I’ve just been trying to book my flight to Finncon. The SAS web site came back with a message saying that the card purchase had not been approved. So I called Amex. That would be $280 for a plane ticket? Yep. And what about the other charge for $28,000 to the same company?
I’ve canceled both charges and will try again when I get to the UK. Thank goodness for Amex. This is why I use them.
(Gosh – Zemanta just came up with e photo of Joe Haldeman from last year’s FinnCon.)
I am reminded that today is not only Dragon Killing Day but also International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. I don’t have anything substantive to post, but then I haven’t been charging you for any of this lot, have I?
More importantly, I spent most of today in San Francisco. That involved having lunch in Starbucks, and I’m pleased to note that I was able to sit there and work on the Tiptree article on the Asus. I’d copied it off a Windows box via a USB stick, and it loaded into Open Office just fine. And I’ve just transfered it back. Again no trouble. I am very pleased.
As regular readers will know, I have an interest in the sociology of the Internet. As someone who has been nominated for awards on the basis of her online writing, I should try to understand the medium in which I’m working. I was therefore fascinating to learn about a study which finds a strong correlation between watching reality TV and “promiscuous friending” on social network sites.
The idea here is that in an increasingly celebrity-obsessed society many people’s social networks contain a significant number of people that they have never met and who don’t know them, but rather are famous people who they have seen on TV, read about in celebrity magazines, and whose blogs they follow. This isn’t new. My grandmother got like this in her later years. She was prone to saying things like, “a friend of mine told me,” when a more accurate statement would have been, “a character on Coronation Street said.”
This also relates to something I’ve been saying for some time about reviewing. If you talk about book reviews online you’ll find a lot of people saying things like, “I don’t want to read reviews by some supposed expert I don’t know, I’d much rather get a recommendation from a friend.” But if people regard high-profile authors as their “friends”, then a recommendation from such a person will do a lot of good for a book. In terms of marketing, it will probably be far more valuable than anything someone like me might write.
Thanks to Peter Wong I have just added Jason Stoddard to my feeds list. This post about how the SF community might present itself in a more positive light is generating a lot of comment, and I’m looking forward to part 2.
Over at the SFWA LiveJournal the ongoing unpleasantness surrounding the current elections has finally resulted in the moderators losing patience with one persistent troll and banning him/her. However, we should not lose hope. No matter how badly SFWA members (or possibly non-members who take an interest in SFWA affairs) behave, they clearly have a very long way to go before they reach the depths plumbed by one romance writer.
I see that NASA has a new web site devoted to science stuff, which of course means mainly space stuff. It looks very neat. However, even though it has a news page, I can’t find any RSS feeds on it. I guess I won’t be following it much then.
The main effect of my appearance on Whatever appears to be that a bunch more people are reading this blog, at least temporarily. Google Analytics reports that to date 189 people clicked through to here from Whatever, which is way more than my average daily readership (but also less than 1% of John’s average daily readership). More permanently, five people have added the LJ feed to their f-lists. That’s what publicity on a very high traffic blog does for you. Thank you, everyone, and especially John.
A few quick comments for the LJ folks. Firstly my policy is to always friend back. I never make f-locked posts, so it makes no difference to me. You have to have done something pretty bad to me for me to ignore a friend request. Secondly, comments are disabled on the LJ feed. If you have something to say, please say it here.
This morning’s feeds included an article about what claims to be the first ever academic study of the habit of blog readers (as opposed to blog writers). The professorial types seem to have done a reasonably good job, but to my mind separating the blogosphere into “writers” and “readers” is a fundamental misunderstanding and misses some of the most interesting interactions.
The short version of the story is that Kevin and I are adopting a little boy. The long version is a little more complicated.
Continue reading
My daily RSS feed reading includes a number of news services targeted at WordPress developers. This morning I found a story about a new plugin called Zemanta which claims to help you find stories to write about by comparing your content with what it finds elsewhere on the Internet. This was way too science-fictional to pass up, so I have installed it.
Continue reading
Some observations on discussion that has been happening elsewhere. Please note that I’m not trying to preach here. Goddess only knows I’ve said enough stupid things online myself before now. But hopefully I have learned a few things too.
1. Your blog is not “personal space”. If you say bad things about people on it, there’s a good chance they will find out and come calling. If you want your thoughts to stay private, use a privacy feature such as “friend-locking”.
2. Using sarcasm and irony after you have got people angry with you is generally not a good idea, because angry people don’t have much of a sense of humor.
3. Sometimes the best thing to do with someone who disagrees with you is to let them have the last word. Accusing someone of bullying you because they can’t see your point of view doesn’t help, especially if you appear to be using that accusation as a means of preventing them from responding to your points.
4. If you complain about someone’s behavior to your friends on your blog, don’t be surprised if your friends then go and crap all over said person’s blog in a much more unpleasant way than you would have done. You might not have intended to spark a mob, but these things can happen.
5. If you call someone a “Nazi” then people will think that you are unpleasant and an idiot.
6. If people do crap on your blog, don’t delete their posts. Being rude makes people look bad. Deleting posts makes you look bad.
The House of Lords has a blog.
Normally I avoid the various memes that propagate through the blogosphere, but Andrew Wheeler (via Ben Jeapes who originated it) has come up with one that sounds quite interesting:
Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don’t blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don’t blog about, but you’d like to hear about, and I’ll write a post about it.
That’s a proper writerly challenge, so I guess I should be up for it. I can’t promise instant satisfaction, because today is a mad panic and tomorrow I’ll be flying to Florida, but hopefully I’ll be able to do something later in the week. That gives you two days to come up with ideas.
There appears to have been a small firestorm in the blogosphere today. Both John Scalzi and Justine Larbalestier have put out posts trying to head off a flame war directed at Robin Hobb for this rather amusing post.
Oh Noes! Someone has said that it is more important to write novels than spend all of your time blogging!
But you know, I’m not really surprised. Blogging is instant daily entertainment. Novels you have to wait months for. And blogging is free. Novels you have to pay for. Is it any wonder that fans would prefer to have writers spend their time blogging than writing books? Why does the phrase “sense of entitlement” come to mind? Maybe what Robin needs to do is employ a ghost writer to blog for her.
I got my first piece of Facebook spam today. As with LJ, I’ll accept friend requests from anyone, even if I’ve never heard of them before. And today one such person put an ad for a commercial service on my Wall. The good news is that Facebook does have a means of deleting such things, but I’m not wondering how long it will be before the system clogs up with people posting spam.
Look guys, if you are going to write and tell me that I’ve inherited $17m in someone’s will you might at least have the intelligence not to list another hundred or so people in the “to” field of the email. Doh!
I wonder where they got the list from though. I see an awful lot of addresses I recognize.
Via Galleycat I have discovered Redroom.com, which bills itself as a social networking site for authors and “the official home of the world’s greatest writers”. Of course it isn’t only for authors – readers are welcome too. So basically the idea seems to be that it is a bit like SFFnet – you want to be online, they do all the tech for you.
Given that it is a mainstream literary thing, I’m afraid I assumed the worst. But I went to have a look, and lo, there were sections on SF and fantasy writers. I didn’t recognize many of the names, but there weren’t many people there. A quick word of congratulations to Jason Erik Lundberg for being the first person to be listed as a writer of “speculative fiction”.
Anyway, these folks are based in San Francisco, and of course the web site is accessible from anywhere. I shall see what else I can find out.
The BBC has just put up an article about how the Press Complaints Commission is introducing new guidelines about what information the news media is free to lift from social media sites when writing a story about someone. Quite how much help this will be is another matter. It is all very well saying that you can’t lift an embarrassing photo from someone’s Facebook site without asking permission to use it, but in these days of ubiquitous camera phones the Internet is doubtless full of embarrassing photos of people on other people’s web sites, and offered a few bucks by a journalist they’d be happy to pass them over.
Anyway, this reminds me that in odd spare moments I have been reading my way through a book called The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. I was recommended by danah boyd and it is fascinating reading. Some of that fascination is sheer horror at the damage the Internet can do to your life if you are unlucky enough to have a story about you go viral. Stories such as those about the “dog poop girl” from Korea or the “Star Wars boy” from Canada are really quite chilling when you realize that the same sort of thing could happen to you. But author Daniel J. Solove is also very interesting when he talks about the history of privacy and how things like the invention of the camera were, in the past, regarded with just as much technophobic horror as the Internet is today. It is all good stuff, and the book is freely available online under a Creative Commons license. You can read it here. The book is quite short, and there are chunks you can skip over because they are the usual academic thing of establishing your starting position by stating stuff that everyone knows, so reading it online is no great hardship, though I’m planning to buy a copy when I get back to the US.
This is an unashamed plug for a friend. Karen Burnham writes great book reviews, and at long last she’s moved them from a hand-crated web site to a blog with an RSS feed. You can read her at Spiral Galaxy.
Browsing through GalleyCat this morning I was led to this long and interesting post about how to make money out of blogging. Although Steve Pavlina is essentially in the self-improvement business, which is home to a great deal of quackery, what he says is very sensible. In particular he’s right that those who are good at creating content are by no means always good at selling it, and if you want to make a success of being self-employed you have to be good at selling yourself (or very lucky, which may be more true in my case). On the other hand, selling yourself without having anything worth selling is an equally big mistake, and doubtless the one that leads to some of the bizarre query letters that La Gringa has been talking about.
Continue reading