Categories
Books Writing

Don’t search on me

Following on the heels of the recent excitement about searching within pages of books at Amazon, there’s now a growing backlash against this facility from, among others, the Author’s Guild. According to Volokh Conspiracy and numerous publications, such as Ziff-Davis News in the UK, and The New York Times the pushback occurs because each search returns five surrounding pages of a book, and the Guild says that this could be used to get all the pages for a relevant section of a book so it need not be purchased. Ultimately, according to the Guild, this violates contracts between authors and publishers.

I’m an author, and currently have several books out at Amazon. From test searches, it would seem that my Practical RDF book has not been added to the database yet. Personally, I hope it does get added, because it can only help sales.

For instance, a person is interested in an RDF API called Jena, and searches on this keyword, rather than RDF. My book shows up in the results because I cover Jena. This is good for me as an author because the more I put my book in the front of readers’ eyes, the better chance it has of selling. This is a much better selling tool then me going into book stores, pulling my books from obscure shelves and putting them in more prominant locations.

(Eye level of the average person, front of book displayed if there’s room, or pulled out from shelf so it’s no longer even with the other books.)

If I have a problem with the facility is that it’s a mess. There doesn’t seem to be a way to turn off this look inside feature to find a book on a subject, not just a keyword. As for ‘Jena’, its rather surprising the number of ‘Jenas’ in books out there. To compensate for this, you’re reduced to trying different search patterns that focus on Jena, the RDF API, rather than Jena, the Napoleon campaign.

This is less easy then it seems. For instance, you’d think you’d have a winner with ‘java jena rdf’, except the first title that shows is “The Polish Officer: A Novel”. What are these authors talking about?

I, of course, also did a vanity search on my name, in quotes, out at the site and found a few references to it in other books. Not many – I’m usually the writer not the writee. One I thought was particularly interesting is my name showing up in a figure in a book,and the page containing the figure was shown. It would seem the search works with figures as well as text.

As for this enhanced facility adversely impacting on book sales, I’m finding that the current political and economic climate in this country and the rest of the world is doing a great job of this anyway – Amazon’s efforts aren’t adding much to the overall effect.

Update:

Professor Bainbridge has some good comments on the negative aspects of this search facility on the sale of his books – but I still want my books in it.

Categories
Just Shelley

I feel good

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I feel good.

Fall colors are at their peak here in Missouri, which means they’re beyond the peak for me because I like the colors when they’re just starting to touch the trees. However, I missed my peak Fall color time, though it’s very pretty here now and the weather is about as good as you can get to enjoy these times of change.

(Missed is the wrong word, because I didn’t ‘miss’ the colors – I just didn’t see them. There’s a difference.)

I spent yesterday walking around the Shaw Arboretum and Route 66 parks taking photos with both my digital and film cameras, which is whyyou’re blessed with slow downloads today. Yesterday was a Good Picture day, or at least, I think it was. Perhaps because I was feeling good, everything around me felt good, including the photos. Maybe someday I’ll be feeling bad and return to this post and ask myself what was I thinking.

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I’ve worked out a new photo expedition routine: film camera on strap around neck, camera bag on shoulder with its film and filters and lens, digital camera in case hooked through finger or belt, and monopod in my right hand doubling as a walking stick. I am a walking photo studio, or at one point yesterday when I was trying to climb down a steep hill to the water’s edge – always water with me, isn’t it? – I was almost a falling photo studio. Up, nup, up, oh no, aiee! Next time, don’t leave the lens cap off.

At the Arboretum it was School Day, which didn’t impact on me much except at one point when I was taking photos of a field because I liked the colors and texture, not because there was anything clever or cute or significant. There, I ran into a group of kids I couldn’t avoid in time and the students were looking at me – with all my gadgets and bags and stands – instead of their teacher who only had a lousy bud in her hand.

“Does anyone know why I found this bud now, rather than in the Spring?”

The kids couldn’t care less and you could see in some of the students faces that they wanted to play with the cameras, and others wanted to be in front of the cameras, and one girl was in the field picking all the wild flowers because, as she told the teacher, they ‘were pretty’. All the while the park ranger or whoever she was was standing in the background as escort, probably wondering why she was there because ‘park ranger’ is the profession that shows up on aptitude tests when you come across as extremely introverted and uncomfortable with groups of people.

I know. I took the tests.

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Back to my new routine: I use the digital camera to frame a photo and test exposure settings, trying out various angles and depths. I then take the photos on film, bracketing the shots just to make sure that I have a better chance in one good picture. I’ll post the digital photos online, for fun, reserving the film shots for magazines. I’m now on three magazines ‘needs’ list, which means that the photo samples I’ve sent have passed muster and when the magazines need a particular type of shot, I’ll be on the list of people who receive a ‘Do you have any photos of …’.

Today I’m out taking photos again, responding to a request of ‘Do you have photos of Missouri’s unusual rock formations’, which I hope I can respond to, in a week or so, with, ‘Why yes, as a matter of fact, I do.’ This isn’t a lie; this is postdated truth.

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It’s also true that I’m on a new lifelong diet now that restricts my consumption of things such as chocolate, which is a bit heart breaking because I think eating good chocolate is an incredibly sensual experience, and there’s few things more interesting than eating a lovely bit of cream with a bittersweet chocolate covering and a candied violet on top. However, I also like feeling good so accept such restrictions with equanimity. I figured what I would do is reserve my chocolate consumption for very special occasions, such as my birthday, when I’ll buy myself a beautiful box of chocolates – it must be beautiful, or it’s not the same. I’ll then enjoy them, one by one, accompanied by cups of strong, rich coffee, sitting at a window looking outside with my feet up and an afghan over the legs. Can you see that I’m building a new ritual here to help me accept that my lifestyle changes are a reward not a punishments?

To help me breaking my belief in indulgence as an everyday thing, I’m trying to convince myself that other activities such as ‘hiking’, ‘photography’, and ‘weblogging’, are vices and therefore bad for me. By doing this I satisfy my craving for bad things, with things that are really good for me, or at least, sometimes good for me.

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Speaking of weblogging, did you like the Year Ago feature I implemented? I found it reminded me of where I was a year ago as compared to where I am now, but without the hang up of ‘time’s a flying and I’m a dying’ that past reflectiveness tends to generate. Whenever I take a break I’m going to throw this page back up, so you’ll know when I’m taking a break, and when I’m just not feeling like posting. I think its important to distinguish between the two, don’t you? After all, taking a break implies doing something fun and it’s probably okay to email the person and say, “What’s happening?” Not feeling like posting most likely means that you’re too busy and in a pissy mood, or you’re not busy enough and in a pissy mood, and who wants to walk into that one?

Of course, my break wasn’t a true break, so this break from the break probably won’t be a long one. Did you understand that? Or were you dazzled by the pretty pictures and the rambling discourse?

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During my break, which wasn’t a complete break and therefore didn’t count, I did a self-interview thing with Frank Paynter, a different pattern to the famous Sandhill Tech interview process that I don’t think Frank liked much because the man really wants to control the direction of his interviews. Of course, he thinks I don’t like interviews because I want to control what’s printed, but that’s just not true. For instance, I was also interviewed by a very nice Wired journalist for an upcoming article, which I’ll point out when it comes online. If I approve of it, of course.

Just joking.

I enjoyed the self-interview for Frank, and Frank’s a pretty cool guy, though he’s not paid me my dollar yet for he photos I took for him. Once I get that dollar I’ll add it to one or two others and send a pound of MJB coffee and a Boulder, Colorado library card to my friend Chris Locke, who is both certifiable and broke . He’s a good man, Chris is. A little scary, especially when you talk to him on the phone late at night when you’re groggy and not quite there and vulnerable to strange talk and stranger men, but good.

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I also wrote a weblog essay about weblog comments to Weblogging for Poets. I felt I needed to say something when I was trackback pinged 22 times for an older posting on handling comment spam. I was also disturbed by a growing trend I’m seeing among webloggers to use global technology approaches to fixing what are social challenges. This includes blacklisting, which will never be an effective solution to our Net problems.

Another variation of this arose in the last few days when Hosting Matters was hit with a particularly virulent DDoS attack, as discussed at Winds of Change. It’s been in the Blogdex, and folks are saying that the attack is generated by Al-Queda against a Zionist weblog responsible for taking down Al-Queda sympathetic weblogs. All this according to their ‘intelligence reports’, or intel reports, as they like to call them.

Our current server was hit with DoS attacks in the last month, and it’s a Canadian-based server. Is it being attacked, then, by religious fundamentalists because Canada is talking gay marriage?

There is nothing more dangerous than people holding a gun they don’t know how to use, and webloggers who don’t understand the technology they depend on shoot themselves in the foot or the mouth with too much regularity. There are essays waiting to be written in the Internet for Poets weblog that say, among other things, this is the trigger, and this is the part where the bullet comes out and don’t point this part at your head when you pull that trigger.

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We talk with great enthusiasm about topics as diverse as linguistics, philosophy, politics, art, culture, language, history, literature, sex, and rock n’ roll. However, when the conversation goes round to technology all but the most diehard techies turn off because we’ve now entered the no-man, or should I say no-woman’s world that frankly most of you find completely lacking in interest. Yet it is technology that can effect you, and does effect you, more than most of these other topics. Not the politics of technology, which I also find to be an incredible bore – but the hows and whys of email spam and comment spam and DDoS. How can you make good decisions when you don’t understand?

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Because of the recent Net problems, we’re moving the Wayward Weblogger home, and the The For Poets site is the first being moved to the new server. Yes, the Wayward webloggers are moving off a a dedicated server and to a new home with, you guessed it, Hosting Matters. In fact, I started the account the very day this last DDoS happened, but really, it was a coincidence. Yes, only a coincidence that our new server was in the good block of IP addresses, not the ones under attack. I did not break it. Honest. I don’t need to break what’s already broken.

Next year is going to be a very bad year for the Net, and every weblogger, no matter who you’re hosted with, had better be ready to have your site down an average of 2-4 days every month. Yes, days. Email will continue to be a problem, as well as viruses and comment spam and a host of other problems. Our reactions to these events, rather than helping, are just making things worse. If webloggers may not hold the key to influencing the presidential election or the war in Iraq, we are the keyhole for an every increasing burden on the Internet. In other words, webloggers are bad ju ju for the Net.

Added up, I just couldn’t devote the time necessary to protect our dedicated server the way it needed to be protected and opted out to have the very professional team at Hosting Matters handle it. I watched them in this last go around and the steps they tool to block the DDoS. They did good, as good as anyone can with this type of attack – contrary to the half-wits saying, “Well, these types of attacks are easily prevented.”

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My, look at the time! That’s the problem with weblogging – it generates a time warp and you start to write at 7 and all of a sudden its now 11 and I have a pile of rocks with my name on it. Must toodle.

I have to share one last photo with you first, though, of a friend I met along the way yesterday. He was sprawled across the limestone rocks trying to absorb the heat into his body. He was having a marvelous time, flattening himself down and stretching as far as he could because that heat felt wonderful. You could see it in his gentle, sweet little face:

I feel good.

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Categories
Just Shelley

Crescent Move

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

AKMA’s a host at one of the BloggerCon dinners, which means that he leads a table of people in a discussion on a subject that I guess he sets. It sounds a bizarre custom and confining, but if I were going to BloggerCon, I’d sign up to have dinner with AKMA. Even if Mexican food isn’t necessarily on my agenda at the moment.

The discussion about BloggerCon and Weblogs and Politics and Weblogs and Journalism is becoming equivalent to fingernails on chalkboard for me lately, though I like many of the players involved. It seems the more we seek to justify weblogging, the less fresh and exciting it becomes.

But I have to be brutally self-honest: perhaps the real reason for my irritation with all this fooflah lately is that I need another hiatus from weblogging. A long one this time, not my usual one or two weeks.

When JonathonAllan, and Chris returned from their long breaks, all three seemed to return with renewed interest and enthusiasm in their writing, though I see in them, now, a stronger balance between their weblogs and their offline lives. Healthy. I think the days when weblogging was synonymous with daily quick postings is over. Weblogging is just is…whatever it needs to be for the person. And sometimes, not weblogging is what a person needs.

I talked with the doctor today and got the good news/not so bad news story. The good news is the cyst on my lung discovered last week was not cancerous – it’s a benign growth, a result of a malformation that occured when my lungs were developing before my birth. I gather that we humans are full of little imperfections – like bubbles in old glass, adding a unique characteristic to what is otherwise, plain old dull glass.

I’m glad to get this news, it was a bit of a worry. Makes you think, you know?

However, they also found stones in my gall bladder, and this combined with some symptoms I’ve had over time means that I will be having my gall bladder removed*, probably in the next few weeks. This makes as good a reason to take a break as anything, though having one’s gall bladder removed is no big thing.

I’ve been trying to get caught up on promised stories and essays before I break, but the rest will have to wait for when I get back.

*update Gall bladder removed at my young age. I guess I need to take some of my down time and get my butt in better shape, hadn’t I?

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Categories
Burningbird

These shoes are walking

I completed another item from my overdue To Do list, Walking in Simon’s Shoes, this one in the Practical RDF weblog. If I keep this up, I’ll be caught up on promised items by week end and will have nothing left to write.

If you read today’s earlier essay, The Ten Basic Commands of Unix, note that I made some edits for readability earlier this afternoon. I think it’s a bit crisper now, though I may tweak it a bit tomorrow.

(Now, what did I just write about tweaking?)

Today, I also played around with the Genuine Fractal Photoshop plug-in and I’m quite impressed from the examples I’ve printed out. Quite. I’ve received a suggestion of another plug-in that’s said to be as good but is quite a bit cheaper than Genuine, though it doesn’t have a demo copy and I’m holding on downloading it for a bit. When I do, I’ll post a review of both.

Thanks to the two friends for the suggestions of the plug-ins. Both are steely eyed missile men.

You might have noticed different behavior in the coded portions of the weblogs recently. I’ve changed the code for my comments/trackback list to only list trackbacks and comments on items published in the last 30 days. I’m doing this as a way of cutting back the spam items that appear in the list, most of which tend to appear on older items. This cuts out a few viable entries, but I still receive these in email, and they still appear on the posted item. This approach has kept the recent list, well, more recent. It’s also eliminated most of the spam and the hit and run google hits from the list, leaving me to delete the items at a leisurely pace at a later time. It’s not a perfect solution, but at least it’s something.

I’ve also added code to reflect the date and time when a weblog was updated, with the most recently updated weblogs at the top of the Burningbird Network list. This, I hope, let’s people know that I’m writing elsewhere when I’m quiet here. I’ll still probably write a hint here, too.

That’s enough for the night. Tomorrow, more items from the Overdue To Do list.

Categories
Writing

Truly understanding censorship

Sheila points to a nicely written how-to on newspapers having weblogs. This was spurred, in no small part, from the tempest in a teapost about Dan Weintraub and the Sacramento Bee’s new policy about editorial review of his weblog.

Many of the Blogging world’s illuminati became incensed by this action. Micky Klaus writes in a meandering, confused rant:

Unlike a mistake in a print column (or for that matter, a mistake on radio) a mistake in a “24-7 blog” can be easily and quite effectively corrected in the same place it was made. For this reason, the cost of a blog error is less than the cost of a print error. That means when you are balancing a) the cost of errors versus b) the cost of more procedures and “standards,” you come out in a different place for blogs than you do for print.

The cost of an error isn’t the amount of time to edit it, but the amount of damage the ‘error’, backed by a major publication, can do when read by thousands before correction.

Glenn Reynolds writes:

Unthinking political correctness, corporate-mandated dullness, and complete cluelessness, all in one event. If you want to know, in a nutshell, why Old Media is in trouble, this is it.

Taking a look at Weintraub’s statement that caused the uproar:

If [the California Lt. Governor’s] name had been Charles Bustmont rather than Cruz Bustamante, he would have finished his legislative career as an anonymous back-bencher. Thus there is reason to wonder how he would handle ethnic issues as governor.

And while people can debate forever whether MEChA and its more virulent cousins do or do not advocate ethnic separatism, it’s indisputably true that the Legislature’s Latino Caucus advocates policies that are destructive to their own people and to greater California, in the name of ethnic unity.

Making sweeping statements such as ‘…it’s indisputably true that the Legislature’s Latino Caucus advocates policies that are destructive to their own people and to greater California…” is something I would expect to read from a weblogger who is throwing opinions around without due consideration of the impact of the words. Perhaps that’s what Klaus and Reynolds want – more rants, less news and thoughtful commentary.

Doc Searls points to most of the articles on this issue, and seems to agree with Roger Smith:

In the future, in order to demonstrate their integrity, true blogs may have to be completely independent of major media. And maybe that’s for the best. At least that way we will be able to scrutinize the bloggers intentions without having to see through a haze of editing or, worse, the agendas (hidden and not) of media corporations.

I share Sheila’s take:

Weintraub’s comments about Bustamante are the sort of words you might hear in a bar. If Weintraub wants to pop off with unsubstantiated personal slams like that, add a comments capacity to his blog and give his readers equal opportunity to publicly challenge him.

Weintraub’s weblog is not a personal weblog hosted on Blogspot. It’s hosted and paid for by the Sacramento Bee, which has an existing editorial policy for opinions expressed by employees of the newspaper. The only crime the Bee committed is that it’s following through on what webloggers have been asking for – treating Weintraub’s weblog like it was a ‘real’ journalist’s effort.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say weblogs are journalism,and should be treated as ‘real’ publications. and then deny the sometimes stringent requirements of newspapers and other publications. An error in a weblog can embarrass a weblogger; an error in a newspaper can get the paper sued, or unfairly and adversely impact on the events being reported.

It is a given, and known fact, that people who work for a newspaper or other publication are bound by the editorial process for same. Sometimes this results in the suppression of news, but many times, this prevents offhand remarks and ill-thought comments from hitting the streets and causing damage that a retraction just won’t heal. Even a digital retraction.

Of course, the uproar on this event has died since Weintraub himself doesn’t see himself the victim of censorship, or being muzzled.

Perhaps folks upset by Weintraub going through the editorial process need a reminder of what censorship really likes like:

  • This week is the ALA’s Banned Books Week. Books on the list include any of the Harry Potter novels, The Chocolate War, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Native Son, To Kill a Mockingbird, and far too many others.
  • Amnesty International lists several authors imprisoned in their countries for speaking their mind, including Zouheir Yahiaoui who was arrested for for expressing his opinions online.
  • Al Jazeera has been banned from access to official sources of news in Iraq for supposedly sedicious reporting.
  • The directors of Zimbabwe’s four private newspapers have been charged with “illegally publishing” their newspapers. (Thanks to Frizzy Logic)
  • Reporters without Borders can also give you an eyeful, including the Defense Department’s clearance of all culpability for the death’s of journalists in Iraq by US soldiers
  • The Patriot Act

If Weintraub wants to start a personal weblog on Blogspot and carefully disassociate what he writes there from his newspaper, I’d be more supportive of him not ‘being censored’. However, the price a writer pays for a steady income from a publication is that the publication usually has some say in what’s written. It’s not just the writer who is credited, or discredited, when they spout off.