“Ugliness is so grim. A little beauty, something that is lovely, I think, can help create harmony which will lessen tensions.”
— Lady Bird Johnson

Just as the plethora of billboards ruined the skylines of Route 66 and other great highways of the past, advertising today in its most blatant forms has invaded any mental domain imaginable. Nowhere is safe, definitely not Twitter. It’s no surprise that online marketing and advertising would pounce on a free medium to promote their wares. To a point, I don’t blame them. Publicity is king; notoriety can be manufactured into benefit. Like I said, to a point.

Squarespace understood that point. They offered a free iPhone (actually a $199 gift card at an Apple Store). Each mention, each day, constituted an entry. Soon enough, the density of messages that had the #squarespace hashtag became deafening. Even their statement that one entry a day was enough was not enough for some some people. So Squarespace decided to reduce the noise even more and said that one entry serves in perpetuity.

Moonfruit (not to be linked here), on the other hand, has upped the stakes by giving out ten MacBook Pros. So far, they have not followed the Squarespace ettiquette, and my Twitter stream has been dominated by messages mentioning the company. It’s reached the point where a few of the people I’m following have posted numerous, consecutive messages with the hashtag in it.

The odds of winning in this game may be astronomical, but the power of denial can’t be denied. In the meantime, everyone’s Twitter streams have been littered with promotions, and, as Dan Zarella (@danzarrella) noted, it “is going to spawn like a million clones.” If it does, it looks like Twitter will be powerless to stop it. Hashtag contests are turning the people I following into spammers.

This, too, is different from a lottery. Games of chance where participants pay to play are usually regulated. Free raffles are usually not. Take note that I am not yet ready to call shenanigans on this, but instead of paid participation, people offer up their time. In a world of free content all vying for our attention, our time remains the most valuable asset we are all too willing to give up.

Moonfruit’s campaign and the clones it will spawn will lead to a general degradation in the aesthetic of the Twitter stream. To a user, we have but two choices: bear through it, or unfollow someone. Getting spammed three messages at a time by half of my users is a painful thing to sit through, because I’d rather not block or unfollow these people. They are still worth following, and it is this good will that I and others extend to the people we follow that companies capitalize on whenever they do these awful contests.

The Highway Beautification Bill went through an acrimonious process before being passed. Twitter, however, has only people who refuse to play such games to help prevent it from being a wasteland of useless hashtag promotions and nothing more.

1. You have to think of a conventionally acceptable number for your list. Fourteen seems off.
2. They’re usually bite-size chunks of nonsense.
3. This list item is here so I can hit fourteen. (See #2.)
4. List posts turn HTML unordered lists into disordered lists.
5. They tend to serve as linkbait, in spite of, or in accordance with, the author’s intentions.
6. The comments sections of these posts are full of sycophants.
7. Markup freaks like myself have to worry over OL, UL, or DL when Ps work just fine. (See #4.)
8. Lists don’t generally lead to discussion.
9. Santa Claus is the O.G. list writer. You’re all unoriginal.
10. Everytime I come across a list post, I think of Jakob Nielsen. In fact, this post makes me think of him now, eew.
11. The Book Of Lists fom the 1970s had more interesting stuff.
12. They don’t offer anything new about the author who put it together.
13. Lists generally get repeated into memes so much so that they drown out other quality stuff out there.
14. And the final, and most serious reason: lists tend to enumerate, but they don’t usually elucidate.

I recall when linkrot was the major issue for the web back in the late nineties. While it remains a problem today, I think that the web as a sandbox of emergent technologies has not only promoted linkrot, but something even worse. For now, let’s call it service rot. Today, we take for granted site services such as Google Analytics and Domains, URL shorterners like Bitly and TinyURL, and even social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Has it occured to anyone that these services will one day be gone? Is anyone else worried about how dependent we are on major services to promote ourselves and our brands?

I worry because back when I started blogging, oh, six or seven years ago, I tested the waters with Blogger. I had no comments, no blogroll except for the links I would manually edit into my template. Haloscan gave Blogger comments before it was bought by Google. Blogrolling gave me a link manager before anyone else could. Later on, I discovered B2, found a remarkable web host, and my site’s exposure grew just as the blogosphere did. I was an avid participant in the Conservative area of the blogsophere, and all sorts of little kaboodles came out. I made it to a large mammal in the TTLB ecosystem. I played in Blogshares. There are things I did that I don’t even remember doing.

As the number of participants grew, the fidelity of the services floundered. Haloscan would time out. Blogrolling would time out. TTLB? Time out. Blogshares? Well, people just stopped playing that. I can’t document any and all of the services that have gone through this cycle, but the general drift is that as these services grew, as the freeloading users refused to pay, and as the search for funding became more and more frustrating, some services just threw in the towel.

Epochs in the growth of the web are ushered in by groundbreaking ideas that attract capital in all its forms in the hopes to monetize these ideas. So many magazines and websites devote so much time performing case studies on the successes. What few people ever talk about is the disparity between the failures and the successes. Case studies of the failures would probably serve better as cautionary tales for those who have a great idea but do not know how to run a business, because the successful companies out there on the web are where they are not just because of superior product and marketing, but because they are aware of the mistakes their competitors made. They are able to anticipate problems that are a mere matter of eventuality.

The most obvious factor is the economics of scale. It affects us in business “in the real world,” and it affects blogs, online stores, and brochureware sites. It affects all of us, from Google’s massive array of free services to the lowliest blogger who pays five dollars a month in hosting. Each site is by nature a service that is provided to the rest of the web. As the number of service consumers grows, the operating costs for each grow as well. I conjecture that this growth is not so much linear compared to the growth of customers, but exponential, with a very small value for k. In non-mathematical terms, for most of us on shared hosting, or who are doing this blogging thing, or this plugin development thing, for free, or to build enough exposure to get some kind of money elsewhere, there is always a tipping point where the costs go beyond what we can afford, and once that point is reached, there is very little time before we have to shut things down all together.

I have seen this in the political blogosphere, where folks with great opinions and good research get pushed onto the stage, front and center, as when a post “goes viral.” Most of these authors don’t know their ways around anything beyond simple FTP, and are unprepared for the fabled Instalanche. Glenn Reynolds himself has complained, at the height of the MT vs. WP firefights, of WP-powered sites he’d link to that are unable to withstand the traffic. I’ve known a few people who’ve had to switch hosts multiple times with very little time in between moves as a result of CPU cycle abuse. The process is far from painless, and while paying someone to do it can ease the situation, it’s nonetheless a hassle.

As services grow and fail like the ebb and flow of the tides, how are we to cope? My suggestions in Part 2.

Some guy's stats on Twitter.

Seriously? Don’t you, um, have work?

First, when I’m done with a book, especially fiction, it goes into the dustheap of history unless I want to read a passage that I particularly relish. Stephen King’s The Stand is one of those books. If I don’t care to keep a book for posterity, I give it away. From what I understand, it’s not easy to give away a Kindle with a bunch of books and have the gift recipient be the owner of those copies. It’s weird, to apply the same ol’ rules of DRM-protected music to books, yah?

Second, I have a library of over a hundred books at home. Many were bought on Amazon, others, not. I don’t want to pay twice to have to own the book again in Kindle format. What I want is to be able to enter a control number for a book bought on Amazon, and I can download the electronic copy of a book I already own. I want a discount on an ISBN that I bought somewhere else by entering a control number for an electronic copy.

Some DVDs allow you to download a copy, albeit protected, for use on a portable device. Until e-book readers solve this little issue, I’m not buying one.

It’s about choices. Unfortunately, sometimes choices have to be made in the dark, with a less than full disclosure of material information. The infamous explanation by Roger Simon is currently not pulling up on my browser. Bits and pieces are out there, but this quip is what people are discussing:

Actually that part of our business has been losing money from the beginning, so the people getting their quarterly checks from PJM were getting a form of stipend from us in the hopes that advertisers would start to cotton to blogs and we could possibly make a profit. Didn’t happen. No wonder those people are kicking and screaming now that they are off the dole. I might too. [What's their beef? I thought most of them were free marketeer libertarians or something.-ed. Go figure.]

Jeff’s retort was scathing but appropriate. I see no reason whatsoever to keep the people on the ad network in the dark about business being in the red. I really don’t. To take that dig that PJM’s ad network has become a form of “wingnut welfare,” from the very person who founded that damn thing, was out of place. I don’t quite understand how the bloggers paid by the ad network never got the disclosure that not only are they benefitted from a loss-leader program, but that they were in fact contributory to it.

Did the PJM ad network fail because it was a throwback to medieval patronage of the arts? All clues seem to indicate “yes,” and the responsibility to choose was not necessarily that of the bloggers themselves. They thought they were blogging along just fine and making money for PJM while PJM was making money for the bloggers and the VCs.

Leftist bloggers, though, shouldn’t be so liberal with the schadenfreude. Patronage, as I believe, isn’t a good model. In the case of the PJM adnet, I’m glad to see it go. Graceless and charmless as the pink slip may have been, and given that some of the full-time bloggers have but a month to find new work, there is a benefit to its dismantling. For one, maybe we might venture a little past the all-too-familiar territory that PJM has built. Just in the writing of this post I’ve come across Locust Blog, and Atlas Shrugs. The number of blogs has risen, the signal-to-noise ratio has gotten really low, and quality, that ever-elusive metric, is hard to come by. The temptation to coalesce is strong, but the dangers—such as backscratching, banishment of unwelcome opinions—are real.

Burn bright or burn out doesn’t just apply to photography; it applies to everyone.

Canal phones offer much better sound than their “in ear” cousins, but in order to hear the full range of the sound (especially the bass), they must be inserted properly. This is definitely a subjective thing (ergo the different insertion tips), and something that takes practice and intimate knowledge of they layout of your ears. The phones come with a handy insertion guide, and Etymotic has a video on their site with even more detail.

Here’s what I’ve learned. First, make sure your ears are clean and dry! This is a great excuse to start being an adult about ear cleanliness. For the flanged tips, it helps to slightly moisten the flange prior to insertion. Don’t get it too wet! While a drop of water may help the tip slide into your ear canal, too much will make it easily slip back out. Use as little water as possible. To insert, slightly open your jaw, and pull on your ear, to straighten and open your ear canal. Which way you pull your ear will depend on which way your canal goes or bends. For me, I grab in the back, slightly above the lobe, and pull down and back. [...]

Seriously? Finagle your ear to accommodate canal buds? In order to listen to music at Godly quality while flying or waiting at the doc’s office? It might be worth the trouble, until you get a case of otitis externa. I still go by the old adage, Don’t put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear.

Coming from my Treo 650, that was a leap all its own. I chose the phone because I am a very heavy texter, and I was slowly getting the knack of using the keys, whose tactile response was definitely different from what I was used to.

I actually started to like texting on this phone. It’s easier on my pocket when I am at work, for one.

Then tonight, when I had 40 messages, I got a warning telling me that my messages memory is 80% full.

Damn you, VZW for providing a phone for heavy texters and not keeping in mind that maybe, just maybe, we like to keep our messages on hand. We have hearts too, and some messages have sentimental value.

I’m switching back to the Treo by Sunday, once I’ve bragged to everyone and their mother that I have this phone.

For some reason, after reading Owen Winkler speaking truth to Apple, the above line just came up in my head. Then again, Owen wasn’t really belligerent nor purposefully offensive in writing about how Ipods don’t work the way Windows users expect them to in the Windows environment, as well as a few key interface issues like in-song seek control. However, his post is so like lancing the proverbial sacred cow.

Most PC users already know how to perform a folder drill-down, and a Windows-Explorer–based manipulation of mobile audio player files. Most know how to do this from plenty of experience working with flash drives and digital cameras. When I had to manage an Ipod Shuffle for a while, using iTunes on a computer with a gigabyte and a half of RAM (still slowed the computer down to a crawl), I damn near felt like throwing it at the wall.

Interestingly enough when my friend let me use his Creative Zen Vision:M, I found it remarkable. I’ve always wanted one, even though I don’t have room for all the songs, until I think about how I can put in DivX/XviD avi files that play natively without a snag. Oh, yum. Porn on the go.

What’s the second rule? If you want to break the first rule, don’t use GMail. Plain and simple, right?

I don’t have Picasa installed. I don’t use the Google Desktop Search. And I have a fast enough connection not to sacrifice my privacy to have webpages load faster than usual. 37 Signals is on the case, which I found from Podz (who by the way has pics of fruit fraternization; creepy).

There are things Google does that are good for everyone: advertisers, Google, end-users. Then there are things Google does that deserve a warning for future generations to come that there are favors that come with too high a price to pay. At least the choice to patronize their services is still there.