Category Archives: Internet

Blogs, social media and digital ethics

Learning experiences

Internet,

March is definitely coming in like a lion for me, mostly thanks to work. I’ve been in the middle of two major projects this month:

* The Date our friends feature
* The TOC site redesign

I mentioned the genesis of Date our friends here, and it’s finally wrapping up this week. In retrospect, we should have planned dates in places that would be easier to film. The final video was posted today, and it’s so dark, it’s damn near unwatchable. So much so that I briefly flirted with the idea of running it as an audio podcast. In any case, lessons learned. Overall, I thought the feature came together well and it was a big hit for us traffic-wise.

The site redesign is good news, bad news. Good news is the site looks much better than it used to. The bad news is that we’re still working out some bugs so the post-launch stress abatement has yet to occur.

Said stress is also due in part to me heading to Austin this week for the annual South By Southwest music conference. I’ve been so focused on the site relaunch that I haven’t had much time to research my SXSW plans, so I took today off to do so. Yes, I took a day off of work because I have so much work to do.

Speaking of SXSW, I’ll be taking a hiatus from the OMIC Twitter from Wednesday through Sunday so I can send updates from my phone to the Time Out Chicago Twitter stream. This will be my first time covering an event via Twitter – though I’ll also be blogging at the TOC blog– and I’m looking forward to utilizing it as a reporting tool. (I thought about creating a Tumblr blog for it but my jaw still hurts from biting off more than I could chew during Date our Friends).

What's going on

Internet, ,

Ugh, the guilt of a neglected blog.

I’m in another one of those phases where I’ve got a handful of half-finished posts sitting in draft, and can’t work up the nerve to attack those pesky, unworkable words and fashion them into fully-grown expressions. Also, 25 in 12 has hit a snag because of a book that I flat-out hate, but am determined to finish.

So, as usual, when all else fails, I talk about work.

TOC is running a month-long feature called Date Our Friends. It’s easily our most ambitious online project ever, and is my brainchild so I’m hoping it comes off. Two weeks ago, we asked readers to write in if they wanted to date one of our four friends. This week, we reveal who the daters will be, one each day. Next week, we’ll be posting video excerpts from their dates, and asking readers to vote on whether they think they’ll make it to a second.

The funny thing about all this is that yours truly will be accompanying these folks on their dates (dates don’t videotape themselves, you know!), which I am sure won’t be awkward at all. Ahem. This whole project is either going to be a smashing success or massive disaster. Either way, it ought to be fun to watch. So check out the feature each day at timeoutchicago.com/dateourfriends for the next couple weeks to see our updates.

Also, TOC now has a Twitter stream. It’s still in a soft launch right now, but feel free to follow us as we post updates on interesting articles, as well as goings-on within the TOC offices. We’ll be giving it a big push just prior to SXSW, as I’ll be posting daily updates to the TOCblog, and tweets to the Twitter stream.

I believe the interns are our future

Internet,

This post is a little “inside baseball” and I’m kind of burying the lede. So if you want to immediately see what I’m building up to, read this.

A couple weeks ago – as we were going to press on the blogging issue of Time Out Chicago – I found out that the cover story of Chicago magazine’s February issue was “171 Great Chicago Websites.”

Initially, I hit the roof.

Our feature involved critics from almost every major media entity in the city – I interviewed a handful of them for my story and Theater writer Kris Vire hosted a critics’ chat room with many more – so we were a bit worried that another publication would get wind of it and scoop us on our story.

To the casual observer, it probably looks someone’s a copycat. But Chicago magazine is a monthly, so they were probably closing their feature before we started writing ours, and I can honestly say that no one at TOC knew about what they were doing until we closed. It’s a coincidence that occurs often when you’ve got so much media out there.

After perusing a copy of Chicago, it turned out that both features covered different ground. Ours was focused on online criticism, specifically, and they cast their net wider to include every informational resource in town, and then some. They did a very thorough job, and I was hoping both stories would spur more of a discussion about what’s happening online in Chicago, but so far that hasn’t happened.

While Chicago beat us to the punch on the newsstands, we beat ’em online. In fact, I’ve been waiting for weeks for the story to show up on its website, as its other stories from February are already up. It’s been a running joke in the TOC offices that Chicago‘s story about websites wasn’t actually on its website even while people were commenting on the placeholder page.

As someone whose job depends on all media recognizing the importance of the Internet, I was irritated that Chicago wasn’t gettin’ to business. I was complaining about this to one of the NYC directors that was in town, and she said “Well why don’t you just put the links on our blog?”

And that’s how this happened. And then Metroblogging Chicago did us both one better by creating a newsreader file of both their story and ours.

So far, no reaction from the folks at Chicago magazine, but I’m hoping they’ll take it in the good-natured spirit that it’s offered. There’s already a troll in the comments section at Chicagoist who’s making the predictable arguments. (The notion that because our intern was working on this story, all other work in our offices stopped is amusing, but not worth addressing).

Blogging and remixing content of other media outlets isn’t “stealing” so long as credit is given where credit is due (for example, Gridskipper routinely Google-maps TOC content for stories like this). I’ve had dust-ups in the office about how our content’s being used online. Over the past year, one of my goals has been to get folks there to understand that this is the way that media works now, it’s ultimately good for us, and TOC needs to be doing it as much as Chicagoist, Gapers Block and all the rest do (so long as we stick to standards of journalism ethics, even if other folks don’t).

If we – or any other media entity – fails to recognize the importance of what’s happening online, someone else will.

U2's manager is barking up the wrong metaphorical tree

Internet, Music,

Mega-selling bands – and their managers – need to stop presenting themselves as the standard bearer for artists who are losing money due to illegal downloads. If you have ever toured with a giant lemon as part of your stage show, you lose the argument before you begin.

Having said that, here’s what U2’s manager Paul McGuiness has to say about the role of ISPs vis a vis illegal downloading:

“‘If you were a magazine advertising stolen cars, handling the money for stolen cars and seeing to the delivery of stolen cars, the police would soon be at your door,’ he said. ‘That’s no different to an ISP, but they say they can’t do anything about it.'”

Leaving aside for the moment the whole notion that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 means that ISPs are not, in fact, liable for such behavior, let’s look at what McGuinness is really saying here.

If a “magazine” was taking possession of stolen cars and receiving money for them, they would, in fact, be breaking the law. But let’s go with this and say that possession of copyrighted material that you do not own is like a stolen car (better return that copy of Freakonomics or The National album now!). ISPs neither receive money for the possession of copyrighted material (his first point) nor do they provide the programs that allow one to access copyrighted material (his second point about “seeing to the delivery” of stolen material). This would be like saying that the builder of a garage used to operate a chop shop is responsible for the thievery that goes on there. Or that Xerox is responsible for people who photocopy books.

I could go on, but what’s the point? This is like the time I told my sister that the government wasn’t responsible for providing for a particular service because it wasn’t in the Constitution and she replied “Well asparagus isn’t in the Constitution…” How do you argue with logic that isn’t logical?

This whole argument is stemming from Canada’s efforts to tax ISPs (they call it a fee, but come on now) and funnel that music to artists. Anyone who’s been following the business of music for the last 50 years ought to be suspicious of such a plan, even if such a fee goes directly to the music publishers and bypasses labels altogether. Sound Opinions also discussed this topic recently and I’m surprised they jumped on board with it. If for no other reason but that not everyone uses his or her Internet connection to download music they haven’t paid for.

But hey: let’s compromise. How about anyone who buys an album by crap Canadian bands has to pay a “bad taste” tax? So if you by the next album by Celine Dion, Nickelback, Sum 41 or Avril Lavigne, you have to pay an extra five bucks. Who’s with me?

And only 10 years after kids on AOL figured it out

Internet,


Woah, really MySpace? An answer to the mystery? Um, again?

But I bit anyway, just to see if he confirmed it, and found the most galling thing about the whole tease. At the moment of the reveal, the video supposedly melts away as if were a cheap reel exposed to the light of a projector.

So galling that I’m not even going to post a link to it. You’ll thank me later, when you have an extra two minutes in your life that you wouldn’t have had before, having wasted it to watch little more than a promo clip.

An unexpected error, indeed.