Welcome to another week of the daily edition of CobWEBs, the flagship podcast of The Cynical Bastards!
For those who don’t remember from the other episodes, this is a new format for the show as we are going to try giving you daily bite sized chunks of our patented brand of cynicism over everything in the tech universe. The show will have a rotating host schedule between Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself. You’ll always get two of us, you just never know which two!
Steven Hodson and I take a look at at the safety of cloud computing in the wake of the T-Mobile Sidekick debacle. Is it really safe? Should you rely on it?
Only a few things are certain in life: death, taxes and that I’ll rant about Christopher Columbus on Columbus Day.
For the past four years I have posted a rant about Columbus Day and how it is a farce that this man is still honored by people for his supposed accomplishments. Well, luckily it seems this year I am no longer alone in these beliefs.
According to a new story from the Associated Press, schools are beginning to downplay his importance to the history of the United States. I would quote more of it, but the AP has very strict rules about what bloggers can quote from their works, so I would recommend you just go and read it for yourselves, it is well worth the time and effort.
For everyone else, here is the annual rant about Columbus, enjoy!
___
Welcome to the fourth annual posting of this entry! Long time readers can skip it, but as I keep adding more readers, it’ll keep getting posted!
Ah, Columbus Day, the day we set aside each year to celebrate a lie. It always warms my heart.
People tend to forget that Christopher Columbus wasn’t looking for North America when he landed here, he was looking for the West Indies. Quite the navigator there. He also believed, until his death, that the entire time he was in this area that he was exploring the Eastern coast of Asia.
Never mind the fact that he also took the indigenous people as slaves and shipped them back to Spain, against the Crowns wishes. Never mind that colonists he brought over here rebelled against him when the New World didn’t come close to what he described. No, no, all those things are just a-ok for a man we should honor with a governmental and banking holiday.
The biggest offense to me is that he was far from the first person to “discover” the Americas. (how does one “discover” a place that is already inhabited?) The Siberians crossed the land bridge with Alaska as early as 70,000 BC, and it was those crossings that gave us the Native Americans. There were numerous other occurrences of people coming to the Americas, but one of the most well documented was Leifur Eircksson in 1005 when he sailed from Iceland to North America and traveled down the coast. Gee, does that come before 1492?
Yet, history textbooks still hail him as the man who “discovered” America. Why is beyond me, but a friend pointed me to a wonderful book called Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (Barnes & Noble link) that spends an entire chapter delving into this very matter. Fascinating stuff.
If you want to credit Columbus with something, just say that he brought the America’s to the attention of Europe, but leave it at that.
Well, glad someone took the time to actually record video of what I’ve always talked about happening in the online gaming community.
Duncan Riley over at The Inquisitr stumbled across a video on YouTube entitled “Halo 3: Homophobia Evolved”. This was a video recorded by an openly gay gamer who spent 11 nights recording his interactions with other players of Halo 3. I’ve talkedtwice before about the sort of thing, and also about the young people you encounter, but it is hard to convey that absolute vitriol that comes from these people unless you hear it.
The video contains extremely harsh language, you have been warned.
Luckily I find players on Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare to be far more polite, and you never hear this amount of garbage on that game, this seems fairly restricted to the Halo games for some reason. I actually skipped buying Halo 3:ODST when it came out a few weeks ago because of the way its online community acts.
Kinda makes you fear for the future of the United States, doesn’t it?
On October 11th, 1975, American late night television changed forever.
35 years ago today, the very first episode of Saturday Night Live aired from studio 8H in 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the same studio the show continues to broadcast from. During the first season the show was called NBC’s Saturday Night due to a conflict with a sports show on ABC at the time named Saturday Night Live.
The format of the first episode was different as George Carlin was the host, but only appeared on stage to do stand up, never appearing in an actual sketch, of which there was very few. The episode also featured two musical guests that week, Billy Preston and Janis Ian. This particular episode was rerun on June 28, 2008 to commemorate the passing of Mr. Carlin, and after having watched it that night, and on DVD, I am honestly shocked the show ever survived. It was so rough compared to later seasons, but there was no denying that the original cast (Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman. Gilda Radner, George Coe and Michael O’Donoghue) were all talented, but I don’t think anyone knew just how talented.
It’s interesting to compare the impact of SNL on comedy to Monty Python’s 40th Anniversary, which happened earlier this week. Although only 5 years separate the two series, people can quote every sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and with SNL, people only remember the players, and really none of the skits from that first season. I remember a few of them such as the very first sketch of Belushi trying to learn English and saying, “I would like … to buy … a wol-ver-ine”, and the Bees showed up a few times, but that season was so rough that very people remember it.
The show has certainly had its ups and downs over the years (the 1985-1986 eleventh season was a complete train wreck), it has continued to deliver quality comedy now for 35 years. How much longer can it go? Who knows, but I know I will continue to watch it though until the end.
- Barnes & Noble is launching its own e-reader? Hmm, this could be interesting.
- More detailed info on my feelings about the FTC Guidelines (PDF link).
Here’s
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Welcome to another week of the daily edition of CobWEBs, the flagship podcast of The Cynical Bastards!
For those who don’t remember from the other episodes, this is a new format for the show as we are going to try giving you daily bite sized chunks of our patented brand of cynicism over everything in the tech universe. The show will have a rotating host schedule between Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself. You’ll always get two of us, you just never know which two!
Steven Hodson and I take a break from all of the FTC talk to discuss Twitter, text messaging, ebook readers … and Snuggy sex.
Okay, we really haven’t declared war on the Moon, but we are bombing it tomorrow.
At 11:30 AM GMT October 9, the Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will impact the Moon in a crater named Cabeus A in the South Polar region. The impact will occur at 5,600 MPH, creating a new crater about 1/3rd the size of an American football field. The resulting plume of debris is expected to extend up to 30 miles from the Lunar surface.
Why are we doing this? Well, first of all, it’s fun, and secondly, NASA is attempting to see if there is any water or ice crystals mixed in the debris.
While we have been doing some scans of the Moon’s surface that indicate there is ice, an essential element to us building any sort of long-term colony on our planet’s only satellite, we do not have any definitive proof as of yet. While a return to the Moon has been brought into question as of late, this is something we still need to know if we ever hope to go back there for an extended period.
If you have a telescope at home that lens surface is 10″ or more, you will be able to watch it happen, but somehow I doubt that is very many of you. Gizmodo made a handy guide of how you can watch this event for yourself:
Attend one of the many public events organized by observatories throughout the country. You can see a list of events here.
Day 3 of “The Blogopshere vs. the FTC” brings us the full set of guidelines, and wow are they head spinning.
I really don’t want to blog daily on this whole Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guideline debacle, but it just keeps getting weirder and weirder.
First off, I finally got a link to the full 81-page document (PDF link) from Steven Hodson, and although I have only read through 51 pages thus far, this is going to be mandatory reading for every independent blogger if you want to make sure to keep yourself from getting in trouble with the FTC. That being said, be prepared for the extreme ambiguity of the document on many fronts.
So far I have still yet to find anywhere that describes in detail how disclosures are supposed to be written. It mentions numerous times that you must disclose if you receive a product for free and then give it a positive review (there is some implication that disclosure is not required on negative reviews), but nowhere does it say how are exactly where it is to be placed.
The document also discusses new rules for celebrity endorsements and how they are supposed to disclose their relationship with anything they speak positively of. The problem with this is that at no time do they define what a celebrity is. On tonight’s episode of CobWEBs, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and I discussed this, and technically you could call iJustine a celebrity, but that is only to a handful of people on the Internet. Heck, there was even a time when I was working for Wizard magazine that I was being asked for my autograph on a regular basis, would that have qualified me as a celebrity? I was a celebrity to those people, but not to the other 99.999999999% of the population of the country, but would I have qualified for the FTC celebrity rules? Who knows, their answers are so vague.
Then to muddy the waters even further, Richard Cleland, assistant director, division of advertising practices at the FTC (and someone Rizzn has been trying to get an interview with for 3 months with no luck) spoke with FastCompany, and made some of the most mind boggling statements ever.
Heather B. Armstrong, author of parenting blog Dooce: “Eleven thousand dollars is a little crazy for a post. Maybe I’m being naïve, but I think a lot of people who are in violation [of not disclosing] just don’t know that they’re supposed to.”
Richard Cleland: “That $11,000 fine is not true. Worst-case scenario, someone receives a warning, refuses to comply, followed by a serious product defect; we would institute a proceeding with a cease-and-desist order and mandate compliance with the law…
Excuse me? When did the FTC start writing laws? They are a regulatory body, they are not capable of making “laws”. Perhaps he was misquoted, but if the FTC really sees this as “law”, we’re in bigger trouble than any of us first thought.
Brian Lam, editorial director of Gizmodo: “Some colleagues of mine just reminded me of how many freelance pro journalists take junkets. In the end, I’m glad these rules are being introduced, but it’s kind of stupid to attach unethical behavior to a particular publishing medium. Look at how shitty TV journalism can be, by and large.”
RC: “It’s not the medium, it’s the message. We want to establish a self-imposed ethical standard so people are aware of the conflicts of interest…
“We want to establish a self-imposed…” um … which part of this sentence makes any sense? How does person #2 establish SELF-IMPOSED anything on person #1?
This is what we are dealing with folks: vagueness, ambiguity and a regulatory body that seems to have no clue what its actual job is. If you aren’t scared yet, you aren’t thinking.
Welcome to another week of the daily edition of CobWEBs, the flagship podcast of The Cynical Bastards!
For those who don’t remember from the other episodes, this is a new format for the show as we are going to try giving you daily bite sized chunks of our patented brand of cynicism over everything in the tech universe. The show will have a rotating host schedule between Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself. You’ll always get two of us, you just never know which two!
Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkin and I continue to discuss all the discussion surrounding the FTC guidelines that we covered on Monday. Just before we recorded, the mysterious Richard Cleland from the FTC, someone Mark has been trying to interview for 3 months, spoke with FastCompany to try to “clear up” some of the misconceptions we have over the guidelines. Trust us … who just ends up making it worse.
This was the most tired argument I have seen, and it simply isn’t true. If this was true, I want you to point out to me where movie reviewers disclose that they got into a movie for free or got sent a DVD copy of the movie for free. We all know it happens, but have you ever seen them disclose it? Same goes for book, movie and DVD reviews.
Now, under these new FTC rules, if I decide to review anything, and if it was sent to me for free, then I have to write a disclosure every single time I do it. Tell me how these are the same rules traditional media has been under.
“Facebook and Twitter fall under these rules also.”
Yep, all that fun you have on social media sites? Well, prepare yourself to always disclose your relationship for any product you speak positively of.
Caroline McCarthy of CNET spoke with a Richard Cleland, associate director for the FTC’s advertising division, and here is the scenario he set up to explain the Facebook scenario:
Here’s a sample scenario: a celebrity or other prominent figure with loads of friends on Facebook receives free hotel says [sic] from Hotel Chain X in exchange for running Hotel Chain X ads on his or her blog. If that person then signs up as a Facebook fan of Hotel Chain X–which, remember, could mean that the person’s name can show up for his or her Facebook friends alongside Hotel Chain X display ads on the social network–he or she could be held liable by the FTC.
“It would be the same thing if you were going to pay the celebrity a thousand dollars to go register as a fan,” Cleland said. “In that case, there wouldn’t be any question about it.”
And as for new media darling Twitter?
As for Twitter, the FTC isn’t letting you get a pass with the excuse that 140 characters–Twitter’s famous text limit–is simply too short. “There are ways to abbreviate a disclosure that fit within 140 characters,” Cleland said. “You may have to say a little bit of something else, but if you can’t make the disclosure, you can’t make the ad.”
So, think you will be exempt from this if you aren’t a blogger. Too bad. If you have any sort of relationship with a product, and you make a comment anywhere on the Web about it, you better be prepared to disclose your relationship.
“This is all about going after sploggers.”
No, it isn’t.
In a discussion between Steven Hodson and Matt Cutts of Google on The Noisy Channel, they brought up the discussion of how this will cut out bad marketing:
Steven: “No degree of FTC intervention is going to make any difference to splogs or other such garbage…”
Matt: At a respected search conference last year, I sat in the audience and watched a presenter recommend “sock puppet” marketing by coming up with fake personas to promote products. With this new guidance from the FTC (plus similar recent guidance in the UK/EU against sock puppet marketing), that sort of bad advice will be much less likely to appear at search conferences. That’s one easy counter-example.
No, Matt, it isn’t. You are talking about advice given at a conference, big deal. The Sock Puppet marketers will simply start hiring people from Africa and India off of GetAFreelancer or other such sites and have them do that sort of marketing far from the reach of the USA, UK or EU.
And that is one of my biggest complaints about this whole thing is that the unethical people it is supposedly targeting will just find new ways of working around it, while those of us who follow ethical blogging and online presence will be saddled with these idiotic new rules, libing under fear of some little slip up costing us a potential $11,000 fine. Oh yeah, that makes things so much better.
“This will stop all those fake review sites.”
Are you kidding me?
Lets say that an “unethical” blogger is currently working out of the USA with their web site on servers that reside in the USA. They want to get away from these new rules so they move their site to servers in another country, they put privacy protection on their domain name and then they sit back.
The FTC finds them lacking disclosure, they will have to get a court order to reveal the name of the person who holds the ownership of the domain. So the FTC will have to weight taking the time to get the court order, and in some cases they will have to go through a court in another country, is it really worth all of that effort, time and taxpayer money for a possibly undisclosed material relationship? You guessed it, I would go with “no.” Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t try.
All of the “bad” sites will simply move off shore to countries that don’t care about all of this hoopla, and the innocent people will yet again be left to jumping through hoops that should have never been required.
“This system is ripe for abuse.”
Yes, it is.
We have no clue what the investigation process will be like yet, but what is to stop people from reporting you for fun or revenge? ”Oh, hey, I think so-and-so has a relationship with that company they just posted abut on Facebook.” Oh won’t that be fun to defend yourself from false accusations? This is why some people will be better off even disclosing when they purchased something to cut off any possible questioning to avoid any sense in impropriety.
In other words, people will be so annoyed by having to watch their behinds that they simply won’t want to talk any more.
“Aren’t you worrying about this too much?”
No, I’m not.
I have done more reading today, and the tone of the conversations have changed quite a bit in the second day. Check out SiliconANGLE’s FTC vs. the Blogosphere Day 2 Roundup to get a better sense of what is being said everywhere. (disclosure: I am linked to in that article and I work for SiliconANGLE … see … won’t that get annoying?)
1. Will these same ‘guidelines’ be applied against “traditional media” and if not – why not?
2. What exact form do these disclosure need to take? Per post? Per page? Per comment?
3. Is this retroactive? Does this mean that sites like Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Mashable, – well every single blog past and present will have to go through all their archives and add a disclaimer. Because we all know that posts that are even months or years old can resurface.
4.Will book publishers make signing a disclosure form a part of bloggers doing book reviews and is it really worth the effort at that point?
5. Does the country of origin of the writer matter as to whether a disclosure is included?
6. Does it matter the country of origin of where the blog served from come into play?
7 Does the country of origin of the product, service or book come into play at all?
(disclaimer: I know Steven and make fun of his Canadian citizenship on a regular basis)
The FTC has got to start defining this whole thing better, but somehow I don’t see that coming any time soon.
Only a few things are certain in life: death, taxes and that I’ll rant about Christopher Columbus on Columbus Day.
On October 11th, 1975, American late night television changed forever.
Up to 33 articles this week … don’t think it will go up again like it has been.
Scattercast is 64 … and wondering how these weeks just seem to fly by.
Okay, we really haven’t declared war on the Moon, but we are bombing it tomorrow.
Day 3 of “The Blogopshere vs. the FTC” brings us the full set of guidelines, and wow are they head spinning.
