On the value of blog comments

Over at GigaOm, Matthew Ingram weighs in on whether blogs should allow comments or not, spurred by a debate between venture capitalist Fred Wilson and Tech Crunch blogger-turned-venture capitalist M.G. Siegler:

MG Siegler, who doesn’t have comments on his blog and has written several posts defending his decision, saying they are 99-percent bile and a waste of his time. On the other side of the debate is fellow VC Fred Wilson, who says Siegler is missing a lot by not allowing comments. I think Wilson is right — while comments can be a royal pain at times, they are a crucial part of what makes a blog more than just a bully pulpit.

As is often the case, I agree with Mathew Ingram: blog comments are worth the effort.

He cites two important examples of high functioning people who maintain blogs with excellent comment sections, Anil Dash and Fred Wilson.

Dash and Wilson both spend time reading and responding to comments. For those who have been online for a few years, you know that’s not the case with many other blog authors. In a frank post last year, Dash observed that if your website is full of bad behavior, it’s your fault. He clearly thinks it’s worth it:

“When you engage with a community online in a constructive way, it can be one of the most meaningful experiences of your life. It doesn’t have to be polite, or neat and tidy, or full of everyone agreeing with each other. It just has to not be hateful and destructive.”

It’s on that count that Ingram has extra credibility with me, since he used to be the social media editor at the Globe and Mail in Canada. While Canadians generally have a reputation for being polite, online that can change. Despite years of exposure to the best and worst of humanity on his screen, however, Mathew still supports having them:

“…I still defend comments as a crucial element of what blogging is, and more than that I defend anonymity as well. A blog without comments is a soap-box, plain and simple. Not having comments says you are only interested in passing on your wisdom, without testing it against any external source (at least not where others can watch you do so) or leaving open the opportunity to actually learn something from those who don’t have their own blogs, or aren’t on Twitter or Google+. That may make for a nicer experience for you the blogger, and it may make your blog load faster, but it is still a loss — for you, and for your readers.”

Moderating and responding to comments is a full-time job at high traffic blogs. If you’re a one man outfit, small business or don’t have a full time community manager, that’s going to take time away from research, writing and interviews — and that’s a legitimate problem for a writer, much less an entire news outfit. MG made this point today, commenting on the decision by Macstories to remove all comments:

That said, I think keeping up that level of engagement is worth it. It’s important to me. I hear from readers that it’s important to them. I plan to continue to publish posts this year that have comments enabled because I believe, as Mathew Ingram does, that they’re worth it, both for me and for other readers. If I ever think that they aren’t, I’ll either turn them off or advocate that we do so — but I’m not expecting a change of heart any time soon. Read more at digiphile.wordpress.com

Amazon just did a boneheaded thing, and it deserves all the scorn you want to heap on it. Last week, the company offered people cash in exchange for going into retail stores and scanning items using the company’s Price Check smartphone app. If you scanned a product and then purchased it from Amazon rather than the shop you were standing in, Amazon would give you a 5 percent discount on the sale. (Disclosure: Slate is an Amazon affiliate; when you click on an Amazon link from Slate, the magazine gets a cut of the proceeds from whatever you buy.)

I’m generally a fan of price comparison—like everyone else, I hate spending more than I should—but I can understand physical retailers’ fear of the practice becoming widespread. When you walk into Best Buy and get a salesperson to spend 10 minutes showing you a television, then leave empty-handed so you can buy the TV for less on Amazon, you’ve just turned Best Buy into Jeff Bezos’ chump. The Price Check promotion (which lasted only one day) was, like Amazon’s aggressive efforts to dodge the collection of sales tax, a brazen attempt to crush local retailers, and I (as did many others) found it distasteful. Sure, I’m a fan of Amazon and devote a substantial portion of my income to its coffers—but does it have to be so wantonly callous about destroying its competitors?

That’s simply bogus. As much as I despise some of its recent tactics, no company in recent years has done more than Amazon to ignite a national passion for buying, reading, and even writing new books. With his creepy laugh and Dr. Evil smile, Bezos is an easy guy to hate, and I’ve previously worried that he’d ruin the book industry. But if you’re a novelist—not to mention a reader, a book publisher, or anyone else who cares about a vibrant book industry—you should thank him for crushing that precious indie on the corner.

Compared with online retailers, bookstores present a frustrating consumer experience. A physical store—whether it’s your favorite indie or the humongous Barnes & Noble at the mall—offers a relatively paltry selection, no customer reviews, no reliable way to find what you’re looking for, and a dubious recommendations engine. Amazon suggests books based on others you’ve read; your local store recommends what the employees like. If you don’t choose your movies based on what the guy at the box office recommends, why would you choose your books that way?

In the past, bookstores did have one clear advantage over online retailers—you could read any book before you purchased it. But in the e-book age that advantage has slipped away. Amazon and Barnes & Noble let you sample the first chapter of every digital title they carry, and you can do so without leaving your couch.

It’s not just that bookstores are difficult to use. They’re economically inefficient, too. Rent, utilities, and a brigade of book-reading workers aren’t cheap, so the only way for bookstores to stay afloat is to sell items at a huge markup. A few times a year, my wife—an unreformed local-bookstore cultist—drags me into one of our supposedly sacrosanct neighborhood booksellers, and I’m always astonished by how much they want me to pay for books. At many local stores, most titles—even new releases—usually go for list price, which means $35 for hardcovers and $9 to $15 for paperbacks. That’s not slightly more than Amazon charges—at Amazon, you can usually save a staggering 30 to 50 percent. In other words, for the price you’d pay for one book at your indie, you could buy two.

I get that some people like bookstores, and they’re willing to pay extra to shop there. They find browsing through physical books to be a meditative experience, and they enjoy some of the ancillary benefits of physicality (authors’ readings, unlimited magazine browsing, in-store coffee shops, the warm couches that you can curl into on a cold day). And that’s fine: In the same way that I sometimes wander into Whole Foods for the luxurious experience of buying fancy food, I don’t begrudge bookstore devotees spending extra to get an experience they fancy.

What rankles me, though, is the hectoring attitude of bookstore cultists like Russo, especially when they argue that readers who spurn indies are abandoning some kind of “local” literary culture. There is little that’s “local” about most local bookstores. Unlike a farmers’ market, which connects you with the people who are seasonally and sustainably tending crops within driving distance of your house, an independent bookstore’s shelves don’t have much to do with your community. Sure, every local bookstore promotes local authors, but its bread and butter is the same stuff that Amazon sells—mass-manufactured goods whose intellectual property was produced by one of the major publishing houses in Manhattan. It doesn’t make a difference whether you buy Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs at City Lights, Powell’s, Politics & Prose, or Amazon—it’s the same book everywhere. Read more at www.slate.com

From reputable news organizations to gossip magazines, everything is moving online. And to keep the flow of information going, content providers need profits. Everyone knows heaping revenues lie in advertising.

You might have noticed the adverts beside our posts here, on The Next Web. The odds are, you’re accustomed to being pitched to, and understand that free services like news have to pay writers somehow. But Ads can be done the right way or the wrong way.

Intrusive, auto-playing videos, gigantic banners that hide content below the fold and “Click here to continue” pages are some examples of what you are about to see.

CNN

CNN’s offenses are clear. The internationally known company features a faux-led scrolling banner, squeezed between two sidebar ads, with another ad snuck into the content area. This screen shot really doesn’t do the level of distraction CNN has achieved justice.

CNN recently won the Society for News Design’s award for the world’s best designed news site, and when I activate Adblock Plus to hide the madness, I actually consider them to be a reasonable candidate.

AOL

AOL‘s decently successful design feels fresher and cleaner than ever before. Crisp type and a clear information hierarchy make the viewing experience enjoyable — if it weren’t for all the floating, glittering Kohl’s dollar signs moving across the screen. Read more at thenextweb.com

Why Amazon Loses Money On Every Kindle Fire

November 15, 2011 Listen to the Story Morning Edition [4 min 16 sec] Add to Playlist Download Transcript

If you wanted a tablet but thought the price of an iPad was too steep, Amazon has a message for you. You can’t afford NOT to buy yourself a Kindle Fire.

The new tablet sells for $199 — less than half the price of an iPad.

Amazon can sell for such a low price partly because it’s willing to sell each Kindle Fire for less than it costs to produce.

Amazon hasn’t said exactly how much it costs the company to make each Fire. But Andrew Rassweiler of the research firm IHS iSuppli has a pretty good idea. He added up the price of the components in the tablet and came up with a cost of $209.63 for materials and manufacturing per tablet.

And Rassweiler’s estimate doesn’t include the licensing deals Amazon cuts to stream content, or the marketing to promote the Fire.

Why does Amazon sell a product at a loss? Because, for Amazon, the Fire is a book store, and a movie theater, and a record shop. And (of course) Amazon is the one selling books, movies and records.

Once you’re inside Amazon’s ecosystem, there are a whole bunch of ways they can make money off you. You buy Amazon’s books, movies, and music. You buy Amazon’s apps. You see Amazon’s ads. There’s no Apple store on an Amazon device. You’re locked in. Read more at www.npr.org

The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class’s venality

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that “New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers” covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that “It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk.”

In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on “how to suppress” Occupy protests.

Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

The mainstream media was declaring continually “OWS has no message”. Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online “What is it you want?” answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics.

No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, “we are going after these scruffy hippies”. Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women’s wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the “scandal” of presidential contender Newt Gingrich’s having been paid $1.8m for a few hours’ “consulting” to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies’ profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists’ privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can’t suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

My Purple-Haired Made-Up Best Friend, and Why She Had to Die

By Chris Dahlen

Before I tell you this story, I should introduce Rachael Webster. The trouble is, I’m not sure how to do that. Was she a friend of mine? Sure. A great friend. We spent nine months together as tight as Siamese twins. But she wasn’t family, and I never really met her in person. I could say she didn’t exist, but that’s a copout: she obviously existed, and had a life, and friends, and a career, at least until her budget ran out and I had to write her out of this world.

I do know she was real—as real as a fictional character can get.

Rachael started out as a character in a novel, Personal Effects: Dark Arts, by J. C. Hutchins and Jordan Weisman. But the novel didn’t stop as a novel. It was what we call a “transmedia experience,” meaning that the characters between the covers can jump to other media. They hang out on websites, at pay phones, and in videogames. In fact, you’re supposed to believe that they want to hang out with you. If you buy a novel like Cathy’s Book, you’ll see a phone number on the cover, and if you dial it, it will ring an actual number and play an actual message, which is supposed to be both immersive and spooky.

Transmedia’s kind of a fad right now, although it’s been around for years. Maybe you’ve heard of its close cousin, alternate reality games, which Weisman helped invent at Microsoft when he worked on a project known as “the Beast”—a marketing campaign for the film A.I. that went on to become the granddaddy of the genre. But all you really need to know about it is that it rests on the idea that fans don’t want to pick up a story, read it, and leave it behind. They want to get so attached to the characters that they’ll email them, talk to them, and spend day after day choosing to believe they’re real. Read more at killscreendaily.com

So far, so simple. The first and until now most successful literary adaptation has been the apping of T.S.Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land. A publisher like Faber understandably wants to exploit an impressive backlist, and Faber’s The Waste Land app is a great way to breathe new life into an existing piece of writing.

This is one approach to making apps for booklovers – use the technology to find creative ways of repackaging works that already exist. It may be, however, that this approach suits only a certain type of book. The idea of flipping from a text version to a video of Fiona Shaw enacting The Da Vinci Code is somehow unenticing.

Other big publishers are repackaging living authors with a pre-established audience. Penguin, for example, created myFry, an ‘app edition’ of Fry’s latest autobiography. The Fry Chronicles. The key-word here is ‘edition’ – the material is the same as in the book, though organized in a slightly different way. Transworld have done something similar with Richard Dawkins, adding illustrations and info-graphics to The Magic of Reality. Chris Meade of if:book reviewed the Dawkins app here on The Literary Platform, with a reluctant sense of disappointment: ‘this is the book transferred to tablet, not transformed by it.’

Which takes us to the most interesting version of what new digital platforms can achieve for reading and for writers. In time, apps may enable the creation of entirely new work that explores the narrative boundaries of the technology. This is likely to involve a combustion of soundtrack, images (still and moving) with text.

While traditional publishers are busy repackaging, digital design studios are inventing exciting bells and whistles. Design studios move faster than print publishers and have more of an incentive to innovate for its own sake – they understand the value of being first.

Except they don’t, nobody does, not when it comes to story-telling apps. If the value of being first, financially, is a cinema-type value (count the zeros) then it’s worth the investment. Far less so if the hidden value is more of a bookish literary kind (the zeros fade like smoke-rings).

This is the dilemma of the moment. Storytelling apps may be at the ‘birth of cinema’ stage, waiting for innovative writers to create the foundational artworks of a new narrative form. My feeling is that design studios and writers would like publishers to share their excitement about this. Instead, the publishers see a less risky future in repackaging what they already know.

This is where writers can make a difference. T.S.Eliot is no longer able to take sides, but the writer as risk-taker was once a figure to be admired. There are development studios like ustwo and Nosy Crow developing amazing tools that can create an experience that isn’t quite a book but isn’t a film, either. Read more at www.theliteraryplatform.com

Lower Manhattan’s 60 Hudson Street is one of the world’s most concentrated hubs of Internet connectivity. This short documentary peeks inside, offering a glimpse of the massive material infrastructure that makes the Internet possible. Featuring interviews with Stephen Graham, Saskia Sassen, Dave Timmes of Telx, Rich Miller of datacenterknowledge.com, Stephen Klenert of Atlantic Metro Communications, and Josh Wallace of the City of Palo Alto Utilities. Read more at vimeo.com

What we told current Journalism majors about working at startups.

If you enjoy this article, say hello on Twitter. Find Scott at @scottrocketship and Amanda at @amandamorrow.

Amanda and I spoke to a web design class of mostly junior and senior Journalism students at Drake University this past Monday. To the best of my recollection, this is what we told them:

If you want a cool job working with cool people, you have to make things. You will not network or interview your way into this job. You have to put yourself out there and do cool things. Blog. Make videos. Organize people. Start a business. Ship product.

Projects undertaken with agency are worth 100x as much as projects where you were just a cog in someone else’s machine. Nobody cares how big or cool the company you interned at is if you didn’t actually do anything interesting there.

Curiosity pays off in spades. Join new social networks. Try out apps. The Internet is easy to explore — take advantage of it.

Blogging is changing fast. Lone-wolf, article-style blogging is being replaced by more interesting platforms like Instagram and Google+. Embrace it.

There’s a startup out there for every interest. Pursue your passions. Add technology where you can.

Read up on content strategy and user experience (for starters). There are whole jobs, whole fields, whole industries that they’re probably not telling you about in school.

You have to understand how the Internet works in a deep and complete way. You don’t have to know how to develop an API, but you have to know what one is and why they’re important. Go from there and keep learning.

Nobody (who matters) cares about your GPA.

Nobody (who matters) cares about your degree or certifications.

It’s okay to be a beginner. Don’t pretend more skill or knowledge than you have. You won’t learn anything that way.

If you like print design, learn digital. It won’t bite. (Psst…if you’re in Des Moines, start here.)

Job security at big corporations is bullshit. You will probably get laid off. If you get a job at a big media conglomerate you’re probably replacing someone that just got laid off.

Take classes like statistics, accounting, and economics. Understanding, processing, visualizing and communicating about data is increasingly important.

Expect to change jobs a lot. Expect contract work. Expect to spend time freelancing.

Always have health insurance. Always. (But don’t use it as an excuse to stay in a shitty job…lay off the DVD’s and dining out and buy it yourself.)

Trying to be someone you’re not is a dangerous waste of time. Don’t fear self-improvement, but don’t try and be someone you’re not. AKA: Keep the mohawk.

Hire professionals. If you’re freelancing or starting a business, lawyer up and get an accountant. If you’re not, get an accountant anyway.

The greater startup ecosystem is incredibly permeable. Go to events. Start events. Speak at events. Listen to podcasts. Comment on blogs. Start a blog. Be connected. It’s not hard, but it does take work.

Internet people are, on the whole, really nice, really normal, and really down to Earth. They are also easy to flatter. Say hello and tell them you like their work. Write them. Subscribe to their blog. Follow them on Twitter. Ask if you can crash at a desk at their office for a day. If you’re genuinely interested in what they do and let them know, they’ll likely surprise you with their kindness and generosity.

Don’t worry too much about networking events. Do build a network.

Write every day.

It never hurts to learn something new. Ever.

Hit publish (or update, or upload, or share) even if you think it sucks. It won’t get better if you don’t show it to other people. Read more at bitmethod.com