Author: Tom Slee

SYS-CON Media Redux: You Couldn’t Make This Stuff Up

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Here is how I was going to start this post:

Do you have fifteen minutes or so? Then relax and, if you don't mind a few f-words, enjoy the hilarity of a supposed media company shooting itself in the foot. Then the other foot. Then going so far beyond shooting itself in the foot you won't believe it.

But, while that's one way to look at it, there is also the possibility that this is a tragedy. That the state of the world is so grim that these poor hapless people are driven to extremes of apparent stupidity. What could be going on in their lives to reduce them to this? Do they have landlords demanding the rent by tomorrow or they will be out on the street? Or what? Because, really, there is something here that is undeniably pathetic.

But enough of the teaser. On to the action. A couple of weeks ago I posted about my own unpleasant experience with SYS-CON media. I already knew about, but did not mention, the LinuxWorld fiasco there, because it didn't seem fair. But that's for later.

Yesterday a comment on that post led me to Jame-Ane Ervin's blog, where she describes a run-in with the CEO of SYS-CON. In short, as an advertiser on SYS-CON she offered some suggestions, in an abrupt but not impolite way, on how they could improve what they do. And she asked to be removed from their site. According to Jame Ervin (whom I have never met) she got a reply including these words from SYS-CON CEO Fuat Kircaali:

Who the fuck you think you are, lady? Are you fucking out of your mind?

You are certainly mixing SYS-CON media with some other company. The
reason you heard from the CEO of the “most powerful” tech media company
in North America today is because he could not believe your email, out
of more than 4,000 contacts who received the same email, you had to be
the only bitch with a big fucking mouth.

Now it did occur to me that this was so unbelievable, so incomprehensibly over the top, that it was a fake. I mean, I don't know Jame Ervin. It could be a hoax, right? She could have said something unbelievably offensive to Mr. Kircaali to prompt this outburst? The world is a pretty damn strange place sometimes, right?

But today I see that SYS-CON have actually posted, on their own site, the entire correspondence, to explain their response. So go read it if you are interested. Did Jame Ervin behave outrageously? She did not. The entire correspondence just makes the Kircaali email more jaw-droppingly offensive than it already seemed.

And just in case you thought this was all, SYS-CON also posted an article about the affair. Go ahead, read it. I'll wait here.

Done? Good. I think my favourite line is this:

Well, reporters use the word "bitch" casually these days. Last week, there was a headline published here, announcing the new Yahoo CEO as "Tough Brazen Bitch Takes Over Yahoo," but I know Carol Bartz and this crackpot marketing woman is no Carol Bartz.

The linked-to headline is, of course, a SYS-CON one.

Now maybe I shouldn't be joking about something as offensive and aggressive as these insults. But really, the SYS-CON people can surely not be in a position to hurt Ms. Ervin professionally, and I trust they live miles away, so I'm assuming the offense – unpleasant as it is – carries no real threat with it. In which case it comes across as being simply delusional.

And now back to the beginning, where I mentioned LinuxWorld. A technical magazine run by volunteer editors, the entire editorial board resigned a couple of years ago in response to a complete lack of editorial control and in the wake of a scandal involving personal attacks written by a SYS-CON writer. When Dana Blankenhorn wrote about this SYS-CON responded by, you guessed it, publicly having a go at Blankenhorn. Of course, being SYS-CON, their article is posted across all their publications, including the unbelievable Yacht and Charters Magazine: see here, calling him a "crackpot" (the same word they used for Ms. Ervin) and poking fun at Mr Blankenhorn's possible joblessness. 

From what it looks like, he has been in the business for 25 years and
can not find a job, and because of that he hates the company (SYS-CON) and its
founder.

Is this over now? Part of me hopes so. But I admit that another part of me can't wait to see what these people say next. You really couldn't make this stuff up, could you?

One hundred thousand

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That's the total number of page views of this blog, according to Sitemeter, although TypePad says it's only 83,000 or so. Still, it seems like a time to take stock or at least review some basic stats:

First post: November 2005. Total number of posts, excluding this one, 292. So that's about two a week.
Number of visits: about 60,000. So on average a visit is two pages. Most are only one, and a few people with nothing better to do click around once in a while.

Average page view rate is about 100 per day. Probably a good half of those are inappropriate searches, and it looks which leaves an actual readership of about 50 people per day. In general my traffic is lower than that, but I seem to have a handful
of patrons (thank you Nick C, Henry F, Mark T, Brad D) who
have sent people this way and then I get a spike.
Most views in a day was over 2500 when Nick Carr pointed people to Mr. Google's Guidebook. I've only had one post get traffic through reddit or digg, which was a computer software post some time ago.
Audience: On average, I'm writing for an audience of about 100 people, although there is no way to tell someone who reads every word I write from someone who glances at the title and moves on.
Comments: 429, or about 1.5 comments per post. My impression is this is pretty low even for blogs of my readership. Not surprising as I am too slow a writer to get into many of the debates that prompt comments and don't link to other bloggers as much as I should. Partly, while some widely read blogs post link collections to draw people's attention to particular views, it seems a waste to post such collections here. There is little point in me saying "hey, look what the BBC/New York Times/CBC has posted"; if you need a guide to the news you won't find it here.

Thanks to those of you who come here regularly. I will try to respond to comments more often, but let's face it, that resolution may well go the way of my others.

Now, if I just carry on blogging for another two years I should have the same size audience as my 30 second caterpillar video has achieved on YouTube, recorded in less than twenty minutes in a single afternoon.

Mr. Amazon’s Bookshop: The Differ

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[This is the sixth instalment of Mr. Amazon's Bookshop. A list of all instalments is here; the previous instalment is here.]

I rocketed over to my stables at the crack of noon and cleaned up the old difference engine, or differ as we enthusiasts call it. My friend Mr. Babbage, you will recall, had told me that Mr. Amazon had a new trick – instead of going to Mr. Amazon's Bookshop, one could use a difference engine to ask him as many questions as you like. I determined to use my differ to interrogate Amazon and better understand how his intriguing operation works.

I had to chase out a few voles and a cat that had set up house in among the levers and pistons, and it was nearly dinner time before I fired up the bellows and the great machine began to hum. It had been some while since I last set it going and the smell of burning dust was atrocious. But finally I was able to start communing with it, and I readied my questions.

My first query to Mr. Amazon's service was a simple one, and harked back to my earliest visit. "If I tell you I like Special Topics in Calamity Physics, what books would you recommend?" 

I twisted and turned the knobs until the instructions were in place, and then pulled on the master lever to set the machine to work. Steam hissed, a piercing high-pitched whine drilled at my ear drums, and for a moment I thought the whole thing was going to explode. What could be going on? I was sure I had the instructions right. I pulled harder on the lever, hoping to blow past the obstruction, but to no use. The temperature reading was creeping dangerously high and I cast about for what was wrong. Finally I caught sight of a large beetle stuck in one of the outlet valves, obstructing the flow of air. I pulled at the release lever, shutting down the process, and watched in relief as the temperature lowered.

Once I had cleaned out the valves, I took a swig from the sherry bottle and pulled the master lever again. "If I tell you I like Special Topics in Calamity Physics, what books would you recommend?" And this time, after a few scraping noises, the output pointers began to swing. A short while deciphering and I had my answer:

Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
… and a handful of others.

I was thrilled. I stared at the list, entranced, until a thought crawled into my awareness. Here, it said, was the link between Mr. Amazon's Bookshop and what I think of as a real bookshop.

Mr. Amazon's is not a bookshop. It is closer to the truth to say it is a mechanism, a differ if you like, that we each use to generate our own personal bookshop, with shelves and all, by the questions we ask of its proprietor. I had accused Mr. Amazon of not having shelves, but here was a set of books grouped together as I looked at Special Topics… Surely that is close enough to a shelf.


I chose one of the ten recommendations at random by the usual method of throwing a barnyard cat at the wall and counting the number of squeals it emitted. The cat squealed twice to indicate The Yiddish Policeman's Union (occasionally the cat does not scream, so the counting starts at zero). and I sent up my second question to Mr. Amazon. "If I tell you I like The Yiddish Policeman's Union, what books would you recommend?" A moment later, back came the answer:
The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay (also by Michael Ch
abon)
Gentlemen of the Road by, you guessed it, Michael Chabon.
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
… and a handful of others.

The shelf is longer, I muttered. Quickly I flung the cat again to select a book from the list (Falling Man, by Don DeLillo) and sent off the next query.
The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
… and a handful of others.

This could go on indefinitely, I realised. There is no point in simply asking over and over again for recommended books. Sooner or later people stop browsing and either buy a book or leave the shop. I decided to cap the number of requests at a random number (poor cat) between 1 and 20 – 12 on this occasion – and then listed in my notebook each of the dozen books I had picked from among the recommendations. Here is that list:

Special Topics in Calamity Physics
The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel (P.S.)
Falling Man: A Novel
Tree of Smoke: A Novel
Bridge of Sighs: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel (Oprah Book Club #62)
The Art of Racing in the Rain
The Beach House
Chasing Harry Winston: A Novel
Celebutantes
Remember Me?
Love the One You're With

That, I decided, looked like one visit to Mr. Amazon's shop. Each book selected from the list was one I had "picked up" and skimmed (at least those parts Mr. Amazon lets me see). Moving along shelves, picking books up that are not too far from the place you stand. There was an undeniable similarity, albeit a pale imitation of the casual, unpredictable and whimsical act of browsing in what I still thought of as a "real" bookshop.


I decided to simulate a second visit. I know Mr. Amazon would have a few recommendations waiting for me, based on my previous visits, so I cat-picked one from the list of books I had "picked up" (Falling Man: A Novel) and generated a second list of books:

Falling Man: A Novel
Divisadero (Vintage International)
The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel (P.S.)
Falling Man: A Novel
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Tree of Smoke: A Novel
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
The Post-American World
The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order
The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East
The Return of History and the End of Dreams
Dangerous Nation: America's Place in the World, from it's Earliest Days to the Dawn of the 20th Century
Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present
Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East
The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977
Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East
The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace in the Middle East

Some books, I noticed, were appearing again and again. Who on earth, I wondered, is this Oscar Wao whose brief wondrous life is appearing in all the lists I generate? And what is this Falling Man? I had heard of neither, yet Mr. Amazon seemed to be pushing them at me insistently. And how had I got from a literary mystery to what looked like nonfiction books about the near Orient? There was so much to think about in these lists that I copied the second list into my notebook and headed to my library to think, telling Google to bring me some smoked kippers, Turkish coffee, and the latest copy of the Literary Review. He bowed obsequiously, but not quickly enough to hide the supercilious smirk he sometimes gives, as if he knows not only what problems I seek to solve but the answers too. But this quest was becoming my own, and I did not want his help.

It was Jennie the one-legged housekeeper who climbed the worn stone steps of the western wing to my library in the turret, bringing the kippers, a wet copy of the Literary Review, and a half-empty cup of luke-warm coffee. It is most inconvenient that she is crippled and I shall have to do something about it – perhaps reassign her to the kitchen where she does not have to move about so much? But this is not the time to indulge myself in such sentimental nonsense, I told myself. My warm heart and generous nature is so well known locally that I fear they are often taken advantage of. I must make myself of sterner stuff. So I dismissed Jennie and turned to the Review.

First, those two books. It turns out they were not so obscure as I thought. Falling Man is written by that impetuous youngster Don DeLillo, author of Underworld. And Oscar Wao won something called a Pulitzer Prize, that is apparently worthy of note in the provinces. Amazon, I was slightly chuffed to realise, was showing me books that were new to me, but – despite what I am often told is my encyclopedic knowledge – far from obscure. I could probably pick up either of those volumes at Words Worth or at Heather's Big House O'Books.

And how did we get from Special Topics to The Arab Israeli Wars? Via The Falling Man, it seems. That book is a literary novel (and so linked to Special Topics) and yet is concerned with terrorism, and so leads us into other books about warfare and terrorism. Not too far-fetched, I thought, and yet ingenious.

As I stretched in front of the library fire, the warmth and my exhertions combined to induce a sluggish drowsiness. I drifted in and out of a doze, my mind filled with pictures of endless lists of books, on topics leaping from terrorism to gourmet cooking to accounting in a few bounds. How could I impose some kind of order on this profligacy? What can one learn from this spewing of titles? How does Mr. Amazon impose order? He must, I was convinced, have some mechanism for governing the labours of those poor, enslaved mole-people deep in his basement-factories.

Just before my dozing turned to sleep, I remembered one nugget of information that had come back along with the title in response to my requests – the SalesRank. This, I knew, is Mr. Amazon's seller list. But unlike a real best seller list, it does not stop at a mere ten or so items. Instead, as seems typical of Mr. Amazon's industrious nature, it goes on and on into the hundreds, the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, each book with its rank. That, I decided, would be the starting point for my next investigation.

Motor Neuron Disease/ALS

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You can react to illness in a couple  of ways.

Take me. I have had a really crappy cold for the last couple of days and so I didn't cook last night, didn't walk the dog this morning, and I've been basically slobbing around and doing nothing.

Or take my friend Tim Lester. Diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease (also called ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease) a couple of years ago, he still plays in a band, has done a large part of a walk across the Speyside Way, promotes MND awareness and continues to raise his kids. His son Alex (who, I happen to know, is prepared to wear a Borat thong in front of a high-school audience) narrates this video on Tim's life with MND; it's a short (2 mins 30s), clear, unsentimental, and helpful description of what challenges the disease brings with it. 

Maybe I shouldn't let a cold slow me down so much.

The Outsider Manoeuvre

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Writers and actors are notorious for seeing themselves as outsiders. "Why did you become an actor?" they are asked. "Well, I was always a bit of an outsider…" This morning, take director Terence Davies:

"I felt like an outsider because I was from a large working-class family. And I spoke with this kind of [posh] accent even by the time I was 11," Davies noted in our interview. "I've always felt an outsider. I think I was reasonably intelligent, I largely taught myself because I didn't go to university. And I was Catholic. And I was gay. I mean, in a large, working-class Catholic family, that's very hard."

He may be right, what do I know? But it is a standard manoeuvre and we should not trust it.

Politicians are fond of the same trick, of course. Americans saw this in spades over the last few months with the self-positioning of the Republicans, after eight years in power, as "mavericks".

And the phenomenon reaches into the world of blogs as well. Dan Gilmor at Talking Points Memo writes about "The Media's Role in the Financial Crisis", making it clear that TPM and DG in particular are not part of the media. They are outsiders. 

But they are not.

Dan Gilmor is, according to his Wikipedia entry, Director of a new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He's a long-time journalist. He just doesn't want to appear as one – hence his book title from a few years ago "We the Media".

And TPM is a widely-read collection of writings, many by actual journalists, surrounded by advertisements. It may not have started off as media, but it is now media in most senses we use the word.

I saw a link to the Gilmor piece posted on boingboing.net, introduced like this:

In Talking Points Memo, Dan Gillmor makes some stinging points about the media's complicity in manufacturing the financial crisis by unquestioningly promoting reckless bubble spending while pooh-poohing any idea that the bill would come due some day: 

But boingboing is also advertising-funded, and run by people who write  as a full time job. It is media.

The First Rule of Critical Reading, digital or otherwise, should be "don't believe what people say about themselves".  Particularly if they position themselves as outsiders.

Take it from me. Look around: I have no advertising here and I'm not paid to write this stuff. 

I'm an outsider.

Mr. Amazon’s Bookshop: Doubts About Amazon

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[This is the fifth instalment of Mr. Amazon's Bookshop. A list of all instalments is here; the previous instalment is here.  This instalment was written over the Christmas holiday, well before Belkingate.]

My inability to understand how Amazon worked was the first step in an increasingly tormented relationship with the shop and its owner during the last few months. Two other events pushed me from by early enthusiasm with the peculiar place to a more antagonistic stance. 

First, one of the other bookstores in town closed down. Mr. Babbage's Books with a Difference (Engine) stocked books that dealt particularly with my old hobby – the steam-driven monstrosity I had built in the stables, and with which I had tinkered on the weekends for years. I bumped into him on the street and he complained that the kids these days bought all their books at Amazon's shop. It's a shame – Mr. Babbage had recommended several good books to me when I visited his shop and also given me several tips at times when I got stuck in the construction of my difference engine. I felt that the world of books was a little poorer for his loss.

The second reason was harder to put my finger on. Even though Mr. Amazon was never at a loss for a book to recommend, I was increasingly disappointed at the predictability of his suggestions, and at the limits of his knowledge whenever I ventured into new areas.

He would recite the comments of others but I increasingly felt that he did so with little conviction. He did not know who these others were or why they wrote what they wrote. One day I asked him what he knew of The Secret History by Donna Tartt and he just told me that someone called A Customer had said that "The Secret History has been one of my favorite leisure-reading selections for several years". 


I guffawed. 

He went on to say that "Gary Marfin says it is a very powerful novel and Gary Marfin's real name is, in fact, Gary Marfin." But this told me little – does Gary Marfin have the same refined tastes I do? Unlikely, given that he apparently comes from some place called Sugar Land in Texas: a more un-Whimsley like location I can hardly imagine.

"But what do you think, Amazon, what do you think?" I pestered. All he could come up with was that "329 of 539 customers gave this book five stars" "So what?" I demanded, and actually stamped out of the shop in a huff.

I decided it was time to resolve some of my contradictory impressions about Mr. Amazon's Bookshop. Its virtue is clear – if you know a book he will find it for you. Its limitations are also clear – it is not a real bookshop, for all his postmodernist posturing, and one cannot browse the shelves. For special orders of books Mr. Amazon is impressive, but if I don't go there with a book in mind then all I have to go on are his recommendations. And these, despite the enthusiasm of the young, seemed limited to me. 


My brow was sorely furrowed all the way home. I fed raw rice to the ducks in the park, but could not even raise a chuckle at the thought of their discomfort as it swelled inside them. But as I approached Whimsley Hall and walked past the stables a thought struck me. Just before going out of business Mr. Babbage had told me that Mr. Amazon had a new trick – instead of going to Mr. Amazon's Bookshop, one could use a difference engine to ask him as many questions as you like. Perhaps, I thought, I could tune my difference engine to ask him for all kinds of recommendations, and then I could get a deeper sense of what his shop augured for the world of books. I was so excited I almost started on this project right away, but my stressful excursion had quite worn me out and I retreated instead to my bedroom and a spoonful of laudanum. Next day, I told myself, I would start up my difference engine and ask a few more questions of Mr. Amazon.

Tumbleweed blogs (firstname challenge again)

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So some bloke called Graham emails me about my competition and he says, like, why don't you do it yourself then? And here's a list of names: http://bel-epa.com/area51/library/names.txt.

So I says, OK then. I will. And I write myself a little python like this:

import httplib
import re
import sys
conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("bel-epa.com")
conn.request("GET", "/area51/library/names.txt")

namelist = conn.getresponse().read().split()
conn.close()

activenames = {}
inactivenames = {}

print len(namelist)

for name in namelist:
 try:
 host = name + ".blogspot.com"
 p = re.compile('200[0-9]<')
 conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(host)
 conn.request("GET", "")
 response = conn.getresponse()
 body = response.read()
 mo = p.search(body) 
 if mo:
 activenames[name] = mo.group().rstrip('<')
 print name, mo.group().rstrip('<')
 else:
 inactivenames[name] = "null" 
 print name, "null"
 except:
 print "Failure on " + name 
conn.close()

f = open("blogdeath.csv", "w")
f.write("name,year\n")
for name, year in activenames.iteritems():
 f.write(name + "," + year + "\n")
for name, year in inactivenames.iteritems():
  f.write(name + ",1900\n")

And then I plot the results and they look like this.
Blogs
Which means that of the 7489 potential firstname.blogspot.com URLs:

  • 2692 don't seem to have anything going on ever or have weird styling so I can't catch the date headers blogger templates usually use.  A quick scan suggests that most are stillborn. See http://ned.blogspot.com/ or http://karim.blogspot.com/ for a couple of examples.
  • 361 were born and died in 2000.
  • 2001 and 2002 were the peak years for firstname blogs, with over 900 dying off each year. Not surprising that this is an early peak: the firstname places would be picked up quickly. Perhaps more surprising is that these blogs have been sitting there for 7 or 8 years, unattended, and blogger hasn't done anything with them.
  • The number of dying blogs falls off – meaning that the number of active ones does as well probably. Until now, only 96 blogs have been updated in the first three weeks of 2009.

96 out of 7489. That's about one in 75 that are active. Pretty small numbers.

How does this silly survey compare with a bigger picture? The  Technorati annual review of blogging for 2008 says that about 7.5 million blogs were updated in the 120 days before their report of 133 million that they have ever indexed: about one in 20 or so. Given the longer timeframe, not too bad a match. So 19 out of 20 blogs that have ever been started are now moribund.

And here, for those of you who are interested, the 96 firstname blogs still going strong are listed at the end of this post.

My technorati ranking is
about 33 at the moment but I have been as high as 90. That puts me,
they say, in the top 1% of blogs. I get about 50 readers a day, many of
whom are googlers who probably land here and don't find what they are
looking for. And, on generous average, about one comment per post, so 99 out of a hundred bloggers get few readers and no comments. If these people are a typical sample, maybe one of them gets a comment per post. Maybe you should choose one and say hello.

elvina
adger
minta
cindi
worden
doretta
grover
carmen
charlton
hildagarde
melesa
lillian
miranda
delcina
barbette
urbanus
tina
jess
roland
bonny
madalyn
vivi
corabella
nikoletta
faunie
cherey
henka
terrill
olive
valli
kamila
cherice
lorette
daune
orville
sella
johnathon
aleecia
madelina
dottie
dario
roselyn
merrie
amalea
ephraim
trey
werner
antonino
levon
lavina
saxe
douglas
meira
danila
winston
lavinie
teresita
clovis
chas
letti
anders
edythe
aileen
luanna
huntlee
bancroft
sidonnie
fancie
marcelline
joella
pauline
engracia
oran
kirk
rhonda
leonardo
claudia
evette
kris
bird
zia
wilmette
merrel
fitz
cain
lindy
hope
dwain
mareah
sara
berkley
pinchas
josselyn
robinett
oprah
heidi