Hey! You! Get Off of RssCloud
Clinton Gallagher recently posted a blistering tirade against me in the comments of Workbench. He thinks that I'm part of a dishonest campaign against Dave Winer and the RssCloud element:
Cadenhead you are being a jerk putting words in the mouth of Dave Winer --again-- as those of us who used to read the RSS mailing lists can attest; so herein I speak for myself in this regard. Secondly, if you were as professional as you imply Cadenhead --and-- if you were an all-around decent kind of fair play fella (which you are having a problem with) you would use your ill-deserved name recognition to expose the fact that the feed validator at feedvalidator.org has been coded by the sleazy-weasel(s) Sam Ruby et al. to undermine RSS. ...
It is only your dishonesty, the lack of information, the lack of coding skills of the typical web developer and the bully pulpit that causes the rssCloud element to now appear as if must be relegated to the back seat.
I'd like to see rssCloud have a fair chance, the developers of WordPress agree and support rssCloud too so gfy Roger.
Normally I'd have some fun with his over-the-top personal attack and Winer psychodrama, but I'm completely bored with that stuff. RSS is eleven years old. Winer and his BFFs have their view and the RSS Advisory Board has ours. We endorsed the Feed Validator and wrote an RSS Profile to help publishers and developers adopt the format with a minimum of aggravation.
For people like Gallagher who think we suck rocks, the validator is open source and the profile is licensed under Creative Commons. If you hate Sam Ruby, hate me or hate the RSS board, you can use our own work to put us in our place. Though I must warn you there's no money in it and the RSS community is painfully short on groupies, if you don't mind that, knock yourself out.
As for RssCloud, it is now a year since Winer tried to revive it and he's never bothered to write a specification for all the changes he was making. Life is too short to waste time implementing his half-assed ideas. I use PubSubHubbub for real-time RSS support in my software. It's well-specified and it works great.
Modern Journalism is a Serious Pickle
The recent firings of Dave Weigel by the Washington Post and Octavia Nasr by CNN show that mainstream journalists, who are expected to display some personality and attitude on social media to better connect to the audience, will be fired the minute they make an important group mad. I don't envy the job of a reporter at a major media outlet pressed into blogging or tweeting for the company.
Conservative journalist James Poulos sums up the predicament well:
Writers now have competing pressures -- to be witty, quick, ironic, noticeable, flip, to dispatch every clay pigeon tossed up by a culture pandemic with pigeons; but also to self-edit, to self-moderate, to be reticent at the right time, to pussyfoot expertly, to pick battles, to avoid perils, to besmirch rarely, to duck blame, to satisfy spectral overseers. This is a serious pickle, is it not? And yet it now appears to be the cost of doing business. Possibly, this is the internet imitating life.
I found this great quote in a funny fake media orientation video.
Woot Mocks AP's DMCA Copyright Bullying
The DMCA copyright battle between the Associated Press and the Drudge Retort took place two years ago, but Woot CEO Matt Rutledge remembered it in a blog post this week.
Rutledge noticed that when AP covered the sale of his company to Amazon.Com, it quoted from his blog.
The AP, we can't thank you enough for looking our way. You see, when we showed off our good news on Wednesday afternoon, we expected we'd get a little bit of attention. But when we found your little newsy thing you do, we couldn't help but notice something important. And that something is this: you printed our web content in your article! The web content that came from our blog! Why, isn't that the very thing you've previously told nu-media bloggers they’re not supposed to do?
So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we've figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create. ...
We're major digital players now. Don't force us to pass this matter to a collection agency.
In response to Rutledge's mockery, I can only say woot!
Two years ago, when the AP was taking a massive barrage of criticism over using the DMCA to squash the free speech rights of blogs and social news sites, the wire service told Saul Hansell of the New York Times that it was going to produce fair use guidelines for bloggers.
The Associated Press, one of the nation's largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.'s copyright.
AP never produced those guidelines. My gut feeling at the time was that AP would wait for the issue to blow over and forget it made that promise, because the company sells headline-and-lead syndication packages around the world. Telling people they might possibly be able to quote its stories without getting sued undercuts its business.
Not Tonight, Honey, I'm Psychologically Satisfied
A reader comment by Fabius Cunctator to an op-ed column against gay marriage:
Homosexuals do not achieve psychological satisfaction by engaging in same-sex sex. That is the reason that homosexuals are highly promiscuous compared to heterosexuals. Homosexuals can desire sex again only one or two hours after same-sex because they are not psychologically satisfied by their sex. Heterosexuals often can go for days, weeks or months before desiring sex again because they have achieved psychological satisfaction from their last physical sex act.
So heterosexual sex is so satisfying that one can go months without wanting to do it again. Homosexual sex, on the other hand, is so unsatisfying that it's desired as soon as one hour later.
He goes on to tell a married man of 20-plus years that having sex with his wife every 2-3 days is "abnormally frequent sex."
My condolences to Mrs. Cunctator.
Review: 'Tinkers' by Paul Harding
This year's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tinkers by Paul Harding, is one of the best I've read in years. The slim 191-page book is about the last eight days of dying clock repairman George Washington Crosby, whose hallucinating mind wanders across time in his final hours, stopping at disordered points in his life and that of his father.
The first novel by Harding, Tinkers was rejected by numerous publishers and sat in a drawer for several years before it found a home at Bellevue Literary Press, an obscure non-profit publisher based in New York's Bellevue Hospital. It's the first book from a small press to win the Pulitzer since John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces in 1981.
I don't often like awardbait -- difficult literary novels with spare plots seemingly tailored for award consideration -- but the language of Tinkers is as exquisite as a T.S. Eliot poem. Harding is at his most evocative when describing the workings of an antique clock or the natural wonder of the New England countryside, yet the entire book is written with an tinkerer's eye towards the world. There may never be a more eyebrow-curling description of halitosis than when George's father Howard pulls the tooth of a suffering hermit who buys from his tinker's wagon: "A breeze caught the hermit's breath and Howard gasped and saw visions of slaughter-houses and dead pets under porches." When George witnesses his father's epileptic seizure at the dinner table on Christmas Day, it's a perfectly described moment of absolute terror -- and you can see why he's taking it to the grave.
At times, Tinkers wanders into pure existential reverie, like these thoughts from George's father as he drags his wagon of goods from one rural homestead to another:
Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.
I wasn't sure about this novel until I was 50 pages in, and even briefly considered abandoning it for fare more light than an old man's deathbed vigil. The cumulative impact of passage after passage like the above convinced me that Tinkers was a masterwork that would be cherished for generations, like a centuries-old grandfather clock.
Related posts:
- The New York Times, which did not review Tinkers, tells the story of its publication
Exercising My Right to Petition the Government
On Tuesday I visited five Congressional offices in the Capitol to make the case for small publishers who rely on targeted Internet ads for revenue, an event that rated a story in Politico. The Interactive Advertising Bureau invited web entrepreneurs to come to DC and meet members of Congress and their aides, hoping to make the point that thousands of Americans are running businesses powered by these ads. We're one of the only sectors of the economy that's been growing during this recession.
Although I had to pay my own travel and hotel costs, I accepted the invitation to tell the story of the Drudge Retort. As a former newspaper journalist, I've been able to run a social news site that receives two million visits a month because of the revenue generated by online ads. My wife lost her job as a reporter in a layoff two years ago, and we've endured the tough economic times with the help of the site.
There are a lot of Americans running web-based businesses in circumstances like ours. Reporting jobs are disappearing, so we've started our own media empire out of the house.
With several web publishers and a lawyer for the IAB as chaperone, I met aides for Reps. Diane DeGette (D-Colo.), Michael Castle (R-Del.), Bill Young (D-Fl.), Charlie Melancon (D-La.) and Mike Rogers (R-Mich.). We wandered around a catacomb of ancient underground hallways that connect the Rayburn, Longworth and Cannon buildings where members of Congress work, getting 10-15 minutes with each aide to argue that proposed new legislation would crush our businesses, send jobs overseas and cause web advertising to be considerably more annoying than it is today. There's an Internet privacy bill by Reps. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), currently being circulated as a draft, that could be interpreted to require every bit of targeting in online marketing to be opt-in.
Although that sounds OK in principle, in practice there's a lot of personalization going on today thanks to anonymous cookies, IP addresses and the relationships customers build with online sites. Dell sends an email to you offering a warranty extension for your laptop. Google delivers local restaurant ads based on the geographic location of your IP address. An Amazon shopper who buys the latest Justin Bieber album is told he might also enjoy earplugs.
I thought I did OK in the meetings, though it's a challenge to pitch the public benefit of something that's so obviously tied to your own self-interest. I was reminded of the old saying that "what's good for IBM is good for America."
Before I went to the Capitol, I sought advice from the members of the Retort, getting all manner of helpful and not-so-helpful suggestions. One comment from Dirk, a libertarian member of the site, gave me something to talk about in several meetings.
At the end of the day the internet is about servicing humanity through the vital sharing of information. Government intrusion only hinders this important service that you provide. ...
Right makes might and you are in the right. This is "a unique medium for humanity to share information and ideas" don't let anyone compare it to any other areas of communication that have been regulated in the past and if they attempt to point out where those forms of communication have died off.
If you've spent any time on the Retort, you know that it's a cantankerous community of people of all political stripes who show up each day to yell at each other about the news of the day. And yell at me.
But one thing the members do agree on is that the Retort and thousands of other independent blogs are an important vehicle for free expression. The third-party ads that run on the site leave me beholden to no one, because I'm not required to directly solicit advertisers and other entities for support. The stories that run on the site are based on my own editorial judgment and that of the users who contribute their own links. The users of the site are as invested in the success of this business model as I am.
Although I did not get to meet a member of Congress in an official capacity, while crammed into one of the Capitol's tiny elevators in the Rayburn building, I accidentally elbowed a well-dressed mustachioed gentleman square in the nose. He had been graciously helping us find the tunnel to the Longworth building.
I found out later he was Rep. Ciro Rodriguez (D-Texas).
Related posts:
- Todd Curl (another event attendee): The Pungent Aroma of Democracy
Credit: The photo of the U.S. Capitol tunnel going to the Cannon Building was taken by Indianagal.
Mr. Cadenhead Goes to Washington
I'm in Woodbridge, Va., this morning about to head out to the Long Tail Alliance Fly-In, a gathering of small web publishers organized by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Google. As a publisher who uses context-based advertising on the Drudge Retort and other sites, I was invited to come to DC and meet with members of Congress to talk about why this form of advertising is important to online media.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has concerns that Congress is working on regulations that would kick this form of advertising in the fiddly parts:
Political campaigns have been launched at the federal and state levels to seek government regulation of many of the core processes and technologies that support interactive advertising. The IAB believes a disproportionately negative impact would be felt by small publishers whose advertising sales are largely or entirely managed by ad networks. This would affect advertising revenues and potentially diminish the diversity of voices and ideas on this most diverse of communications media.
I'll be liveblogging the event on Twitter using hashtag #iabdc. Follow me on Twitter to live this adventure in real time.
I don't know yet who I'll be meeting (Michelle Bachmann! Michelle Bachmann! Michelle Bachmann!). As the publisher of a liberal-leaning web site that calls itself "Red Meat for Yellow Dogs," it could be amusingly awkward if I get some conservative Republicans.
Then again, I'm here on my own dime trying to keep my bidness free of government regulation. So I'm practically speaking Republican already.
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