Paul O'Flaherty

The Blogosphere Is Dead And Its Your Fault

Killing ourselves off!

Warning: ** If you’re easily offended I suggest you click off to another blog this instant because I will offend your delicate sensibilities. This post is about the blogosphere in its entirety and not about any one particular individual or their actions. **

I am sick to death of the blogsphere. It’s weak, it’s spineless and has about as much veracity as a neutered, toothless, three legged Chihuahua.

It’s dying.

I’d love to know what the root cause of the blogospheres apathetic decline into little more than a circle-jerk for various communities is, but I’m betting that from here on in we’re pretty much screwed.

We’ve descended into a mob of self serving, self centered sheeple that act with about as much individuality a a shoal of fish. One of us reacts and we all react, we all panic. We all cling to each other like sprat on the shores of community while the mackerel devour us.

We secretly despise each others success and revel in others failure, all the while acting like we’re all the best of buddies and that everything everybody writes is amazing and smells like roses.

Well it does smell like roses, until you realize it’s the smell of the bullshit you’ve thrown on the roses to fertilize them.

This weekend I’ve been deeply disturbed by the wishy washy, head stuck in the sand, lets avoid reality when it’s spitting down our throats,  nature of a fairly substantial number of my fellow bloggers.

The entire @MyBottlesUp story just sums it all up for me. Here you have a woman who blatantly fabricated a story that a goverment agency took her child from her. Tweeted about it wrote about it, tried to cash in on her “story” and then when faced with undeniable video evidence that it had never happened, accused the TSA of doctoring the video.

No remorse, no guilt, just more accusations.

So the TSA released more video. 9 videos in fact, showing her entire journey through airport security, sometimes from various angles.

The response of some of the people: “The TSA are faking it” or worse (because I can actually understand that there are a lot of wing-nut conspiracy freaks out there donning  their silver foil hats) the response of those who think we should let it be because she’s “not well”. She suffers from anxiety and substance abuse.

She was well enough to make this shit up. She was well enough to write about it. To tweet about lining up publishers. Well enough to try to pretend her site was down and to write a long response refuting the undeniable evidence.

Yet people want to protect her. They want to make excuses. They would much rather we all look like one big idiot community than do what is needed.

Take a stand. Say what she did was wrong and unfollow her. Unfollow her and unsubscribe from her everywhere. If she wants back make her earn it. Make her apologize.

A prime example of this spineless behavior is Blog with Integrity. You may have seen it, it’s a square blue badge which adorns some bloggers sites stating that they have basically signed a pledge to be goodie goodies… It’s noble. Naive, but noble.

@MyBottleUp proudly displays the “blog with integrity” badge on her sidebar. When the people behind the “I’m holier than thou emblem” were asked what their stance was on all the goings on, they responded by scurrying into the corner like mice afraid of their own shadow. They chose to stay out of it because you know, a blogger sporting their badge should never have to be talked to or asked to have it removed when they violate the principles it is supposed to represent.

Over the weekend, a blogger wrote a negative post about her experiences with the TSA during an airport security screening. The TSA refuted her claims in a post that included video of the incident. The inevitable blogstorm ensued.

The blogger displays the Blog with Integrity badge on her blog, and we have been asked in email, in posts and on Twitter about the matter. Some have called for us to ask her to remove the badge. Others merely wonder what we will do.

Here is our position:

Disputes and disagreements are between the parties involved. There are two sides to every story. It’s only fair to let a story play out before anyone makes up their mind.

Blog with Integrity is a voluntary community effort. Not a regulatory body. We don’t make decisions about your integrity. You do. Your readers do. The badge is a symbol of a blogger’s personal commitment to the principles of the pledge; only he or she can decide whether or not to display it.

In this case, we hope that everyone who has blogged, commented or tweeted about the incident will take the opportunity to re-examine his or her own words, and act accordingly.

Remember the final line of the pledge: “I own my words. Even if I occasionally have to eat them.”

Up Yours!

Bullshit! Your badge either means something or it doesn’t. You are either serious about what it represents or you’re not.

If you’re going to shy away at the first point of contention then why even bother in the first place. Good intentions have never gotten anybody anywhere.

What exactly does the badge stand for if any unscrupulous twat can just slap it on the side of his or her blog and claim they’ve got integrity as if some mighty Monty Python finger descended from the heavens and shoved integrity up their backside?

I’m not one for regulating the blogosphere. But you know what? If it was my badge I would do some of the following in order to make it mean something:

• Have a registry of sites that are displaying the badge.
• Use some kind of script to track the distribution of the badge so it is tied to each website and if they violate the pledge turn off the badge.
• Make community regulation an integral part of the system. After all it’s so much easier to stick to the rules when you have people supporting you and possibly snitching on you if you cheat…
• Act like I give a shit when stuff like this goes down.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t really want to regulate the blogosphere, in fact I’ve lambasted Tim O’Reilly and others for suggesting such silliness in the past. But that said, if you’re going to try to do it, dear “Blog with Integrity” people, then for feck sake at least do it right!

I’m truly sick of todays blogosphere, where the ultra polite and light on brainwave activity have massive zombie hordes follower numbers while those who dare to express an actual opinion are ostracized to the edges of mediocrity. I honestly believe that John C Dovark is the only person to have crossed that divide, but that still plays out as a poor reflection on that esteemed section of the blogging community that act like everything is one great big group hug with Barney the purple pedophile.

Heaven forbid that someone be different. That someone suggest we don’t all have to brown nose each other all the time.

When the hell is the blogosphere going to finally grow up and stop moaning about what it doesn’t have, what bloggers believe (naively) they are entitled to and act like adults.

Adults can have opinions. We don’t have to go along with the crowd. We can do something different and be part of the community.We don’t have to think that every god damn post by every idiot we just happen to know is praiseworthy to the point of gushing…

We can call a spade a spade. We can call people out for what they’ve done wrong and praise them for what they’ve achieved. We can regulate ourselves without a laid out set of rules or crappy badges in our sidebars. I mean seriously who besides those that display them know what they’re for anyway?

All we have to do is accept that we are adults and that we have a community to protect and build if we ever want to get taken seriously.

Treat the community as a plant with each one of us acting as a gardener. I know that sounds daft but stick with me.

If a bit is rotten, does wrong, then don’t just ignore it. Cut it off. Each of us, one at a time. If that part heals, grows strong again, then let it back in for another chance.

If we all act like little gardeners and follow our own individual moral compass and just decide to unsubscribe, unfollow and not visit the blogs of people who we feel are not in the best interest of the community we will eventually find a natural middle ground where everyone is comfortable.

Yes the community will split. Probably into a number of parts. The marketers and spammers will find themselves marketing and spamming each other. The trolls will have nobody to play with etc… But the core will remain and just like cutting the dead branches off a tree in order to save it, the community will begin to grow and flourish again.

If we can just drop this, everybody be nice to everybody about everything no matter what attitude, the blogosphere will be a far better place and may actually start to earn some respect.

We need to drop the “He’s local so I’ll follow his blog or on twitter even though he’s a dick” bullshit. The same within communities such as mommybloggers. You can’t protect the idiots from themselves so let them go, let them die off.

Darwin called it natural selection. Survival of the fittest. The weak, infirm and just plain stupid die off so as not to pollute the gene pool and damage the entire species.

We’ve been protecting and making excuses for far too long. They’re like a cancer and our acceptance and encouragement is only weakening the entire body and eating us up from the inside while we trot around like idiots with our rose tinted glassed on pretending that everything is fine.

Very soon the only bloggers remaining will be barely capable of thought in more the 140 character bursts and only capable of that if they are participating in a community reach around scheme.

Culling the herd is a common practice to stop the spread of disease so that all the animals aren’t lost. If we don’t cull some of our herds, and soon, there won’t be any blogosphere left worth protecting.

How Do You Gauge Credibility?

Trust me!

An interesting question was inadvertently raised by @SabrinaDent (Sabrinas blog) earlier when responding on Twitter to my post “The FCC, TSA, @MyBottlesUp And Why Bloggers Can’t Be Trusted”.

How do you judge credibility online?

Credible bloggers are taken plenty seriously – TheStory.ie is an example. This woman has no credibility and never built any.

How do you judge the credibility of someone you’ve never heard of?

It’s relatively easy to judge the credibility of someone you’ve been following online for a long time. You get to know them, get a feel for them and you usually can see them being mentioned by other people who you also associate with online.

If you’re part of the same community you’ll see their name appear in the same forums, see other people linking to them and mentioning them and generally they become known to you by word of mouth.

The more you see someone mentioned (in a positive light) and the more you see people you know interacting with them the more likely you are to take them as a credible source.

The best gauge of credibility for me is the interaction of my peers. I tend to give a lot of weight to the those who have the ear and attention of my peers.

It’s a very different story when you don’t know the person and don’t move in the same circles. So how do we judge?

Well, you could do a search on the person and see what other people are saying or read through multiple posts on their blog and try and get a feel for them, but seriously who ever does that. Most of us are just clicking through to something that caught our eye and moving on, with perhaps a quick press of the retweet button.

The sad fact of the matter is that the internet has a sheep mentality. People will follow you just because other people are. It has a knock on effect and is something that bloggers (as one example) have been using for the longest time to get you to subscribe to them.

Almost every blogger proudly displays their RSS subscriber count and sometimes their email subscriber count. The reason for doing this is simple. It’s like saying : “Hey look at me, I have 2000 followers, you should follow me too” and sadly enough, for a lot of people that is enough.

Sometimes you will have more information to go on. A good design helps to put us at ease as it makes us feel like someone is at least being diligent and doing their housework with regards to their blog!

On Twitter a high follower to following ratio gives a good impression as it eases suspicion that the user may be a spammer and that other people are paying attention to them.

A good Pagerank and a good Alexa rank are indicators that people may be linking to them and that their traffic is descent which reinforces the idea that they are credible, but at the end of the day they are all only indicators in a situation where most of us make a snap decision about credibility.

I’ve met some high profile bloggers in my time who appear to be very credible but in real life I don’t think I would trust them to organize dinner never mind consult or run a business. There are others like Steven Hodson, who could blog that the moon had been stolen by little green men and I probably wouldn’t go to the window to look out and check, I’d just take him at his word because since I’ve known him he’s proven to be sincere, trustworthy, cranky and credible.

So how do we judge if someone is credible or not! Most of us have neither the desire nor time to really dig into the details of someone online before deciding to retweet their post. Most of us make this snap decision many times a day?

What indicators do you use to judge if a post or blogger is credible in what they say? Or how about a twitter user, especially one with a blog?

The FCC, TSA, @MyBottlesUp And Why Bloggers Can’t Be Trusted

Nic from MyBottlesUp - Lying for attention?

Bloggers can’t be trusted!

Mainstream media knows it! The FCC knows it! We know it ourselves yet refuse to admit it.

You know it and “Nic” from My Bottles Up (site has a black splash screen thrown up at time of posting)  has just proved it beyond question.

Bloggers seek attention. That’s why we blog. I’ve said it many times before, the only reason people blog is because they are attention whores. You can give all the excuses you want, or even throw out the oldest defence, that you blog for yourself. It’s therapeutic.

Well, if it’s therapy you need, or therapy you’re looking for, then buy a diary or share your woes with Microsoft Word and leave them off the internet.

We are attention seekers.

In a spark of what I will kindly assume what psychotic behavior, either that or her bottle really had been upended and emptied (repeatedly) one mommy blogger has proven why bloggers are not to be taken seriously, let alone be trusted.

She wrote a long and impassioned post decrying and vilifying the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) claiming that they had taken and separated her from her son, among many other spurious allegations.

My son was taken from me.

Taken.

My son was taken from me by the TSA agents at Atlanta Harstfield-Jackson airport yesterday.

As usual twitter was in uproar. As expected the support rolled in, generating over 300+ comments on the post.

But then the truth came out. The TSA decided that enough was enough and released the actual security footage of her trip through airport security. All time stamped. An act of complete transparency which demonstrates beyond a doubt that she was lying.

She was lying. The story was fabricated. She is now in virtual hiding.

You know what the problem with attention seekers is? They desire attention. They’re always looking for new ways to get it.

Bloggers call that building an audience. There are many ways to go about this. You can work your ass off and write daily. You can run competitions and you can write about stuff sent to you for review. Stuff which other folks may not have. Objects that they want. Objects that they desire and will visit your blog to read about.

The FCC knows this. That’s why they implemented the guidelines that they have. They know that there are very few incorruptible people out there. Most people have their price.

Sure you may say that you would never compromise the integrity of your blog (or yourself) but who are you to speak for the millions of other people that call themselves bloggers?

Sure you may claim that your readers are smart enough to know the difference if you’ve suddenly turned into a shill or are lying or even just padding the facts a little. Well, if that’s the case why was everybody in uproar and support of “My Bottles Up Nic” until the TSA released the video?

You may still be angry that we are not treated the same as our traditional media brethren. You know, the media which has an editorial process and a visible entity to challenge (legally or otherwise) if information is false, misleading or just blatant advertising.

We are, for the most part, a pack of attention seeking wannabes. We have proven ourselves time and again to be willing to post information that is unresearched and uncorroborated. We’ve proven that we are willing to be shills for as little as $5. We’ve proven that we act as mob with knee jerk reactions. As of today we’ve also proven, not for the first or sadly the last time, that we are willing to lie just to get a bit of attention.

We can’t be trusted! Until we prove that we can be then we have no business claiming we should be taken seriously and treated the same.

FTC Guidelines : They’re Not About YOUR Blog!

All your blogs...

I watched the news surface yesterday about the FTC’s guidelines governing endorsements and testimonials and how they now affect bloggers.

I read the entire 81 page document (it’s a bit of a drag to read but I recommend that you do), shrugged my shoulders and moved on. I decided to stay out of the inevitable shit storm that I knew the blogosphere would make of this and return to my navel gazing. After all, I’ve been disclosing since early 2007.

I’m sure that the most excited I got was to tell Sara: “The only people who will complain about this are people with something to hide”. I may or may not have been correct.

My feed reader is full of posts (which I did not read) about the guidelines today. My twitter stream is seeing more than a few mentions and as far as I can see the general reaction either “meh” or “oh hell no… we’re all doomed!”.

Except of course for my good friend Steven Hodson. His Canadian sensibilities are so tightly wound up by this that his man spuds must be pushing past his tonsils at this point. According to Steven the FTC guidelines are seven shades of wrong, unfair and make us bloggers out to be “scumbags”.

Apparently I am also a “fuckwad” because I think these guidelines are actually good for the blogosphere and the internet as a whole.

As this misguided Irishman sees it the objections to the FTC guidelines are as follows

• Bloggers shouldn’t be subject to these guidelines because traditional media outlets appear not be
• Our readers are smart enough to know if we’re hawking shite because they know us and they’re smart.
• Oh yes, did I mention that the traditional media outlets don’t have to!

Okay, where to begin.

The FCC guidelines are about more than bloggers. They cover all “new media” users. That means, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, everywhere. Basically if it’s online and you’re not a “proper” journo, this affects you.

The biggest flaw in the logic of those claiming that these guidelines are a bad thing lies in the belief that it is about bloggers, or more specifically you as a specific blogger. It’s not! It’s about search engines and search results.

It doesn’t matter if your readership can spot that you have an apparent “mystery change in attitude” about a product and know you’re suffering from freebie induced verbal diarrhea. Your readers, who on the whole I seriously doubt are not smart enough to notice, unless you became a shill on every product review (1 in 10 could just be called a bad call), are not the people these guidelines are designed to protect.

Look at the stats of your blog and see where the vast majority of you traffic comes from. Go on, I’ll wait….

Just to state the blindingly obvious, the vast majority of your traffic comes from search engines like Google. Bloggers also get a lot of traffic from social networks where the person clicking through may be clicking on a retweet or a forward  and have no idea who the heck you are. Damn, they wouldn’t even care if you died 5 minutes after hitting the post button, they’re just interested in scanning your review, endorsement or otherwise of a product.

Those people coming from Google and Twitter have no idea if you’re affiliated with a company, got paid for your review or accepted a blowjob in order to write 100 glowing words. They don’t know you or your reputation.

Search engine results can also be polluted. It’s all to easy for a company to solicit a 1000 reviews from high profile bloggers, or 10000 reviews from “average bloggers” or even more from Z list bloggers like myself.

This is common place behaviour. Don’t fool yourself into thinking it isn’t.

Starting to see how this is not just about you as a blogger and your readership? It’s about large numbers of bloggers and new media users combined with all their readerships and when you think of it that way, the FTC guidelines start to make a lot of sense.

Bloggers should be incredibly happy about these guidelines because they will help protect the impartiality of our beloved internet.

Addressing the issue of traditional media, according to the FTC (page 47):

The Commission acknowledges that bloggers may be subject to different disclosure requirements than reviewers in traditional media. In general, under usual circumstances, the Commission does not consider reviews published in traditional media (i.e., where a newspaper, magazine, or television or radio station with independent editorial responsibility assigns an employee to review various products or services as part of his or her official duties, and then publishes those reviews) to be sponsored advertising messages. Accordingly, such reviews are not “endorsements” within the meaning of the Guides.100 Under these circumstances, the Commission believes, knowing whether the media entity that published the review paid for the item in question would not affect the weight consumers give to the reviewer’s statements.

As such their point is sound. There is a difference between being paid to review products where that is known and accepted by the audience from the get go and, say, reviewing a new Xbox 360 game when an impoverished blogger may not have been able to afford the game themselves.

There is a fundamental difference between your actual job being paid to review things for a traditional media outlet, and a blogger who doesn’t get paid reviewing a freebie or being paid to review a product.

There is a massive difference in expectation. There is  simply no way to know for the average visitor landing on a blog from a search engine, what the bloggers position is without disclosure.

It is perhaps this difference between traditional media outlets and bloggers that make these guidelines so beneficial for the blogosphere and the internet as a whole.

We now have a proper platform with which to make ourselves stand out from the shills. Those of us that disclose will carry more weight and authority. Folks that are shills can now be properly called out and scandalized (perhaps not the kind of fodder the blogosphere needs but think of the posts) and that may help cull the crap.

We can also stand apart and above from our traditional media brethren, and rather than this being a free pass for them, we can now criticize them and their behaviour, their nondisclosure and self serving interests and bring pressure to bear for positive change.

We can also, finally, bring some respectability to the cesspool of the blogosphere which is overpopulated by self serving marketers and folks out to make a quick buck under the guise of blogging. The shit might finally sink and the cream may rise to the top.

So, why the problem with disclosing? It’s not about serving ourselves, it’s about serving the wider internet. Focusing on your own blog is just self-centered and shows you’re missing the bigger picture.

RIP Journalism and Integrity

The internet “reduces opinion diversity of opinion”. Not only that, but it’s also responsible for “less minority and female ownership” and declining job numbers for journalists.

I know many of you are looking at that and going “WTF Paul, are you delirious? Did you have a bad curry or something? It’s obviously blown what little remains of your mind!”.

No, I’m not suffering a bout of dementia, those are in fact, the opinions of Michael Coops, a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commissions and it’s former acting chairman. Not only are they his opinion, but they are opinions he expressed in an internal report examining the state of media journalism in America according to CNSNews.com.

“We’re not only losing journalists, we may be losing journalism,” he said. “Some blame the Internet and bloggers, and that’s certainly a part of the story. All that consolidation and mindless deregulation, rather than reviving the news business, condemned us to less real news, less serious political coverage, less diversity of opinion, less minority and female ownership, less investigative journalism and fewer jobs for journalists.”

Now, far be it from me to moan about the current state of journalism. My last post attacked CNN for having zero journalistic integrity and essentially making lies up to drive readership. I’ve also publicly decried all those bloggers who consider themselves journalists and serious reporters but in all honesty are “me too” hacks sitting at their desks in pajamas stuffing their fat faces with Doritos.

Neither, do I consider myself a journalist. I’m just a guy with an opinion, which is something I’ll get to in a minute.

The simple fact of the matter is that the internet, not blogging or social media which occurs there, is not responsible for the decline in quality journalism.

Human nature is responsible for the decline. People love to be informed, we love to keep up to date, we love to talk to our friends and get the latest “gossip”. You know, Jennie’s pregnant, Rosie’s sleeping with Jim, Carol and Kristen just had a fight and broke up. That sort of thing.

The internet has provided us with mediums to gossip with an exponentially larger circle of “friends” and at a much quicker pace.

Yet the tools that now provide us with a platform to gossip also facilitate the discussion of news beyond the local gossip. They allow us to discuss matters that were previously the sole realm of the journalists and editors of the print and mainstream news machine.

Coops has said that we’re not just losing journalists, we’re losing journalism. Coops is sorely mistaken, at least about losing journalists. We have more of them than ever, they just lack the means to do their jobs.

The internet may provide the platform for you or anybody to express their opinion, but the ability to express your opinion is not what sets journalists apart from the Doritos eating, pajama-clad blogger.

Integrity, a work ethic, and a pay check is what sets a journalist apart.

You may wonder why I mention the pay check. For me, it’s fundamental, because a journalist has a responsibility to be accurate and honest, a responsibly to their readers far beyond that of any blogger, simply because they are paid to.

They produce the content, their publisher, editor etc.. approves it, we consume it and we pay to consume it, via one medium or another, which means that in a very direct way the journalists responsibility is to us.

The journalist works for the readers. Not the newspaper. The newspaper facilitates the distribution of the journalists news, but at the end of the day makes it’s money off of the arrangement between the journalist and the reader: the content creator and the person paying to consume said content.

Which again brings me back to human nature and gossip. Gossip is news without research. Mary tells Ann, who tells Peter, who tells Sharon who tells Jack something completely different that gets posted to Twitter.

Journalists are supposed to provide us with news, or in other words are supposed to provide us with the gossip that has been vetted by them and they are saying is correct. As they are being paid to vouch for this gossip, we take it as news.

Yet journalists are human. As more and more new media news outlets crop up, we get to hear from more and more of these human journalists.

The problem with humans, is that the more of them you meet, the more of our flaws you get exposed to.

One of our biggest flaws is that a lot of us humans are innately lazy. If there is a short cut we’ll take it.

See where I’m going with this? The more journalists we’re exposed to, the more of their flaws we’ll see and that will lead us to spot the lazy ones who only regurgitate news to publish unsubstantiated gossip.

Sounds a lot like the differences between bloggers doesn’t it?

Despite Coops claims of it reducing diversity of opinion the internet has provided us with the tools to give everybody, regardless of race, color, creed, sex or location to express our opinions. To be bloggers and (if only in our minds eye) journalists.

Yet, in giving everybody the ability to report gossip and throw their opinion into the ring, the verified “from the horses mouth” truth gets lost in the noise.

It’s also created an issue for the real journalists out there as they are feeling pressure from those above them to compete with the immediacy of the gossipers.

Let’s get one thing clear: Journalists can never compete with gossip on rapidity of dissemination.

It’s like living in a small town. You can’t do anything without people gossiping about it and usually your mother knows what you were doing before you’ve even done it.

The key to making journalism successful lies in the fact that journalists are expected to have integrity because they are paid by us to have it. They are paid to do the research. They are paid to verify the story.

They are paid to provide trust.

Twitter is great for breaking news, blogs are great for opinion, but only paid journalists provide the trust that drives real loyal, returning, paying readership.

The issue here is not the internet. It is money.

There will always be jobs for journalists because as much as people love gossip, they hate being lied to, intentionally or not.

If newspapers and mainstream media would simply realize that they do not need to compete with the immediacy of blogging and social media then they will be taking a step in the right direction.

If they realize that their business is not in fact providing the news, but providing trust worthy accurate news, then they’ll be taking a step in the right direction.

If they realize, that it’s simply human nature for people to gravitate towards trusted sources they’ll realize just what it is they need to be doing.

Journalists provide the vital function of delivering that trust but, as the numbers of people aspiring to be journalist increases, so do the number of people who may have a flair for writing but little integrity or work ethic.

This is what “old media” publishers need to be worried about. Diluting the value of the journalist by providing any old hack with a paid mouth piece.

The way forward is to strengthen the bond between journalist and consumer and this is done by putting mechanisms in place to ensure that what the journalist is reporting is as accurate as possible.

The internet has provided journalists, lazy and not, the means to get access to exponentially increased volumes of gossip that ever before. The publishers need to ensure that the journalists are not exploiting this, or being put under pressure to publish unresearched gossip as news.

Publishers need to help journalists provide trust. Help them develop the means to verify sources and information gathered from the wild west of gossip reporting that is social media.  To help them discover the truth amongst the gossip and opinion.

If they can help them build their trust value, their integrity, their reputation as a worthy outlet for news, then the money will flow and there will be more jobs and respect for real journalists.

The world needs journalists to be that mainstay of integrity because there isn’t much of it amongst the gossiping, marketing and spam driven social media world and I, for one, fear integrity’s death completely to the advertising buck!

CNN reporter linked to Michael Jackson’s death!

The reporters (and I use the term very loosely) at CNN are apparently so starved for news, so desperate for page views and have such a tenuous grasp on reality that they now resort to groping at the thinnest and most improbable of straws in order to create a headline.

Today there was a post about a generic version of a drug being recalled from the maker because two lots of it had been tainted by some contaminant.

Now, as story, it stands up by itself. The reporter could have kept things short and sweet, telling the truth, that the drug is manufactured by 3 different companies and that the brand name, as well as the product from the two other manufacturers, is still on the market.

But guess what CNN decided to do instead?

That’s right, they decided to go for the most flimsy and ridiculous thread they could find, which is that Michael Jackson had “reportedly” taken the brand version while he was still capable of doing the moonwalk.

The result was an article entitled: “Generic version of drug linked to Michael Jackson recalled”.

What’s even worse is that, not only is this a ridiculously far fetched piece of link bait, but within the first two paragraphs of the article, they completely destroy their own reason for using the headline.

(CNN) — Two tainted lots of a generic version of a drug reportedly taken by Michael Jackson have been recalled by the drug maker.

However, no link has been established between the drug — a powerful sedative and anesthetic called propofol — and the singer’s death.

I’ve added the underlines to the quote to highlight the idiocy of what they are suggesting, as well  I almost find myself needing to scream: “You idiot! Of course there is no link – he’s not taking that version of the drug!”

Let’s get this straight: The recalled drug was called “Propofol”, Jackson was reported to have used “Diprivan”, the brand version, at some point while he was alive? Get it? Good.

This kind of “link-baiting”, this grasping at imaginary straws, this connecting of two completely unrelated events in an attempt to draw visitors to a, let’s admit it, barely news-worthy post, is quite simply not the level of integrity or professionalism expected from one one of the largest news outlets in the world.

The kind of logic employed and apparently acceptable to the editor of that post, would also allow me, if I was working for a news agency with similar low standards, to get away with the title of this post, simply because CNN had someone cover and report on the events surrounding Jackson’s death.

It’s just over 17 months ago since I wrote about my belief that most bloggers simply don’t have what it takes to be mainstream reporters, but as I look at how far mainstream media has fallen with their reporting standards, I may have to eat my words.

It seams that any hack with a keyboard can call themselves a journalist these days.

Give an inch. They’ll take a mile

Why do so many people feel an unwarranted sense of entitlement in life?

People get something for nothing once and then feel like they are entitled to it forever!

I’ve seen this happen with bloggers and more recently I’ve been seeing it where I work at night. All of the people staying where I work are essentially guests of the state.

They are seeking asylum (I’m not picking on them, it’s just an easy example) and are unable to return to their own countries. You would think they would be grateful for what they are given here?

Alas, for some of the residents in the centre this is not the case.

Let’s look at what they have for a moment. They have a nice place to stay, free room and board. TV’s and DVD players in their rooms. Recreation areas with pool tables and satellite TV. Staff who come in to clean up after them, clean the bathrooms, toilets and wash the dishes that they use.

They have a chefs who come in and cook their meals, with varying menus and always the best of food.

Yet for some it is not enough.

So many of them take the staff who clean for granted that it seriously pisses me off.

I had an incident recently where I had to reprimand one of the residents for tipping rubbish, from a box due to be disposed of, out onto the floor.

When he was told he can’t leave the rubbish where it was and that he would have to find a bin for it, he replied that it “Is not my duty to bring rubbish to the bin” and that the cleaners would take care of it the next morning.

What annoyed me about this, was not just the statement or action, but the sheer arrogance of it. The expectation that the staff were here solely to clean up his mess and that he had no responsibility.

A similar annoyance occurred today with a resident complaining about the food. Apparently the food was “good but had too much sauce and the chef today is no good”.

The first thought to my mind: “You arrogant, ungrateful shit”.

Go back to your own f’n country and see if you get food like that cooked for you. You’re lucky you get bread and water (although this lad could have done with a bread and water diet. Obviously never missed a meal in his life).

Then there are the little things that I could list forever, but all of which are a result of sheer laziness and born of an unjustified sense of self entitlement.

Don’t get me wrong here folks. I have nothing against asylum seekers or anybody for that matter. Some of the guys here are quite sound, but…

I hate this attitude, which is prevalent among so many people, asylum seekers, blogger’s and otherwise of self entitlement, when they haven’t done so much scratched their arse for it. (Probably expect someone to do that for them as well).

BlogRolled: a quick route to the Google penalty box?

Back in February of 2007 I removed my blogroll from this site and declared blogrolls to be dead. My logic, at the time, was that links from within my posts were of more value to people I read as readers may actually click on them, and the fact that if I were to link to everybody I read then my blog roll with be a couple of hundred links long.

If you want to know who I read and get the best of what they write simply subscribe to my link blog.

Yet, as much as they are a dead duck to me the fact is that the vast majority of bloggers feature a blog roll on their site and those blog rolls pass a lot of Google juice around the web.

In fact, considering how much link juice they drive (most blogrolls exist on every page on a blog) and I’ve been wondering how long it would take for a service to come along which would make it easy for advertisers to purchase space in your blogroll or even the whole thing.

The benefits of having your companies link in a bloggers blogroll are enormous. Not only does space in a blogroll generally mean a site wide link, but blogrolls are looked upon as endorsements on the internet.

By adding someone’s link a blogger is essential saying “I trust and respect this source, you should to!” and I’m sure Google sees it the same way.

Well it looks like that trust is about to be shattered.

A few days ago I received an email asking me to enroll in BlogRolled, a service looks to be the middleman between bloggers and advertisers and sell links within your blogroll or even your entire blogroll.

I signed up for the service, added my blog (even though I don’t have a blogroll) and waited until I got approved to try to get under the hood of how this works.

I wanted to see what kind of code they were using to embed the links and see if it was “nofollow”, even though I knew it wouldn’t be as they are touting “natural search benefits” as one of the selling points to advertisers.

Amazingly, there is no embed code. Or at least none that I have seen yet because there are no opportunities available in the market place.

You can read that as “No advertisers have signed up with us yet”. (Maybe this is a good thing!)

It looks as if the code is only given to you after an advertiser has purchased your blogroll.

Considering how much trust is put in blogrolls, I can see this a being potentially damaging both to bloggers who sell links within their blogrolls and the blogosphere as a whole.

Considering how hell bent Google is on cracking down on paid links, (Matt Cutts is actively asking people to report sites with paid links and Michael Gray is calling for Google to shift its focus from SEO’s to PR people and top bloggers) I’m wondering how long it would take a blogger who used this system to fall afoul of Google’s penalties and worse yet, if this selling of blogrolls became widespread, how long it would take Google to reduce the value given to links from within blogrolls.

If that happened I’m sure that more than a few bloggers would see a hit to their PageRank and to their wallets.

Is blogging journalism?

I’ve ranted on an on about this in the past, but over the years I’ve complained that the vast majority of bloggers are simply too unprofessional to claim themselves to be anything but the incompetent tea boy (or girl) of a press room. (There are of course, exceptions that prove the rule!)

Yet, the question keeps coming back at me time and time again.

In a recent interview for an as yet unpublished paper, I was asked the following:

Even though you are working in what many see as a journalistic medium, you do not consider yourself a journalist. Why is this? Why do you think that blogging is not a form of journalism?

Now I put the question to you. Is blogging journalism? If it’s not, why not?

Are you locked in your room?

I was thinking as I lay awake last night (30 minutes total sleep and I went to bed at a shockingly early 11pm) that the room I was staying in last night was very much representative of many bloggers who don’t read other blogs (or who keep within a limited number of like minded bloggers).

The room itself is representative of the mind set of many people who like to surround themselves with people who think along the same lines and represents a self imposed wall of thought around the creative process behind blogging.

That’s why the best bloggers read a lot. Not just blogs, but newspapers, magazines, listen to the radio and build a much broader picture of their world that the narrow one which is just their field of interest.

They don’t keep the door to the room locked and only allow in folks of similar opinion. They make the room open to all and sundry to visit and actively trek outside to experience other rooms and place in order to build of a bigger picture of the world.

They pursue experience by challenging themselves to face to opinions of those who would not normally fit into their room.

What about you? Do you let fly the windows and doors and venture outside or do you remain inside?

Interview with Lorelle VanFossen

While I was in Chicago at SOBCon08 I got an opportunity to interview some amazing people and the one of the ones that really stands out in my mind was with Lorelle VanFossen from Lorelle on WordPress.

We talk about the parallels between blogs and brick and mortar stores and how people like you and me are learning from those parallels to improve their blogs.

Lorelle address issues such issues as defining what makes a blogger successful, what separates a successful blogger from everybody else and how to achieve this for yourself.

Of all of the interviews I did at SOBCon, this was one of my favorites, it’s packed full of great information and great tips and is definitely worth watching.

Lorelle is such a funny and charismatic person and it just floods through the screen in this interview as she imparts some brilliant advice in this 35 minute episode.

As Lorelle mentions in the interview she is the author of “Blogging Tips – What bloggers won’t tell you about blogging” and you can win one of 2 free signed copies of the book by partaking in our quiz.

You can download the interview for yourself by clicking on the following link.

Lorelle VanFossen (112MB WMV)

The interview itself clocks in at 112MB so is just too large and at 35 minutes too long for uploading to Youtube. Any suggestions as to where to upload files this big in the future so that we can embed them would be greatly appreciated.