didn’t get an interrupt on). I was pleased to see a new rationale for not publishing reviews long before a book is available in the shops, but the thing that jumped out at me was this:

After all, the majority of links between blogs have been made to or from blogs with four or fewer inbound links in total — that means that the Internet has figured out a cost-effective means of helping audiences of three people discover the writers they should be reading.

That’s what I call a long tail. And the converse is the spike. I’m assuming that Cory got that data from Technorati. Those blogs would all have an authority of 4 or less, and a ranking somewhere in the millions. This blog has an authority of 36 and a ranking of around 272,000. SFAW is up to 73 and 124,000, while the Hugo Awards site manages a ranking of just under 100,000 with just 15 points more authority. Cory’s blog, Boing! Boing!, is currently ranked 5, and has an authority of 16,730. See what I mean by a spike?

This is, of course, just an example of a more general phenomenon. Only a few people get to play Premier League soccer, or star in a Hollywood blockbuster, or get to govern their nation. The trick, I guess, is to find one small area of personal endeavour in which you are in the spike, not in the tail.

Asus Update

~ Cheryl

I’ve come across an annoying little problem with the Asus. Google Reader doesn’t work properly (at least under Firefox). The web site is OK, but there is a scrollable section in the bottom left of the screen where you pick which folder you want to view, and it is just far enough down the page to not display the scroll bar. Changing the text size didn’t work, but I finally got it displayed by turning off all of the toolbars. Irritating,