Coffee heat rising

Month: June 2011

The Sanity Discount: Ethics for Small Businesses and Bloggers

by

Well. Bloggers who run ads are small businesses, of course. A couple of ripples in the daily flow of things have, over the past couple of days, led me to ruminate about integrity and ethics, and about how they should direct the course of our little side businesses, including our blogs.

First, a very nice new client recently wandered in through the door. Says he wants someone to edit website copy for a successful small business in the trades. I send my rate sheet, which frames my rates on a per-page basis. He wants to know what I’ll charge by the hour. I say sixty bucks, not an unreasonable amount in the large scheme of things (twenty years ago a friend here was getting $120 an hour for similar work). He, doing business in a large city far, far away where employees’ and independent contractors’ pay is not throttled by right-to-work laws, doesn’t even blink.

So I dive into the project, which is kind of fun. Well, “kind of fun” because it doesn’t entail a lot of technical language or esoteric theory, unlike most of the stuff I do. Mathematical biosciences this is not, nor is it abstruse postmodernist blather. But there’s a fair amount of it, and it needs substantial reorganization, rewriting, and new research & writing. I enjoy this little endeavor over the course of about 22 hours. Eventually I wrap the job and add up my bill, and…

Holy mackerel! At $60 an hour, the tab came to enough for me to buy a condo in the guy’s expensive city. It really did seem out of line, given the relative ease and mild entertainment value of the work.

Okay, it’s true that if I based my fees on how much fun the job is, I’d have to edit Poisoned Pen Press copy for free. But still…there’s a limit.

Seeking a fairer arrangement, I calculated what it would cost the client if I charged my highest page rate—justifiable, I figured, because of the amount of actual writing I did—and came up with an amount that was enough for The Copyeditor’s Desk to buy itself a couple of printer cartridges. Fairly respectable, actually, but not enough to break the bank.

So that was what I ended up billing: about four or five hundred bucks less than the hourly rate would have commanded. But at $60 an hour, the bottom line added up to a figure utterly beyond reason. In an abstract way, it didn’t seem right to charge that much for that kind of work.

Call it the Sanity Discount.

Hard on the heels of that exchange, an ongoing conundrum resurfaced. Some of you probably noticed the recent “sp0ns0r3d post” that went up recently. You may or may not have observed that it also went down.

Funny about Money is getting large enough to attract the attention of various individuals and groups who bill themselves as advertisers. Almost all of them—a good 99.9 percent of them—want me to run paid text links. And they’re willing to pay pretty well for the privilege. I could easily double or triple Funny’s revenues by selling paid text links.

These people and their brokers approach the blogger by saying either that they want to buy ad space on the site or that they are generously offering a guest post, “absolutely free to you.”

Trouble is, doing so eventually puts one afoul of Google’s arcane rules, designed to protect its search engine algorithm. To simplify a complicated story, if Google catches you publishing paid text links (which sooner or later it will), your page rank magically drops to zero.

So, after you’ve worked for months or years to build a respectable page rank, these folks come along and take advantage of it; then when their practices kill your page rank, they of course will abandon you.

That particular aspect is not at issue here, though. What we have at issue is the so-called advertiser’s strategy to evade discovery, which is to produce copy for a post that fits the blogger’s site theme. The paid link is then embedded in the post, in such a way that the link appears to point to something relevant to the post’s subject.

It’s important to understand that paid links are not advertising. They’re a device to suck link juice from a site with a relatively decent page rank into the buyer’s own site, by way of making the other site appear at or near the top of a Google search.

In other words, what looks like a real post is a deceptive device to mount self-serving links whose purpose has nothing to do with the host site’s content. Often it contains a link pointing to some outfit selling a service or product that runs counter to the host site’s very raison d’être. Why, for example, would a personal finance blogger who urges readers to get out of debt, manage money wisely, and avoid loan sharks recommend taking out a payday loan?

Why? To collect a hundred bucks for publishing two words attached to a live do-follow link, that’s why.

Such a post is, in short, advertorial. Actually, it doesn’t even rise to that level, because the articles are not really intended to be read; they exist to carry the links, which exist to use the host’s page rank to jack up the search engine page rank on the link seller’s site. While they’re billed as advertising, they’re actually a form of black-hat SEO.

Well, I started in journalism back in 1979, and over the years I’ve worked for some of the most prominent regional periodicals in my part of the country. Believe it or not, there is such a thing as journalistic ethics, and over the course of 32 years they tend to inhabit your thinking. When I came up, there was a sharp divide between advertising and editorial—in fact, the ad and circulation departments were housed on the other side of the building from where the editors and artists worked.

Magazines did publish crass little “articles” written by highly paid writers—earning far more than any of us did!—whose purpose was to plug paying advertisers. This was to be expected: magazines survive on ad revenue; subscription income does not suffice to support a print publication. However, ethical publishers mark advertorials as such: with a running header or footer saying something like “Advertisement.” Often advertorials are set off typographically and even printed on slightly different paper from the rest of the rag.

To publish advertising or SEO masquerading as an article without cluing the reader to the fact that the stuff is paid advertising is dishonest.

It is to lie.

That is why many publications do not print advertorial at all, and why those who do, if they have any decency at all, label them prominently as advertising.

Times have changed, of course, with the advent of the brave new world that is the Internet. And blogging is and is not journalism, though it has readers who presumably expect some standard of honesty from their writers. Here’s what journalistic webmaster Robert Niles says about the issue, writing at the Online Journalism Review:

The old rule: There must be a wall between advertising and editorial.

The new rule: Sell ads into ad space and report news in editorial space. And make sure to show the reader the difference.

Accordingly, I marked the paid-link peddler’s copy as a Sp0nsor3d Post!

This elicited a squawk of dismay. When I refused to remove the notice saying the post was a paid article containing links to the author’s clients’ sites, the deal fell through. Cheerfully, I removed the post from my site, and good riddance to it.

To cope with the practice of secreting paid links in fake stories, Google is now demanding that all links to commercial sites be coded as no-follow links. The would-be advertisers hate this, of course—because the link juice is what they’re paying for—and usually they will decline to place a paid link unless it’s do-follow. Many bloggers simply take a chance that Google will never catch them, and they justify the potential loss of page rank by arguing that PR doesn’t matter anyway.

Maybe it doesn’t, maybe it does. The technicalities of page rank are way above my pretty little head, and so I don’t trouble myself with them.

But one could argue, with some justice, that Google’s policy on paid do-follow links is hugely unfair, since Google Adsense places plenty of paid links on your site. And since Google pays nothing like what these often rather sleazy “advertisers” will pay, Google itself takes on a whiff of the exploitive.

About that, I say it is what it is.

Ironically, while Google’s policy is self-serving (their motive has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with the way the company’s business model works), it in fact feeds into that fundamental journalistic ethic: the effect of the rule is to discourage deceptive content and to encourage separation of advertising and editorial.

Old-fashioned…but then so is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

😉

Gunfire? Reconsidering the suburbs…

by

Carol (accountant/neighbor right across the street) e-mailed to ask if I’d heard Sunday morning’s gunshot fusillade. She was awakened by the racket, too (for me, it was just another sleepless night; she actually has work she needs to be awake for), and she called the cops. They told her several other people had called in a shots-fired report.

Hm. I thought it was firecrackers. Our idiot legislators have legalized fireworks, and so every one of their fellow morons—and we have more than our share of those in this state—has run out and stocked up on every incendiary device one can now get one’s hands on. The Safeway, if you can imagine, is selling fireworks that will blow your fingers off and scorch your eyes blind. But by golly, we wouldn’t want Big Brother robbing our kids of a nostalgic childhood experience!

Oh. Sorry. Back on topic:

Firecrackers. Pretty Daughter‘s teenage kids were outside—I could hear them laughing when I got up to investigate. And an  unmuffled car with a boombox, exactly the description of Pretty Daughter’s girl child’s boyfriend’s vehicle, roared off down the street forthwith.

The gangbangers around here favor automatic and semiautomatic weapons. This was not one of those. If it was a gun, the person was using an old-fashioned six-shooter, and that is so unlikely in this neighborhood as to defy credibility. Also, the reports—about twenty of them—were not as sharp as pistol shots.

But Carol is pretty sure it was a gun. And Sally was up that night, too—her lights were on; she turned them off and apparently went back to bed after the dust settled. I imagine Sally, who’s been around the block a few times, also called 911.

Damn, but sometimes one tires of living in…shall we say, a socioecomically mixed neighborhood. Those slums west of 19th and north of Dunlap really do affect the quality of life in adjacent middle- and working-class neighborhoods. And as the economy slides deeper into actual depression for low-income workers, who now comprise the largest numbers of permanently unemployed Americans, the area to the west is getting worse and worse. Really, none of the grocery stores and other retail establishments that serve our neighborhood are safe to patronize now. The Albertson’s has been hopeless for a long time, but the Sprouts across the road from it used to be OK. Now I won’t go into either shopping center. The Ranch market has taken the place of the defunct Food City in serving the Latino population—it feels a little safer because most of the customers are families, and because the proprietors have hired a security guard to patrol the parking lot.

But really: who wants to do their grocery shopping under the gaze of an armed guard?

I love my house, I love my immediate neighborhood, and I love my life in the central city. BUT… Do I really want to spend my old age dodging bullets?

This brings me back to the possibility of buying one of the hugely devalued houses in the new tracts up against the White Tanks mountains. One thing you have to say about an old folks’ “community” (snark) in a new settlement occupied entirely by middle-class whites: not a lot of gunfire will be going on there. Consequently, not a lot of cop helicopters will be rending the quiet of the evening hours (you can set your clock by the 11:00 p.m. cop fly-by here).

I’d love to have a beautiful new house like the models out there. But on the other hand, how could I live without choir, without my friends, and without seeing my son at the drop of a hat? And how could I get by without enough adjunct teaching income to take up the financial slack?

By way of wasting time when I should be working, I tricked out a little pro-and-con analysis. Listed twelve items in favor of living in Trilogy and twelve agin’ it. Then assigned a value to each, according to how important it is to me, subjectively. The result was a little surprising:

I expected the point spread between the pro’s and the cons would be a lot wider, much heavier in favor of staying put where I’m as happy as I’m ever likely to get. But there’s only a four-point difference between the reasons to move out there and the reasons not to move out there.

Some items, of course, are huge: dodging automatic fire stacks up just as heavily as being able to see my son on short notice. Others are more ambiguous: I don’t consider a new house to be especially important, especially given the solid construction and pleasant ambience of the 40-year-old house I’m living in. To my mind, the absence of rambunctious, noisy teenagers is not necessarily a good thing; hence the relatively low “7” on the pro side.

Judging by these dozen criteria, it’s almost a toss-up whether I stay in the increasingly violent inner city or follow my kind to the Holsum Bread suburbs.

Realistically? I can’t afford to live out there. Certainly not while I’m tethered to the upside-down house M’hijito and I got ourselves into: to pay that bill, I have to have a job, and the only work I can hope to get is part-time adjunct community college teaching. There are no community colleges within sane driving distance of the White Tank mountains. Plus no matter how much “greener” construction might save on the utility bills, a $218/month homeowner’s association fee is out of the question.

Which, yea verily, brings us to the homeowner’s association. Notwithstanding phenomena like Dave’s Marina, Used Car Lot, and Weed Arboretum (now mercifully replaced by the tidy accountants across the street), I do not want to live in an HOA. I like to hang my laundry on the line…the last thing I need is some supercilious association telling me I can’t put my sheets out on the back porch. Or, more to the point, that I have to spend $350 to $500 I can’t afford to replace a dryer I don’t really  need or, now, even want.

Guess I’m your basic trailer trash, eh? Looks like this is where I belong.

😉

iPad: Probably Not Now…

by
Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland on a first-generation iPad. Evan-Amos. Public domain.
Down the rabbit hole on an iPad

This morning we learn that Google has signed up the British Library to its digitization project: holdings published between 1700 and 1870 will be added to the 13 million books Google has already scanned. Much of this stuff is available free on the iPad.

{sigh} I had decided to reward myself for the crushing amount of work I just ground through by having The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., buy me an iPad. It would be handy for editorial and teaching work (to say nothing of serving as an incredible toy!), and I figured CED could afford the $25/month ATT connection. And with Skype or some such on it, the thing would function as a cell phone, too.

But when I went over to the Apple store on Saturday, they didn’t have the model I want, and their manager seemed less than enthusiastic about selling one to me. Basically he said that you have to keep coming back to the store to see if they have the desired iPad in—often to nail what you want, you have to go back several times a day! He suggested ordering it online.

Well. I don’t want to order it online. I want to see what I’m getting and ask questions of real human beings and read the paperwork before I walk off with it.

So, I guess I don’t really need that thing. I’ve managed to stumble through 66 years without it, and I expect I’ll live another 20 or 30 years without it.

The interruption in the drive to buy an iPad was just enough to raise the question: Is this a need or a want? And more to the point, can CED really afford the thing?

Answer to the first question: want.

Answer to the second: apparently not.

The delay in gratifying that want gave me time to reconsider the S-corp’s performance. And I see that because Adsense has been underperforming over the past few months, CE Desk is just barely earning enough to pay my sidekicks and cover the operating costs I’ve recently shifted onto its books.

Fortunately, a couple of new clients recently appeared at the door. And we’re supposed to start a big project management account in July. If we perform decently on that, there’s a good shot the project management thing will develop into steady, long-term work.

Tina is extremely good at project management—that is, as a matter of fact, what she does on her day job. She’s so good at it that the Chinese government is going to keep her on contract as managing editor of the huge international business management journal she runs through the Great Desert University, even after the GDU gives her its second shafting (they’re laying her off again). So, I’m expecting that she will take over management of this huge client and farm out the grunt work to me and our other sidekick. But…it could be awhile before we see actual work and pay come in from this enterprise.

At any rate, when you run a business you have to apply the same frugalist principles as you do in operating your personal finances. To wit: always ask if it’s a need or a want!

But darn. I really did want that gadget. Way to market a product, Apple!

We’ll revisit this question later in the year, when we see how 2011 shakes out. Which leads us to another rule in common between business and personal finance: never bet on the come. 😉

Image: Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland on a first-generation iPad.
Evan-Amos. Public domain.

Ant Wars: The Battle of Kenmore

by
Ant carrying an aphid

They’re b-a-a-a-a-c-k!

The Ondts have begun their summer campaign, and we have engaged the first battle of the season. A Myrmidon battalion was spotted this afternoon, undertaking an attack on the refrigerator. It appeared they were trying to roll it out the back door.

Ant intelligence agents are telepathic. How else to explain their unerring knowledge of the human exhaustion level? Invariably, they launch their raids when the enemy is quivering on the edge of nervous collapse.

O.K., O.K. I admit it: I haven’t cleaned the kitchen floor in a week, and yeah, something that I don’t clearly remember rolled under the fridge a week or so ago, and no, I’m just not strong enough to move the refrigerator, and so yes, it was inevitable that eventually the ant trash removal brigade would show up sooner or later. But really. They could have picked a day that didn’t begin at 5:30 a.m. with backwashing the clogged pool filter followed by the surprise 6:15 appearance of Gerardo’s non-English-speaking palm tree dude followed by MORE pool-cleaning followed by a very busy day of racing around the city followed by a wrestling match with Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner in 110-degree heat. They know. They do know.

I laid waste to legions of the lady warriors, though. Home-made glass & tile cleaner (rubbing alcohol + water + ammonia) does them in when it’s sprayed directly over their little bodies. Must’ve killed 80 or 100 of them. Experience suggests, however, that for every ant that croaks over, two ants are waiting to take her place.

Mopped up the field of battle with a microfiber rag on a swiffer mop. Vacuumed and vacuumed and vacuumed, in hopes of picking up whatever flecks of food are on the floor. Then dust-mopped again. Then mopped with a hot solution of Simple Green.

This strategy seemed to beat them back.

Ah, but the night is young. Puny human efforts to vanquish the armies of the night, as we know, little avail us. I expect they’re still out there. Waiting.

Image: Ant carrying an aphid. Luisifer. vlastní fotografie. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Real Estate, 2011

by

Yesterday KJG and I took it into our pretty little heads to spend the day looking at real estate. More specifically, we killed several hours touring the models at Trilogy, a Shea Homes tract in Vistancia, itself a sprawling development halfway to Las Vegas. Entertaining experience.

Prices have come down so far that I actually could afford a base house in one of the low-end models out there. Well. That’s assuming I put in no landscaping, no window coverings, and no furniture.

Some of the houses are very pretty—one thing you have to say for today’s developers, they finally have design down pat. I’m partial to the Monaco, which unlike some of the other models doesn’t waste space with a hall-like entry “foyer” for you to keep clean. It has a decent-sized kitchen, nice bedrooms, and an easy-to-care-for layout. The “den” (a sort of second breakfast nook) could serve as an office, if I could stir myself to pick up the litter off my desk.

The problem is, even though the property the developers purchased and bladed is vast and so far out from the city they must have bought it for a song, the houses are built right on top of each other. The gorgeous ceiling-to-floor windows that grace the back end of the house look straight into the back porch and windows of the neighbor’s house. You couldn’t walk into the kitchen to brew a cup of coffee in the morning without being fully dressed! The side windows on some of these models, which often have small side patios, peer right into the windows or patios of the neighbors’ houses.

Want privacy? Encase your yard in a six-foot block wall! That’s exactly what everybody out there eventually will do. So instead of looking into your neighbor’s windows, your pretty little breakfast nook or den will have a view of an ugly cement wall, three feet outside.

If you could persuade Shea homes to build one of these houses on a larger lot—say, a nice boulder-strewn number with a view of the Bradshaws  up in Yarnell—you would have the house from heaven. The Monaco would be my choice for the dream small house in the middle of 40 acres. But elbow-to-elbow with the guy next door and his kids, cats, and dogs? Don’t think so.

For the privilege of living on top of your neighbor, you’ll pay $218 a month in association fees. That’s for starters: you know the amount will never go down! The fee supports a vast community center with two pools, a spa, a restaurant, and a golf course. Plus the city of Peoria has divested itself of responsibility for the roads: homeowners also have to maintain the streets. In other words, you’re paying a $218 a month tax on top of the county taxes, and every now and again you’ll be assessed to cover the astronomical cost of repairing and repaving the roads.

Makes the slums across the road look pretty good, doesn’t it?

Last night shortly after we crawled into the sack, Cassie and I were rousted by the sound of an explosion. Couldn’t see any flames nearby, so I figured it probably came from the source of the late, great fumes, over to the west of us. Mwa ha ha: another meth house bites the dust!

{sigh} If my son and the choir and most of my friends weren’t located in the middle of the city, the excessively neighborly Vistancia would look pretty good. Realistically, of course, I can’t afford $218+++ in fees to support a golf course (I don’t golf), swimming pools (I dislike swimming in public pools), a restaurant (I can barely afford to eat out now and certainly couldn’t if I had to choke up over two C-bills a month!), a spa, and roads that ought to be maintained by the municipality that’s extracting taxes from me.

LOL! I guess I could afford a forty-year-old trailer in Yarnell, though!

🙂

 

Brand New Dead Things (community center in Yarnell)

 

Bird Rescue

by

So, late this afternoon I notice the swimming pool is laboring, choked by all the crud sifting down from the hated palm trees. I’m on the phone leaving word with the accountant’s answering machine about a new little project I’ve cooked up while running across the yard to shut off the pump when I spot yet another bird in the sink of death.

That’s what a pool is, you know: a sink of death. It kills all sorts of small things, from little insects to little children, with birds about a third of the way across the spectrum. In size, I mean.

This one, though, has not yet drowned. It’s managed to climb aboard Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner’s hose, where it’s perched next to the intake. Because the pump is so thickly clogged, not enough current is sucking to pull the bird off its life raft.

It was a fledgling white-wing, the second to fall into the pool in the past week or ten days. So stunned was the chick that it allowed me to reach in, wrap a paper towel around it, and lift it out of the water.

But…then what?

It couldn’t come in the house: Cassie would make real short work of it. For the same reason, it couldn’t be left on the ground. If Cassie didn’t grab it, the ants would soon eat it alive.

I carried it around to the west side and set it on the shaded concrete bench, figuring it would probably die soon enough on its own.

Half an hour or so later, peered out the Arcadia door to see it was standing on its little feet, still all wadded up and unhappy-looking but distinctly alive. Put some water in a plant dish and set that and a handful of birdseed on the bench. The bird was not interested.

Went out to wrestle with the pool, around phone calls from Gerardo, who claimed to be trying to get a palm tree dude over here this afternoon or Saturday. Took some doing to persuade him that when I said I intend to spend tomorrow in Waddell, I’m not kidding. Pulled Harvey out of the drink; cleaned out his leaf-catcher and the pump pot but decided to let the extremely premature backwash job wait until after the promised palm tree guys have come and gone, since they’ll make an unholy mess of the pool and the pump will have to be backwashed again. Which reminds me: I’ve lost the bonnet to the water-hose-run debris collector.

Damn! Another Home Depot run. Already $126 in the red this month; by the time these guys are done, I’ll be a good $350 in the hole.

But while I’m out there, I realize a couple of adult doves are flying around with uncharacteristic bravado. They must be looking for their pup. So that means the fledgling belongs on the east side of the house, somewhere near its nest. There’s another fledgling hopping around in the tree, which must mean the mating doves haven’t yet lost all their brood to the pool.

After awhile, I spot their nest: about two stories high in a limb of the devil-pod tree. You’d need a cherry-picker to lift this bird back up there. Hm.

Finally, I decide to put the little bird on top of the metal storage shed, which by this time in the afternoon is fully in the shade. But it’s a 110 degrees out there, and the metal is too hot for it to sit on any length of time. A large, flat plant dish, retrieved from the  junk pile hidden behind that side of the house, would work to insulate and hold the bird, though. So I haul out a stepladder and set this thing atop the metal roof.

Go and retrieve the bird, which still shows no inclination to try to escape.

However, when I climb up on the ladder and go to set it in the plant dish, it doesn’t like that idea at all. It panics and tries to fly away, skittering across the corrugated metal roof and falling down behind the shed, between its back side and the concrete wall.

Seriously damn! Dead bird, for sure!

Well, no. I peek back in there and see the bird has landed on its feet and looks OK: a great deal better than it looked when plucked from the pool. The old boards I hid back there years ago are level and coated with an inch or so of composting devil pods and leaves, forming a soft substrate…probably not unlike a nest. It’s shaded and cool back there, and there’s no way Cassie can reach the bird. Probably there are precious few ants back there, too—it’ll take them a while to find the little thing, anyway.

As I write this, it’s coming onto the middle of the night. Out of curiosity, I took the flashlight out and peeked behind the shed, expecting to find an avian corpse out there.

Gone!

The bird has flown the coop. Couldn’t see it on the ground, either. So presumably it must have eventually dried out enough to take flight and, with any luck at all, made its way back into the tree and maybe even back to the nest.

Let’s just hope after all that it remembers to stay away from the darned pool!

Images:

Two White-winged Doves perching on a cactus in Tucson, Arizona, USA. Snowmanradio. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
A White-winged Dove perching on a Santa Rita Prickly Pear cactus in Tucson, Arizona, USA. Snowmanradio. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.