“Obviously there’s no censorship in the bill and no one can indicate any censorship whatsoever. It’s not censorship to want to stop illegal activity. That’s all we do. We’re trying to impede illegal activity by foreign websites.”

-Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas) to the Wall Street Journal

As I read legislators’ responses to the hue and cry that the tech-savvy public have raised against the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sister act, the Protect IP Act, a common thread that I see is an assurance that the intent of the law is not to censor speech but instead stop crime.

I take these lawmakers at their collective word. I don’t believe that Lamar Smith wants to erode our speech rights, not really. But I do think that the strict adherence to this particular talking point is willfully ignorant to the damaging unintended consequences of these proposed laws. It is also willfully ignorant to the legacy of any piece of legislation: the intent of the author is not the only intent that should be taken into account, and hand-waving away loopholes or potentials for abuse with ‘well, I don’t want to do that’ statements only papers over the problem. It’s safe to assume that at some future date, someone will want to abuse this power. I’d think that part of the responsibility of drafting a living document is future-proofing it against such behavior. But, as has been pointed out to me many times, I’m hopelessly naive.

The protest against SOPA and PIPA does not stop with the end of today’s mass Internet blackout. The blackout is where it should start. Our representatives in government don’t represent us anymore – they represent lobbies and special interest groups – and the second we stop holding them accountable for the laws they pass is the second that the lobbies and special interest groups will make sure that their agendas are serviced in the blind spots created by our lack of attention.

Natasha rightly provides some equal time for Mr. Arthur Brisbane in the comments to last week’s reductive outburst on the New York Times’ ‘Truth Vigilante’ flap. We had pretty candid debate about the ‘Truth Vigilantism’ issue during Grey’s Anatomy commercial breaks last week and, as a journalist instead of just a guy who is a bit of a dick, her opinion is the more reasoned, coherent, correct one.

Of course Arthur Brisbane is not asking ‘should we report factual inaccuracies’ – but rather wondering aloud where the line is between calling out a bad fact attributed to a newsmaker (“Despite these allegations, candidate Gingrich has never been charged with a sexual crime involving otters.”) and attempting some sort of omnipresience (“We all know Ron Paul intends his stance on foreign policy as the first step toward a one-world government controlled by reptilian aliens living on a sub-orbital bio-satellite that travels through time”). And there is a worthy discussion to be had on that topic.

New York Times Public Editor Arthur S. Brisbane blogs today:

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

1. Yes.

2. Fuck you.

Warning: Two marketing posts back-to-back, you guys. I’m sorry.

I don’t watch a lot of TV on an actual TV these days and most of the TV that I do watch is time-shifted. We live in the future, you know. Instead, I watch a lot of programming on my iPad. Between Hulu and Netflix and iTunes, there’s not a whole lot that I need to miss if I’m content to wait a day (or 8 days, in the case of some Fox programming). I even sat and caught up on The Office the last time I got my oil changed by watching on my phone. Again, we live in the future. I hate to invoke the Apple mantra, but we live in a world where stuff just works.

Which is why it’s easy to forget that there are some platforms that make it truly difficult to complete their users’ intended goal. But I got a reminder about that very thing when I tried to watch last week’s episode of Leverage on my laptop. TNT’s video player is maybe the worst one that I’ve used in the past year.

Here’s what it looks like:

I also have to say, before I get going on UX, that the quality of the video player itself was downright impractical. It took me over an hour to watch 42 minutes of television because of how frequently the stream had to buffer, buffer, buffer.

When I landed on this page, the most immediate thing I noticed was that I couldn’t watch the video without logging in. Not to TNT.tv – to my DirecTV account. I’d understand the former, even though that’s another hoop erected for the user to jump through to do the thing he or she wants to do. Every time you put up one of those hoops, more visitors leave in frustration. I’m currently three steps into a funnel and I’m being hit with one more hoop that I didn’t anticipate.

Fortunately, I know my DirecTV password. But the only reason I have it at-hand in my brain is that I just set up the Cartoon Network app on my tablet (so I can watch Batman: the Brave and the Bold episodes, mostly), and getting that to happen necessitated me resetting the password and setting a new one, because that’s how frequently we use these logins, how infrequently we have come to use logins in general.

Ideally, adding your content to another channel should be about increasing the reach of that content, democratizing it and making it accessible to new eyes.  Or, in this case, it’s maybe about ensuring that the only people who can view your content are the same people who can already access it elsewhere. That seems backwards, doesn’t it?

The irony is that users without connected accounts can only watch the clips, the behind-the-scenes stuff, the stuff that the committed fan wants to watch. Would it be smarter to give the episodes to everyone, and restrict access to the bonus content? Most people don’t want it, but enough of the ones who do are likely willing to give TNT a premium, in this case in the form of entering an external login.

I can’t castigate TNT for this solely, since it’s something that I’m seeing more and more of. Hell, even as a Hulu Plus subscriber, I also need to subscribe to Dish Network in order to get some shows with next-day availability. This is the sort of corporate behavior that encourages piracy – the creation of a subset of users whose want for the content is not equal to their willingness to give the faceless entity that acts as its gatekeeper the toll it asks for. This is a decision that has nothing to do with human users; it’s another reminder that, though we may like to think so, we are not actually the customers of these companies and that we are, in fact, part of the product.

But that’s a tangent. The screen that you’re on while you watch this video buffer is a mess. The bottom of the screen has an ad space that is half below the fold on my screen and that isn’t somewhere where anybody is going to even pay attention to it. I’d love to see clickthrough rates on that ad spot, or even an eye tracking study. Next to that ad is a recommendation that I watch Rizzoli & Isles. I’m skeptical of how well this kind of cross-sell works. After all, if I wanted to watch Rizzoli & Isles, I’d be on that landing page watching them tell me to watch Leverage or Falling Skies or whatever. While people that watch a lot of physical TV are prone to couch potato behavior, with lots of flipping between shows and back and forth, the Internet TV viewer is often more single-purpose. Less “I want to see what’s on” and more “I want to watch Once Upon A Time right now.” That’s loyalty to an intellectual property. I doubt there are a lot of people who just say to themselves “I’m a big fan of TNT – I’m just going to surf over there and see what they’ve got.” Maybe that’s just me, though I doubt it.

What TNT could be doing on this page is upselling me on things related to the episode I’m watching. Maybe some DVDs (that is the dream, right? That someone watching online converts into a purchaser)? Maybe a second-screen app that’s exclusive to the show I’m watching? Maybe an attempt to attract viewers to the site’s community?

Maybe something more like this?

This layout takes up the same rough space as the existing one and targets it toward fans of the show with a bit more precision.  The login call-to-action is placed directly beneath the video here, presenting a much smaller profile while still being a constant reminder to anyone watching the video player without being logged in (and also, in my wishful thinking scenario where the login gates off bonus content instead of full episodes, it creates some continuity between the content they’re viewing and the content that’s incentivized).

I think that’s a little better, a little more focused. I could be wrong, of course. What do you think? How would you redesign a screen like this?

Warning: This post is at least tangentially related to my job as an online marketer. You may wish to avoid it.

About three years ago, I radically redesigned my business cards. This was the first card I designed for myself in the wake of pink kind of accidentally becoming my ‘personal brand’* color. I can barely stand to look at the thing now for two reasons: first, because it’s a typographic nightmare, but second because of the gigantic QR code on it.

QR codes were very exciting at one point. Like a lot of things that we can accomplish with the Internet, though, the reality is never as good as the promise and we live in a world where most people are perplexed by QR codes while a small core of people who are mostly interested in demonstrating how savvy and clever they are keep trying to foist them on a public that is probably never going to scan them.

There are two great barriers to the democratization of QR codes, and neither is likely to change any time soon, even if 2012 manages to somehow finally be ‘The Year of Mobile’ that has been presaged since time immemorial. Yes, smartphone adoption is up and web traffic from mobile platforms  has been trending up slowly but steadily, but there hasn’t been this massive shift in mobile use/adoption that keeps getting predicted by the technorati.

One of the barriers to QR codes becoming popular instead of just omnipresent is their own usefulness. In a post at Marketing Pilgrim today, Cynthia Boris very rightly points out:

I find that most codes just lead me to a website that I could have arrived at more easily by typing in the URL. Other than that, I’ve been led to a few recipes and some behind the scenes videos for movies. Nothing thrilling and certainly nothing worth sharing.

Factor this in, too, with all those QR codes you see posted in subway tunnels and other places where they can’t actually be scanned.

The second barrier? It’s that there’s no smartphone I can think of that has a QR scanner built into its native camera app. Change that – give me a toggle that lets me switch between the normal camera and an ‘augmented reality mode’** and you’ll see the engagement with these marketing strategies skyrocket.

As it stands right now, I take a picture of the QR code at the top of this post with my iPhone and it…takes a picture of the code. As with most instances of QR codes in the wild, there’s no instructions, no recommendation to download QR Reader or RedLaser or whatever, not even an intimation of what will happen when you scan the code (which, well, don’t worry about that, because it’s not going to be interesting or useful). The ideal interaction with QR or AR is supposed to be quick and simple and we’ve made it a pain in the ass. If we were talking about an augmented reality interaction as if it were a sale, we’d be looking at a conversion funnel that has way too many unnecessary steps.

When it comes to rich media and augmented reality, marketers need to stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. Instead of just vomiting out new things either because we can or because our personal echo chamber full of other marketers and tech-savvy hypersharers thinks it’s amazing. Make something valuable instead of something cool.

Those AR-animated holiday Starbucks cups? They’re completely lacking in value. At least they had the good sense to integrate the viewer into the Starbucks app that everybody is already using when they enter a store, the one they use to pay for their coffee.

It’s not about cartoony faux-interactivity or racking up pageviews; it’s about providing convenience and value (the things that create engagement).

Am I wrong? Anybody out there love QR codes and find them useful?

*I hate this term so much, and the quotes here are ‘sarcastiquotes’.

** Of course, with virtually every mobile provider choking off unfettered access to data, this becomes double impractical.

Rogue websites – those singularly devoted to profiting from their blatant illegal piracy – restrict demand for legitimate video game products and services

- from a statement on SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) released by the ESA (Entertainment Software Association); edited by me to include the hyperlink

The most frustrating thing to come out of the past year of political discourse in our country and around the world is an impossibly heightened sense that we, the constituents, have been robbed of our representatives in government or that, rather, our representatives in government have been duped into thinking that their constituencies are massive lobbying groups with agendas that almost never venn with the wants and needs of the general populace.

Nowhere is this clearer than the ongoing battle against the depressingly-inevitable-it-seems Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which will do nothing less than change the way we interact with both the Internet and other people on that Internet. The proposed legislature essentially tries to stop online piracy by turning basically everything into something potentially piratical. This is, you may have noticed, a bit like stopping King Midas from turning everything into gold by throwing all his gloves away.

A majority of sensible, tech-savvy people understand that this is awful (and it is awful), but here’s the thing: the lobbies pushing for this bill both actively hate and completely misunderstand the Internet, and the legislators responsible for voting on the bill don’t know what the Internet is at all, and are oddly proud of their ignorance (which is how you know that a whole bunch of them are Republican*).

*Sen. Bob Casey (D – PA) – my Senator – is a co-sponsor of this bill, and it is one of the reasons why I refuse to support his reelection.**

**Which leads me to the uncomfortable thought of who to vote for when nobody on the ballot deserves my vote.***

***Never mind – I’m too depressed.

There’s something heartwarming about a song that seems to advocate that the best way to spend the all-too-brief time before a loved one’s death is shopping at the mall. For stuff you can’t afford, stuff that is at best a distraction from the dismal circumstances of life. It, and by it I mean New Song’s “Christmas Shoes,” a holiday song that – if I had an archnemesis and that archnemesis could be an anthropomorphized piece of music (note to self: put that in the idea book) – would be my archnemesis; it is a reinforcement of every single thing that is ‘wrong’ with Christmas (crass commercialism) in the guise of celebrating everything that is ‘right’ with Christmas (joy, togetherness, charity and – for some people – Jesus, though my mileage varies on that last one).  Remember that the next time its strains make you all weepy-eyed.

It’s basically only acceptable to talk during a movie in three cases – first, when the movie is so awful that it’s subjectively awful and no living thing can find any enjoyment in its viewing; second, when it’s a horror movie, because the sort of fun, pop horror that you want to see in a theater is practically a dialogue with the audience; and lastly, the sort of fist-bump dudebro explodey action film of which The Expendables is the perfect bannerman.

It’s either extremely bad luck, auditory dementia, or some kind of shadow conspiracy whose goal is the slow and subtle disintegration of my psyche, but whenever I go to the movies, there’s always someone sitting near me saying inane things. Whether it’s someone asking “who are all those guys and why do they look the same?” during the Smiths Vs. Neo fight in The Matrix Reloaded, a little girl plaintively asking her mother what those men are doing to that girl during a 10:30pm screening of Last House on the Left, a man commenting incessantly on the quality of the cars driven by people in Thor, or the woman leaving The Social Network who insisted that Trent Reznor was the frontman for Metallica. Like a mild headache or a constant craving for the taste of gin, theater-talkers are typically not awful enough that they detract from my ability to go to the movies and enjoy them. Natasha might even opine that my fondness for going to the movies is actually just a byproduct of the joy that I take in being enraged by others, and I suspect she might be right were that her opinion.

If she’s right, then The Descendants was the most fun I’ve had at the movies in years. There were ten people in the theater when Natasha and I went to see it last Wednesday and, you guys, eight of talked so much that they seemed to miss important plot points in the film because they were too busy talking. I know that I’m prone to hyperbole, but this is no exaggeration.

In the row behind us, two middle-aged women chatted ceaselessly throughout the film. Their commentary was occasionally punctuated by a rondo of “Oh No”s that started whenever something mildly interesting happened. It became so omnipresent that at one point, in response to Shailene Woodley’s declaration that she had ordered mahi for George Clooney, I found myself saying “Oh no” aloud.

It got so bad that I started having improbable revenge fantasies about what I was going to do to these people. These may have included making two middle-aged women think that they were being haunted by ghosts.

So I’m driving around on Friday morning and suddenly, a battered-looking U-Haul pulls out onto the street. Maybe I should wait until I see The Gutter King a third time to call that it’s a real thing and not just a hallucination of mine, but I’m a little worried that the third time I see it is kind of like the third time you say ‘Candyman’ or ‘Bloody Mary’ or ‘Beetlejuice‘.

In other news, I’m not even sure what goes here anymore. Tumbling and Tweeting and the general, I don’t know, plugged-in-ness that comes with smartphone ownership, is really punching my longform blogging in the face because when I have the time to sit down and write a post, I feel like there’s nothing of consequence to say.  Maybe I can just put a bunch of AdSense boxes here or whatever. Maybe?

When Doogie Hower had a blog, it wasn’t connected to the Internet. I don’t know that a lot of the people watching Doogie Howser, M.D. knew what the Internet was or imagine the thing that it would become. It was just a journal, but we knew that it was hipper and more modern that Kevin Arnold’s voiceovers in the preceding half-hour because it happened in a word processor. Beep. Bop. Boop. Beep.

I had a laptop as a kid. It was a big, hulking beast of a thing intended for road warrior salesmen like my dad was; it was his cast-off laptop that I inherited. It ran text adventures and Battle Chess and Thexder (which grew in me a specific kind of small affection for MIDI versions of other songs) and, most importantly, WordPerfect. I think one of the reasons why I still code myself as a writer when I think about myself is that I wrote constantly on that stupid twenty or so pound laptop with its orange and black LCD screen and its battery that was the size of a small dolphin. All manner of really dumb stuff, mind you, but I clacked and pecked at those keys in most of my spare time that wasn’t full of comics or painting my Warhammer miniatures or poring over Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books.

Don’t worry, I know all about how tragically uncool I was. But the point is, it helps to write.

That Doogie Howser journal, it was a blog. It was just that nobody read it. Except probably Doogie’s mother.

I think the worst thing that can happen to a blog is that it gets readers.

I’m thinking about this because I found myself browsing through the series of posts on Dan Harmon’s blog in which he talks about his breakup with his girlfriend. Harmon’s outpouring is remarkable for its emotional honesty and teen-movie earnestness. It’s a lot of brooding shoegaze stuff about love is a lie and all that – not true, but true to what’s in his head as he’s writing it, you know? And there’s a sad shoegaze-y poetry in that that resonates. I’m not going to post excerpts and I’m not going to link to it – I think that undercuts what I am trying to talk about, maybe. Google is your friend. Hell, this is three months ago – you’ve already read it already.

Like you’d expect, Harmon’s ex finds these posts and replies angrily. But that’s not the thing. The thing is the hundreds of people who ‘like’ this naked emotional outpouring from a guy who’s probably at a bad place in his heart. I read through the notes, because I’m the sort of person who says “I’m done reading comments” but then get sucked in when I should be doing other work and find myself doing exactly the things I know are not productive for me (that’s what I’m doing right now, in fact). Some Tumblr user reblogged it (lots of Tumblr users reblogged it, but this one in particular) and said “I love this.”

You love this?

I’m a big Ben Folds fan. You know this about me, probably. “Brick,” the one song of his to really become commercially successful, is an autobiographical song about being a high school kid who was so poor that he had to pawn his Christmas presents to pay for his girlfriend’s abortion. That’s some heavy shit, so much so that Folds didn’t talk about the song for a long time, choosing to let it stand for itself. If you’ve been there, he reasoned, you’d know what it was about.

I can’t imagine talking to Ben Folds and gushing about how much I love that song, is what I’m saying.

I listen to what my ex would always call “Sad Music;” I listen to it a lot, no matter what my mood is. Ask Natasha, because she still lovingly ribs me about my effusive praise for The Antlers’ Hospice album. The why of that is that, as a music listener, I crave that same emotional honesty that Harmon is laying down, the real Old Testament Western stuff about pain and loss and the limits of strength. I’m an eclectic guy who owns weeks worth of music, but that’s the stuff that’s my Sanctum Sanctorum music. You can be moved by it, you can excise the emotions and respect it as a text, but to say ‘I love this’ is perverse. To be ebullient over such a naked expression of sorrow, you have to be a fucking monster.

Putting those words down – whether it’s on a blog or in a song – is therapy. Because writing the words down is a solitary act, you get fooled into thinking it really is solitary and not for a billion people to read. As a result, it can be jarring when strangers find it and proclaim it “the best thing.”

That’s a mistake I made when I was at my worst. I started blogging six years ago to try and make myself write with more ease and regularity. Most of that early stuff was nonsense – paragraph-long movie reviews and silly anecdotes. As I got more comfortable with doing it, it started to become a zone of catharsis for me. There were no comments and only a handful of my friends knew the address of the damn thing. Maybe not much has changed, right? I even tried to stay anonymous for awhile, but for various reasons, that didn’t stick for very long.

At some point, the comments started popping up on things that I’d written for me but foolishly assumed that other people wouldn’t read and wouldn’t care about. That’s an awkward feeling to have. Scratch that; having your belief that you’re beneath scrutiny exploded as a myth,  it’s a terrifying feeling. It’s like being naked in a bad dream scenario. You may notice, that it hasn’t stopped me from oversharing about my life. But you get over your terror by looking it in the eye, and besides,  it would be hypocritical of me as someone who once wrote a social media column in a magazine to not live in public by my own best advice of openness and reasonable transparency.

And that comes with occasional moments of discomfort.  But then, everything does, and in the end it might not be worth stopping all the sociopaths from telling you how hilarious it was that time when you got your fingers broken with a claw hammer (which is a fake thing that has never happened to me, nor is it ever a thing I have done to others). Ultimately, that’s on the sociopaths. Who are also us, a lot of the time, really. In a culture of constant data and instant gratification, it really all comes back around to fan-entitlement, I think, and how we need to stop perceiving every piece of information we devour as a thing placed there solely for us to consume.