On Giving Linky Credit Where Due

A side thought:
In today's other post, above, I encountered some internal resistance as I was picking links. Was it necessary to link to some automated index, which had vacuumed up these stories from their respective sources, or just to the original articles?

Why was such a commonplace even an issue? If you've ever discovered your own stuff lifted, as a whole — as distinguished from partial, Fair Use referencing — on some parasitic phantom site, you know where I'm coming from. Fie on those who profit (however slimly) off someone else's labor, while adding no real value of their own.

As I've been (slow-)blogging these last few years, I've given a lot of thought to linking, trying to achieve the right balance of interconnectivity with relevance to the piece. Every widely-travelled surfer has seen articles where the author, excuse me, the "content producer" has gone hog wild with links, producing madly distracting sentences with four or five separate words underlined and flight-ready, often just to a word's Wikipedia entry. Gee, thanks, but I can look it up myself if I'm puzzled; kinda gotten the hang of that now.

It never takes long for "link fatigue" to set in with these baubly pages; the writer is expecting you do so much work, not just reading but evaluating every third word to ask if you should follow the pointers to another, another, yet another page.

Then there are the opposite extreme, people who are, let's be blunt, too lazy and "self-preoccupied" (the mildest form of that dis I can come up with,) to make the little extra effort to be sure their borrowings are at least minimally attributed. C'mon, people, it's fun — and you know that if someone were quoting you...

(In this case, I did wind up choosing to link to that index, because it's BusinessWeek's, an established publication where one assumes some editorial effort was involved, and further inspection showed that one of the stories was their own, disguised as a related brand.)

Related, here:
35 posts tagged "giving credit where due"

Is Your Head (Lost) In The Cloud?

Google's recent unscheduled downtime came at a good point, perhaps, with so many technology promoters urging us all to hurry up into the Cloud for all our computing needs.

PC World reported that the May 14th outage "left 14 percent of its user base without Google's wide variety of online services for a few hours." PC World's story was accompanied by this graph of North American Web traffic that day, from an Internet security company, Arbor Networks, which tells the story in concise and dramatic fashion.
Google said, in one of their blogs, it was the result of a simple traffic jam at a data center. Oh, that's really reassuring. What if it had been the dirty work of some of those cyber-crooks, who decided to put their botnets to work on taking down or compromising the All-Seeing Eye? How long might it have taken them to get all their services back in operation then?

"Ultimately, the outage was a fixable error and the Internet didn't come crashing down because of it," PC World said, but asked, "Just how smart is it to depend on a company to store all your data online?"

Cloud computing is a natural development of the technological path we're on, and of course it has many benefits, like being able to get at your information from anywhere there's an Internet connection. My point is just this: don't over-depend on it.

Do not assume that what you upload to any brand of cloud formation will necessarily be there when you next look for it — like the young lady I knew whose emails, years' worth, disappeared one day from Hotmail, never to be seen again.

When it's crunch time, especially with free services, host companies have oft responded by saying, Gee, sorry, there's nothing we can do about that now — but you know, it is a free service. (Implying about their own no-cost, no-guarantee offerings that YGWYPF: You Get What You Pay For.)

So, okay, these services can be highly useful. Just don't forget, in a tenet from the earliest days of computing: Back It Up!

"Google Outage Lesson: Don't Get Stuck in a Cloud"
by Ian Paul, PC World

Related, here:
Crackberry Down!

"Baaack it up!" * (Before the Botnets get it)

Web-based apps vs. Verizon customer service

(P.S.: Appropriately, I got this message several times while trying to post this: "Could not contact Blogger.com. Saving and publishing may fail. Retrying...")

Twittering on about Facebook, etc.

Continuing on my (ir)regular, implied theme of What's Not Hot among topics currently considered high-temperature in the media, two items:

There's lots of twaddle about Twitter in the tech press and online communities. Most of it is just the old demonstration that the writers are Fully Buzzword Compliant, well versed in the latest thing, whatever the heck that thing is and may or may not be useful for.

This Web service appears to be providing the much-needed function of adding yet another layer of distraction to our ADD World. ("Thanks a lot! - what was your name again? Oh, gotta run, see you --") I loved the quote from the last post here, down below, noting that a "friend" had just left a note to everyone that they were brushing their teeth. I'm hoping the writer was kidding, but either way, this is a layer of "content" so thin as to defy measurement.

So I was glad to see this statement in one of the blogs on CNet, the venerable (in Web terms,) tech news site:

"Twitter's not going to change the world"

CNet's Charles Cooper, quoting a video blogger named Loren Feldman:

"Loren's main point (is), anyone who has followed the incessant bleating about Twitter's supposedly existential meaning to our lives--let alone the silly debate over Twitter versus FriendFeed--has to wonder whether tech's chattering class has lost its sense of perspective.

"Are we guilty of navel gazing to the point of silliness?"

Breaking taboos in the tech fishbowlJuly 20, 2008
=== === ===

This tied in nicely with a piece I saw in the Old Grey Lady Online, a few caveats about Facebook -

.. .from a business perspective, it creates some complications.
...I neither want to be strategic in my postings nor selective in my friending, but I should probably be doing one or the other. I am also not religious in maintaining my profile, in part because I have no personal assistant to update my page, as one executive I know told me he does.

Once you jack in, Facebook creates its own imperatives. Why am I uploading pictures of my last family trip to the lake in the Adirondacks at 11:45 p.m.? Because I want someone, anyone, to see them.

When a new media winner like Facebook comes over the horizon, who loses? In my case, it’s probably my real actual friends. As a reporter, I learn to hate the telephone during the day, but at night I feel somewhat social again and step out onto the porch to call buddies for a little nocturnal quality time. Now I am too busy checking their status updates to actually speak to them.

The Media Equation: Hey, Friend, Do I Know You?
By David Carr, July 21, 2008
=== === ===

Exactly as e-mail now reflects the pounds of junk mail in our "street" mailboxes, all new media will eventually return to earth, mirroring the net level of quality-of-life that most people are functioning at. (Not that there aren't people who reach for something more, a higher level of practice in whatever they do, of course -- imagine what it would be like if there weren't enough of them quietly anchoring things).

Postscript:
As you'll see from the date of the following post, I dropped out of blogging for awhile there, to take a break after two+ years at it -- even if admittedly doing it at a fairly relaxed pace for the medium, as it's currently understood. Once I saw that a few big bloggers had heart attacks over the last year, then that my favorite blogger, Maura Welch (who I began reading in the Boston Globe), just renounced regular blogging, and some other bigtime blogger just said goodbye, too... well, now I feel like I'm on the leading edge of the next hot trend, the post-blog Web!

But it's just another wave in the natural progression of new modes...

"Top 10 Social Networking Annoyances"

Thank you Scott Spanbauer of PC World for putting words on my own aversion to a lot of aspects of the social networking craze. From the "friends" game to visually godawful Myspace pages to just how much time it takes to be a player in this arena, his article yesterday nailed it, and in a fairly witty way.

His #1 reason? What he's termed "Multiple Social Network Syndrome (MSNS)" --

"With the advent of social networking, my e-mail traffic has gotten worse, not better. Here's an e-mail telling me that my brother has sent an e-mail within Facebook. Another message informs me that Susie has updated her profile at Friendster. Another announces that Bob over at FriendNet has just brushed his teeth... And on and on and on. To reply or act on any of these events, I'll have to bring up one of the 12 social networks I've been sucked into joining, log in, and then view the ads there.

"All of that, of course, necessitates a lot of extra clicks and keystrokes, and after a while, I find that I don't really like my friends anymore."

"The Top 10 Social Networking Annoyances"
- Scott Spanbauer, PC World - May 14, 2008

Since we're on the subject of MySpace, (do I really need to link to them? It's "-.com", okay?) I think the more accurate name would be "HisSpace," in honor of owner Rupert Murdoch, who just coincidentally also owns and micro-manages the absurdly unfair and unreasonable Fox News. (Again, "-.com").

Why should I entrust this guy in particular with all the personal information that inevitably accumulates on such a site? I'm pretty damn sure he considers himself the owner of whatever resides on his various company's servers, should there ever be any disagreement over its use.

Related, here:
Half of all media will be created by consumers?
(Maybe, but will anyone else want to consume it?)
Quoted again on Boston Globe's site, on 'Web 2.0' & American Idol
Posts tagged Web 2.0

On "Blog Coaching"

Just received this very kind letter today from Mitch Ditkoff, the President of Idea Champions, the "culture of innovation" trainers/consultancy, about my ongoing blog coaching services for them. He explains so well what we do in that space that I don't need to add a further word of explanation.
I figure he won't mind me excerpting the longer letter here:

"Thank you very much for all the fine work you’ve done to help Idea Champions create and launch it’s very successful Heart of Innovation blog...

"Your efforts, insights and support were the missing piece. You helped me sort through the choices, consider my options, and made some very insightful recommendations. I appreciate all your flexibility, responsiveness, and commitment to see this project through to the end.

"I see your blog consulting service as a kind of 'chiropractic adjustment.' You have a light touch, know what you’re doing, and are all about the 'health' of your clients.. . I needed the human touch – the Walk Me Through It school of education. So thanks again for hanging in there with me and helping manifest a 'good idea' into a bottom-line reality."

(For my part, I've just got to say that we should all be so lucky to have such enlightened and light-hearted clients.)

What I'm learning about blogging

(Or perhaps it's more accurate to say, what opinions I'm finding I've developed about it:)

The following ideas started life as a prospective style note to my bloggy brothers at Idea Champions' "Heart of Innovation," on which I'm happily toiling these days, after Mitch Ditkoff, the company's President-for-Life and our Captain Kirk (unless he's prefer Picard), e-mailed the other writers this admonition about a particular topic:

"We can revisit this idea a number of times on the blog. Don't need to nail it all in one posting."

I happen to think this is a Mighty Principle where webloggery is concerned, and wanted to spill about it briefly. As I said, of course, it's just my own BFO (Big Fat Opinion).

At this point in time, 'blogs are more of a minimalist art form, like e-mail. People surfing the web and spilling onto your page momentarily want to be fed a tasty but bite-sized bit, and if they like it they'll hang out for awhile and sample your other menu items.

Not very hungry just now? Put another way, then, it's not the book or even a chapter, it's the dust jacket copy. The accumulation of passing comments eventually winds up as a complete statement, whether by ear, in print, or online. All of your points will be made, in time -- patience is still sometimes a virtue, even in these hyper-driven times.

It is excellent to have an Extended Entry capability (The Heart of Innovation is produced with Movable Type; Blogger, here, hasn't evolved to that point yet). Extended Entry, aka "MORE," means you can go into some real depth, while offering just a maybe five-six paragraph opening bit that expresses your complete thought.

If you have enough to say, it can become a series of posts on a given topic. The next stage of development is that any topic can evolve into an article. But in general, when blogging, Cut To The Chase -- everybody's real busy these days.

Team Blogging
It's really just out-and-out, major Fun to be working on a blog with a team of like-minded (and -spirited) writers, and on such an intrinsically exciting topic. "Innovation," after all is really based on open-mindedness, awareness, whatever you call that elusive quality of really being present and paying attention to Life, as it is happening.

And the synergy -- I'm really enjoying the different styles and levels employed by each of the writers. For me, every new entry is a different version of "Wow!" This can't help but get you up for your own next offering.

Mitch, for instance, is the jazz musician, the sax player blowing these wild and crazy licks that make you sit up in your seat and go, "Yeah!" (Very Kerouac, here in the 50th anniversary year of "On The Road.")

The rest of us, Val Vadeboncoeur, Tim Moore, Farrell Reynolds and I, so far seem to be more into various degrees of working through the lines of reasoning, carefully link-annotating a wide range of reference points, in pursuit of the Comprehensive Statement. So a big part of my role has been to keep exhorting the troops to stay in touch with that modern feeling that Less Is More.

(You'll notice, if you read this far, that my theory far exceeds my practice. But we soldier on, trying to follow our own advice. And ain't that the way it so often is? But damn, do I wish Blogger had that-there extended entry thang.)

The Limitations of "Free" Content

So much of what you read about businesses and sites in the brave new world of Web 2.0/social media, etc., is about how great it is to get the faceless (or even the Facebooked) millions to create all your content for free. Here in this corner, though, it is still considered to be true that "you get what you pay for."

I was blog-surfing this morning and came across a small example -- a very small one -- of the drawbacks of purely user-generated content: in this case, the lack of simple proofreading, which brings down the perceived level of quality of the writing. That may not sound like any kind of big deal, but the point is it's one of those elements that gives your readers wings -- inducing them to fly away from your site.

The overall point here is that user-generated content requires an editorial layer, to make sure your featured material has a reasonably consistent level of quality.

I wrote the author in question, in this case in the blog of the Social Media Club, which otherwise seems to be a pretty smart commentator on the scene. The post was a live-blogged report from last Friday at the Supernova conference in San Francisco, where it is claimed a set of movers and shakers joined "a provocative new program to debate the future of the connected world."

I'm going to save* (see the comments) myself some time by pasting in here the related comment I made to them. To wit:

As a perfect illustration of this quote of Andrew Keen's in the piece:
>> “it is the job of mainstream media to find raw talent and polish it up”

...you might want to go back and do a copy edit of your live-blogged post. As of this writing, strange, misshapen artifacts lurk within, such as, "ologarchy," "acknolwedges," and "deomcratization."

Obviously just slips of the finger and still recognizable words, but just a couple of those have the power to distract a reader enough to lure them into taking off. It causes the reader to subconsciously question the intelligence of the author, blowing the equivalent of the theatrical "willing suspension of disbelief." (Not that I'm entertaining such judgmental thoughts, mind you -- since why else would I take the time to write you about it?)

Here's the main point: user-generated content is not free, because you've got to have editorial oversight, and that still means humans who are hopefully(!) being paid a living wage to make the user's stuff Ready For Primetime.

This is a significant but underreported issue with building social media based sites.

(That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

Brick and mortar e-music & bookstores

I’ve sometimes conducted my web surfing and electronic communications from an independent bookstore, Lord help them, but I feel guilty about it because I never buy anything besides coffee and a pastry.

The last time I moved, I’d accumulated far too many shelves and boxes’ worth of volumes to deal with, and I got to the point of deciding half of them had to go. Either they got read by then or didn’t, but I wasn’t going to move them again, except to the bins in back of the library.

The mad magazine and newspaper reading I used to do (and the Mad Magazine reading, too,) has also been replaced by making the rounds of numerous favored sites, and then a large number of the sites the first ones point me to, work up a lather, repeat as necessary.

There’s so much to read there, such linkical overabundance, you feel as if you never have time for more than a taste of it all. Why buy more of it on paper, which you'll then have to carry back out your door?

So what’s a indie bookstore owner to do? Being so cybernetic, I naturally turned to the idea of suggesting they adapt to, you might say “co-opt,” the competition, that being the electronic distribution of “content.” (Ick -- can’t stand that word, but it is so damnably accurate and convenient, if empty and bland; in fact, the term itself is devoid of content.)
I just had my first encounter a couple weeks back with a Starbucks/Hear Music store in Miami Beach, one of seven in the country, begun in mid 2005. I bought my sister a new Jeff Beck album with singer Imogen Heap and carried it out, which was pretty good considering that they didn’t have it in stock. But they did, of course – in the database.

A resident Starbuckian introduced me to the system, where we just did a search for the album and poured it into a CD, I handed over about 13 bucks and walked out with the disc. They said it was full audio, not MP3s, and it comes in a generic though classy case, with a tiny, maybe 1” square cutout of the album cover.

Imagine, as if CDs weren’t already small-enough canvasses for the once-glorious medium of album cover art. But it’s still pretty cool to combine the vast storage of digital choices with the ability to walk out of a store with something new in your hand. One hopes a little more generous helping of the visuals could be worked out with the rights holders.

The bookstore business is essentially about selling information organized into ideas and products for consumption. How about making the store a destination where people can lounge around in the contemporary fashion, wirelessly connected, sipping on downloads and highly customized digital offerings?

What can a store offer that a downloader can't get at home, at least in the same way?
• wide-angle viewing of visual media
• a (semi-)professionally produced product, for show and tell with their friends
• community
• coffee (not their same old grind,) and snacks

Hey, NYT: What about Fair Use?

I was amused at a dialog that just popped up as I read one of David Pogue's columns in the New York Times. (I was going to add, "online," but then a dialog wouldn't have bluudy-well popped up out of the print edition, would it?)

From the NYT and “Powered by Rightslink, the copyright clearance center,” it offered to give me a “Quick Price Estimate for reproducing the article to use in your own materials."

By stating via pull-down menus that I was inquiring about republishing an “excerpt (max. 250 words)” on “a non-profit internet site” for three months, I was invited to pay $200 dollars, or $400 for a year. Oh, sure; I’m eager to pay for a quote that clearly would be covered under Fair Use.

That would be the “Fair use… doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test.”

(That’s in the words of the faceless, numberless contributors to the Wikipedia’s page on Fair Use.)

This is going to influence me to stop quoting the New York Times, who can perhaps be forgiven for trying to find additional ways to save the newspaper business but are making an unfortunate choice here. What has fueled the nearly universal adoption of the Internet is exactly the reasonable application of appropriating other people's material.

That's assuming, of course, that we're talking logically here, about quoting a small chunk of someone's work with proper linking/attribution. (As we know, unreasonable out-and-out theft of other people's intellectual property has also been rumored to occur; but that's not what we're talking about.)

Quoted again on Boston Globe's site, on 'Web 2.0' & American Idol

We are right pleased to have been quoted again in the Business Filter, the Boston Globe's online business blog. Columnist Maura Welch wrote:

Bill Ross admits he's a 'wicked music snob,' and writes with a great little rant about my post about Bix, the soon to launch site that will let advertisers sponsor contests like American Idol online.
"The 'Web 2.0 version of American Idol' says it perfectly about where, IMHO, all the social networking sites are ultimately headed. And that's to the place called 'The Lowest Common Denominator,' a plane where I have seldom if ever found anything of value."

(Ooh -- sure does sound like a wicked snob, hm?) I'd written her about the Bix post, and since I'd recently written the lengthy rant you see below (7/20) on the same general subject, it enabled me to "repurpose" a little of it.

(Here's the rest of what I wrote to Maura, for that extra bit of context:)

Now, I'm speaking solely as a Consumer of Content here; maybe somebody can indeed make big bucks off this. But if I was starting a venture, I'd want to base it on something that I felt had inherent quality, as opposed to starting out knowing I was going to be creating and living with a junk generator.

Caveat
Let me admit that I've yet to watch more than one minute of AI (there's an overused acronym for you: Artificial Intelligence, Allen Iverson, neither of whom I look forward to seeing play for the Celtics,), because it immediately seemed evident that,

a) it was just "Star Search" reborn, with all these people who had obviously been painfully coached to act like stars, with all the old gestures and cheap tricks,

b) most of what I heard about Idol was about the nasty things that guy Simon would say to those poor contestants. Like the bumper sticker tells us, "Mean People S(tin)k." Plus, I'd be shocked to discover that it wasn't fixed.

The Thing About "User-Generated' Sites - YGWYPF?

You hear an awful lot these days about the miracle of User-Generated Content on the Web, from all these startups and companies who believe they’ve found a way to create content-rich sites in no time, and at no cost.

You put up a wall, thousands of people presumably throw, uh, “material” up on it, and presto! You’ve got a bona fide content-driven website that attracts millions of visitors – mostly the immediate friends and family of the ones who threw all that compost up there – and you sell billions of dollars worth of contextual ads.

And it’s Free; it costs you mothing to create all those pages of what-all. It’s hard to argue with that… except by invoking YGWYPF, the timeless axiom that holds, “You Get What You Pay For.”

It reminds me of the pre-Internet, AOL days, when “chat rooms” were all the rage. But when I first joined, all I found was what I've heard people say MySpace is now full of: teens, or the teen-like, just mindlessly blabbing away. After a few visits, I was outta there.

CNET's Download.com Music section recently went through a redesign that now emphasizes commercially promoted bands over the user contributed music that they established the site with, because, as one of the staffers confided in their artists’ forum, 'Let’s be honest, most of it is awful.'

That's who usually shows up for these parties. If you’re lucky, you attract the kind of Early Adopters who enthusiastically add stuff that people do want to look at or listen to. But with success and increased visibility come the unseen throngs of those who, and how to put this gently, have less to offer.

Some have not yet developed their talent, let’s say, but either no one’s told them or they’re just not listening. Then there are the poor souls whose level of enjoyment is so limited that they can only delight in trashing things.

They’ll all dive in there and fill your site with junk, Because It’s There, and they can. There’s an old saying that, some people have nothing to say – but it takes a long time to find that out. So user-built sites may have a decent shot at a run, but it’s usually relatively short-term, and many such ventures wind up as ghost sites where the visitor soon realizes nobody's home anymore, it's all on auto-pilot, and they leave.

Not that there haven't been big successes, and it is pretty cool that you can throw some software out there and thousands of people will fill it up, potentially creating a new community from like-minded but widely distributed people who wouldn't have connected any other way. (See? We're not being totally Grinchy here.) But it ain't as easy at it looks to maintain and react to a site like that; it requires some strong editorial input and management, too, unless you're fine with site whose between-the-lines motto is, "The Lowest Common Denominator!"