Here’s my latest InformationWeek column: “17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You.” It’s a checklist of the stuff that keeps me — and many other bloggers — from posting about sites. There are companies and causes out there spending their time and money trying to get people to talk about them online, while shooting themselves in the foot by not having permalinks (duh), by resizing your browser window (duh), or by having “linking policies” that seek to set out the circumstances under which you can link to them.
Have a link. Seriously: if you want bloggers to link to you, you need to have something linkable. Your upcoming TV show, protest march, product or soccer tournament is literally unbloggable unless you put it on the Web somewhere first.
Have a permanent link. Don’t just change the front page of your site every time a new speaker for your speaker-series in announced. A blogger who links to the front page of your site today in a post about the upcoming address by Philo T Farnsworth, wants that link to stay good for in the future, and not point to the upcoming address by Paris Hilton when you change it next week. Put up a separate, permanently linkable page for everything you want to get blogged.
Have a link for everything. Don’t have a single page with ten items on it. Blogging a link to the top of your fifty-screen-long page with a blurb about something halfway down generates 200 e-mails from readers who can’t find the referenced item.
Use real links. Don’t have links with expiring session-keys that are no good if someone revisits the URL later. If a blogger can’t send the URL to a friend or put it on the Web, then that blogger can’t send people to go look at your stuff. Likewise, avoid the giant, 800-character gobbledegook URLs filled with junky alphabet-soup GUIDs — if it can’t be pasted into IRC without linebreaking, there’s some group of compulsive communicators who’ll be unable to get to it.
My latest Guardian column just went live: “Time to fight security superstition.” It talks about the growing number of strictures on talking about, recording, and arguing with the security measures in our society, and how this makes us all less safe:
Unfortunately, today’s security cheerleaders have regressed to a more superstitious era, a time from before Bletchley Park’s wizards won the second world war. The public isn’t supposed to take photographs of CCTV cameras in case this knowledge can be used against them (despite the fact that surely terrorists can memorise their locations).
We can’t mention terrorist attacks at the airport while we’re being subjected to systematic anti-dignity depredations; your bank won’t let you open an account with a passport – you need to supply a laser-printed utility bill as well (”to prevent money laundering” … you can just hear Osama’s chief forgers gnashing their teeth for lack of a piece of A4).
The superstitions that grip airport checkpoints and banks are themselves a threat to security, because the security that does not admit of examination and discussion is no security at all.
If terrorists are a danger to London, then the only way to be safe is to talk about real threats and real countermeasures, to question the security around us and shut down the systems that don’t work.
The annual Locus Magazine Poll and Survey is online and anyone can participate. The Locus Poll tries to take the global temperature of science fiction, gathering detailed, long-running stats on the state of the field and its readership. It’s also the basis for the Locus Award, science fiction’s most-participated-in popular award (I’m up in two categories this year: Best Novella for After the Siege; and Best Short Story Collection for Overclocked).
My next novel, Little Brother, is coming out in about six weeks, on April 29. It’s a book for young adults, about freedom, surveillance, and how technology can be used to free you or to lock you up. It’s about a gang of hacker/gamer kids in San Francisco who use technology to restore freedom to America, despite the damndest efforts of the Department of Homeland Security to take it away in the name of fighting terrorism.
Since this book is intended for high-school-age kids, my publisher has agreed to send 200 advance review copies of the book to school newspaper reviewers, along with the same press-kit that gets sent to “real” papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post (actually, the school kit has even more stuff — it also includes a signed personal letter explaining why I wrote this book and why I hope kids will read it).
If you edit or write for your school paper (or if you have kids or friends that do) and you’re interested in receiving a copy, send an email to torpublicity@tor.com with the subject line “DON’T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25″ — and include your contact info, high school/newspaper, and mailing address.
Here are some nice things that other preview readers have had to say about Little Brother:
“A rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion, as necessary and dangerous as file sharing, free speech, and bottled water on a plane.”
- Scott Westerfeld, author of UGLIES and EXTRAS
“I can talk about Little Brother in terms of its bravura political speculation or its brilliant uses of technology — each of which make this book a must-read — but, at the end of it all, I’m haunted by the universality of Marcus’s rite-of-passage and struggle, an experience any teen today is going to grasp: the moment when you choose what your life will mean and how to achieve it.”
- Steven C Gould, author of JUMPER and REFLEX
I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart teenagers, male and female, as I can.
Because I think it’ll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won’t be the same after they’ve read it. Maybe they’ll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it’ll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they’ll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they’ll want to open their computer and see what’s in there. I don’t know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It’s a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless.
The annual Locus Magazine Recommended Reading List just came out — it’s the critical consensus of Locus’s reviewers on the best science fiction and fantasy of the year, and a more reliable guide to great speculative fiction you will not find. I’m pleased to say that my short story collection Overclocked and my novella After the Siege made the cut!
SF novels
* HARM, Brian W. Aldiss (Del Rey; Duckworth)
* The Sons of Heaven, Kage Baker (Tor)
* Conqueror, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz; Ace)
* Undertow, Elizabeth Bear (Bantam Spectra)
* Till Human Voices Wake Us, Mark Budz (Bantam Spectra)
* The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)
* Spook Country, William Gibson (Putnam; Viking UK)
* In War Times, Kathleen Ann Goonan (Tor)
* The Accidental Time Machine, Joe Haldeman (Ace)
* Mainspring, Jay Lake (Tor)
* The Execution Channel, Ken MacLeod (Orbit UK; Tor)
* Brasyl, Ian McDonald (Pyr; Gollancz)
* Black Man, Richard Morgan (Gollancz; Del Rey as Thirteen)
* Shelter, Susan Palwick (Tor)
* Engineer Trilogy: Devices and Desires / Evil for Evil / The Escapement, K. J. Parker (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
* The Prefect, Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz; Ace 6/08)
* Sixty Days and Counting, Kim Stanley Robinson (Bantam Spectra; HarperCollins UK)
* Bad Monkeys, Matt Ruff (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
* Queen of Candesce, Karl Schroeder (Tor)
* Halting State, Charles Stross (Ace)
* Ha’Penny, Jo Walton (Tor)
* Axis, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
My latest Locus column, “Put Not Your Faith in Ebook Readers,” just went live. In it, I discuss the fact what while there’s plenty of programmers who’ll hack you a little ebook business that runs on a phone, handheld game device or PDA; there’s a genuine shortage of high-quality manufacturers who’ll build you a great, cheap, hardware-based ebook reader, and that that’s likely to continue for some time.
China has experienced the largest migration in human history — 160,000,000 people moved from the inland farms to the coastal manufacturing cities — but it is not endless. Most of the world has shut down most of its factories, shuttering domestic manufacturing capacity in favor of the cheap labor, poor working conditions and environmental controls of China’s factory cities. When you go to China to get your Kindle or your Wii produced, you’re competing for space among the factories that produce socket wrenches, Happy Meal toys, laptop computers, prison cafeteria trays, decorative tin planters, vinyl action figures, keychain flashlights and cheap handguns.
Frankly, book reading just isn’t important enough to qualify for priority treatment in that marketplace. E-book readers to date have been either badly made, expensive, out-of-stock or some combination of all three. No one’s making dedicated e-book readers in such quantity that the price drops to the cost of a paperback — the cost at which the average occasional reader may be tempted to take a flutter on one. Certainly, these things aren’t being made in such quantity that they’re being folded in as freebies with the Sunday paper or given away at the turnstiles at a ballgame to the majority of people who are non-book-readers.
Meanwhile, handheld game consoles, phones, and other multipurpose devices have found their way into the hands of people from every walk of life. In some countries, mobile phone penetration is above 100 percent — that is, a significant proportion of the population maintain more than one phone, for example, a work cellular and a home cellular.
Not only can these devices command the lion’s share of China’s high-quality manufacturing capacity, but they are produced in such staggering volume (and often distributed with a subsidy — game devices are sold below cost in the expectation of selling games; phones are subsidized by carriers) that they can be had for a pittance.
My second novel Eastern Standard Tribe has been published in German by Heyne, under the title Upload. As with the German edition of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (published as Download), they’ve released the German text under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Given that Heyne’s a division of the mega-publisher Bertelsmann, this is pretty cool news — especially considering that the CC release was their idea!
My latest InfoWeek column, “In Defense Of Complaining,” went online while I was on break earlier this month — it’s a rebuttal to people who say that people who are upset about bad products should just buy something else, rather than complaining:
I’m always astounded by this reaction. Companies aren’t charities. They’re businesses. It doesn’t matter why they’re offering an unacceptable product — all that matters is that the product is unacceptable. Companies aren’t five-year-olds bringing their fingerpaintings home from kindergarten. We don’t have to put on a brave smile and tell them, “that’s just lovely dear,” and display their wares proudly on the fridge. I don’t care if Apple adds DRM because Lars from Metallica has incriminating photos of Steve Jobs, I don’t care if Sony BMG put a rootkit on its CDs because they were duped into it by a trickster spirit that appeared to their technologists in a dream. I care whether their product is worth my money. It’s the market — there’s no A for Effort.
Even weirder is the idea that companies shouldn’t be criticized because in a market, you should just take your business elsewhere. Free markets thrive on good information. For a market to function, customers need to have good information about which goods are worth buying and which ones should be avoided — that’s why we complain in public, to help companies make better decisions.
My latest Guardian column, “‘Intellectual property’ is a silly euphemism” is online — in it, I argue that although knowledge is important and valuable, it’s not property, and when we treat it as such, it makes us do dumb things. Hervé Le Crosnier liked it and translated it into French and put it online under a CC license.
It’s this disconnect that makes the “property” in intellectual property so troublesome. If everyone who came over to my flat physically took a piece of it away with them, it’d drive me bonkers. I’d spend all my time worrying about who crossed the threshold, I’d make them sign all kinds of invasive agreements before they got to use the loo, and so on. And as anyone who has bought a DVD and been forced to sit through an insulting, cack-handed “You wouldn’t steal a car” short film knows, this is exactly the kind of behaviour that property talk inspires when it comes to knowledge.
But there’s plenty of stuff out there that’s valuable even though it’s not property. For example, my daughter was born on February 3, 2008. She’s not my property. But she’s worth quite a lot to me. If you took her from me, the crime wouldn’t be “theft”. If you injured her, it wouldn’t be “trespass to chattels”. We have an entire vocabulary and set of legal concepts to deal with the value that a human life embodies.
What’s more, even though she’s not my property, I still have a legally recognised interest in my daughter. She’s “mine” in some meaningful sense, but she also falls under the purview of many other entities - the governments of the UK and Canada, the NHS, child protection services, even her extended family - they can all lay a claim to some interest in the disposition, treatment and future of my daughter.
