Behind-The-Scenes Linkjacking

One of my favorite film writers, Eric Vespe, has been painstakingly putting together amazing behind-the-scenes photos in a daily feature at Ain’t It Cool News. When I spoke to Eric about this collection awhile ago during his most recent appearance on the /Filmcast, he mentioned that he assembled these photos from a variety of sources, including submissions from readers and his own personal collection. Here’s an example of a post in this awesome series.

Today, I was disappointed to find that a blogger (Angus Shamal) had assembled a bunch of Quint’s photos and republished them into a new blog post. This post was then submitted to Reddit, where it quickly became a popular story. Later, popular blogger John Gruber linked to Shamal’s post on his site as well. As a conservative estimate (based on my knowledge of the incoming traffic these two sites receive), Shamal’s blog post probably received at least 100,000 visits today, only a small fraction of which led to visits/hits for Ain’t It Cool News. Currently, the offending site is down from the massive amounts of traffic, although you can visit a mirror/cached copy of it by clicking here.

When I saw the story on Reddit, I was angered that someone had repurposed Quint’s work and was using it to get a ton of traffic. I was about to take to the comments section and insist that Redditors visit the Ain’t It Cool News site directly…except I couldn’t find an easy link at Ain’t It Cool News that assembled a bunch of the photos together in one place. Heck, I couldn’t even find a link that led me to all the columns that Quint had written for this series. Ain’t It Cool makes it difficult to surface this content, even for people who are looking for it. Chastened, I realized that as quasi-sleazy as it was for Shamal to copy all those images onto his blog, it actually served a purpose: it presented a bunch of Quint’s content in an easy-to-read format that Ain’t It Cool News either cannot or does not want to replicate.

Thus, there are several lessons I personally glean from this incident:

Always assume your work can/will be stolen – If you produce awesome material, it’s possible that someone else on the internet will repurpose it in some way, then receive all the credit/pageviews/advertising/money. You can bitch and moan about this, or you can adapt and prepare for this eventuality as best as possible.

Make it easy for social media sites to link to your content – To promote virality of your work, these days, it is not enough to simply produce great content; it is also important to assemble it in such a way that facilitates easy linking from sites such as Reddit. If you don’t do it, someone else will do it for you.

Protect your images – Some kind of watermark ensures that if your work is totally jacked by another blogger, you’ll at least get some free advertising from it.

The Crimes of Dahl

I always thought there was mean streak to Roald Dahl’s books. Perhaps that’s why I enjoyed them so much as a child; Dahl indulged in that vengeful, immature side of little boys that we hopefully subsume by the time we become young adults.

Now comes this piece from Alex Carnevale explaining that apparently, Dahl was an anti-semitic womanizer. Does this make me think of his books any less? Yeah. It does.

An unhappy and bullied little boy, in adulthood he longed for the kind of dominance he never achieved as a child. Even from his earliest days, he was a hateful little fuck. He began one prep school essay, “Sometimes there is a great advantage in traveling to hot countries, where niggers dwell. They will give you many valuable things.” From a very young age Dahl found himself attracted to older women, cultivating many secret relationships throughout his life, including a variety of affairs with married women.

How The Medium Changed Everything

The always-awesome Maria Bustillos, on how Wikipedia is ushering in a new era of epistemology:

It’s high time people stopped kvetching about Wikipedia, which has long been the best encyclopedia available in English, and started figuring out what it portends instead. For one thing, Wikipedia is forcing us to confront the paradox inherent in the idea of learners as “doers, not recipients.” If learners are indeed doers and not recipients, from whom are they learning? From one another, it appears; same as it ever was.

The Tribulations of The Father

Shawn Taylor writes movingly on his struggles as a father of color:

Being tattooed, visually Black (I’m half Jamaican and half Puerto Rican), over six feet tall and muscular, holding a little ethnically-ambiguous toddler makes many people double, triple, quadruple take—and also, for some odd reason, loosens tongues, mostly of white folks, and creates an environment of familiarity. And yet they still manage to see me wrong: In my daughter’s twenty-two months of living, I have been labeled ‘uncle,’ ‘babysitter,’ ‘guardian,’ ‘cousin,’ but never father. I can’t tell you just how crushing a blow this is. I LOVE being a father and I think that I am becoming a better one by the day, but to have one of my greatest joys discounted is painful.

Sarah Palin Humiliates Self, Doesn’t Back Down

The above video speaks for itself, but I think James Poniewozik has a smart take on it:

Palin’s history lesson is a controversy different in character and content from Anthony Weiner’s Twitter woes last week: no one suggests on the one hand that anyone “hacked” an interview with Sarah Palin, and on the other hand botching an American history citation is not allegedly tweeting a salacious picture in public. (Which is the worse offense, I leave to the voters.) But they are both examples of a common pattern: a politician, caught in a dustup, tries to brazen his/her way through it and ends up looking even worse. (While, maybe, rallying his/her supporters even more strongly.)

Afterwards, Palin tried to explain that she was actually in the right and that she hadn’t actually horribly botched her little history lesson. Mark Memmot explains why she was still wrong.

Boston: the worst place in the world in which to butcher American history.

The Trend of Celebrity Ghostwriters

The NYTimes, on how many celebrities are publishing ghostwritten books:

Like a branded fragrance or clothing line, the novel — once quaintly considered an artistic endeavor sprung from a single creative voice — has become another piece of merchandise stamped with the name of celebrities, who often pass off the book as their work alone despite the nearly universal involvement of ghostwriters. And the publishing industry has been happy to oblige.

Ghostwriting is a win-win for the publishing industry and for the celebrity. The publisher gets to make a mint by leveraging the celebrity’s name, but still publish a book that is at least mildly readable. Meanwhile the celebrity doesn’t need to do nearly as much work, and can pass off better-written prose as his or her own.

I don’t see this practice stopping anytime soon, although ghostwriting as a concept is obviously not a recent development (it has been with us since time immemorial). What does concern me is the fact that Stephen Tobolowsky’s book will be published relatively soon, and I fear it will get unfairly perceived as either a) a ghostwritten book, b) another “celebrity memoir” book, or c) both of the above. I believe that Stephen’s stories, which are 100% his own words, transcend these categories and I hope the book is marketed that way.

(For samples of Stephen’s stories in written form, click here and here)