Scott Rosenberg, one of Salon.Com founders, "Says Everything" (About Web Media)

Scott Rosenberg, author of the blogging history "Say Everything," founder of mediabugs.org and executive editor of Grist, skyped in with my Pace University Blogging a Better Planet class last fall. If you're interested in Web communication, it's worth a half hour!
Rosenberg's book: http://www.sayeverything.com
http:www.Grist.org
Dot Earth blog:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com

Writing the news we want to be true, or writing the news that is

Many of us are concerned about Tibet, China's control over that country, the many Tibetans killed by the Chinese government, the exile of Tibets government, the usurpation of Tibetan Buddhism by China and so forth.   So when a friend pointed me at a News article titled "China agrees to give Tibet back to the Tibetans" which started off by saying that "In an unprecedented announcement, President Hu Jintao of the Peoples Republic of China has announced the long-desired return of the land of Tibet to its indigenous people,"well, I was kind of ecstatic.  Reading down the article said he had agreed to return the land to its people, free the Panchen Lama, and a bunch of other things including ending the practice of harvesting organs from prisoners.

Sounded cool but it started to sound like a hoax.  Heading over to Google News I see this article over there, but all the rest of the Tibet articles talk about a wave of self immolations, recriminations against China over the immolations, and other violence by China against Tibet. 

Obviously the guy who wrote the article was pulling an Yes-Men-esque stunt on the rest of us.  He was writing the news that we want to be true, and doing it so well that a lot of people are falling for it.

As of this writing the article has over 10,000 page views, over 2000 likes onto Facebook, almost 140 tweets, etc.  Clearly it's catching the imaginations of a lot of people. 

I mentioned the Yes Men because of some stunts they've pulled.  Their an activist group whose schtick is to stage fake news, the sort of news we want to be true.  The biggest stunt they pulled was to arrange to be interviewed by the BBC posing as representatives of Union Carbide and apologizing for the Bhopal disaster, and promising to pay reparations.  In case you don't know about that event - the disaster was a chemical plant explosion in India that killed and poisoned a bunch of people in India.  Union Carbide has denied responsibility and refused to pay anything (so far as I remember), so what they did was concoct the sort of news we want to see happen.  Namely, a large company actually taking responsibility for their misdeeds.

In this case the target is China and Tibet, but we have the same pattern.

In the Transition Town movement there's a process we call "back-casting" where we create a picture/story/etc of where we want to be and project that backwards to find out how we get there.  One of the ways some Transition groups have approached it is to publish fake newspapers containing the stories we want to be true.

But - is it appropriate for The News? 

The story was published on AllVoices.com, a citizen journalism website.  Anybody can sign up for the site to write articles and earn money.  It's real easy to sign up - I just went through the process and got signed up in about 30 minutes.  It appears to be a small website still with not many people writing on the site.  Their pay structure appears to be pretty good.  etc..

But the point of mentioning this is that the people on the site aren't always gonna be proper journalists with proper journalist ethics.  In this case the guy obviously wasn't interested in posting Real News but instead News That We Want to be True.  But because AllVoices is hooked up with Google News as a News Source, the article can be found (right now) as a news story on Google News amongst all the stories of bloodshed in Tibet.

The stories we see in a place like Google News obviously should be true.  We want places like Google News to contain Real News.  The reason is so that we can interpret the world as it is with the benefit of accurate information about the world which exists.

Real Journalism ideally focuses on Real News.  This is completely distinct from the News That We Want To Be True sort of story as this one about Tibet.  Fortunately AllVoices has policies saying that News That We Want To Be True (or any other sort of false news report) violates the policies of AllVoices, will be removed, the author will lose out on earning any money from pieces that violate policies, etc. 

Maybe there should be a place to publish News That We Want To Be True.  There are places which publish Hoax News such as The Onion (an utterly fine publication), for example.  Hurm.  We just have to make sure we don't pollute Real News with News That We Want To Be True ... right?

Illegitimate download sites and digital books and seeing my book available for free download

I have written a book, Node Web Development (available through the publisher, or amazon.com), and have a blog http://nodejs.davidherron.com/ that's in part meant to promote the book as well as write about Node.js and thereby get some attention to myself and indirectly the book.  One strategy I'm following is to look for people who've written reviews of the book, and promote their book review.  That helps me, it helps them, we all win, etc.  But it means I'm typing the name of the book, Node Web Development, into search engines, carefully going through the search results, and I just came away disturbed by what I found.

There's this scummy underbelly of the Internet where copyrighted works you're expected to pay $$'s for are available for free download.  The sites who do this feel scummy, are full of scummy advertising, scummy popup ads, etc.  These sites might be unseen most of the time, I'd certainly never seen them come up in search results before today.  But a yahoogle search for "Node Web Development" today brings up a couple dozen of these sites within the first 10 pages of search results.

It's disturbing to say the least to see the book I sweated over for 9 months available for free download.

There's a saying some "leading thinkers" came up with - the information wants to be free.  We convert our works into digital form, to make it easier on our customers to use, but that digital form then makes it really easy to copy the file around and for example put it up on a download site where people can access it for free. 

It's nice in theory to say "the information wants to be free" but when your income model is earning revenue from sales of your work it doesn't feel good to see my work set free for download by anyone.

By saying "the information wants to be free" they're talking about a free flow of data and information in the soup of culture.   Yes, I understand that in theory.  But there are times what sounds like a wonderful theory doesn't feel so good when you're presented with reality.

I've sent the publisher a report of a dozen or so sites I found making the book available for free download.  The publisher is the one who owns the copyright, so it's their job to protect the book and e.g. send takedown orders and the like.

Another defense I can think of is for there to be more web pages out there mentioning the book.  That is, bury these scammy download sites in the search results by making legit postings on a variety of websites.  Hence, this blog post mentions the name of the book, Node Web Development, in a deliberate attempt to get indexed by the search engines .. (wink wink)

I've read some "free e-book" advice that there's a submarket of "free e-book" authors who throw together "books" that may be of dubious quality, and their revenue model is to fill the free e-book with affiliate links.  And along the way of distributing the free e-book they might collect email addresses into a newsletter so they can market other products to those people later on.  In other words some people use free e-books as a not-so-honest marketing method.  In this case my book is not in that vein, and the publisher is not that sort of publishing house.  Our revenue model is a straightforward sale of a book to a buying customer.

Bleah

Interesting conversation on the future of publishing in by Mark Glaser, MediaShift on 5across

Printed books have been with us since the time of the Pharoah's, and our friend Gutenberg made it practical to publish printed books in large quantity.  Despite the coming of electrification of "media" printed books are still widely sold and used, and there are bookstore chains around the world still selling printed books.  But will this always be the case?  This month's 5across (PBS's MediaShift program with Mark Glaser) is titled "Beyond the Book" and focuses the discussion on the future of publishing, the format of published works, the 80000 pound Gorilla that is amazon.com, the business of self publishing, and the role of social media in authors getting published.

The Kindle is extremely popular and as I noted before, amazon.com (the seller of the Kindle) is moving to being a full service publishing house.  Is it the be-all-end-all of electronic book publishing?  Current electronic book formats replicate printed books, but is that the best format for an electronic book?

Amazon, because they're obviously moving towards becoming the be-all-end-all of all businesses - is that good or bad.  They're heading towards having a monopoly position in publishing, right?  Good, bad?

 

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Is Amazon eating the lunch of book publishers?

The online retail giant, Amazon, isn't sitting still. Like the massive river basin the company is named after, the company is continually developing new product lines. Lately, with the Kindle marketplace, they are now eating into the business territory currently occupied by traditional publishing houses.

The Kindle electronic book reader has opened the doors to a whoever new power structure in book publishing. Rather than let the book publishers hold the reins of being the conduit of bringing books to market, Amazon can now do the whole thing. Anybody with a book, in the proper electronic book format, and with an ISBN number, can upload their book to Amazon to sell it electronically to Kindle owners. This completely bypasses the traditional book publishers and threatens their existence similarly to the way news publishing industry recently went through major upheavals.

The GigaOM article linked below details Amazons quiet process the last year of assembling this threat upon the book publishing industry. They began by opening the Kindle bookstore to anyone. This launched a small industry of publishing houses who assist authors to get into not just the Kindle marketplace, but for other electronic book markets. However Amazon has now put together their own book imprints, and have made distribution deals with several major authors.

The question would be - what threat is this to traditional publishers?

Would the customer base totally eschew paper books? Amazons power here is that they control a highly popular electronic book distribution channel. It isn't the only e-book market but it's perhaps the most popular. But does it compete with paper books? That is will the customers ever completely switch from buying paper books to e-books?

Would authors completely eschew traditional book publishers? They have existing patterns where authors and publishers work together to get books onto the market. Perhaps Amazon can offer authors a better deal than regular publishers, but to equal the existing system Amazon would have to develop expertise in editoring, working with authors to make great books, book design, and marketing. Publishers don't just print ink on paper to distribute through warehouses. Amazon can recreate it all but it will take time and money, both of which Amazon appears to have.

Will Amazon have exclusive control over book sales? This would be a thing to be properly afraid of, Amazon being the only market for authors to sell books. That would give Amazon a strangle-hold over the ideas our society tells itself through books. Fortunately there are plenty of other e-book markets for authors to sell in. Today. Who knows what the future will hold? The iPad I'm writing this on has book reader apps from four e-book marketplaces, but I primarily use the Kindle market.

Will the existing format of books remain the format used as electronic books develop in future years? Current e-book formats mimic the chapter/page structure of printed books. But as we develop electronic books should that remain as the organization structure?


http://freelance-writing.davidherron.com/2011/07/spamazon-spammers-filling-electronic.html

Publishers: What are you doing while Amazon eats your lunch?

Spamazon? Spammers filling electronic book marketplaces with junk?

A recent article by a Salon.com co-founder Laura Miller about the proliferation of cheap junky books in the Kindle marketplace. She's blaming spammers doing algorithmic manipulation of texts to spin off low quality books and in some individuals have posted thousands of books on Kindle. The fear is that the Kindle marketplace will be so full of junky that Kindle customers will be unable to find useful books and be turned off by the whole idea of purchasing electronic books instantly delivered wirelessly to a portable device. Perhaps that will be the result, but isn't it up to Amazon to detect the situation and prevent it from happening?

One source of this is a trend that's existed for years, but because of the Kindle and other online electronic book marketplaces, can enter the mainstream. That is, "Private Label Rights" books have been available for years. The idea is that someone puts together a "book" and then licenses that book to others to manipulate, relabel, and present to the public as their own work. The result is someone presenting themselves as an author, but instead they're buying and algorithmically restructuring someone elses work. Algorithmically restructured text isn't as readable as text written by a human who cares about their work. Also it's not an original work despite being foisted upon the public as if it were.

As someone who is intent on writing short low cost but high quality books for these marketplaces I'm concerned that the market might be filled with junk. I don't want to produce books which will be shunned because they're sitting next to junk.

On the other hand Amazon, Barnes and Noble and the other companies running electronic book markets obviously have an incentive for we their customers to continue buying books and stuff .. hence, there is likely to be some effort made to screen out the junk. It's similar to the work by search engines to detect spamblogs and keep them out of search results.

I think there's potentially a lot of value to short low cost high quality electronic books. The markets allow a writer to more rapidly write and publish, especially if they're willing to do their own marketing.

link: 

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2011/06/21/spamazon/index.html

Pandoc: a universal document converter, ePub creator, etc

Pandoc is called "a universal document converter". It "can read markdown and (subsets of) reStructuredText, textile, HTML, and LaTeX" and it "can write plain text, markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, PDF, RTF, DocBook XML, OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, textile, groff man pages, Emacs org-mode, EPUB ebooks, and S5 and Slidy HTML slide shows". This makes it feasible as a universal document restructurer that could feasibly serve as a key segment in publishing electronic books.

It "understands a number of useful markdown syntax extensions, including document metadata (title, author, date); footnotes; tables; definition lists; superscript and subscript; strikeout; enhanced ordered lists (start number and numbering style are significant); delimited code blocks; markdown inside HTML blocks; and TeX math".

Pandoc is in the MacPorts, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, Arch, Fedora, NetBSD, and FreeBSD ports repositories.

link: 

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/