Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: social media

  • Let Your Content Be Copied

    Let Your Content Be Copied

    Do Not CopyRecently I undertook a personal project to convert a website from Flash to WordPress. I didn’t do this for any reason other than I wanted to do something nice for someone who has, in a very strange way, been the reason I am who I am within WordPress. She’s an artist, which means her website was very media heavy, and back in the early 2000s, the way to do this was Flash.

    I hated it.

    Oh I loved how it looked, but really that was it. It made her content slow, and it made it impossible for me to say “Hey, check out the new content!” without also saying “To get there, click on Sputnik, then on the fourth star, then the fifth box…” It’s just really bad UI, and no matter how pretty it is, the barrier between reader and content was nigh insurmountable. Also it doesn’t work on iOS these days.

    My father, similarly, had his old site as all PDFs, so when I redid his site for his birthday (which he loves, and yes, WordPress), I copied his PDFs to text, with a lot of LATex in there for the math, and he complained. “People will steal my content.” I pointed out they could do that anyway. In fact, I had, in essence, done what they would, downloading the PDF and copying out the text and images. He grumbled, but as soon as his peers remarked that they could finally read his work, he calmed down.

    I understand the fear of theft. You want to show you work to draw people in and then sell yourself. My father is a consultant and speaker, and his fear is that people will take his work and plagiarize him, or worse, make it seem like he endorsed them. If you think libel is a rough road on the Internet, try the endorsement shenanigans. Some people will do anything to make themselves seem more appealing.

    At the same time, I agree with Cory Doctorow that giving your books away isn’t bad. The reason my ebooks are pay what you will is that I want people to find me, and find value in me. You can argue I wouldn’t have my job if I didn’t do that. My ebook profits paid for a brake repair and help keep my webhosting fees under control, but I sure don’t make a living off two ebooks. But again, the point is not that the website, directly, makes me money, but that it allows me to make money.

    CopyIt seems counterintuitive. How can I make money giving things away? A website is like advertising. You don’t make money directly on an ad. You pay around $3.5 million dollars to have an ad in the Super Bowl not because you think someone will drop what they’re doing, run out and buy Doritos, but because you are trying to make an impact. The best Super Bowl ads, the best ads in general, are the ones we watch and want to share with our friends. We talk about them, and when we’re at the store and spot Doritos, we have a positive association with them, and are inclined to buy them. Sneaky ain’t it?

    The website is the same thing. You read a lot about WordPress here, so at a certain point you start to associate ‘Ipstenu’ and ‘Half-Elf’ with WordPress. You see me on the forums, posting and helping people, and you get positive reinforcement of that association. Then you see I have an ebook about Multisite and you buy it. So why are the ebooks also pay what you want? Because people come to these things the other way, too. They find the ebooks, wonder about my qualifications and merits, and later come back and pay. And yes, I’ve gotten money that way too. After a while, when you build up your cred, you don’t have to mess with that and you can just sell, but at the time of my ebooks, I wasn’t someone who could say “My job is WordPress” so I couldn’t afford to just sell. I probably could today.

    By why keep giving things away? WordPress (the code) is free, and my content is technically free here. You’re not paying me to read this, after all. It goes back to positive associations. If you get a good association with something, you keep using it. Newspapers, back in the day, were the only way to get news. You paid for two things: the information and the reliability. The radio came and changed the game, letting you listen to news, but the papers stuck around because unlike TV and radio news, you didn’t have to wait for your segment to come up, you could flip the pages and read sports.

    The value of straight news didn’t really change until the Internet, where we started offering you the information at no immediate cost. Most of the time, the Internet sites can’t compete with reliability, but people became increasingly annoyed with having to pay for content. Buying the paper, sure, but I’m already paying for the Internet (access to it). Shouldn’t that be funneling back like TV fees do? Alas, they don’t, which means news media goes through hoops and ladders to try to lock their content down so you can’t copy it, or you have to pay to get at it. In return people like me find ways around paying to read content.

    It’s not that we don’t think we should pay for things. I do pay for books, music, movies, media, news, etc, and I encourage people to do so. It’s not the money at all, it’s the barrier between me and the content. There’s obvious value in reading the news, but the value is diminished by proliferation and frankly by their own quality. It’s true that if you build it they will come, but without letting people share what they found, then you won’t get more readers.

    Ctrl-CThat’s why the walls between your reader and your content need to go. That’s why you need to allow a direct link to your content, so I can say “Hey, I read this awesome article, go here!” You want me to tweet, text, link, post, tumble, and share your content so you get more readers, and more to the point, you get happy readers. The happier your readers, the more they feel like they should share. They’re getting a psychological kick-back from sharing, and we’re back to the positive association reinforcement we want.

    I’m certainly not going to say that giving away all your content is going to make you money, but I will say that giving away some of your content will do so. There’s no magic formula to say where the breakpoint is for your product, but there’s no way to do that for anything. You have to determine where you’re going to make your money. My father makes money with his work and lectures. By posting smaller excerpts of his essays and papers online for free, people can find value in his work and hire him. An artist can post lower resolution/quality versions of their art for free, and let the reason find merit in the product. A writer can put disparate thoughts that don’t really combine themselves well into one work up on their blog, and let people see the value in their books. And by letting people copy your content, by letting them quote in part on in whole, you make them happy.

    Do I worry about plagiarism and content theft? Funny thing, no. By having my SEO ranking high, based on Google and all being able to read my content, if someone searches for phrases found in my articles, they’ll find my site before the sploggers and thieves. By making it easier for people to link to me, I increase my SEO. The same goes for my quality of content. I make it high, people will link to me, and we get a happy circle of reciprocity. I never fear content theft, and because of that, I let my content be copied.

    It’s served me well.

  • Anti-Social Competition

    Anti-Social Competition

    browser war copyA lot has been said already about how stupid Twitter is to bite the hand that tweeted them into fame. People are all on about how Facebook’s draconian actions will hurt them. Now Instagram is in on the restriction game. There are business models for actions like this, and we’ve seen them time and again. People think the only way to keep their user base (i.e. their revenue) is to stop the users from integrating with the other tools.

    They’re wrong.

    Look, none of us use a product because they limit us, or because they force us to. While the monetary loss and software hassle of switching to a PC would hurt me, the reason I use a Mac is not because they make it impossible to switch, but because they make me not want to. It’s a part of a psychological gambit, making it easy to do what I want, and if I really wanted, easy to walk away. But what neither Apple nor Microsoft does is attempt to lock me in to their way forever.

    Now some of you might argue that’s not true, but look at the US phone system. AT&T and Verizon and all the other traditional companies lock us into their systems. We can’t leave without paying exhorbinant fees. With Apple and Microsoft, the setup fee was my choice, and I don’t pay ongoing prices to use their service, though I can in some cases.

    When I see things like Instagram and Twitter having a slap-fight, to the point that Twitter decided to remove Instagram’s embedding in Twitter, I wanted to kick them both. Twitter is going to hurt itself more and more by biting the hands that feed them (which we already knew about when they decided people making their own Twitter tools was bad). Instagram is following the trend, and that doesn’t help at all. What they’re doing is generating anti-social behavior, which is to say that they’re making it hard to be social.

    twitter-beefThese are social media outlets, and it’s almost to the point where they’re saying ‘You can drive our car, but it only uses gasoline from these vendors.’ We would cry foul and sic the lawyers on them for that. In fact, we did. Remember when Microsoft made it near impossible to run other browsers by tightly integrating IE with their OS? Look at how well that worked out. Sidebar: I don’t think Apple limiting the default browser on iOS devices is the same thing. Unlike Microsoft, they own both hardware and software, so it’s more like saying ‘You can’t put a Fiat engine in your Mini Coop.’ I do think they should allow it, but it’s not the same as the gasoline analogy. Hair splitting, I know. Don’t think I like that I can’t set Chrome as my default browser on my iPad, it really annoys me.

    One of the driving points I love about open source is that we all work together to make things better. With a few notable exceptions, we really try hard to be cooperative, because we know that one group, alone, can’t do everything. This is why I’m often an evangelist for people to contribute, I know that we need to work together in all things. My chosen flag is, right now, Open Source.

    For some reason this is lost on people when they start looking to monetize their products. And it’s not just products like Twitter that do this stupid thing. Right away, everyone’s an enemy. Recently, Carrie Dils ran into this when her presentation at a WordPress Meetup was rejected. Carrie correctly pointed out, she’s not your competition. (I’m very confident this will be addressed in the meetup world, and I know this is not the kind of behavior anyone encourages or endorsees.) Except in a way, she totally is my competition. Just not the way that guy seemed to think of it.

    That bizarre situation points out the absurdity in all this. The world is not a zero-sum game. You’ll never have all the money, all the products, all the clients, or all the people. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t aspire to have as many as you can manage, but it means you don’t need to attack the other guy. Having a rival, having competition, is good. Every other forum moderator is better than I am at something. Even if it’s just quilting, or as weird as Microsoft servers, the crux of the issue is that competition can be a good thing, and the way to ‘win’ is not to smear the other guy or block them from sharing your client base, but to offer what the other guys doesn’t have.

    Look back at Twitter and Instagram. Twitter is for sharing 140 characters of words. Instagram is for sharing retro photos. So what does Instagram have to gain by blocking people from being able to show photos in Twitter? Well there is a practical point here, and it’s one I tout: Own your own data. After all, I don’t allow hotlinking of my images on other sites specifically because I want people to come here for content (and it’s bandwidth theft, which I hate), but also I don’t like when people steal my content without asking and present it as their own. A large part of owning my own data is also owning where it lives. So while I use Instagram and Twitter (and Facebook), anything of merit that isn’t just casual chatter ends up on one of my own sites.

    Unlike Instagram, I will happily embed small version of my content (excerpts) on any social media site I care to use. Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus all allow me to put a link, or a link and a phrase, that shows a teaser of my blog content. This drives traffic back to me, which increases my presence, and nets me what I want. Instagram could have done this, and permitted embedding like that on a small scale (click to see bigger, click to leave comment) on Twitter and anywhere else, which would probably help them.(Wouldn’t it be cool if we could code our own sites to let Twitter embed some media from them too? Sadly, they won’t let us because some people would use it for Goatse.cx (DO NOT VISIT)) Instead, they put up a wall to make people click a link and go through. This is why WordPress lets you embed media on your site from other sources. They get it.

    I wish those other guys did. I just want to play in the park with everyone.

  • Running My Own Social Network Falls Short

    Running My Own Social Network Falls Short

    Webchick is a good cat herder - Some rights reserved by muir.ceardachI say this having run a variety of social networks, from blogs and forums to MUSHes and Facebook ‘Wall’ type things. I’ve been around and I’ve had to manage cats in myriad situations.

    The problem they all have is managing spammers and trolls.

    Spammers are, weirdly, easier. You use a decent plugin/extension, you block the idiots, you move on. But trolls. Oh lord, trolls. You know those users you just want to take out back and kick until they find a clue, but you know they never will? Right.

    When I was on a MUSH, I came up with a tool called the ‘Ban Hammer.’  If you’re not familiar with it, the basic idea is anyone can log on, make a character and join a role playing game.  Sounds great.  If someone breaks the rules, the people in charge (Wizards) can delete their character.  The problem I had was someone was coming and not breaking the rules, but had made himself basically unwelcome.  The Wizards wouldn’t delete the account because “Being a Dick” isn’t against their rules.  I decided to write a tool that looked for this user and locked every room, door and exit against him.  On top of that, if he tried to teleport into a room, it booted him out.  And he got a message “You are not currently welcome here. Please speak with Ipstenu.” (or whomever was the local area boss).  Then I shared it with everyone on the game.(If you can’t tell, I’m a huge proponent of sharing and Open Source. I gave people the source code too.)

    As I see it, the problem is that most social extensions are fantastic in a closed system, but the minute you open things up to anyone, you have the problem of user management.  Facebook and Twitter are failing at it today.  There’s just too many spammers and trolls to manage. Most people spend time and effort hunting down spammers, which is probably why managing morons falls by the wayside.

    The other interesting point I’ve noticed is that most programmers don’t run social sites. They use them, but they don’t manage them as an end-moderator. These are totally different skill sets and, as with all separate skill sets, there’s often a disconnect between what one sees as a need and what the other sees as a want.

    I have to rewind here. My high school had a big emphasis on teaching us the difference between a want and a need. You need food. You want hot water. “a simple life school, where one learns to get on without” (Paul Squib – Founder of Midland School”) A lot of my decisions in life roll back to that simple premise. If you needed something, the school provided it. If you wanted something, you worked for it. I learned how to chop wood and make a fire in order to make enough hot water for 14 teenage girls to shower because we wanted the water hot. (Funny Midland story. We basically had an old propane tank, fitted with a small stove ‘hole’ to make the fire. You started the fire, added the logs, and stoked it for about 2-3 hours to heat the water, often augmented by the solar panels. If you made the water hot enough, however, you created steam, which would flip a switch on the safety switch so people didn’t get scalded. It was called the ‘Steam Lock’, and we measured our abilities by how efficiently you could activate it. I learned how to do it on my second shower fire, having been taught by Amber and Katie. Thanks, girls!) Because of that, not a day goes by that I don’t think “Is that a want or a need?” And I am ruthless with myself about that. Because of that rigorous crucible, I am confident what I say that I know what I need, I really mean that.

    The tools I need to deal with trouble-making users aren’t many.

    Track IPs – only to keep tabs on repeat offenders. A spammer’s IP doesn’t matter. Bob the troll’s does. This is going to always require a level of manual intervention, that a human will have to go in and think about things, but that’s not a bad idea anyway.  I made a WordPress plugin called Register IP Multisite to handle that for both single and MultiSite.

    Flag as spam – I need to be able to say ‘Bob’s acting an ass. I want him to go away.’ Really this should be ‘flag as bozo’ as he’s not a spammer, but I’ll take either one. A time out feature to put people out of sight from the users for a while. Obviously, again, there’s a level of manual work required.  You can do this on WordPress MultiSite, but not single site, and it’s silly to think that you would have to go to MultiSite to enable this.

    Bad Words – Sometimes it’s easy to stop the jerks. Sometimes I just want to keep a place clean for kiddies. Most tools, blogging or otherwise, have a way to clean words, but then you have strange problems. If you use, say, “cialis” as a bad word, you block “socialisim.” Ooops! Also, I would like to block people from using bad words in their ‘name’, and not just comments. But again, this needs manual monitoring.

    The tools I’d want, but don’t need, are also few:

    Report users – Most forums have this ability, to let people patrol each other. Google+ has it. If you’re opening up your site to the world, you have to be able to let the crowd help you. But within reason. You can only report people once, for example, and after X reports, someone should be just blocked for now until a moderator manually steps in.

    What about you?  What tools do you know you can’t live without?

  • United States Patent: 8010458

    An online social network is provided in which members of the online social network control who may view their personal information and who may communicate with them. The members control who may view their personal information by setting a visibility preference. A member may not view another member’s full personal profile if the measure of relatedness between the two is greater than the visibility preference of the other member. The members also control who may communicate with them by setting a contactability preference. A member may not communicate with another member if the measure of relatedness between the two is greater than the contactability preference of the other member.

    via United States Patent: 8010458.

    It’s official. The US patent office is useless.

  • Social Media Gets It Backwards

    Social Media Gets It Backwards

    If you’re on Google+, you know you can sort people by circles. I want to tell my ‘Clients from Hell’ people stories about this, or my ‘WordPress’ people stories about that. But what they don’t have is a way for me to say ‘I only want to see Otto’s WordPress stories.’

    I know, that sounds really basic and simple. Public shared circles.

    Circles are a way for me to target you, but not helpful when I want to be selective. So far, no social media product has addressed this. With a blog, I can follow a specific category or tag via RSS. Provided you’re not being a jerk about things, any site using WordPress has the ability to follow a tag or category. https://halfelf.org/tag/wp/feed will show you all my WordPress posts. (However. Many people are assholes and redirect all their feeds to one location, usually FeedBurner, in the interest of getting advertising revenue. http://freelanceswitch.com/, I’m looking at you, and it was a dick move that made me stop following your site.) While this relies on my personal honesty and accuracy, it makes things easier for the reader to find what they want. You can follow the same logic on Drupal via their nodes, WordPress’s CPTS and so on and so forth.

    So why is something that simple and obvious hard to manage on a social site?

    It’s a numbers game. Your site, you’re in control of how you tag and categorize things. I do it differently from many people, who do it differently from others and so on and so forth. While this difference is great (go diversity!) it means that ‘tagging’ a topic on Google is up to the person making the post. I may call it WordPress, you may use WP, and now which one do I follow?

    The best solution I’ve come up with is that when you add someone to a Google+ circle, you can say ‘All posts, posts tagged …’ and then you get a list of ALL the tags someone has used. When they add new tags, you would get notified (like you do when someone new follows you). “Bob has added a new tag called “Home Brew.”” Then you can decide to follow it or not.

    Of course this relies on Bob’s honesty, and sometimes he might forget to tag things. I do all the time on Tumblr, because they removed tagging from the forefront of my screen. WordPress’s habit of keeping them right there on the sidebar by default actually helps me remember that this is an important part of my social face. It’s not just who I am, or what I’m saying, but what I’m talking about.

    If you’re interested in some of me and not all of me, that should be easy to share too. After all, I may love my friends, but I really don’t care about Glee, and I’d like to be able to ignore all tweets labeled ‘#glee’ now and then.