I've been in some weird situations in my time, but this one pushed the boat out a little further than usual.
As many of you know, I've created a Zazzle store. Originally it was to furnish monetised pictures for articles on places like Wizzley. As time has gone on, I've grown to love the site. I'm not exactly a visual person, so my comfort zone is in words. Zazzle is all pictures. Nevertheless, extra strings to my bow were added with aplomb.
Then representatives of the UK Secretary of State for Defence complained about me. Apparently. They demanded that a photograph that I'd taken of HMS Edinburgh be removed for copyright reasons. I took the photograph. It's the one pictured above.
I admit that my jaw dropped a tad, as I read the e-mail from Zazzle's Content Review Team. The products made from it had been up less than 24 hours, when the Defence Department leapt upon it. Naturally, I felt a letter to my MP and to the Rt Hon Philip Hammond coming on. They were e-mailed just now.
The precise wording, in the Zazzle e-mail, was thus:
'We have been contacted by legal and commercial
rights representatives of The UK Secretary of State for Defence, and at their
request, to remove designs which infringe upon their rights from the Zazzle
Marketplace.'
But surely, as a British taxpayer, it could be argued that I paid for HMS Edinburgh. At least, I paid my taxes and a Destroyer was added to the Royal Navy using tax revenue. I'm not saying that I could direct its manoeuvres, but there is a link here. Also as a British taxpayer, any income I receive from the Zazzle products will be taxed too. That's more money in the coffers to build military battleships!
Actually, put like that, it's probably for the best that the Secretary of State for Defence is wasting time and resources firing pot-shots at British businesses. It stops them being diverted into wars, which aren't supported by the British people instead.
I'd be interested to read the response from Mr Hammond. I'll keep you posted.
As a faintly amusing coda, another image of HMS Edinburgh, which was posted on the same day, same hour, same folder and sat right next to the one removed, was patently deemed admissible. It's still there.
On January 18th 2012, the internet went on strike. It was to protest two American bills, which could seriously threaten the basic architecture of the world wide web.
I took a grand total of nine websites, blogs, clubs and forum profiles into the protest. Some were off-line completely, while the others were redirected or otherwise censored. I wasn't alone. An estimated 7000 websites joined in the action, including Google, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Craigslist and the instigators of it all, Reddit.
Here is a photostream of just some of the sites that I saw censored during the day.
Tomorrow (January 18th 2012), this blog will not be available. I am participating in American Censorship Day, a protest in which the internet effectively goes on strike.
Update: It seems that this was very premature. See edits at the end.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry. It's hard work sometimes being a blogger with a conscience in cyberspace.
I've just spent an intense half an hour scrolling through code, as I prepared to join in the protest on January 18th 2012. On that day, huge giants of the internet would have entered blackout. Reddit, ICanHasCheezburger, Nerd Reactor and an increasing number of other websites were all pulling their pages for one day only. My friends and I have been watching that list growing daily - mega-sites pledging their support. The big question on everyone's lips was would Facebook and Google have the guts to join in?
Of course, I'm not anywhere near that league, but I do have an internet presence. I did have a few things to remove on SOPA Day. My websites are easy. I have full access to them, so it would be nothing to insert a file which took them off-line. But everywhere else was a little more tricky.
I'd already sussed that I could place all of my Wizzley articles into draft mode, which would delist them all. But I would have to persuade the site owners to remove my section of Suite101, MangaBullet and Sal's Realm of Runescape. Technically, I could pull the draft mode trick for Sal's too, but I've been writing blog entries there since early 2007. We're talking well over a thousand pages.
Then there are my two Blogger sites. I have some access to the code there and this was where I'd spent the past thirty minutes. It took a great deal of trial and error, but I eventually cracked it. I have four templates saved - two originals from this blog and Jo's Library; then two doctored with redirects.
On January 18th 2012, anyone trying to access either blog would have found themselves here. There would be no way to read my content until I returned the templates back to their original form.
All ready and set to go! Phew! I went to see which other sites had signed up in the interim and that led me to the news. An hour ago, President Obama signed a formal veto which effectively shelves both SOPA and PIPA.
Wow!
It's early minutes yet. I'm going to keep my prepared coding safe on my hard-drive and we'll see how this pans out. Not that I'm a cynic, but I've seen the other foot falling one too many times. For now, I'll just cheer with the rest of the free world. It looks like it was another round for freedom of speech.
Edit: News I'm getting now is that Wikipedia is going ahead with the blackout. SOPA is shelved, not dead; and/or PIPA is shelved, not dead. Still monitoring Twitter and occasionally the less up-to-date press too.
5.06pm: AnonNews has just confirmed that the blackout is still on. PIPA going to the Senate on January 24th.
5.09pm: Reddit have confirmed that their blackout is also still on. I think it goes without saying that mine was back on the books the second the doubt crept in.
5.16pm: Jimmy Wales is Tweeting that he thinks it's just a tactic to ward off the blackout. Full steam ahead!
8pm: I'm still not getting a consistent story. It seems that this is the source. Though Eric Cantor may or may not have shelved it. Either way, every site that signed up is now saying that the protest is going ahead. I'm with them too.
I've just been honoured with a Wizzley Gold Star for Outstanding Articles. I'm only the 7th person ever to receive it; and I managed it in just 26 days. Everyone else on the list has been there for months and they have far more articles than I have.
Let's just say that this has touched me more than I can possibly communicate right now. Words have finally failed me.
The accolade is purely cosmetic. There's a ribbon on my profile picture, which says 'excellent author' if you run your cursor over it. From what I can tell, it also places me (permanently?) on the front page of the best authors section.
Thank you ChefKeem and all of the team at Wizzley.
The pressure is immense. Forget about the human rights, the history and the literature, concentrate on Justin Bieber. It's what the people want.
Naturally it's not what the feedback is in comments. Ask the readership of any site what they think they want and a variety of topics end up on the list. The scope of curiosity is as expansive as the human mind itself. I can go whole weeks without any one of my friends mentioning Kate Middleton, Beyonce or Lady Gaga. (Ok, maybe not weeks with the latter. She is pretty ubiquitous.) But if I want hits, then they are the subjects to focus upon.
I didn't believe those experienced veterans of internet prose at first. When I joined sites like Suite101, I was prepared to fill volumes of binary text with descriptions of historical events. It was my passion and my raison d'être. I knew that I could make the past live again, if I was only given the chance. I was going to save lives with reporting human rights abuses, waving my Amnesty International membership in the air. All of that education would never go to waste.
In my early days at Suite101, I had a wise soul tell me that it's all about the hits. It doesn't matter where you're writing on the internet, you'll never get rich without those likes, retweets, favourites and links. People come; people read; people alert all of their friends. That's the bread and butter of on-line freelance writing.
My first article to approach any measure of success was about Justin Bieber. His fans picked it up and, for a glorious few days, the link was being reposted all over the internet. It's still being read. Months after the news became old, I get a dozen or so Beliebers a week looking in on the article.
You cannot believe how tempting it is to do nothing but write about Justin Bieber all day. The only thing stopping me is, well, I'd have to write about Justin Bieber all day.
The pattern was continued with other articles. Prince William and Kate Middleton visited Birmingham. I wrote about it basically because I had photographs of the riot damage that they'd come to inspect. The hits on that story dwarfed even those for Mr Bieber. They have continued to do so, whenever I've written about royalty.
But only the right royalty. I didn't get very far pointing out, for example, that Britain's prime minister, David Cameron, is related to Queen Elizabeth II. Perhaps Britons have always secretly regretted that whole unpleasantness with Charles I and would love to return to a proper governmental monarchy.
As I gaze down my statistics on every site, the same story presents itself. Write about celebrity and the hits pour in. Write about anything vaguely cerebral and they dry up again. Though I have managed to get away with it with a Wizzley article.
When it was called Studying History as a Timeline, the article was my only real failure on the site. As everything else that I've written slowly rose though the ranks, this one bucked the trend by falling. (On Wizzley, each article is graded according to hits, comments and likes etc.) I changed nothing but the title. Suddenly it's up at 86% and rising. Then again, Anne Boleyn's breasts have always had huge implications for the rest of the world.
Are We Dumbing Down the Internet?
I don't believe that my writing becomes worse or the whole page loses something, when I'm talking about the things I love. Do I really describe television programmes better than I can a pivotal historical battle? I received an Editor's Choice for my article about Torchwood. I barely got any hits on my series about what happened at the Battle of Shrewsbury.
The thing is that it's not just me. Every freelance on-line writer out there is facing the same dilemma. I know because I'm privy to them talking about it on writing forums, where the general public can't see. Experts in so many fields are just giving up, so they can concentrate on the stories that bring the hits.
I worry that we're dumbing down the internet. I worry that our readers are going to let us.
So just to give this blog entry some kind of meaning, let me add an important fact: Jay-Z has already got a track out about his daughter, Blue Ivy Carter. Glory even features her cry. You can hear it right here! Awww!
Paper.li is a wonderful on-line tool, especially for writers like me. It's a curating service that collects together all of your links, RSS feed articles, Twitter hashtags and a variety of other media, then displays them all in a newspaper format. This provides a single URL to which you can direct readers. Instead of trawling through a dozen websites or a billion Tweets, they have everything that you want to show them right there.
But what if something goes wrong and your articles appear in Chinese writing on Paper.li? This happened to me recently, but we have the solution to put it right!
The problem comes when there's a mismatch between your RSS feed and Paper.li's receipt. When I first started receiving some articles in the Chinese language, I contacted Birgit Seitz of Paper.li. She responded very quickly, very professionally, but with a friendly tone. Unfortunately the news she gave me made it clear that the initial problem had been at my end:
The feed defines that content is in utf-8:
While the content of the feed is served as iso-8859-1 (latin1).
I passed this onto the Tech Team at Suite101, as that was the site from which the articles were scrambled.
The issue was fixed for many Suite101 writers, but not for me. Happily, Suite101's Darren Roberts was equal to finding the extra step needed. After some experimentation, here is the fix that he gave me; and it worked!
Changing Paper.li Link Articles Back into English from Chinese
You will need to be logged onto Paper.li, in order to change your paper settings.
Click on your account icon in the top right-hand corner.
Select 'Paper Settings'.
Select the affected newspaper from the pull-down menu in the left-hand corner of your paper settings control board.
Click on the 'Content' tab.
Scroll down, below all of the stream settings, to the 'Paper Language' section.
Select 'English' (or your language of choice) from the pull-down menu.
Scroll down further and press 'Save'.
The next time that your Paper.li newspaper updates, your articles will all be in the language that you selected. The Chinese writing will be gone and you can enjoy the benefits of this wonderful curator tool again. However, you should note that the already published papers will remain as they are.
If these fixes didn't work for you, then I recommend leaving a ticket with the Help staff at Paper.li. They are very friendly and will answer promptly.
For more information about what Paper.li is, and how it might make your life easier, please check out a previous article that I wrote about it. Or, of course, peruse my own current newspaper: The Jo Harrington Times!
Publicity is the key to success for any event, be it a garden fete or a mass protest in the streets of New York. But those wishing to achieve it often overlook a tiny detail - the licence designation on their photographs. For those with a controversial cause, it can make the difference between a sympathetic article reaching readers in time or negative responses too late in the day.
This is an insight into an all too common scenario, which played out this morning.
Finding an Image for #OccupyWallStreet
It was September 17th 2011. For weeks the social networking feeds had been buzzing with the Adbuster arranged activism that was taking place this day. Anonymous were on board, as were US Day of Rage and other groups. There were publicity posters, leaflets, photographs and other images all over the internet. Many were produced by hacktivists with the full implication that they could be reused by whomever had such inclination.
As a journalist and a writer for Suite101, I set out to produce an article. I wanted it to published well before noon GMT, the proposed time that the protest was taking place. There was method in my madness. When ordinary New Yorkers stumbled across the event, they would want information. I wanted my article to be ready and waiting, in Google News, for just an occurance.
But there was a problem. Not one of the mass of images on the internet specially carried a Creative Commons 3 licence. This allows for commercial reuse and Suite101, mindful of law suits, demands it. They have advertisements on the site, which counts as commercialisation. Without an image, my article could not be published.
The Devil is in the Detail
There is an old adage, purportedly from the Battle of Bosworth and Richard III's alleged cry, 'My kingdom for a horse.' (Historically inaccurate; Shakespeare made it up.) It goes: 'For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the kingdom was lost.' It felt like a very apt saying this morning.
I've been here before. I've had articles in mind, then searched for an image, as I know I'll need one. There aren't any with the status, 'for commercial reuse', so I don't bother with the article. I move on to something that I can illustrate. But I felt that the occupation of Wall Street was important. I wanted to write about this.
For the best part of an hour, I searched websites and blogs for that all important Creative Commons 3 tag. None of them included it. It was seen as implicit that the images could be used. My editor wasn't going to see it that way. All the time, the clock was ticking. The protest would have started before I got this up. In desperation, I Tweeted owners of likely images. They weren't online.
Meanwhile, news articles were starting to spring up. They were from mainstream news outlets, like Fox and CNN, who could afford to have photographers on the scene. Small indpendents, like myself, are so reliant on participants. We don't have the big business funding that they have, to use in our coverage of anti-big business protests.
Educating Anonymous and Sourcing an Image
Fortunately, I did have one more avenue to try. After having now wasted an hour on trying to source an image, I decided to be cheeky. A few days ago, AnonCMD had sent me a link for an Anonymous IRC Channel. It was meant to be used to interview AnonCMD about RefRef, but they didn't show up. I used the same link now, in the hope that other members of Anonymous were around. After all, these hacktivists were responsible for half of the pictures I'd found.
True to their nature, the resulting conversation was placed in Pastebin by Anonymous. After hearing me out, one of them then took my favoured image and stuck a notice on it: 'for commercial reuse'. I had my illustration!
However, it had taken so long to find, that I was now just an hour away from the start of the protest. I wrote and researched fast. It wasn't quite as well crafted as it might have been, if I had twice the time in which to pen it.
Publicising the Protest with a Picture and an Article
The timing (and the fact that Anonymous subsequently Tweeted it through dozens of their channels) was critical. For a start, it pushed my article to the top of those listed in Google News, above heavyweights like CNN and the Huffington Post:
In short, it was the first option available for ordinary people searching for news about the protest in Wall Street; and it was sympathetic to the demonstration.
Moreover, within minutes, it had been collected by the New York Daily News, a Paper.li, edition. It was featured, because it had an image.
So mine was the version of events that New Yorkers were reading on Paper.li. Just an hour and half after the article was published, it has been already been read by 551 people.
What Can People do to Facilitate These Kind of News Stories
Bear in mind that journalists like myself are bound by the rules of our publishers. We can't put articles out without images; and we need somewhere to prove to our editors that the images are 'for commercial reuse'.
When putting out pictures, all that is required is a simple line beneath them, or somewhere in the blog entry: 'This content/image/photo/poster is licenced under Creative Commons [add which one]'. For commercial reuse, the following are applicable:
Just find the one you prefer, then link it somewhere in the vicinity of the images that can be used. It doesn't necessarily have to be in the picture itself, as we can link back to the source for the licence attribution.
Finally, thank you very much to the good people of Anonymous, who took the time to create an image for me this morning. Good luck with the #OccupyWallStreet demonstration.
I'm the first person interviewed here. To see more from KicFM and the Wolverhampton Riots, visit KicFM/shows/riots. I'm also the second person to speak in the 'Why are young people rioting?' slot, which can be heard using the mini player at that same link. That's me waffling on about people losing jobs, the economy and the example of government.
I want a job that makes me leap out of bed with joy in the morning. I want my waking moments filled with excitement that what I call 'work' actually pays the bills. I want to pirouette on the carpet, batting away the little bluebirds and other woodland creatures, that apparently always gather in times of great happiness. (Unless the cartoons lied to us.) In short, I want to be a writer and get paid for it!
So I have my blog. I hummed and arred over the title. This is the semi-professional blog. The one where I write about interesting things, but I'm also free to do with without the formal tone of, say, my articles on Suite101. Jo speaks of formality to me. It would be better to skip to one of my other names.
I've had several nicknames in my time. I think the largest number of people call me Matilda Mother (or Matti) after the Syd Barrett song; either that or Merch Gwyar, my Runescape pseudonym. But the former might give the impression that I write stories in less than sober conditions; while the latter already has a large blog attached.
At University, there were a lot of people called Jo. It's a very common name. I hadn't even heard any Syd Barrett at the time, so Matilda Mother was not yet the alternative. But the Waterboys had recorded 'A Girl Called Johnny' and Jo is short for Joanne (male form: John). There are many people who still call me Johnny, including myself sometimes.
The very first thing that confronts me is that, though blogs are all about writing, you need to be an artist before anything else. I can write great walls of text (and frequently do), but if the look of the page is wrong, then only really good friends and my parents might linger to read it. Then there's the lay-out, stuff like that.
I sighed. I played in the design screen. I silently wept.
Fortunately, I have artist friends! Thank you very much to the lovely Alex Lardar, who arranged things, mixed colours and cut out photos of me to get the aesthetics just right. Of course, there were no adverts when she did that, so it looked even smoother.
All I had to do was waffle on about Grace Petrie and the blog was launched! It was even better when Ms Petrie picked it up and Tweeted it to all of her fans. My first proper blog entry suddenly had a lot of hits.
Hits. Hits are good. Hits are what could potentially turn this blog into a winning line of work. I just had to add adverts. But I'm so terribly British about this. My first insertion of blocks of advertisements were very discreetly placed. Half way down the blocks to the side and coloured in to make it compatible. I was partially hoping that no-one would notice them there.
Then I rushed into Runescape and grabbed a panel of (mostly) teenage male gamers to be my first market research panel. Good blog? Fantastic blog, they reported. Then one lone voice called up. And you're monetising this how precisely? *sigh*
I watched videos on YouTube about how to place my adverts. Better? Yep, I am asking for feedback here. Beyond this, I'll be writing proper blog entries, so this is the moment to speak up; and thank you in advance if you do. :D
Disclaimer: Please do not click on any advertisements unless you are a genuine buyer. Invalid clicks will get me closed down.
I want to be a writer. I want to write blogs, articles and features just interesting enough that it turns into the day job. It's not like I haven't done the 'proper' day jobs before.
I walked the streets (uphill both ways; barefoot and waist high in snow (even in summer); raining constantly... ok, if I'm going to wilfully exaggerate, I really should keep the weather consistent) selling Avon products at fourteen years old. At 18, I was dressing up as a (small) woman-sized squirrel to delight orphan children (children's page editor, charity event, local newspaper). As a tour guide, I've led groups of people around a 17th century stately home; and spooked myself by singing 'Goosey Goosey Gander', really slowly, in the sort of chapel that the nursery rhyme recalls.
As a student, I did the usual chip-shop and pub, part-time, seasonal, badly paid jobs. Many, many stories there. Like the time that the local gangster took umbrage to the fact that I served the person in front of him in the queue first. I ended up being yanked over the bar by my lapels and deposited on the floor, bruised and humiliated. Then the leader of the opposing gang threatened to take him down for his treatment of me; and I'm stood in the middle, like a scene out of 'West Side Story', really hoping that the landlord would make an appearance some time soon.
Beyond university, I got to be the secretary, events organiser, receptionist, store-keeper and general dogsbody of the Psychic Research Foundation. That was fun. I met really fascinating people from all walks of life, alongside a fair smattering of complete and utter charlatans; as well as people so entranced by their own point of view, that nothing else could penetrate. Still I got to walk around historical and potentially haunted buildings in the middle of the night, with permission to be there!
Those paranormal evenings were great. People would pay to be scared out of their wits, though often nothing happened but atmosphere and suggestion. We would sit at seances and readings; or hold lectures on subjects ranging from astrology through to UFO sightings. Some of the best conversations happened off the record. I learned how we just give away so much personal information about ourselves in our dress, jewellery and general demeanour. With the slightest promoting, those having readings frequently just spill out their entire life history, then gasp in shock, when it's repeated back to them. *shakes head*
That's not to say that nothing was real here. I did witness things that widened my eyes and had me struggling for a mainstream explanation. Like the time when the astrology lecturer met my sceptism with a challenge. She would list the star-signs of everyone walking into that room. I just had to note them and, at the end of the lecture, she would ask the attendees to confirm or deny her allocations. She based it all on where they decided to sit, in a room full of strangers. I knew that she didn't have the guestlist. She had only arrived half an hour before and she had been with me the whole time. I'd organised the event and only I had the guest details. She was 100% correct, for all 30 people.
Muse of Astrology
Unfortunately, the organisation ended up being so successful that the owner got a job on national radio and sodded off to London. All of the local staff were made redundant, as we were replaced by southern counterparts. He was back within a year, but by then we'd all moved on. I was now a librarian!
Well, technically, I was a CD Clerk in a jukebox and fruit machine company. But it involved categorising and storing loads of different media. This was a boring job, though it did involve me having to travel around the country training up other CD Clerks after a while. I was good at this job, which let to my major mistake - I stupidly got promoted. Yay! More money! *happy dance* Oh crap! A job that I not only hated, but which saw me replacing a well loved person, who'd been sacked. I didn't know the details, but the 15 people now under me didn't want me there on general principle.
I ended up in debt collection by accident. Within my first month, I brought in 25k out of the 32k outstanding for over a year. The boss asked where the other 7k was. I thought he was joking and laughed. He wasn't.
I didn't last long in that job. It really wasn't my comfort zone and it left a bad taste in my mouth.
Plus I once had someone waiting outside the door with a crowbar for me. Colleagues laughed it off. "You think that's dangerous? I've been held up at gunpoint 13 times!" "Oh! I once got beaten up en route to my car. They took 2 grand off me!" etc etc.
In which work environment is that ever acceptable and amusing?
Enter a decade working for my local university. When I first walked in, my new manager said it was like meeting Little Orphan Annie crossed with Oliver Twist. I wasn't used to dinner breaks and finishing on time, without anyone giving me more urgent work, as I was supposed to be going home. Culture shock! She was a fantastic woman, who gradually ate away at my workaholicism, until I came back down to Earth.
It was such a great place to work. I held four jobs in all, moving through the ranks due to promotion and, on one occasion, being head-hunted. The unions ensured that we had fair employment rights, conditions and pay. The people were largely intelligent and interesting. The side-lines in classes, listening to guest lecturers and attending parties were unparalleled.
One of my more interesting jobs was to organise the Holocaust Memorial Day. I welcomed in survivors of some of the most horrific camps in Europe. I sat down, over a cup of tea and a meal, with people who bore those terrible tattoos. They each had different ways of coping with their past.
Eva Mozes Kor was particularly memorable. She had been a child in Auschwitz, subject to experimentation, with her twin sister, under the supervision of Mengele. She forgave him. She realised, late in life, that it was the only way forward. Paul Oppenheimer, who had been in Belsen, where he had lost most of his family, survived now on his anger. It gave him the passion to continue. I felt very honoured to meet them both, along with the other people who came to share their stories.
My final position was as part of Aimhigher West Midlands, doing all we could to get people like me into higher education. People who, for whatever socio-economic reason, don't traditionally consider university in their life prospects. However, this was government funded and, when the recession came, the government publicly sacked us all. The minister had specifically announced our redundancy to the press, before he'd thought to mention it to us. True story. I read about it in the news, then 'phoned the director and suggested that she read it too. I was the last person out of the door, because I was the one archiving all that we'd achieved. I cried. It was sad.
One last job to bring us right up to date. This was so good that I found it hard to believe that it was even a 'proper' job. I was the copy-writer and blogger for a tour company based in Mexico. I was approached by someone who read my Runescape blog and just offered the post. Yay! Bring it on! For over a year, I got to make a living through writing and that is a gold-plated life for me. Until the troubles and the American press hit Mexico right in the economy and the company had to close down.
But if I could make a living writing before, why not now?
