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Jun 3, 2013 ∞

Tumblr, Yahoo, and Ads That Don't Suck

Here’s a semi-article, in that it’s more like a rant, but certainly not a link post. If you’ve seen similar stuff in your dashboard, feel free to let me know.

Dear Marissa and David,

Joe here. I’ve used all of Tumblr’s competitors extensively and I settled on Tumblr because it’s mindfully-designed, community-focused, and dead simple. The lack of ads helped, but more important to me than services with no ads are services that do have ads at least respecting their users enough to have decent ads.

So.

Keep ads for The Bachelorette out of my dashboard feed. Please consider presenting users with relevant ads. Scan my blog, the tags i use, the words I like, the stuff I link to. After all, you own it. So look at it. Run it through an algorithm and spit out some sort of value which you can key to a set of sponsored posts that, based on their weighted relevance to my interests and the things I cover on my blog, may actually be interesting to me. This is more palatable to users and more valuable to advertisers than showing me some random woman running around on the beach.

Over and over again.

Despite my never clicking it or reblogging it or seeing it without making an angry face and swearing never to watch that goddamn show. This dashboard spam does not bode well for Tumblr’s future at Yahoo, and that makes me sad, because I like Tumblr, and I rather like both of your styles, to the extent I can know anything about them from reading things on the Internet or watching you do interviews.

You said you wouldn’t fuck this up, but the glut of sponsored posts in my feed tonight about something I’ve never given any corner of the web any reason to think I care about suggests otherwise. Turn it around while you still can.

Change Yahoo, change Tumblr a bit if you must, but why not change advertising and the typically adversarial relationship between advertisers and target audiences while you’re at it?

in other words, don’t shove bad ads in our faces. If we wanted that we would turn on the TV or some other medium that can only collect data in really clumsy inaccurate old ways.

You’ve disrupted plenty of things, why not this?

If you ever want more advice, get in touch. I’ve got lots of ideas.

Sincerely, Joe Ross

Mar 6, 2013 ∞

How to Roll Your Own Multireddit

This is probably so awesome to me because only recently have I dusted off my Reddit account and started using the internet’s greatest link-sharing site in earnest.

Reddit is divided into “subreddits.” These are topic-based, like /r/Gaming and /r/Tumblr. It allows the growth of communities based on shared interests or disinterests.

Now all of that I knew, and you probably did, too. But what I recently found out is that you can append multiple subreddits to a URL to open them in a cocktail of sorts. So, if you want to view a mashup of Reddit entries about Philadelphia, technology, and burritos, just go to /r/philadelphia+technology+burritos.

The possibilities are endless, so use /r/Multireddit to browse what your fellow redditors have posted.

Jan 9, 2013 ∞

Site Design as Context: An Amateur's Perspective

Introduction

I hesitated to change themes because, well, it’s one of those things people do instead of writing. But while my customized version of Quite Big theme had treated me very well, I hate using Tumblr’s default mobile theme on phones, or seeing my desktop-optimized layout on a tablet. I also had modified Quite Big so much that it started to look a little off to me. I know enough HTML and CSS to avoid breaking sites altogether, but over time my changes had started to give the theme a clunky look. I decided that I needed to find the ultimate theme for me: minimal, useful, and responsive.

Minimal, Useful, and Responsive

Some people use minimal themes to keep the focus on their content. Others use minimal themes because they think any content placed within a minimal theme will appear great. I think of myself as the former, and it’s why I’ve been personally trending to more minimal site designs for a long time. I consider the use of a minimal site design focused on content to be a commitment. It commits me to quality, and that’s a great thing.

I also want my website’s design to be useful. I’m particularly annoyed when a theme requires me to scroll down to the footer to see how the author describes the site, what other pages are on it, or how you might contact the site’s purveyor. Give me the things I expect when and where I expect them. Yes, it is absolutely a sense of entitlement, but when you’re writing at a blog, you’re writing for whomever is reading. If most people expect things in a certain place, put them there and get to writing the real stuff.

Finally, most free blogging platforms have automatic mobile layouts, but they’re often global, meaning that all sites on the platform end up looking the same on a phone or whatever device the reader is using. This site is on Tumblr because I got tired of maintaining Wordpress and other self-managed CMS installations. I love Tumblr for its simplicity and its Markdown support, as well as its truly beautiful apps. But their “optimized mobile layout,” while minimal and designed for clarity, feels far too cookie-cutter.

Vision Quest

After all, a theme, however minimal, does more than determine post width and font face. It sets the tone for the site. It provides a context in which all of your content is going to be experienced. I think of site design, whether for a blog or a corporate portal, as a form of self-expression. Many people get enough self-expression out of being able to share whatever they want, or looking “professional” or “enterprise,” and to them the theme of their site isn’t important. But I take pride in:

having a vision for how my content should be presented to readers;
seeking out well-made themes as starting points for that, and
being able to make customizations that bring the theme I found and the vision I have together

If you can find a theme or site design that fits your vision out of the box, that’s great. Nothing beats just applying a new theme and getting to the writing part of it all. But if you do need to modify someone else’s design work, it’s important to leave credit somewhere in the theme.

~~I credit Idraki Muhamad's MNML in the footer as well as on my About page. The changes I’ve made fit the design into my vision, but Mr. Muhamad created the theme.~~

Ed. note: I’ve moved to Observer by Tumblr designer Zach Sultan since first writing this in January, but the principals still apply, and MNML is an awesome theme.

Conclusion

Most people use blogs as a means to an end, usually to share opinions or showcase work. But geeks often see their blog as an end in itself. If your site is a book, its aesthetic and layout are the cover, and unlike many authors, bloggers have full control over it. I take advantage of that, and I encourage others to do the same.

In a world of cloned “default” themes, a site design with a little bit of personal nuance will stick in someone’s mind. You don’t need to use design to scream “I’m DIFFERENT!” but you should use it to politely remind visitors that, you know, you’re different.

Then, all you have to do is write amazing content.

Jan 8, 2013 ∞

App to App Handshakes

Fred Wilson:

This morning I was at the gym listening to the Django Unchained Soundtrack on my phone in the SoundCloud android app. I decided I wanted to make Trinity my song of the day on Tumblr. I hit the share icon, up came a list of apps, I selected Tumblr, and I was taken to the Tumblr app but as a link share. I wanted an audio share.

This happens whenever I try to share something to Tumblr and it drives me crazy. Hopefully Mr. Wilson’s emails to SoundCloud and Tumblr will prompt resolution between their apps, and spur conversation about fixing this kind of thing overall.

Oct 11, 2012 ∞

Tumblr Puts More Focus On Photos With Photoset, Its New Standalone iOS App

Drew Olanoff, at TechCrunch:

By not forcing you to log into your Tumblr account, the company could attract a brand new set of users who just want to pull photos together without the hassle of creating a page, tagging things or worrying about how to share them.

Maybe this will work, maybe not. But I like Tumblr’s people because of stuff like this.

Aug 23, 2012 ∞

Tent - the decentralized social web

Tent is decentralized, not federated or centralized. Any Tent server can connect to any other Tent server. All features are available to any server as first-class citizens. Anyone can host their own Tent server. Tent servers can also be run as Tor hidden services to create a social darknet for at-risk organizers and activists. Anyone can write applications that connect to Tent in order to display or create user content.

Is it Diaspora? Is it IRC? Is it Twitter? Is it Wordpress?

Well, I think, yes. And no.

Twitter’s recent adoption of a hostile stance toward its developer community and, to some extent, its users, is catalyzing the market for alternatives. Matthew Panzarino reports at The Next Web that they cut off Tumblr’s ability to help you find Twitter friends who also use Tumblr, as they did with Instagram.

Self-Promotion Alert: Read My (Very Short!) Fiction

This site is supposed to be me talking about the law and technology, but I have some shameless self promotion to do, so I’m deviating from the usual subject matter this week.

<shameless_self_promotion>

I recently started a new Tumblr called, creatively, Fiction by Joe Ross. I’m posting flash fiction there, because I love to write it and it’s the best I can do length-wise until I finish my JD in December (a semester early, if you’re counting, which I am … pats self on back). It’s going to be mostly but not all science fiction, so if you’re into that sort of thing, please check it out and tell me what you think.

I have been writing fiction since, probably, ever. My first short story was a survival tale about a man’s struggle in the wilderness. Alas, I can’t find it, but I wrote it in high school and I remember being super proud of it. Survival? Wilderness? Sold!

Anyway, I wrote another story in college, call Three Days, which you can get for free in eBook format at Leanpub. Did I mention that it’s free? Go get it. It has an epidemic, love, psychiatry, and time travel.

I know, genius.

Oh, and it’s okay to tell me you don’t like stuff. You get extra points for being as polite about it as Scott, my first commenter, was, but what I really want is to know why you didn’t like it. Of course, it won’t kill me to hear from you even if you did like it, but constructive criticism is wonderful.

Nowadays, I’m one of those obnoxious people who doesn’t mind telling you I’m in law school, and working full time, and kind of a big deal because of all that. The bottom line is, though, that I never have much time to write, the little time I do have I use mostly to write about tech news and law stuff, and I have no time at all to edit. So I’ve been hoarding all these little scenes of mine, sometimes for years. That hoarding, for better or worse, has come to an end.

As of the publication of this post, I’ve already put up two scenes, Carnival Time and The Deaths of Dolly Dignan. I bet you’ll like at least one of them, at least a little bit.

And, even if you don’t, and I become a famous author one day, you’ll be one of the cool kids who read my stuff long before I was on the bestsellers list. People make fun of people like that but admit it, the truth is that we all love having the chance to be one of them.

Well, it’s that very chance that I’m offering you today, for the future. Or something. So here’s the link, one more time.

Okay, I’m done.

</shameless_self_promotion>

May 7, 2012 ∞

The Pinterest (Er, Tumblr) Problem, Fair Use, and a Suggestion for Change

I wrote the article below for Temple Law’s student newspaper, Prima Facie. While my views on the topic of copyright liability in the modern Internet’s “sharing economy” continue to evolve, I haven’t made any edits to the version that ran in Prima’s April issue. This is a long post, but I would welcome any feedback, including criticism as long as it’s constructive. I also include a postscript at the bottom mentioning a recent development that may affect the relevant legal landscape.

Fair use doctrine is a great thing. Its allows limited use of copyrighted works and consists of four factors. Those factors include the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the work used, the amount used relative to the whole work, and the effect of the use upon the potential market for the work. These considerations, developed at common law and now included in the Copyright Act at 17 USC § 107, can be powerful tools for art, education, and other endeavors. But they are also widely misunderstood. Copyright law and fair use are in many ways more important than ever.

Ours is an increasingly networked world, marked by everyday activities like sharing things on Facebook and posting things to blogs. The rise of social engagement and the sharing economy has been so meteoric as to pull even the enterprise into its gravitational field. The largest companies in the world are now active on Twitter, and even the late Steve Jobs made his Apple, Inc. email address publicly known, sometimes even sending personal replies to complete strangers.

This is an exciting development, and harbors many of the hallmarks of what early pioneers of the public internet might call “success.” And they would be right. But the internet is a tool, and like any tool, it is only as good or as evil as the people who use it. The internet is used to spread child pornography, to pirate movies and music, and to steal massive amounts of credit card and other sensitive private information. However, somewhere between the glorious interconnection that let frustrated Apple users get the low-down from Mr. Jobs himself, and the internet’s criminal underground, there are more pedestrian, though no less important, issues for us to face.

Issues like Pinterest.com. Well, Pinterest isn’t the issue, the issue is still copyright law and the confusion it often causes when it comes to the internet. Legislation like 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act tries to minimize the liability of service providers for the digital wrongs committed by their users. But those laws don’t (and probably shouldn’t) take similar steps to relieve the users themselves of liability for things like copyright infringement. And therein lies the complication for Pinterest.

The invite-only image sharing site had 11.7 million unique visitors in January 2012, according to web metrics firm comScore. Users keep an eye out for interesting or beautiful images while they’re shopping, reading news, or otherwise surfing the web. When they find something worth bookmarking, they “pin” it, building “boards” based on different topics. Earlier this year, attorney and photographer Kirsten Kowalski wrote a blog post about her misgivings: it looked to her like Pinterest users were engaging in copyright infringement on a scale never before seen. Pinterest, the internet seemed to say in unison, has a very big copyright problem.

Now, to be clear, it’s not really Pinterest’s copyright problem. It’s Pinterest’s users copyright problem, since the DMCA and a well-worded indemnification clause in their terms of service probably get Pinterest themselves off the hook. But the problem with Kowalski’s post, and with the press and viral internet attention it got, is that the “Pinterest problem” is absolutely not on a scale never before seen. This is, in fact, how the internet works. The compliance with the DMCA and solid indemnification clauses keep companies out of hot copyright water, but users are infringing at an astounding daily rate.

The popular blogging service Tumblr gets around twelve billion monthly pageviews. Just Google “tumblr star wars” to get a feel for how much user infringement is going on over there. Sections 9 and 10 of Tumblr’s terms of service give them the same indemnity from claims and judgments related to use of the service that Pinterest demands. That’s because Tumblr, Facebook, and others have been around for years, doing exactly what Pinterest does: enabling (and often profiting, directly or indirectly, from) infringement. Publishers often let it go because the traffic and mindshare they derive from this rampant sharing is more valuable to them than the hunt-and-peck game of suing individual infringers. In reality, users agree to assume massive liability in return for the use of myriad blogging services every day, and they have been for a very, very long time.

Pinterest has developed a snippet of website code they refer to as a “nopin” tag that copyright owners can include on their own websites to block Pinterest users from displaying their content via Pinterest. It’s a gesture of goodwill from Pinterest to rights holders, and popular photo sharing site Flickr has made the “nopin” tag an option for its own copyright-holding users. But there’s a better way to empower users to share than mere reliance on the continued laissez-faire legal strategies of publishers and ad hoc website tags.

This brings us back to fair use, the doctrine mentioned at the beginning of this article. Many misconstrue fair use as a right to use someone else’s work regardless of copyright. That’s not what it is at all, though. It is an affirmative defense, only marshaled when a defendant essentially admits to infringing a §106 right. You admit the infringement, but then assert a fair use defense. Under current law, fair use never “excuses” or “permits” infringement ex ante.

But maybe it should.

Maybe copyright law should be modified to make fair use an a priori right of the public to use, with certain limitations and restrictions, the copyrighted works of others. That doesn’t mean that Pinterest users would be off the hook, and commercial companies running their own Pinterest boards will always be more likely to draw negative attention from rights holders in copyright as well as trademark and “use of likeness” issues. Users are required to comply with current law.

But fair use as a right instead of an affirmative defense would reduce the chilling effect overbroad copyright law sometimes has, and would facilitate the growth of the sharing economy that has come to define the modern internet.

Postscript: Porn publisher Perfect 10 has sued Tumblr over the many copies of its copyrighted photos the blogging service allegedly stores on its servers. Note that they’re not suing Pinterest, despite its recent surge in popularity. As I said, what many call the “Pinterest problem” predates Pinterest, and as today’s news suggests, it might be more aptly termed the “Tumblr problem.” Read Jeff John Roberts’ post at paidContent for more information.

joeross.me