Sitepoint, Non-Payers and Plagiarism

I saw an interesting discussion on Sitepoint the other day. A potential website owner wanted to run a news site but didn't have the budget to either hire writers to write news stories or to go out and buy the products that he wanted to talk about and write them himself. Of course, that's a clear indication that he shouldn't do it at all. Surprisingly, person after person told him to simply plagiarize someone else's work. After all, he wants the site and can't afford it.

This case isn't the only one that I've seen like it. Many people tend to get defensive about their budget, even if their budget isn't enough to pay for the thing they want. I'd like to own a Domino's, but I don't have the budget. Should I steal one? Um, no. I can't afford one, so I'm not getting one. For some reason, people can see this clearly when it involves a brick and mortar business. But, when it comes to an online one, many people believe they are entitled to have one even if they can't afford one. This leads to plagiarism, content scraping and people who outright steal other people's work and then refuse to pay for it.

So, what happens if they can't afford to pay their writers, or can't afford to populate their site with any content? They should go out of business, just like any other business person who can't get the capital together to keep going.

It's kind of the same way that I see the fast food industry and minimum wage. If minimum wage was raised high enough to give workers something closer to a living wage, fast food restaurants claim that they'd go out of business. Great! If you can't afford to pay your workers a decent wage then you should to go out of business. If the fast food industry disappeared, teenagers would stop spending half their week doing low wage labor and perhaps go back to their studies. Adult workers would be forced to look into some of the free job training provided by their county (just about every county in the U.S. has training centers free to low income workers) and stop working at a dead-end job. Customers would have to put some thought into their meals rather than buying the cheapest, fattiest food available just because it's convenient. You'd have less obesity, less poverty and fewer hideous fast food restaurants littering the roadsides. It would be better for everyone.

The same is true with websites. If the people who couldn't afford to go into business stayed out of it, the bidding sites wouldn't be littered with weirdos hoping to find someone willing to work for .01 a word. You wouldn't have junk websites hiring people to write garbage in the hopes of making .50 a month through AdSense. This too would be better for everyone.

Cybersquatting

It's been a wacky week in freelance land. The wackiest day of the week came when eBay sent me an email threatening to sue me for cybersquatting. I wrote a fairly short ebook about selling on eBay, which I sell regularly on eBay itself as well as having a ClickBank listing. I thought it might be nice to have my own site to sell it on as well in order to avoid the steep fees that I pay to both of those sites on each sale. Well, apparently they are going after everyone with a domain name that has the word eBay anywhere in it, and using the cover of cycbersquatting law to scare people into taking their sites down. The cybersquatting law was started to prevent people from buying domain names that are the names of existing companies and then offering to sell the domain to the company at an increased rate. Obviously I didn't do that.

They also said that someone might confuse my piddling little site with one that was owned by eBay, which was also untrue. I have no discernible web design skills and the site was extremely plain, consisting only of a page about the ebook and a link to buy it. I can't imagine anyone believing that it was in any way a part of eBay. The example they used in the email was their successful blockage of the domain "ebaysecurities." I don't have any proof, but I believe that was an attempted phishing site being used to trick people into giving up their personal information. I didn't do anything of the kind. I would have likely won in court if they had decided to take it that far, and I am incorporated, so I can't see them getting much more than my laptop, some office paper and possibly my giant box of Bic pens even if they won. But, in the end, I decided not to mess with it. In an uncharacteristic backing down, I erased everything from the site. I just don't need the aggravation and I don't really have the time to do much promotion for the site anyway. I may have an obnoxious streak, but I don't mean any harm to anyone and don't want any trouble.

If you have a site with any company name in it, you might think about checking with the current cybersquatting legislation just to make sure you're on the right side of the law. There are other companies shutting down domains, but so far none of them have been tiny sites selling an ebook.

How Words and Letters Effect Everyone

I think we all realize how words can affect us, from the words we use to the words we hear and read from everyone else. The PC notion was started with good intentions- to reduce the sexism and racism that was present in some of the everyday language that was common. No, "man" does not mean human anymore than "woman" does. Specific words hold strong distinctions that can affect us subconsciously, though the entire notion has gotten extremely out of hand. Merry Christmas!

But, I found out recently that even the letters we are attracted to are letters than have significance to us. The initials of our names create a preference for words that start with those letters. This has been found even in GPAs, with people with names starting with A and B getting better grades than people with names starting with C and D. People choose their brands with a preference for ones that start with their initial letters. Since reading that, I've noticed how many of the brands I'm loyal to start with an S- there are a lot.

That's how deeply words can affect us. We see the words around us as being personal and connected to us, even when we don't realize it.

More Queries

Since getting my rejections from a couple of children's book agents, I really believe that the project would better be pitched directly to a publisher. But, I am choosing right now to concentrate on a non-fiction book that I think has a lot more market possibilities. The question for this one, of course, is whether to query agents or publishers. I's rather try to get an agent to do a lot of this for me, but I think I might just query publishers right now and try to get somewhere that way. In the end, there is the distinct possibility that none of it will matter and no one will be interested in this book. My time would probably better be spent on seeking new freelance clients.

Will that stop me? Heck no. There's nothing like a book project to get me feeling creative and excited. Most of my fiction has been abandoned at some point because there's really no limit on what can happen in the book. I can go on for years with fiction, tooling and retooling a piece of dialogue or adding scenes that I thought of while in the shower. But, a non-fiction book has a much more distinct flavor. There's an actual stopping point with non-fiction. At some point, the topic has been covered to your satisfaction and the book ends. So, win or lose, this is my project and I'm going to try to get it noticed. I'll post when I start getting rejections.

A Gush Over Fareed Zakaria

Anytime I read anything, and that includes cereal boxes, I always consider how I would reword some of it. I don't think I'm better than everything I read, I just always find passages that I think could have been better. Sometimes it's awkward phrasing, sometimes it's a cliche, and sometimes it's just a crappy paragraph.

The only modern writer that I can read without ever doing that is Fareed Zakaria. He's a Newsweek columnist as well as being Newsweek International's editor. He sometimes pops up elsewhere, but I mainly know him from reading Newsweek. One recent pop up was on The Daily Show, which really freaked me out. Who knew my hero was popular enough to go on The Daily Show?

Fareed Zakaria's writing is so superb and so nuanced that it feels completely effortless. It's like stepping into bathwater that's exactly the right temperature. Nothing in his writing ever feels forced. He uses facts and figures in the perfect places without ever coming across as aggressive or snotty. His complete understanding of what he's writing about shines through. He keeps his own opinions visible, though they aren't the driving force of the work.

He is simply the most amazing columnist I've ever read, and I would so marry him if he asked me. If I met him on the street, didn't know where we would live or whether he snored or smoked cigars, I would still marry him. Is there a Fareed Zakaria fan club? If so, I would welcome wearing a t-shirt with his picture on it and possibly putting a bumper sticker with his head on it on my car.

Here's this week's column, which is entirely flawless: A New French Revolution

Last week's was one of my very favorites, since he talks a little about his own experiences. At first it feels like he's doing it to start off in a conversational tone or to use a holiday reference to start the column out slowly. But after reading it a couple of times, it looks like he uses his personal experiences to establish himself as a outsider (born outside the U.S.) who understands the immigrant experience, but also as an insider who loves America and is therefore free to criticize it. Move over, Mark Antony.

The Seven Things Meme

I was tagged for a meme challenge by two people yesterday- same challenge. Those have always looked like fun- that's for the tags! The rules are to reveal seven things about yourself, link to the ones who tagged you and then tag seven other people and post the links to their blogs. Here goes:

I was tagged by Easing Chronic Pain and Anything Parenting.

1. I LOVE Beauty and the Geek and Project Runway. They are the only reality shows I can stand.
2. I usually write until about 3 a.m. and then take a nap in the afternoon.
3. When I get strapped for time I use voice recognition software and dictate my work.
4. I have a cage full of anoles.
5. I am a huge Anglophile.
6. I have big curly hair and look kind of like Bob Dylan.
7. I am a Trekkie to the point that I sometimes think- what would Kirk do?

I am tagging:

Web Writing Info
Geek Parenting
Slacker-Moms-R-Us
Drawing on Words
Writing on the Wall
Work at Home Mom to Five
Fiction Writing- The Passionate Journey

You've been tagged!

Rejected by Two Literary Agents - Woo Hoo!

I've gotten two rejections from literary agents already, which I thought was pretty impressive. The first came the day after I sent the query. Since most agents I looked at advise waiting up to six weeks for an answer, that was an agent who definitely knew what she didn't want- me. I expect to be rejected by all of them, since the project I was pitching is very weird and there's nothing really like it on the market.

To get it published I would probably need to send it directly to publishers, and I have another book project that I would rather spend that time on. But, now that I've gotten my feet wet with agent queries, I expect to be much less nervous when pitching my much-more-marketable book. And hey, there are still six or seven other agents out there who haven't yet responded. There's always the chance that one of them won't hate my weirdo book. Isn't there? Maybe not.