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Is It Safe?

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No, it’s not safe.

No matter how much money the powers-that-be put into making the internet seem like a sunny day in the park, the internet is the technological and societal equivalent of a dark alley. From the thugs working out of mom’s basement who are trying to steal your bank account login info, to the thugs at Facebook opting you in to efforts to track, exploit and sell your every click — and intentionally making it impossible for you to opt out — there is no safe place to be on the world wide web.  [ Read more ]

Taking Stock: Ditchwalk at Six Months

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Six months ago I put up my first post on this blog. My goals at the time were pretty straightforward:

  • Re-establish an internet presence for myself as a writer. I had a professional web site for years that was devoted to my interactive work. I took it down when I stepped back from interactive in the middle of the 90’s. (Blog posts and documents from that site have been added to Ditchwalk, and can be located via the Archive and Docs tabs on the main nav.)
  • Investigate the (r)evolution taking place in publishing, how the self-publishing/online movement is impacting traditional publishing, and any opportunities this presents.
  • Get up to speed on the new wave of social networking tools. In a few short years, online forums and e-mail groups were out, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter were in.
  • Get up to speed on new tech, including e-readers, online publishing sites, self-publishing service providers, and print-on-demand (POD) technology.
  • Get up to speed on issues facing writers and storytellers in this brave new world. (Google’s deal with the Authors Guild quickly caught my eye.)
  • Identify opinion leaders and stress-test their opinions.
  • Network with others who share any or all of these interests.

Six months later I feel good about what I’ve learned and accomplished. There’s more I want to do, and more I need to know, but today I feel as if I’m on the crest of the breaking publishing wave rather than paddling behind it.  [ Read more ]

Walking the Ditchwalk

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In my parasites post I advocated spending money only when you absolutely have to, and only when you know you’re getting something of equal or greater value in return. As an independent author I followed my own advice in putting up this site, and in this post I’d like to walk you though the process I followed in considering blog software options, blog theme options, and a number of graphics options.

For blog software I was fairly sure I would go with WordPress, because it’s free and because I had a positive experience with it several years ago. What I got for my effort then was pretty impressive. The functionality you get with WordPress now is almost absurd, and I couldn’t recommend the application more. (I use the self-hosted version, but WordPress.com is also available if you prefer something hosted and less technical.)  [ Read more ]

Taking Stock

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After three weeks of blogging and Site Seeing I definitely have a better handle on what’s happening out there, but I’ve also come to grips with the fact that I simply can’t keep track of it all. And that’s true even if I avail myself of all the latest tech, tech filters and social networks — which I would also have to spend a great deal of time reading about in order to achieve cutting-edge productivity.

(There’s a reason they call it the ‘cutting’ edge.)

In the end there’s too much to see and digest, let alone comment on, let alone act on. So it’s time to tighten the focus a bit, in anticipation of tightening it more in the future. Although this is an exclusionary process in some respects, I tend to think of it as irising in on something in the distance and pulling it into sharper focus. Simplification as zoom lens. Or sniper scope.

Traditional Publishing
I can’t really say the industry is dead, because it’s not dead. What I can say is that it’s broken, and I think everybody gets that. But I don’t think it’s simply broken relative to some newfangled process or advance (the internet), but rather that it’s inherently broken in ways that the internet is only now revealing.  [ Read more ]

Digging In

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Many of the better bloggers out there are thoughtful people who also have the ability to slap multiple short, pithy posts and quirky links onto their sites over the course of each day. Unfortunately, that’s not me. In fact, the last time I took a cursory look at something was in high school when I was supposed to be studying algebra.

What I’m interested in, and what I hope you’re interested in, is depth. And I don’t just mean intellectual depth, in which everything is erudite and sophisticated and an allusion to something else that’s erudite and sophisticated. I’m talking about understanding things, and in particular, understanding the techniques and craft knowledge which allow for successful storytelling (by whatever criteria) in any medium. I’m completely, totally interested in that, but it’s not the kind of thing you can talk about in short posts or 140-character blurbs.

So on days like this, when I barely get a post up before the clock ticks to a new day, I hope you’ll forgive me. I’ve been burning through a massive amount of information in the past couple of weeks, trying to get up to speed on what’s happening in so many different and interesting storytelling arenas. It’s an amazing time, but I clearly need to sharpen my focus if only to keep from being swamped. More soon.

— Mark Barrett

Saturation Day

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One minute you’re skulking around a forgotten alleyway, looking at sights (and sites) that only a few intrepid explorers have ever seen. The next minute someone runs up laughing, slaps a satellite photo in your hand, points to the teeny-tiny, itty-bitty you standing in an infinite grid of similar forgotten alleyways — all of which have already been clearly marked by and populated with people just like you.

That’s Saturation Day. The day the exploring catches up with reality. The day the ground drops out from beneath your feet. The day you realize that the thing you’re trying to take in is bigger than you thought it could be. The day you begin to sense the forest for the trees.

(It’s also the day you’re really glad you didn’t do any exploring before you put up your site, or you just might have decided to go with Plan B: The Ditch in American Cinema — 1930 to 1975.)

Internet fiction is happening. I’m still trying to find a fiction site that really connects with me, but the long tail of independent effort is already established. People are writing fiction on the internet and other people are trying to figure out how to make a buck off those people. Which is pretty much how the internet ballgame works.

Tomorrow, I’m going to speed up the tempo and try to catch up with the things I’ve seen and thought about so far. Because I’m already getting a good idea about what I want to try, and I’m not seeing any reason to think about it a whole lot more before I take the leap.

— Mark Barrett

The Ditchwalk Name

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Naming a web site used to be easy. You thought of the name you wanted, you registered the name, you put up your site.

Then came the speculators. Search for your domain name of choice today, or your second choice, or third, or tenth, and you’re likely to discover that the name has already been registered by someone who has no intention of ever using the domain to establish a web site. Rather, they hope to sell you the name for a vastly inflated price and turn a profit in doing so. Because domain names are based on language, and there are a finite number of words in any language, the speculators know that if they buy up the most common words and phrases, someone will inevitably come knocking….

In the parlance of business, this is called ‘making a market’ for a commodity — in this case, domain names. Other well known examples of this entrepreneurial spirit include Enron’s electric power market, oil topping $140 a barrel and driving gas prices past $4.00 at the pump, and those sexy real-estate-backed derivatives that were based on inflated mortgage values, leading to the housing crisis and the worst American recession in seventy years. (Your free markets in action.)  [ Read more ]

Getting Underway

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Launching even a small web site like this is both fun and frustrating. It’s fun because it holds promise. It’s frustrating because for every coding rule there’s an exception, or a variance necessary to coddle some third-party application or software or browser which steadfastly refuses to join with the rather blindingly obvious cause of standards compliance.

Still, at some point in the development process (which is itself a grand term for what I’ve been doing), the cobbled-together back end and the bells and whistles out front achieve a state of grumbling tolerance, and there’s nothing left to do but get on with it. Call it a shakedown cruise. Call it a public beta. Call it open-source testing.

All of which is to say that you’re going to find some glitches here and there as I continue to tweak this and that. If something doesn’t work for you, or displays poorly, please let me know.

— Mark Barrett

You Say You Want a Revolution…

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The more things change, the more they stay the same. When it comes to human beings and their actions and choices, I believe that.

But sometimes change really is change. And once in a great while, change is revolution.

Right now — today — is one of those times, because the internet is clearly a revolution. (At least until a global power shortage forces us all back to cold chisels and granite slabs for communication.)

I’ve been a professional writer and storyteller for more than twenty years, and for over a decade I’ve been making a living as a direct result of the advent of the internet. But that’s only looking at the internet as a communication pipeline that allows me to work for clients across the country and around the globe without leaving my chair. Amazing as it is (and it still amazes me), that part of the revolution is pretty much over.

But there’s another way of looking at the internet, and that’s as a medium — as this web site, web page, and these words attest. As a publishing medium in particular the internet is still evolving and growing, while powerful established industries such as newspapers, television and the book business are already reeling as a result of the force of this change.  [ Read more ]