Rob's Blog

THE CONNECTIVE: Get The Connective!

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:16:06 -0400

After spending 48 hours furiously writing, editing, and designing (and many, many more hours anxiously awaiting its final release), we’re so thrilled to announce that The Connective, a crowd-sourced magazine created in a single weekend, is finally live and available for download. You can find it…

You should get this and read it. It’s great. And not just because I was one of the contributors.

I think this might be my favourite part of Bioshock Infinite so...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 21:00:21 -0400

I think this might be my favourite part of Bioshock Infinite so far.

Still trying to find out who performed it.

Bioshock Infinite - Tainted Love (Blues Cover) (by cfabbro)

Purina wants developers to build more video games for cats

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 20:49:14 -0400

Purina wants developers to build more video games for cats:

Cute as this is, I’d worry that introducing my cats to video games would mean I never get to use my iPad again.

It was bad enough when I had to deal with one cat who had developed a severe laser pointer addiction.

94,926 Items

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:29:00 -0400

Since March 11, 2007, I have a read total of 94,926 items in Google Reader.

So, yeah. The news broke today. Google Reader will be gone once the calendar hits July 1st, 2013.

Google Reader (or GReader) was the first RSS feed reader I ever used as more of my news consumption moved online and as my career as a journalist was starting to go somewhere and found myself needing to keep up on more and more sites.

In fact, it was probably the Google service I used most besides GMail. It was always open in a browser tab.

But soon it will be gone.

This whole thing feels like the time Yahoo announced they would be (using that great Silicon Valley euphemism) “sunsetting” Delicious, a rather great site for storing and sharing bookmarks.

While alternatives like NewsBlur and TheOldReader exist, I can’t help but worry, once again, about what happens when we start to rely on software stored on other people’s servers.

A massive company like Google shutting down a popular service like Reader suggests to me that no web app is safe.

The Most Terrifying Button On Facebook

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 21:11:42 -0500

The Most Terrifying Button On Facebook:

More and more, I begin to wonder if perhaps Facebook is some type of incredibly elaborate (and expensive) performance art.

Today's lesson in journalistic ethics

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 19:28:00 -0500

Today's lesson in journalistic ethics :

I’m imagining the update to journalism school text books that’ll be appearing in the next editions:

Note that sleeping with a source is considered a bad idea and may be considered a violation of ethics and a conflict of interest. It should generally be avoided.

Outlawed by Amazon DRM

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 23:03:46 -0400

Outlawed by Amazon DRM :

I really like the concept of eBooks. Not using paper, having something that’s searchable, being able to find and then copy and paste citations rather than re-typing a passage. Being able to keep hundreds of books on a device smaller than a single paper book.

But that’s where it ends.

This tale of having one’s Amazon account obliterated due to committing some kind of infraction that Amazon won’t specify and then losing access to all their books as a result is beyond absurd.

This is the second strike for Amazon after they remotely deleted Kindle copies of 1984 and Animal Farm back in 2009.

If eBooks are to have a serious future, the industry needs to get over Digital Rights Management. Desperately.

I’m sure Amazon will issue some kind of apology and say this was a mistake but the fact of the matter is, they shouldn’t have the capability to remotely destroy someone’s books in the first place.

In the meantime, I suppose for research purposes, I should go back to sticky-tabs and highlighters on printed books.

Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:26:08 -0400

Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong:

Here Alexis Madrigal looks at the history of sharing content online and the harder to measure shares, like people sending each other links via Instant Messenger and other “dark social” areas.

Turns out, those shares can be pretty significant.

This is exactly why I don’t understand the amount of navel gazing that goes on in media circles over some link being shared on Twitter. We never saw that kind of circlejerking over “MSN journalism” or “AIM journalism.” Heck, as far as I can tell, those were never “things.”

Content Mills and Diminished Dreams

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 22:43:29 -0400

On Content Mills and the Springboard to Diminished Dreams

Last week’s issue of San Francisco-based SF Weekly features a lengthy look by Joe Eskenazi at Bleacher Report, an online sports news site that was sold to Turner Broadcasting for what was reported to be near $200 million last August.

I highly recommend reading the full article as it provides a pretty in-depth perspective (though it is pretty clear that author does not like the site) of the operation and a look at “content mills.”

Bleacher Report is frequently criticized for publishing really, really bad articles written by an army of writers who are posting for free. B/R is just one of many sites that operate using this model where the focus isn’t so much on producing quality reporting, analysis and commentary as it is on showing up in Google search results and getting the all important pageviews that drive those sweet, sweet digital advertising dollars.

This focus on what is known as Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) has led to Bleacher Report running articles like “Top 20 Boobtastic Athletes” and others of the Top [Number] [Adjective] [Plural Noun] variety along with blatant click-bait like “Why Tom Brady is the most Overrated Quarterback of All Time,” which Eskenazi reveals was written by a teenager who doesn’t even actually believe the headline.

GigaOm senior writer Matthew Ingram took issue with this piece and came to the defense of content mills, instead suggesting that they are part of the “ongoing democratization of journalism.”

In presenting his defense of Bleacher Report, Ingram states:

This is part of the problem with the traditional media response to “content farms” or user-generated media sites like Huffington Post and Bleacher Report — the sense that they can’t possibly be as worthwhile as a regular content operation because people are writing for free, and therefore the only possible value has to be the creation of low-quality content for cheap traffic purposes. But what about the writers? Why do they do it? And isn’t there value there as well?

Well, I think that question was in fact answered quite well in Eskenazi’s piece:

In an era when those who have more get more, when so many have been forced to recalibrate their expectations, it’s hard not to see Bleacher Report as epitomizing more than just sportswriting on the Internet. Those on the top have profited handsomely. For the folks whose work powers the site, however, Bleacher Report is often the best opportunity they can find, and a springboard to diminished dreams.

That line, “a springboard to diminished dreams,” hit me pretty hard when I first read the article. Having made the mistake of writing for content mills, I knew what it meant all too well.

Before I tell my story, I’d like to make a few things clear. This is not some digital v.s. print or old media v.s. new media rant. I agree completely that the media landscape is changing and will continue to change and that those of us working in media need to change with it. But out of all the new publishing venues that have arisen in the past 20 years, I have a special level of contempt for content mills.

It was 2006. I had just finished journalism school along with multiple internships and a stint at a small town community weekly (where, yes, I was overworked and underpaid) and I was broke. I very quickly took a job at a call centre that paid about a dollar more than minimum wage while I tried to pursue the elusive career in journalism.

Now, when I say I was broke, I mean I couldn’t even afford the postage to send out resumes and article clippings (at the time, this was still the standard way of applying for a job at a newspaper.) My cellphone had been cut off because I couldn’t pay the bill and I feared my DSL connection would soon follow.

Not surprisingly, I hated the call centre work which was compounded by the fact that I soon learned that a dollar above minimum wage was not enough money to live on, which would lead to me having to couch-surf for a period of time.

Then I came across a job posting seeking writers for an “online magazine.” It sounded good. With digital being the future it made sense to work for an online operation plus the word “magazine” implied a high level of quality (I envisioned Salon.com ) Also, the posting said there was money involved.

I applied and felt lucky when I was accepted as a “feature writer” (another term that implied high quality in the old media world.)

And so, with an avatar on the site the ability to publish, I set to work “creating content” in what little free time I could find.

I knew going in that writers would be paid by pageviews, though the recruitment literature suggested that there was already a large audience reading the site and stated, if I remember correctly, that many writers were making $400 a month posting two articles a week and some were getting enough pageviews to make a full-time income.

I realize $400 per month sounds like very little money but it would’ve been enough of a supplement to my call centre salary that I wouldn’t be taking anything remotely valuable I owned to pawn shops.

However, the literature didn’t mention how unlikely it was for a writer to get to the $400/month spot, never mind making a “full-time income.”

My postings started off slow. Trying to do this while working full-time didn’t exactly give me enough time to work the phones, chasing down leads on articles and all the other things that generally go into a news article. Not that it mattered, much.

Like Bleacher Report, the content mill in question didn’t really want writers to break news or focus on anything current at all. The preference was for evergreen content that wasn’t time sensitive that people would find via Google.

See, rather than promoting the “online magazine” as a great destination to read quality articles, writers were instead expected to optimize articles for Google by stuffing in as many keywords that people search for as possible, often at the cost of decent writing and clever headlines.

If writing for content mills did anything for me, it was making bitter towards the letters S, E and O a little earlier than most others working in media.

Back when I was in journalism school, a classmate mentioned the depressing realization that we were writing articles to please our instructors and editors rather than the actual people reading. If only I’d known back then that I’d instead end up writing articles not to please any human being but an algorithm instead.

So, without the time or resources to track down people to interview or even really focus on news, I instead started stitching together press releases (always careful to attribute the content to press releases, making it clear that none of the quotes were obtained via interviews and that there is a marketing slant on them) in order to at least fool myself into feeling like I was practicing some sort of “journalism”. Of course, in reality, I was now a churnalist and my name was attached to some “articles” I really wasn’t proud of.

But I held out hope. The pageviews would come, followed by money. Or at least I’d be building up some kind of portfolio to move onto something better.

No.

Instead, I took advice from the site’s private forum for writers where the response from editors to complaints about not being able to pull in pageviews was “Write more” and “More keywords!”

Next thing I knew, I was reduced to writing Top [Number] [Adjective] [Plural Noun]

I was writing articles to intentionally piss people off hoping that would drive pageviews. That some of those might still exist online, since the Internet never forgets, still embarrasses me to this day.

This was made worse by the fact that I could only find time to spend on content mill articles around 1 a.m. or so because of my schedule and the stuff I hit publish on was often riddled with grammatical errors and other typos. There was very little feedback from editors and what little there was consisted of wanting us to focus on keywords or spamming Digg and other social media sites. How I’d have loved for someone to have given a fuck about an Oxford comma.

The worst part, though? I didn’t even care anymore. I acknowledge that this could very well have been my own personal failing, but I had allowed my writing to be devalued so much that I began to devalue it myself. I was miserable.

Before all this, I had been through low-paid and even one unpaid internship. While I do think there are issues with that practice, I still feel like I got something out of it. I had editors who were not so polite in expressing what they thought were flaws in my writing and while I may have thought they were jerks at the time, I did push myself hard to meet their standards and started developing my own high standards to hold myself to. Looking back, I’m amazed at how little time it took for those standards to vanish.

I can’t say how every content mill operates but in my experience, there isn’t much in the way to help a writer improve. Much of the “quality control” is automated. A script will refuse to publish an article with too many typos or is too short or too long (600 words was the limit, if I recall) or didn’t have enough of those precious keywords.

In retrospect, the warning signs were there. Much of the recruitment literature read like a multi-level marketing scam where they focus on what the top earners are making and word it in such a way to make the experience of the top one per cent sound like the norm.

Had I done some basic due diligence, a Google search would have revealed blog posts by angry former writers and editors of this site that could’ve kept me away. But I was broke while working a job that was making me miserable and I was desperate for both money and to get back to writing.

To Bleacher Report’s credit, they don’t bring people in with the promise of money right away but do dangle possible promotions including one that comes with a $600/month stipend in front of potential writers, despite the fact that very few will ever qualify.

Back at GigaOm, Ingram suggests that such sites provide an alternate career path in media that allows aspiring writers to “bypass the traditional barriers that used to encircle journalism.” Based on what I’ve seen of content mills and my own experience, I have to respectfully disagree.

Just as I said earlier, this is not intended to be a new media v.s. old media rant, nor is it intended to be a screed against writing for free either.

It is true that media is more democratized and I agree that this is a good thing. I also think in this digital era that aspiring journalists need to be more choosy than ever about who gets a freebie. Obviously I’m not completely opposed. I’m not getting paid for this piece and I’m fine with that.

Which is why I suggest to anyone looking to “bypass the traditional barriers of journalism,” to start their own blog. Hold yourself to your own standards. Don’t sit around worrying about keyword stuffing or writing articles to fit a pre-written headline rather than a fitting headline topping off a finished article. But most of all, I really recommend against content mills where even if you do hold yourself to high standards and your writing is the best, it will still be surrounded by some truly awful articles.

More than that, with a content mill, you’re more likely to end up as a cog in someone else’s turnkey operation that may lead to a nine-figure payday for the founders but nothing for the writers who produce the content that made those sites big in the first place. I just can’t see it as being worthwhile.

Community news website OpenFile suspends publication

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:27:51 -0400

Community news website OpenFile suspends publication:

“We’re not shutting down,” he said. “But we need to suspend operations for a week or two as we work out some details. I expect to be back pretty soon.”

I’m sincerely hoping this news isn’t as bad as it sounds.

OpenFile has been a great addition to the Canadian media landscape and I don’t just say that because I’m one of the many freelancers writing articles for the site.

I really hope this does re-launch as something awesome. Though, in my experience, having to suspend publication in the meantime is rarely a good sign.

All we can do is wait and see.

Did Blowing into Nintendo Cartridges Really Help?

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 14:44:06 -0400

Did Blowing into Nintendo Cartridges Really Help? :

Like so many of my generation, I remember trying to play a game, having it not work, removing the cartridge and blowing on it, replacing it in the machine and behold: the game was now playable.

But did it really work? Mental Floss is on the case…

Sneakers Is a Masterpiece

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 14:41:52 -0400

Sneakers Is a Masterpiece:

Well, this is awesome. Slate is running a whole series of articles looking back on the 1992 film Sneakers, which is arguably still the greatest hacker movie ever made.

In another part of the series, Lowen Liu attempts to recreate one of the film’s most memorable moments where a blind character attempts to determine where a car carrying the protagonist locked in the trunk was going using the way the road sounds.

Ever since seeing Sneakers in my younger years, I’ve found myself paying attention to the road, especially the dull thud produced by driving over seams in the pavement. Apparently I wasn’t alone.

Can'tada | Tracking the stuff you can't use in Canada

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 22:00:00 -0400

Can'tada | Tracking the stuff you can't use in Canada:

All the fun tech stuff we Canadians are not allowed to use.

Internet Scam Alert: Most “Kickstarter” Projects...

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 17:29:10 -0400

Internet Scam Alert: Most “Kickstarter” Projects Just Useless Crap (by TheOnion

Yes, it’s The Onion, just so we’re clear.

Twitter account re-tweets public photos of peoples' debit cards

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 17:17:00 -0400

Twitter account re-tweets public photos of peoples' debit cards:

While I’m busy warning people to watch what they post online…

RIM gets the Next Media Animation treatment: BlackBerry 10...

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 15:51:16 -0400

RIM gets the Next Media Animation treatment: BlackBerry 10 delayed, RIM future in doubt after bleak earnings report (by NMAWorldEdition)

Postmedia cuts more jobs, Sunday editions - The Globe and Mail

Mon, 28 May 2012 20:11:14 -0400

Postmedia cuts more jobs, Sunday editions - The Globe and Mail:

R.I.P Ottawa Xpress - lament for the paper that could have been

Tue, 22 May 2012 16:00:57 -0400

R.I.P Ottawa Xpress - lament for the paper that could have been:

My friends are tired of my weekly snide remark.

Standing at a bus stop, I’d pick up a copy of the Ottawa Xpress, and note out loud: “Seems to be even thinner this week.”

Well, I can only make that remark one more time as the Xpress literally cannot get any thinner.

Over the long week, it was revealed that the alternative weekly will be axing its print operations, no longer distributing 40,000 copies of the alternative weekly within the nation’s capital.

It has become the latest paper the fall in a long series of printing presses that have shut down in the last five years or so. The name will live on in website form but I can’t say I’m terribly hopeful that it’ll succeed.

To be perfectly frank, the only thing shocking about this to me is that it took until 2012 before those four page editions were no longer being stuffed into plastic boxes on a weekly basis. There just hasn’t been a reason to pull a copy out of one of those boxes for a very long time.

In the last year, several online media outlets like the New York City-based Gawker blog network have been aiming to publish higher quality articles with the best of that writing referred to as being “alt-weekly quality features.”

Residents of Ottawa can be forgiven for having no clue what that compliment means as, unlike other major cities, we haven’t seen any examples.

In the case of the Xpress it isn’t really clear what it was supposed to be an alternative to.

When it started publication in 1993 perhaps it really was an alternative to the Citizen and Sun papers, though I was nine-years-old at the time, so I wouldn’t know. Then in 2001, the paper was sold to Montreal-based Communications Voir.

I became a regular reader in 2004 when I moved to Ottawa to study journalism and was trying to absorb as much local media as possible. Even then, it wasn’t a particularly high quality publication.

There would be a single short local news article, often with only one source quoted, if that. There were good opinion pieces by Sylvie Hill and Jon Akpata and a few (again short) arts related articles, usually an interview with a fairly well-known band that would be performing in Ottawa that week along with (very short) reviews of recently released albums and movies (though without any local focus.)

Oh, they also syndicated Dan Savage’s sex column, Savage Love.

That was it, though. There wasn’t any locally-focused investigative reporting or any actual features that you might find in other alt-weeklies, like say Vancouver’s Gerogia Straight or Toronto’s Eye Weekly (now The Grid).

Sure, there were short articles with a small “Feature” label in the Xpress but they were also about five or so paragraphs rather than the 1,500-3,000 word pieces that are general thought of when the word “feature” is used in the context of journalism.

Then in 2006, the paper removed Hill and Akpata’s columns and it seemed like the articles were even shorter. Pretty much, the only use for the Xpress at point was to read Savage Love while waiting for the bus.

Come 2010, that reason to read the Xpress was gone, as they dropped the syndicated column.

At that point, the time it took to read the paper cover to cover each week could probably be measured in seconds.

In late January 2012, it seemed like the Xpress took one last gasp for air when they ran an intentionally provocative cover with the words “Ottawa Sucks!” across it.

Like many, I saw and snatched it up, eager to see how or why they were eviscerating the capital.

But the provocation ended on the cover. Instead of any rants about being The City Fun Forgot, inside was an article about an upcoming discussion panel at SAW Gallery on the “growing migration of populations into cities, and its cultural and urban design implications.”

The “Ottawa Sucks!” cover apparently went with this piece, as the panel featured two journalists, Andrew Cohen and Barry McKenna who’ve been critical of the national capital in the past. Though, there are only four short quotes from Cohen, which are more about the panel discussion rather than what’s wrong with Ottawa. Though the piece did mention that he’d written a column headlined “The Problem with Ottawa is Ottawans,” without any kind of summary.

Of course, an upcoming discussion panel on these topics would be perfect for local news. But worthy of being the cover story? Especially with that inflammatory cover?

I doubt it. Nor did it help that the issue hit news stands the day after the panel took place.

Which is why, again, all I can do is wonder why it survived as long as it did.

Though, for all the kicks I’ve just delivered to the paper while its down, I hope I don’t come off as celebrating the demise of the Xpress. I really do hate to see anyone lose their jobs, especially considering I’ve worked at publications that no longer exist. It sucks.

But while I’m not enthused about the paper’s demise, I’m also not going the mourn the loss of the Xpress. Instead, I’ll mourn the paper that it could have, no, the paper that it should have been.

Prince of Persia Source Code — Posted!

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 01:15:53 -0400

Prince of Persia Source Code — Posted! :

This is neat, not just because the original source code for a classic video game was found and put online but also for the observations on just what it took to extract the data from old Apple ][ disks.

Coping With Pony (copingwithpony) on Twitter

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 21:20:00 -0400

Coping With Pony (copingwithpony) on Twitter:

Apparently The Bronies have messed up Netflix’s recommendation engine so many non-Bronie geeks have found the online streaming service recommending they watch My Little Pony based on other shows they enjoy (like The IT Crowd.)

Coping With Pony captures some hilarious reactions to this.