Author: Stephanie Booth

Parents, Teenagers, Internet, Predators, Fear… [en]

[fr] Conseils aux parents (après mon interview à la BBC ce soir au sujet des "sex offenders" bannis de MySpace):

  • pas de panique, les prédateurs sexuels tels que nous les présentent les médias ne sont pas légion, votre enfant ne court pas des risques immodérés en étant sur internet;
  • dialoguez avec votre enfant; intéressez-vous à ce qu'il fait en ligne;
  • souvenez-vous que fournir des informations personnelles n'est pas un très grand risque; par contre, s'engager dans des relations de séduction avec des inconnus ou des amis adultes en ligne l'est.

J'ai écrit relativement peu en anglais à ce sujet jusqu'à maintenant. En français, lisez Adolescents, MySpace, internet: citations de danah boyd et Henry Jenkins, De la “prévention internet”, les billets en rapport avec mon projet de livre sur les adolescents et internet, et la documentation à l'attention des ados que j'ai rédigée pour ciao.ch.

Update: radio stream is up and will be so until next Wednesday. MySpace piece starts at 29:30, and I start talking shortly after 34:00. Use the right-facing arrow at the top of the player to move forwards. Sorry you can’t go backwards.

I was just interviewed by BBC World Have Your Say (radio, links will come) about the MySpace banning sex offenders story. (They didn’t find me, though, I sent them a note pointing to my blog post through the form on their site.) Here’s a bit of follow-up information for people who might just have arrived here around this issue.

First, I’m often asked what advice I give to parents regarding the safety of their children online (the BBC asked this question but I didn’t get to answer). So here’s my basic advice, and a few things to keep in mind:

  • don’t panic — the media make the whole online sexual predator issue sound much worse than it is; (they might even be more at risk offline than online if they’re “normal” kids who do not generally engage in risky behaviour, given that most perpetrators of sex crimes against minors are family members or ‘known people’)
  • talk with your kids about what they do online; dialog is essential, as in many educational situations; show interest, it’s part of their lives, and it might be an important one; start early, by introducing them to the internet yourself, rather than letting them loose on it to fend for themselves from day one;
  • keep in mind that sharing personal information is not the greater risk: engaging in talk of a sexual nature with strangers/adult friends is, however <insert something about proper sexual education here>;

I regularly give talks in schools, and I speak to students, teachers, and parents — all three if possible, but not at the same time, because the message is not the same, of course. When I talk to parents, I see a lot of very scared/concerned parents who understand very little about the living internet their kids spend so much time in. But they read the mainstream media, and they’ve heard how the internet is this horrible place teeming with sexual predators, lurking in chatrooms and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, on the look-out for their next victim.

I may be dramatizing a little, but this is basically the state of mind I find parents in. I’ll jump on this occasion to introduce a piece by Anastasia Goodstein: Dangers Overblown for Teens Using Social Media. I’m quite ashamed to say I only discovered Anastasia and her work about a month ago — we seem to cover similar ground, and I’m really impressed by what I see of her online (for example, she’s actually published a book about teens online whereas I’m stuck-stalled in the process of trying to get started writing mine — in French). She also reacted to the MySpace Sex Offender Saga.

Anyway, my job when I’m talking to parents is usually:

  • play “tourist guide” to introduce them to this strange internet culture (my background in Indian culture clearly helps me manage the cross-cultural internet/offline dialogue) — I encourage them to try chatting (find a friend who chats and can help you sign up to MSN to chat with her/him) and blogging (head off to WordPress.com and write about random stuff you’re interested in for a couple of months)
  • de-dramatize the whole “internet predator” thing so they’re not as tense when it comes to having their kids online, or being online themselves, and put forward the positive aspects of having an online life too.

What am I concerned about, when it comes to teens online? A bunch of things, but not really sick old men in raincoats posing as little girls in chatrooms or MySpace profiles.

  • their blissful unawareness of how permanent digital media is; photos, videos, text etc. are all out of your control once they’ve left your hands; easy to multiply and distribute, they could very well be there for ever; they also don’t realize that all their digital interactions (particularly webcam stuff) is recordable, and that nothing is really private;
  • their perception of the online world as “uncharted territories” where all is allowed, where there are no rules, no laws, no adult presence; for that, I blame adults who do not accompany their young children online at first, who do not show any interest in what’s going on online for their kids, and who do not go online to be there too; teens need adult presence online to help them learn to become responsible internet citizens, just as they do offline; our fear of predators is resulting in teenager-only spaces which I’m not sure are really that great;
  • their certainty that one can evade rules/law/morals by being anonymous online and hiding; we’ve told them so much to stay hidden (from predators), and that one can be anonymous online (like predators) that they think they can hide (from parents, guardians, teachers);
  • their idea that what is online is up for grabs (I’m not going to stand up against what the record companies call “piracy” — that’s for another blog post — but I do feel very strongly about crediting people for their work, and respecting terms individuals or small businesses set for their work).

There are other things which are important, but discussed so little, because “online predators” is such a scary issue that it makes everything else seem unimportant: the “chat effect” (why is it easy to “fall in love over chat”?), findability of online stuff (yeah, by parents, teachers, future bosses), what to say and what not to say online (“what am I comfortable with?”), gaming environments like WoW…

One thing we need to remember is that kids/teens are not passive victims. Some teens are actively seeking certain types of relationships online, and when they do, chances are they’ll find them (proof the “catch a predator” operations in which “normal people” or policemen pose as lusty/consenting teens to trap dirty predators… sure it works, but most teens aren’t like that!)

I remember getting in touch with a kid who had an account on Xanga. He had lifted some HTML code from my site, and visits to his page were showing up in my stats. I asked him to remove it (“hey, lifting code like that isn’t cool!”) and he didn’t react. I found his ICQ number and messaged him, and he was outright obnoxious. A few days later, he started messaging me vulgar messages out of the blue (“I want to f*** you, b****!”). We finally trapped him, a friend of mine posing as a Xanga official who scared him a bit so he’d remove the code from his site, and who actually had a long, long talk with him. He was 9 years old.

If you came here via the BBC, leave a comment to let me know what you think about these issues, or what your experience is!

MySpace Banning Sex Offenders: Online Predator Paranoia [en]

Update: If you’re a parent looking for advice, you’ll probably find my next post more interesting.

MySpace has removed profiles of 29’000 registered sex offenders from their site.

In a statement, MySpace said: “We’re pleased that we’ve successfully identified and removed registered sex offenders from our site and hope that other social networking sites follow our lead.”

BBC News, MySpace bars 29,000 sex offenders, July 2007

Sounds like a good move, doesn’t it?

Maybe not so.

First, what is a sex offender? A sex offender is somebody on the state registry of people who have been convicted of sex crimes. A sex offender is not necessarily a pedophile. And in some states… a sex offender might not have done anything really offensive.

Listen to Regina Lynn, author of the popular Wired column Sex Drive and the book The Sexual Revolution 2.0:

Lately I’ve been wondering if I’ll end up on the sex offender registry. Not because I have any intention of harming anyone, but because it has recently come to my attention that in a flurry of joie de vivre I might have broken a sex law.

You see, I keep hearing these stories of mild infractions that led to listing on the sex-offender registry alongside child molesters, rapists and abusive spouses. There’s the girl who bared her ass out a bus window in college and pled guilty to indecent exposure — and then couldn’t become an elementary school teacher because of her sex offense. Then there’s the guy who peed on a bush in a park and was convicted of public lewdness, a sex offender because he couldn’t find a bathroom.

[…]

But sometimes I do skirt the edge of the law when it comes to sex. And if you’ve ever ducked into the bushes for a little al fresco fondling, so have you.

Unfortunately, even in California, it’s not technically legal to make discreet love in public spaces, even in your truck, even if it has a camper shell with dark windows and Liberator furniture, even if no one can see you without pressing his nose to the glass or hoisting her children up over her head.

And if a passerby does intrude on your personal moment, it’s no longer a matter of “OK kids, pack it up and get out of here.” A witness’s cell-phone video could be on the internet within five minutes. A busybody might even feel justified in calling the police.

“If someone saw something that offended them and they wanted to sign a citizen’s arrest, the officer is obliged to take the citizen’s arrest,” says Inspector Poelstra of the Sexual Offender Unit of the San Francisco Police Department, who spoke with me by phone.

Regina Lynn, Could You End Up on a Sex Offender Registry?, April 2007

Critics of Megan’s Law, which requires convicted sex offenders to register with the state, have also put forward that the registries include people it would be rather far-fetched to consider a threat to our children’s safety.

But the laws have unexpected implications. Consider California, whose 1996 Megan’s Law requires creating a CD-ROM database of convicted sex offenders, available to the public. (The state has had a registry of sex offenders since 1944.) The Los Angeles Times reports that this new database is turning up many ancient cases of men arrested for consensual gay sex in public or semi-public places, some of them youthful experiments of men who went on to long married lives. One man, arrested in 1944 for touching the knee of another man in a parked car, was surprised when his wife collected the mail containing an envelope, stamped “sex crime” in red ink, telling him he needed to register as a sex offender. Many of these men are going through humiliating confrontations with long-forgotten aspects of their past, and complicated and expensive legal maneuverings to get themselves off the list. “It’s a real concern,” says Suzanne Goldberg of the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, which works on legal issues involving gays. “These laws have the potential to sweep in more people than they should. Laws requiring registration of people engaging in consensual sex are far beyond the pale. Those requirements can have devastating effects on people’s lives.”

Brian Doherty, Megan’s Flaws?, June 1997

These concerns about indiscriminate lumping together of “sex offenders” in the light of the online predator paranoia were already raised in January when MySpace handed over a database containing information about sex offenders to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, on Violet Blue::Open Source Sex and Sex Drive Daily. (As an aside, I now find myself wondering if this post is going to get me blacklisted by internet security filters left and right… How ironic that would be.)

These are state registries, and depending on the state you’re in, you’re a “sex offender” under Megan’s Law if you get caught urinating in public, mooning, skinny dipping, or if you get busted having consensual sex in public. Think of how lopsided these charges must be in homophobic states. Also, it’s a lesson in what sites like MySpace can and will do with personal information. I’m definitely an advocate for speeding up natural selection when it comes to rapists and pedophiles, but I worry about what could happen to individuals and personal privacy when a questionably informed company casts a wide net, and turns it over to anyone who asks.

Violet Blue, MySpace and the Sex Offenders, Jan. 2007

In addition to that, we need to totally rethink the views we have on how sexual predators act online. The old pervert lurking in chatrooms is more a media construct and a product of the culture of fear we live in than a reality our kids are likely to bump into, as I said recently in an interview on BBC News. Remember kids are way more likely to be abused by a person they know (family, friends) than by a random stranger. I’ll assume you don’t have the time to read through the whole 34-page transcript of the panel danah boyd participated in a few months ago, so here are the most significant excerpt about this issue (yes, I’m excerpting a lot in this post, but this is an important issue and I know people read better if they don’t need to click away). Here is what Dr. David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes against
Children Research Center and the codirector of the Family Research
Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, has to say:

Now, on the case of internet sex crimes against kids, I’m concerned
that we’re already off to a bad start here. The public and the
professional impression about what’s going on in these kinds of
crimes is not in sync with the reality, at least so far as we can
ascertain it on the basis of research that we’ve done. And this
research has really been based on some large national studies of
cases coming to the attention of law enforcement as well as to large
national surveys of youth.

If you think about what the public impression is about this crime,
it’s really that we have these internet pedophiles who’ve moved
from the playground into your living room through the internet
connection, who are targeting young children by pretending to be
other children who are lying about their ages and their identities and
their motives, who are tricking kids into disclosing personal
information about themselves or harvesting that information from
blogs or websites or social networking sites. Then armed with this
information, these criminals stalk children. They abduct them.
They rape them, or even worse.

But actually, the research in the cases that we’ve gleaned from
actual law enforcement files, for example, suggests a different
reality for these crimes. So first fact is that the predominant online
sex crime victims are not young children. They are teenagers.
There’s almost no victims in the sample that we collected from – a
representative sample of law enforcement cases that involved the
child under the age of 13.

In the predominant sex crime scenario, doesn’t involve violence,
stranger molesters posing online as other children in order to set up
an abduction or assault. Only five percent of these cases actually
involved violence. Only three percent involved an abduction. It’s
also interesting that deception does not seem to be a major factor.
Only five percent of the offenders concealed the fact that they were
adults from their victims. Eighty percent were quite explicit about
their sexual intentions with the youth that they were communicating
with.

So these are not mostly violence sex crimes, but they are criminal
seductions that take advantage of teenage, common teenage
vulnerabilities. The offenders lure teens after weeks of
conversations with them, they play on teens’ desires for romance,
adventure, sexual information, understanding, and they lure them to
encounters that the teams know are sexual in nature with people who
are considerably older than themselves.

So for example, Jenna – this is a pretty typical case – 13-year-old
girl from a divorced family, frequented sex-oriented chat rooms, had
the screen name “Evil Girl.” There she met a guy who, after a
number of conversations, admitted he was 45. He flattered her, gave
– sent her gifts, jewelry. They talked about intimate things. And
eventually, he drove across several states to meet her for sex on
several occasions in motel rooms. When he was arrested in her
company, she was reluctant to cooperate with the law enforcement
authorities.

David Finkelhor, in panel Just The Facts About Online Youth Victimization: Researchers Present the Facts and Debunk Myths, May 2007

Let me summarize the important facts and figures from this excerpt and the next few pages. The numbers are based on a sample of law enforcement cases which Finkelhor et al. performed research upon:

  • most victims of “online predators” are teenagers, not young children
  • only 5% of cases involved violence
  • only 3% involved abduction
  • deception does not seem to be a major factor
  • 5% of offenders concealed the fact they were adults from their victimes
  • 80% of offenders were quite explicit about their sexual intentions
  • these crimes are “criminal seductions”, sexual relationships between teenagers and older adults
  • 73% of cases include multiple sexual encounters
  • in half the cases, victims are described as being in love with the offender or feeling close friendship
  • in a quarter of the cases, victims had actually ran away from home to be with the person they met online
  • only 7% of arrests for statutory rape in 2000 were internet-initiated

I find these figures very sobering. Basically, our kids are more at risk offline than online. No reason to panic! About this last figure, listen to Dr. Michele Ybarra, president of Internet
Solutions for Kids:

One victimization is
one too many. We watch the television, however, and it makes it
seem as if the internet is so unsafe that it’s impossible for young
people to engage on the internet without being victimized. Yet
based upon data compiled by Dr. Finkelhor’s group, of all the arrests
made in 2000 for statutory rape, it appears that seven percent were
internet initiated. So that means that the overwhelming majority are
still initiated offline.

Michele Ybarra, in panel Just The Facts About Online Youth Victimization: Researchers Present the Facts and Debunk Myths, May 2007

I digress a little, but all this shows us that we need to go way beyond “don’t give out personal information, don’t chat with strangers” to keep teenagers safe from the small (but real, yes) number of sexual predators online:

Our research, actually looking at what puts kids at risk for receiving
the most serious kinds of sexual solicitation online, suggests that it’s
not giving out personal information that puts kid at risk. It’s not
having a blog or a personal website that does that either. What puts
kids in danger is being willing to talk about sex online with
strangers or having a pattern of multiple risky activities on the web
like going to sex sites and chat rooms, meeting lots of people there,
kind of behaving in what we call like an internet daredevil.

We think that in order to address these crimes and prevent them,
we’re gonna have to take on a lot more awkward and complicated
topics that start with an acceptance of the fact that some teens are
curious about sex and are looking for romance and adventure and
take risks when they do that. We have to talk to them about their
decision making if they are doing things like that.

David Finkelhor, in panel Just The Facts About Online Youth Victimization: Researchers Present the Facts and Debunk Myths, May 2007

So, bottom line — what do I think? I think that MySpace’s announcement is more of a PR stunt than anything. This kind of action is the result of the ambient paranoia around sexual predators online, but it also fuels it. If MySpace are doing that, it must mean that we are right to be afraid, doesn’t it? I think it is a great pity that the media systematically jump on the fear-mongering bandwagon. We need more sane voices in the mainstream press.

Here is a collection of links related to this issue. Some I have mentioned in the body of the post, some I have not.

note: comments are moderated for first-time commenters.

There's No Place Like Home [en]

[fr] Qu'il fait bon être de retour chez soi!

I’m home.

  • I know how the oven works and the temperatures on the dial mean something to me.
  • The water in the shower is hot immediately, no need to wait.
  • Bagha is there.
  • Dressing-gown.
  • Sleeping in my bed. With my nordic-style bedsheets. Mmmh.
  • Frozen lasagna from Migros, tastes “just like it should”.
  • Quiet. Calm. Silence. (Just a bit of thunder now and again.)
  • Shopping on auto-pilot with no surprises. Price tags indicate how much I’ll pay, tax included.
  • Spotlessly clean busses.
  • Dreadful grumble winter-like grey grumble weather.
  • Paying my bus fare with my CASH card. No need to convert bills into quarters.
  • A fridge filled with familiar food.
  • Did I mention the calm and silence?

It’s been a long time since I was away from home for so long.

A Day at WordCamp 2007 [en]

[fr] Résumé des notes prises durant WordCamp.

Today was the first day of WordCamp 2007. Had a really nice day, met cool people (hi Daniel!), and live-blogged my hands off (almost literally: nasty RSI flare-up which made me skip two sessions of note-taking). Two sessions in the morning, two in the afternoon, a big two-session break, and then Matt Cutts. I also, of course, took a bunch of photos, which, as usually, received far more praise than I think they deserve. I’d like to take this occasion to remind everybody to please open up tagging to the community, and add tags to my photos as you stroll through them.

WordCamp 2007 4

Here are the sessions I live-blogged.

So, what do you think, 😉 should I start marketing myself as a 2.0 conference live-blogger? (Laying aside the fact RSI does limit the number of sessions I can do in a row…)

WordCamp 2007: Matt Cutts, Whitehat SEO Tips for Bloggers [en]

Here are my notes of Matt’s session. Might be inaccurate, blah blah blah. Oh, and RSI, so might be a bit short. Check out the post on Matt’s blog too.

Update, August 2007: Matt wrote another blog post in which you’ll find links to his Powerpoint presentation and the video of his talk.

WordCamp 2007 Matt Cutts

Google doesn’t hate your site. Some guy invented an immortality device (with magnetic rings). His site looks like the love-child of Geocities and MySpace. He claims to have been repressed by Google because of the immortality device. No! Instead, view the source of the page. Ugly things hidden in it! Hundreds of words in a tiny textarea! Hence, the penalty.

Good plugin: SEO Title (swaps the name of your blog with the name of your post).

Don’t put your blog at the root of your domain:

  • what if you want something besides a blog?
  • people link to main page and main blog page, so you get some extra links that way.

Think about it.

Call your blog “blog” and not “wordpress” — you never know if you might switch.

What do SEOs know that bloggers might not?

Keywords

What might people be typing to search for your stuff? example… “lol kittens“! Don’t spam, but if you know what people are searching for, there are perfectly natural ways of slipping them in your posts. Use synonyms! steph-note: it’s also better writing than repeating the same words over and over again. Use this knowledge for good, not for evil!

Use category names which are good keywords. Dashes are best to separate words. Then underscores. No spaces is dreadful.

But wait! If everything is already in place, don’t completely mess up your urls to change. Leave the old stuff as it is, and make the new stuff better.

Use alt tags, or the blind guy at Google will get really angry. 3-4 relevant words. Keep it short.

Q: does having .php .html .asp in the URL make a difference?

A: nope. just avoid .exe 😉

Dynamic URLs are treated just as static URLs. However, keep the number of parameters low.

Should I do an audio podcast, or a video? Well, depends on how pretty you are. If you’re not sure, try hotornot.com.

Usability

Make sure your site is crawlable (WP: good).

Q Ben Metcalfe: what about duplicate content WP archives create? Supplementary results?

A: Not too bad, but WP does suffer a bit from the fact you can get to a post from 3-4 different ways. Will have WordPress wishlist at the end of the talk.

Make sure post creation dates are easy to find.

Q: Does Google care about the number of slashes in a URL? (Date in URL)

A: Google doesn’t care about link depth.

Moving to a new IP

  1. Reduce your DNS time-to-live
  2. Back up your site, bring it up on new IP.
  3. Watch Googlebot and user traffic until they fetch the site from the new IP address.
  4. Take down the old site.

steph-note: heck, will be doing that soon.

Q: for mobile/iPhone, different site, or different stylesheet?

A: if you can, different stylesheet.

A2 from public: use Alex King’s wp-mobile plugin

Moving to new domain

  • use a 301 redirect

better:

  • do 301 on one subdirectory and when that is ok do the rest
  • write to everyone and ask them to update their links (useful!)
  • standardize www or no-www but don’t use both, also slash/no-slash

Free Google tools

  • webmaster console
  • feedburner (you can get feeds.mydomain.com rather than feeds.feedburner.com with MyBrand for free steph-note need to do that!! so you can leave feedburner…)
  • custom search engine
  • adsense
  • google analytics

Webmaster Console

It’s at google.com/webmasters

A famous web publisher used robots.txt to blog Google completely, then called in a panic “what’s the matter! Google is blocking me!”.

  • test robots.txt before pushing live
  • submit an authenticated spam report
  • remove URLs (for emergencies, useful!)

You can see the backlinks — who’s linking to your site.

Q: can google analytics harm your search results? (?)

A: nope.

You can see crawl errors which can give you hints on making your 404 handling better. Also, tell Google what your preferred domain is (www or not).

“Get noticed, then get traffic from Google” rather than “Get traffic from Google, then get noticed” (steph-note: yay, exactly the position I defended in a whitepaper on search optimisation for a client!)

Ideas:

  • PDF sign converter
  • Lolcat builder
  • iPhone app directory
  • say Google fast
  • sell your moustache on eBay — linkbait!
  • free hugs campaign
  • tutorials
  • analysis
  • hunting down wikipedia defaces
  • liveblogging
  • create controversy (like Dvorak!) — linkbait!
  • mention Robert Scoble
  • make lists (13 reasons why something rulez/sux0rs)
  • …

Be creative! (Well, maybe we need to embrace the fact there are many ways to get attention, and linkbait is one…)

steph-note: Matt is deadly funny… watch the video of the talk if it exists.

If you get popular enough, people might want to hack you. You can make your wp-admin accessible only via a whitelist.

A to Q: Google doesn’t look at meta tags much.

Don’t worry about the algorithm too much, focus on compelling content.

If you’re buying/selling links, make sure they don’t affect search engines.

WordPress 2007: Jeremy Wright, Im in ur blogz grabbin' ur kash! Blog Monetization [en]

These are my notes of Jeremy’s session. They might be inaccurate. I did my best. Reminder: you’re invited to tag my photos on Flickr if you go off to explore them.

WordCamp 2007 Jeremy Wright

b5media is a large blog network. 250 blogs. Finds people who are really passionate about their stuff (gardening, football, cats…) and help them make money with it.

Plan, invite a few random people on stage for an impromptu panel. Open source presentation.

  • one person who earns money blogging
  • someone who’s earning a cup of coffee a day
  • someone who’s thinking about making money with blogs, but just thinking

Quick historical look at blog advertising.

2003: blog advertising was evil. Selling your soul. (It does happen, but by and large bloggers are fairly opinionated, and readers fairly astute at outing fakers.) Before pay-per-post, which is obviously evil, btw.

Now, anybody who wants to, can make a full-time living blogging. steph-note: I must have misunderstood that.

There’s a lot of money in blogging. AdSense, TLA, custom campaigns… You do need to put a few months in before you get to full-time pay. You make more money consulting/speaking etc. than actually writing.

3 people:

WordCamp 2007 Panelists Concentrating

Q: picking a topic that will maximize monetization?

A E: we didn’t choose a topic to make money. just wanted to do funny stuff. And people came.

WordCamp 2007 Eric Nakagawa

A M: started four years ago, early blogger (steph-note: and what am I, then? OMG! dinosaur!), linked to book she wrote.

WordCamp 2007 Michelle Leder

A J: getting out of unemployment: program, needed an idea, chose to blog about her passion, cottaging.

WordCamp 2007 Julie

Q: ??

A E: wondering what the people who visit our site would be interested in? And match up with relevant advertisers, rather than use AdSense which just scrape your content.

A M: struggling with this question right now. Google ads are not a good match for my audience.

Lorna Dietz: Philippino community site => gets huge amounts of dating sites with AdSense, annoying!

E: being a full-time blogger is really full-time, so you better really love what you’re blogging about.

JW: reducing the number of ads on a page.

Ben Metcalfe: seems the best way to monetize your blog, going down the long tail, is not advertising but adding value with your blog to some other thing you’re going to be able to earn money from.

A M: I make a fair amount of my money through speaking, clearly more than ads.

A E: could make money selling billions of T-shirts, but do you really want to do this? We’re just trying to do this and see how long we can push it.

A J: making videos of wakeboard stuff, hoping to attract a younger demographic. Problem now is: how can I get traffic?

JW: Average traffic, average money. 10-12’000 page views a month for a personal blog won’t bring you much more than a couple 100 $ a month.

JW: Would you read your blog?

Ten tips:

  • lots of valuable content
  • host your blog yourself, own your domain
  • AdSense is the crack of blog advertising, but don’t get hooked
  • do 2-3 things really well in blog advertising
  • CPA/CPL don’t work well (repeat audience)
  • content syndication
  • partner
  • be smart about TLA (you don’t want to be exited by Google)
  • don’t sell out
  • if your audience supports it, blogging about stuff your paid for can work

steph-note: going too fast, fingers hurt too much. folding up for this session.

Extra:

WordCamp 2007: Lorelle VanFossen, Kicking Ass Content Connections [en]

[fr] Lorelle VanFossen explique comment avoir du bon contenu.

These are my notes of Lorelle’s talk, as accurate as possible, but I’m only human. There might be mistakes. Feel free to add links to other write-ups, or correct mistakes, in the comments.

Lorelle: if you want to make money, invest in transportation. We order stuff on the internet and want it now. We should have all got a copy of her book today, but transportation has broken down (UPS) and they aren’t here!

WordCamp 2007 Lorelle Van Fossen

Problems with blogs: so many blogposts look like they were written in 10 minutes by people who

  • can’t type
  • can’t think
  • make you think they were released for the day by an institution.

If you want someone’s attention, you need to show them something they’ve never seen before, or in a way they’ve never seen it before.

Look for the missing subjects. Find the missing pieces. Not everything has been said, and even if it has been said, it can be said better: cleaner, more efficient, or in a new perspective.

Do we really need another “how to install WordPress” article? Before you start writing, do a search. If there are many copies, point to the good ones, find a new angle, don’t regurgitate.

Write about what’s missing. There is always another way, always a better way. We’re trained in school to not ask why. As bloggers, we’re asking why. Ask the whys.

1994: website about travels and stuff… a kind of blog before a blog.

Be an editor for your blog. When is the last time you generated a really good sitemap, looked at what you wrote, what you think you covered and you didn’t? steph-note: I need to do more of that. More editing. But so much screams to be written!

Unless you blog the news, read your feeds at night, sleep on them, think about it. You don’t have to be first out the gate, because other people are first out the gate, no matter how hard you try.

When you jump right in, you’re in a panic to get the stuff out there, you’re just processing and not thinking. And people who read it are the “panicked to get the information” ones. Wait, and you can be the sane voice a few days afterwards. The perception of your audience will also change. (Reader psychology.) The calmer the reader, the wiser they think you are.

2006: tagging; 2007: relationships

What’s the difference between a website and a blog? Comments, conversation, relationships.

Liz Strauss: gives out Successful Blog Awards. She’s started a series on blog strategy building. When you write your blog, you blog for one person: you. steph-note: totally agreed.

A successful blog is a blog you arrive on looking for information, and it gives you a feeling of “home” — safe, has the info I want, looks like me. (We like comments which say “You’re right! I agree with you!”) First impression to go for: this is the place that has answers I need, it’s familiar and safe. Blog for you and to you. steph-note: gosh, I really need to work on CTTS

How do we know when a blogger is faking it (audience):

  • factual information that’s wrong, when we know better
  • too many ads and affiliate links
  • excerpts and no added value — blog-quoting
  • people that just re-post their twitters

Dead Sea Scrolls: scraps containing journal entries or info about people’s everyday lives.

Our blogs are note on our boring everyday lives for the future, at the least. Write for the future.

Playstation fake blog: top search results are about the fake blog, not about the playstation itself.

I don’t get any comments! Tips:

  • too many people are still writing for their eighth-grade teacher. Complete sentences, complete thoughts, complete ideas — complete essays. Doesn’t leave any space for response. Don’t finish the idea. Leave things out on purpose.

Don’t respond to every comment, but make your readers think that you do. Blog your passion, your ideas, show that you care, say thank you (don’t fake it, though). Avoid “Now, what do you think?”. Doesn’t work.

Be with your readers like an old married couple — let them finish your sentences. Blog about what other people are blogging about. Blog about their conversations, and add stuff. Don’t challenge people to blog about something. Be linky. Comment on other blogs, but intelligently. Make people want to see your blog! We all do it. It’s our job to help our fellow bloggers continue the conversation. Comment in a way which will help the conversation go further. steph-note: un poil didactique, là.

steph-note: Lorelle giving a shout-out to a bunch of people from the WP community who are in the room.

Help each other, share connections, blog about each other, comment on your friends’ blogs…

Lorelle has been under WordPress since pre-1.2.

“I lived in Israel 5 years. I know about terrorism, so I know how to handle comments on my blog!”

Lorelle doesn’t care about stats. They’re not important for what she does. She’s been doing this too long, doesn’t care anymore.

Write timeless stuff. One of her posts from two years ago was dugg over Thanksgiving.

Q: fictional blogs. Good or bad, when it’s not clear? Blogotainment.

A: if people know, it makes a difference. disclosure.

Q: could too many guidelines/rules turn us into the traditional media?

A: has a lot of rules for her blog (ie, doesn’t blog about politics, personal life, dad dying, being sick…) — she has very focused blogs.

Q: Fighting comment spam?

A: Akismet, Spam Karma, Bad Behavior.

John C. Dvorak and Om Malik: Blogs vs. Journalism [en]

[fr] Conversation entre John C. Dvorak et Om Malik sur les similitudes et différences entre blogging et journalisme. Intéressant.

These are my notes of this session. They may be inaccurate. Check with people who actually said the words before jumping up and suing them. Thanks.

WordCamp 2007 John C. Dvorak, Om Malik, Matt Mullenweg

John C. Dvorak thinks there is no difference whatsoever, and bloggers should be given credentials. The mainstream media are not taking bloggers seriously yet. *steph-note: I remember Dvorak from 2002 and the kitty-heads.

Om Malik: Shift… blogs have a different dynamic, do not replace mainstream journalism. Careful not to lump all bloggers in the same category.

steph-note: arghl, going to sleep. Please, wake me up.

JCD: bloggers cover crap stuff like Paris Hilton’s lost PDA or Tom Cruise doing something silly, just like the mainstream press. Problem. “Quote posts” amongst bloggers (quote, + “what is this guy thinking?”, and that’s your blog post). Driving mainstream media nuts. The blogging world will be rejected by the mainstream because they are an annoyance.

At one point, JCD had to fight to stick links to outside sites in his column (“OMG! if we link outside people will see how crap we are!”)

OM: comments can be good/bad. Important feature. You have to assume that your commentors care. They’ve spent time on your site. Respect that.

JCD: asking readers to fill in the blanks of your story steph-note: like I’m doing for my 2002 Dvorak article — very interesting, the whole of the information is in the post plus the comments.

OM: comments are what makes blogging different from mainstream media, tapping into the collective intelligence. Engage every single comment. Single most important lesson learned.

JCD: hey, you can moderate comments without killing the blog (JCD uses Spam Karma). Some comments don’t contribute much (“You suck!” doesn’t really add much to the conversation). Recommends moderating to make sure comments have value. Need critical mass of readers to have enough comments. Moderation should be the responsibility of the post author. In this new world, you make a post, these comments are part of your job as the writer.

OM: you set the tone. There are good bars, lousy bars. People choose. steph-note: blog gardening is really important. what you accept or not will influence the way people act in the comments.

WordCamp 2007 Om Malik

JCD: also need to relax. Not a national disaster if things go downhill in the comments. JCD has been called an idiot for 25 years, but he’s still up there ;-).

OM: you can rate comments.

JCD: doesn’t like rating comments, except restaurant reviews. steph-note: I don’t like comment rating very much either.

OM: One trick is to step away from what you wrote for 15 minutes before posting.

JCD: journalist trick: read out loud (really!) because your ears and eyes don’t work the same way. Catches a lot of errors.

OM: Actually, you can have your mac read it back to you.

Q Ben Metcalfe: “no difference about bloggers and journalists” — could you explain more? Investigative journalism, holding government to account… More thoughts on the mainstream stuff.

JCD: Importance of layout. If it “looks too much like a blog”, you may lose credibility (people go “ah, it’s a blog“). Cf. The Onion. NYT redesigned after the Onion (challenged!) Neo-blog style: credibility goes way higher, with same content. Same old templates, different flower, different pink, place for cat photo… Same old tired layouts.

WordCamp 2007 John C. Dvorak

BM: Is it really just a question of layouts?

JCD: What I’m saying is valid for first impressions.

Q: ??

JCD: “Citizen Journalism”: artificial construct steph-note: what is it with Dvorak and cats?

OM: Bloggers should call people. Try to get information directly from people. At least you can say you tried to get in touch.

JCD: Maybe take one course in journalism so at least you have a clue how it works, and study libel law, that’s important (you can’t call people a “crook” for example, you can get sued into oblivion — “douchebag”, however, is OK!)

OM: Actually, “douchebag” might even have a greater effect in the post. The English language is wonderful, has many ways of describing the same thing.

JCD: You need to be careful, and I think bloggers haven’t had the lecture on libel law. You don’t want to get sued for a minor comment or something.

OM: blogging uptake directly related to broadband penetration steph-note: not sure about that!!

Ben Metcalfe: places blogging is catching on are places where there is not really much free press (e.g. Eastern Europe, Iran — not necessarily lots of blogging). Absence of free press more valid correlation than broadband.

OM: Lots of blogging in USA etc.

JCD: yeah, countries with a lousy free press. We don’t have a free press.

WordCamp 2007: Dan Kuykendall, Podcasting and podPress [en]

[fr] Notes prises à WordCamp 2007. Introduction au podcasting et à podPress, un plugin WordPress qui le transforme en machine à podcaster.

Here are the notes I took of Dan’s talk on Podcasting and podPress. I did my best, but they may not be accurate.

WordCamp 2007 Podcasting and podPress

Dan Kuykendall is the author of the popular podcasting plugin podPress.

Podcasting is very similar to blogging (just audio/video). About getting your message out. All about content, in consumable ways. Feeds.

RSS2 feed + “enclosure” tag.

Difference with blogging: lots of offline podcast viewers/listening. (Not many offline blog readers.)

Gear? Microphone, recording software, site + RSS2, something to say/play. Dan has a $100 mike, a $100 external sound card — steph-note: fancy! but not even necessary… in-built microphone and soundcard can do for starters.). Software: Audacity is free, so is WordPress.

WordCamp 2007 Dan Kuykendall's Gear

Podcasting does not require a major investment.

Dan got into podcasting early 2006. steph-note: is that early, as far as the history of podcasting is concerned? Podcasting is a little more personal than blogging (voice, etc.) Podcasters, like bloggers, really crave feedback. At that time, podcasting wasn’t built into iTunes. WordPress looks great for that, but if you’re interested in podcasting more than blogging… hmm.

WordCamp 2007 Dan Kuykendall

Dan heard about the plugin system in WordPress… He had figured out how to do podcasting and make his podcast look good in iTunes, but what about others? => started writing a plugin, PodPress. “Which has now grown a bit out of control!” steph-note: indeed, problems with redundant queries which caused my site to be shut down by DreamHost twice in the last six months.

Podcasting is not just about pointing to your mp3 files. PodPress adds meta information, media players, etc. This means your public can view your podcast even if they don’t use a dedicated “podcast reader” (iTunes…)

steph-note: tour of podPress’s features, and demo (not blogging this)

WordPress: amazing blogging platform and CMS, with tons of hooks for plugin developers.

steph-note: my experience of podPress is lots of settings, does the job though, even with minimal settings. However, as I mentioned above, my blog has been taken down once and maimed at least once by DreamHost because it was raising the load on the server it was hosted on way too much. After narrowing down the problem, the culprit appeared to be podPress.

Q from Dan: who is providing media content in their blog, but doesn’t use podPress? steph-note: question unclear from me, in my mind a blog which provides media content is a podcast, as long as the media content is made available as an enclosure in the feed, which I thought WordPress did out of the box.

Q from audience: monetization? A: no, for free, but PayPal donations, though they haven’t really covered the cost of hosting…

Q Mark JaquithAaron Brazell: I love podPress, but the only problem is the weekly releases… could we space them out a bit? A: never sure when I’ll be coding, so when I get some stuff done I release it. => Q for Matt: will WordPress support some kind of plugin update automation? A (Matt): yes, for 2.3 (at least notification). steph-note: yay!

Time to Leave San Francisco [en]

[fr] Il est bientôt temps pour moi de quitter San Francisco! Départ dimanche en fin d'après-midi, et arrivée lundi dans la journée en Suisse.

There we are. Five weeks have flown by, and it’s time to start packing my possessions to leave San Francisco. I stopped at a clearance place this morning for some last-minute shopping — oh my god! dresses (fancy, cocktail or party) for $29, skirts for $12… I’m afraid I went a bit overboard. I’ll have to do some serious cupboard-emptying when I get home.

An Afternoon in San Francisco 1

If you want to say goodbye (or hi!) to me before I leave (assuming you’re not going to be at WordCamp tomorrow please come and join us for some Chaat from 7pm to 10pm (or maybe earlier if we decide to move to Taylor’s Refresher where the WordCamp people will be — I know it’s a bit of a clash). We should be about a dozen people or so — a human-sized gathering.

Thanks to everybody who contributed to make my stay here pleasant. I really had a nice time. I regret not having the time to see everybody or do everything — life tends to be like that for me. I guess it means I’ll have to come again.

I have to say, though, that I’m looking forward to seeing Bagha again — and my beloved Lausanne.

Update: I guess nobody will be surprised by this, but we will use Stowe’s “bank” system to settle the bill. Please bring some cash as it makes things more practical.