Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter as a way to share and consume information but I’m tired of the coverage lavished on it as a revolutionary entity.

The latest breathless article appeared in The Toronto Star recently in which the author, Antonia Zerbisias, talked about how Twitter was used during the G20 meetings, and how a digital divide is being created between people who get their news via Twitter, and those who receive it using traditional media sources.

It’s yet another example of Twitter getting far more credit than it really deserves. Yes, Twitter is an exciting new communication tool but the praise being bestowed on it as a “game breaker” is unjustified.

It’s not just political coverage that is getting people excited about Twitter. It’s healthcare, entertainment, sports, and business. As a long-time Twitter user, it’s strange to see Twitter hailed as such a breakthrough given the tremendous technology advances that have happened in recent years.

The fascination with Twitter may have to do with how it is rapidly emerging as more than just a niche service. With more than 100 million users, Twitter is big enough that it doesn’t draw a lot of blank stares from people unaware of it. That said, it’s still a new and shiny toy for those just starting to get on the Twitter bandwagon. This explains articles that gush over how much it has changed the world as we know it.

Twitter is a valuable tool for personal and professional reasons but, come on, it’s not the greatest thing since sliced bread. While I don’t have Twitter Fatigue, I am tired of seeing so much adoration for it.

Originally published on markevanstech.com.

The Times shut down its old website on Tuesday and started directing all traffic to two new ones: thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk. These are the ones that they propose, at sometime in the indeterminate future, to start charging for.

I was interested to see how Rupert Murdoch, wily media titan that he is, intended to get people to pay for something they’re used to getting for free, and will still be able to get for free from most of his competitors. I imagined lots of rich media, streaming video, real-time interaction with visitors, maybe the kind of collaborative citizen/professional journalism, using Google Wave, that recently won the Seattle Times a Pulitzer. Imagine my surprise, then, when I signed up for the sneak preview a few weeks ago and found this:

A newspaper. Okay, so I wasn’t that surprised. As I’ve already written, the whole notion of charging for newspapers online represents a massive failure of imagination. This just confirmed that the NewsCorp cartel had run out of ideas.

And possibly reporters, too. I happened to be logged-in the night that the Israeli navy was chasing the Rachel Corrie on its voyage towards Gaza. The whole world was watching, to see if there’d be a repeat of the bloody incident of a few days before. Down in the corner, The Times was reporting this:

But as it turned out, it would actually be a good half hour before soldiers boarded the boat. Significantly, Twitter was busy at the same time with the same “news,” but already new reports were beginning to emerge there: the Israelis hadn’t “seized” the boat, but were merely tailing it. So I waited, and sure enough, about 10 minutes later:

The implication seemed unavoidable: The Times was getting its news from Twitter, right along with the rest of us. And for this it wants to charge us?

Sorry, Rupert. I already have Twitter. But good luck with that paywall idea anyway.

Q: How difficult would it be for the copyright holder of a film to get the IP addresses of people sharing that film over bittorrent?

A: Easy as pie. Here’s a portion of a screen capture from my bittorrent client, ktorrent, showing the ip addresses of people sharing a popular file on my computer right now.

I’ve blurred the ip addresses in the image in order to protect the innocent until proven guilty.

The relationship between the IP address on your computer and packets of information sent on the internet is similar to the address of your residence and letters sent by post — both letters and packets must know where they’re going if they’re ever to get there. If you want to access or share data on the internet, you can’t be without one, which is why it is difficult to be absolutely anonymous. Really, the best you can do is use someone else’s IP address — either by connecting through a proxy which, while it sees your IP address, displays its own to everyone else, or by connecting via someone else’s IP address, such as that of the wireless service provided by a local cafe or neighbour who has left their wireless unprotected by a password.

So why then haven’t studios gone after people using bittorrent? Surely the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which represents the big studios, would have an interest. Perhaps they don’t want the negative image that the RIAA and its member labels (Sony, Universal, EMI, Warner, etc.) have acquired by going after the people who are often their own customers. Or perhaps, since they’re experiencing record profits, they don’t really feel a need.

But a smaller studio, Voltage, has filed a copyright complaint against the currently unknown holders of 5,000 IP addresses who used bittorrent to snag a copy of their movie The Hurt Locker. Lawsuits for 10 other small films have been filed by a company called the U.S. Copyright Group.

The message they want to send is probably that you shouldn’t take free copies of movies via bittorrent. But in practical terms the message may be more specific, namely avoid the movies of litigious studios like Voltage and those represented by the US Copyright Group, including Cinepro Pictures International (The Steam Experiment), Far Cry Productions (Far Cry), G2 Productions (Uncross the Stars), Animationwerks (Gray Man) and Braeburn Entertainment (Call of the Wild in 3D). It shouldn’t be too hard, since none of these movies is exactly rated highly.

I just hope this doesn’t represent a new business model — create a crappy movie, then recoup your losses by suing file sharers en masse. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Will ISP’s cooperate in associating names with IP addresses? Will those targetted simply settle, rather than go to court? If they don’t settle, will the courts react negatively to being used as part of a business model intended to generate revenue through litigation? Or will they award the sort of over-the-top damages that they have in music sharing cases? Stay tuned.

As those of you with way too little to worry about may know, May 31st is Quit Facebook Day. This is a Canadian initiative, once again proving that, while we of the North may not have the entrepreneurial mojo to create much, we sure know how to get all indignant once somebody else has.

The latest Hate on Facebook campaign (following on the “Dang, They Changed the Way it Looks” and the “Dang, They Changed the Way it Looks Again” campaigns) was prompted by news that the company has partnered with three other sites in a customization experiment. On yelp.com, pandora.com, and docs.com, you will henceforth be informed that the site is using public information from your facebook page to personalize your experience. If you don’t like that, you can click a link to opt out. That’s it. That’s what has caused a hue and cry in the geek community, though it has yet to spread very far in the common-sense community.

Now, the fact is that, as a Canadian, you would have to work very, very hard at this point to breach your own privacy on these sites. Pandora is not even accessible from Canada, and yelp — evidently spooked by the controversy — has turned off the personalization feature, making only vague noises about its return “in the future.” That leaves docs.com (Microsoft’s version of Google Docs), which apparently intends to let you embed Word files, spreadsheets, etc., in your facebook feed. Actually, that sounds kind of useful.

But even if docs.com were attempting to suck huge chunks of information out of my facebook account for the personal gratification of Steve Ballmer, it wouldn’t get very far. First of all, note that it can only access information which has been made public; if I’ve chosen to hide my interest in toe-sucking from all but my friends, docs.com will be none the wiser. And I don’t put a lot of personal information on facebook anyway. Why? Because I am not an idiot; if I want to keep something private, I don’t do it by putting it on the internet.

Some argue that unsophisticated users have no idea what they are and aren’t sharing publicly, nor how to control that. Which is true, and which means that what we have here is a teaching moment. Teach your daughter or your Uncle Ted how to use the privacy settings — they’re not nearly as complicated as facebook hysterics make out, and Mark Zuckerberg has announced that they will be made yet simpler. And while you’re at it, try to convince Uncle Ted that the world doesn’t really give a crap about what movies he likes anyhow.

The greatest irony in the great facebook backlash is that a lot of the geeks who are leading it are proponents of Gmail — Google’s in-the-cloud e-mail service. That makes a lot of sense — fuss about whether or not yelp.com knows you like sushi while entrusting your private and business correspondence to a service which — believe it — can be accessed by government snoops without so much as a warrant. It makes you wonder who the real unsophisticated users are.

Diana Gabaldon either needs to stop writing such effortlessly good historical fiction, or she needs to keep her ignorant viewpoints on fan fiction to herself, because I am having trouble reconciling my shameless adoration of her Outlander series with my urge to kill her blog with fire.

Ditto goes for George Double-R Martin, whose Song of Ice and Fire series I love with unfettered (now somewhat fettered) glee, and whose screed against fan fiction is less inflammatory than Gabaldon’s but who still uses dubious bogeymen to assert that fanfic = author-poison.  Gabaldon has since called off her anger monkeys and removed her post (and subsequent posts [and predictable onslaught of furious comments]), opting instead for a a Pleez Don’ Fan My Fic policy on her official site.   Martin has let his stand.

Leaving aside as unworthy of comment Gabaldon’s sweeping blanket descriptions of fanfic as porny (it’s as porny as the internet, which is to say, a lot but not entirely and with much else to recommend it), DGal’s, GRRRRRRM’s, and any other author’s repeated cries that It Mustn’t Be Done are like so much shouting into a hurricane.   The internet is an inexorable sandbox, and everyone has a play space.  Insisting people shouldn’t write fanfic is like insisting 16-year olds shouldn’t stage renditions of If You Wanna Be My Lover in their cousin’s backyard (say).  Ees gonna happen.

But just because it’s doomed to happen doesn’t mean we need to quietly accept it, you say?  Isn’t there valor in fighting a righteous but losing battle?  Mayhaps.  But it is only so much wasted energy when your enemy hurts exactly no one, especially not the authors whose work they are advertising for free.  Fanfiction does not dent sales the way a cheap ereader might make me think twice about a Kindle (I’m a-lookin’ at you, Kobo); there’s no way reading Jamie and Claire go to Mars is going to make me pass up on Outlander: Original Sauce.

Because sometimes, yes, fanfic gets published and people make teh moneys.  Blogger Aja Romano has compiled a list of literary and filmic works that rip off other works, to greater or lesser (but mostly acclaimed) success, among them Geraldine Brooks’ March which fanfics off of Little Women, and the no-end-in-sight collection of ‘Jane Austen meets gimmicky monster’ novels.  But who’s going to read March who hasn’t already read Little Women?  Contrariwise, how many people now have increased sense and sensibility, due to the application of a few sea monsters?

There are obviously more legal snakes on this plane than addressable here, but one of the more harped-on frights is that if an author cops to being aware of fan pieces, said author ostensibly loses the ability to later fight those pieces.  Author Catherynne M. Valente, who sees fanfic as the sincerest form of flattery, offers an absurdly basic solution to this problem: don’t read them.  Ignorance is bliss, both rhetorically and legally.

It may be worth noting at this point that both Gabaldon and Martin take a heinous long time between books and may be suffering from Absent Boyfriend Syndrome (in this metaphor, Fanfic becomes the gentleman of dubious but available quality who moves in on the forlorn and abandoned fan).  In which case, relax, my darlings.  Fanfiction and I were just making out a little, while I waited for you to stop embarrassing me like this.

Facebook has taught us some lessons about what people want on the web. Geocities provided a space, but there was nothing in it. It had to be filled with content from the account owner transferred via something called FTP — waaay too much work for a lot of people, and scary too. I mean “FTP” sounds like something out of a barely remembered science class. There might also have been an uncomfortable implication that you ought to have something worthwhile to say before going to all that trouble.

With Facebook, on the other hand, the content practically generates itself! Just hit a lot of “Like” and “Share” buttons and you don’t really need to write anything. Or if you do feel like broadcasting yourself, just type whatever you like into a form, and it’s as easy as that! And so safe as well for those who don’t want their info exposed to the whole world, but only to a select group of one or two or three or four hundred “friends.”

Facebook’s Achilles’ heel, though, may turn out to be privacy. Matt McKeon has created a wonderful chart which allows one to track, year-by-year, the erosion in Facebook’s default privacy settings. Over at Wired, Ryan Singel provides some insight into the current situation.

So is there an alternative for those concerned by Facebook’s emerging business model — namely, selling its user’s identities? Could any private entity be trusted not to do exactly the same?

The answer may be to take a fresh look at the web, with the lessons of Facebook in mind. Facebook does nothing unique, and it doesn’t do any particular thing particularly well. What it does primarily is aggregate a number of things which can already be done, and facilitate sharing of information between users (and increasingly anyone else they feel like sharing user info with).

What if these various functions could be distributed following much the same sort of model as the internet? Let’s take a simple example, like your email address. There isn’t a central server which holds all info about email addresses, but rather a system which allows your computer to fire off an email which goes to another computer which does a lookup and sends the info on towards its destination. Yes, it’s all quite technical, but, as a user, you don’t need to know any of the technicalities in order to send email, and no single entity or organization needs to manage all the email addresses in the world so that everyone can communicate with one another.

An open, distributed system wouldn’t be enough on its own for a lot of people, just as Geocities’ free empty space you could FTP to wasn’t appealing to a lot of people. But it would allow others to set up their own “Facebooks,” and every one of them would be interoperable with every other. If friend Alice posted something on her “wall” in her account with the Super Social Networking A-go-go site, friend Benny would see it in his account with Awesome Social Networking Divas site. And accounts would be transferable between sites, just like any real internet type account is today.

That latter point is very important. If Super’s privacy policy sucks, there’s absolutely nothing stopping Alice from moving her account to Awesome. Users would no longer be The Damned, condemned to an individual social networking site’s hell.

It’s difficult to say when or even if this will come to pass, but I’ve yet to hear a Facebook user who was entirely pleased with the service, especially on the issue of privacy. Give users a site with all the functionality of Facebook, better designed, as easy or easier to use, with total control over access to their information, and they might just go for it. Make it a distributed technology, and you’d do away with the need for a single entity to acquire a critical mass of users — any individual, group, ISP, etc. could set up their little corner, which would be interoperable with everyone else’s little corner, with all those little corners adding up to a global community of users.

In other words: watch out, Facebook.

Confession: I’m a social media junkie – an enthusiastic blogger, active Twitter user, reluctant member of the ever-growing Facebook empire, and YouTube watcher. I like to share my thoughts and interesting content and online services.

The chances, however, of me using Blippy are zero, nil, nadda, nunca.

Why anyone would give a third-party their credit card information so their purchases can be tracked and broadcast is beyond me. Over the past week, I have been beating the drum about the changes that Facebook made to its API that now make more of your information public. Blippy is just another strange part of the “tell-all” ecosystem that has emerged in recent years.

Really, what are the benefits of telling the world about your purchases? Seriously, what’s in it for you, your friends, or strangers?

Is it vanity? Is it a way to provide real-world suggestions about the best products and services to purchase? Is it just another creature of consumerism, which seems to have survived the recession relatively unscathed? Or is Blippy just another beast to feed our growing addiction to sharing?

I’m sure there are people who get some value from Blippy by getting a better idea of what people are buying so they can make better purchasing decisions, but let’s be real here: Blippy’s in the business of collecting massive amounts of data so it can aggregate and leverage it to make money. In other words, your activity fuels the fire.

To me, the common theme between Facebook and Blippy is how the balance between the benefits offered to users, and what these companies get from all their users’ activity, is starting to tilt in the direction of the businesses. While users get a few social media crumbs, Facebook and Blippy are gorging at the data buffet.

By the way, here’s Blippy mea culpa in the wake of reports that some of its users’ credit card information was accidentally disclosed via Google.

Originally posted on markevanstech.com

An open letter to Biz Stone, co-founder, Twitter:

Dear Biz,

I’m sure you appreciate the intense, burning interest that people have in how Twitter is going to make money. After all, you’ve got more than 50 million users, which has caused the monetization buzz to get more increasingly feverish the more popular that Twitter becomes.

But can you do me a favour: please stop talking about how Twitter is going to be announcing a business model soon. It’s an act that, frankly, has grown tired because it keeps repeating itself.

Yes, I understand that you’ve got to answer the “money” question every time you do an interview, but the thing is you keep giving interviews so they keep asking the money question. It’s a vicious circle that’s become more vicious.

That said, it seems that you have a hard time not playing the game, so when you appeared on TV last week, you declared Twitter will unveil a business model in the next month.

Is this a tease or do you really mean it? The problem is no one is sure whether Twitter will actually announce a business model because we’ve been led down this path before only to be disappointed.

I’m hoping this time you mean it but time will tell.

Originally posted on markevanstech.com

An infinite number of bloggers on an infinite number of netbooks blathering for a handful of years have produced an entirely new face for marketing.  Whereas widely-spread opinions could once only be held by those with credentials, now anyone with dial-up can wax judgmental about any old thing.  And it’s driving some people mad.

It must be unendurably painful for someone who has fought to be published see their baby one-starred-and-feathered on Amazon.  But nothing so thoroughly hoists an author by their own petard than trying to enlist the internet to attack itself.  Last year, Alice Hoffman twittered her fury over a review in The Boston Globe, calling in her troops to harangue the reviewer, and all it earned her was a hefty serving of scorn.  Alain de Botton made a resoundingly misguided (though sort of hilariously angry) comment on a critic’s blog, later admitting that this was “clearly an insane thing to write in a new public age.” While the internet has opened its arms to everyone’s $0.02, it has also cheerfully created space for the occasional train wreck.

The latest author to go all Hulk! Smash! on a nay-sayer is romance writer Candace Sams.  After Amazon reviewer L B Taylor posted a disappointed handful of paragraphs warning people off of Sams’ Electra Galaxy’s Mr Interstellar Feller, the author (under the pseudonym “Niteflyr One”) rose up in a lather of fury and excuses.  Clearly, she said, the reviewer was herself a failed romance writer.  Clearly she didn’t understand how little control writers have over the cover (natch), “sequencing of scenes” (?) or the “language used in dialogue” (!?!), all of which are apparently dictated on high from the editor.

The twitternets and bloggotown were alive with elbow-nudgings and note-passing almost immediately, and before long a crowd had gathered in the comments section.  Taylor quickly backed away from the maelstrom, but Niteflyr responded with SPEED and VIGOR (if maybe not sense) to all comers.

And it isn’t so much that she responded to a negative review in the first place (which is like making out with an alligator [in that it rarely ends well]), but that she sounded like an illiterate loon.  Her insistence that Taylor could dish it out but not take it, combined with her repeated inability to “take it,” make for some dizzyingly circular arguments.  Her bottle of whine about how careless reviewers can fillet an author’s career WITH IMPUNITY suggest that the reading world owes her a livelihood just. because. she writes.  Or puts letters down, anyways.  Because it’s “beseech,” not “beseach,” and although she might (sadly) “loose” more contracts on the world because of this controversy, my spidey-sense tells me that she meant “lose.” Maybe she should call up that publishing house she hates so much (and so publicly) and have them send someone to tinker with her tirades.

What seems to be at play here (besides a completely skewed sense of entitlement) is a misunderstanding of the way the internet works.  As Sams herself admits, once authors sell their work they “leave themselves open for attack.”  Where Sams has dun it rong is by not seeing that those attacks no longer extend only from friend to friend, but across the webiverse.  The Amazon reviews and their comments are not an author’s personal parlour, but a forum designed for promoting good products and warning people away from bad ones.  Any old idiot can say whatever they want, but these days any old idiot has that right.  There is no point in kicking against the goads because the goads are legion and probably have more time to kill than you.

Sams is past the point where she could (like de Botton) apologize profusely and sincerely, or (like Hoffman) attempt to rub the mess out.  To date, Amazon has deleted eight of her comments from the thread, but I’d bet my bottom dollar that someone(s) has screen-captured all 20-odd pages of rant.  Some new scandal will rise up in 20 minutes and push this to the back-burner, but like authorial missteps made before it, it will never be fully expunged.  The internet is forever.

J.D. Frazer’s book Money for Content and Your Clicks for Free is more interesting for the insight it provides into the business side of the online comic strip User Friendly than as a putative how-to book. (Frazer has written User Friendly under the pen name Illiad since 1997.) As a how-to book, its advice on how to make money on the web is extremely easy to summarize. It breaks down into two steps:

1. Create some online content, like a web comic, for example, which becomes super popular and gets several thousand visits a day.
2. Monetize it with advertising, merchandising, and sponsorship.

This could be a candidate for Monty Python’s ‘How to do it’ show.

First do something exceptionally challenging which we’ll just gloss over without providing any information with regards to how to achieve it, then apply the following information which will be of limited value until you have completed step one. Of course, if you’re a User Friendly fan, you may enjoy the book simply as a behind-the-scenes look at the business side of a very successful web comic.

On page 150 (original italics), Frazer outlines an informal contract which he imagines exists between himself and visitors to his website. First he lists what he perceives his obligations to be –basically, providing a cartoon a day and behaving ethically –then he lists what the visitors’ obligations are.

• You will respect my intellectual property and acknowledge my sole right to determine how it will be used and distributed.
• You understand that content is not actually “free”; someone had to put their time, money, and/or effort into creating and distributing it.
• You will support me and the other independent creators whose work you enjoy through the purchase of memberships, visiting our advertisers, or even just by spreading the word and letting us know you like what we do.
• You will not use an ad blocker, particularly when you can turn the ads off by buying a membership.
• You will not consume content by Web-scraping or any other unsanctioned means that denies me or any other primary content creator pageviews and, therefore, ad impressions, and, therefore, money to help keep their efforts afloat.
• You understand that you don’t have a right to free content on the Net.
• You will always remain within the boundaries of ethical behavior and will let your conscience be your guide.

I have the feeling he is pushing against a perception on the web, conscious or unconscious, that everything is free. He claims that visitors to his site more-or-less meet his expectations. However, when it comes to advertising, if you have a hugely popular site like User Friendly, you can negotiate favorable terms where you get money for every ad impression regardless of whether or not the ad is clicked on (thus the concern regarding people with ad blockers installed in their browsers) — that’s what step one is all about, creating a hugely popular site.

I look at clicking on ads as a form of tipping. If I like a site, I click an ad. It’s unfortunate that I seem to be amongst the minority who are looking for simple, affordable ways to give back to content creators. I’ve even been known to hit the odd donate button to pass on a buck or two. I’m far from being well off, but the beauty of easy access by masses of people to low-cost content (very low relative to owning a print newspaper or TV station) is that if a significant percentage of people did the same, content creators could be rewarded at very little cost to the individual visitor. Indeed, clicking on an ad only costs a small amount of time.

I should note that I’m not encouraging you to click on ads on this site. No sir, that would be against Google’s policy. I’m not even mentioning the ads on this site, because even calling attention to them is against policy. If you think I’m encouraging you to click this site’s ads, or calling attention to them, then I’m sorry if I’ve somehow led you to this mistaken perception, since I most certainly am not suggesting that it would really help this site and cost you only a small amount of time if you clicked on an ad. And if the site’s proprietor appears to be encouraging you in this recent post, remember, he lives on an island, and I suspect it must be a very sunny one where he has suffered from too much exposure. Pay his ranting no heed, especially if you work for Google.

But with regard to other sites, and speaking very much in general, it would be nice if step one wasn’t creating a hugely popular site where one could make decent money from ad impressions, merchandising (backofthebook.ca toques anyone?), and sponsorship (”backofthebook.ca bloggers endorse [ this space for rent ]!”). Wouldn’t it be nice if producing a great site with interesting articles could be rewarded as well? Again, I’m not talking about any specific site here, but in general, if you like a site, and it’s clearly trying to monetize itself in some way, consider being a sweetheart and playing along. Consuming without giving back makes baby (Jesus|Mohamed|Krishna|Buddha|Moses|Darwin|other) cry.