Erasing Past Work from the Present

Business Insider has a piece from Dan Frommer discussing what appears to be an epidemic – Journalism professionals wishing to erase their crappy college work from existence:

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice feature about the subject in its May 15 issue, called "Alumni Try to Rewrite History on College-Newspaper Web Sites."

But it turns out this is more common than we thought. Someone from my alma mater -- Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism -- is petitioning the school paper right now to remove some of their columns from the site that they're not particularly proud of. In this case, the paper wouldn't delete the articles -- that's really crossing the line -- but it might consider hiding them from Google, which could be less troublesome.

Last night on CobWEBs, we talked about why it seems people in our sector don’t reach for the simple solution when trying to rectify problems. Both Dan and his friend (who he quoted in his BI piece) suggest either redacting the original pieces, or hiding them from Google since they have higher SERP rankings.

Here’s an idea – writing something better!

There’s a million ways to get better SERPs for newer articles – how about doing a guest post for a high pagerank blog, and instead of linking to old college work in your bio, link to the new stuff?

Or how about hitching your new articles’ feeds to Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed?

There are a million ways to fix this ‘problem’ without self-censorship.

Of course, that’d mean learning about how the Internet works, and then engaging critical thinking – something Heritage Media journalists are often loathe to do.

Crackle Ceases to be Interesting for Anyone

News comes today via NewTeeVee that Crackle is cutting off user uploads, in an email that was supposedly sent out to their users yesterday (though for some reason, I was excluded from this mailing):

[B]eginning June 1, 2009, general video uploading will no longer be supported by Crackle. Videos that you have previously uploaded to Crackle may still be available for viewing by accessing your profile page while logged in to Crackle, or by those who have bookmarked them. Sharing of uploaded videos via the “send” function in the video player is no longer supported. Consider taking some time to bookmark videos that you would like to continue to view. This availability, however, may be temporary. You should plan accordingly. We apologize for any inconvenience this transition has caused you.

I think it’s a poor move, all things considered.  I’m fairly certain that Sony’s own content isn’t what’s motivating the majority of their pageviews:

Still, as Sony doesn’t have an ad company backing them, it isn’t likely they’re going to beat Google / YouTube to the monetization brass ring.

I still can’t hope but wonder why they don’t at least try, though. backing out – actively de-emphasizing content that many other content video networks would kill to have?  I’m definitely scratching my head.

For those looking to find my content on Crackle, you should head on over to my member page, or scroll down for some of the highlights.

From Crackle: Three in the Afternoon

From Crackle: Ernie Mosteller Brunner

From Crackle: Rizzn with Rudder Save Your Finances

riz.gd Gets Popular [holy crap!]

Earlier today I was absently and morosely looking at the decline in my visitor stats since last week I went altogether way too light on my posting on rizzn.com, and I paged over to my stats on riz.gd, and had to do a double take.

 

 

Yesterday, my stats jumped up from a dismal 100-375 unique hits a day all the way up to nearly 10,000 uniques overnight. At the moment, my stats tracking is in its infancy (as I really didn’t intend for it to go as viral as it apparently has gone this quickly), so I’m not sure who’s responsible exactly, although I’m pretty happy to see it where it is.

I went through the database of URLs, and it appears as if this is being used for the purposes of simplifying affiliate links in addition to light usage all over Twitter.

It has me pondering the feasibility of monetization, though.  My ultimate plan for the site was to make riz.gd a home for Twitter utilities of various types, though I’m not certain that’s set in stone.

I’ve got a few ideas on how to monetize it, but for the mean time, I’m keeping them under my hat until I work out all the logistics.

This weekend, I should have some better stat tracking in place (which I’ll make available to the public) as well as a bookmarklet to simplify URL creation on the fly.

Seth Finkelstein is Smarter Than You, and Doesn’t Like @You

Seth Finkelstein wrote a piece in the UK Guardian decrying Twitter as a system that exists simply for the purpose of .. how did he put it?  Oh yes: facilitating the “pathologies of celebrity,” his five-dollar term for narcissism.

He spends eleven paragraphs talking about how horrible it is when people talk about themselves and then how some people get popular from it, and then how some other people make money. That wasn’t enough ranting to get it out of his system (or as we put it in CobWEBs this evening, that rant didn’t Gillmor all the crap from his innards).

He also posted over at his personal blog, Infothought, and lamented what a mistake it was to ever inject personality into his blog:

I suspect some people are going to miss the point of this column, and tell me that, golly gee, I can chat with friends. I know that. Really. I'm well into a third decade of being on the Net (I went to MIT, I was on the Net more way before it reached the general population), and I know all about text chat. I don't want to use Twitter to chat.

I also don't want to broadcast or narrowcast my life's trivia. Encouraging exhibitionism is part of what I meant by "pathologies of celebrity". I made a deliberate, strategic choice to put "personal voice" into my blog, and in retrospect that was, overall, a pretty bad decision.

What's left is the rat race of trying to get followers for one's micropunditry and links. No. Not again. Not another grind of a few BigHeads on top all group-grooming each other, while everyone else is practically unheard. Not again, not so I can be monetized by another social/data-mining start-up.

Well, gee, here’s an idea – if you don’t want to engage people, you don’t want to reveal anything real about yourself, and you hate everyone else for climbing the social ladder to their own benefit – be anti-social on your own time.

I mean, seriously, we get it.  If your editorials reflect your true feelings, you’re an anti-social geek (with a dash of class-envy) from MIT that knows more than everyone else and hates talking to everyone. Good for you. That didn’t require two blog postings and sixteen paragraphs total.  I just summed it up in one (admittedly run-on) sentence.

That ain’t news – it’s just a bit of your personality on display for everyone (which, incidentally, goes against one of your primary objections with blogging and Twittering).

As I re-read what I wrote, I can see how one might get the impression that I’m pretty down on Seth Finkelstein – I don’t have any personal quibbles with the guy, and despite his alleged quirks, he’s undoubtedly a very deep thinker and eloquent writer.  I just think that in this instance, he’s transferring quite a bit of emotion to the technology and culture surround social media.

For what it’s worth, though, Seth’s view of Twitter is pretty myopic, and in Twitter as in life, if you find yourself hating everything and everyone, you can change one of two things to remedy it: change yourself, or change everything and everyone one else.

As Seth himself said in an interview with Harvard’s Greplaw:

There's nothing wrong with keeping an online diary which is read by friends and family. Just like there's nothing wrong with playing frequent poker games. You don't have to be a professional, or make a living at it, to enjoy it and find it worthwhile.

That is, when it comes down to it, what most people use social media tools for, be it MySpace, Twitter or blogging. Seth sees the world in shades of Winer, Lessig, and Wales. The much wider world isn’t concerned with the “A-List” rat race, and thus his railings against Twitter fall completely flat.

Once Again, Techcrunch Steps Into Quagmire on Paid Posting

I won’t go into my great big long rant about this – I covered this topic pretty thoroughly not long ago here:

• The Truth about Magpie [Google It]
• How to Buy Your Way Into the Conversation
• Other Thoughts on Sponsored Posts and Magpie [Buying Conversation]

But Sarah Lacy over at Techcrunch couldn’t resist (on what I suspect was a day of blogger writer’s blog) bagging on Ted Murphy at Izea today:

In the last few months I have gotten the same pitch from PayPerPost (now called Izea) all sent from different names. My favorite part is this:

“…while compensating bloggers was considered taboo a few years ago, there has been a paradigm shift in thinking over the last year…”

Really? Yeah, I guess that whole Google resetting the page rank of PayPerPost bloggers was all the way back in November 2007. I must have slipped into a coma and missed the “paradigm shift” since.

She goes on to act as if she’s asking an innocuous question even though someone less observant than Forest Gump could tell you she’s trying to start a fight:

Each time I’ve gotten this email, I have written back something like, “I’m sorry, I still consider paying for coverage incredibly controversial and, for a reporter, unethical. Can you explain to me what has changed about this issue?” No response. Month or so passes, then I get the same email. I honestly don’t know if the emails are being sent to me for press consideration or as a nudge that I should sign up, because it’s just obliquely titled “suggestion” in the subject line.

And then, as predictable as Kavis Alpha, comes the self-righteous knee-jerking:

So, let me address this publicly, to save the time of future Izea employees cutting and pasting the email and sending it to me again: There is no time during my life on planet earth or beyond that I will *ever* consider accepting payment for coverage. There is no circumstance or situation where I will respect a journalist who does, especially if the details of that conflict aren’t clearly disclosed. P.E.R.I.O.D.

She then constructs a series of straw-men arguments and subsequently knock them down. What doesn’t happen? A well reasoned set of circumstances where this business model could work and stay within the narrow bounds of what’s ethical for those that consider themselves simply bloggers and those that hold themselves to the standards of journalism.

What isn’t mentioned at all? Techcrunch’s company policy of monthly paid blog posts for their sponsors. Let me refresh your memory – I covered this a week or two ago:

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch has remained fairly silent recently about sponsored posting recently.  The last time he really broached the topic specifically was back in November of last year when he talked about Magpierather objectively for his personal style. When it comes to sponsored posting, though, Mike Arrington is much less vitriolic about the topic, though no less fervent, calling it shilling.

This, of course, doesn’t stop him from running posts showcasing the many sponsors of his various get-togethers, demos and conferences. I haven’t noticed many specifically sponsored posts in several months, but I know they exist in Techcrunch’s history in one form or another. No disrespect to Mike, but I think he calls it “doing business” when he does it, rather than shilling.

Last time I broached this topic on the blog, we had a great discussion about what should and shouldn’t be in-bounds.  It’s too bad the A-List is more concerned with muckraking for pageviews rather than talking about this topic with intellectual honesty.

The FBI Takes Seven Years to Develop a Top Secret FriendFeed

I was paging through a pretty well written article over at Ars Technica regarding the bumbling results of a seven year long project at the FBI to create what’s being dubbed an “everything bucket” to warehouse the data they collect on an ongoing basis.

The description will make you cringe, but go ahead and read it so the rest of what I say will make sense to you:

Earlier this week, the EFF published a new report detailing the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse, which appears to be something like a combination of Google and a university's slightly out-of-date custom card catalog with a front-end written for Windows 2000 that uses cartoon icons that some work-study student made in Microsoft Paint. I guess I'm supposed to fear the IDW as an invasion of privacy, and indeed I do, but given the report's description of it and my experiences with the internal-facing software products of large, sprawling, unaccountable bureaucracies, I mostly just fear for our collective safety.

The idea behind the system, which the FBI has been working on since at least 2002, is that the Bureau can dump all of its information in there so that it can be easily searched and shared. IDW contains more documents than the library of congress—a stew of TIFFs with OCRed text, multiple Oracle databases, news streamed in from the Internet, reports and records in various in-house data formats, watch lists, telephone data, and an alphabet soup of smaller databases and records repositories—all accessible as one sprawling system that processes batch jobs, runs queries, and issues alerts. In short, the IDW is an "everything bucket" for the FBI.

Tell me if you caught the same thing I caught (it shouldn’t be hard, since I used italics and bold). This IDW thing is basically a lifestreaming services for the whole country?

The data collected is supposedly more plentiful than the library of congress, and contains all manner of inane data, sometimes substantive and relevant discussion, and news streamed in from the Internet.

Sounds a bit like FriendFeed or the Facebook news feed (only, y’know, searchable).

Took them seven years to achieve that? Really?

I do sort of want to take a peek at the system, now, based on that revelation. Based on what the EFF has said, though, that ain’t gonna happen.

(Incidentally, I can almost guarantee that while it is probably an inferior product to FriendFeed, the color scheme is almost certainly superior).

Google: Indexing the World’s Information So Long as It’s Not a Torrent File.

Yesterday afternoon, Ernesto at TorrentFreak reported that Google has taken a quiet but definitive stance against the BitTorrent using public in blocking the access of over 28 million uTorrent users from searching the site through the use of “Google Custom Search.”

Of course, Ernesto trots out the “Don’t be evil” line, but aside from whether or not we can assign moral imperative to the move, it is fairly out of line for what I’d normally consider Google’s character to be.

BitTorrent as a technology really doesn’t interfere with or call into question any of Google’s over-arching business  strategies, and indexing and making accessible the world’s information is the company’s call to action. 

So what’s the problem?

I doubt we’ll hear official word from the company on this, but it’d sure be nice to hear them break their stoic silence on legal and censorship issues for once and say something.