Texas Linux Fest is rapidly approaching. The GNOME Project is looking for one or two friendly volunteers to help run the GNOME booth at TLF on April 10th. The event is going to be held at the Monarch Event Center in Austin, TX. I'm going to be helping with the booth, but I'm giving one of the keynotes at the event and won't be able to spend the entire day at the booth.
Please give me a shout if you'd like to help run the GNOME booth. Travel sponsorship may be available.
One of the more difficult things for reporters working in the tech industry, especially those who aren't really familiar with a beat, is finding contacts for free software projects.
Increasingly, projects like GNOME or openSUSE are in mainstream news, but finding someone to "speak for" those projects can be a challenge. This is doubly true when a site has no contact information for project "leadership" or stale information for the project.
As an example, I just pinged all the addresses on the GNOME Press Resources page -- and they're in a pitiful state right now. At an outside guess, I'd say that the page is at least three years old and probably older than that, and the bounces I just received reflect that. Luckily, I'm not on deadline or anything -- I'm just trying to get information and clean the page so that we have good contacts for any press who are researching stories about GNOME.
A reporter on deadline might not get a great impression about the project if they pinged some of these contacts because they'd either get a "recipient failed" note from everyone's favorite contact "Mail Delivery Subsystem," or they'd get (even worse) a "subscription required to post to this list" in some cases.
This is not the way to receive glowing press coverage. Hell, it's not necessarily the way to receive any press coverage at all.
If you're participating in a FLOSS project, make sure there's a prominent contact page where reporters, bloggers, etc., can find someone to talk to and get information from on very short notice. Some reporters are savvy and persistent enough to hunt developers down in IRC if needed or stalk mailing lists to find the contact info -- but most won't, and the best you'll be able to hope for is "project could not be reached by deadline."
This also highlights the importance of attracting non-developer contributors to projects. Maintaining this sort of information and putting together PR plans is something that a few developers are good at and enjoy, but not very many -- and it's rarely a good use of their time in any event.
I get a lot of emails from a friends, colleagues, acquaintances, or random strangers asking me how to get started writing. Since the question comes up a lot, I thought it might be worth a post here. Maybe it will help some of the people who haven't asked yet, or at least it'll give me something to link to rather than composing a custom response each time someone asks. 
The first step: Deciding if you really do want to be a professional writer. Let's start with a series of questions that you should ask yourself before considering writing as a professional activity:
If the answer to question one was "I like to write," then game over and thanks for playing. No, really. People don't succeed as writers long-term because it's something they sort of enjoy doing -- for the same reason people who enjoy drawing or painting don't become famous artists, people who just sort of enjoy playing guitar don't become Eric Clapton. I promise you that if you don't need to write, you'll go from sort of enjoying writing to hating writing.
Take a weekend and see if you can do 2,500 to 3,500 words on Saturday and Sunday, each. Yes, while everyone else is out having fun. Repeat that for a couple of weekends. In a row. If you can generate 10,000 words of publishable work in a month, you might be a candidate to be a professional writer.
Topics -- if you're born to write, or have had it beaten into you somehow, you're going to see topics literally everywhere. If you're a subject matter expert in one or more areas, you'll be able to nail down topic ideas from the basics to the more subtle areas of your expertise. If you're a generalist, you ought to be able to think of topics you'd send to everybody from Reader's Digest to Make Magazine. (Maybe not those specifically, but if you're going to be a generalist freelance writer, you have to have a very wide net.)
This isn't a problem for tech authors, necessarily -- if you're lucky enough to be on staff as a tech writer, the topics will be assigned to you, but I don't know many folks who've landed tech writing jobs without a portfolio.
Deadlines: Can you hit them?
Criticism: Can you take it? This is something I see trip up a lot of first-timers. If you don't have a really thick skin, or if you feel that your writing is so special that it just can't be changed... you are not a candidate to be a professional writer. Editors will change your work. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, and sometimes just because they need to whack 200 words to squeeze your manuscript into a space. (Assuming you write for print...)
There's a word for writers who don't accept changes well: Unemployed. The editor assigning the story and the client writing the check get final say, and you should have very little ego about this.
That doesn't mean that authors have to accept every change or allow their work to be published under their byline if it's not something they'd be proud to put their name on. If an editor changes something and the result is a piece that's factually incorrect or something you'd be embarrassed to put your name on, stand your ground. But too many authors huff and puff because of trivial changes or because the "voice" of the piece has been changed a bit.
If you're lucky enough to work with an editor that does provide feedback, accept it gracefully and gratefully.
Next -- are you good at marketing yourself? Unless you are very, very lucky, building a decent client list requires aggressive marketing and pitching to publications and clients. If you're not good at this, you don't get work.
And are you ready to run your own small business? Because that's what freelance writing is -- running a business. You need to do the whole thing: Pitch the work, make the sale, close the deal, actually do the writing, do customer service with clients, have meetings, be the accountant, do the invoicing, handle collections if you're unfortunate enough to have clients who are slow to pay, and so on. You have to read contracts and decide how much you need to make per hour to make a living -- factoring in that you'll only be able to bill for time you're actually writing. Spending 40 hours a week working isn't the same as billing 40 hours per week.
Good rule of thumb: Expect to see checks roll in 30 to 45 days after the work is done. Sometimes even more slowly. This means you need to have a decent cushion for clients who don't pay quickly. If you're about to go into freelancing, I recommend a cushion of no less than three months, and six months is actually a better idea. You want a long runway if you don't land a lot of work right away.
Finally, realize that it's a very, very competitive field. A lot of people want to write for a living, and you're going to be pitching for the same publications and clients as a lot of other writers. And there are outfits like Demand Media that are consistently lowering the bar on quality and pay, making it that much more difficult to eke out a living when many clients and publications will settle for a low-quality content-like substance.
It might sound like I'm trying to discourage people from freelancing. Mainly, I just want to give a realistic view of what writing for a living entails. It's nowhere near as easy as most people think it is. It does come easily or naturally to some people, but it doesn't to most. Simply being a decent writer isn't the same thing as being ready to be a professional writer. If it's not something that you are fully committed to, you'll probably fail, and you'll certainly hate it.
TechDirt points to a discussion about today's newsroom and the idea a new role in a newsroom: Curators. That is, someone who would help readers by sorting, organizing, verifying, and editing information that's already on the Web or in the media.
Traditional journalists might look down on this, as journalism programs really focus hot and heavy on front-line reporting roles and editing roles. J-schools don't focus on roles that look at existing information and putting that into context for readers, even though that's what a lot of publications are focusing on at the moment -- original and investigative reporting being rather expensive.
It might be a hard sell at first, since that's not prestigious work and probably not what a lot of people want to get into journalism for.
But making news accessible and ensuring that things are verified and in context... that's deeply important, too. Looking at it just from my beat -- the IT industry and open source community in particular -- a lot of projects are sort of self-reporting. Information is available from thousands of sources (seriously... my Google Reader feeds prove that...) that are far too disperse for most readers to see things firsthand. There's quite a bit of value in curating the news, when it's done well. Some sites already do this, to varying degrees of success. And it's certainly true that someone in a pure curator role is not looked at as a journalist in the strictest sense -- but maybe they should be.
A good example of this would be Groklaw. The Groklaw folks do some original reporting and investigation, but the site is primarily about curating the SCO case and related information. It's obviously proven valuable for a large audience. And I'd argue that it's journalism working just as it should. If Groklaw's not being taught in J-schools now as a case study for the future of media, it ought to be: maybe it isn't a model of for-profit publishing, but it's showing what can be done with new tools and a community of interested contributors with a few curators at the helm.
A bad example of this... well, I don't like to point fingers. But there are plenty of linkroll sites where the editors / moderators don't practice any verification or use reasonable judgment in publishing links or stories. Sites that pose as gatekeepers should have moderators that actually do some vetting of stories and be more responsible about what they link to. I see too many sites that play up any "controversy" or give a very loud soapbox to people who really don't know what the hell they're talking about.
It might be difficult to get the public as fired up about other important topics as Groklaw's audience is, but it'd be interesting to try.
I do disagree with Mike Masnick's conclusion that "if a newsroom were set up with a focus on these three roles... I doubt we'd see newspapers struggling as much as they are today."
Maybe newspapers would be struggling a tiny, little bit less. But the problems newspapers face are not simply due to changing roles in the newsroom -- the financial system that has supported newspapers has collapsed. Sites like Craigslist have devastated the revenue model for some papers. Advertisers are less interested in supporting traditional media.
But the reporter, columnist, editor, curator newsroom has some promise. I hope that this idea catches on.
Not-so Classy App Store Apps
Just read that Apple has tightened its restrictions on all the crap "boob, babe, and bikini" apps in the App Store. What took so long?
I get sick of seeing all the crap apps in the App Store, especially when Apple restricts legitimate but "competing" applications. If Apple is going to play gatekeeper, then they should exercise a bit of quality control and block these skeezy and useless apps from the phone. A few examples are to the left. OK, the iBearSoft application and iPlummet Free apps don't look too offensive. I'm not really sure what they do but they don't look offensive.
"Asian Hot Sexy Girls," and "How to KISS DIRTY!" apps, however, do. According to this eWeek story, Apple's SDK says no to any apps with "obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind." The apps here probably don't rate as obscene or pornographic, but they're definitely offensive.
But Apple hasn't been enforcing this policy consistently. Apple's SDK policy isn't new, and these apps have been allowed in the App Store for a long time. I think these apps are scuzzy, but it's also unreasonable to allow the apps into the store and then bump them back out again later because of a change in the wind in Cupertino. Techcrunch has a link to a list of items which will, suddenly, be off-limits. No boobs, no babes (well, no uncovered ones), and no bikinis.
As far as I'm concerned, that's hunky dory: But Apple should have communicated this sooner. It doesn't seem reasonable to me that Apple would accept these for so long and then suddenly do a 180. It's not as if one or two lone apps have slipped through: The App Store is rife with this kind of thing. Do a search for "sexy" or "strip," for example -- you'll see plenty of adult-oriented content that's obviously adult-oriented. It's not like these slipped through: So what's with the sudden change?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If I were an app developer, I'd be very wary of basing my business on the iPhone. Technically, it's a great platform. Apple has done a really good job of showing people what's possible on mobile computers. Unfortunately, the company has also shown that it's unpredictable to do business with.
One thing I love about the UNIX philosophy is the idea that each program should do one job and do it really well. There are zillions of small tools for UNIX-type OSes that make life much easier and are hugely useful, but they don't necessarily get written about. They certainly don't receive the same kind of coverage that Apache and Sendmail receive. One of my favorites, HTML Tidy, is a tool for HTML/Web development that I think will interest a lot of folks. HTML Tidy cleans up HTML produced by WYSIWYG editors and such.
Keep It Tidy
Webmasters are often asked to look after HTML documents that were produced by other folks using WYSIWYG editors or word processors like Microsoft Word. Although the use of such editors and word processors simplifies production for many people, the HTML produced by these programs is usually pretty ugly. It might be acceptable in a browser, but it's downright unpleasant to maintain.
In my case, I use DocBook for a lot of documents and SGML&Tools to render HTML from DocBook markup and then tweak it slightly. Although the HTML looks just fine in a browser, it's kind of ugly when you open it up in Vim. Running the output through HTML Tidy makes it easier to read and leaves you with "valid" 4.01 HTML.
Blogging 101: Conducting interviews for media
A good friend of mine from the FLOSS community is going to be doing some interviews for his blog at an upcoming conference, and asked for a few tips on interviewing. Interviewing is not a science, but an art: And art requires practice.
I don't claim to be the world's best interviewer: Most of the interviews I do are your basic information gathering sessions to fill in the gaps for a feature or news piece that I'm writing. If that's the kind of interview you're gearing up for, then the primary thing is to make sure you have a set of clear questions that will get the answers you need and to do the interview in whatever way will produce the most clear answers. (I prefer email for this sort of thing.)
But if you're trying to get the sense of a person, and convey more than some basic stats about them, you need to do a few things:
Too many folks show up for interviews with a set of cursory questions and hope that the the interviewee will just magically open up and provide a great interview. If you're doing an interview that you hope will matter, spend some time researching the person (or persons) you'll be talking to. Read their previous interviews if you can. Find out what they're usually asked and what they haven't been asked.
Finally, put yourself in the interviewee's seat. One of the best tools to learn about interviewing is to be interviewed. I spent a lot of time doing interviews via email, phone, and in person while with Novell. Most of the interviews were the same question over and over. But a few of the interviewees were actually very on the ball and asked insightful questions and seemed to care about the answers. Those were the interviews that were most enjoyable and produced the best results, in my opinion.
Respect the interviewee's time, and that of your audience. If you go in with that at top of mind, you should do a great job whether it's your first interview or one thousandth.