Freelance Unbound

Kathy Gill writes on Wired Pen that Tumblr has removed its RSS import tool. So Tumblr users can’t use the platform to aggregate content, and as a result she finds it “far less useful”.
It could also mean Tumblr is far less secure financially. The telling quote is from Tumblr’s own customer services:

In order to conserve our resources, Tumblr is no longer supporting feed imports on blogs that have not already imported feeds in the past. We deeply regret any inconvenience that this may cause. But, this change will allow us to focus our resources and energy on other useful Tumblr features.

Uh – Tumblr needs to “conserve resources” by stopping aggregation? How many “resources” are tied up with automatic RSS imports? It could be the coding time required to keep this working smoothly – but, seriously, Tumblr can’t afford this?
I’ve been wondering for a while how long the current crop of super, free web content creation tools can last. Social network builder Ning quietly ended its free business model last year; how long will others with no visible means of support last?
It’s a particularly pertinent question for those of us trying to teach online journalism at university. I’ve been toying with the idea of introducing first years to Posterous, rather than Blogger, for example, because you can use Posterous as a conduit for publishing content to a whole range of other platforms – from YouTube to Twitter, Facebook to Blogger. Not only that, but you can post via email, from a phone, say, and you can easily set up group posting. [NB: Thanks to Paul Bradshaw’s very useful blogging tools review.]
All of those are great features to encourage students to think about managing digital communication across different platforms. Most importantly, Posterous itself is a tiny bit boring to look at and isn’t really a destination in itself – so the idea would be to stop students thinking about blogging as simply creating a nice looking web page and talking about themselves in a vacuum. (Well, it might work.)
But is it a good idea to rely on a particular creative tool that can change its specification at a moment’s notice? Or even pull the plug on its service – free or otherwise? At the very least, it means you need to frequently revisit your teaching plan, which will itself “use resources” and can mess up continuity.
For a little while, a few years ago, Solent University played with Second Life as a digital platform for journalism students. Of course, almost as soon as Solent got into Second Life, almost everyone else stopped talking about it – it was that ephemeral.
It was a perfectly valid experiment for Solent – after all, it’s only a few years ago that Facebook was just another fad; now everyone is falling over themselves to figure out how to get it to save journalism.
The problem is that not only do we have to figure out which tools and platforms will catch the public imagination – but also which of them will have the cash to survive.
Blogger, anyone?

Evidence that modern life is rubbish, linguistically at least: spotted in the local Morrisons, a handy Coinstar coin exchange machine.

Unlike most other commentators, I’m not taking issue with the ridiculous idea of paying a machine for the privilege of counting my money.

But I believe we must stand up against the incoherence of its selling message: “Turn your change into cash! – it’s as easy as 1-2-3”

Why this is utter nonsense:

Change is cash. Last time I looked. You’re suggesting our change – made up of coins –  is something else. Get a dictionary.

Oh, I see – small coins are fiddly and inconvenient. So – exchange your fiddly shrapnel for a handy £10 note. Well, that’s OK.

No! Here’s the 1-2-3 bit:

1. To start, touch the green button on the screen or on the keypad below
2. Put coins in tray
3. Redeem voucher at this location today

So – what we’re doing is taking cash, putting in into the Coinstar machine, getting in exchange not cash, but a voucher, then standing in a queue to exchange it for other cash (or paying towards your shopping maybe). And paying 5-10% in commission for the privilege.

That doesn’t sound easy to me. Especially given Morrisons’ under-staffed checkouts. It sounds like a palaver. What sounds easy is spending the coins themselves – as, you know, cash.

The worst thing is that many people will read this and think it makes sense. And does anyone know why this business model actually works? Baffling…

A juror who has been prosecuted for contempt of the English language after using Facebook to contact a defendant in a drugs trial, has been sentenced to eight months of remedial language lessons.

Joanne Fraill admitted at London’s high court using Facebook to exchange incoherent messages with Jamie Sewart, a former defendant in last year’s multimillion-pound drug trial in Manchester.

Sewart admitted she knew that Fraill was a juror in the trial when she added her as a Facebook friend during jury deliberations. Sewart asked her in a Facebook chat on 3 August “what’s happenin with the other charge??”, to which Fraill responded by asking her to clarify her question by using simpler words.

Fraill wrote: “cant get anyone to go either no one budging pleeeeeese don’t say anything cause jamie they could all miss trial and I will get 4cked to0.”

Another incomprehensible message read: “jamie am gonna get off this lot doing me head in x it be over tomoz fingers crossed , im not as daft as am cabbage looking hahaha alll that note taking was just killing time lolol drew more than i wrote lol”

At this point the court was forced to bring in a translator to turn the updates into standard English.

Fraill admitted carrying out an internet search into Sewart’s boyfriend, co-defendant Gary Knox, during the jury’s deliberations. Luckily, Google’s pre-emptive fuzzy-spelling search allowed her to find the information she needed in this case.

When the lord chief justice, the improbably named Lord Judge, announced her eight-month sentence, Fraill sobbed “what’s a sentence?”, and put her head on the table in front of her, forcing the judge to adjourn the court “for everyone to check their Fowler’s”.

Sentencing Fraill, the judge said in a written ruling: “Her conduct in updating her Facebook Wall was directly contrary to the principles of coherent English, and her contact with the acquitted defendant, as well as her repeated searches on the internet, constituted flagrant breaches of literacy.”

Sewart said: “I really feel for the woman [Fraill]. She’s got kids who can spell better than her. She apollergised said sorry, and she’s not a bad lady. I really feel for her.”

Fraill hugged sobbing relatives before she was led away to start her sentence (preferably with a subject).

After intensive language tuition by her legal counsel, Fraill improbably suggested she emailed Sewart because she felt “empathetic” and saw “considerable parallels” between their lives.

The solicitor general, Edward Garnier QC, acting on behalf of the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, accused Fraill and Sewart of acting in “plain contempt of the English language”.

A psychiatric report on Fraill reveals a “most unhappy schooling, a troubled academic life” and “linguistic misfortune on a very considerable scale”, her barrister said.

So, YouTube has introduced a groovy new feature called “As seen on YouTube”, which creates special pages of videos embedded on various blogs and other web sites. It’s a celebration of content curators, apparently.

Sounds great! How can I get my site’s curated YouTube video all in one place on an “As seen on  YouTube” page?

From YouTube’s blog post on the tool:

By crawling web feeds of sites that have embedded videos, we’ve built dedicated pages that highlight your embedded videos. This means that there is now a place on YouTube to find videos mentioned on your favorite blogs & sites.

Apparently the “As seen on…” link shows up on the bottom right of the video on YouTube.

What isn’t in the story is:

• How do you get an “As seen on…” page?
• When you get one, how do you know you’ve got it?
• And how do you find it?
• If you don’t want one, can you remove it?

And what about videos that have been shown on multiple blogs? Will YouTube list dozens of “As seen on…” links under each video? Or will it rotate them randomly? Or will it pick the most recent?

I’m not sure this has been properly thought through…

Apparently you have to “like” your own page before Facebook will publish it. Unless a page has at least one “like”, Facebook won’t let you go live with it (thanks, Squidoo).

Which is so bonkers I can’t even begin to express it. And where’s that information in the Facebook help pages? Hmm?

Any reader looking to the right of this post will see a blank Facebook feed requiring a login to see a “Facebook public profile”. Or maybe a feed from my Freelance Unbound Facebook page. Or maybe they’ll see something else that I don’t see – because Facebook is nothing if not contrary.
The other day I finally got around to setting up the Freelance Unbound Facebook page. Anyone who likes it (even just a little) will get to see lots of extra fun stuff from this media empire including, yes, pictures of my dog editorial assistant.
But making the feed actually show up is a nightmare.

• It’s supposed to be a publicly visible page, but Facebook asks for a login to see it (whose? No idea)
• It was supposed to be published, but then Facebook said it wasn’t. So I published it and it showed up. Now it’s gone again. And again.
• I keep logging in to Facebook and it keeps logging me out – even when I check the “keep me logged in” box. Is it trying to tell me something?
• As an aside, my feed from Freelance Unbound is supposed to go through to my personal profile, but it seems to have vanished

Aside from all the flak that Facebook has taken for its attitude to privacy, my problem with the site is that it is just a pig to use. Has anyone else experienced this?
Find me on Facebook? Fat chance…

In light of recent events, here’s Vogue food critic Jeffrey Steingarten talking about his prescient essay on “Salad, the Silent Killer”, from his collection of gastronomic writings The Man Who Ate Everything – (everything except, it would seem, salad).
We should have listened…

The latest instalment of a long-running technology health scare finds the BBC web site telling us that Mobiles ‘may cause brain cancer’.
This isn’t exactly new. We’ve been worried that mobile phones can cause brain tumours for a couple of decades now. First studies say they do. Then they say they don’t. What’s the evidence now?
This is one of those studies of studies. Apparently a group of experts has met, probably over drinks, to review a whole lot of published scientific papers about mobile phones and electromagnetic radiation. What did they find?

The World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) […] concluded that mobiles should be rated as “possibly carcinogenic”

Oh no! Tell us more!
In a grim statement, the group concluded that it was “not clearly established that it does cause cancer in humans”. But, just to be on the safe side, an increased risk of a malignant type of brain cancer “cannot be ruled out”.
Well, it’s not like the WHO has anything else to do with its funding – like tackle the near-million deaths a year we have from malaria. (Mind you, sometimes it seems eager to downplay malaria deaths, rather than talk them up. Maybe it’s easier to tackle problems that don’t exist).
So – now anything that can’t actually be ruled out as a health risk warrants an official warning from the WHO and scary headlines in the national news media. Hold the front page…

How we love the Daily Mail. Today’s shock news is that the must-have high-street frock that the Duchess of Cambridge wore this week to meet that nice American couple Mr and Mrs Obama was made “in a Romanian ‘sweatshop’ by women on just 99p an hour.”

That’s terrible! The royals are exploiting the poorest of the poor in a grim Eastern European ghetto. Something must be done!

Hmm. Just notice the quotes around that ‘sweatshop’. Why are they there? Because this story is opportunistic nonsense, and I suspect that, secretly, the Mail knows it.

Like most economically illiterate stories in the popular press, it is based on a lack of reason and false assumptions. Worse, the facts in the story don’t support the headline and the story’s attempted slant. Let’s look at them:

1. Workers in the ‘sweatshop’ get paid more than the Romanian minimum wage
   So, really, it’s not a sweatshop. Unless you think the Romanian minimum wage should be more. In which case lobby the Romanian government. But how do you think the Mail would take to, say, the Americans or the Swiss lobbying the UK government to raise the minimum wage here? Not well, probably. The Mail doesn’t even like the minimum wage. Typical headline: ‘Industry warns on minimum wage’, repeated in various forms here, here and here.
2. Romania is in the EU
   So, you know, it falls under EU regulations. Of which there are loads, and of which the Mail heartily disapproves, as demonstrated here. So the EU is not protecting Romanians from business, but it is strangling business in the UK. Go figure.
3. Workers in the ‘sweatshop’ actually don’t complain about it
   Typical quotes: conditions are “good”, “this is normal for me, I’m used to it”, “It’s really nice that a small thing that I do here gets into a ballroom somewhere in the world.” Employee Juliana Haita did say the factory got hot in the summer, but then they get an extra half hour break. It sounds really awful.
4. Factories are not holiday camps
   Apparently, Mrs Haita has “repeated the same menial tasks on garment after garment each day for the past 15 years.” Yes – it’s a factory. We used to have those factories over here. The Mail is quite nostalgic about them when it suits it. But this factory “resembles an industrial compound”. What on earth is it supposed to resemble? Centre Parcs? Look, you don’t want to work in a factory, I don’t want to work in a factory. But the people who work at Rimcor Ex probably do want to work in a factory – this factory.

The whole thing is nonsense. The only way Romania is going to drag itself out of the poverty bequeathed it by the Ceausescu regime is by trading with richer EU nations and developing its economy.

The solution? The story quotes Greg Muttitt from War on Want (not a typical friend of the Daily Mail), who said: “The Government must introduce regulation to stop UK retailers exploiting workers abroad.”

So, what happens then? Do we help get rid of Romanian factories because we don’t fancy working in them ourselves? Where would Mrs Haita work then? In a nice office? Or would she end up begging or selling her body in the Bucharest slum next door?

And where do we actually buy things from then? If we made our clothes in nice, sunny factories in the UK, where the workers earned £20 an hour, we wouldn’t be able to afford them. And Juliana would have no work at all.

Rock star contrarian historian Niall Ferguson took his Civilisation: The West and The Rest world tour to the genteel folk of Bath this evening at the excellent Topping & Company book shop.
The small but enthusiastic audience of largely white, largely middle aged and relentlessly middle class Bath folk seemed strangely unperturbed by his grim predictions of resource wars and western decline.
But there was more downbeat analysis for media democracy optimists. Unlike many observers in the west, Ferguson does not believe that digital communications technology is inherently democratising.

It’s not self-evident that these technologies are agents of westernisation or democratisation. People observing in the west assume that using the technology means everyone is going to turn into a Californian.

However, he is pessimistic about the possibilities of democratisation in the Middle East, and believes that when it comes to the region’s recent social upheaval, “there may be a less happy outcome than people were predicting”. Disruptive technology tends to be an agent of revolution – not necessarily liberation.
As a telling aside, the spread of digital communications technology in China is not prompting young users to discuss the legacy of Tiananmen Square. Instead, the material being shared on the Chinese equivalent of YouTube is dominated by videos promoting radical Chinese nationalism.
Still everyone enjoyed themselves and he sold a fair few books – which just goes to show how important the live experience is in the age of digital content…