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Good news and bad news

The good news is that this here blog, begun with such hesitancy and foot-shuffling in early January, has recently received its two-hundred-thousandth visitor.  It took us from January 7 to May 9 to reach 100,000, and just under two and a half months to double that.  We have no delusions of grandeur around here—we’re no Atrios or Kos or Billmon or Crooked Timber—but we do sometimes speak about ourselves in the first person plural, and that’s already pretty grandiose, we think.

The bad news is that ever since I posted a pair of items on Dinesh D’Souza, I have earned myself my very first cybershadow.  But he doesn’t send me hate mail.  Instead, he’s filed a nasty “review” of my book, Life As We Know It, with amazon.com, under the heading “a reader from Minneapolis.” The first time he did it, he posted something like “Bérubé is a puerile hate-monger who denies the existence of political correctness and fails to answer the arguments of Dinesh D’Souza with reason.” I came across this “review” about a month after it was posted, and wrote to amazon.com to ask them whether they had any quality-control mechanisms on board, since the “review” had nothing to do with the book.  Happily, amazon.com wrote back in a couple of days to say, sorry ‘bout that, we’ll delete that “review” within 48 hours.  A few days later, though, my “reader from Minneapolis” was back (he’s still there, if you want to check), complaining about my aversion to reason and insisting that I’m using my son’s disability to advance my “extreme politics.” (It’s true—Life As We Know It argues for national health care and endorses John Rawls’s “justice as fairness” critique of utilitarianism with a critical caveat about the Rawlsian “original position.” I’m one short step from Stalin!  Dude, I’m completely X-Treme!)

I’m not worried about the “review” in itself, now.  It’s hardly going to matter to me or to my book.  But I’m worried that there are people out there who’ve read my critique of Dinesh D’Souza and have become so enraged that . . . that . . . ooooh, they will write bad things about me on the amazon.com website! That’ll show me!!  Really, this is a very odd, very mediated form of political “retribution.” I doubt that it was common in Cicero’s Rome or Machiavelli’s Florence, not that I’d prefer to have those methods applied to me and my family.

And then there’s the swarm of viruses being sent my way lately—one of which breached the Penn State firewall and my own Norton Antivirus program.  (I think it’s called “backdoor.") For the past week my laptop has been wheezing through the Internet, reconfiguring my email and producing dozens of popups where there were no popups before.  (One morning this past weekend I turned on the laptop and saw popups even before I’d opened a browser.  Those of you who’ve seen the last twenty minutes of The Ring will have some idea of what this was like.) I suppose I’m infected with spyware or something, but this is really beyond my technical chops.  So, if anyone out there has any suggestions, please, now’s the time.  I have no idea whether this trouble is related to the recent emergence of my friend from Minneapolis, but I do know that I’m glad I’m getting myself a new laptop soon.

Back to the good news.  We learned this summer that Nick was accepted to a great college, Washington University in St. Louis, whose architecture program sounds just perfect for him.  (I haven’t posted much about Nick, partly because some of his friends read this blog.  Friends of Nick, stop reading this blog!  Yes, that means you.  And you, too.  Go read a book—haven’t you seen that recent National Endowment for the Arts report about the decline of reading in America, a decline which just happens to be most precipitous among 18-to-25-year-olds?  You rotten kids aren’t reading enough fiction.  Go read fiction, rotten kids.  Go.) The bad news is that the tuition and fees, over four years, come to a dollar amount that is eerily close to the number of visitors this blog has had since January.  (Had Nick gone to Penn State, by contrast, he would have been charged the standard child-of-faculty rate, namely, one-quarter of the quite reasonable in-state rate for tuition.) The obvious solution proposed itself—instead of begging for spare change from readers via PayPal, I could just install software that deducted one dollar from the savings accounts of readers visiting the site!  But I was told that the technology that would permit websites to make involuntary deductions from readers’ private savings accounts is still months away from successful deployment.

No, I’m making that up.  Really.  I would never pick your pockets-- and I will never sell out!!  (Unless a very good offer comes my way.) But I did briefly consider selling blog ads, after I read this fascinating item by Maureen Ryan in the July 13 Chicago Tribune.

CHICAGO - (KRT) - A year ago, blogger Glenn Reynolds joked to the Tribune that he was making “burger-flipping” wages from the trickle of funds readers donated to his popular Web site, Instapundit.com.

These days, Reynolds can afford to order steak. Since he began accepting advertisements on his site five months ago, Instapundit.com has been bringing in several thousand dollars a month.

It’s starting to look as if bloggers can make a living from their sites, thanks to an advertising boom. Companies who want to reach specific consumers - current-events mavens, conservative PhDs, cell phone fanatics - are hooking up with blogs that can deliver those eyeballs. Some politically oriented blogs are also riding an election-year advertising wave, but industry experts expect the trend to last well beyond November.

Blog ads!  Why didn’t I think of this before?!?  I get about 1.5 percent of the Uberpundit’s readership, I should be able to pull down 1.5 percent of his income, or a couple dozen dollars a month. . . .

But then I thought, wait a second.  Check out this seventh-to-last paragraph, on the fortunes of Nick Denton and Gawker Media:

Some advertisers are also wary of bloggers’ freewheeling writing styles, but Denton has rebuffed potential clients who’ve asked him to reign in his cheeky staff.

Golly!  Advertisers might be wary of my cheeky, freewheeling writing style.  So much for that little get-rich-quick-and-pay-for-college scheme!  But I understand.  It makes sense for advertisers to stick with writers in traditional print media, even if neither they nor their editors know the difference between “reign in” and “rein in.”

(Addendum:  apparently the Macon, Georgia Telegraph, whose copy of the Tribune essay I’ve linked to above, has seen fit to publish the article under the headline, “Bloggers Earns Extra Income Via Ads.” Which reminds me:  rarely is the question asked, is our bloggers earning?)

Again, I invite anyone with advice on spyware and popups and annoying cybershadows to advise away.

Posted by on 07/20 at 04:36 PM

  1. Dear Michael:

    Just because I read your blog doesn’t mean that I don’t hit the odd novel or two every now and then.  I’ve even been known to read short stories from time to time!

    Also, I think that if I were reading this blog to hear about Nick, I would be a sad, sad person.  There’s a distinct possibility I might just read this because I’m interested in what you have to say.

    love always,
    Arthur

    Posted by Arthur  on  07/20  at  07:21 PM

  2. Dear Michael, You are right. I should probably cease to read this blog and focus on fiction.  Unfortunately, between “attending performing arts events, visiting art museums, volunteering and doing charity work, and (occasionally) attending or participating in sports activities”, there is little time to dive into serious literature.  Thus I cannot possibly hope to experience all of the apparent lifestyle characteristics of “readers” and must content myself to frequent this blog instead. Perhaps some day when I fit the demographic I, too, will be able to know these perks. But, alas, for now at least I know that “I’ve got my spine (and) I’ve got my orange crush”. xo, Sarah

    Posted by  on  07/20  at  07:39 PM

  3. anti-spyware advice:  try running these free programs:

    http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/
    http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

    it’s worth running both, as they have slightly different coverage.  good luck!

    Posted by Alma Whitten  on  07/20  at  08:07 PM

  4. Sarah!  Arthur!  Don’t you realize that you two smart, highly literate 18-to-25-year-olds were mentioned by name in that NEA report?  Believe me, when I insist that you stop reading this blog, I’m only telling you what’s best for you!  My 35-to-50 age group has conducted Very Scientific Surveys that show how people like you (indeed, people exactly like you) have been responsible for America’s cultural decline!  So don’t try to tell me that you read “short stories” and attend “performing arts events"-- we all know that cultural intelligence is a zero-sum game, and that smart people reading blogs cannot also be smart people doing other things!

    Seriously, folks (and not just Sarah and Arthur), don’t you remember all those overheated late-90s studies about how the Internet was disrupting ordinary human interaction?  It turned out, when you cleared away the nostalgic fog covering these things, that people were communicating by email instead of by phone-- see Scott Rosenberg’s 2000 essay on the subject at http://archive.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/02/18/stanford_study/.  Don’t even get me started about this:  I so prefer email to telephones that I have not made or received a “phone” “call” in over nine years.  And of course I think that blogs-- the best of ‘em-- are thoroughly worthwhile reading.  Better that people read Digby or Brad DeLong or the Decembrist or Body and Soul or Talk Left than their local paper, if they want anything like cogent political analyses of the events of the day.  And forget about televised news-- it honestly couldn’t be worse.

    Now, back to you two.  Stop reading this blog.  And remember to tell all your friends about it!

    Posted by  on  07/20  at  08:26 PM

  5. Michael- do yourself a favor and buy a mac powerbook instead of another PC laptop.  All of your virus/spyware issues will vanish and you will be graced with a stable, intuitive system whch just WORKS.

    I’m fairly new to your blog and am greatly enjoying your refreshing viewpoint- keep up the good work!

    Posted by  on  07/20  at  08:53 PM

  6. A second nod for AdAware, it’s both free and effective.

    You might also consider changing to AVG anti-virus from http://www.grisoft.com

    At least do AdAware right away, regardless of whether or not you’re replacing your machine. Something/someone could be harvesting your passwords!

    Posted by  on  07/20  at  09:46 PM

  7. In addition to the excellent Ad Aware and Spybot, I’d run SpywareBlaster , which “prevent the installation of ActiveX-based spyware, adware, browser hijackers, dialers, and other potentially unwanted pests.”

    I’ve had good luck with NAV, though a couple of attachments (.exe and .com) have gotten through this week. Please don’t tell us you executed attachments from unknown people, did you?

    Bonne chance! smile

    SÈbastien

    PS: Depending on what Ad Aware and Spybot find, it would also make sense to look in the registry and see what programs are being run on startup. 

    Posted by Sadly, No!  on  07/21  at  02:48 AM

  8. Alma, thanks!  (It’s great to have security experts reading one’s blog, even the self-indulgent posts.) AdAware found all kinds of InternetOptimizers and Blasters and data miners running around in there.  Larry B, thanks for letting me know about password-harvesting.  And Chris, I know, I know, but I’ve already ordered the dang pc.  Maybe next time-- but thanks for the kind words about this site.  And SÈbastien, no, I never open attachments from unknown people.  This past week I’ve received about 20-25 of them a day ("cat" seems to be the most popular), and I whisk them away before they can crawl out of my screen and melt my face, or whatever it is they’re designed to do this week.

    I really appreciate the help.  Now to run the other two programs. . . .

    Posted by  on  07/21  at  03:40 AM

  9. Also, look up Spybot Search & Destroy—free and effective for my Windows users.

    http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

    Grisoft, as mentioned above, is good, too. Catches things the widely-used programs might miss, in my experience.

    Also—if it’s a new machine you want, go Mac.

    Posted by  on  07/21  at  05:50 AM

  10. And you should regularly check for windows updates!  http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/

    Posted by Donna  on  07/21  at  06:14 AM

  11. ìSpybot Search & Destroyî is a great program to get rid of problems already on your machine.  However, it is not preemptive.  Also, make sure you know what you’re doing because it’s possible to accidentally delete important files. Iíd recommend reading the tutorial first.

    Posted by  on  07/21  at  06:44 AM

  12. I agree with all the immunization measures mentioned above. Adaware, SpywareBlaster, Spybot and AVG are good to have around the desktop. If switching to Mac isn’t an option, might I suggest that you switch your browsing allegiance to the fine products made by those cyber-hippies at Mozilla. I’ve been using Firefox for a month since contracting a nasty browser hijacker (aictres.dll, in my XP’s system32 folder), and I haven’t seen a popup, had my homepage reset or any other bad innerweb thing happen to me since. Also, there is a googleable little utility called CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) that will hose down your registry and temp folders to get rid of all the crap that these spyware weasels leave on your machine.
    Good luck to you sir, and keep up the good blogging

    Posted by  on  07/21  at  06:46 AM

  13. The Adblock plug-in for mozilla is also nice for getting rid of annoying banners and whatnot.

    Posted by  on  07/21  at  06:56 AM

  14. Mozilla-- hmm, I’ll give this a try.  About that Mac, what do I do with my 120 MB of essays, letters of rec, class preps, professional correspondence, etc., that are all in WordPerfect going back to the days of WP 4.1 and big floppy disks?

    Posted by  on  07/21  at  09:16 AM

  15. Michael: re:college costs. I’ve recently been through it. Iwould guess you know this, but am mentioning in case you don’t. Since you are a Penn State faculty member, you should check to see about your university’s membership in the national tuition exchange programs for children of faculty members. Your child might be the designated exchange student for WUSL, with an attendent tuition reduction. Check with your own instituion’s financial aid office to see how PSU handles this program.
    Charles

    Posted by  on  07/21  at  10:18 AM

  16. Cyber-shadows are pesky, and unfortunately there is no software to delete them. You might have to get used to yours…

    In my brief and rather un-illustrious history as a blogger, I managed to attract one so disruptive he forced me to close open commenting. Since then, having been blocked from making nasty comments, he has had my site added to Blogfreaks.com. A master-troll!

    Posted by Amardeep  on  07/21  at  11:07 AM

  17. Thanks, Charles!  I was down to

    (a) donating blood
    (b) telemarketing
    (c) volunteering for more of those $4/hr psychological experiments I did when I was an undergraduate at Columbia (captured well by that scene in Ghostbusters)

    Posted by  on  07/21  at  03:28 PM

  18. For what it’s worth—I went through total crash-out thanks to accumulated pop-up, trojan, and spyware junk.  A local nerd cleaned it off my hard-drive for me.  I’m not a big fan of Norton, but I have to admit that if (as I was instructed) you use it manically, daily, getting the latest version and scheduling daily updates and scans, you have a chance.

    Another nerdy neighbor, a software engineeer for Dell, ret., said about Norton Anti-Virus:  It stinks, but it’s the best one out there if you make sure it does its thing daily!

    I removed every bit of Adware etc. which the nerd had downloaded so enthusiastically, however.  There are lots of little programs out there to cope with pop-ups but they tend to get as annoying, in the long run, as the pop-ups themselves!

    Posted by  on  07/21  at  11:52 PM

  19. PS—I switched to Firefox too.  Definitely speedier if one’s on antique rural dial-up.  And seems to be outside the radar sweep of the latest viruses.  So far.  Also:  Dell neighbor said, in a loud voice:  Get Rid Of Instant Messenger. closing a back door sometimes used by intruders.  Outlook Express doesn’t like that, but it can be done (CNet tells you how to re config). 

    Posted by  on  07/21  at  11:57 PM

  20. I agree with Bean re: MSN Messenger. You can remove it easily using XP AntiSpy. (btw, is it me or is the email notification of new comments not working?)

    Posted by Sadly, No!  on  07/22  at  01:56 AM

  21. I use Foxfire, too, but sometimes I think it’s slower on the PSU network than IE.  Also, many Microsoft sites won’t load in it.  You’ll just see a blank screen. Go figure.

    Posted by Donna  on  07/22  at  04:06 AM

  22. but we do sometimes speak about ourselves in the first person plural, and that’s already pretty grandiose

    It’s what all the cool kids do! wink

    Posted by Sadly, No!  on  07/22  at  04:41 AM

  23. One nice feature I just discovered about Spybot Search and Destroy, which I’ve been using happily for months: its “Tools” section has a sweeper for detecting “helper” applications that have been registered with Internet Explorer. I had a hell of a time getting rid of popups that only appeared when I used Explorer, but running this feature, and then experimenting with disabling the various items it found, finally solved the problem! What a relief.

    I also have the Google toolbar installed in my Explorer browser, and its popup blocker has reliably caught popups that used to appear when I went to certain commercial sites (such as The Village Voice, and NY Times). These new and nasty popups appeared independently of that function.

    BTW, I haven’t switched from Explorer to another browser yet because I’m used to it, and because I have a lot of “Favorites” bookmarked that I’m not sure I could transfer. Guess that makes me old school?

    Posted by Willie Mink  on  07/22  at  05:54 AM

  24. I was worried about that too, Willie, but Favorites transfers over and becomes Bookmarks.  Pretty much the same. 

    Superstitious about saying this (will the pop-ups hear and start again?) but I’ve been pop-up-free for almost three months running just Norton Anti-Virus.

    I think it’s worth it downloading Firefox (or other) and having it as an alternative to Windows Expl.  Ver-r-r-y easy.

    Posted by  on  07/22  at  08:11 AM

  25. I run AdAware and antivirus software, and I use Mozilla for my email, not Outlook. I don’t (knock wood) have much problems, or with popups, you can configure mozilla to selectively block popups too. (some sites use popups for menus or slideshows, so it’s helpful to have an easy way to allow those only.)

    As far as having an annoying cyber-heckler - all I can say is sympathy, but you ain’t seen nothing till you’ve been Fandom!Wanked. (It’s kind of like being freeped, except they have no ideology beyond thinking that you’re annoying and vulnerable to being picked on - and they don’t usually go for death threats, they just want to make you cry and pull your stuff down. Fanfiction can be a very bloodthirsty subculture indeed.)

    Also - are the Unearthly Trio of Fafblog drifting through cyberspace on their vacation, possessing various bloggers in turn? First Echidne, now you :

    (I haven’t posted much about Nick, partly because some of his friends read this blog. Friends of Nick, stop reading this blog! Yes, that means you. And you, too. Go read a book-- haven’t you seen that recent National Endowment for the Arts report about the decline of reading in America, a decline which just happens to be most precipitous among 18-to-25-year-olds? You rotten kids aren’t reading enough fiction. Go read fiction, rotten kids. Go.)

    It’s like a message from absent friends…

    PS - there might be plugins that can translate the Word Perfect into Claris Works, if you really want to go the mac route.

    Posted by bellatrys  on  07/22  at  01:43 PM

  26. Don’t rule out PayPal as an option too quickly. Yes, moving around blogtopia, we’re all faced with many such buttons inviting us to contribute to worthy individuals and causes, but those astounding numbers of readers a blog like yours acquires also means that a very minor contribution by even half of those who show up in your stats could get Nick into his junior year. (Nick is old enough to go to college! Seems like only yesterday I met him in “Life As We Know it.” ).

    Regarding the suggestion above that you switch to a Mac, a friend loaned me his to try it out; the freedom from fear of infection factor was wonderful, but if you’ve spent most of your computing life on a P.C., you may find, as I did, that your intuitive sense has been permanently corrupted by MicroSoft non-intuitive operating systems, and the super intuitive Mac will strike you as the work of a Satanic madman.

    Posted by Leah A  on  07/23  at  02:15 AM

  27. Bellatrys, I like the idea of being possessed by Fafblog-- though I’m not crazy about the ham jello.  I’ll confess, though, that in the passage in question, I was shooting more for Go, Dog.  Go! And yes, a weird-ass “review” at amazon is nothing compared to the fanfiction world. . . .

    And Leah, thanks as always for the encouragement, but I just can’t come back from a vacation in the south of France and then ask readers to help put my kid through college.  It would be wrong.  Seriously, I mentioned the college bit because I thought the stuff about blogads would be humorous-- and this blog is all for fun.  As for Nick, the only reason we’re in sticker shock is that he was wait-listed at Wash U, which means that we went well past April 1-- two months and more-- thinking he was probably headed to Penn State, which would’ve been a very reasonable $2600/yr with the faculty discount.  (Without the discount it’s pretty steep, even in-state; but like most other “public” universities, we’ve seen our state support dry up to the point at which the Commonwealth of PA now provides only 16 percent of our budget.  I believe Michigan is down to 11.  Below 10 percent, I think, universities should have the option of being called “the University of Kansas,” say, or “a University that happens to be in Kansas.")

    Posted by  on  07/23  at  10:29 AM

  28. Hey!  This comments section censors even my mild obscenities, like “weird-ass”!  So it seems that I can tell a Senator to go fuck himself on the main page, but I cannot tell a Senator to go fuck himself in comments.  That’s weird-ass.

    Posted by  on  07/23  at  10:31 AM

  29. about getting those WP4.1 files over to a Mac… it’s a bit of a roundabout way but older versions of MS Word on Windoze (97, maybe 2000) can open those. if you save them as .doc files then Word X on a Mac can read em.

    Posted by 42  on  07/24  at  07:08 PM

  30. Thanks for posting about viruses, Michael, because I’ve been mining your comments to this post to clear up my own machine as well.  Nice to have real techies as readers, huh?

    Posted by David Morgen  on  07/25  at  12:01 PM

  31. Generous real techies, too.  Very nice!

    Posted by  on  07/25  at  12:41 PM

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