Chris Anderson, who many of you techies may know, is the editor of Wired magazine and has published the renown book about internet business models called “The Long Tail.”

Waldo Jaquith was reading a promotional copy of Chris’ new book, Free, in which he found many instances of copied text from, you guessed it, the free *cough*online encyclopedia, wikipedia and several other sources. Waldo emailed Chris and his publisher alerting them to this fact.  Chris responded:

All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources…

This all came about once we collapsed the notes into the copy. I had the original sources footnoted, but once we lost the footnotes at the 11th hour, I went through the document and redid all the attributions, in three groups…

Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. As you’ll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book’s focus, mostly on historical asides, but that’s no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced.

I think what we’ll do is publish those notes after all, online as they should have been to begin with. That way the links are live and we don’t have to wrestle with how to freeze them in time, which is what threw me in the first place.

Nice find Waldo.  Very well done.  This is a bit unnerving coming from such a hot shot internet journalist.

P.S. If anyone wants to make funny edits, you can find the original Free cover here.

[via VQR] [spicybear/flickr pic]

From the City…

America will celebrate Building Safety Week next week from May 3 through 9. The theme is “Building Safety: Where You Live, Work and Play.” The City of Charlottesville’s Neighborhood Development Services building inspectors are participating by offering, free of charge, safety inspections of outdoor decks in the City.

First observed in 1980, Building Safety Week annually raises public awareness of critical safety issues affecting every person, regardless of age or occupation. These entail the structural soundness of the buildings where we live and work, reliability of fire prevention and suppression systems, plumbing and mechanical systems, accessibility, energy efficiency and sustainability.

Recent crane failures at high rise buildings in the US and night club overcrowding disasters are extreme examples of the importance of building safety. Residential deck failures unfortunately occur each summer due to overcrowding and faulty construction and maintenance. The City will offer a courtesy wood deck inspection during Building Safety Week (May 3-9). To sign up, go online to Charlottesville.org and press Online Services. An inspector will respond and leave a written report at your front door. We will arrive between 8 AM and 4 PM and let you know we are there. We are not able to give an exact time because we are also performing the new construction inspections requested each day.

Building and fire inspectors, plan reviewers, and others in the City of Charlottesville work to ensure the safety of the structures in which all of us live, work, attend school, worship and play. These officials provide the first line of defense against building disasters. We are silent but vigilant guardians who work daily to ensure safety in the built environment.

Building codes are available at Jefferson Madison Regional Library at 201 East Market Street and www2.iccsafe.org/states/Virginia. The website codes include Virginia amendments to the national codes. There are separate codes for single family dwellings and commercial buildings.

The City of Charlottesville is a member of the International Code Council. The sponsor of Building Safety Week, the Code Council develops the most widely used building safety and fire prevention codes in the nation. Each Charlottesville inspector is also a member of the statewide building code professional organization, Virginia Building Code Officials Association. Tom Elliott, is the Building Code Official, and Denise Burgess, Darin Clements & Francis Vineyard are Building Inspectors for the City of Charlottesville.

[pic from anoldent]

The City of Charlottesville announced last night that, in order to provide reliable transportation to the polls for all residents, CTS rides on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 will be free. That announcement was issued by Mayor Dave Norris at last night’s City Council meeting. As has been publicized, a record turnout is expected on Election Day and parking challenges may develop as a result of this interest particularly at the Downtown, Alumni, Venable, and Tonsler polling precincts. Residents are encouraged to carpool to the polls, arrive during non-peak hours such as the mid morning and afternoon, or take free public transportation. City staff is currently arranging for additional parking and safe transport to polling locations that may see the most pressing parking challenges.

For more information residents are urged to call 970-3250 or log onto www.charlottesville.org/vote

If you’ve been around Charlottesville long enough,  you realize that paying for parking is for tourists, college students, newbies or lazy  people.  It’s not that hard to find parking 1 or 2 blocks away from any destination site, be it the downtown mall, the corner or midtown.

We’re going to use this thread to solicit secret, free parking spots and we’ll put together a giant map of those free spots when we get everyone’s tips.  Please leave your secret parking spot in the comments and we’ll start building the map.

Oh and if you haven’t seen our bad parking jobs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

I was just perusing the Charlottesville Craigslist musician’s blog and discovered a heated debate about paying musicians vs. playing for tips. A local Belmont coffee shop put out a request for musical acts and offered food, drink and tips as compensation. However, this arrangement didn’t sit well with at least one local musician who thinks such an offer is an “insult to musicians” everywhere. I don’t really see anything wrong with playing music for tips or a cut of the door, but I’m curious as to what other folks think.

Is it really insulting to ask musicians or bands to play for no guarantee? Seems to me most up-and-coming bands would jump at a chance to gig out and get some exposure, even if the compensation wasn’t exactly pro-level.

[Post highlights added after the break]

»Read More

Hello everyone, we just got a brand new Black iPod Nano 8GB to give away to you.

The Rules:

- You have go to the Spicy Bear offices to pick the Nano within 3 days of winning the contest (or you can pick it up at our party!).  If you live across the country, sorry!

-  Enter by commenting with a link to your favorite cVillain.com, cvilleMUSE.com, or cvilleStyle.com article. The article has to be at least 10 days old!

- Only one comment entry per person, except you can enter a second time by linking to your favorite cVillain  cvilleMUSE.com, or cvilleStyle.com article on your website and giving us a link to your website in the comment section below.

-  The contest ends Friday, August 1st at Noon.  We will choose the winner at random and notify them by email.

Good luck!

Perhaps you remember the cartoon shown above and our discussion; or, maybe you remember our critique of the Cavalier Daily when it published an article loosely based on Catholic pseudo-science that claimed having sex around a “natural planning cycle” is more effective than condoms. Let’s not forget the “tear down this wall” column which said the freedom wall was “nothing more than a cheap, interactive platitude.” And finally, take an opinion from the same publication about StreakTheLawn.com (now shut down) which explained that exposing seedier aspects of college life was a “risk” to UVA’s reputation.

Do you see a trend with the Cavalier Daily, University of Virginia’s “independent newspaper?” We do… and so do others.

»Read More