A few comments on comments

So it is possible to post from bed. Though my lap may be overheating, I have to start hacking away at the backlog of things to post. One of them is about comments on this blog, something I was meaning to get to a month ago.

I used to maintain a really strict commenting policy: No comments posted without moderation. I figured that was the safest way to keep the spammers, psychos and occasional foam-at-the-mouth neo-nazi at bay, as happened when I wrote a series on racism in Germany around the time of those horrendous attacks on Indians last summer.

But one day while rummaging around in the WordPress Dashboard - before the nuclear meltdown latest upgrade - I discovered you can allow those whom you’ve previously approved to post comments immediately, while those posting for the very first time are still held back for moderation.

Wow. Didn’t notice that when I started out, and never bothered to check up on it again.

So I quietly changed the setting to allow regular commenters to have their say right away. I do hope regular readers appreciate this loosening of the tie, so to speak, and hope that new commenters will understand theirs will have to be vetted the first time.

And speaking of new commenters, three comments waiting for me one morning last week were such a welcome gift, they’re worth talking about here.

The first one was most unusual. More than a year ago, I raved nearly uncontrollably about the new ski lift installed in 2007 at St Anton, Austria, our usual ski holiday destination. I was so completely overwhelmed by its design and engineering, I wrote a post about it, complete with photo and video. Well, it took more than a year for the first comment to appear, a thank-you from one of the engineers who worked on it.

Unexpected? I’d almost forgotten I’d written it!

I’d like to thank you, sir, for taking the time to tell me who you are and your connection to it. Great work. I hope to be back there again next year.

Though I hope she doesn’t say it to all the boys, the second one made me smile: I just love your blog. Thanks, Rebecca.

And finally, the third in the queue that morning: a comment that had me sitting up and saying wow. It’s from CaliGerm, a couple who’s recently moved to Lüneburg, which is just down the pike from Hamburg.

It really encourages me to keep doing what I’m doing when I’m told this blog was one of the few which inspired them to start their own.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Lesson learned: do your damn research before posting

My most recent post about the blog Stuff White People Like contained a glaring error that basically blows apart my whole thesis.

As someone - probably Brian from catsandbeer.com who is a contributor - pointed out in this comment, the author is Canadian.   The Assimilated Negro has an interview with the author in which he states that he grew up in Toronto’s East Chinatown and now lives in LA.  Another contributing author lives in Vancouver.

Oops.  The interview post is a week old.  No excuse for poor research.  Thanks, Dude.

Every ecosystem has its predators and bottom-feeders

The comments on my last post about photos and copyright show that there is a lot of confusion about what images you can put in your blog and still sleep soundly at night.

After all, as I pointed out, there are predators and bottom-feeders out there with jaws poised like a spring-loaded trap, ready to sue your butt at the first sighting of your using any of their photos.  The link to the whole show - it’s the first item - is now in the right-hand sidebar of the show’s site.  It’s near the top under Video, which from my advanced language course I learned is German for video.

But even if you don’t speak German, take a look at the TV segment.  You’ll at least get a close-up view of who I’m talking about.  Have a barf bowl ready, just in case.

The show - and I - recommend using only your own stuff if you want to be 100% protected from these, errr… people.  But safe to some is boring.  What if you want to use somebody else’s work, and still be safe from a lawsuit?

Some hide behind the fair use fig leaf.  As pointed out by timethief - a tireless worker in the thankless and never-ending job of helping out wordpress.com users lost in their chaotic forums - as long as you’re not using it to make money you should be OK.

But where does occasionally using a photo or drawing for illustrative, critical or satirical purposes end, and systematically mining someone’s work for publication on your own blog begin?  Take a look at Comics I don’t Understand.  Actually, a lot of the comics on that site I do understand.  What I don’t get is how they can claim fair use.  His entire concept is based on the work of other people.  I asked him in the comments under a post with a full-colour Garfield cartoon what he does about copyright, but got no answer from the blog author.   Someone else in the comments said that since the site is for comment and criticism of copyrighted work, it’s OK to use it.

Buddy, I hope you have good insurance, because if I were the author of any one of those cartoons, I’d tell you to butt out after three posts of my stuff.  Sure, you might not be out to make a profit, but it’s like having a site entitled Photos I think are, like, bitchin’ and posting the collected works of Annie Leibovitz a little at a time. 

Headbang8 of Deutschland über Elvis says that if you’re a serious amateur blogger, get an el-cheapo subscription to clipart.com, where you can choose from more than nine million illustrations and model-released photos.    The catch with that site is, sure you can download as many gigs worth of images you like in one week for only 15 bucks, but if you don’t use them for the first time within the period of your subscription, you can’t use them unless you take out a new subscription.  To do so would be stockpiling, which is against their rules. 

Simon, a caricaturist based in London, is coming at it from the author’s side.  What to do about his stuff being grabbed and used on other sites?  Simon, if you want to make sure your art doesn’t get stolen, don’t post it on the Internet.  Like others pointed out in the comments, whatever you post is going to be scraped and used elsewhere whether you like it or not.  I’ve bitched and whined about this myself, and all I am is some duff blogger.  I’m slowly getting over myself though.

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Speaking of photos, and since recent events have put me in a giddy mood, I will now break two rules.  One: I am going to go completely off-topic within the same post, and two: post what we had for dinner last night.  Ta-da…..!

Sweetie, just take the picture.  My fingers are burning.

Photos and pizza guaranteed 100% home-made.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

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How much is that doggie on the sofa?

I had great laughs this morning reading through B’s latest Eurotrippen post about the celebrity life of her dog, but it also got me thinking about a German TV show I saw on the weekend, which had an item about photos and copyright.

B’s photos are all her own, so she’s free and clear. But what if B didn’t have a dog? What if she had that twisted little idea in her head, but no dog to illustrate it? She could probably find a few pics of doggies dressed in leather and lace and weave a little story around them, right?

Sure, but she’d be putting herself in serious financial peril, not only for the obvious reason that a lot of photos out there have rights on them, but that there are websites out there dedicated to sucking you in to using their photographs on your blog and then turning right around and suing your sorry ass off.

The TV show profiles a couple who started up a little site dedicated to keeping birds as pets. They went a - googling for a few shots of common vegetables so they could brighten up a page on what to feed them. They clicked on one of the top results and found hundreds of photos on the Voldemort of recipe sites, the link to which I not only absolutely refuse to provide, I won’t even mention its name.

If you fail to look for the page that says they don’t give out the photos for free, and take one of their photos for use on your blog, the site tracks the photo’s new location and immediately fires off a bill to you for around €700 euro - or more than one thousand US dollars - per photo! Our pair of budgie boffins were asked to fork over €8600, and they are just one of hundreds the show says the site has already sued.

Since users are most likely to click on the top lines rather than wade through pages and pages of stuff, the shows says the site uses Google-bombing to game themselves into the top ranks of search results. And with more and more people getting into blogging for the first time without a clue as to its many pitfalls, their supply of fresh meat is almost endless.

The experts on the show say that if you don’t want to go to court and risk paying thousands more should you lose, there’s not much you can do besides negotiate the price down. After all, nearly a thousand euro for a fuzzy thumbnail jpeg is pretty outrageous.

So if you want to be like B, do what she does and use your own dog, your own camera, your own frilly clothes, your own electrician’s tape, and your own sofa. That way, the only mess you’ll have to clean up is a few hairs - provided it’s fully housebroken.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

PS: You can tape the show - schade, nur auf Deutsch - in repeat on Wednesday, February 20 around 2345, or Friday the 22nd at 0920 on HR (Hessischen Rundfunk) or simply watch it on the web via the link provided above when they get around to posting it.

PPS: Please see this excellent post on fair use from The Blog Herald, a blog on blogging.

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A few signs bloggers are taking themselves much too seriously

• Targetting fitness tips to bloggers as if the breed were something special and the advice didn’t apply to the rest of the real world. All together now! Climb those stairs, say hello to Mom, put on shades and suncream, go outside, breathe deeply…
• Nutrition advice for bloggers as per above.
• Worrying about what happens to your blog after you die. Guess what? You won’t care.
• Wait a minute. Maybe you will. I first heard of this via Raincoaster, who pointed out that no matter how successful a blogger you are, there will always be someone out there with more readers and a more loyal following. Even if the blogger died more than six months ago. Not to make light of suicide - far from it - but where do the desperation that drives you that far end, and the obsession to blog forever, overlap? Think about it. If you want to, you can write hundreds of entries, time-posting them so that they publish on the dates and times you choose in the future. After you die, but before pre-paying your hosting fees, if you have them. I don’t know… I think it would make responding to comments a bit of a problem.
• Reading too much into one executive’s move a while back from dusty, crusty old CBS News to shiny, new, hip and happening news blog The Huffington Post. I’d be willing to bet they simply offered her a shitload more money.
• Writing a diary about your blogging habits. Don’t millions already consider their blog to be a diary? I guess it would look something like this: Dear offline diary. Woke up, scratched privates, logged on, blogged. Went offline, wrote this. Went back online, wrote some more. Went offline, wrote a bit more about what I wrote online. Went online… The really obsessives could start a new blog which tracks the offline diary which tracks their main blog.
• Getting bummed out about your blog and generally not having fun. The writer says he has people come to him “…feeling despondent (about) their underperforming blogs.” Lighten up, already! Everyone goes through a slump now and then. When in doubt, go out.
• Like me. I was going to list ten, but have to stop here.
• © 2008 lettershometoyou

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What I think about this whole blogging thing

If you’re also a blogger, you’ve probably heard this before:

I am, to be honest, mystified by the whole blog phenomenon. I’m barely interested in the minutiae of my own day, so why on earth would I want to read about someone else’s?

That’s from an old friend with whom I’ve recently re-connected via Facebook. No, not THAT old friend.

Here’s what I wrote back:

I know what you mean. There’s even a book title on blogging that goes to exactly that: No one cares what you had for lunch.

But scrape beyond the surface, spend some time seriously sifting through the vast array of blogs out there, and you’ll come across gems. I liken it to writing a newspaper column or even doing stand-up comedy. You write about what everyone has experienced sometime or another, but put a twist in it that makes the reader say, hmmm, never thought of it that way before. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but what keeps you going is the challenge. Or you do a bit of a niche thing, like what it’s like to be a gay expatriate. Or an expatriate who is stateless, rootless, godless and gay. Or a funny Canadian freezing his ass off enjoying winters sports in Norway.

Some blogs are as unusual as the jobs held by the people who write them. If you go to my blogroll, check out Gimcrack Hospital. It’s written by this nurse who works in a hospital for old people who’ve literally fallen off their rocker. She’s a psychiatric geriatric specialist. It’s at times hilarious, at others shocking, brutal, touching, whimsical and flirty. I love it. Ummm, NSFW, especially on Fridays.

Some blog for money, and some have made fortunes, but mostly I yawn at their stuff. I mean, I know they have a following of millions, but icanhascheezburger.com - for the past few months consistently the most popular blog on WordPress - is nothing but a bunch of cat pics with mangled English pasted over. I do not find it funny. But people send the stuff in, they post it, a few laughs are had, and the money rolls in.

There are now so many tens of millions of blogs, it’s starting to resemble life itself. You can choose whom you want to read and communicate with, just as in real life you can choose whom you want to be friends with. Some you will find fascinating, others boring, still others disgusting. I like to think there’s room for all of us.

Sometimes I make the mistake of comparing mine to others and think I should have done the usual and invented something really quirky instead of Letters Home (I dropped the To You a while back) but then again, if I called it something funny and edgy and cool like Little Red Rabbit Turds I would have to live up to it - be funny and edgy and cool all the time.

That’s not only impossible to maintain, it isn’t me. I’m political one day, whacko the next, introspective the third, ranting the fourth, dripping with cynicism the fifth… I prefer it that way because some blogs start to look like the same post over and over after a while. This way, even if it’s at the risk of alienating some readers who prefer one type of writing and not others, I can try to keep fresh myself. Besides, I’m not a kid anymore. If I were, I’d be on (retch) MySpace.

We’ll see how it goes. I’m still having fun doing it, though it can piss you off at times when people steal your content and stick ads up beside it, and sometimes you don’t feel like posting, so I don’t. But I’ve met some real-life people - and not just in Dresden this past autumn - and that’s been fun, too.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

PS: Today marks one year since my first post. Thanks for reading, commenting, clicking on links, checking out the blogroll and the photos way down at the bottom, and for just dropping by. -Ian

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The poetry of spam

Since we’re on the topic of why it pays to look in your spam dump once in a while, I might as well keep running with it.

One of the most beautiful gifts we have ever received is junk. It’s a rusty old pitchfork, it’s a drill bit, it’s an auger - and a candleholder all in one.

The end of the drill bit is covered in gold leaf. Nice touch.

An old friend of my wife - a high school arts teacher who went through a phase tinkering with this sort of stuff - gave it to us as a wedding present. When our daughter came along we had to put it away in a box for awhile, concerned as we were about the possibility of having to explain to the doctors in emergency that we really had no plans to make a shishkebab of our kid.

Spam poetry works the same way. You take scrap that normally wouldn’t merit a second glance to make something new out of it.

Here goes.

(Perhaps based on an old joke repeated in Dresden and buried near the bottom of the dreaded post.)

You spot the pleasant-looking Adonis at a friends group

and fell

gray matter over heels in darling with him.

But alas!

Gorgeous girls have already surrounded him

he seems to be enjoying every bit of the consideration

showered on him by the members

of fairer sex.

Now

what can you do?

Will you leave the coalition

midway

with a broken heart?

Hope.

I had a cherished wand

whose touch

could kind him.

my man

you utter these words to yourself.

This is, of course, a tricky situation.

Turning a straight guy into gay

is something next to

not on.

It by and large depends on your luck.

Still,

our suggestions can definitely be of great help.

If he is an unknown guy,

try to style amity with him.

If he is by now your collaborator

then type an exertion

to take your attachment

to a difficult level.

Don’t run after something

out of the question

instead

opt for a more sensible solution.

After becoming friends with him,

you can ask him

his feelings

on various

gay

issues.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Why you should care about what’s in your spam dump

If you go to my sidebar and scroll to the bottom right, you will find an Askimet spam counter. As of today it’s climbed to nearly 5,900. That’s an average of about 17 a day since my first post nearly a year ago, though most have hit only in the past three months.

Askimet does an amazing job filtering the crap out of your comments box. The service is free and comes as a default on WordPress.com. It works in the background, quietly making sure that only real, live human beings get a chance to have their say on what you post.

But sometimes it works too well. Sometimes a real comment from a real reader gets thrown into the spam dump. That’s why it pays to take a look in there once in a while to see what Askimet has been up to.

It doesn’t happen that often, but if you do see a real comment has been accidently put in the spam queue, simply check the Not Spam box at bottom left of the comment, then click De-spam marked comments at the bottom of the page. The comment will then re-appear on the post where it belongs. Feeling a little like covered in scum after hanging around in that dreck, but at least it doesn’t stay there forever.

But in the interest of fairness and equal time to those whose only contribution to the Internet is to gum it up with worthless shit, I have pulled out some of the more remarkable little spam-turds gleaned over the past few months of comment rescue operations.

Mr Chin of peek-show.cn.sexy-mature-movie tells me: Great site! I will bookmark for my sons to view as well!!! which makes me wonder what he’s already been showing his boys.

Someone who’s probably can has-ing too much Cheezburgr tells me: I is pleasantly amazed! Thank!!! while Britney at pussy-movies.cn/hardcore-shemale writes: Wow!!! Good job. Could I take some of yours triks to build my own site? Britney: trust me, your triks are already legendary; could I learn from you?

Stuff like This site is really superb!!! Thank you for you work! Good Luck2 are getting to be as common as news of the real Britney getting hauled off to hospital, but sometimes something original does pop up.

Mr gluhhlnhjkljnfrwaoi9srxsex has enthused most exclamatorially over my recent Scientology piece by saying: i think you are so sexy!!!!!!!!! kiss my vigina sexy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Mr gluh, do I know you? Your name reminds me of a girlfriend who used to make that noise when she cleared her throat.

Sveta from telemarketing Asia somehow manages to keep her spelling intact in saying: The site\’\’s very professional! Keep up the good work! Oh yes, one extra comment - maybe you could add more pictures too! So, good luck to your team!

Thanks Sveta babe. My team is working in unison to help spill forth some of the best the Internet has to offer. Please check back.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

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