Why is it writers have become obsessed with the word “killer”?

“Such-and-such gadget is a this-and-that gadget killer.”

This is a refrain I have seen endlessly since I joined the tech blogging world back in July of 2007, and it is getting tiresome.  David Coursey over at PC World is just the latest offender with his piece entitled “B&N’s Nook Is A Kindle Killer: 5 Reasons Why“.

Mr. Coursey isn’t to blame, it has become an accepted trend, but that doesn’t mean it is one that should continue.  It has actually become a joke amongst professional bloggers that every new gadget or app released is either a “killer”, somehow “pwns” an existing tool and so on.  Whatever happened to words like “supplant”?  ”Replaces”?  ”Threatens”?  How about a headline along the lines of “B&N’s Nook Threatens Kindle’s E-Reader Dominance: 5 Reasons Why”.

Guess the word “killer” just sounds more serious, but whatever.

As for the nook, will it overtake the Kindle?  Well … it could.  This isn’t too big of a surprise as the Kindle was the first big name in the space, and it had become synonymous with e-readers, so that is always hard to knock out of that top spot.  (Think how “Googling” has replaced the word “searching” and you get the idea)

The nook has several legs up on the Kindle in the way of Wi-Fi, access to over 500,000 free e-books from Google, a color browser for shopping and so on.

One of the interesting aspects to me is the LendMe feature which allows one B&N users (be it on th nook, iPhone, computer, phone etc) can lend a book to another account holder on any device for 14 days free of charge.  While I’m not sure this is a feature I would ever actually use, it is a small way of capturing the experience of reading actual books.

You can read more details on the Barnes & Noble nook on StarterTech, but I have to say I was never tempted to buy a Kindle, but I am very, very tempted by the nook.  I like the look of the device, I like the advances in the user friendliness of the device (replaceable battery!), access to free books and so on.  Will I buy one for sure?  I’m still not sure, but I’m giving it some serious thought.

However, you will never hear me refer to it as “a Kindle killer” …

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.

Sorry folks, but this Federal Trade Commission dust up is going to be front and center at this blog for some time to come.

In all of the hoopla yesterday, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins, Steven Hodson and myself ran into many instances of being questioned over our vehement hatred of the new guidelines, and also more examples of just how messed up this whole thing is.

“Print media is already under these rules.”

No, they aren’t.

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?)

Also make sure to check out Steven Hodson’s questions that he is still waiting for answers to:

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.

The Federal Trade Commission has made the first steps towards a scary, scary precedent, and if you aren’t careful, you could be next.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has updated its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in advertising for the first time since 1980.  The new additions to the guides include endorsements by consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities, as well as disclosing of “material connections” between advertisers and endorsers.  In plain English, this means that if you get paid to talk about an item, or you receive it for free, you must disclose those situations wherever you talk about them online.

Well, that is if you talk about it on the Internet, if you do the same in a magazine or newspaper, then you’re perfectly fine and don’t have to say a word.

You see, for years newspapers and magazines have received free items to review, but they have never been required to disclose the arrangement.  Do you really think movie reviewers pay to go all those movies?  Do book reviewers pay for the books they receive?  No, they don’t, but for some reason it is important that people know that those of us on the Internet who receive similar freebies are obligated to tell you because … well … we’re not really sure why, but if we don’t we could be facing fines of up to $11,000 per incident.

I have already written about this today at Tech.BLORGE.com and StarterTech.com, as well as having just recorded a podcast with Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and Steven Hodson about it that I will be posting later, and I have never thrilled to reusing a subject, but this is just too important to not be everywhere possible.  The StarterTech article in particular lists my major reservations over this, but it can all be summarized as I fear the precedent it sets.  It starts here, where does it go next?

My father asked me why I was so upset about this today as I don’t do reviews typically and it would have little to no impact on me, and I pointed him to one of my all time favorite quotes:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)

This speaks to First Amendment issues, and is actually why I imagine this could end up being challenged in the courts at some point, but for now it is just frightening.  The FTC thinks they are helping the American people, but this leads to one of Mark Hopkins’ favorite quotes:

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

Ronald Reagan

If you don’t speak out against this, then where will they go next?

For as old an organization as the Associated Press is, you would think that might have some people around the offices that might be able to tell them how the Internet works.

Back in April, the Associated Press (A.P.) began its war on the Internet.  At that time they were already saying that they wanted news aggregator sites such as Google News to stop indexing their stories as it iolated the Fair Use doctorine in their eyes.  Fine, whatever, this is the same group of yahoos who was trying to set up a system where every site that quoted any story of theirs was charged $1.50 per word for the use.

Well, late last week the A.P. took another hit off their collective bong they keep in the office and came up with a new policy that is just mind boggling.  In a story from The New York Times entitled A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web (and I am using the full headline on purpose here), the A.P. has now said that no one may use their headlines without express consent from the association.

The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.

Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.

Now, you notice how nice all of this is for The New York Times? They’re getting a link (which helps get them better rankings in search engines… they’re getting free advertising… some of you will click on the link, giving them another pageview and assists in upping their ad impressions… heck, some of you may even click on an ad, generating revenue for them.  Well, here is just a little bit more from the article from you that shows you how the A.P. obviously doesn’t have a brain in their heads.

Asked if that stance went further than The A.P. had gone before, he said, “That’s right.” The company envisions a campaign that goes far beyond The A.P., a nonprofit corporation. It wants the 1,400 American newspapers that own the company to join the effort and use its software.

“If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that,” Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.

Okay, let me explain this in the simplest terms for the A.P…. no, you are not going to grow a “multihundred-million businesses” out of this.  Well, wait, I take that back, you just might, but it won’t be yours, it will be all of the other sites that will get the traffic you once did.

Think I’m alone in these thoughts?

- Scott Rosenberg

Need another?

When AP tries to impose a license fee on linking to its content, people will stop linking to AP content. Not just some sites, but 99% of sites. There may be no official boycott as such, but likewise most won’t be interested in battling AP in court. The result will be a big drop in traffic to AP content as the link juice it previously had disappears, juice that also helps their search engine rankings.

But it could be better again, because big players like Google won’t stand for paying for the right to link, so AP content may disappear altogether from most search engines as well.

The net result is that papers who rely on AP content online will see their traffic and online revenue plummet at a time that many of them are struggling to survive as it is. The drop in newspaper advertising may have driven many of them to the point of extinction, but AP will help push them off the final cliff.

- Duncan Riley, The Inquisitr

How can a group that has been in the publishing business as long as the A.P. not be getting this?  Instead of making money you are only accomplishing making enemies out of every blogger out there.  Sure they will be able to continue to sell their wire services, but the idea that anyone on the Internet is going to pay them a single penny when there are so many sites that gladly welcome you linking to them, well then… the office bong is working overtime.

Give it up A.P., you have failed at the Internet, and you might as well leave because you are going to be non-existent here pretty darn quick.  No links = Internet death… I am sure it will be a lovely funeral.

After a long bout with illness, Walter Cronkite has passed away at the age of 92.

As any one who reads this blog on a regular basis knows, I am passionate about journalism.  I owe a lot of it to Mr. Cronkite.  I can remember watching him in the 1970’s, when I was in the single digit age range, and being mesmerized by his voice and delivery of the news.  Did that make him a quintessentially good newsman?  Not necessarily, but it planted in my mind that was what a newsman should sound and look like.  Mr. Cronkite wasn’t so much a newsman as he was the news.  For decades people thought of one name when you said you had been watching the news, and that name was always “Cronkite”.

I wasn’t alone in my thoughts about him as he regularly was named in opinion polls in the 1960’s and 1970’s as “the most trusted man in America”.

One of his most famous moments came on November 22nd, 1963 during the coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  Newsman had always been assumed to be unemotional, delivering their reports without any hint of how they felt about a story personally, but all of that changed during his coverage of that tragic day.

After making the announcement that the President was officially dead, he paused for a moment, started his next sentence, and about half way through he coughed.  It was slight and brief, but it was obviously the cough of someone trying to hold back their emotions.  He said of that moment in a 2006 interview:

I choked up, I really had a little trouble…my eyes got a little wet…[what Kennedy had represented] was just all lost to us. Fortunately, I grabbed hold before I was actually [crying].

That little moment changed a lot of things for newsmen: they became humans. They had emotions, they could feel their stories and it was a moment that shall live on in the history of journalism.

Goodbye, Mr. Cronkite, you shall truly be missed.

Listen for the infamous cough around the 34-second mark in the video below.

Folks, please, just… stop.

I have really tried refraining from even touching on the subject of Michael Jackson, but this has now reached absurd proportions.  I can understand fans being sad at his passing, but the idea that the website set up to award tickets to his memorial service (which the fact they are giving out tickets to this is disturbing in its own right) received 500 million hits in the first hour of operation.  While it is safe to say many of those were multiple visits from the same people, that is still insane.

Even though only 8,750 people will be issued a pair of tickets, 1.2 million officially applied for tickets.  The city of Los Angeles is expecting around 500,000 to 750,000 to descend upon the Staples Center to stand around outside the center during the ceremony.

Now comes the news that the networks are going to make this in to even more of a circus

• CBS is handing over the majority of its programming for the day to coverage of the event.  The Early Show, Evening News with Katie Couric and a special edition of 48 Hours anchored by Katie Couric will all originate from the Staples Center in Los Angeles where the event is being held.
• ABC will be doing live coverage of the event starting at 10 AM PDT and will pre-empt their normal daytime programming.  They are sending Charles Gibson to do the coverage.
• NBC will not do live coverage, but instead will do a one-hour highlights show Tuesday night.
• CNN will be live.
• MSNBC will be live.
• E! will be live.

Stop… please, for the love of the deity of your choice, just stop.

Michael Jackson was indeed a talented singer, but he was just that… a singer.  He didn’t cure diseases.  He didn’t serve his country.  He did nothing heroic.  He was a cute child singer, and he grew in to a very disturbed adult man due to any number of reasons that became better known for his eccentricities than his talents.  If you want to mourn him, fine, but does anyone really need to stand outside of an arena in the summer heat to mark his passing?  (hope you all remember to bring water)  Does every network need to have a crew on hand for this?  No.

This is all part of an idolism of celebrities that makes no real sense.  Anyone remember the insanity surrounding the death of Princess Diana?  At least she went out and tried to change people’s lives, while Michael… spent money on amusement park rides?  The fervor over Diana’s death didn’t make any sense either, as I said in Scattercast Episode 50, I’m not sure a terrorist attack by Osama Bin Laden would have gotten media coverage during that week in 1997, and that’s how I’m feeling about this insanity swirling around everything involving Michael Jackson.

You don’t think it has spun horribly out of control? Did you know that Anderson Cooper 360 actually went through the trouble to track down Michael Jackson’s pet chimp, Bubbles? Thanks to The Colbert Report, you can see this news handled in the manner it was most deserving of.

When you start hunting down a chimp as ‘news’, you know this story has been beat to within an inch of its life.

Up until the day he died, Michael Jackson was vilified by the media for close to 20 years, but come the day he died, he turned into something close to being a saint in the eyes of the media, and that is just sickening to me.  Not only have you obviously used this man’s death to improve your ratings, but you have betrayed your previous stance on him with your sickeningly saccharine-laced new version of the events of what and who Michael Jackson was.  Shame on the media.  How about you take that energy you spent on finding Bubbles and look in to what happened in Ft. Worth?  What is the latest on the civil unrest in Iran?  How is the world reacting to the seven ballistic missles North Korea fired in to the Sea of Japan today?  No no, that’s okay, please go do a hard hitting interview with Bubbles… really, that’s what we need more of in this world, not real news.

As for the public… well… I won’t say “shame on you” because I don’t know what each person’s individual motivation is for caring about this man so much about him, but it sure doesn’t make any sense to me to get this worked up over a celeberities death.

Sometimes I read something online that is so mind numbingly stupid that I can’t even conceive how someone reached that conclusion. Yep… this is one of those times.

Over the weekend, Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch wrote up a post about how Judge Richard Posner wrote up a blog about the death of newspapers, and he had one of the craziest ideas I’ve ever heard of for saving them from the worsening economy:

Imagine if the New York Times migrated entirely to the World Wide Web. Could it support, out of advertising and subscriber revenues, as large a news-gathering apparatus as it does today? This seems unlikely, because it is much easier to create a web site and free ride on other sites than to create a print newspaper and free ride on other print newspapers, in part because of the lag in print publication; what is staler than last week’s news. Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

For those of you unfamiliar with the theory of linking and how it works, it’s a fairly simple concept.  Take me linking the word “TechCrunch” above.  I chose to link to the actual story Ms. Schonfeld wrote, so now when this post is published he will receive a notice called a “trackback” that allows him to know that I referenced his article in my post.  This will also be used by search engines to see how relevant his post is and how much credence they should give it.  The more links a site or story receives, the more importance a search engine puts on it, and the more chance of people searching on the appropriate terms will see it.

Essentially, links are the life’s blood of blogging.

Now, what Judge Posner is suggesting that linking to copyrighted material, or using a portion of it as a quote (like I did with his blog post above), should be illegal under copyright law , you have to wonder how he thinks this will save the the newspaper industry.  I’m not sure where to even start with just how wrong he has gotten this, but lets give it a go anyway:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking…

Okay, lets say you want to link to NYTimes.com, that would probably be fine, but if you want to link to a specific story, say Karl Malden, Everyman Actor, Dies at 97, the link would look like this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/movies/02malden.html?_r=1&hp

This is known as “deep linking”, and I have a feeling this is what Judge Posner is talking about as this is actual copyrighted material.  The problem is that without deep linking you could never share a story with any one.  Are you going to link to the main page and then tell them “Okay, click here… and then here… and then do this…”, no, you aren’t.

Deep linking is also essential to how search engines index the importance of a specific page so that it knows how much priority to gie it when people search on a term.  The more links a page has to it, the more important it is, the higher up in search results it appears.  Deep linking is a very, very good thing in the Internet business.

…paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent

What he is talking about here is block quotes like I did above.  The problem with this is that it would make it impossible for anyone to write a rebuttal to anything as you would have to do a long, drawn out, explanation of what the original article said.  You would have to make sure the wording was different enough so as not to be accused of plagiarism, but then balance making sure you got the original tone of the article.  That is essentially impossible.

Quoting stories is as old as journalism and is essential to editorials as well as stories.  So long as you only quote a small portion of the story it falls under Fair Use, and I don’t really see that ever being written out of copyright law.

It all comes down to “consent”

Judge Posner does stipulate that people could get the copyright holder’s consent and do the linking and quoting, but due to time constraints, and the timeliness of stories, would any newspaper want a dedicated person sitting around 24/7 just to approve requests?  Of course they wouldn’t,  so the solution would be giving people carte blanche to link and quote.  Those papars that wouldn’t do it would quickly see themselves losing popularity due to a lack of links, and… in short, everyone would have to give blanket permission and we would be back to where we started.  Everyone would have permission, and those that didn’t grant it would get zero traffic because of how far behind they are.

So, basically I am saying that Judge Posner’s solution is flawed beyond belief and that he shows a total lack of understanding for how the Internet actually operates.  His ’solutions’ will do nothing but create grief for bloggers and newspapers alike  It would take no time for workarounds to be found, and in the meantime it would end up costing those papers money as they try to handle all of the increased number of requests for permission.

Try to save old media if you want, but at least have a working knowledge of your “solution” before you suggest it.

It’s times like this that I think back to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

“Don’t Panic”.

I won’t bother explaining the quote.  If you’ve read the book or seen the movie, you get it.  If you haven’t done either, you still get it… it’s like a universal quote.

The insanity that is circulating around the recent outbreak of swine flu is staggering.  You couldn’t bat an eye on Twitter this weekend without someone talking about it.  Blogs are writing endless posts about what to do.  Television shows are being interrupted to bring you the latest news when an a confirmed case is reported…

ENOUGH ALREADY!

We get it, there is a flu going around… it is transmitted via human-to-human contact… people have died.

You know what this reminds me of?

THE FLU!

Yes, it is a bit worse because this one came out of the blue, and we do not currently have a vaccine for it, but, then again, sometimes the vaccaine is worse than the flu for those who remember what happened in 1976.  In short, the vaccaine ended up killing a lot of people, and the pandemic like spread of the virus they predicted never materialized.

I do think it is wise to inform the public, “Hey, this is going on, you need to be careful, wash your hands, don’t go to work if you’re sick”, etc, but these are common sense rules everyone should follow.  Course, if they did, then I wouldn’t have had to write a post like Social Etiquette While You’re Sick just last month.  Do make sure you go back and read that because it is filled with basic tips that may keep you healthy during any flu outbreak.

What gets me is how the media is just making this worse.  They are acting as if no one has ever died from the flu before.  So, I went and looked up the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports on flu mortality rates.  Here is the excerpt for just the 2007-2008 flu season.

As of June 19, 2008, 83 deaths associated with laboratory-confirmed influenza infections have occurred among children aged < 18 years during the 2007–08 influenza season that were reported to CDC. These deaths were reported from 33 states (Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin). Among the 83 cases, the mean and median age was 6.4 years and 5.0 years, respectively; seven children were aged < 6 months, 16 were aged 6–23 months, 18 were aged 2–4 years, and 42 were aged 5–17 years. Of the 79 cases for which the influenza virus type was known, 51 were influenza A viruses, 27 were influenza B viruses, and one had co-infection with influenza A and B viruses. Of the 63 cases aged 6 months and older for whom vaccination status was known, 58 (92%) had not been vaccinated against influenza according to the 2007 Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations. These data are provisional and subject to change as more information becomes available.

83 deaths in the United States alone. Where were the experts on TV to tell us how we should protect ourselves? Where were the flashy graphics? Where were the news conferences by elected officials? What about the travel warnings by other countries? Oh, that’s right, it’s because this happens every year.

There is an old saying in journalism, “if it bleeds, it leads.” Here you have a pre-packaged story for lazy reporters. You have deaths… in an exotic locale… a snazzy, brandable name (go and try to find a Swine Flu related domain name that isn’t taken… I dare ya) that is easy to say and can invoke fear because it’s short and weird sounding… hey, wait a minute, didn’t we play this exact same scenario out with Avian flu? Oh, and wasn’t it SARS a few years before that was going to kill us all?

Again, I am not saying you should be cavalier about this, do take precautions, I’m just saying they should be no different than the ones you should take every flu season.  And as for the people in the media… stop being lazy.

Isn’t it amazing what a year, and an economic crisis, can do to change the perception of an industry?

It was just last April that I wrote up a post about how some news sources were talking about how professional bloggers work under harsh conditions, and now I get to tell you how we’re America’s newest profession, and some of us are rolling in money!  Well, that is at least what one reporter at the Wall Street Journal is telling the world.

According to Mark Penn, there are now over 20 million people in the United States who are blogging, of those numbers, 1.7 million are profiting from it, and another 452.000 are using it as their primary source of income.  He got those numbers from a poll on Technorati, and he’s sticking to them.

He then went to a post on ReadWriteWeb where they talked about 20 of the top-tier bloggers who shared that they are earning between $45,000 to $90,000 a year.  This is also his source of information that sites that generate around 100,000 unique visitors a month can expect to earn around $75,000 a year.

While I certainly don’t know every blogger out there, I have been in the professional tech blogging field now for close to 22-months, and I can assure you I am not earning $45,000 a year.  I can also say, with a fair degree of certainty, that I only know of one of my fellow bloggers in that pay range, and right now there are rumblings of him receiving a pay cut.

Sure it is nice to a see more positive piece about one my current professions, but I also think that Mr. Penn is painting a far rosier picture about the industry than it deserves.  Revenue from blogging is almost 100% dependent on advertising, and companies are currently cutting their advertising budgets to the bone.  I have already seen bloggers receiving tremendous pay cuts due to the downturn in ad dollars, and I have seen others completely lose their jobs.  Right now is not the time for anyone with even an inkling of how this business works to be saying, “wow, look at how much bloggers are making!”, because, quite frankly, we’re not.

My biggest concern out of a piece like this is that it is going to give false hope to people who have recently lost their jobs that they may be able to replace some of that income with trying their hand in the field, or even launching their own blogs.  Mr. Penn writes in fairly cheery tones how the barrier to entry is so low to start your own blog, saying that it is around $80, which is actually high, and how you can work your way up to earning a few hundred dollars a month.  Again, speaking as someone who has run this blog for 49 months, I can assure you it is not making a few hundred dollars a month.  If I manage to cover my hosting fees each month, I call it a good month.

So, how far off is Mr. Penn from reality?

Professional Blogging

He waxes on poetically about how much the top bloggers earn, and how you can expect some single pieces to pay you $200 a pop and so on.  Course he doesn’t tell you about how to find these jobs, how long those people have been in the field, how some blogs find sneaky ways to not pay you and so on, but hey, you can say in theory you were supposed to earn $200!

The field is currently choked with seasoned writers, and it is a buyer’s market out there.  We, the writers, are all scrambling to find work to make up for jobs we’ve lost, or ones where we have had our pay cut.  We are all competing for the same handful of positions, and we don’t need a publication like the Wall Street Journal working off of pre-economic crisis blog posts to tell a whole new group of people, “Hey, come over here, there’s ‘easy money’ over here!”

Running Your Own Blog

I speak to this from the perspective of running several blogs.  While my mother and I started StarterTech.com over a year ago, its numbers are still low.  As for ad revenue, it doesn’t even cover its portion of the hosting fees, but we’re fine with that, we see it as a long term project, and we’re dedicated to it, but it is also not expected to be our primary source of income like some of the neophytes reading that original article might look upon any blog they start.

As for this blog, it has taken me years to get it up to decent traffic.  2008 was my best year ever, doubling the traffic of 2007.  This year is shaping up even better with me having surpassed the traffic for all 12 months of 2008 on April 19th.  It has taken a lot of time and effort this year to get my numbers up like that, and I am still not near those magical numbers Mr. Penn mentions.

He really makes it sound so easy to do, but he doesn’t go into things like how these bloggers would have to learn about SEO (search engine optimization), meta tags, setting up site maps for search engine crawls, submitting to the engines and on and on and on.  Nope, just throw $80 at someone and you have a blog that will be making you money!  Running a site is as hard as any other desk job, and in some ways even harder if you have no clue some of the technical aspects even exist.  There are millions of blogs out there, and you have to jump through hoops to make sure you even get noticed.

Is This The Next eBay Gold Rush?

This article reminds me so much of the ones you saw around the time everyone was discovering eBay for the first time.  “Did you know there’s money to be made out there?!?”, and people who had no clue what they were doing, all ran out to their garages, took pictures of their junk, and tried selling it via auctions.  Sure, some good sellers came out of that, and I am sure we could gain some good bloggers, but it’s the initial onslaught of everyone with a keyboard trying to be a blogger that worries me.  More people fighting for the limited jobs, more blogs to help muddy up the search engines and just more drivel in general making it onto the Interwebs.

I don’t think this will happen unless more articles like this begin to appear, and seeing as how journalists are already fearing they may lose their jobs to bloggers, something Mr. Penn oddly does address, we won’t see an onslaught of new people in the blogosphere.  I do think his article does point out, one again, that unless you understand all the facets of a subject, perhaps you shouldn’t be writing an opinion piece on it.

It would seem Marvel Comics really doesn’t like you to talk about them… unless they tell you what to say.

The Inquisitr and Newsarama are both talking about Marvel Comics seeming hatred of the comic industry press and Twitter.  While using Twitter comments (also known as “Tweets”) in reporting is considered lazy by some, I don’t see it as any different than quoting something printed elsewhere such as in a magazine or newspaper.  I honestly think it is a littler stronger than that because you are 100% sure the person (or their paid representative in the case of some celebrities) actually said it.  However, some of the exectutives at Marvel are taking offense at their Tweets being reprinted elsewhere and are launching a war of words with bloggers, and even going so far as to suggest they are owed payment for their use.

Are they out of their freaking minds?

Oh wait, this is the comic book industry… they ARE out of their freaking minds.

From August 1986 to December 2001 I ran a comic book store.  During that time I worked for a comic book company on the side, consulted with companies, and even worked inside the comic book & toy press industries.  As much as I love comic books as an art medium, it was sort of like the old saying about loving sausage doesn’t mean you want to see how it is made.  I have only recently returned to reading comics, something I used to have a die hard passion for, because it took me over seven years to try to forget just how messed up of an industry it is.

I have still been involved with it slightly over the past few years, and I have grown amazed by seeing an average comic book rise in price to $2.99 a month, with others hitting the $3.99 and $4.99 mark; the days of the entry level pricing are gone.  I have also seen the number of venues where comics are sold dwindle to near non-existence, all but assuring that the industry is surviving only on those that have been it for years already, and no new blood is coming into it.

With all of this in mind, don’t you think they may want to have the word spread as far and wide as they can about what is going on in the business?  Don’t you think that they should welcome every mention of their names and brands in the hopes it might bring in more readers?

Apparently if your name is “Marvel”, you don’t.

Tom Brevoort, Brian Michael Bendis and Joe Quesada, all employed by Marvel, and they decided to launch arguments with the comic press about their, publicly available mind you, Tweets being used as quotes in articles.  This has begun happening in the mainstream press on a regular basis, and even Ashton Kutcher said in the Oprah episode about Twitter that he likes the fact that he can diffuse some stories about himself in the press because he can refute them quickly on the site.  Here is someone who is virtually a household name, and he encourages people to use his Twitter stream as a source of information about him.

Not in the comic book industry though.  Oh no, we can’t have you using something they made public themselves without first asking their permission to do it.  Apparently they have missed the fact that you can lock a Twitter stream which means that no one is allowed to republish your Tweets.  No, they’ll just go on saying things that anyone can see and then get angry when people actually quote them on it.

In Lucas Siegel’s rebuttal piece to all this (Newsarama link above), he points out that due to the walled garden type situation in the comics industry, the comic book companies enjoy an unprecedented control over their industry press.  If you print something before THEY say you can, they can simply cut you off from any future information.  So, in general, the comics press does nothing that could potentially anger the comic book companies.  This has left them with a feeling of omnipotence that they can somehow control everything that happens, but they have forgotten that once something is on the Internet, you generally lost all control of it.  It takes on a life of its own, and the possibility of controlling the ways it is consumed are completely lost. As someone who has also worked inside the comic book press, I can tell you that Mr. Siegel is 100% accurate in his portrayal of how things work. No matter when or how you learn about an upcoming project, you could not run the news until the company said you could for fear of having all of your in roads to that company quickly severed.

I can almost understand their anger over the Tweets because they simply aren’t used to not having complete control over a press situation.  However, to suggest that they should get paid for their Tweets, let alone the asking for permission to reprint something that was made available to the public, is just disgusting at its core.  If you don’t want it done, don’t Tweet or lock the stream.  Two very easy solutions, but solutions they are choosing not to take.  It is far easier, it would seem, to whine and cry about it and make the press look the proverbial comic book bad guys, and the bad PR they garner over this be damned.

… have I mentioned how glad I am to be away from this industry?

Be sure to listen to this week’s Scattercast, which comes out tomorrow, where I will continue stories of my life in the comic industry, and how one big name creator once called and cursed me out for 90 minutes for daring to express my opinion about his work ethic on a CLOSED forum.

It would seem that the Associated Press (AP) is insanely short sighted.

At a meeting of the AP, which encompasses approximately 1500 member publications, AP Chairman Dean Singleton talked to the audience about the increasing evils of the Internet, and how their content was being abused by blogs and news aggregation sites.

We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more. AP and its member newspapers must be paid fully and fairly.

While they certainly have every right to protect their intellectual properties, but they are talking about even going after sites like Google News that aggregate multiple news sources into one centralized location.    They are saying that even these types of sites are profiteering off of their copyrighted works, and if they are to continue, they must pay for the use of AP content just as any other news source that reprints their content with permission.

The problem with this whole theory is that sites like Google News simply provide the headline, maybe an image, and usually around one sentence of the story to give you and idea of what it is about.  If you choose to read more of the story, you then click on the link are taking to the original page that presents the story.  Due to the limited amount of the story that ir reprinted, this falls well within the terms of “fair use“, or, as the AP calls it, “misguided legal theories.”

Essentially fair use is the concept that you can reprint things in an article so long as you limit how much of it you copy, and you site the source of the information.  Copying an entire piece, even with a link to the original source would fall outside of the fair use guidelines.  As anyone familiar with Google News knows, they show you a headline, maybe an image and one to two introductory lines from the article. Then, if you are interested in it, you click on it and go to the original piece. Well, it seems the AP no longer wants this to happen unless sites like Google pay them a fee for running those brief intros.

Here’s the back-asswards part of this whole thing. Someone like me has no time to read news unless they go through an aggregator. I don’t have time to go to multiple sources, and by using a service by Google News I do visit a lot of local television sites, smaller town newspapers and so on. In other words, these sites are getting traffic they never would have if it wasn’t for Google doing what they do.  In the AP’s amazing lack of wisdom, they see this as a horrible thing that Google is slapping some ads on those results pages, and that is where their problem is.  It’s a chick and the egg type scenario… I wouldn’t be seeing those ads on Google if I wasn’t coming to their site to look for the news stories that I can then go and read, and, in turn, see the ads of those original sites.

Old media, which the AP is a glowing example of, is in desperate need of money, and they are trying to get it from anywhere they can, even if it means cutting off their nose to spite their face.  Charge Google… Google may drop you… you just lost thousands, if not millions, of potential readers.  Is there not a time where you have to skip making money from a venue to make other money because of that same venue?  Yes, there is, and this is one of those times.

The even sadder part is that it isn’t just Google they want to go after, but also bloggers for quoting their articles.  Well, quoting articles is an age old tradition in journalism, which blogging is an off shoot of.  Sure some bloggers take it too far, but the vast majority don’t.  So why not leave us alone and les us spread your work for even more people to see?  I have no desire to quote entire articles, that would be pointless for someone like me.  I actually already stopped using AP stories due to their plan a few months ago to start charging something like a $1.50 per word for every word you quoted.  I didn’t feel like seeing what their limit would be, so I always look for on-AP stories to quote, and apparently I am going to have to keep that policy in place.

It is time for the AP to grow up and accept the 21st century or this truly will be the end of newspapers as we know it.  So go ahead, AP, keep annoying the people who might be your only salvation and see how far you get.