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.
I just moved and have been internet-less for almost a week. That’s a long time without internet in Spunkworld. In a panic, I ordered high speed internet service from Comcast today. To complete my order, I was directed to start a live chat with a comcastic customer service rep. Not deep into our meaningful conversation about modems, he asks for my social security number. Like I said, I was panicked for internet…that can be my only excuse for so stupidly giving out such personal information without a fight.
And now, Cristobal from Comcast has my address, phone number, and social security number. Am I totally screwed, or is this SOP for Comcast’s service minions?
PS: The chat box was annoying. I had to scroll horizontally to see the long, canned sentences the guy entered.
We put together a list of resources for you to watch live online streams of the presidential debate.
Some people don’t have television and still want to watch a live version of the debates on the internet. These were not easy to find people. If you have more resources, let us know in the comments and we’ll add them to the list. The debates always start at 9PM EST!
It’s come to my attention recently that the discussions on our fair board, particularly those of a frivolous yet mindlessly entertaining nature, are somewhat hard to break into. In fact, I’ve tested out a few aliai (yes, aliai, i made it up) in the past few weeks and found being a newbie somewhat boring, as all the jokes are extremely “inside” and hardly anybody takes the time to explain things. At best, you’ll get a link to an obscure, context-less archived post, which usually serves only to make things slightly more confusing.
But I’m not here to lecture anybody. I’m here to BE that archive to which we refer people. At the risk of making this site even more self-referential, I propose that we open this up to new people (there are 1400 readers today, ahem) to throw their proverbial hats into the internet. We’ll do it like this: I’ll make several broad, sweeping generalizations about cVillain and some of our favorite people, and then you all can jump in and talk about whatever it is… you DO here. I got all dolled up and used capital letters for this post, so help me out. Chime in with your own thoughts on cVillain, and let’s see if we can drag some new friends out of the tubework.
Apparently this metal thong clip flew off and hit this woman in the eye and now she is suing Victoria’s Secret, saying that it caused her “excruciating pain.”
Internet Addiction is Finally a “Clinical Disorder”
It’s about time that people recognized awesomeness, officially. I’m sure this doesn’t apply to anyone on cVillain. You have four symptoms (and the officially recognized cVillain addiction sub-disease) if you have this disorder:
Forgetting to eat/sleep (cVillain version: forgetting to stop drinking and TUIing after 3AM in the morning)
Need more hours online/better technology as you begin to resist online pleasure (cVillain version: checking cVillain from your phone)
Withdrawal symptoms if away from computer ( cVillain version: checking the internet is the first thing you do when you get near a computer)
More argumentative, more fatigue, feel isolated (cVillain version: trolling, flame wars, going to cVillain hangouts to not feel isolated)
Craig had a great idea the other day, about creating short bio’s for all of our writers. He pointed out that when it was just Thor and Lilith you pretty much knew what you were getting, but nowadays you really have no idea who or what lies behind the name. Is cocoNUT really the foodie he claims to be, or is he in fact salting your fries at McDonald’s? Or both? How about Gobbler and Stanley? Are they and I really enemies, or do we manufacture the drama and insults just to milk pageviews? (A: we are mortal enemies).
Some authors like it anonymous (which is fine, welcome to the internet, etc) but I’m going to submit a request: If you consider yourself a writer for this site and would like to have a bio (fake or otherwise), then send me something and we’ll build a page for author info. Try to keep it to about 75-100 words (American), and go crazy. Make it as serious or as ridiculous as you want. Now you can finally tell your mom that you’re famous!
We recently received a grant from the Virginia Humanities Coalition for the Education of Internet Safety and Public Awareness Campaign of Sovereign Power. We wanted to share that presentation with you. It will be required reading in Virginia schools. It’s after the break:
Virginia is the first state to require internet safety lessons. I need to take the classes.
You would think I am making this up, but this is totally true. A recent AP story explains:
On a screen at the front of a classroom, Gene Fishel flashed an online social-networking profile of “hotlilflgirl,” which said she was 15, enjoys being around boys and wants to meet new people.
The next image revealed the real “hotlilflgirl”—a mug shot of a 31- year-old man who was convicted of sexually abusing 11 children he met online and was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
“Not little, not fly and not a girl,” said Fishel, a Virginia assistant attorney general. He warned his audience about the dangers of sharing personal information on the Internet and agreeing to meet Web acquaintances in person.
Fishel’s presentation at James River High School recently was one of many being held this school year in the state, the first to mandate that public schools offer Internet safety classes for all grade levels.
Nationally, Texas and Illinois are among states that have since passed their own Internet safety education laws, but unlike Virginia they don’t make the courses mandatory.
Now, time to make an internet safety presentation. Check back tomorrow! Official presentations here.
Craig had a great idea the other day