So, I’ve been using Verizon for eight years now, and I know that a lot of people have difficulties with Verizon, but I have actually been a huge fan of them as a carrier. On the few occasions when problems have arisen, they’ve responded promptly and very helpfully, and, for an evil telecommunications giant, I think that they are basically a pretty decent company.

But I may have to revise that opinion in the wake of events this week.

You see, I’ve been getting a lot of calls from numbers which come up “unidentified” lately. Which isn’t really a problem, I know lots of people with blocked numbers, and honestly, caller ID has never been very important to me. The problem is that many of these calls are telemarketers (who should not be calling my cell phone) and some of them are hangups, which is just annoying, especially early in the morning.

My response to the situation, since I have no phone numbers to wave in the face of the FCC, was to contact Verizon and see if I could block calls from unidentified numbers. It’s a service offered on landlines, I know, so I sort of assumed that Verizon would have it, and it would be totally worth it to be to pay a little extra each month to not get calls from blocked numbers.

Not an unreasonable request, right?

Well, allow me to quote from Verizon’s response:

I regret to hear that you have been receiving calls from parties that are not identifying themselves, I know how annoying that can be.  My name is Xxxx, and I am happy to assist you.

While we do now currently offer Usage Controls to manage calls and other allowance, unfortunately there is not a way to restrict calls that come in as unavailable.

The only other option you would have would be to change your wireless number.  If you make the change during your bill cycle, your next billing statement will reflect partial month billing. Partial-month billing is the process of prorating your monthly access and monthly allowance minutes. To minimize partial month billing on your next statement, the best day to process your request is on the 8th of the month.

If you decide to change your number, please call us directly from a landline phone so we can assist you in programming your phone with your new wireless number.

Yeah, so Verizon’s response is that I should change my phone number. Do I really need to explain how this is not an adequate response to a totally reasonable (and common) customer request? Do I need to explain how this is pretty much the antithesis of customer service? I did a bit of poking around on their website, and found several comments referencing this issue, which suggests that I am far from the first customer to request it.

I do not think that changing my phone number is an appropriate response to the situation. I think that allowing me to block calls from blocked numbers is. I like that old friends can get in touch with me with this number. I like that there are people in the world who have lost track of me who could find me if they wanted to by dialing this number. A few weeks ago, I talked to someone I hadn’t talked to in five years because she tried this number on the off chance that it was still good. Verizon, apparently, wants to take that away from me, or force me to continue dealing with obnoxious phone calls (which, I might add, I must pay for, because they are always during prime air time, or whatever the heck Verizon calls it).

There are lots of reasons why people might want to block calls from blocked numbers, which is why it is a pretty standard service on most landline contracts. Women with stalkers, for example, usually want to know who is calling them. I am, quite frankly, boggled by Verizon’s totally useless and totally inappropriate response.

I have to say, I am pretty pissed right now with Verizon’s response to my inquiry. I feel like I’m a pretty darn loyal customer, and I feel distinctly unserved right now. Maybe I should look into moving my number to a carrier who does offer this service and see how they like that.

All of the comments on the television post got me thinking. Clearly a fair number of you are enthusiastic about television, for one thing, and when the Book Project finally ends in December, I might want to start a new, but slightly different project: writing about every movie/television show I watch in 2009. “The Media Project” is, I admit, kind of a clumsy title, but maybe we can come up with a better one.

I think that, like the Book Project, it will be really interesting to actually track my viewing habits over the course of a year, and to see how many hours I really spend watching movies and television. I think I may surprise myself, and some of the weird stuff I watch might surprise some of you. Like the Book Project, I think I would solicit recommendations for materials to watch, because the best way to discover new things is to have them recommended.

I’m also thinking that since some of you are clearly closet television fiends, we might get some lively discussion going on when I write about ongoing television shows. We can argue about whether or not Bones and Booth should get together, what in the heck is going on in Lost, and how often Eliza Dushku can wear leather pants and still get away with it.

Does this sound like something that would be interesting/fun to read? Or are you guys all secretly counting down the days to 1 January and the end of the Book Project? Let me know what you think.

In 2004, roughly 20% of 17 year olds read for fun, claims this New York Times article discussing literacy in the digital age. That statistic grabbed me, right there at the bottom of the first page, and then I read the rest of the article, increasingly quivering in horror as I proceeded. The article is basically a discussion of how new media is affecting literacy, and whether or not this is a good or bad thing, but, in a way, it reads like a tragic tale of decline. And I think it’s well worth taking the time to check out.

Literacy, in my mind, is extremely important. It’s a powerful tool which can be taken in a huge assortment of directions, and used in a range of ways. I’d take literacy over pretty much anything else, because I have the ability to do anything with the right books in my hand. And, while the data still needs to be gathered, there seem to be some strong indicators that the Internet may be slowly killing literacy as we know it.

While one could argue that Internet literacy is a different, new kind of literacy, I still think that old-fashioned book literacy has an important place in society, and I would hope that many people agree with me. Yes, the Internet can be a powerful tool, but, as the article points out, it also has some serious flaws.

Like the fact that Internet users are far less capable of being able to evaluate sources than book readers. I’ve always suspected this, and talking with my father about his students, this suspicion has been supported by observation, but researchers actually studied this issue, and found it to be true.

And then there’s this:

Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted “Dieing Isn’t Always Bad,” about a girl who comes back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.

Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. “No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college,” she said.

Which just broke my heart. And my mind. I defy you to read that, to consider it, and not cry on the inside. Or possibly on the outside, if you’re the emotionally demonstrative type.

Some people suggest that reading on the Internet is better than not reading at all, and they are totally right. Furthermore, brains work in different ways, and some brains probably are better-suited to digital media, which means that people who would have fallen through the cracks are now getting a fighting chance. This is an excellent thing.

At least people who are reading on the Internet are showing some kind of interest in world affairs, and in creativity, and that is a good thing. I’m not going to argue with that. But an inability to evaluate sources sets up a dangerous situation where people take everything they read on the Internet for granted, and this is not a good thing. And, it appears that Internet/digital reading cultivates different kind of reading skills than physical reading, which means that people who read a high concentration of material online may have trouble reading printed text. How is the MySpace generation going to cope with the reality of printed material in, say, the workplace?

It’s all about the balance. I read a lot online. I read all of my news online, for example. I work online. I read short fiction and other blogs and all sorts of things on the Internet. There are some definite advantages to reading materials online, like access to news sources I wouldn’t otherwise see, and the ability to have my mind actually melted by trolls on feminist websites. But I also read books (for pleasure, even), and I try to maintain a healthy balance between reading on the screen and reading elsewhere.

Because I do notice that my reading habits on the screen differ from the ones I use to read books. And if I read online too much, my tendency to skim tends to transfer to my book reading, which makes books much less enjoyable.

I wouldn’t argue that reading online “isn’t reading,” but it is most certainly a different kind of reading, and I think it’s going to reshape the way we think about reading and printed materials, as a society. I doubt that books are going to vanish entirely, at least not in my lifetime, but if this article is any indicator, the printed word might be in for some woeful neglect pretty soon.

Trolling the Press Democrat the other day for scraps of news of interest, I noticed the headline “Outrage over prisoners’ right to blog,” and while it took me a few days, I did eventually click on it to find out what the deal was. And the deal is, pretty much, exactly what it sounds like. Prisoners blog by sending out posts in letters and relying on friends to publish them, and people get riled up about it.

The way we treat prisoners in this country is very intriguing, in a lot of ways, and it looks like the Internet is reshaping, yet again, the way we think about prisoners. It was interesting to read the strident railings against prisoner blogging from family members of victims, especially when contrasted with measured statements which pointed out that prisoners do, in fact, have first amendment rights.

And they do. That’s the simple fact of the matter. Committing crimes in this country deprives you of the right to freedom, assuming that you are tried and convicted, but it doesn’t abridge other rights. (With the exception of the right to vote, for felons.) Personally, I support the extension of basic rights to prisoners. I’m not a fan of the gulag, and I don’t think that prisoners should be isolated from society altogether. I’m not sure I’m quite as comfortable with the comparatively deluxe accommodations in some prisons, but I do think that prisoners should be allowed to vote, to pursue educations, the blog, and so forth, because these are all acts which promote rehabilitation and healthy function in society.

Granted, no one close to me has been murdered, and maybe I would feel differently if that was the case. But I feel like the Internet is a big place, and if I don’t want to read a murderer’s blog, I don’t have to. No one’s going to sneak it into my RSS feed, and people aren’t going to send me the link and say “hey, check this out.” Someone who chooses to live a very public life as a victim advocate might be confronted with such material more often, but, again, that’s a personal choice, and choices have consequences.

Obviously, I support measures which are designed to prevent prisoners from orchestrating crimes while behind bars, and I don’t support witness intimidation, evidence tampering, jury manipulation, and that sort of thing. But if a prisoner wants to blog about his experiences, I see no reason to stop him; I might choose not to read it, but I think I also might find prison blogs interesting, especially if I wanted to learn more about life in American prisons.

Inevitably, of course, I’m sure that not all prison blogs are all that healthy, and that some of them may very well influence society. Americans do seem to have a fascination with people who commit heinous crimes, and I doubt that restricting prisoner blogging is going to stop that. In an era where the Bill of Rights is increasingly less meaningful, thanks to figures in our government who are actively working to undermine it, I’m also glad to see any fight to retain basic rights, no matter who that fight is supporting.

I’ve been going through my RSS subscriptions this week, weeding out sites I don’t want to subscribe to anymore and adding a few new ones. I like to do this every six months or so, because otherwise my RSS becomes totally unwieldy, and I find myself not really reading the feed in the morning, but sort of skimming over it blindly without paying much attention.

This is the danger of RSS, I think, that because it’s so easy to subscribe to most sites these days, there’s a temptation to just load up with feeds, and in the end you find yourself not reading them, because there are just so many that it becomes overwhelming.

So I go through my RSS. I take out sites that I do not plan on reading ever again, and I also take out sites that I still like, but don’t need to read on a daily basis. And then my bloated Google Reader trims back down again, allowing me to actually focus when I read, and over the course of a few months, of course, it balloons back up again as I see neat sites and add them.

There are a couple of reasons why I stop reading sites. Sites that haven’t updated in forever usually get removed, just because I assume that they have gone stagnant, although I always wonder about what happens when a site just becomes totally inert, without notice. What happened to the author? Is everything ok? Was he or she forced to stop writing for some reason?

I also take sites off when I become bored with them. I’ve noticed of late that every time I start to get really into a site, it either stops being updated, or sells out, which is extremely annoying. So a site that I once loved either drops off the radar, or starts being filled with sponsored posts and advertisements and crap, and I just don’t have time for that kind of thing. I don’t do it on my site, and it’s kind of a point of pride with me that none of the content on this site is a sponsored post/advertisement/etc. Although I certainly do write posts about things I like to encourage people to try them, I don’t get any special treatment or compensation for writing them. While I understand that some people and organizations do choose to blog for profit, I choose not to read them, because I feel that it inherently compromises them, and perhaps this is a topic for a more extended post in the future.

Even if a site doesn’t sell out, sometimes it becomes twisted from its original values, which either disappoints me or causes me to lose interest, and I think that’s a problem that happens to a lot of sites. People evolve over the years, of course, and so do their websites, so it’s only natural that our interests should diverge at some point. Heck, looking through my own archives, I find a slew of posts that puzzle, embarrass, or confuse me, although I leave them up because I believe in maintaining the integrity of the site as a whole. (For the record, I have deleted two posts from this site: one was a status update which I felt didn’t need to live in posterity forever, and the other, which I regret deleting, was removed at the request of a company I worked for. I was young and naive then, and not really aware of my rights or willing to stand up for them.)

I also stop reading sites when they do things which annoy me, either because they are just generally irritating, or because I find them to be in conflict with my personal values. Sites which do things like making it really hard to comment would fall under the annoying category, while sites which do things like constantly revising their history to make themselves look better would be considered the latter. And, again, that’s a matter of personal choice; sites which are poorly designed or crappy can choose to carry on, and I can decide to stop reading them, so it’s all good.

It seems that the blogging craze is finally starting to slow, with less new blogs being created each year, and more and more going dormant. It’s interesting, to me, to see which sites survive and which ones don’t, and the ways in which sites change. I assume that anthropologists somewhere are making a thorough study of the world of new media and blogging, because it seems like it would be a fruitful thing to explore.

When I think about the reasons I stop reading sites, it makes me wonder about the reasons I continue reading others, and about the sites that seem to have long-term staying power. It makes me wonder why bad sites become incredibly popular, and why others remain in obscurity for years with a limited readership. There’s some sort of magical equation there, but I’m not sure what it is, although I suspect it has something to do with the complex and very incestuous network in the blogging community. While I might envy sites with a huge and very active readership, in a way I’m glad to be outside of that network and all of the attending drama and nepotism, and I note that almost none of the sites I read on a regular basis are inside the super-elite-insiders network of bloggers, which I think says something. About them or me, I’m not sure.

So, what makes you decide to stop reading a site? Have you ever stopped reading a site and then forgiven it and decided to come back? If you blog, what do you think contributes to the staying power of a site? Have you ever fallen in love with a site, only to have it mysteriously disappear?

Since I am tired of having this argument:

That would be Visa’s card acceptance policy. Yeah, all those people who tell you to leave your card unsigned or write “See ID”? They are wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. WRONG!

Here’s American Express. And Mastercard, which sayeth: “The back of the card must be signed, and the signature should reasonably compare to the cardholder signature on the sales receipt. Check to be sure that it has not been taped over, mutilated, erased or altered in any suspicious manner.”

The big three all say the same thing, kids, and that is: SIGN YOUR DAMN CREDIT CARD.

I was interested to read on Tuesday about a plan among several major Internet service providers to block content which contains child pornography, in yet another attempt to cope with the flowering of child pornography here on the wilds of the Intertubes. This is not a proposal I support, for an assortment of reasons, and I think that a fair number of Internet users are probably with me on this one (including, of course, and unfortunately, child pornographers and their customers).

Before I spell out my reasons for being opposed to this, I feel that I should say, for the record, that I am categorically opposed to child pornography and the exploitation of children. I think that porn which features children is foul, and disgusting, and that we most certainly should be taking regulatory steps to make it harder to access to to penalize the people who produce it. I would hope that this is a given, but I thought I should throw it out there.

In the first place, this proposal sets a very dangerous precedent, and I could see it getting bound up in the more general discussion about net neutrality. The proposal to block “objectionable” content could balloon; while I think we can all agree that child porn is not ok, what about porn in general? Directions for making bombs? Racist websites? Where do we draw the line, and who decides how that line gets drawn?

I am also curious to see how they plan to filter content. It’s been pretty clearly proved that the vast majority of content filters are not terribly smart, and I can see the potential for a lot of perfectly acceptable websites being swept up in the ban, which is no good. And, if it’s going to be done purely on the basis of user reports, could people start getting vindictive or try to shut down competition by crying “child porn”?

Furthermore, how effective would such a ban really be? People are pretty adroit at circumventing all manner of measures on the Internet, and I’m willing to bet that innovative and determined kiddie porn lovers and those who supply them will find a way to step around the boundaries of the ban, like simply switching to another ISP, for example. While the Times clearly enjoyed taking a potshot at Usenet, what about email services? File sharing applications? Instant messaging? Is there a serious proposal to block these services as well? Because that could be really, really ugly.

In the wording of the article, it sounds like all Usenet access could be shut off, which would be a major bummer for people with legitimate uses of Usenet. Now, I’ve read several poorly researched and badly worded articles in the Times lately, so I’m hoping that was just poor editing, but one never knows where the insanity will stop. The things that make Usenet so very handy for the distribution of child porn are also useful for political dissidents trying to exchange information, for students to communicate quickly and effectively for people all over the world, and for people to generally exchange ideas and information without excessive scrutiny. Should we sacrifice all that for a tactic which may not be all that effective in ending child porn?

I also note that the “agreement” was the result of sneaky and coercive tactics on the part of the office of the New York State Attorney General, which doesn’t bode well, in my book. I’m with Internet service providers on this one; the Internet is a big place, and by using it, you run the risk of seeing some things you don’t like. To suggest that ISPs are responsible for the abundance of child porn is just fallacious.

What it really boils down to, for me, is the question of whether or not this tactic will prevent the exploitation of children in pornography. I don’t think it will. It might drive child porn underground, and cause ISPs that go along with it a lot of customers in the meanwhile, but it won’t address the root problem, which is the very existence of child porn. Going after the people who make such content may not be working as well as we’d like, because where one pornographer falls, 10 will rise, but it’s better than penalizing the rest of the Internet.

Blocking sites which offer child pornography is like covering your eyes in a nuclear explosion. You might not be able to see it, and that might make you feel better, but…guess what? It’s still happening.

You Suck. Seriously. You. Suck. You suck so much that I’m surprised you don’t create a vacuum.

Sincerely,

s.e. smith

At the risk of confusing Google even more, I had to share some of these search terms with you, because they are too funny not to spread to the world at large. This, my friends, is why I like looking through my server logs:

“cost to transport dead body by air” -I don’t know the answer to this one, but I’ll bet you’d qualify for a bereavement fare.

“fort bragg glass jellyfish fire” -Uhm. What?

“picture of stink in the book not in the book” -I don’t know how one would photograph stink, exactly, whether it was in a book or not.

“low water pressure glen park san francisco” -I know this may come as a shock, but I am actually not the San Francisco Department of Public Works.

“dog vomit brown odor how to clean” -Someone with synesthesia has a sick dog, apparently.

“coconut porn” -Why? Seriously. WHY?

“pillow feathers girls” -Once again, what?

“have sex in san francisco” -Don’t do it. It’s a trap!

“pippis longstocking fort bragg” -They sell awesome socks, it’s true.

“behaving like an adult” -Boy, did you come to the wrong place.

“is twenty dollars a good tip at spas” -It depends on how much you paid for the massage. And how good the massage was, of course.

Naturally, no list of searches is complete without “nefarious pickle,” and I am pleased to see that I am back at the top of the Google results for that particular term. Which must be really annoying for the porn site of the same name, as well as all of the people who innocently click the link looking for porn and get pictures of cheesemaking instead.

Those of you who read along via RSS have probably noticed odd little things popping up in my posts, and since you’re undoubtedly wondering that in the heck is going on, I thought I should explain, but in order to do so, I briefly have to discuss a foul beast without discourse of reason known as a splogger.

Sploggers steal things. Things like my content. They use these things to make money. Here’s an article all about them. Basically, a splog is a spam blog, filled with nonsense content, and most splogs aren’t even really meant to be read, they just hang out, making money for their lazy, two-bit, worthless owners who can’t even be bothered to do actual work.

This irritates me. I really don’t like seeing my content smeared onto websites which don’t belong to me and being used to increase their PageRank and revenue, especially since I don’t profit at all from this site. I’m fine with a little fair use action, but I really like people to visit my site to read my writing, and I like to have some control over who reprints my work.

I think this is reasonable, because my work is a part of me, and there are certain things that I don’t like to be associated with. As a general rule in the past, any time someone has approached me and asked to reprint my photographs or writing, I have consented, and in some cases I have donated work to charities, so I don’t have a problem with people making money off my work, I just like to know who is making the money, and where that money is going.

Once I started tracking the theft of my content, I was pretty amazed and rather disheartened. Those of my readers who are also bloggers who aren’t aware of the splog problem might want to use Copyscape as a jumping off point to see who is stealing their work. You’d be astonished at where it pops up, and if you’re even a bit like me, a twinge of infuriation will burn in your heart when you see your words on someone else’s site without your consent.

One of the ways in which sploggers steal content is through feeds. I could turn off feeds for this site altogether, and I have considered this as an option, but I find sites without feeds immensely inconvenient and annoying, and as a result, I don’t keep up with them. And it would be rather hypocritical of me to rail against sites without feeds and to then close my feeds.

I could also turn my feeds into excerpts instead of full posts, except that it annoys me all to heck when people do this. The whole point of having a feed reader is so that I don’t have to read 80 million websites every morning. When people turn their feeds into excerpts, I only click through when they are really enticing, which is rare, so once again I would be kind of an ass if I did that.

Therefore, I’m having to be a bit more crafty. I’m using two Wordpress plugins, AntiLeech and Digital Fingerprint. I don’t really want to go into lengthy detail, but they are designed to thwart sploggers, and they are designed in a way which allows me to control them, which should prevent y’all from getting caught in the crossfire, except that you will notice weird little things in my feeds like sentences which look out of place.

Splogging is really frustrating to me on a lot of levels. Not least because it clutters the Intertubes, making it really hard to find valid, useful, interesting content. It is also frustrating to have my words repeatedly stolen from me (and yes, there are measures to deal with it, but it’s a pain in the ass). A lot of blogging services are starting to realize that splogging is a major problem and they are theoretically taking steps to combat splog, but sploggers are of course getting smarter, making things even harder for those of us who are trying to maintain our integrity.

There’s no easy way to solve the splog problem, but I do appreciate it when readers pass on information about other sites passing my content off as their own, or using my content in a way which violates fair use. And I also encourage you to report splogs when you encounter them on hosted services like Blogger (a favourite splogger domain which should probably just be changed to “Splogger” at this point).

Splogs have been around almost as long as blogs have, illustrating the amazing talent spammers have for filling every possible niche, and they are unlikely to go away anytime soon. But I’m not going down without a fight.