Publishing

And the Booker Goes To ...

There aren't many instances where I wish the American Revolution had turned out differently, but the yearly award of the Booker Prize for Fiction is one of them. Our former rulers treat an annual literary contest with the pagaentry and hype that the U.S. bestows upon Survivor finales and the joyous day Tom Cruise announces that he has anointed his next bride. Advantage Britain. The Booker's such a big deal there's a tell-all book coming out about the contest, written by departing administrator ... (read more)

2005/10/11

Don't Fall for Scamazon.Com

Considering the sophistication of the scam e-mails that I've been receiving lately, there must be a huge black market in phishing, the practice of tricking people into revealing their passwords from ecommerce sites and banks. A phony Amazon.Com e-mail I received last night is pretty convincing: Dear Amazon member, Due to concerns we have for the safety and integrity of the Amazon community we have issued this warning. Per the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, ... (read more)

2005/10/02

Throw the Book at Google

Jim Minatel, an acquisitions editor at Wiley for one of my books, believes that Google's plan to turn web-crawling googlebots loose on print libraries is a clear violation of copyright. I'm not so sure. If I had a copy of the world's most useful computer book (let's call it Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition), and I made a practice of sending one page of the book to people who asked a question answered by that page, would I be violating Wiley's copyright? Selective quotation of a book is fair ... (read more)

2005/10/01

The Joy of MySQL

While deleting some comment spam in the Drudge Retort database, I just had to use the following MySQL query: delete from feedback where author like '%sperm%'; ... (read more)

2005/09/30

Your Deadline Or Your Life

Computer book author Dave Prochnow rode out Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi and risked his family's life so he could FedEx a manuscript: Getting to the highway involved doing things that you would never ever do with kids in a car -- driving off the road, driving through people's yards, and driving over power lines. Yes, we had to drive over power lines. Luckily at least one of them was dead -- that was the one that just touched our roof antenna. Gulp. Generalizing wildly from his personal ... (read more)

2005/09/26

Displaying XML Data with PHP

I recently finished writing Sams Teach Yourself Programming with Java in 24 Hours, the fourth edition of an introductory book for Java programmers, which comes out in around two weeks. I've been given wide editorial license with the book, so it contains unusual projects like Lottorobics, a lottery simulation applet that demonstrates why "Win the Lotto" is a terrible retirement plan. The new edition adds chapters on XML and XML-RPC that use XOM and Apache XML-RPC, two great open source class ... (read more)

2005/09/21

The Andrew Breitbart Report

After leaving the Huffington Post, Andrew Breitbart has been getting huge traffic on his weeks-old news portal, Breitbart.Com. The Drudge Report links to his copies of AP and Reuters news stories, making his site more popular than Slashdot overnight. Developing ... WorldNewsDaily calls Breitbart a former employee of the Drudge Report, but my impression is that he's currently working as Matt Drudge's double super-secret coauthor. Drudge has been coy about Breitbart's work for years, probably ... (read more)

2005/09/08

Pimping Your Pagerank for Profit

The tech blogger Phil Ringnalda is taking heat over criticizing O'Reilly about some questionable link ads on the company's web sites. Tim O'Reilly posted a thoughtful response that shows he's not entirely comfortable with selling ads that trade on a site's Google pagerank, rather than visitor eyeballs. This is a good discussion for web publishers to be having, because the practice of pimping pagerank is becoming more pervasive. I've received numerous offers to put such links on SportsFilter, a ... (read more)

2005/08/24

Getting a Read on My Readers

People who have read Workbench for a while are probably wondering whether this has become a political weblog. My site has always emphasized what I'm working on at the moment, and I'm currently developing the LAMP web application that runs the Drudge Retort and serving as an unofficial geek advisor to the Alan Colmes Radio Show. As a consequence, I've been eating, breathing, and sleeping politics for weeks. I may be taking it too far; I dreamed about Michelle Malkin last night, and all we did ... (read more)

2005/08/12

Wikipedia's a Sticky Wicket

The neutrality and factual accuracy of this article on Wikipedia are disputed. The Los Angeles Times gave up its wikitorial experiment after three days. Someone got their goat by adding one of the web's most infamous gross-out photos to the site. Jeff Jarvis defends the honor of wikis, blaming the Times: They didn't get that wikis are a collaborative medium where, even when people disagree, they try to find common ground, knowing there can be only one outcome, or else the wiki will, by its ... (read more)

2005/06/21

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