A Few More Thoughts on the FTC Ridiculousness

One thing that kept coming to mind when I was blogging the other day about the new FTC proposal to start requiring bloggers to disclose freebies and other conflicts of interest: Is this some weird kind of joke? I couldn't put it better than eva:

"My first thought was beauty magazines...they don't mention that they're inundated with free products when they're recommending things. *rolls eyes* I think this is some kind of prank."

I swear, I had to google a few different reliable sources and I'm still waiting for someone to tell me I was ranting about an article originated by The Onion.

I really enjoyed some of the other comments and questions that people brought up. As Wendy points out:

"So here's a good question. If I get a "free" book and give it a negative review, how does that factor in? Do I have to disclose it was "free" if I didn't like it??"

Really, that seems to be the problem that the FTC has, is the positive reviews in exchange for free swag. But one solution for bloggers would be, I suppose to just pan everything you receive for free.

Some Ridiculousness from the FTC

I receive the occasional a multitude of emails every day offering me an ARC of almost any type of book under the sun. If I agree, implicit in the agreement is that I will post a review of said book on my blog, and pretty pretty please we hope it's a positive review.

While free books are a pretty nice perk, my time has become too limited lately for me to quickly read and review the books I receive. I don't know if I'll like the book I receive. At the moment, I just don't need any extra obligations to feel I must finish a book I don't like, and since I can't really make any guarantee I'll finish reading the free book someone sent me, it just seems greedy to accept.

I still do have some ARCs in my tbr stack. Under some planned changes by the FTC, if I finish reading Strangers in Death by J.D. Robb and post a rave review on my blog, but fail to mention that hey, it was a freebie, they can go after me for failure to disclose a conflict of interest and making false claims.

The problem, according to the AP article, is that consumers go to the web for independent reviews, and doggone it, they are being deceived by tainted reviews in which the blogger has been given freebies.

"If you walk into a department store, you know the (sales) clerk is a clerk," said Rich Cleland, assistant director in the FTC's division of advertising practices. "Online, if you think that somebody is providing you with independent advice and ... they have an economic motive for what they're saying, that's information a consumer should know."

I feel very, very sorry that there are people who go on the internet for product reviews and think that any old yahoo with a blog is a trustworthy source of information. So really, we are going to get our panties in a bundle because PromQueen78 wrote OMG I found the most amazing dress ever at this awesome website www.promdress.com and you find out later that promdress.com paid PromQueen78 to advertise their website? I mean, there are a lot of other things PromQueen78 probably failed to disclose on her blog, like the fact she's actually a 45-year old man living in his parent's basement, trying to make a living online so he can quit his fast food job. Or the fact he has an extremely embarassing acne problem. Should we go after him for making the false claim she/he is actually an unrepentent nerd and not a hot cheerleader, like her/his profile claims?

OMG, it is the INTERNET people! What do you expect? That people are going to tell you the truth all the time??

There is indeed a place and a time for product reviews, but savvy internet users already know that you don't go to one review of a product and take it as the gospel truth. Let's say I want to know if Old Man's War by John Scalzi is worth a read. I might start by just googling "old man's war review". I come up with several reviews on www.sfreviews.net, Amazon and goodreads.com. If I specifically use the Google Blog Search function, I immediately pull up at least five different reviews by bloggers. Between all of these reviews, I discover that the consensus is that Old Man's War is a great read, and I conclude that it would like be a book I would enjoy as well. I buy the book, I read it, I'm happy. Later I find out that one of the bloggers received a free copy of Old Man's War and failed to disclose it. So what? For all I know, her opinion was still completely genuine. Maybe it wasn't. Who cares? I liked the book either way.

What it really comes down to is personal responsibility. I'm sorry but if you took PromQueen78's advice and hated the dress you bought, it isn't PromQueen78's fault. It's your's for buying it. It's the height of ridiculousness that we should be blaming anonymous people on the internet for giving you bad advice.

I don't disagree in theory that bloggers should disclose that they've received freebies. It's something I should and now plan to start doing here. But the way the article frames the issue is just plain silly.

"As blogging rises in importance and sophistication, it has taken on characteristics of community journalism — but without consensus on the types of ethical practices typically found in traditional media.

Journalists who work for newspapers and broadcasters are held accountable by their employers, and they generally cannot receive payments from marketers and must return free products after they finish reviewing them.

The blogosphere is quite different."

No really. The blogosphere is different from newspapers? Okay, let's break it down. Newspapers are held accountable to different standards because it's expected that they will print higher quality news than what they ate for lunch and a picture of their cat. Blogs are around to provide people a chance to network with other people. Some blogs are high in quality. Some are not. There will NEVER be a standard for blogs. That would be like saying there should be a standard for websites. Sorry, there will always be websites that suck.

And so far, I've been avoiding the bigger ridiculousness in the whole equation. What I really really want to know is if anyone told the FTC how many blogs there are on the internet. Because at this moment in time, the U.S. Government can barely handle recalling tainted food products, that you know... actually kill people. And they want to start regulating 50 million plus blogs for failing to disclose freebies? Really?

AT LAST!!!

I'm back online ya'll. The long internet-less nightmare is over at last.

All it took was replacing the RAM, motherboard, and reformatting my hard drive. Piece o' cake, man (insert sarcasm here).

I kept my cool with Dell pretty well if I do say so myself throughout the entire ordeal, but I NEARLY LOST IT when I sat down to FINALLY blog and found out my mouse driver had not been loaded when the tech reformatted my hard drive.

Distract me please from my withering hatred of all devices invented by Dell. How have you been since last we talked? Please tell me you had more exciting adventures than I.

Good luck needed

I need your good luck. Mind sending it my way? The new laptop is DEAD and my hard drive is off for recovery of my files. Cell phone blogging will probably be intermittent. I MISS YA'LL ALREADY!!

How To Know Your Blog Is Cool

While I was out there was apparently a discussion on what makes book blogs worthwhile and what makes them lame. There are lots of people who wrote lots of interesting things about it, so all that I want to add is...

I know I'm cool.

Because I've started getting spam comments.

I never used to get them. But someone's decided that my blog is a great place to dump a bunch of random links. I don't want to add the dumb blogger visual verification and I am too technologically illiterate for the cooler options, so for now I'll just be deleting them by hand.

Wanna Win?

Sticky Post!

If you haven't used Picasa, you really should. The new Picasa 3 has the ability to add I Can Haz Cheezburger-like captions to your pics. Thus making it even easier to post silly pics of your pets.

Do you have a better caption for my picture? Post one by January 1st at midnight, and you'll be entered into a contest that includes CHOICES. I'll choose my favorite three captions, then I'll sent the winners a list of books and they get to pick which one they want! First place gets first pick, second place gets second pick, etc. Sound good? Okay, ready, set, captionize!

EDIT:

Okay, to make it easier, you can enter by leaving a comment, but you get five entries if you come up with a caption for my picture. The first winner gets their choice of at least five different books (to be announced, but it will be awesome). Second place gets the next choice, third place gets the next choice, etc.

Five more entries for blogging about it on your blog and letting me know you did. So eleven potential entries, and I'll make the deadline January 12th, just because.

Life, Minus Facebook

I have been posting quite irregularly in the past few weeks here, but that's nothing compared to how often I've signed into facebook. Yesterday was my first login in... months? I think? There was apparently a huge redesign that I completely missed.

I was too overwhelmed to sit and take in the new design, I did note that a few couples I know have gotten engaged recently. This leaves me wondering what happened to good old phone calls of "AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! HE PROPOSED!!!!" ??

Of course, this all leads to the important question of the Facebook era: When did facebook take the place of actually telling your friends about the important events in your life? Even a mass email seems more personal than just happening to see online that a particular friend is engaged or preggo or just ate a whole box of milkduds or whatever else big is going on in their lives.

I know, I know, facebook is great for catching up with old friends. But is it really? I was pretty iffy about facebook for quite a while. It was getting to the point if I got another invitation from someone I barely know to join their entourage or become the top friend of my former roommate's ex-best-friend, I was going to quit facebook for good. And finally someone I couldn't even remember meeting sent me the fatal invite to join a zombie war. It was the straw that broke the camel's back. I. Quit. Facebook. Okay, I didn't actually delete my profile yet. But that's coming, when I get around to it.

The people I actually do care to hear from have managed, somehow or another to get in touch with me and vice versa in the past few months without facebook. And the ones I don't care about? Well, I've been doing fine without being spammed by updates about their life.

I have been finding that I have more than enough to keep up on when I attempt to follow an insane number of book blogs because of the amazing bloggers out there with fabulous blogs. (My Google Reader gives a groan).

And there is of course writing, and reading, and occassionally getting my lazy butt to the gym. Really, between all of that, it's incredible that my husband gets any attention from me at all.

This is Awesome

I don't know why but it is.

Thanks to Google, you can visit a time machine into the past. Or the next best thing. The Google archive from January 2001.

Thoughts:

I completely forgot that I at one time wrote a two sentence movie review about X-Men on a movie review website.

Kimberly Koski

Great entertainment, better than expected

I saw my name there, in black and white and thought to myself... did I really write this? And I have concluded that since I have never found another person with my name online, I must have.

Al Qaeda pulled up 1,670 hits in January 2001. That's a far cry from the 16,700,000 hits currently on Google.

Wikipedia was apparently a tiny concept known only too a few. A mere 681 hits, compared to 272,000,000 today. The weirdest part of the Google 2001 is not seeing the pretty much ubiquitous Wikipedia page pulled up with every search. How weird is that??

I think this picture speaks for itself. But since you asked, here's the article accompanying the picture:

These days, cell phones provide an incredible array of functions, and new ones are being added at a breakneck pace. Depending on the cell-phone model, you can:

• Store contact information
• Make task or to-do lists
• Keep track of appointments and set reminders
• Use the built-in calculator for simple math
• Send or receive e-mail
• Get information (news, entertainment, stock quotes) from the Internet
• Play simple games
• Integrate other devices such as PDAs, MP3 players and GPS receivers

Bwah ha ha. I like that there are links to explain what e-mail and the Internet are.

Clicking on the link to email, you are informed of this:

Every day, the citizens of the Internet send each other billions of e-mail messages. If you are online a lot, you yourself may send a dozen or more e-mails each day without even thinking about it. Obviously, e-mail has become an extremely popular communication tool.

Why yes, I do probably send a dozen or more emails each day. I keep getting one from this really nice Nigerian widow who says she's got a great deal for me if I email her over my Social Security and bank number.

My favorite bit is that Barrack Obama pulled up only 9 hits. John McCain was a decent 225,000.

So what cool things are you finding?

Why Is Firefly So Good?

Is Joss Whedon some kind of genius? Or am I just in the right mood for a western scifi TV show?

Either way, Firefly is amazing. It was a short-lived scifi series that suffered an early demise back in 2002. In the future, there's no aliens, but there are still bullets, cattle rustlers, smugglers and plenty of bar fights. At least when you are Captain Malcolm Reynolds. After winding up on the losing side of a civil war, he winds up in the smuggling business, off on the edge of space with his crew in a ramshackle but beloved ship called Serenity.

Only 14 episodes ever got filmed, but let's be honest here. In 1 short season, Firefly managed to elicit a fan response that hasn't been seen since the grand-daddy of scifi shows, Star Trek. And there's a good reason for that.

First of all, this was a series with great writing. Each of the characters, though modeled on archetypes from the Old West, become real people with histories we're interested in. Why does the preacher claim to be a peaceful man but know how to handle a gun? What happened to the troubled River to make her so... psychotic? Will the Captain ever admit he's in love with Inara? As far as the writing is concerned, being on the edge of cancellation was probably quite helpful; forcing the writers to remove the "fluff" from the series. (I'm talking to you, Heroes).

There is a wonderful mix of drama and comedy. My husband's favorite line is when the Captain tells a seemingly frightened girl who thinks she's soon to be killed, "Don't you take that. If someone tries to kill you, you try to kill them right back!"

Not to mention the filming. In Firefly, as in old John Wayne movies, the producers make use of the wonderful zoom lens. Considered somewhat shoddy in most of cinematography today, the zoom lens gives us true sense of being in the scene. Since the zoom lens forces us to "focus" on a scene it is similar to if we were being jostled around on a spaceship, constantly trying to refocus our eyes on what surrounds us. In addition, most of the filming is done by hand which increased the intimate feel of the shots. In space, there are no sound effects, just (realistic) science.

The low-tech and high-tech themes collide as they face down other spaceships, the Feds, and horse-riding, gun-wielding baddies. Laser guns exist, but as the wielder of one such toy learns, when the low-battery light starts flashing, real bullets are mighty fine to have instead.

The interplay of familiar themes in a sort of futuristic, sort of old fashioned setting made for interesting TV-viewing. While they do have a spaceship, Serenity has a primitive feel to it, not polished and perfected and full of transporters and research labs. The crew are likewise not a perfectly cohesive fighting machine. Their loyalties are divided and at times its all the captain can do to keep them together to earn money.

The series, due to its early death, has an unfinished feeling to it. I'm certainly not the first nor will I be the last one to watch the series and wonder what would have happened if only this series hadn't been ahead of its time. Of course, there's always the possibility it could have ended up like Heroes, dragged on far past a good ending point, devoid of any logical connection between plotlines.

A few years back, I saw the movie that was later created as a follow-up to Firefly, called Serenity. At the time, I hadn't seen or heard of Firefly, so the movie didn't stick with me. I'm looking forward to going back and watching it, this time understanding the backstory.

After watching Firefly over the last few days (my excuse for not blogging) I feel like I could not write a whole thesis on why scifi and western genres are really overlapping, but for now I'm going to spare you. Just watch the series, you'll know what I mean.

My promised updates

Here are the updates I promised last week:

Well first of all, I've reviewed Great Expectations and found it enjoyable. I seem to have gotten into a habit of writing my reviews the way I wrote papers in college. I think I need to learn brevity.

Husband and I have new gym memberships at the Y and so far we've 0nly lost our membership cards once in the 2 weeks we've been enrolled. Stupid insurance plan doesn't give us the discount we were counting on, but we finally decided to bite the bullet and enroll anyhow.

You'll have to wait a big more for my review of Smoke and Mirrors, but now that I've written my massive thesis of a review of Great Expectations, I can work on it.

What else am I forgetting? Oh yes, computers. I have a new one at work. Everything is supposed to upgrade and transfer and be so much easier and more streamlined, right? Ha. I've lost all my old emails (again) and I'm struggling with Outlook 2007. The moment where it just about went out the window came shortly before I learned that that "Groups" and now called "Distribution Lists" (HUH????) Still I'm grateful. I really am. I also really love the fact I can't download anything now, my photo printing program won't work, and I am stuck using Internet Explorer 6, not Firefox or at least Internet Explorer 7. Thank you, computer gods!

In happier news, I received my first ever advance review copy yesterday, of Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah. Reviews to come!

The Blue Screen of Death... or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the External Hard Drive

Let's hear it for fortuitous circumstances. One of my Christmas gifts this year was an external hard drive, and December 26th is when my husband backed up all of his files on it. On December 27th, the Blue Screen of Death appeared.

While the body of the Dell is now broken (although hopefully revivable), its files, or soul, if you will live on. Simply in another format. To really mix my religious metaphors, you might even call it reincarnated in the external hard drive. Let's just call the whole situation what it is. A Christmas miracle! (picture a small child with very wide eyes saying this).

Anyone else experience any Christmas miracles? Or, if you will, Christmas fortuitous circumstances?

Confessions

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – Arthur C. Clarke

As I am trying my hardest to wrap my (non-technological) mind around all of the possibilities in blog design, I was reminded of that quote by Arthur C. Clarke. I’m viewing the dizzying array of templates, widgets, add-ins, and because I barely understand how they work, much less how someone comes up with the idea on their own, they seem… well… yes… magical. I guess this psychology major is just never going to understand javascript.

I have a lot of “umm… this may be a dumb question but….” moments when it comes to computers and technology, but I used to have a wonderful coworker who always made me feel like such a computer smarty. She was having anxiety because she couldn’t open this extremely important document. Alright, said I, show me what you’re doing. She opened Word, clicked on Open, and scrolled through to find the document in question. The file was labeled file.xls. Ta da, opening an Excel file in Word is your diagnosis! Solution: open Excel file in Excel. And I come out looking oh so smart. Other incidences like this have led to my (I hope) permanent status as somewhat of a “computer genius”. Or “computer magician”, I suppose.