Archive - 2010
February 12th
#cttu – Aldon Hynes, Internet Novelist
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/12/2010 - 09:46It’s five o’clock on a Thursday and the usual crowd is driving to the CT Tweet Crawl. It is a diverse group of people that gather every so often who are united by little more than their common use of Twitter. I’ve been going to Tweet Crawls, Tweetups, and other social media gatherings for years. It used to be much more geeks talking about some wild idea for a new website. The content producers started showing up, the bloggers, podcasters, and videobloggers. Finally, the marketing people caught on with their nice suits and a chance to exchange business cards.
I’m listening to All Things Considered on the radio as I drive up. They are talking about William Faulkner and I think about novel writing. Every year I give National Novel Writing Month a try, and one year I completed the novel, but never got around to editing it.
I’m thinking to myself, “What do I have to say to this upcoming gathering? What do they have to say to me?” I anticipate the first question I will hear from many people, “So, what do you do?” I eat, I drink, I sleep, sometimes I write or manage to find interesting technology projects that pay the bills, but that isn’t concise enough for this crowd and people won’t want to swap cards with me. I could say that I’m quick with a joke, or to light up a smoke but people would then assume that there’s some place that I’d rather be.
Years ago, I spoke with my daughter’s kindergarten class about what I do. It occurred to me that the best way to describe what I do is to say that I “help people tell their stories online.” With this in mind, the words of William Faulkner rattling around in my head and a little Billy Joel somehow slipping in, I decided on my new job description. “I’m an Internet Novelist”.
Yeah, it’s a little different from Bill’s friend the Real Estate Novelist. I’ve had time for a wife, although she may sometimes get frustrated at the amount of time that I am online. So, at the TweetCrawl, I use the phrase. I get polite nods as people seem to get it, exchange business cards and move on. Only one person seems to object. He points out that novels are supposed to be long form fiction. A lot of social media is very short form, and by novel standards, even a long blog post is short form. In addition, social media people are supposed to be writing about what is really going on, not some fiction.
While I’m a big advocate of truth and authenticity online, it seems as if a good social media presence is concerned with the narrative, with taking all the bits and pieces of life and weaving it into an interesting story. Hopefully, the story isn’t fiction, but becomes true in the telling of the story.
So, there you have it. I’ve told my story of being an Internet Novelist, and hopefully telling this story makes it a little bit true. It certainly made the discussions at the CT Tweetup more interesting. On the way home, I listened to Fresh Air as Terry Gross interviewed Loudon Wainwright. He talked some about his father being a journalist for Life magazine and how he had bought into the notion that you need to write a book to be a serious writer. Maybe I’ll end up buying into the same notion, but until then I’ll keep up my various forms of internet writing and hope to weave them into interesting stories.
February 11th
Cheating at EntreCard and Finding Real Top Droppers
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 12:44Yesterday, Martin at Corneymans Money-Blog wrote a blog post about EntreCard members getting scammed. Specifically, he noted that even after he removed the EntreCard widget from his website, several people continued to drop cards on that website.
For those not acquainted with EntreCard, it is a system where you have a widget on your site with an advertisement for another participating member. EntreCard members that visit your site can ‘drop a card’ on your site by clicking on the widget. Every time they do this, they get a credit, and then use the credits to put up advertisements up on other people’s sites.
Martin wondered how people could drop cards on a site that doesn’t have a widget. He accused people who have done that of ‘cheating’. I suggested that while this shouldn’t be happening, it is a bit of a leap to call such people cheaters. It could be a bug with EntreCard or something else we don’t fully understand.
Martin went on to provide an example of how people could cheat on EntreCard by posting just the part of the widget necessary to drop a card. It appears as if EntreCard has fixed this part of the problem since that now shows up as ‘Invalid’. However, it does not address the bigger part of the problem. In theory, anyone could post anyone else’s widget on their own site. They could even set up a page with the widget of the top hundred sites they wish to drop on. It may well be that EntreCard has come up with some code to address this, but I didn’t want to do extensive testing and end up setting off triggers at EntreCard.
Whether or not people have been dropping cards on people without widgets as a form of cheating, because of some bug, or simply using some dropping tool they don’t fully understand, it does seem that the number of drops, and the drops in the inbox are not as accurate as we would like. So, what can be done about this?
Using Google Analytics, I checked out the traffic coming to my site from EntreCard. Specifically, I went to Traffic Sources, Referring Sites, and clicked on EntreCard. I found that the top two pages where from the Category Browser, and from my details page. The remaining 370 pages were from people’s inboxes.
For obvious security reasons, you cannot go to other people’s inboxes. However, if you use their userid, you can get to their details at http://entrecard.com/user_details/nnnn where nnnn is their userid. As an example, my user detail page is http://entrecard.com/user_details/11692. With that, and a little poking around I could find out who came to my site and visited the most pages from their drop in box. It is worth noting that this is not necessarily related to how often they drop on me. In some cases people would come from their inbox to my site a couple times a day. Some would visit multiple pages on each visit. To me, this is much more interesting. These are the people who are engaged with my website.
With that, let me highlight a few of them. At the top of the list was Doctor Faustroll Writes the Wrongs.. Coming in second was First Door on the Left, which is a blog I love to visit as well. Third was One World Realty. In fourth was Moms Lifestyle. Rounding out the top five was The Last Bear.
This was a surprising and interesting list to me and I expect I’ll spend more time visiting sites that rank high on the page visits instead of how many cards they drop on me.
Am I concerned about possible cheating at EntreCard? Yeah, a little bit. I would much rather have visitors that come and read what I’m writing, than those who drop cards on me, perhaps without even visiting my site. However every card dropped on me does boost my popularity on EntreCard, so even those visits are not completely meaningless.
If there is cheating going on, I hope the folks at EntreCard fix it so it stops. More importantly, I hope people read my blog and that I continue to find other interesting blogs to read.
What do you think?
February 10th
CT Underhound Railroad, Half a Year Later
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 14:19Last August, Fiona and I gave a ride to a young pit bull rescued from the Hartford Pound. It took the efforts of several people to save the young dog.
First, Sherry, an animal control officer in Hartford reached out to people that might be able to help. A woman in Maine had a place where the dog could be fostered, if there was some way to get her up to Maine. Fiona and I couldn’t drive up on the day that the dog needed to be picked up from the pound, so another person pulled the dog from the Hartford Pound and took her over to the Sadie Mae Foundation where she stayed for a couple days. Finally, Fiona and I picked her up and drove her up to Maine. Another woman picked her up from us and brought her to her foster home. Eventually, she found her forever home.
After the trip, I set up a mailing list for the CTUnderhound Railroad. Over the past half year, we’ve set up a website, a group and fan page on Facebook and have touched the lives of many dogs. As we look at our next half year, we’ve been thinking back over the past half year, and how we can be most effective.
Besides finding homes for dogs in need, we also need to work to make sure that there are fewer dogs that end up in the shelters, and we’ve worked hard to encourage spay and neuter programs. We also want to encourage town animal shelters to adopt best practices to make sure that these dogs find safe homes as quickly as possible.
The group has worked together to create a spreadsheet of town shelters as well as to reach out to various animal control officers. Currently, we are listing the Petfinder pages of forty-four town shelters on the CT Underhound Railroad Shelters Page.
This morning, I did a quick census of dogs on these pages. I counted 125 different dogs of twenty eight different breeds in these shelters looking for homes. Almost half of them are pit bulls. Pit bulls can be wonderful pets when they are properly taken care of, and I hope that people looking for a new pet seriously consider adopting a pit bull. However, I realize that for some people that is not an option and there are many other wonderful dogs in the shelter of Connecticut. If you are looking, please spend time looking through this list and seeing if there is dog that meets your needs.
The first half year of the CT Underhound Railroad has been more successful than I ever imagined it would be when we first started, and hopefully the second half of our first year will be even more so.
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 10:27
February 9th
Freedom of Information and Political Campaigns
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 02/09/2010 - 14:37Saturday’s Hartford Courant has an article about a complaint that Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz used public data for private use. After a brief investigation, I find that The Friends of Susan 2010 has used public data as part of their campaign. In fact, just about every campaign legally uses public data in their campaigns. What is different about The Friends of Susan 2010 is that they used public data in a creative and innovative way.
On February 2, 2009, Jason Doucette, Treasurer of Friends of Susan 2010 filed a freedom of information request per the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act of 2008 (Connecticut General Statues Chapter 14, Section 1-211) requesting an electronic copy of the Secretary of State’s constituent database. This public information was provided to the campaign and the campaign then used it to contact various people.
Based upon a letter from Joan Andrews, director of legal affairs and enforcement for the State Election Enforcement Commission (SEEC) to a Geoffrey Griswold Fisher of Litchfield, CT, it appears that over eight months later, Mr. Fisher filed an affidavit of compliant with the SEEC on October 26, 2009. The response sates that “This matter will not be docketed for an investigation as it does not allege facts, which if proven true, would constitute a violation of any law within the Commission’s jurisdiction.” It goes on to state that Connecticut General Statutes 5-266 et seq, commonly known as the State Hatch Act is administered by the Department of Administrative Services as a personnel matter. Ms. Andrews accordingly referred the complaint to the “Commissioner of the Department of Administrative Services and the Auditors of Public Accounts.”
The Secretary of State’s office keeps many different databases of public information. One is the voter registration database which is often purchased by campaigns for their voter outreach programs. Another database is the list of Notaries of the Public, which vendors sometime request in an effort to do business with Notaries. There are also databases about companies registered in the State of Connecticut and their agents. Often, the Secretary of State’s office has been criticized for not having systems that make this data more easily accessible.
In this case, the Friends of Susan 2010 have requested and received public information that they have used in a creative, innovative and as far as I can tell, perfectly legal manner. To test this, I have sent a Freedom of Information Request to each of the Constitutional Offices as well as the Governor’s and the Lt. Governor’s office.
Deputy Secretary of State Lesley Mara has informed me that the IT staff in the Secretary of State’s office will fulfill my request in the same manner as it did for the Friends of Susan 2010 and will be providing details soon on exactly when I can retrieve this data.
As of the time that this article is being written, I have also received several replies from other agencies. Anna Ficeto, Legal Counsel for the Office of Governor M. Jodi Rell responded:
This email will acknowledge receipt of your FOI request. We have not had a similar request and will need to research this with our IT staff. We will be in touch. Feel free to email me with any questions or concerns.
Catherine LaMarr, General Counsel to the Treasurer’s office replied:
I am in receipt of your email addressed to the Office of the Treasurer dated the 8th of February 2010, requesting that this office furnish you with copies of certain documents in accordance with the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”).
By copy of this message, I am asking the Treasurer’s Senior Executive Assistant for External Relations to furnish me with a copy of any constituent database she may employ. Additionally, I am checking with each Treasury Division to determine whether such divisions maintain constituent databases. Once I have determined whether the Office of the Treasurer has databases responsive to your request, we will determine the cost of compiling and copying any such database.
It is the standard practice of this office to charge $0.25 per page for copies of documents or the actual cost in employee time and state resources to produce electronic copies of records requested under the Connecticut FOIA. Once we have identified documents responsive to your request and calculated the costs associated with your request, we will contact you.
Should you have any questions regarding this matter or should you wish to modify your request, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Steve Jensen, Press Director for the Comptroller’s office replied:
I'm Nancy's press director. I assume your request is in the context of the story regarding the Sec. of State's constituent database. The short answer is we do not compile such a database here - we have a monthly mail log that records constituent inquiries and contains copies of their correspondence and to whom it was assigned internally for action, but we do not compile the names in a list or use the info for any other purpose. Let me know if that satisfies your request or not...
So far, there has not yet been a response by the Lt. Governor’s Office or the Attorney General’s office.
There is a lot of valuable information that our State Government collects and makes available to all the people of the state. The Secretary of State’s office has done a good addressing these requests. The Friends of Susan 2010 has been creative and innovative in their use of public data and others would be wise to follow suit. Others in politics do not yet appear to have learned the value of openness and public information.
By looking more closely at Mr. Fisher’s apparently meritless complaint we can find two different paths. Mr. Fisher seems to want to use the State Hatch laws to prevent people from gaining access to public information. On the other hand, we can take the course of the Secretary of State’s Office in their reply to the Friends of Susan 2010 request to promote the use of public information and move towards a more open government that is, in fact, of, by and for the people.
