Bloggasm

Valleywag tries to answer this question.

Oh crap

At least eight American blogger-activists and several other foreigners have been detained in Beijing as the government intensifies a crackdown on pro-Tibetan protests in the home stretch of the Olympics, rights groups said on Wednesday.

Rather than posting here I should be working on my state taxes (I finished federal taxes last night) but I just don’t have the energy for it tonight. Speaking of taxes, the IRS website is incredibly shitty — I know that government websites are known to be terrible but you’d think they’d take extra care with that one, considering it’s the nation’s money-maker.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement.

1. May 1 is RSS Awareness Day, which is certainly something I can support. I knew what an RSS feed was long before I actually started using them. There’s just this odd inertia that keeps you from actually getting on the bandwagon, but once you do you immediately realize it’s worth it. Signing up for RSS feeds relieves some pressure on bloggers to post around the clock because an RSS worldview doesn’t involve you having to check a website over and over again to see if it has been updated. There are some sites I subscribe to that barely ever update, and without the RSS feed I would probably never know when something new has been posted. Rather than explaining what an RSS feed is on my own terms, here’s a handy dandy link to the Wikipedia entry.

2. “Porn for the Blind is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing audio descriptions of sample movie clips from adult web sites. This service is provided free of charge.” The description says it all.

3. Jeff Jarvis explores the true value of his blog. Rather than focusing solely on what the blog brings in through direct advertising revenue, he also adds in the money that comes in indirectly — speaking fees, book deals, other gigs — and determines that the blog is worth over a million dollars. Not bad for a site that averages only a few thousand hits a day.

4. This is pretty huge. Gawker Media has sold off three of its blogs, including Wonkette. Gawker founder Nick Denton references the coming online advertising decline, saying he’s dumping his less profitable sites in order to ride out the storm. I still find it weird, though, that they would get rid of Wonkette, which has become some sort of symbol for the rise of the blogosphere as a powerful media outlet — it was often cited in mainstream media stories about the power of blogs. It’s especially a weird move given that it’s a contentious presidential season that has resulted in rising traffic for most major political blogs.

5. It looks like we’re seeing a new use for POD: computer generated books. That New York Times article doesn’t do a great job of explaining how the guy’s company works, but I wouldn’t be able to point to more representative example of the long-tail benefits of Print On Demand.

6. It looks like AP photographer Bilal Hussein, who was jailed for two years without charges, is definitely going to be released. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who led the smear campaign against Bilal, has remained mostly silent on this issue.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. A gay porn company has been exposed in an HIV scandal, resulting in several DVDs being taken off the market.

2. Apparently The New Yorker is on a hiring binge, welcoming in two new writers: Ariel Levy and Kelefa Sanneh. Since that’s my dream job, I’m definitely jealous.

3. If there was an award for melodramatic blog posts, this one would get it. Will a Gawker media blog cause a string of suicides? Not likely, though he does make some good points.

4. This article isn’t about media or journalism, but should be read as an example of what excellent new journalism is.

5. Why it would be stupid for a media company to try and buy up an A-list blog.

Here are some media-related links for your perusal:

1. I’m posting this one just for the headline: Gay Porn Twins Arrested for Robbery Spree

2. Here’s a brilliant smack-down of Ben Stein’s silly documentary arguing against evolution. The best part is the retelling of how the movie reviewer was invited to the screening and then showed up after they tried to take away his invitation.

3. Well, I was as surprised as any to see that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was dating the Canadian hot female version of Godhatesfags leader Fred Phelps. But before I even got a chance to post about it, they broke up and their online cyber sex leaked onto the internets.

4. Amazon was among the first to create a “if you bought this item you might also like this item” feature. Netflix has taken it to a whole new level by creating a contest with a million dollar prize for the person or team that improves its recommendation system by 10%. Though many of those in the lead are mathematicians, a retired psychologist may take home the prize.

5. Apparently the title “Washington Post Media Critic” is a code phrase that means right-wing blogger.

6. You know you’ve read one of these NY Times articles. The journalist points out a “growing trend” that you didn’t know existed. Sometimes it just gets ridiculous.

7. Blogging is good for your social life.

And then finally, posted without comment:

Several media outlets have reported on Chez Pazienza, a former CNN producer who was fired because he had a blog. In a long post recently, Pazienza gave us some of the details of what led to his firing. The CNN people who terminated him drilled home a single line in the employee handbook that “any writing done for a ‘non-CNN outlet’ must be run through the network’s standards and practices department,” an ambiguous rule to be sure and one that is very outdated. It eventually becomes very easy to read between the lines in this firing — Pazienza wasn’t fired because he had a blog, but rather because of what he had written in it.

The first high-profile case of a blogger being fired for something written in a blog was Amanda Armstrong, the blogger behind dooce (this is why when someone gets fired for blogging it’s called “being dooced”). And since then there have been a number of other high-profile cases — it usually makes news when it’s someone from a company like Google or a major news outlet. But I think it happens more often than you might think. A girl I went to college with got a job teaching at a Catholic school and then was later fired after she criticized the Catholic faith on her blog. I think it’s a natural tendency for people to use blogging as a way to vent about problems at work, and then they don’t realize their mistake until it’s too late and they’ve been given their walking papers.

Some blogging purists might automatically come to the defense of anyone who is fired because of a blog. I’m not one of those knee-jerk people. After all, a company has a right to protect itself, and if it legitimately feels that it’s being damaged by an employee’s blog, then it has a right to take action.

It’s because of this that a little less than a year ago I developed a set of rules for myself to always follow when I blog. I realize that Bloggasm is the first thing that shows up when you Google my name, meaning it doesn’t take much sleuthing to monitor what I write here. I realized that if I wasn’t careful, I could get into a world of trouble, and so I implemented many of the rules you see below. I think other bloggers could use these rules as a guidebook when deciding what to write and what not to write, and if you follow them I don’t think an employer would have a conceivably good reason to fire you:

1. Don’t blog about work. Don’t blog about your day at work, any clients you have, or any business decisions at the job. If possible, don’t even mention *where* you work, or at least mention it as little as possible. This includes even saying positive things about your job. I remember reading about one intern at a network being fired even though every single post was gushing about how great her job was. Employers tend to think you’re stepping over a boundary if you write about them.

2. Don’t blog at work. If you blog during the workday then you are using company time and computers, and this can quickly anger an employer. This is especially true if you’re getting paid by the hour. Wait until you get home to log in. If you’re surfing the net at work and come across a link you want to write about, save it using a social bookmark and come back to it later.

3. Use a blog platform that allows locked entries. Livejournal, for instance, has a “friends only” feature. This way, if you absolutely have to blog about work, then you can do so without having to worry much about the wrong people seeing it.

4. If you’re an employer, try to lay out some rules in your policy guidebook. And don’t just ban all blogging. Be realistic. So many things fall under the category of blogging that banning it outright allows too much ambiguity. And plus it’s just simply not fair to force your workers to not be able to engage in a writing hobby when they go home at the end of the night.

5. If you’re a journalist, try to avoid writing about beats you cover. Not only does it muddy the waters on where your blog coverage leaves off and your news coverage picks up, it can make your employer a prime target for being accused of having a bias. So if you write about technology for the Washington Post, don’t start your own highly-opinionated tech blog.

6. On the other hand, #5 can be a little harsh, and depends on the situation. For instance — if you’re a newspaper journalist, should you avoid talking about the entire newspaper industry on your blog? I don’t think you should have to.

7. Don’t go overboard in what you post — though you should feel free to express yourself, don’t post extremely inappropriate pictures or lace your writing with profane or vulgar sentences. This is a call-it-as-you-see-it type thing, but I wouldn’t blame an employer for firing an employee for posting sex bondage pictures of himself all over his blog.

8. If you feel comfortable doing so, let your employer know about your blog. If you’re straightforward with them, then it makes it more difficult for them to come at you three months down the road with some retroactive “no blogging” rule.

Ok, I’m not going to be lame and think of two more things just so I can have 10 items. Did I miss anything?

Sorry for all the posts about genre publications, but after I wrote the original article about science fiction ezines there have been new developments within the field. After that initial article I found out that Tor Books would soon be launching its own online presence using the monetization model I outlined.

And then today, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction launched a new blog for its site.

To be honest, this is something that should have probably happened like two years ago or more — many readers not familiar with the pulps might say “Why is it a big deal that a magazine is launching a blog? Most magazines started doing that years ago.”

Well, so far, F&SF is the first of the three remaining pulps to do so. I think this is a big step forward for them learning how to survive and market themselves to a generation that has so far been moving on without them.

Sorry, not trying to sound condescending here, like I’m patting F&SF on the head. And I’m not even 100% sure that this will have a grand positive effect on the magazine. But since just about every other publication out there has gone this route, I definitely think it’s a step in the right direction.