Cloud Culture Spotlight: Phil Rossi's Harvey

I was introduced to the world of podcast novels when I downloaded Phil Rossi's Crescent in full a couple of years back. It seems only appropriate that Harvey ended up being the first podcast novel I listened to as new chapters were released, rather than after the fact.

Harvey is a small, sunny Virginia town that is slowly being devoured by dark forces that are a mystery to its inhabitants and, for almost all of the book, the reader. On aspect of the writing that I liked was that the creatures we are exposed to for most of the book are almost a red herring to discovering the malevolent force that is the prime mover behind everything.

Rossi populates Harvey with a slew of interesting characters, but I really liked the two main ones. They're both an exercise in contrast--the Sheriff's deputy Frank Meeks on the one hand, who is the very definition of a townie, and the Californian singer Calvin Hubbard on the other, who is retreating to the small town to work on his album in the wake of a scandalous affair with the equivalent of an American Idol judge.

Importantly, both characters are very sympathetic. As the book progressed I found myself rooting for the both of them; for Meeks to get to the bottom of the terrible events plaguing the town, and for Calvin to survive each success encounter with danger. More to the point, they both come off as genuinely likable people who you'd be comfortable hanging out with if they were real people. I enjoy stories who follow characters like that a lot more than ones where I find even the main characters to be unpleasant or reprehensible.

As with Crescent, Rossi demonstrates a remarkable ability to have an original monster--it isn't vampires or ghosts or anything else old hat--while making great use of established genre devices. So the creatures aren't exactly zombies, but they're close enough to often give the story the feel of a zombie horror. Moreover, the small town that is under siege from the supernatural has been around as least as long as Salem's Lot, arguably as long as or longer than H. P. Lovecraft.

For my own taste, Harvey had the great advantage of having dramatically fewer descriptions of hard-ons than Crescent. I don't know how many other horror fans really care about this--hell, some may find it to be a strike against this book--but I just thought I'd put that out there.

All in all, if you love horror as a genre you owe it to yourself to read this book. More to the point, the range that Rossi has shown across both of these books is striking. I for one will be paying very close attention to what he has in store moving forward, and you should too.

Wordpress Trumps Blogger in Mobile

While I was waiting in a doctor's office today, I browsed Tweed on my Palm Pre. I clicked a link that took me to a blog post. In the past, this has taken me to some article that was designed to appear on a computer screen. The result is tiny text that I have to zoom in to see, and move the page back and forth to read--in short, it is cumbersome.

Today, however, I landed on a page that was perfectly optimized for my screen. It was a great experience. I was called in to see the doctor before I got a chance to see who the blog host was, but it got me curious about whether the big guys have all taken the time to optimize.

So I went to Vulgar Morality, a blog I know is hosted on wordpress. I was very impressed. Below is the main page.


The the beginning of the first post is visible, and if you want to continue read you click "read this post". The rest of the posts just display the title, date, author, and categories. You can contract the first post to this state by clicking the arrow on its top right. To get to the other posts, you expand them by clicking the arrow on their top right, and then clicking "read this post." Below is what the first post looks like if you click "read this post".


The design is perfect, or as close to it as could be reasonably expected. Wordpress gets the most words on the screen without making them too small to read.

Excited, I went to check out my other blog, Sophistpundit. Like Cloud Culture, Sophistpundit is hosted on Blogger. You can imagine my disappointment when I was greeted by the following:


It's basically the same page as the one you get looking at it from a computer.

Blogger is owned by Google. Google. How can they drop the ball on mobile like this?

All I can say is that they'd better get on this, and soon. Mobile readership is only going to get more important; it's only a matter of time before it begins to rival regular web readership. Blog platforms cannot afford to fall behind in this space. I'm very disappointed to discover that the one I've used for years now is lagging in this important area.

All I have to say is I hope they're already working on this.

Bringing Money into Scanlation?

I've written about scanlation before, and it's an area I hope to do some research in at some point in the future. For those who've never heard the term before, scanlation is the process of taking manga (Japanese comics) that are released in Japan, scanning them, then translating them and making them available online.

Today when reading a chapter that had recently come out I found this:

Hey guys, I'm Zambo, leader of Keishou Scans. We're really in need of donations at the moment because we're going to be paying a raw provider money to provide us with better quality raws for our Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu releases, which would mean that we could put out higher quality releases for you to read, so we could really use all the donations we can possibly get because as you all know, every little helps. So please visit our site at: http://keishou.net and donate some money towards the payment to the raw provider. We're also looking for a raw provider that can provide earlier HQ Beelzebub scans.

Thanks very much in advance, Zambo.

Let me translate some of that.

A "raw" is just the scanned version of the manga straight for the scanner--in other words, still in Japanese. The guy with the online handle Zambo is the "leader" (whatever that means in practice, my guess is webmaster) of the scanlation community called Keishou. They have people that provide them with raw scans on a weekly basis, and they're hoping to actually pay them to put more effort into making the scans higher quality.

I thought that the whole process was just completely volunteer labor; I'm surprised to hear anyone talking about money. Especially given that this is basically a pirating operation; cross-country and cross-language, but illegal nevertheless.

The thing that interests me about all of this is that, as an economist, I see a clear public good problem that they seem to overcome pretty effortlessly. That is, getting the scans online, translating and proliferating them is something that benefits all of the fans of these manga, not just the specific subset that does all the work. You would therefore think that there would be an enormous amount of freeriding. I mean, I myself am a freerider--I don't speak Japanese and I have no intention of donating money to any of these guys. I enjoy the fruits of their labor but contribute nothing to encourage them to continue it.

Of course, the freerider problem just doesn't seem to matter on the internet the way it does for situations faced more traditionally. You see more and more examples of things like Wikipedia where a small fraction of motivated users from a big enough user base seems to be enough to overcome the costs of collective action.

But that's exactly why I'd love to do some research into the guts of how these things actually work in practice. So over on the Keishou website there are a few things that stand out to me. First of all, they actually have a specific amount that they said they need every month--$30. As of right now, they're almost there, with $26 having been donated.

Second, they have a list of the people who donated, and with the specific amounts donated by each individual. This obviously provides some rewards in the form of reputation within the community. I have to think that the primary donors (or all of them) aren't going to be guys like me, but people who are already active in the particular community in question.

But I don't know how a lot of this works in practice. I don't even know if it's unusual or typical to pay the raw providers like these guys are going to try to do. When I get out of grad school, I'd like to spend more time looking into this sort of thing. There are so many little communities all over the internet that, empowered by modern technology, are actually able to do some pretty amazingly productive things.

Podcasting Short Stories

Maybe a month and a half ago I discovered Escape Pod, a podcast offering a science fiction short story every week. It struck me as a pretty awesome idea. Shortly afterwards, I discovered that I was actually three times as lucky as I thought I was--Escape Pod is just one of three podcasts under the Escape Artists, Inc. umbrella. There's PodCastle which focuses on fantasy and PseudoPod that focuses on horror.

Up until I found these guys, the only form of audio fiction I was consuming were podcast novels. They're great, of course! I've got a couple of reviews up and one in the works on Phil Rossi's Harvey. But novels have their downsides. Sure, the greater length means that you can build to something much more spectacular. And if you like the characters, you get the fun of following them around for much longer. But it's much more involved than something shorter.

Moreover, when they're done, they're done. In general, podcast novel feeds are author specific--Scott Sigler has his feed, so does Phil Rossi, and J. C. Hutchins, and so on. When their latest novel is over, there's usually a lapse between that and the next one. Authors are, after all, only human--writing takes time, and so does recording and promoting your work and doing all of the various things required to make a living. In short, now that Harvey is over, I'm not expecting another novel from Phil Rossi to fill my commute over the next few months.

The joy of what the folks at Escape Artists are doing is that it is perpetual. It may be that you can't cram as much into a short story as you can into a novel, but it is no less an art form in its own right. Meanwhile, because the stories are all written by different authors, there is an endless supply to draw from. If all of the authors featured up until this point on Escape Pod stopped writing henceforth, it would not diminish the producers' ability to keep putting up new ones each week because there are so many science fiction writers out there.

Frankly, I'm surprised there isn't a lot more of this. I think this is going to be one of the important frontiers in which new writers will cut their teeth the same way that they've done so in genre magazines up until this point. And it's great for genre readers who have any kind of commute to work.

As a jumping point I'd recommend the Escape Pod episode 222: Infestation. It's the one I've most recently listened to and has two things to recommend it: it's an awesome story, and I actually really enjoyed the monologue afterwards.

The Modern Face of Professional Reporting

The question of what will replace the professional print reporting has been a subject of contention since the rise of the internet made it clear that things were going to be changing, one way or another.

Much of the debate has focused on the role of amateurs--people writing about a particular subject who don't do it as their primary job, and for the most part don't make any money off of it. Their certainly will be--and already is--substantial, but I think there is always going to be an important role for professionals.

To begin with, the really successful amateurs usually end up giving up their day jobs and going professional. Examples that come to mind are Prince of Petworth and Perez Hilton, for instance. This follows the same pattern found in webcomics and just about any kind of content.

When it comes to professional reporting, though, I look at Engadget and I see the future.

With bundled content becoming increasingly uneconomical, there's going to be increasing specialization of subject matter reported. Of course tech journalism is something that has existed long before the internet, so Engadget and blogs like it don't exactly exist in a vacuum, either.

Engadget is primarily a blog. There's the main one, there's one that specializes in news about mobile, and one that specializes in news about HD. Each one has a podcast corresponding to its subject matter. And they recently launched a show that streams live once a month. So they certainly have the multimedia approach down. I've read their main blog for some time, and the corresponding podcast has helped improve the quality of my commute for almost a year.

Engadget puts a lot of energy into keeping on top of the latest news in consumer technology. Online outlets get a lot of flack, which is why I found this podcast particularly interesting.

In it, they describe a recent incident where the Wall Street Journal had reported that Apple was going to give up MacWorld and go to CES from now on. Engadget Editor in Chief Josh Topolsky described how they were unable to get another source to confirm the WSJ's report, and so they watched the story bounce around the internet purely on the strength of the WSJ's reputation before it was finally shot down for being wrong. Topolsky emphasized that, despite rumors to the contrary, they do have fact-checking at Engadget, and he is constantly amazed at how bad the mainstream outlets are at it when it comes to the subjects he knows about.

Providing the latest information isn't the only valuable service that Engadget's staff performs. We live in a world where reviews are everywhere--I review fiction all the time on this very blog; just about anyone who has an opinion about a product can put it online on a blog, on a social network, or a million other places. As such, if you want to get attention in this area there are a couple of dimensions you can compete on.

You could, like Amazon.com, attempt to accrue many reviews in a single location, making it more advantageous to go to their page than to look for the scattered reviews across the web. Or you could take the Engadget approach and provide a high quality, very thorough review.

The first serious review of theirs that I read was the Blackberry Storm review. It gave a lot of background information, as well as detailed observations on its performance, design, and many different aspects. Along the way the review provided a lot of photographs to show its design or particular features, and even videos to show it in action. After I read the review I felt like I had a good idea of what the strengths and weaknesses of the device were, and decided against getting it. Similarly, when I did eventually buy the Palm Pre, I felt that the Engadget review had more than adequately prepared me for its shortcomings.

I think the quality of the reviews has received a fair amount of attention. I've noticed that a lot of places that tend to only quote the old mainstream reviews when a product comes out will include a quote and link to Engadget.

What Engadget does in consumer electronics, I expect we will see in every subject that garners enough attention to support that kind of organization. I'm sure there already are equivalents, in subject areas I have not paid as much attention to.

For all the pessimists who think that everything is going to get worse once old media institutions dissolve, I hold up Engadget as one example of how we can expect it to get better, as professionals take the fullest advantage of the available technology.

The Many Faces of the Blog

Following a line of thought here. After considering just what it was that blogs bring to the table, I got to thinking about the many varied uses people have found for the platform.

Political blogs have an update rate like a news cycle on crack--the big guys here update many, many times a day to keep up with the latest. Blogs displace news in a lot of other areas--such as celebrity gossip, sports, and consumer technology. The ease of updating on a blog facilitates the kind of continual coverage that blogs like these specialize in.

Just because you can update frequently doesn't mean that you have to. Cafe Hayek, one of my favorite economics blogs, updates several times a day, but does not reach nearly the volume of posts of an Instapundit or Boing Boing. The bloggers at the Cafe post thoughts on a few subjects every day, sometimes relevant to current events and sometimes more broad than that. The Vulgar Moralist posts much less than once a day, but writes philosophy essays with a little more thought put into them than your average political blog post.

Travel and photo blogs obviously are more focused on the visual side of things, rather than on writing. The blog simply provides a platform on which the photos can be organized and presented, with varying amounts of additional commentary.

Then of course there is the personal blog. LiveJournal, created months before Blogger, was built precisely to cater to this side of things. These are what get the most flack from people who think all blogging is self-absorbed myopia; teenage girls writing about their new purses or something like that. There's nothing wrong with that--after all, it was a teenage girl like that who ended up covering the military coup in Thailand--but personal blogs can be a lot more than that. In an interview on EconTalk, Friendfeed founder and Gmail creator Paul Buchheit described how he started a blog to keep his family updated on the status of his new born daughter, who had health problems.

People blog their books and short stories.

As I said in the previous post, all of these things could be done without blogs. But blogs have made it so much easier. It's hard to imagine that the sheer volume and variety of content found on blogs today would be out there without a platform that allowed nontechnical users to flood onto the web and share their stuff.

The Life and Times of the Blog

Technorati's invaluable State of the Blogosphere went up for 2009 a couple of weeks ago.

With a lot of other, more social venues for content like Twitter and Facebook, there has been a continuing debate about the relevance of blog. I think discussions like those miss the point--ultimately, what is relevant is content.

It did get me wondering, though: what do blogs add? I mean, specifically.

Walk with me for a moment. You can write the exact same content that you put on blogs on a regular old website that you just update and make new pages for. All of the benefits of linking different pages to one another can exist without blogs. All of the benefits of having video, images, audio, and text online can exist without blogs. So what's so special about blogs, exactly?

Blogs are a platform. They are to internet content what the assembly line is to manufacturing. They minimize the cost of getting your content out there and making it as easy to proliferate as possible.

The first, and most important thing that blogs do is minimize the amount of technical knowledge required to put content online. You don't need to know any HTML tags in order to write a blog post. Over time, blogs have incorporate more and more buttons that make it easy to embed images and video without needing to know much, if any, code.

The second, almost as important thing that a blog does is create distinct units of content. An old school Angelfire page made no distinction between the website and the content on the website. The blog post creates distinct units, which makes all kinds of things possible.

Think about that last point for a moment. There is no practical limitation on the length of a blog post--something I certainly have taken advantage of--but at the same time there isn't a minimum, either. Long before Twitter existed, there were bloggers like Instapundit and Atrios who had many posts that probably did not exceed 160 characters. In fact, Instapundit was notorious for the one word post that just linked somewhere ("heh.")

The post is an extremely flexible unit, therefore, but it is a unit. Having a unit means that you can link to a specific post rather than a whole web page. Having a unit makes it possible to have an RSS feed, where readers get new posts as they come out without you having to do a thing to alert them.

And returning to our first point, bloggers don't have to be aware of the advantages of having distinct units in order to benefit from them.

Blogs will continue to have these advantages, and even more goodies will get baked in along the way as well to minimize the difficulty of making use of them and maximize the ability of bloggers' content to proliferate.

On the other hand, the ecosystem of which blogs are a part has certainly grown far more diverse over the years. And this is to the good. The many varying forms of social media help lower the cost of sharing content--be it content on a blog, hosted on YouTube or Flickr, or a podcast. But I'm pretty confident the blog is going to be alive and well many years from now, because the basic advantages of the platform will remain.