explodedlibrary.info

would you sell the corpse and feed of your blog as ad space?

There was a once Tasmanian blog called dolebludger [view as archived in 2004]. I first started reading it at the end of 2003, as I was preparing to return to Australia. I think I must have discovered it towards the close of its most active period. During 2004 it began a gradual decline, although there was still an occasional brilliant post which more than justified its place in my reading list. I felt quite an affinity with this blog in the first part of 2004, as I was also unemployed in Tasmania. The blog was very quiet in 2005, and then today I got a rude shock.

The entire blog as well as its feed is now an ad!

Most likely, dolebludger has folded up its tent, and its author has literally sold the entire blog and feed as ad space. Maybe there are other possible explanations, involving hacking or death, but I think they’re pretty unlikely. It’s very disappointing because dolebludger’s author seemed so stridently anti-capitalist. How could this happen?

I know, people change over time, as do their blogs. I know as well that there is no consistent relationship between the health of a blog and the well-being of its author. But whatever  the causes, I’m not happy with the outcome. Thank God for the waybackmachine, otherwise this blog would have completely vanished.

This has prompted me to end my experiment with text ads on this blog. I was going to wait until the end of month, but now seems more appropriate, seeing that I’m complaining about an example when ads have degraded a blog.

Here’s my advice to other TypePad users who are considering the ads. It wasn’t the worst thing I could do to try this, because it was very easy to remove them. The payment is based on the click-through rate, not actual clicks. This means that if you have a blog with a small supportive audience who is more likely to click on the ads, you’ll probably do much better than if you have many readers who never click on the ads. It’s strange, but I made the most money on one of the days when the blog was having domain name problems and my readership was way down. But all this talk about readership, support and revenue is making me uncomfortable, and I’m glad my ads are gone.

Google - a good tool, or what?

Blogging's been light lately because I'm getting over a cold. Of course I know why I caught this, because I mentioned online how I had dodged this bullet several times lately.

Fascinating discussions on the essence of a library. It puts me in awkward position. I'm generally quite well-disposed towards to Google, and believe that Google and other search engines can complement libraries and vice versa. I think there's plenty of room for both libraries and Google, but Google is a very different beast than a human staffed library. If libraries are redefined in Google's image, the uniqueness of human-staffed libraries will be defined out of existence. Would this be the beginning of the end for libraries - maybe, maybe not.

Here's an interesting Copyfight post that is one link removed from this topic. If librarians are to survive and thrive in the 21st century, we need to avoid the extremes of a) being luddites and sticking our heads in the sand and ignoring these changes and b) giving up and not standing our ground to preserve what only human librarians can do.

ranking and motivation in blogging

[7 September 2005 follow-up post]

I have found all the posts commenting on Walt’s list (I’m calling it this for brevity rather than accuracy – I hear Walt’s disclaimer that he never intended it to be a definitive top 60 list, just one possible top 60) to be quite compelling. At first I thought I wouldn’t comment, that I’d wait for this issue to go away, but I think that’s going to take a while and I’ve decided not to hold back.

The best thing about all of this, is that it’s helped me find out about a lot of other blogs that are worth reading. Some of these were in Walt’s list, others have been mentioned by bloggers in response to this list. I think it’s overall a good thing when we start thinking about the great stuff which people are doing in our library blog community.

When I look at the matter from a more personal, less of a big picture point of view, I have very mixed feelings. This is nothing new, I have mixed feelings about most things :)

unsmiling passport photos, returning resident alien

How quickly one year passes! It's almost time for me to make my obligatory annual visit to the US to re-establish my US permanent residency status. Or as it's worded in officialese:

A permanent resident alien returning to the United States from a visit abroad of less than a year may apply for readmission  by presenting an Alien Registration Receipt Card ("green card") to the immigration authorities at a port of entry.
[Returning Resident Alien Leaflet, U.S. Department of State]

Even more scary is how quickly the past ten years have gone by. My Australian passport has expired after ten years and it's time for me to renew it. I have discovered that by law, my new passport photo must be unsmiling. I gather that smiles cause problems with new face scanning technologies, where scanners in the airport try to match the faces with the passport photos. Maybe unsmiling passport photos are also a lot more realistic, especially considering how most people feel at the end of a long-haul flight.

So, I'm going to be visiting Hawaii between the 9th and 15th of September. Hawaii doesn't have the reputation of being a cheap destination, but it's the cheapest US destination for me to reach from Australia. It's weird to think that for the time being, I have to go Hawaii once a year, but I'm also looking forward to having a little break.

I like living in Australia and think it was the right decision for me to return. I have no plans to move back to the US, but I also want to keep my options open. At least for the time being.

still no iTunes Music Store in Australia - a casualty of squabbling between Apple and Sony

[7 September 2005: This post has been followed up]
[15 May 2006: The portion about Australian intellectual property law has been followed up]

An Australian iTunes Music Store (iTMS) was supposed to open in May 2005. This unexpectedly fell through. At the time, there were rumours in Slashdot that one major record company (possibly Sony) was the cause of this delay. Three months later, there is still no iTMS in Australia and there is more confirmation that Sony is the company which has been stone-walling in negotiations with Apple over licensing rates. Joshua Gliddon, "Burning issue", Bulletin (7 June 2005).

In Today's Australian Financial Review there was another article about this, "Apple's turn to bite the download bullet" (9 August 2005). I'm not linking to it, because the AFR has a nasty pay-per-view system. The gist of this article was that the Australian iTMS store has become collateral damage in the larger competition between Sony and Apple. Although Sony did not block the original iTMS in North America, or its other expansions, this time it is putting its foot down and insisting that Apple give some ground over licensing rates and access to Apple's FairPlay DRM system. The Australian market isn't that vital to Apple, and it's not going to make these concessions to Sony, and if that holds up the Australian iTMS, so be it. At this rate, it's possible New Zealand will have its iTMS before Australia. Good on them too (my Mum's from NZ, so I have major respect for the country and its people).

Meanwhile, because of an absurdity in Australian copyright law, there is still no legal way of using an iPod in Australia - unless your iPod is filled with music which you have yourself created. So I'm a law-breaker if I buy a CD and format-shift by ripping the music onto my iPod. So are two other Australian bloggers whom I know (I promise not to turn you in, F & S), so are the dozens of people I see everyday in Sydney with some sort of iPod, whether it's a big one or a mini or a shuffle. We're all law-breakers on this issue, even the lawyers. I'm waiting for the day when police will stop me in Martin Place, "Oi, you with those white earphones, what do you think you're up to?"

domain issues resolved

Domain names are weird little things. Once they're working, it's possible to forget about them and take them for granted. They're very low maintenance and mostly very easy. But when there are problems, it's huge. Anway, I just wanted to say that everything's working fine again.

domain issues

Probably nobody is going to be able to read this, but just in case somebody can, I just wanted to let you know that I'm having some issues with my explodedlibrary.info domain hosting and forwarding. It's going to be out of commission until Friday my time. If you're using the original http://explodedlibrary.typepad.com/salonblog/ URL, you can still access the site, although it looks a bit strange - must be the domain mapping aspect. Because of these issues, I'm not going to be updating this blog much until everything's working as it should.

stress and the cold

Despite its recent glorious weather (speaking as a former Tasmanian and Minnesotan, I can say that winter in Sydney isn't worthy of the name, it's just a welcome respite from the hot weather), it seems like Sydney is stuck in the worst weeks of the flu season. This morning at work I had an eye of the storm moment where I briefly glimpsed this insight amongst all the busy-ness of the morning. We can’t control the stress and problems belonging to other people – but it helps to understand them. When somebody else’s stress or problems or pain spills over onto me, it doesn’t have to infect me and cause me to do the same unto somebody else. Sometimes it will happen, just as once in a while I will catch a cold, but other times I can resist it, especially if I’m aware of what’s happening.

3 years blogging

This blog started as an experiment and a bit of research which took on a life of its own.

I used to want to be a writer somehow, but never felt comfortable with any of the most likely genres – short stories, poetry or non-fiction. I also became increasingly dispirited by what has been going on in the writing business – the consolidation of publishers and book retailers, the weakening of smaller independent voices and gate-keepers. The thing about blogging for which I’m most grateful is that it’s helped me discover that there are different ways of being a writer, and connecting with an audience. The difficult and the exhilarating part is that because all of this is still new, there are no set paths to follow and we each have to find our own way, stumbling with every other step. I still haven’t discovered the sort of things which I really want to be writing yet, but feel I’ve made some progress, especially after I realized that blogging and journaling weren’t competition for my regular writing, blogging is my writing.