Asavin Wattanajantra recently wrote a list of things he’d learned in his first 7 months as an IT journalist. Which pretty much covers it, but since this week marks my second full year working for Micro Mart, I figured I’d, er, shamelessly steal the idea and write my own list.

1. Free stuff is great. I utterly agree that we love getting free stuff, particularly when you don’t have to give it back.

2. You rarely get the free stuff you want, though, because everyone else wants it too.

3. PRs often have a radically different idea of what constitutes a “high-res” image than we do.

4. Nothing you’re actively looking for, be it story, specifications, or pictures, will ever show up until after the deadline has passed.

5. … but on a weekly magazine you can usually just use it next week, instead.

6. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

7. Anything that can’t go wrong - because it’s all sorted out, everything’s fine, everyone knows what they’re doing and there’s loads of time left! - will go wrong. Things that will easily destroy any sense of organisation: illness, injury, weather, trains, and babies.

8. Speaking of trains, somehow you still always manage to go through a tunnel at exactly the most inconvenient moment in a mobile phone conversation.

9. I will never learn to carry a laptop around. Those things are heavy.

10. Apple product launches are hypnotic (and people will re-fill your wine glass when you’re not looking, which adds to the effect). If Steve Jobs is enthusiastic about it, I will want it. The effect takes a couple weeks to wear off.

11. … admittedly, I’d still quite like an iPhone, though, so that’s not really worn off at all.

12. Just because a product is billed as the fastest/most efficient/quietest/smallest/etc, doesn’t mean that’s actually true. And even if it is, it’ll only stay true for about a week.

13. Making puns based around Flash Gordon references for stories about flash memory stops being funny really fast.

14. Getting noticed by Google News is awesome.

15. The more often you update your blog, the more attention you’ll attract. (Actually, I think I learned this one from just blogging, generally, in a non-work sense, but shhh.)

16. No matter what you write about, someone somewhere will disagree with you.

17. But hey, at least that means they’re reading!

18. I really don’t understand how or why to use Twitter, but I’m sort of trying. In between waiting for it to stop being broken.

19. The best sentence I’ve written so far is “Take these rats off my Internet face!” Context? Er, no. I’ll just let that one stand alone.

20. There can never be enough coffee.

Robert Scoble’s blog post this week on Has/How/Why Tech Blogging Has Failed You made for interesting reading. He makes a lot of good points - definitely worth thinking about, whether you’re a tech blogger or, really, just a blogger of any kind - but it’s his analysis of what’s gone wrong with commenting on blogs that really resonated with me most:

Our commenting systems really suck. I didn’t realize just how badly they sucked until I started using FriendFeed. My comments here are gummed up with moderation, with spam filters that only sorta work, that don’t have threading, and have many other problems ranging from needing to be signed into, to not working on mobile devices very well, to requiring you to enter weird numbers or do math just to be able to post a comment.

What does this mean? Only the most motivated will leave comments. That’s usually someone with an axe to grind. I’m so tired of those kinds of conversations “Scoble, you’re an idiot.” Hey, I already know that, remember my conversation with Jurvetson and Williams? Why can’t commenters be nice, the way they probably would be if they were face to face? That’s cause we’ve failed you. We haven’t moderated jerks out of our commenting system so now no normal person would go close to anything resembling a modern commenting system.

As if to bear out his point, David Edelstein blogged at NY Magazine about the online reaction to his less-than-entirely-positive review of The Dark Knight. It’s easy to say that he should just ignore the comments entirely; after all, he’s a professional film critic and the commenters hadn’t even seen the film, so their personal attacks on him had very little grounding in reality. But obviously he couldn’t just ignore them - Edelstein felt the need to reply, to justify himself. And I really can’t blame him; I’ve been there myself (albeit on a much smaller scale!). After the initial indignation and urge to defend my opinion, I eventually had to just let it go and accept that writing anything on the Internet invites criticism. While that can be useful - and obviously I’m not saying all criticism is ungrounded - it’s important to be able to separate that which is actually justified from, well, abuse.

Eventually, you just have to accept that if someone is ranting and raving about what a complete idiot you are and how you should be banned from writing anything ever again, they’re unlikely to change their mind - but you also don’t have to care. (Unless they’re your editor, in which case, er, you probably will have to.)

But what does it mean for the Internet, and for Web 2.0, if virtually all discussions of anything online get derailed? If all comment sections become places anyone with any sense wouldn’t dare to tread - and writers are afraid of writing anything even remotely contentious for fear of the reaction? If we’ve failed by letting things get to this point, how do we rectify that?

I wish I had an answer.

My blogging muscles are twitchy today because, well, mostly because I’m the contrary type, and today a group of LiveJournal users are having a blogging strike. Or, more accurately, a LiveJournal-using strike. It seems a large number of LiveJournal’s userbase is angry over a couple of recent decisions made by LiveJournal’s new management, the Russian online media company SUP.

One of these decisions was to discontinue creation of “Basic” accounts. To backtrack a bit - LiveJournal, as the name implies, is a blogging site. Users can create blogs, and also join blogging networks by adding other bloggers as “friends”. When the service was created, its founder promised that there would never be advertising on LiveJournal, but since then the company has changed hands twice, and advertising has, inevitably, turned up. When the ads were introduced, there were three levels of account types: Basic, which was free, had no adverts, and had only the most basic of features available; Plus, which was free, had adverts, and had more features available, and Paid, which, er, users had to pay for, had no ads, and had advanced features. The idea was that the new Plus level would be attractive to users because of the additional features, for which they would accept advertising being placed on their blogs. At the time, there was controversy over this decision - but nowhere near as much controversy as the news that the Basic account, as of March 12th, was being discontinued, and all new accounts would have to be either Plus or Paid.

The reasoning behind this move seems fairly obvious - all accounts will now generate revenue for LiveJournal, one way or another. Since existing Basic accounts aren’t being forced to upgrade, you might expect little resistance, except in doing so you’d be overlooking something fairly important: LiveJournal users create new accounts all the time. LiveJournal communities can be created by any user at any time, and these too will presumably now no longer be ad-free (unless someone wants to pay for them), but even setting communities aside, people create new blogs for new interests, or just because they want a fresh start, all the time. It’s not a case of not being able to miss what you’ve never had, because it won’t just be new users who are affected by the loss of a Basic account - existing users will either have to stick with the account they’ve got, accept that they’re going to see advertising, or pony up the cash to get rid of them.

Even so, I know what you’re thinking - so what? Aren’t we all used to advertising nowadays? Well… yeah. But that doesn’t mean anyone actually likes it. Plus, the fact that LiveJournal didn’t actually announce this change via its usual News channel but instead left it to one staff member to leave a comment on an already much-commented-upon News update didn’t go down well with users - if you’re subscribing to a News feed for a service you use, wouldn’t you expect a major change to the terms and conditions of the service to be reported there?

There’s another reason many LiveJournal users are on strike today, too: it recently emerged that SUP was removing certain interests from its reports of its users most popular interests. Mostly, these interests related to either fanfiction or homosexuality - it’s not clear why, exactly, SUP chose to purge those interests from its reports, but it’s being presumed that it’s to appeal to advertisers. Again, that might not seem like a particularly big deal, but you’d be underestimating the fervency with which people actually use LiveJournal - SUP probably never expected anyone other than potential advertisers to even notice that the reports had been doctored, yet outraged posts are popping up all over the blogosphere on the topic. And considering that, last May, several LiveJournal users found their accounts suspended without warning because they had listed interests in these same categories, it’s not surprising that there’s a small scale riot going on.

Actually, that might be overstating the case a bit. What’s actually happening is that many LiveJournal users have decided to boycott the site for the day. They won’t read posts, they won’t post content, and they won’t post comments, in the hope that the drop in traffic will signal to LiveJournal’s owners that their recent conduct has been deemed unacceptable by its users. The argument goes that if people can’t sign up free, ad-free, then they’ll go somewhere else; that SUP has fundamentally failed to understand LiveJournal’s business model, which relies upon a great amount of content being posted, much of it by free users, in order to attract traffic … and without traffic, you can’t serve many adverts.

I’m kind of torn about where I stand on the whole thing. I’ve had a Basic LiveJournal account for years and years, although I occasionally pay for a period of paid time, and I’m quite happy with the basic feature set so long as I don’t have to see adverts. I do see adverts on my Gmail account every day, and on almost every single website I visit, so I’m sure I could cope with seeing them on LiveJournal, but, y’know, I’d rather not. And I certainly don’t agree with the censoring of interests, even if it’s just in annual reports designed to attract advertisers. But I can’t help feeling that a one-day strike - on Good Friday, too, which is bound to be a slow day anyway since most people are off work and probably out and about, away from their computers - probably won’t do much good.

It’s like online petitions, in a way - how much good do those ever do? There must be a more effective way of registering displeasure - but other ways, like sending letters or e-mails, take more time and effort. So I guess I’ll be on strike today. Not that anyone will notice, given that I generally post about five times a month on LiveJournal anyway…

I’m late to the party here, but I figured I’d weigh in on the Max Gogarty incident at the Guardian. If you missed it, here’s a quick recap: a 19 year old wrote a not-very-good column for the Guardian’s Travelog section about his upcoming gap year trip to Thailand; comments discovered that his dad was a travel writer for the Guardian and smelt nepotism rather than talent in the commissioning of the column; all hell broke loose in the comments thread; senior Guardian writers weighed in, closed comments, and Max’s blog was abandoned after just the one sensational entry.

Now that the dust has settled on the whole incident, it all seems slightly silly. There’s nothing particularly outrageous about any of it: the blog wasn’t particularly well-written, but then lots of the Guardian, and indeed lots of Internet blogs, aren’t. (Though the Guardian piece was at least paid, so there’s a reasonable assumption of quality there.) That Max Gogarty’s father is also a freelance writer for the Guardian also isn’t particularly shocking or immoral - sure, Max probably had access to contacts your average 19 year old on the street doesn’t, but then why should that stop him from trying to do something he wants to do, career-wise? And it’s really, really not shocking or unusual that a pack of Guardian commenters went ballistic.

Read any article or blog on the Guardian’s website and you’ll find all sorts of vitriolic comments - maybe some of them are warranted, maybe not, but the point is, they’re inescapable. It’s not just the Guardian, either; it’s any website on the Internet where strong opinions are expressed, and there’s enough traffic to spark a reaction. Really, attracting Internet trolls isn’t a particularly mysterious process - you just need traffic, and then drama is practically guaranteed.

There have been all sorts of studies carried out and theories espoused as to what it is about the anonymity of the Internet that causes perfectly rational people to get so angry and rude, but then again, there have been lots of studies done and theories espoused about why it is that people like chocolate. The thing about people is, a lot of them are angry and loud in real life. A lot more would like to be angry and loud, but never quite seem to have the nerve, or to be able to think of the perfect comeback at the perfect moment. Taking away any consequences and giving people time to respond to something means all that vitriol can spill freely. The Internet doesn’t make people more cruel; it just takes away the immediate consequences of that cruelty. (Perhaps “cruel” is the wrong word: sometimes, anger is absolutely the correct response to a situation or statement, and sometimes that anger can more easily be expressed online than in person, and that’s not a bad thing.)

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Max Gogarty incident was the response of the Guardian’s editors: the travel editor and the online editor both published blogs about the incident, expressing shock and disappointment over the appalling treatment of poor Max. Seems his trip to India was slightly marred by the outpouring of hatred online, and his blog was cancelled to save his feelings. The whole thing felt slightly like the Guardian was scolding its readers as if they were naughty children, or school playground bullies. (Those follow up blogs attracted plenty of comments, too, for the record.) But really, whose fault was it that an article was published that enraged the paper’s readership? From where I’m sitting, now, post-incident, safely not in charge of any department of the Guardian at all, it seems fairly obvious that an article by a privileged teenager about his merry-yet-clichéd jaunt abroad was going to cause the average Guardian reader to fly into a complete rage - and surely they know their demographic far better than I do.

Then again, wearing my cynical hat, the whole incident got a lot more attention from the blogosphere than most Guardian blog posts. And what’s the point of a website - or a newspaper - if no-one reads it?

While I’m on the subject of angry people on the Internet, I might as well talk about Anonymous for a bit. The online group, whose previous targets included feminist blogs, has turned its attention to Scientology; a couple of weeks ago, a protest was organised outside a couple of Scientology buildings in London, including the one just up the road on Tottenham Court Road. Protesters wore masks based on the one in V for Vendetta, ate cake, danced to Rick Astley, and generally made Internet jokes - and campaigned against Scientology at the same time. Websites used to plan and co-ordinate the events warned potential attendees that they’d have to be on their best behaviour to avoid being moved along by the police, so there wasn’t any violence involved, but seeing well-known Internet memes (including LOLcats on placards and Portal jokes) making the leap into reality was … well, strange, to say the least.

Whether or not their cause is worthwhile, there’s something unsettling about these protests - possibly because it’s generally assumed that people will say things online that they would never back up in reality. It’s easy to say that because something’s happening online, it doesn’t really matter; that it’s just the Internet, that it’s not real. Both the Gogarty incident and the Anonymous Scientology protests, though, suggest that’s really not the case. Like Soylent Green, the Internet - or at least commenters and posters on it - is people.

Fake Steve Jobs picked up this week’s Micro Mart cover - a replay of our cover last year which asked if Vista was 2007’s most pointless upgrade - and answered our question, saying that Vista isn’t pointless: “It’s the best marketing tool we’ve ever had.”

Well, there we go, then.

Photograph: Meredith Parmelee/Getty - taken from the Technology Guardian

It’s not just me, is it? That picture - it is absolutely hideous, right? I actually like the colour pink, and I find it offensive on the eyeballs. It’s actually quite difficult to look at, even before the red haze of rage covers my vision because yes, that hand, with its horribly over-manicured nails, is clearly meant to belong to a woman who is using a hot pink keyboard that appears to have no functional keys whatsoever except a shopping button. I barely know where to start, or how to structure a rant about it.

I know what you’re thinking, though. “So what? Why don’t you just ignore it?” Well, if it had just turned up on a stock photograph website, I would. I’d just scroll straight past. But it was used this week by the Guardian to illustrate a story on its website entitled How secure are your online passwords?

Now, in fairness, the article does talk quite a bit about shopping online. But it’s also, more generally, about how to create and remember a good, uncrackable password that can’t be guessed by random visitors to your MySpace page. It’s a really good article, actually, and it doesn’t seem to be aimed at readers of either gender, particularly - it’s just about encouraging the average Internet user to be more careful with their security online. Considering the Government is busy flinging all of our personal details to the wind, it’s quite important that we’re not leaving ourselves wide open here. But that picture is just so offputting that I almost clicked away from the page as soon as it loaded. It’s hideous, and it’s also completely unsuited to the article. The only link that I can see, the only reason I can find for including that picture with that article, is that the article was written by a woman.

(Presumably, she has a better keyboard than the one in the photo, or she wouldn’t have got very far with her article.)

Maybe it shouldn’t matter, and maybe I shouldn’t care, but quite frankly, I’m feeling pretty offended right now. I’m sure writing angry letters to newspapers is one of the universally recognised signals of getting old and past it (so I sent the Guardian an e-mail instead) but seriously, this is the Guardian we’re talking about. It’s supposed to be one of the more respectable UK newspapers - liberal, progressive, arty, and all that. It’s not the kind of paper you’d expect to be busy propagating sexism. And, okay, it’s only one picture, but the kind of thing is insidious. Sexism is widespread - you only have to cast an eye over the adverts on Tube platforms, or in the paper, or on television, to realise that we’re not living in a state of gender equality. Particularly when you’re talking about the IT industry: the Guardian itself has run stories this year about how women working in IT are paid less than their male counterparts, and that there are far fewer of them to begin with.

Maybe one picture accompanying one article isn’t going to set feminism back by several decades, but it really doesn’t help matters. The idea that women are all pink-loving girlies who do nothing more strenuous or challenging online than buying themselves something pretty (of course, they couldn’t do much more without breaking their nails) is not one that I’d be happy to see propagated anywhere. Let alone in the Guardian.

Oh dear. LiveJournal’s done it again. The original blogging site generates stacks of controversy whenever it makes any changes to the site, and the recent alteration is attracting plenty of new comments and irate blog posts even as I write this.

The change I’m talking about must have seemed like a good idea at the time - but then most things do, before you try to implement them in the real world. What LiveJournal has done is to introduce new filters: “Adult Concepts” and “Explicit Adult Content”. Users can flag their own content as inappropriate for children to either degree, or, if they read a post they believe to be adult in theme or content, can flag it up to LiveJournal’s admin. When posts are marked as containing adult content, they’ll be hidden under a cut tag, and only users whose profiles indicate that they’re over 18 will be able to view them.

All very well in principle, until you consider a couple of things. One, that there’s no way of verifying the age of a LiveJournal user, so underage bloggers may well just claim to be older than they are in order to access the adult content. Two, there are a lot of people who may well want to abuse the system by flagging content they don’t like as inappropriate for underage readers.

The latter is the one that seems to have generated the most problems. That, and the fact that adult users generally don’t want to have to click on a cut-tag to read a post when they’re browsing their LiveJournal friends list (basically, the friends list is an RSS feed of posts from users that have been added as “friends”, i.e. subscribed to).

Users can already lock their own posts so that they are accessible only to their friends, or to select groups of their friends if they’ve set up filters, so the ability to hide some potentially offensive content from the delicate eyes of child isn’t new. But allowing other users to chip in and claim that another LiveJournaller is posting inappropriate content — just by clicking a button, rather than having to fire off an e-mail — is new, and worrying. LiveJournal’s staff has assured its users that content will only be investigated if it’s been flagged by numerous users, but that policy is decidedly questionable. What if a little-known blogger is posting something inappropriate, and only a couple of people have found the content? It wouldn’t get flagged many times, but would be available for children. The flipside is that posts by popular and/or controversial bloggers are liable to be flagged many, many times over. The content will still have to be reviewed by LiveJournal staff, but that sounds like a potential headache, and a massive waste of time, in the making.

And then there’s the problem of defining what, exactly, constitutes adult content.

It’s all a big mess, really. An understandable one, when you consider how often social networking sites (and sites which rely on user generated content) are criticised for not protecting younger members of the Internet community adequately. But exactly how any site is supposed to do that, short of employing thousands of new members of staff solely to scan the site for anything that might be objectionable and remove it, is still a problem that remains unsolved.

Anonymous bloggers have to be careful. Really, really careful. In order to ensure that they maintain their anonymity, they need to change names, places, and circumstances; they need to keep their e-mail address a secret, or set up an alternative one; they need to make sure they don’t tell anyone who they are… it’s all quite a faff. And, if they become famous off the back of their blogs, people will start putting a lot more work into finding out who they are.

Examples of bloggers whose real identities have been ferreted out one way or another are numerous. There’s Dooce, Petite Anglaise, Girl with a One Track Mind, Fake Steve Jobs, Jessica Carr … and, this week, possibly Violent Acres. Whether her real identity has actually been uncovered or not isn’t entirely clear, but that hasn’t stopped various blogs writing gleeful, spite-filled rants about her, and plotting to visit her house to take pictures of her. Most of the bloggers whose identities were found out lost their jobs, and who knows what havok their ‘coming out’ caused to their personal lives…

But isn’t there an upside?

I mean, look at the number of newspaper and television interviews the Girl with a One Track Mind has done since her identity was revealed. She’s a fairly regular contributor to The Guardian, now, and all the extra publicity surrounding her unmasking can’t have hurt her book sales. Several other bloggers who’ve lost their jobs and been involved in all sorts of controversy after their Internet anonymity was ripped away have come away with book deals - and most of them have adverts on their blogs in order to generate revenue, so, again, the extra publicity can’t have hurt…

The only big name anonymous blogger still out there now is Belle Du Jour. She’s got several books out and, currently, a fairly contentious series based on her books starring Billie Piper. If someone found out who she was, would that help her ratings, or harm them?

Then, I suppose, there’s always the issue of whether any amount of money is worth the hassle of becoming unexpectedly infamous. But losing one’s much cherished anonymity online (as well as being practically inevitable these days) might not be all bad.

Not to harp on this Digg thing too much, but… well, you know how we all scoffed at the idea of implementing a code of conduct for bloggers? Sure, it’d be impossible to enforce and everyone would blithely ignore it anyway, but doesn’t this whole fiasco kind of suggest that people don’t really know what they are and aren’t allowed to do online?

Somehow, the issue of the HD DVD key has turned into some imaginary battle for free speech, as blogger protest that it’s only a number, and since you can’t copyright a number, it can’t be illegal to repeat it. But under the US’s Digital Millennium Act, it is illegal to spread around something produced for ‘the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access’ to copyrighted work.

What else might bloggers not realise is illegal to post?

How about anything libellous? Do people generally realise that just sticking the word “allegedly” in there doesn’t get you off the hook? Or that if you’re quoting someone else being libellous, you’re at fault too? Or that even linking to something illegal could land you in hot water?

Maybe a ‘code of conduct’ isn’t quite what we need, but the Internet isn’t a free for all any more. Things you post online could come back to haunt you, and perhaps the blogosphere might do well to figure that out. Sooner, rather than later.