Jul 06
AndrewLife in Digital, Music
The artist known as Prince made a statement to the The Daily Mirror, a print newspaper in the United Kingdom which the artist has contracted with to release his next disc, that the internet is over. Prince is planning on giving away copies of 20Ten in the U.K. and in select European countries rather than attempting to sell it. The musician has shut down his website’s online store, and as yet, a U.S. distribution deal is only a rumor. With regards to digital sales, iTunes and other distributors are out of luck because according to the pop artist, there’s no reason to engage with them at all. If you believe the buzz, he has unabashedly called the internet a fad, and he’s so over it.
In some respects, I’m intrigued by his attitude, even if I disagree with it. The internet is the perfect example of something that’s great except when it’s not. It’s great when you can look up a minute piece of information from almost anywhere in the world. It sucks when you’re looking for something that’s probably there but for using the right search terms. It’s great that you can insta-message just about anyone plugged into the digital age, but it sucks because, phone or laptop, people expect insta-replies and know you got the message no matter that you might claim otherwise. It’s great because it greatly expands your reach as an artist, writer or other creative soul. It sucks when people steal your works and share them freely without your permission.
In theory, this is Prince’s real beef. The internet makes it too easy for his music to find itself in the hands of the wrong person. In practice, Prince has always made it clear that he expects to be paid for his creative output, nevermind the quality of his music, the relationships with his fans, or the state of the music business in 20Ten. It’s not up to you to decide whether you pay for his music, it’s only up to him. So he gives it away freely on compact disc, but cries foul at the abuse of digital media, some tracks that are purchased legitimately, some “borrowed” via nefarious internet file-sharing. The wrong person, then, is anyone on the planet who didn’t ask Prince for permission first to listen to his music.
It’s an antagonistic tactic for an artist to take, and in that light, it doesn’t really signal the death knell of the internet quite the way Prince is predicting. It may, indeed, have lost some of its novelty in recent years, but it is not in any way clear that the internet has also lost its utility. The very thing condemned by the Prince is the ability to share far and wide one’s creative output. Most artists embrace that. Prince seems determined to go the other way.
Ironically, it’s Prince’s fame (and no doubt, the sum of his royalty payments too) that he can afford to take such a strict stance on music distribution. Thank God that Prince was enslaved by Warner Bros. for all the years of his record contract because otherwise he might still be struggling to become the renowned artist that he is. He can afford to give away his works and limit their distribution and slap the hands of anyone who wants to share his music, all in the name of artistry for artistry’s sake. That fact that he still insists on bringing up the cash value of his works is as contradictory as it is unsubtle a message. It’s not about income so much as it is about control. Prince will cede the one as long as he isn’t expected to surrender the other.
For most other creative individuals, the internet is an asset, one that works because of the ease with which creative output can be shared, not because of it. For Prince, it’s just another fad.
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Andrew Marx is the author of the upcoming Smart ReMarx collection Thank You is Implied, available August 10.
May 14
AndrewLife in Digital
The internet has caused catastrophic social damage globally as it has taken over our lives. Our social vocabulary has morphed, our ability to connect with one another face to face has eroded, and our attention has shortened to a speck of time, the merest instant that passes unstimulated becomes a colossal waste. But while some changes are at least inevitable (language is a fluid construct and social mores adjust with the times), there are certain phenomenon for whom the death knell has struck with the coming of the internet.
There’s no such thing as reliable news media any more. The scoop has been replaced with spurious (or at least dubious) tweets and what may be my least favorite internet convention of all time, the trending topic (believe it or not, not original to twitter – yahoo has been doing it for years).
It was over for the scoop the first time a celebrity was outed in the social media web. Not that humiliating celebrities is something new. No, in fact, before the internet, this kind of fodder was reserved almost exclusively for the Star Magazines and National Enquirers of the world. Star Magazine’s headline this week: Exclusive: Glee’s Matthew Morrison in Cheating Scandal. National Enquirer posted a similar accusation of Matt Lauer. It’s a testament to the enduring voyeurism of our cultural wandering eyeball that both print magazines are still in business albeit with online companions trying to compete with Perez Hilton. (Let’s face it, he should just own the Associated Press).
But the coming of the internet with its vast news sources signaled the end for the scoop. These days, there is no one place to get source material. By the time you get to work in the morning, every who wants to already knows anything there is to talk about around the water cooler. Same for when you get home from work. Nobody can mark the definitive time a story broke, no matter who claims to take credit for it. There are too many avenues to the same information. And if that’s not scary enough, think about this:
Perez is actually reporting more factual information than false. Would you ever say that the National Enquirer? It’s a scary world. That’s why outing celebrities is such a big deal. It marked a turning point in our trash-talking, celebrity-stalking culture where the truth is vastly more interesting than the crap that someone is making up.
On the other side of the coin, stalking…er, tracking someone down actually got easier with the internet at the expense of the phone book. The end of the phone directory came from, ironically I say, the cell phone. Smart phones bring the web browser to you. Instantaneous driving directions, food recommendations, local address look-up and phone numbers and now who needs a bulky print phone directory? (It’s a pretty reasonable question to ask why they still print phone books, but they do).
The key to understanding the death of the phone book lies in acknowledging that the smart phone only made an extraordinary problem worse. Print media was already facing possible extinction with the cost of paper and printing only going on up, and readership moving in droves to online magazines. (Let’s face it, any third world society that doesn’t have routine internet access isn’t going to print the Yellow Pages either). And caught in the middle was a little social institution we call the phone directory, delivered to you once a year and tossed down like a dead deer on your stoop. It used to be the place to go for coupons, to compare local restaurants, hell, even to look up someone’s phone number.
But the one thing you could never do in the Yellow Pages was look up someone’s cell phone number. That was a segment that managed to stay out of the phone directory, and the moment of defeat was already written in the stars the minute cell phone numbers were considered, and later affirmed, to be private. Then the internet came along, sniffing around the body of a fallen warrior. The web stuck a gun to the phone book’s temple and fired.
You can still use the phone book on the internet (the Yellow Pages has tried to carve their niche in the market) but who really does? Search engines are more direct, and with user comments the norm now, anecdotal evidence is always in fresh supply. And if that’s not scary enough, think about this:
We probably still need the phone book. Think about it. How many phone numbers do you have memorized? Your phone may be a wealth of knowledge, but you have trained your brain that retaining the information isn’t necessary. I’m guessing if your phone went dead tonight, you could call your mother and that’s about it.
So call her.
The internet is a killer, and it’s going to keep killing. Newspapers are already dead. How long before we no longer need movie theaters? Shopping malls? Schools? Think it’s crazy, think again. Anything that can be done out there is being replicated in here, and in some cases, better. Our social interface will be massacred and in its place, we will all be wired in and strung out. So plug in and enjoy the ride.
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Andrew Marx is the author of Whisper in the Walls, available to download free beginning May 18 at www.whispernovella.com.
May 07
AndrewLife in Digital, Society and Culture
Vizions Magazine, an online GLBTQ publication, is seeking contributors and technical staff for its website, radio show and internet newspaper. Run by QNA Media Group, LLC, the magazine launched in the spring of 2010 and is looking for new contributors, regular columnists, editors, photographers and other staff for when the magazine goes to its monthly format in the fall.
With a focus on the GLBTQ community, Vizions is first looking towards this summer’s Pride events that are held in cities across the nation. The editors are currently compiling an index of pride events in every state, and plan to profile 25 communities that host Pride.
Each issue of Vizions will include in-depth interviews and profiles that impact the GLBTQ community, as well as prose and photographic contributions. A webcast radio show is also in the works. The magazine’s website is available here.
For more information on the magazine or to become a contributor, please see.
Apr 23
AndrewLife in Digital
As time goes on, I’m becoming less a fan of social media in all its myriad forms. Facebook went from being a virtual high school reunion to being a focus group for marketers. Twitter is the 21st century version of morse code except that it has effectively given the entire earth’s population PLI (pragmatic language impairment or the inability to differentiate the meaning between words and symbols). And there are others, many others, discussion groups, theme-driven communities, dating sites, and support forums, all built around the idea of uniting people with common interests.
Discussion forums were one of the original constructs of the internet. You posted a discussion thread and people replied to you personally, each new exchange adding to the conversation. Almost every social media platform still has some form of discussion forum, even though it is a decidedly old school way to communicate. But the platforms themselves have become complicated, bloated systems as they attract more users. The worst offenders, facebook and twitter, have stopped being about community and become something else entirely. A virtual mall, if you will, replacing the physical shopping mall for the place to hang out.
It was nice to make contact with long-lost friends. And for every three or four random people I encounter in my social media travels, one of them is someone worth having met. But no amount of effective networking disguises the fact that the environment itself is toxic. You can no longer have simple ambitions when it comes to being a member of an online community. You’re not allowed to. You implicitly agree to subject yourself to targeted advertising, habit aggregation, and whatever iteration the utility comes up with next. Ironically, I used to say that facebook et al had a right to find ways to make money from their product. I still think so, I just don’t want any part of it.
Distancing yourself from social media, and more generally an online presence, is virtually impossible in 2010. Once any aspect of your personal life ends up on the web, there is no way to erase it. Anonymity is a myth. At best you pray for confidentiality of your personal information. Everything is backed up. Any sort of online presence requires you to have a website, an e-mail address, a twitter account, a page on facebook, blogs, page counters, traffic analytics, feeds, page rank, photo albums, podcasts, mp3s…the list of extensions with personally identifiable information is endless. And here’s the real catch: you have access to all those extensions whether you want to or not, whether you intend to use them or not. Join a forum, create an e-mail account, click on an ad, just one simple action jettisons you into the web firmament for the rest of time. Even if you opt out, close your account, or never use it to begin with, it’s already too late, somewhere, someone is tracking you, ranking you, aggregating information about you and broadcasting it to anyone else who wants to know.
I thought a lot lately about wiping clean my facebook account, shutting down my twitter feed and systematically removing myself from the internet. It has a strange appeal, however impractical that might be. But it doesn’t stop there. I need to stop shopping online. I need to stop using google maps for directions from my phone when I get lost. I need to shut down my two blogs, stop creating goofy videos, delete my e-mail accounts, let my domains expire, and give up instant messenger. And I probably need to stop selling books because I will need to remove my book listings from amazon and other online stores. Impractical begins to seem like an understatement.
The other end of the spectrum is total control over your image, likeness, information by creating accounts for everything and monitoring them continuously. It’s not that farfetched a notion. What do you do right now for your financial accounts – credit cards, checking accounts, investment accounts? Whatever level of monitoring you do for them, you now need to do for all your myriad social networks. You no longer have the option of taking a passive role in your web presence. It was taken away from you the minute you went online.
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Andrew Marx is a long time writer on SmartReMarxcom and recently finished a new work of fiction titled Whisper in the Walls, available as a free digital download in May. He hasn’t given up on twitter yet. Please leave a comment below.
Mar 22
AndrewA Writer's Blog, Life in Digital
Electronic delivery of books is rapidly becoming a more mainstream option for writers to distribute their titles. Although there are competing digital formats for books, if your time and resources are limited, producing a kindle version (for amazon) is a safe bet to start with.
There is some design work involved to convert your title and it requires that you understand html code. There’s no doubt that amazon will continue to find ways to streamline the process but right now, there are some cumbersome issues with kindle conversion. One, there’s no actual step-by-step instructions (there is a starter guide but all it really tells you is check to the FAQ for formatting hints). Two, there is a real lack of organization within the FAQ for specific tasks, like creating an chapter index. Three, if you don’t know html, you face an uphill battle.
The rest of this article is focused on hints to successfully convert your title to an html format for upload to kindle. Note however, this is not an extensive lesson in how to program within html. There are entire websites devoted to teaching html.
1) You need the html file first
If you have a .pdf copy of your complete book, you can use the Export As feature in Adobe Acrobat to save it as an html file. You do not want html with css because the essential process from this point on is to take the html file and strip it of virtually all formatting.
2) You can preview your html file in a web browser
You can check the basic look of your html file by opening the file within a web browser. Every time you edit and save your html file, you can refresh the browser page and see how it looks. Note however that the kindle conversion assumes certain formatting options so it won’t look exactly the same after you upload it to amazon. However, previewing is a sound way to spot design problems within your html file.
3) Edit your file in Notepad or Wordpad
Right click on the file icon and open your html file in Notepad or Wordpad. This is the simplest way to make changes to your file.
4) Beware how conversion can run amok in your file
If you convert from an Adobe pdf file, you need to be aware how it presumes html formatting within the code that creates more problems than it solves. The good news is that it tends to correctly format bold and italics from your book so those likely won’t need any correcting. The bad news is that when you open the file, it can look like a scary mess, filled with incorrectly placed html commands and more commands than you would ever need.
Take a minute to see what’s really there. Look for html commands. They are always written within square brackets. < >
Remember, within html files, extra spaces are ignored.
Also, specialty characters begin with &. So you might see something that looks like garbage but isn’t a mistake. Being able to read the code is essential, so learn html or bring someone on board who knows how to program in html.
5) It pays to look at an example of a kindle book
Don’t own a kindle? The amazon-kindle site has some examples for you to preview (in notepad or in a web browser). You might also benefit from previewing a live book. Remember, kindle doesn’t honor your print versions’ page breaks. That’s right, it has its own formula for where to break to the next page. That means your page numbers may be in the way.
6) For the most part, your objective is to strip away as much html code as possible
That’s right, you want the simplest file possible. Kindle will presume certain formatting options and why not let it? (Technically, you can code around kindle’s assumptions if you know advanced html). That way, you aren’t challenging kindle reader’s expectations of the digital edition with complicated formatting.
7) DRM – digital rights management
Do not enable it when setting up your kindle file. Would you sell a copy to your customer and then ask them not to loan the book out to a friend? No, you wouldn’t. So why would you do it for an electronic format? If you enable DRM, you prevent your customer from sharing it.
8 ) ISBN – international standard book number
An ISBN is not required for kindle editions. If your book has a physical edition, you can use the same ISBN number.
9) Chapter index or table of contents
In order to dynamically create a chapter index, you need to understand anchors and html links. This is advanced html so you need to determine how essential a chapter index is to your final product. If you don’t need a dynamic index, you are saving yourself a lot of programming work.
10) How to add images
The one trick about image links is to use relative links. An absolute link looks like this:
http://smartremarx.com/1922/indie-writerss-new-world-order/
A relative link looks like this:
/1922/indie-writerss-new-world-order/
and the directory information of the image is assumed. If you use absolute links, your image may go missing.
There may have been a time, even a year ago, when the effort to create a kindle edition was more work than reward. That paradigm has shifted and now we live in world that fully embraces digital books.
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Andrew Marx is a long time writer on SmartReMarxcom and recently published a new work of fiction Accidents Happen. You can contact him on twitter or leave a comment below.
Mar 05
AndrewHumor, Life in Digital
You know the feeling you get when you’re showered and freshly wiped and yet the inside of your butt cheeks still feel wet and you irrationally think it might be poop even though it’s probably just moisture? Welcome to Friday B.S. We know exactly how you feel.
I’m barely hanging on to the twitter train. Twitter to me is kind of like a puzzle. I can see the picture on the box and it’s pretty and I want to put it all together, but then I shuffle through the individual pieces and I just can’t figure it out.
I signed up for twitter for the same reason I signed up for facebook. I’m not an entrepreneur, but I am a writer. There’s something to be said for being able to connect with fans of all ages. For entrepreneurs, social networking represents a free way to advertise your wares. All you do is generate a shortened url to a product you are selling, and presto, tweet the link to your followers / post the link to your wall and you’re in business. But for someone in the public eye, it is also a convenient way to extend your reach. You can interact with your fans in short, contained bursts that have a minimal amount of drain on your day to day life but maximum amount of impact on expanding your brand. 
But you might have noticed what I didn’t say. I didn’t create my profiles in order to meet new friends. I didn’t create profiles in order to find people from high school that I had long since buried in the graveyard of people I barely remember, whose names spark only the vaguest recollections of times long since passed. I didn’t make a profile so my parents could keep tabs on me, or I could post photo albums from last weekend, or to become a fan of my favorite bands. All of that stuff happens, but it’s ancillary to my intent. And it always has been.
When I first started using twitter, I would post jokes as I thought of them. Then I started to post when I was drunk. Then I discovered the hashmark and started posting things like
Woke up at 1am to I Wanna Dance w/ Somebody blaring and thought ‘What are my roommates doing?’ Wasn’t them. #falselyaccused
Then I realized that since I am a writer, I should be advertising my books. So I started posting links to the sales page, and updating my followers on the writing process, and tweeting every time I wrote a new blog post. Then I started taking random pictures and posting them with a caption (like this morning, the one of the car I parked next to with the trash barrel in the passenger’s seat and some kind of alien glob coating the side mirror). And finally, after all this time, I just tweet about whatever random thing I’m doing at the time.
But here’s what I don’t get. Why do you care? I barely care about the minutiae of my own life.
The latest wrinkle is follower-farming. Essentially, huge lists of followers who will follow you back. It’s a great idea, I guess, if gathering together a huge following is your thing. But what’s the end game?
The only way to find out is to try it. So I gamely signed up to follow 1,000 new accounts, and lo and behold, just 24 hours later, I have whopping 1,000 new followers myself. It worked as promised. But as far as I can tell, the vast, vast majority of the people I’m following don’t post any original tweets. They retweet crap from other people, post advertising links and sometimes just post lists of their own followers. Over and over and over again. Then there are the select few that tweet quotes from famous people. Over and over and over again. What the fuck? Why? Please someone explain it to me. First off, how is that a good use of the tweeters’ time and energy? And second off, really I mean really who is actually reading your tweets with genuine interest?
Let’s forget about social networking as a means of personal expression. If you’re the kind of person that regularly updates your facebook status or tweets about your day – that’s a legitimate use of the tool. Instead, let’s talk about entrepreneurship. My friend, someone I respect greatly, has said more than once that twitter (and facebook) are free means of advertising. But the message is untargeted and gets lost among this vast network of people who aren’t using the social networks for what they were intended for. Am I wrong? If I tweet a link to my book to 1,000 followers, have I succeeded in piquing their interest in my product or my brand? Are my 1,000 followers, themselves ostensibly entrepreneurs, as interested in my product as I am in theirs (if so, hooboy! I’m in trouble.) I really don’t get it. Not only do I not get it, I’m reasonably certain that my advertising attempts through social networking aren’t going to result in book sales except from people who were already inclined to buy my book in the first place.
Despite all this, I really like connecting with people through facebook and twitter. For every five or so friends or followers I have, there is one that I’m glad to be in contact with. For the rest of it though, I just don’t know what to think. The twitter train is moving pretty fast, but I’m not entirely certain that I even need to be on board.
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Andrew Marx is the author of Accidents Happen. You can follow him on twitter.
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