to link, or not to link – On the mechanics and ethics of linking

Cas is currently

The following is a really rather long post. It has been sitting in my folder of shame for several months now and, whilst I have been working on it on and off all that time, I never really gave it the time it deserved. Today I polished it up and decided to present it to you. Why is it I can write near 3000 words for my blog in an hour, yet can’t do the same for my thesis? Anyway, enjoy, or not. I’m just talking to the dog here.

I once again find myself musing on the vagaries of the information age whilst riding on a relic of in the Victorian era (train) using a technology thousands of years old (pen and paper). For a while I have been thinking on and off about linking, both the mechanics and ethics of. I have talked a bit about this before, or at least pointed you in the direction of people who have been making sense on the topic lately, but I’ve never directly talked about my own views on whether/when you should link in the first place.

Regular Bright Meadow readers will be familiar with my Sunday Roasts – roundups of stories from that week. The majority of these posts comprise links to news-stories and cartoons, though a goodly proportion are to other blogs. Mainly these are to posts containing funnies, but with some regularity I link to posts containing peoples thoughts and opinions.

The fuss being, I hear you ask? Surely one of the beauties of the web is that all information is only a hypertexted click away? And it is. But a vast quantity of things stem from the difference between what a hyperlink actually is and what it is perceived as being.

A hyperlink, at it’s simplest, is a connection forged between one point in your hypertext document and another point somewhere on a vast connected network of computers and servers known colloquially as ‘the Internet’, or the ‘Web’. Despite the imposed functionality of the ‘back’ button and ‘history’ functions of browsers, hyperlinks are one way. Nor do hyperlinks have meaning built into them. They simply are. Any semantic meaning is imposed on the link afterward by the manual addition of some form of clarification (most often text).

Again, all happy and shiny.

It is a given that you should always credit where you get your ideas from. In the academic world you reference pretty much everything, and there are strict conventions on how you reference, be it from books, the internet, newspapers, archives, even personal conversations. It is imperative that, if you have used or mentioned another person’s ideas, you give your reader the means to track down that idea or result, to see it in its original context, so they can make up their own minds about whether you are drawing valid conclusions. This is a part of scholarship, I am more than OK with this, and frequently find myself champing at the bit when some journalist/blogger/author has quoted someone as saying something (or made a statement as fact), and hasn’t provided me with the means to check up on them. Hyperlinks provide a handy and fairly elegant way of doing this, either with internal links to a bibliography and reference list, or external links direct to the given source.

Yep. Got that.
Simple, even, you might say. Linking is good, that’s that, and this is going to be a short post.

Alas, no. Whilst the ethics and mechanics of academic linking are pretty much solidified into convention (which is often more binding than law), how to link on the Internet, and within the blogosphere (*chokes on the word*), is still being worked out. It is wonderful, and exhilarating to be writing the rules as we go, but it can lead to a whole host of unexpected complications.

The ‘problems’ start when pages, sites, and blogs (for example) are ranked in search engines and ‘Top Ten’ lists by computer algorithms that look at all the in-links into a document. The theory being the more in-links a document has, the more authoritative or popular the source must be, so the higher it appears in the search results listing (or on the Top Ten). The higher something is, the more often it gets linked to, the higher it appears in the rankings and so on till we all get dizzy. Computer algorithms, no matter how cleverly written, still just see a link, not any attached qualification as to whether it is positive, negative, or just plain indifferent. When you link to something you confer, without really thinking about it, a measure of approval. Even if you qualify your link with “I really, really don’t agree with what this person says”, you are still providing them with an in-link so making them seem (in many ranking mechanisms) more authoritative than perhaps they deserve to be.

(Now see if you understand the prevalance of ‘link-spamming’ in the comments fields of blogs. Caught on yet? … Good. Clever boy.)

9 times out of the 10, this is not a problem at all. We link to things that we think deserve to be shared, or agree with, or think explain a point better than we ever could. It stands to reason that such sites deserve to climb higher in the rankings of, for example, Google or Technorati. But then, how do you deal with sites you disagree with so strongly that you want to share your displeasure with your fellow readers? A “Warning, Here Be Dragons” kind of link. “Read At Your Peril”, if you will? You want to share the link to save those you care for stumbling across it by accident – in much the same way I tell pretty much everyone I meet that The Da Vinci Code is a shockingly badly written book that I wouldn’t recommend as toilet paper, to save them the pain of reading it. But, if your blog is popular, and people link to it, then slowly but surely this evil link you think is a pimple on the face of the Internet will rise in the rankings, till lo! It is high on the hit parade.

So that is an extreme example, but it could happen. Rather than napalming this site off the surface of the Web (denying it readers) you have conversely exploded its traffic beyond its creators wildest dreams.

Bummer.

There’s not much you can do about this, apart from not linking to sites you don’t like. A few clever people have been attempting to come up with alternative ranking systems, and ways of conveying inherent meaning with a link, and in a year or so I wouldn’t be surprised if everything was different, but for now, we’ll all just have to deal. From a personal blogging standpoint, the knowledge of this has skewed my linking style somewhat. I no longer (or very rarely) link to a post I disagree with. If I find myself linking to such a site, I try and link at least once to a site with a diametrically opposed viewpoint to balance everything out.

Now we’ve got our heads more or less around the idea that linking can have outcomes we never anticipated (or wanted), I would like to introduce the thought that perhaps there are times we shouldn’t link. Yes, you heard me. There are times when it might not be appropriate to link. For this one I am going to be focusing more on the special case of blogs, but the general idea holds true for pretty much everything on the web.

Take a moment and think on what blogs are. Blogs are a special case in internet publishing in that they can be incredibly personal, often containing intensely held personal beliefs and opinions. Therefore, when you link to them, you are holding up a flashing neon sign saying “Look at this! Look at this!”, and some people might not want their personal diaries gawped at by all you voyeurs out there. You could argue that, by publishing these opinions on the internet, the author is begging for it, but that argument gets you perilously close to JB’s ongoing observations that, in Japan, apparently girls who wear short skirts are just asking to be raped.

Yes, I agree that by putting my opinions out there on the great wide Internet I am saying “this is what I believe, this is what I hold to be true, these are my views” and giving my implicit permission to anyone and everyone who cares to, to do what they want with those views (so long as they credit me). And who can deny the pleasure and mini-(sometimes midi- or even maxi-) ego boost you get when someone links back to our carefully crafted words and says “I like this, this makes sense, you are a clever and wonderful person”. Sadly, the flip side of this is that for every nice thing said out there, there seems to be another ten nasty things being said.

Of the many instances I am aware of where in-links have not been as welcome by the linkee as the linker might have hoped, one springs to mind. One of the many blogs I have stumbled across over the past year is the blog of the divine Profgrrrrl, an academic blogger whose take on life I always enjoy (though I have yet to comment and tell her so. Yes, once again, do as I say not do as I do). Somehow or other she discovered that she had been linked to in a Wikipedia article that discussed the mini-phenomena of academic blogs. That is, blogs written by people in academia, but who only tangentially talk about their research, focusing more instead on their daily trials and tribulations. She wasn’t overly enthused that she had been linked to (without her permission) from such a visible source as Wikipedia. This I can sort of understand. Whilst we all want readers, I guess being linked to from Wikipedia is a bit like jumping up and down on the roof of your local department store in your underpants screaming “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!!!!!” Sure, your readership will go through the roof, but a fair number of them might be the unsavoury nutjobs who would spoil the ‘friend-circle’ atmosphere of most personal blogs. Thanks to the beauty of wikis (ah, the blessed wiki) she (or someone else, I can’t tell, damn culture of anonymity and never signing edits!) quickly edited the article so that another academic blogger was linked to as an exemplar. (What this other person had to say on the matter of being linked to I can’t say.)

My point being, you may think that giving a link is a lovely gift (unless your aim is to be mean, and then shame on you), but the recipient of your link might not feel the same way. We do have a habit of getting disproportionately attached to our little domains on the web, and I can think of people who I wouldn’t want to link to me. It is rather silly thinking that I can vet who has access to my blog, but I still find myself relying on this illusory sense of control to ausage my occasional jitters at how much of my daily life I find myself talking about on the web.

So, when should we link? Should we even be linking at all? That second is a silly question – of course we should link. I think you would be hard pushed to find more than a handful of oddballs who support the position that every web-document should be an island. Linking together is part of what makes us a community and, just in case you’ve been asleep whilst reading my posts this past year, I think community is great.

Personally I’ve started to practice what I like to think of as ‘Karmic Blogging’. Blog unto others as you would be blogged to yourself. If I can’t think of something nice to say, then I try to say nothing at all. If I can’t find a happy link, then I don’t link. *1*

When I do link, I make sure (to the best of my ability) that I link to the primary source, rather than a secondary summation of that source. If I was wearing my academic hat here, I would try to link to the original article/report/document, rather than some fellow academics spin on that article/report/document. If, for whatever reason, I do link to a secondary source (normally because they’ve added commentary I think is pertinent), then I try to make sure that the primary is still accessible, either through their post or through mine. Over time you come to find secondary sources who you trust and link to them more often. There’s no sure fire way to find out who these people are – you just have to discover them for yourself. If a blog is part of a network (9rules is one that springs to mind *2*), you can be a bit more assured that the content you find there is trustworthy, but that is still not a hard and fast rule. Use the brains you were graced with, with a healthy dose of skepticism to help it all down.

Addressing the issue of whether people want to be linked to, just use common sense. Whilst you can’t assume totally that, because they are on the internet they want to be linked to, the balance is probably leaning toward the “I want readers!” camp. If you think it’s appropriate, provide a link, but be prepared to take down the link if you are asked. Asking before you link is just not practical, nor necessary for the average post. If you are linking to something incredibly personal, maybe take a moment to think, and if in doubt either ask, or refrain.

While the above holds true for personal blogs, if you are linking to someone with the mind that you are publishing for a wider audience, say in a newspaper article, it is common courtesy to inform people that they are being quoted. A little while back, the really rather lovely Danah talked about blogs and the mainstream media. Not only is the post partly responsible for setting me off thinking about linking again (and so could be considered part-parent to this mutant of a post), but as she says, it raises another question. How long are we to be held to task for our views? I am on the fence on this one. There are times that it is useful to see how one persons ideas have evolved. At the same time, I can think of instances when it is better just to let the past lie beaten in the dust. I would be mortified, and I know many fellow academics would also, if, for example, someone turned round and started quoting my undergraduate dissertation at me as an example of what I believe now. Yes, it reflects the opinions I held at the time I wrote it, but they are not the same opinions I hold today, and who knows what I will think in the future? Again, there is no hard and fast rule on how you should quote somebody’s work, but if it is over a year old, please consider that they may have changed their mind by now and quote accordingly. “Cas thought…” rather than “Cas thinks…” Easy.

Oh, and don’t misquote me. I will find out, hunt you down, and beat you with sticks of celery. Not fatal, I know, just unpleasant for you and therapeutic for me.

Do, please, always try and include a short intro/description/pointer with the link. Something might not offend you, but there are some rather sensitive bunnies out there, and it’s only fair that you give people the chance NOT to click on something that might be offensive to them. Also flag up items that might require you to subscribe to a site to view them (certain newspapers, journals etc). If you can find an alternate (totally free and open) source, that would be even better.

And bear in mind the slightly dubious legal ground bloggers stand on with regard hyperlinking to illegal content. But that’s not a worry for us, is it, because we are all good little boys and girls. Aren’t we?

There endeth todays lesson on the ethics and practicalities of linking.

Now, because all of the above is just my opinion, feel free to disagree with me. That’s why I have a comments field after all.

Endnotes:
*1*This is a guideline not a rule. Sometimes I just can’t help myself. Yes, I know, I’m a bad Buddhist. I kill bugs and eat meat as well.
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*2*One other network that will hopefully prove to be successful is the Wikablog. Still in its infancy (it’s barely even crawling yet), I think it is a brilliant idea. A community of like(ish)-minded bloggers coming together and saying “This is my blog, and these are the blogs I like, and these are the reasons why”. Though this does slightly fall foul of the whole linking to people without their permission issue, I think that the benefits might outweigh the drawbacks. We’ll wait and see. If there’s one thing I have learnt over this past year it is that you can never, ever, ever predict how a community will act, let alone whether you wiki will (a) be a success or (b) turn out how you wanted it to.
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are we having fun yet?

Cas is currently

That last post was a little over long. Sorry. Just something I wanted to get off my chest.

I am aware that, at nearly 3000 words, it stretches what you would want to read on a blog to breaking point and, most likely, beyond. Whilst I think it is worth it (I wouldn’t have posted it other wise), I will totally understand if you just let it sail blythely on by.

I will now leave you to read it (or not, no pressure, up to you), whilst I go and write 5000 words on what you need to take into consideration when you try and implement a wiki for a couple of thousand archaeologists to use. Here’s a tip – don’t do it. It might seem like a good idea, but trust me, it’s not worth. Really, really not worth it.

i felt like poisoning a monk

Cas is currently

You do become something of a connoisseur of hold music, voice-recognition systems, and call centers in general when you move into a new property. Over the last two and a half months, (I am including the house-hunting time as well), I have been put on hold more times, and dealt with more voice recognition systems, than I can shake a moderately sized stick at.

Moose has managed to get out of having to do most of these calls. That’s the price you pay for being home during the day and not having a full time job. I’m also willing to get pissy on the phone, and refuse to be fobbed off, which makes me the best person to deal with the sundry calls that need to be dealt with. Gas companies, electricity companies, water companies, letting agencies, television companies, insurance companies… the list seems endless, and with each call my respect for the brain power of the average call-centre worker diminishes. Another few calls like the ones I’ve had to deal with over the last couple of days and you’ll need an electron microscope to see the level of respect I no longer have. I am friends with people who have worked/still work in call centers and they are very nice and intelligent people. I have, once or twice, had the pleasure of dealing with ‘a customer service representative’ who clearly has more than two brain cells to rub together.

Just, on the whole, I rarely seem to get to speak to these people. I get the people with speech impediments, the people who mumble, the people who talk too fast. I have some minor hearing problems and having to repeatedly ask someone to repeat themselves is just infuriating for the both of us. I get the people who clearly have trouble with the concept “one plus one equals two”. I’m not saying I want to speak to someone who is a nuclear physicist in their spare time (they’d make awful call-center people anyway), but it would be nice if the person on the other end of the phone was capable of a basic level of coherent thought.

I have a personal rule to always (at least attempt to) be nice to call center staff. They have the power to make you very happy (or very very unhappy). When TNT managed to loose the laptop I’d ordered from Apple and I was trying to sort it all out, by the time it was over I was on first name terms with the girl from Apple. She was wonderful and helpful and did an amazing job, and I emailed the customer service people to tell them so. Yes, comments shouldn’t always be for the bad stuff. Good service deserves recognition too. Just, you so rarely come across good service.

I doubt, as a career, few people go to their guidance councilor and say “I want to work in a call centre”. But people do end up doing the job and they should do the best they can at it. Grrr.

(Rant almost over.)

I don’t think I am calm enough yet to go into the horrors that is National Grid-Transco’s voice-recognition system. Let me just say “ARGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!” and leave it at that.

Please, please, please, if your company has a voice recognition system, or any other form of gate-keeper system, can you give it an escape hatch? The words “or press 3 to speak to a customer service representative” are some of the sweetest ten words in the English language. And if your gate-keeper has more than, say, three levels, please redesign it. Press one for this, then two for this, then one for this, then four for this, then… then it’s Ms Hyde the poor call-center innocent has to deal with. Oh, and a voice recognition system should be able to store the information I tell it (address, name, problem etc) so that, when I finally DO get to speak to a human being, they can see what I’ve already spent ten minutes saying to a machine, and not make me say it all over again.

Humph. There endeth today’s rant.

A few companies that stick in my mind:
British Gas’ hold music, and gate-keeper system are not too infuriating. So prolonged exposure to the musak made my brain want to bleed out of my ears, but that’s standard across the board. The three people I ended up speaking to this week all seemed on the ball and did a pretty good job.

National Grid/Transco, on the other hand, made me burst into tears once I’d finished speaking to them. Ok, they’re not totally to blame, but they didn’t help. Their voice recognition gate-keeper is one of the worst I have ever had the misfortune to deal with. It didn’t understand my accent, and I have a pretty vanilla basic British accent with little regionality to it. It didn’t save my responses so I had to repeat EVERYTHING to the human being I finally spoke to. And it had no escape hatch so, when I had to keep calling them back, I had to go through the ENTIRE rigmarole another two times. Not only annoying, but expensive, seeing as how it was my phone bill. The first two people I spoke to weren’t too hot, but the third today was ok.

Apple Customer Service. When you finally get through to them your will to live hasn’t been too sapped by their hold music (unless you ring over the holidays – there’s only so many times you can here ‘Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer’ before you are ready to commit homicide). The staff know what they’re talking about, are helpful, and (most importantly) have individual lines that they are WILLING to give out to people with more indepth problems, so you can be sure you speak to the same person when you ring back. This, trust me, saves a whole lot of hassle.

TNT. I won’t go into detail about TNT. Just trust me when I say their customer service is appalling, their staff must be sourced from another planet for all the sense they make, and they have a distressing habit of ‘misplacing’ expensive items of equipment. The last three things I have had carried by TNT have all gone astray at least twice.

Ok, normal service resumed. Cas has successfully vented her frustration and is, whilst still a bit down, no longer so pissed off she wants to rend fluffy bunnie-wunnies limb from limb.

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i was going to capture a geisha but they’re damn nippy buggers

Cas is currently

Have you ever had to sum up what you feel your greatest achievement has been? In 200 words? That isn’t your degree? If you have, then you might have some comprehension of why I used todays smilie. If you haven’t, then you are very lucky.

Why can’t I talk about my degree? Well, because the chappy from the recruitment bureau told me I was not to. The job I am applying for (which will never come off, so this is the last I will be mentioning it) is a graduate postion, hence everyone applying will be a graduate, so your degree doesn’t really set you apart. That makes a kind of sense.

At the same time, my degrees (undergrad and the current post-grad) are the two things I am most proud of in my life. Finishing Liverpool was no picnic, what with one thing and the other, and the day I graduated was by far the greatest moment of my life bar none. There were times I really didn’t think I would make it, so to be up on that stage, shaking the hand of a man I had never met before, whilst wearing a silly hat and a gown that made me look like a dumpy-arsed penguin, was something special to me. As for this year? Again, not exactly a cake-walk, though for different reasons.

I want to be able to say that the thesis I am currently writing is my greatest achievement (because I truly believe that it is), but I am not allowed to. What else can I talk about? That I was head of machine sales at Whittard of Chelsea is hardly going to cut it. I also don’t think talking about this blog thingy I started back in April that has gained me a few new random internet acquaintances is quite what they are looking for. (Though I am proud of both those things too).

So, in order to give me a few ideas, I need you, my wonderful blog minions, to tell me what your greatest achievement has been.

Whilst you are thinking of that, have some pictures I found lurking on the mobile (click for bigger peeps).

The quilt I made for Brother Dearest and his SO for their joint birthdays.
quilt - click to see bigger on Flickr

How many post-grads does it take to program a phone? And I still can’t work the damn thing!
Moose & Cas & the Phone - click to see bigger on Flickr

a committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled

Cas is currently

Taking into consideration the (one, thank you JB) input I had about the new-format Sunday Roasts, here are my favourites from the past week. The del.icio.us tag ‘sundayroast’ is still very much up and running, so do subscribe to that as well, just to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Starters:
Japan photoset on Flickr. Flickr really does provide you with some visual treats sometimes.

Around China photoset on Flickr. Again, Flickr showing its wonderfulness.

Streetcards – Gaping Void. So hard not to just order a pack of these right now.

mamamusings: isowantone. This is linked to the next item and contains the story behind how it came into being.
I So Want One! Got that tween in your life who you just can’t think of the right present for? Everyone dreads that blank “thank you so much auntie cas, i’ve always wanted socks for christmas’ look you get when you’ve picked up something SO not cool. Well, this here might be the solution to all our problems. A blog written by an 11 year old, reviewing the toys that HE would want. An no, I wouldn’t have linked unless I thought it was a great idea and well executed. Kudos. Go, support the next generation 🙂

Barcode Art. Some of his portraits are mindbending. You’ll never look at the humble barcode in the same way again.

Guide to writing Sci-Fi and Fantasy.

Dr Who – animated series. From the BBC so they’re all official like. Got one written by Douglas Adams. I really wish I hadn’t found these – more blooming distractions!

Main Course:
Wikablog Home Page. I was tempted, mainly because it links two of my current favourite topics (blogs and wikis), but also because I think it is valid. Or not. What does it have that makes it stand out from all the other blog-listing things out there, other than that anyone can add blogs or change the description of blogs. In that sense, I like. Sharing what you know is good is always… good. At the same time, what if someone added you and you didn’t want to be added? There is no ‘delete’ mechanism. Wait and see. It is young yet. Needs a critical mass of people to make it work I think. I also think that there should be more expressed personality on the wiki. Just talking out loud here, but do think that on their homepages, people should put “and these are the blogs that I think are rather snazzy…” Get a community going. Hmmmm… *wombles off to have a quiet muse*
Five days later, I’m liking it, not only because it is (still) a wiki, but because it introduced me to the Scary Duck. Read the first post and laughed so much I sprayed Cookie Crunch all over the desk.

Wikipedia hardcopy for the developing world. Wikipedia in print… Does seem to detract some from the whole point of the site, but hey – if it is for developing nations. Only, there will be some kind of vetting of the articles used, won’t there? WE all know not to trust 100% what wikipedia says, but the thought of Wikipedia being the only/main source of information is a little scary. And I like wikis!

Jimmy Wales talking at SIMS about Wikipedia. Hear the founder in his own words. The file is large, but worth the download. I am not totally sold on everything he has to say, but it really is a treat to hear him.

JB’s nanowrimo2005 blog. Go, read, support. I will be doing just that once the Beast is fully tamed and handed in.

Megatrain.com. For London/So’ton/Portsmouth people, this is great. You can get to London on the train for £1. Yes, that’s right, £1.

apophenia: growing up in a culture of fear: from Columbine to banning of MySpace. More thought provoking goodness from Danah.
For American youths, life is an open book, via blogs – Technology – International Herald Tribune. A good counterpoint to Danah’s previous words.

Sleep – An Insight. I get grumpy if I don’t get my full 8 hours (and with the CC on lates, I am currently only getting 7, hence Cas = a bit snarky right now). This is a Nature (the journal) special all about sleep. Some pretty interesting facts actually.

An open letter to Disney Store UK. *Is nodding head in agreement with all said*

Blogger – turning on comment moderationTurning on the word verification has stopped 99% of my blog-spam, but a higher volume site might find this useful.

Afters:
Heated USB gloves. Tried to think of some snappy caption for this, and I really can’t think of anything to do them justice. I really am speechless,. I can make note only of my speechlessness.

Pastor electrocuted during baptism. This is just too bizarre NOT to be included in the Roast. Especially considering I just typoed it as ‘baTpism”. No idea what batpism is, but it must be dangerous…

Edible toaster. Why?

Walk like an Egyptian zombie thing… More zombie goodness, this time courtesy of Mata.

Designer creates wall of breasts. I couldn’t decide if this was worthy of serving in the Roast, or leaving for Leftovers. But the sheer glee in the CC’s eyes when he saw the headline told me it had to be main meal material. Actually, the reasoning behind the design is a good idea.

And for the best of the rest, go to del.icio.us tag ‘leftovers’.

Also, for more on both sides of the whole Google Print/online book debacle, keep an eye on del.icio.us tag ‘onlinebooks’, which is the tag under which I will be stashing stuff relating to that topic.

i am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it

Cas is currently

(I was going to serve this up as part of the Sunday Roast, but as I got typing I realised I had more that I wanted to say than could be fitted in a snappy two line summary. This is a topic I felt was deserving of its own post.)

Google Print gets going.

There has been a lot of kurfuffle lately about Googles plan to digitize every piece of information on the face of the planet and make it searchable, with a lot of good arguments presented on both sides of the debate. There has also been a load of complete dross spouted by proponents of both camps.

I figured it was about time I made my position clear.

I love reading. Nothing will ever persuade me that curling up in bed with a cup of tea and a good (print version) book isn’t one of the most pleasurable experiences known to mankind. Curling up with the laptop and an e-book just isn’t the same – eyestrain aside, there is the constant worry that I’ll spill the cup of tea, as I have been known to do on occasion. Books and bedsheets dry out. £2000 laptops tend not to. I find it hard to ever think of a time when I won’t want to be surrounded by books, if for no other reason than access to my entire library should not depend on remembering to charge my laptop battery. Nor, computer-saints preserve us, will it all be wiped out when (not if, when) my hard drive explodes. Barring fires and certain other natural disasters, my physical library should survive, and you can be pretty sure that a computer wouldn’t survive such events either. It is very telling that you can still read books written before the invention of the printing press, but frequently run into problems with media only a few years old if it is in the wrong format.

All of which might lead you to think that I am averse to the idea of digitising books.

You would be wrong. I think knowledge should be shared and, especially with more obscure texts, the average person simply doesn’t have access to a physical copy. My current research would have been impossible if I had had to rely on inter-library-loaning every single obscure journal article, instead of logging onto JStor or Google Scholar. The number of times I have read a print-article and gone ‘oh, if only I could search within the text for this one word…’ As a matter of fact my entire current thesis is based on the idea of open access to information. And Google Print isn’t really about reading novels online. It is far better suited to the person in search of information. Where is this quote from? Who wrote that? What were the findings of the 1936 Glastonbury Historical Society? *1*

I can see why there are some rumblings of discontent in the publishing industry – this is just one more in a long line of nails in the coffin of the conventional publication model *2*. As it stands, publishing houses pay authors a sum for the rights to their work, they publish it, charge people to buy copies, and (hopefully) get a profit. The mechanisms currently out there for publishers to get their money back when things are published/accessible online are clunky, often obtrusive, and wholly over-reliant on software/hardware dependent solutions that almost certainly won’t work in a year or so.

It is understandable why the thought of free access to the content of their books sends these people into a tailspin, but at the same time, just think on the benefits. Number one being FREE advertising for the work. Equate it to people dipping into the book in the bookstore to decide if they like it before they purchase it, because that is what most people are going to use it for. Finding information, trying it on for size, before committing to a fairly non-trivial purchase. It is one of the more galling features of modern life when you buy a text book online and get it delivered only to find that the one thing you needed it for is 1) not mentioned in the book or 2) only mentioned once or 3) completely and utterly wrong (all of which has happened to me more than once).

Publishers don’t charge people to get books out of the local library which, you have to agree, is one of the major attractions of the local lending library in this day and age. Is what Google Print trying to do really so very different?

I am grossly over simplifying, and gleefully ignoring copyright, and many other issues, which will keep legions of lawyers for both sides very happy for a very long time. At its simplest, the publishing houses are fighting tooth and nail for their very existence.

Rather than fighting, they might be better served accepting this new way of doing things, and evolving into something new that makes the most of the brave new world. The Internet, online access, and the drive for transparent access to information aren’t going to go away any time soon. I am not sold on the idea that Google are the best people to be in charge of this. They have shown a few tendencies which indicate they are not as appreciative of the whole ‘transparent data’ idea as they claim to be. But it is being done, right here and right now, and hiding heads like so many ostriches really isn’t the solution, nor is trying to freeze progress in its tracks.

A phrase I really hate does spring to mind right now – you can’t make an omlette without cracking some eggs. They said that VHS would kill the movie industry. Hollywood seems to have done alright. Give Google Print a chance. Or, better yet, start your own programs. Just because Google have decided to do it this way, doesn’t mean it’s the right way.

Endnotes:
*1*I’ve had to track down that last piece of information before, and it took me about a week, searching through ten different libraries, to find something that might have taken five minutes if the data had been online, not in a water-damaged box in the basement of the GHS’ HQ which hadn’t actually been catalogued. I only actually found the data because of a chance phone conversation with the chap who cleaned the office. Long story.Back
*2*Oooh, there’s some gloriously mixed metaphors!Back
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when a man is wrestling a leopard in the middle of a pond, he is in no position to run

Cas is currently at life, but at the reviewed piece of technology

Mata, this morning, flagged a new service, Pandora, as one that is worth a play. It’s a streaming radio-player with a difference – you put in a band/track you like, and it will automatically create playlists for you based on that. The people behind it have done it a little differently though. Rather than rely on genres, each individual song is analysed, catalogued, and the selections are based on things like influences, the key the music is in, the beat, vocal harmony, instruments used, and all sorts of other stuff I have no idea about.

I was dubious, I will admit it, but I couldn’t decide on what to listen to whilst I beat my head against ‘Electronic Publication‘, so I fired up Pandora and decided to make the most of their 10 hour free trial.

I plugged in “Matchbox Twenty”, *1* and, skeptically, settled back to see what was presented for my listening pleasure.

I have to say, I’ve been listening to Pandora for most of the day, trying it out, and at most it throws up something I don’t like every ten or so tracks that I do like. And when that happens, you just tell them ‘I don’t like this’, and your preferences get adjusted accordingly. About every third or fourth track, I adore, and I’ve added two new bands to my “must by their album when I have disposable income” list.

The implementation is spot on, the service has skipped just twice in the entire time I’ve been listening, unlike many other Internet radio stations, and I am seriously tempted to pay the subscription fee.

If I have a niggle, it is that even the ‘small’ version of the player is fairly hefty when you only have a 12 inch screen, and it requires pop-ups to be enabled. You don’t realise how many pop-ups are out there till you’ve forgotten you’d turned the blocking off. But that’s one niggle and there’s no law that says I can’t just leave the full version running in another tab, or minimize that one window. Maybe a nice little standalone app could be made at somepoint, though that does defeat the portability of such a sweetly coded in-browser flash application.

This, ladies and gentle-beans is what Flash should be used for, not for infuriating headers/display elements/flash-only sites that take an age to load and do nothing that standard HTML couldn’t have done for a fraction of the overhead and annoyance value… *2*

The nicely integrated ‘buy this at amazon or iTunes’ links are remarkably tempting, but I must practice my willpower, damnit!

So what has Pandora taught me today? Well, it turns out I seem to like music that features:
electric rock instrumentation
country influences
mild rhythmic syncopation
a subtle use of vocal harmony
major key tonality
With the occasional side order of:
mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation
acoustic rhythm guitars

They do say that, whilst your musical taste changes over time, certain forms and arrangements of music will always be your favourite. You’re just wired a certain way. Whatever kinked me along the road, I do seem to favour middle of the road lyrical light rock. With male vocalists. I can’t think of one track it’s given me today that had a female singer. Huh.

I do know why I am in a major beat today – I feel all down, and just the thought of listening to stuff in a sobbing minor key is enough to have me bursting into tears.

I wonder what will happen when I ask it to play me stuff related to Sweet (some good old fashioned glam rock, and the first band I ever remember actively liking. I wore the casette tape out I listened to it so much when I was younger) and

Oh.

My.

God.

Sweet also it turns out have mild rhythmic syncopation, major key tonality, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, electric guitar riffs, and vocal harmonies.

So I know who is to blame for my musical taste now. My father.
Damn him playing T-Rex, Sweet, and Queen at full volume every time we went on a car journey.

Just goes to show, you never know what is going to scar your kids for life.

*UPDATE – 11th November 2005*
It is now possible to use Pandora without paying, as they have introduced an add-supported version. Currently this is only licensed for the States, so you need to plug in a US zip code to show where you live. I am a law-abiding citizen so I will refrain from pointing out the obvious holes in this system. Fingers crossed for international licensing soon!

Endnotes:
*1*A band whose babies I have wanted to have since I first heard ‘Rest Stop’ in Torks’ car on the way back from the cinema in Taunton, July 2001Back
*2*Don’t get me started on my Flash rant, please, life really is too short.Back
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