Internet

Another Oppressed Minority

~ Cheryl ~ 14 Comments

While I was pleased to see New Scientist publishing a collection of fiction last week, I thought Stan Robinson’s associated attack on the Booker Prize was unlikely to get anywhere. The Woolf anecdote was good, but boosting one genre by attacking another is never going to work. And as the Booker folks explained to Alison Flood, they are dependent on what publishers send them, so they can’t be expected to take all of the blame.

Nevertheless, this being the Internet, is was only a matter of time before someone took exception to what Stan said and decided to play the Victim Politics card. Oh woe, we are oppressed! Us poor LitFic folks need our Booker Prize, because the evil, nasty science fiction folks have their own awards and get all the glory and the money and we have to have our own special award that’s only for us so we can get shiny things too, otherwise it is NOT FAIR!!! (Cue desperate sobbing.) Yes, really, here it is.

Also here’s someone else with an interesting table of how often different prizes get mentioned in the online media, based on searches of Google News.

That in itself is worth considering, though, because it introduces a question about what gets into the Google News search. Locus does, and io9. I’m pretty sure that SFAW doesn’t. What about, say SF Signal?

It turns out that the way to get into Google News is to ask Google if they will list you. They don’t guarantee to do so, but then after the recent HG Wells coverage it seems unlikely that they’d ban us. So, has anyone out there tried to get listed? And if so did it succeed?

BTW, the page for submitting content appears to be broken at the moment, which is why I haven’t done any experimentation.

Women and Wikipedia

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

The Wikimedia Foundation has been looking at participation in Wikipedia and, according to Mashable, has come up with some interesting results. Apparently only 13% of Wikipedia contributors are women, and only 31% of Wikipedia users are women. This is perhaps because Wikipedia is a steaming heap of fetid dingo’s kidneys and most women have more sense that to have anything to do with it. Your mileage may vary. Your explanations welcome in comments. Go!

(This post especially for Lisa Gold).

Oh No, Link Salad

~ Cheryl ~ 12 Comments

Sorry about this folks, but I do need to get some paid work out of the way before the end of the month. This is in lieu of proper blogging.

Jed Hartman pointed me at the Geek Feminism Blog, and in particular the Where are all the men bloggers? post, which is hilarious.

Justine is absolutely spot on when she says that wannabe writers tend to ask Very Wrong Questions.

Crochety claims that Jules Verne and HG Wells didn’t write science fiction because they didn’t call it “science fiction”, which I think is the stupidest thing I have heard on a very stupid topic for a very long time.

Damien Walter wants to start a Support Our Zines Day, and as he’s planning to donate money to Clarkesworld as part of it I’m certainly in favor, though there are, of course, many other fine zines out there that deserve your support.

Tim Holman has some more fascinating data, this time proving that urban fantasy is keeping the SF&F business afloat.

SFWA Gets a New Face

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The SFWA web site has got an overhaul this weekend. It looks very nice, though I’m not sure about this tempting people with a cup of coffee on each page. It makes me thirsty just looking at it. I’m especially pleased to see that they are doing something to promote their members via the site. There’s a definite sense that SFWA is going somewhere these days.

21st Century Worldcons – An Update

~ Cheryl ~ 13 Comments

Back when I did my post on 21st Century Worldcons I suggested that Web 2.0 techniques could be used to better involve those who cannot attend the convention in what is going on. That, of course, requires a web site. I haven’t had the time, and don’t have the skills, to do that properly, but it is amazing what you can fling together in a hurry using WordPress and a few simple plug-ins. As a result, I’d like to present to you, ConReporter.com.

What’s all this about? Well, the technical term is a “mashup”. That means it is a site that gathers material from elsewhere. In this particular case it does it using RSS feeds. So people who are attending a convention give us their feed URLs. We put them all into the web site. And then anyone who can’t go to the con has us as a one-stop-shop for a wide variety of reports on the event. It is Citizen Journalism in action. I have already signed up a bunch of people. You may recognize some of the names.

It isn’t perfect by any means. I’d like the reports to be much more searchable, but that requires more complicated programming. What I have done instead is assign tags to each reporter on the basis of their interests. That means that users of the blog can easily get a list of those reporters who have an interest in, say, costuming, or science panels.

Someone, I am sure, will accuse me of stealing other people’s content. That’s certainly not the plan. We only syndicate people’s feeds if they ask us to. Of course that means that you have to ask. We won’t automatically include your feeds just because you are reporting on the con.

What I need now is help. Kevin and I cannot run this by ourselves. We’ll be way too busy. And besides, we need reporters. So I am looking for two groups of people.

Reporters: Are you going to be at Worldcon? Will you be blogging or tweeting from the event? If so we’d love to have your reports included on the site. We are particularly interested in people whose interests are not yet covered, and in people who are going to be reporting in languages other than English. This is a Worldcon, and we want the whole world to be able to participate.

Editors: If this thing takes off as we hope it will, we’ll need help over the next few weeks getting all of the reporters set up on the site. We also need people who are not going to be at Worldcon who can monitor what is going on and create blog posts on the home page highlighting particularly interesting reports. We need people who can act as studio editors for the CoverItLive sessions, answering questions and approving comments.

Long term this is something I hope other people will take over. I hope the technique can be used for other conventions, and I don’t have the time to keep it running. But I’m putting it out there because I want people to take an interest in Worldcon, and I want people who run conventions to see what can be done.

Feedback would be very much appreciated.

The Kids Are All Wrong (Again)

~ Cheryl

Lunch was spend reading the new issue of the very fine women’s writing magazine, Mslexia. The lead article is all about kids and reading. It appears that reading is on the decline throughout the Western world (Oh noes! Moral Panic!!!). But, like most statistics, it all depends on what you measure:

An article in The New York Times last year profiled Nadia, a teenager who struggles to engage with books. She enjoyed one history book, but couldn’t get into the fantasy novel that her mother bought her. The article then sadly states that ‘Nadia never became a big reader.’ It then goes on to detail her obsession with Japanese manga comics and online fan-fiction, which she both reads and writes.

Because, you know, magazines, graphic novels, and everything delivered electronically rather than on paper, is not “reading”.

Sigh.

Anyway, it was a great article, and I note that the author, Lili Wilkinson, runs a web site for YA readers called Inside A Dog. Scott Westerfeld is one of her writers in residence. And the whole thing is run by the Centre for Youth Literature, at the State Library of Victoria, which means that it is in Melbourne and should therefore be a primary target for anyone doing PR for next year’s Worldcon. Hint, hint.

Full Disclosure (or else?)

~ Cheryl

CNet News reports that the US Federal Trade Commission is to crack down on bloggers who write glowing reports of products that have received for free in lieu of payment for their services in writing those reviews. The intention here is to go after people who receive things like free computers or cars or finanacial services and pretend that they’ve bought them, but because of the way laws get written it could easily end up being loose enough to take in book reviewers. The CNet article even speculates that the regulations might extend to affiliate schemes, so even if you bought the book you could be pinged for not disclosing you got a cent or two if someone else bought it through your site.

I expect there to be much wailing and gnashing of teeth over this in the blogosphere in the next few days. Personally I don’t expect the affiliate scheme thing to happen because Amazon will be on the ball and lobby against it. I also don’t expect the FTC to waste its time going after small fry like book reviewers. However, the anarchist in me worries about governments accumulating excuses to go after people they don’t like, however petty those reasons might be.

Internet Piracy

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

While New Zealand is a remarkably beautiful place full of wonderful people, there is one great drawback to the country – it has terrible Internet service. The hotel in Auckland was merely antediluvian: the idea that 200 Mb of traffic is a “monthly” allowance is just absurd. Auckland airport was actually OK. I gave me 100 Mb of download for NZ$10. I wish I had been there longer. But the hotel in Wellington was a disaster.

I’m not too upset with Mercure over this. They don’t provide the ISP service themselves, and by the look of the face of the guy on the front desk when I checked out I’m by no means the only unhappy customer. I think the message is getting through that they need to change providers. 100 Mb / day at $40 is pretty steep compared to the airport charge, but that assumes that you get 100 Mb. Watching my email download, and checking the usage meter, it was pretty clear that either I had some very big incoming downloads (much bigger than the ones that had come in while I was at Auckland airport) or the meter was over-clocking. I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt on that, but there’s no way I believe that logging onto Facebook for a minute or so would have chewed up around 11 Mb.

I can’t see any obvious reason why Internet access in NZ should be so expensive, other than lack of both competition and effective regulation. The country doesn’t lack a decent phone service; it should be able to provide DSL just like anywhere else in the world. And even if there service is expensive, there’s no excuse for cheating customers by over-counting their usage.

Worldcon Bloggers Wanted

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The Montreal Worldcon is looking for people who are going to be blogging, tweeting or whatever from the convention. They don’t say why in the post, but as this is coming from their press room people I’m pretty sure they want to know who’ll be pestering them for things and what they can do to help. Sign up here (and hopefully we’ll get several folks blogging in French too).

Unsurprisingly the #1 question is about wi-fi, which I am still working on.

Meanwhile, Back to Work

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

The live webcast from BayCon was working tolerably well. Video was heavily pixilated and it the connection dropped a few times, but the audio was pretty good. Sadly the same can’t be said of the accompanying chat which was pretty stupid and childish. That’s the last time I’ll be bothering to watch one of those.

The HADOPI issue

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

One things I didn’t manage to follow up on fully while I was in France was the issue of Internet censorship. As one commenter (thank you, Paul!) mentioned, France is in the process of passing some fairly draconian laws that allow for disconnection of users suspected of piracy. There’s an overview in The Guardian here. It all sounds very similar to what happened in New Zealand a while back, with Internet users potentially being pronounced “guilty” on the say-so of big corporations and no right to a trial. That one we won. As for France (insert Gallic shrug)?

I talked about this briefly with Lionel and he says the situation is quite complex. In particular there is European activity in the pipeline that could render the new French regulations illegal under European law. Where things will go from there it is difficult to say. Sorry I can’t be more precise about this.

Webby Awards

~ Cheryl

I’ve just been looking through the list of Webby Award winners to see if there was anything that SFAW should be reporting on. There wasn’t – the closest we came was Coraline being a nominee in the Movies category. It is interesting, however, to see the BBC and The Guardian picking up a bunch of awards. Journalism is definitely going international, and with so many US papers being so local, and the NYT shooting itself in the foot with the pay wall, British news sources seem to be doing rather well.

The other thing I want to highlight is the winner in the Science category, which is the Cassini Mission Website. It has certainly has some awesome material to post, and most of that material has been provided by the project’s imaging team, headed up by Carolyn Porco. Score one for my Ada Lovelace Day pick.

Economist on Internet TV

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Today’s issue of The Economist includes a fascinating article about Internet television. Economists love talking about disruptive technologies, and this one seems to be a classic. According to the article, cable TV companies are doing everything they can to resist the adoption on Internet TV because they are terrified that it will destroy their business model.

Having said that, once of the things that opening up the market will do is emphasize the power law nature of the market. Right now minority taste TV companies make money because they get packaged with more popular channels by cable and satellite companies. In the ultra-competitive world of Internet TV, consumers will eventually only pay for the programs they want, they won’t even have to subscribe to a channel. And that means huge viewing figures for whatever is popular, and a very tiny share of the market for everyone else. Just like trying to sell a book on Amazon. This will doubtless be good and bad in varying quantities.

Personally I won’t care too much as long as I can get baseball on TV when I’m in the UK, and cricket and rugby on TV when I’m in the US.

Meanwhile I’d be interested to hear from anyone who is using Boxee. The only Linux machine I have with me is the Asus, which is not ideal for TV-watching.

More Quiz Stupidity

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

I got caught by another one of those online quiz memes. This one purported to tell you whether you were a hard core science fiction reader. The preamble reads:

The Hard Core Fan knows that Science Fiction is first and foremost about the Written Word. Those of the body need only a paperback in the pocket and anyplace can be home. Do you read ravenously? Then this test is for you!

Ha! Having done the quiz I can tell you that it is nothing of the sort. It is a quiz for people who have read nothing in the last 30 years. A quiz in which the most modern writer mentioned is Harlan Ellison (aside from slipping in JM Straczynski as an obvious wrong answer). And then it has the nerve to say that only someone who knows their ancient history back to front can be a “true fan”.

Is it any wonder that young people don’t go to conventions when they see attitudes like that?

A hard core fan is not someone who only reads fiction that was popular decades ago and turns his nose up at anything more recent. A hard core fan is someone who keeps on reading as new books are published.

Not content with smug arrogance, the quiz also rates a FAIL on one of its questions:

What is the most important form that written Science Fiction shaped? the short story, the novella, the novellete, the novel.

I have no idea what the “correct” answer to that is supposed to be, but really, what a question.

Oh, and I did rate “true fan” when I took the quiz, though I’m sure I got several questions wrong.

I know, I know. I should just ignore online quizzes.

Liveblogging Test Post Mortem

~ Cheryl

The test with CoverItLive that I ran yesterday worked reasonably well, but it did highlight an issue with speed of posting from Twitter. The tweets that Kevin and I did through our accounts normally posted fairly quickly, but anything with one of the listed hashtags in it was very slow to post.

For Montreal this is no problem. What we want is to capture the thoughts of meeting attendees while they are in the city. That doesn’t need to be live. On the other hand, for things live the Hugo coverage we’ll probably want to do without importing everyone’s tagged tweets anyway because that would clog up the show.

So the plan for the weekend remains to create an event that we keep open, mainly to collect tweets from people in Montreal, but also for you to post questions. Kevin and I will try to do a live Q&A at some point, but as we won’t know our schedule until we get there we can’t advertise a time for that just yet.

By the way, I know I haven’t created a specific web site for this stuff yet. I am looking closely at Drupal because it appears to be the best solution for what I want to do, but I’ve not used it before so it will take me a while to get up to speed.

LiveBlogging Test for #Worldcon

~ Cheryl

I figured I ought to test out the latest CoverItLive software before I head out to Montreal. You can find the test here. Feel free to try test tweets with the #worldcon or #hugo hashtag.

I hope to use this technology as part of the coverage of the Anticipation committee meeting in Montreal next weekend (no, not reporting what’s said in the meeting, unless I’m asked to, reporting on Montreal). And I expect it will get used at other conventions I’m attending around the world this year.

Fannish Inquisition from Eastercon (& Montreal?)

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

Over at Eastercon, Geri Sullivan and Ben Yalow did a video presentation via the LXtra webcast about the Reno in 2001 Worldcon bid. There’s not a lot of new information, and having Geri on Skype videophone from the US introduced some annoying time delays, but it was great to see something like this being done. You can watch it here. It lasts 20 minutes.

Talking of Worldcon, Kevin and I will be in Montreal next weekend for a committee meeting. I do intend to take a good look around and shoot some video. We’ll also be tweeting, though not with the iPhone due to roaming costs so the photos will have to wait. Given that the BSFA’s Eastercon coverage through CoverItLive appears to have worked well, I’m planning to do something similar, and hopefully other attendees will tweet too (the hash tag will be #worldcon). Because we’ll be in meetings or out and about a lot of the time we won’t be able to keep an eye on it, so it would be nice if one or two people could offer to do so for us. I’d also like to schedule a Q&A session, but I can’t guarantee that as I don’t know what our schedule will be.