Pat Phelan has a post up over at his blog in which people have been discussing boundaries and blogger ethics in terms of full disclosure. This kicked me up the arse to go and do something I’ve been meaning to do since Day 1: add a Disclosures page to my site.

There are some cases that are cut and dried, like the instance Pat is highlighting. If you’re being paid by Flixwagon, using Flixwagon on your site, demoing Flixwagon, and/or writing about Flixwagon in your own space or others, you need to disclose that you have a financial relationship with Flixwagon.

And then it gets muddy. Because by paid, I mean any exchange with a monetary value attached to it. If I got free hosting from Blacknight (which I do, although not for this blog) and wrote about Blacknight and how awesome they are (which I have), I would be ethically obligated to disclose in my post that I get free hosting from Blacknight (which I did, just for the record).

Furthermore, were I interviewed by a journalist about blog hosting and mentioned that I send all my clients to Blacknight, I would also be ethically obligated to disclose to said journalist that I have an existing financial relationship with them in that I get free hosting.

After that, it’s up to the journalist to put that fact in the piece or not, but I think they should. If they didn’t, you better believe I’d be right here in your browser (or RSS reader, as the case may be) disclosing that myself as soon as the article was published.

Why? Because the fact that I am either getting money or getting freebies by its very nature colours my perception of whoever is giving them to me. Tom Raftery hates them, and I know this. I, however, love them - in part because I’ve never had an issue with them, but also in part because they have given me something that makes me happy. I feel special, warm and fuzzy about Blacknight because they give me stuff, and the fact that they give me stuff slants my opinion of them.

Therefore, when a journalist asks me “What is the best blog hosting?” and I say “Blacknight,” this is not based on an survey of the market or even on my experience as a typical customer. My opinion is no longer impartial because I have an extra relationship with them, and it’s one that involves money, goods or services.

And if that’s true of €33 worth of free hosting for a tiny site that isn’t even running, it’s exponentially more true as the numbers and visibility go up. The web is incredibly powerful in forming opinion, and to not reveal a paid relationship when you endorse or evangelise about a company, product or service is an abuse of readers and viewers. It harms - and can potentially destroy - credibility.

Which, before you ever pull a referral, ship a product or sell a service, is the most important thing anyone has online.

The tiniest bit of internet sleuthing reveals that Dublin based marketing firm Inspiration were the SEO company behind Irish Greeting Card’s recent debacle. Their homepage proudly declares it, in fact.

The part that made my jaw drop, however, was the next notice on their home page:

Cathy McGovern, Inspiration was one of three guests invited by Enterprise Ireland’s eBusiness Unit to participate in a round-table discussion on issues surrounding eMarketing and how it can be exploited by SMEs in Ireland.

Emphasis mine. I don’t have a problem with Enterprise Ireland and I think they’re providing key help for a number of high potential start-ups. Given the state of the economy, God knows bright businesses need the help now more than any time in EI’s history.

Somehow, though, I don’t think this episode is the kind of “exploiting” EI had in mind when they funded Irish Greeting Cards for online marketing consulting. A relationship between EI and Inspiration would seem to exist, but if that’s the case, my hope is that in the name of upholding best (or even acceptable) practices for online business, EI’s eBusiness Unit terminates it.

Post haste.

I started cringing as soon as the email hit my Inbox and it just got worse from there.

A fairly new business called Irish Greeting Cards has been dumping little email missives onto a number of Irish bloggers today. From the badly worded, poorly punctuated and grammatically convoluted copy, we have:

We’ve just completed a major upgrade of the site… The cards are unique in that you can personalize most cards on the outside and your own message on the inside. What we’re looking for is for bloggers to mention the offer and site to their readers (if you think it might be useful to your readers of course) and point them to the Greeting Card Site and perhaps encourage their readers to tell people who might think the cards are worth ordering.

According to Mulley, this contacting campaign was devised by a SEO strategist hired by the company. I have no idea who this SEO guru is, which is good - because if I did, I’d be sorely tempted to haul him out back and shoot him. Frankly, this company had more than enough going against it to begin with without his specialist help.

I am willing to bet that this SEO expert also advised them on their spam blog. And wrote all the “content” himself, lovingly filling it with re-constituted pork. It’s easy to see exactly how much effort went into this grand affair.

The only thing they did right was to mention in the email that “We’re not looking for better Google rankings” and invite me to set my links to no-follow. Which is the only thing they asked me to do that I’ve actually been happy to comply with.

The thing that pisses me off the most about this is that I would have used this service. I hate trying to remember occasions in advance, I hate going to the post office, and I hate filling out cards. I have been looking for a service like this in Ireland so that I can pretend to care enough to send cards by being horrendously lazy and doing it online.

What could they have done better?

• Emailed me an offer to try their product myself. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to forget I have a blog. If I liked it, I’d have blogged it, just like I do with other online services I love using.
• Dropped in a humble PS invitation to tell my friends if I enjoyed my card sending experience with them. Blatant solicitations to pimp their untried products to my blog audience is not the kind of transparency we’re looking for.
• Not shat on the entire concept of blogging with the absolute worst example of… I’d say blogging, but that isn’t anything close to blogging. That’s using WordPress as a CMS for spam.

Granted, not having a product that sucks out loud would have helped, and a little more thought about their “Irish cards, Irish diaspora” positioning wouldn’t have hurt, either.

I mean, know I’m a transplant, but I’m pretty confident there’s nothing particularly Irish about stock images of toast.

Having said that, I’m desperate enough that I probably would have become a regular customer of this outfit and sent the crappy cards to my friends and relatives, just on the basis that they’re better than the cards they are currently not getting at all. At this point, however, all I can do is tell all my friends:

Don’t use Irish Greeting Cards.

Update

So yesterday was the official start date of a project I’ll be working on for the next week or so. Several steps of this project require me to have access for testing purposes to a particular piece of technological gadgetry which I do not own, so I arranged with their internal project manager to borrow one of these widgets for the duration.

This lovely, charming, but geographically challenged man is local to me, and so offered to drop the magical bag of telephony tricks directly to my door. As I am notoriously lazy, notoriously exhausted, and a rumoured agoraphobe (I’m not afraid to leave the house or anything, I just very rarely do), this sounded like a marvellous idea to me and I immediately gave him my address and directions.

“On Blarney Street, off Shandon Street, just past the post office.”

He promised to call me when he was on his way, and I crashed into the duvet and slept like the dead.

When the phone rang four hours later, I was still asleep and in a state of what might be best described as train wreck. My plan was to ignore the fact I was clad in my PJs and just brush my teeth, open the door, thank the nice man, and go back to bed. This plan was going roaringly well until he rang again to ask “Where are you? I’m at the post office.”

I stepped outside my door on the cordless to ask if he could see me, since I live mere steps away. Needless to say, he couldn’t, and after a bit of faffing we determined that he was: a) at the wrong post office; b) parked, and c) wandering around Shandon Street.

Make a note for future reference: most plans devised on four hours of sleep and no coffee have flaws. Tragically, at this critical juncture I was simply not awake enough to remember this.

“Right,” I said, “I’ll walk down the hill, you walk up the hill, and we’ll bump into each other in about two minutes.”

And so I did. I walked out in exactly what I was wearing, which was:

• Light pink pyjama bottoms with huge bright pink stars;
• A ratty Disney World sweatshirt circa 2000, complete with one hole and a bleach stain;
• Freshly washed hair, which I had kipped on whilst wet, and was now perfectly straight on the half I’d slept on and wonderfully curly on the side that had air dried.

I hurried, at some pace, down the hill. Past the post office. Past the school. Past the car dealership. Past everything, in fact, right down to Shandon Street. With each landmark I passed, the absolute humiliation of this sartorial parade of mine became ever more excruciating. The Yummy Mummys queued up for 3 PM pick-up looked every bit as horrified to see me as I was to see them; no doubt they thought this completely insane looking bag lady was going to make off with a complete matching set of Little Tarquins. Carriages were clamped. Babies were clutched. Children were told to avert their eyes.

As if all of this were not bad enough, it goes without saying that I never found him. And so back up the hill with me: past the garage, past the post office, and past the ladies who were now absolutely convinced I was a an unmedicated menace to society and stalking their offspring.

Finally back at home, the phone rang, a car drove up, and kit was delivered. I went back to bed and vowed to never, ever leave the house again.

Agoraphobia: it’s a plan.

A couple of weeks ago I took the early morning train up to Dublin to renew my accidentally expired passport. The US Embassy in Dublin is open for approximately 3 hours each morning, 4 days a week, so this meant getting on the very first train from Cork and I still barely made it before they closed for what is presumably a 21 hour lunch.

Entering the compound one might politely describe as The Ugliest Building in Dublin was a very bizarre experience. In the US, I’m used to armed police on the streets, metal detectors in schools and heavy security at shopping malls. In Ireland, none of that happens. So it is extremely disconcerting to find ones self in Ballsbridge, entering an already freaky compound through something that very closely approximates airport security complete with uniformed guards, a metal detector, an x-ray belt for my handbag, and the requirement to leave both my phone and my nail scissors at the checkpoint. I spent more than a moment wondering if I was being shielded from a potential hostage situation or actually be taken hostage.

Neither event came to pass and everyone was exceedingly nice, from the guards to the cashier to the lovely French woman who helped me complete my application. My new passport was required for our mortgage paperwork, so I was anxious to get it back as soon as possible and minimise any delays. When the form asked for my email address, I provided it willingly so that the consulate could have one more way of contacting me if there were any issues.

There was no opt in/opt out checkbox and no disclaimer or fine print of any kind, so I naturally assumed my email address would be used only for purposes pertaining to the application on which I provided it.

Today, three days after the prompt delivery of my shiny new passport, I received an email from wardendublin@state.gov - something long and rambling to do with absentee ballots and Minnesota. Here it is in all its spammy glory:

First of all, I have no idea what they’re on about, nor do I care. I have never lived in Minnesota and doubt I could locate it on a map if challenged to do so. I have certainly never voted in Minnesota, and voting information specific to Minnesota is irrelevant to me - as it is to every other US expat in Ireland who is from any of the 49 states not named Minnesota.

Second of all, and far more irritating, is the following:

• I have no idea what this list is. It is not identified in any way in the footer. The sender, likewise, is unidentified.
• I did not ask to be on this list, and at no point was I told that my information would be used for what amounts to federal spam.
• Most importantly, there is no mechanism provided for me to opt out of this list now that I’m on it.

I am, to say the least, irate. I have an immediate need to drop someone’s trousers and hand out a suitably painful, lesson-instilling spanking. I am absolutely positive that this practice must break a US or EU spam law, and I am old and crotchety and spoiling for a law suit.

I don’t want to write a letter to some dusty office in Dublin, Brussels or Minnesota; I want to haul someone into court and beat them up for their pocket change, because I am exactly that pissed off.

So tell me, dear interpipes, who do I sue? Seriously.

I’m sad to report in a follow up to my review of the Most Awesome Phone Ever that the mobile version of The Sims 2 has proven, on extended play, to be a huge but limited pile of poo. The limitations come from the very small mobile file size of the game, which means that you are restricted to one property, a cycle of just five jobs, no clothing or decorating options, and a set number of property extensions and goods you can buy. Pretty much the only unrestricted activity is the amount of sex you can have, and hooboy, have I been having a lot.

Here’s the thing: there’s not much to do in The Sims if the number of items you can purchase is limited to 10 and you’re chained to your own property. All you can really do is go to work, come home, and go through the normal routine of trying to keep your Sim fed and in dry pants.

This leaves a rather copious amount of spare time. And the only way to make time pass more quickly in The Sims is by shagging. Literally: you shag, the screen blanks, and three hours passes by in an instant.

In a desperate effort to escape the incredible tedium of the idle suburban life, my Sim leads a complex and free wheeling existence in which she married Ben, had an affair with Lorna, divorced Ben, and married Susan but lives with Ivan. You’d think two relationships and all the sex that goes with them would be enough to keep the girl occupied, but every day she comes home from work and places a booty call to Ben, the enamoured ex who just can’t say no, simply to get the day over with sooner.

Playing this game is like an extended re-run of my 20s, except without the booze, drugs or rehab.

The most frustrating part is that there appears to be literally no way out of this existence. The Sims is a game without end; there is no goal beyond continuation of life, but in the full game play version, when you get absolutely sick of a character you just cannot stand to play any more, you can always find a way to kill them off.

The traditional method for simicide is to remove all of the smoke detectors from the house and wait for a house fire. I am, however, far more vicious and impatient than that, and my preferred method for killing annoying children and irritating spouses is to chuck them in the pool and take away the ladder.

But on the mobile version, there is no death. You can starve them, cut them off from all human contact, and leave them in a puddle of their own waste, and they’ll still get up the next day to cheerfully face a brand new morning at Guantanamo.

Suburbia is hell.

I’m aware of the fact that this is an ironic weekend for this to have happened, but my work computer has officially keeled over and died. This is doubly ironic given that I was vaguely aware all was not well in Computerville, and just yesterday procured an enormous USB stick so I could back up my current projects folder.

Sticking the USB key into the computer? Is what finally killed it.

This is apparently a malady stemming from peripherals. It started with an increadibly troublesome printer that would freeze my entire system with each communication attempt to or from the PC, and finally ended in a blaze of absolute nothingness with the aforementioned USB issue.

There is a long day of mountaineering level rescue attempts ahead of my husband, but I am not terribly hopeful that this is going to end well. And on the off chance that this story does have some kind of happy ending, it is unlikely to be a quick one.

The real issue, however, is that all of my current projects in progress for all pending clients are locked on that dead hard drive. Even if this all gets sorted by the end of the long bank holiday weekend, a forced vacation during repairs is going to mean an enormously crunched work load, even if this event doesn’t mean starting completely from scratch for every single project.

Fortunately, I thrive on disasters, so it will all come good one way or another.

Unfortunately, if I promised you something this weekend, it is unlikely to appear. I will look at everyone’s deadlines, reshuffle in order of deadline priority, and get everything out early next week. When I know what the production schedule looks like, everyone will get an email from me so we can be sure nobody is being pushed to a new deadline that isn’t going to work for them.

I am, of course, very sorry this has happened and will do everything possible to make all of the pain mine and virtually none of it anyone else’s.

The last irony is that of course, I do have a back-up system in place. I back up all accepted layouts, all production designs and code, and every iteration in between. What I don’t back up is the 32 versions I go through before I send someone a suggested design. It just happened to work out that right now, I have about six clients in this awkward pre-production phase.

And yes, you can bet that the new computer system, in whatever incarnation, will involve a nightly, if not hourly, new back-up routine.

The internet takes a lot of crap for being all about pornography. My general response to this is that the market gets what the market wants, and it should come as no surprise that naked people like other naked people. I have zero problem with online pornography as an industry, and the proliferation of everything from college call girls to phone sex workers doesn’t bother me in the least. You work it, honey.

What does bother me is whoring by people who are not, in fact, paid sex workers.

You may be surprised to learn that the most recent example of this is near Bantry, not generally known for being a red light district. A local hostelry is running an online contest which you enter by linking to them in your blog with a particular Google keyword phrase. They are, in short, gaming Google. They don’t want your opinion or your love; they want your inbound links to improve their search engine rankings.

I don’t have a problem with the suckers people who “entered” the contest by writing about Glengarriff Lodge. I have a problem with Glengarriff running a competition that is transparent, blatant link whoring:

You write a blog post which links to our homepage using the term Luxury Self Catering. In the same blog post you link to one friend who you think might be interested in the competition.

The thing is, it looks like a neat place and is touting itself as eco-friendly and sustainable. They could get legitimate links and an authentic viral buzz off of that. I can think of at least ten places with high Google rankings that would cover this joint if told about it, deliver better Google results for a very competitive keyword phrase, and not piss off half the blogsphere in the process. Or - hey! - they could actually optimise their site for search engines, with, say, page titles and stuff.

So, I’m with CrankyPants on this one.

The only good thing I can say about the Glengarriff campaign is that while they are prescribing the single phrase you need to link with, they are not telling you what to say. So, I can tell you that I think this Luxury Self Catering campaign at Glengarriff Lodge sucks, and according to the contest rules, that’s okay. Since I’m interested in what Eoghan McCabe thinks about this campaign, I guess I’m officially entered. Fair enough.

The same good thing cannot be said about ebuzzing, who spammed emailed me this morning to let me know they’ve setup shop on the corner of Hollywood and Vine:

ebuzzing allows bloggers to earn good money by writing about things they actually like, and even to define their own price for doing so. They browse ad campaigns posted by advertisers, create content for their blog discussing things that they genuinely wish to highlight and are paid for each article.

This kind of pay-per-post scheme is not new, and as long as the company running the service has a policy in place that requires the paid posts to be flagged as such, which ebuzzing does, I generally don’t have an issue with it. In this particular case, however, there’s one little catch: they have to approve your blog entry before you post it.

We will not censor content nor pass judgement on the quality of an article you’re publishing on your blog. But we have a duty to guarantee our advertisers the consistency and integrity of their campaigns and to see to it that the briefs they issue on ebuzzing are interpreted correctly. So it is incumbent on us to evaluate whether a post is within the framework laid down for the campaign, includes the necessary elements (eg links to advertisers’ site) and conforms to ebuzzing’s general editorial policy.

Call me cynical, but I’m reading that as “we can’t censor what you write on your own blog, but we’re probably only going to pre-approve and pay you for things that our client has asked for, namely positive blog entries.”

I’m not sure which of these two practices is more odious. The only thing I do know is that I have a lot more respect for the people whoring themselves to the almighty dollar than I do for the one’s whoring themselves to the almighty Google.

I spent yesterday writinga lengthy blog entry over at LuckyOliver on Why I Will Never Use Creative Commons Images. I’ve expounded at length over there as to why I think Creative Commons sucks in practice, even though it’s a fine notion in concept. Nevertheless, I do realise that Creative Commons is widely embraced. So leaving all bitching and moaning to once side, I thought it might be useful to share some of what I’ve found in doing light Creative Commons research, and note some thoughts on good practices if you are a Creative Commons user.

If you’re releasing images under a Creative Commons license, it’s important to note that the attribution portion of the CC license may simply state:

You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

If you don’t specify anything, you’re leaving yourself open to the interpretation that no attribution is required. In fact, unless you specify that you want a link back to the original, a link arguably doesn’t even have to be used:

If you are using a work licensed under one of our core licenses… then the proper way of accrediting your use of a work when you’re making a verbatim use is: (4) the Uniform Resource Identifier for the work if specified by the author and/or licensor.

To avoid this, you need a Creative Commons Attribution Statement (something that as far as I can tell, does not currently exist anywhere) that specifies how you want to be credited for your work. So, if you’re releasing CC images on your own site, create a Creative Commons Attribution page that’s easily found; if you’re just uploading to Flickr, then use your Profile page for your statement.

My statement would read:

Some photographs on this site | in my Flickr stream are released under Creative Commons license, which requires attribution. If you wish to use my work under the associated license, images should be attributed to ©Sabrina Dent with a link to or URL of http://www.sabrinadent.com/(or your gallery page or Flickr profile or whatever you prefer) provided. While not required by the license, I would appreciate it if you could let me know when and how my images are used.

That should cover you for both web and print, so it’s a start, at least.

If you’re using Creative Commons images, one thing you (and virtually everyone else) may have missed is that Creative Commons attribution not only requires a link/credit for the original creator, it also requires a link to Creative Commons license being utilised:

You also need to provide the Uniform Resource Locator for the Creative Commons license that applies to the work, together with each copy of the work that you make available.

While I’m a fan of the idea of Creative Commons, I generally find using Creative Commons to be a ginormous pain in my arse for this and many other reasons and I usually just cannot be bothered. But among people who embrace its use, I think there’s a real need for best practice documentation and some user friendly How To posts. We’re failing on both the creator and the user end to understand how Creative Commons works, and more importantly, the additional steps we need to take individually to make the licensing valid and keep the system valuable.

Image: Three Cats ©ramseyarnaoot [cc]

Last night, my husband left the heat on before coming to bed, and I woke up this morning to find myself in the middle of the menopause.

“Wow, that was sooner than I expected,” I thought.

The bed was drenched, the sheets were drenched, I was drenched. I swam my way downstairs, made a cup of coffee, and promptly vomited it back up five minutes later.

“Oh God, watch me be up the duff,” I thought.

From menopause to pregnancy in 20 minutes. Never an auspicious start to the day.

Before anyone gets too excited, I am not pregnant. Or in the middle of menopause, for that matter, although I don’t think anyone throws you a party or buys you booties for that. I’m about to turn 36, and am entering the statistical sphere where one is every bit as unlikely as the other.

My only real concern is this. The last time I seriously hurled, it was shortly after eating a chocolate eclair. I proceeded to be sick approximately 24 times in the next four hours, and ended up in hospital with a severe and life-threatening case of appendicitis and peritonitis. I have not been able to eat an eclair since, despite the fact I know full well pastry was not the root of the problem.

After a particularly hard-core fraternity party in the 90s, I still have the same issue with Jagermeister 15 years later. To this day, the merest whiff sends me running for the nearest wastepaper basket. And after my recent episode of accidental drunkness, I have had to stop wearing the perfume I wore that night, because the smell just induces instant, gagging hangover.

I can live a happy and fulfilling existence without babies, I can waft through life without Anais Anais, and I can make it through the rest of my days without eclairs.

I cannot, however, survive without coffee.