A new take on digital music

There hasn’t been much on this blog of late.  That’s primarily because, in the topsy-turvy world of Upstart Blogger/Ashley Morgan, there hasn’t been much going on.  Sure I could comment on the 4 different name changes his “record label” has gone through in the past year, or the numerous twists and turns of his Twitter username, but that’s hardly newsworthy.  However, it finally seems as if he’s ready to resurface again.

Thankfully for most of us, he’s not coming back — or hasn’t yet, anyway — to the world of blogging about blogging.  Instead, he’s been laying low and focusing on music.  That’s fine and dandy.  You might recall that, in the past, Mr. Morgan has been a strong advocate of digital music and filesharing, actively taking on the major labels’ attempts to shut down p2p music sharing and control over the industry.  Two years ago (has it really been that long?) in September ’09 he got into a poo flinging contest with Lily Allen and her label (EMI) on Twitter and on his blog in reaction to a post on her MySpace page appealing to her fans against filesharing.

“File sharing’s not okay for British music,” she wrote. “We need to find new ways to help consumers access and buy music legally, but saying file sharing’s fine is not helping anyone – and definitely not helping British music.”

This spurred an almost 2,000 word rant about Lily Allen, how that post couldn’t possibly be written by her but rather she was a puppet for EMI who was trying to get her fans to stop pirating music, and about how the music industry in general was being idiotic if it thought it could really control music sharing.  This attack ultimately lead to a cease and desist order from EMI to pull down the post and stop flaming the fire, which only gave him more fuel since it indicated that he was onto something.  But I don’t care about that.  I’m interested in revisiting his views on digital music at the time.  To wit: “What EMI and Lily know and hate is that independent musicians depend on file sharing as one of the many ways of getting their music heard.” (italics mine)

Fast forward to now.  Ashley has given up all his former main blogs, but he can’t help telling us what he’s up to, as I found when I discovered a couple new posts from my Ashley Morgan Universe Collection of RSS feeds.  Ashley’s now moved primarily over to Posterous where he’s blogging on behalf of the new label E&R Records (don’t bother finding the E&R Records site, there’s nothing there).  As I was reading the most recent entry, and then the entries of the past month or so, I was struck by the sudden 180 with regards to digital music.  Namely, his most recent Q & A post:

“Where can I listen to your music?”

E & R Records distributes music through independent record shops all over the world. To listen to the music go to your local independent record shop and they will be happy to help.

“Where can I buy your music?”

E & R Records music is only available to purchase through independent record shops.

“Is your music available on iTunes?”

No.

“Is your music really only available on vinyl and cassette?”

Yes. Although some of our artists have expressed an interest in making their music available on Mini Disc, something that we shall look into in the near future.

…

“Do you offer free downloads?”

No. If you want our music then go to an independent record shop, order it and buy it. That’s what real music lovers do. If you want to freeload then there is plenty of music out there for you to choose from. But if you want our music you’re going to have to play by our rules.

“How can I buy music without having heard it first?”

You’ve obviously never been in a real independent record shop. Try it. Go into your local independent record shop and tell them that you’d like to listen to something new. Talk to them, get to know them, let them get to know you.

…

“What is your stance on file sharing, torrent sites and music piracy?”

They are all things that plague the digital music industry. We couldn’t care less about them, frankly.

To say that the music industry hasn’t changed in 2 years would be a flat out lie.  I’ve changed my stance on selling music, myself, ultimately deciding that if I’m going to put as much time and energy into making music as the music really deserves, I should at least get a couple bucks for it.  However, I still make low quality mp3s available for free elsewhere, even if all my current full albums on Bandcamp require some form of compensation (even if that’s just an acknowledgement of naming a $0 price for Wasp.

But, completely reversing his stance on digital music entirely and switching to a completely analog label, specializing in vinyl and cassettes?  What is this, 1983?  Mr. E&R Records, will you be providing 8-tracks of your music?  And MiniDiscs?  Seriously?  For, what, the 5 people who still have MiniDisc players?  My real question, though, isn’t even about the technology.  That, I sort of understand.

By taking a stance against digital, he sets himself apart from a growing movement in the music industry towards digital.  When everything is going digital, he can set himself apart as being the lone misfit who still hangs on to the perceived higher fidelity of analog equipment and recording.  Cassettes are a bit of a stretch, but whatever.

However, where does the music snobbery get him?  Maybe he’s pissed off because I found where he posted his band, Enormous’, mp3s and downloaded them while the site was under construction.  (Here’s a secret: they weren’t very good.)  Where does the analog > digital, therefore we will not release any digital, ever, not even as a bonus or an add-on or so people can load their iPods with it mentality going to go?  I get using analog to establish yourself in a particular niche, but completely disregarding digital music entirely is idiotic.  In five years, music will not be physical at all except in limited edition releases.  This is evidenced by Radiohead’s recent The King of Limbs album which was a digital-only release but included special-edition vinyl versions with enhanced packaging and art.  Those that are interested in the art form, the tactile sensation of opening a record sleeve and spinning up a turntable will buy the physical version.  Those that just want the music will get the mp3s.  And that’s how the industry is going to work.  Selling exclusively to independent record stores when the indies are rapidly being swallowed up by the BestBuys and the WalMarts and providing no way of legally getting your music in your car let alone on your headphones is a doomed business model.  Get out of 1970, Ashley, or be eaten alive.

I would like to close my own little soapbox rant by commenting on his idea that “music isn’t digital.”

No.  Music isn’t digital.  But it’s not analog either.  Music is sound.  Any kind of reproduction is just that, a reproduction.  Arguably, one medium is just as good as any other medium.  Vinyl can be as distorting and awful as low-fidelity mp3s if you have a bad needle or a warped turntable or a bad receiver.  One might say that lossless audio files are the closest thing to the original recording you can get, in which case, how could they possibly be inferior?

“Go to a mirror and take a good look at your ears. Do you see anything digital in there?”

No, but I don’t see anything analog in there, either.

A slow day?

For those that haven’t noticed it yet, upstartblogger.com has taken yet another turn.

Remember the old tagline of the site?  If you don’t, I’ll remind you:

Successful blogging made simple.

As it turns out, successful blogging just isn’t simple.  There’s all these acronyms you need to know about, like HTTP — what the hell is that? — and DNS — that means Do Not Subscribe, right? — and all of these things are vital to becoming a successful blogger.

I should give up right now.

That’s what the new approach to upstartblogger.com is: it’s capitalizing on the fear, uncertainty and doubt of people who are tentatively stepping out into the blogosphere and convincing them that they can’t do this themselves, but that’s okay because “the Upstart Blogger people” will help them through this tough time.

Putting the actual value of the “service” aside for a moment, do I need to remind you the previous track record of Upstart Blogger when it comes to customer service?

So, wtf?

Well, obviously he’s trying to squeeze as much value out of his affiliate link for AN Hosting as possible.  All the other tricks have failed.  No one cares about blog sponsorship except the people getting a PR7 incoming link (a value that’s dubious at best) and traffic has to be down — there’s no content!  But rather than try to provide any real value to the blogging world, he is, instead, manipulating people self-consciousness and using it to his advantage to get them to sign up with AN Hosting through his affiliate link.

I just see this as a low blow.  The site used to be about how easy it was to be a professional blogger, but now he’s flipped a(nother) 180 and is capitalizing on how hard it is.  And this new shift in gears just underlies the main problem with Upstart Blogger.

It’s not making any money.

Sure, it might be getting some sales from the AN Hosting banner ads, and AN Hosting was chosen for it’s high payouts for referrals, not because it’s actually any better than any other host.  But look: several years ago the domain was purchased for $10k+ (I don’t remember the exact figure off the top of my head).  At the time, it already had PR7, and was getting steady traffic due to the PageRank and having valuable content for aspiring bloggers.  And it got more traffic through aggressive post titles that attacked big names like Tim Ferris and Darren Rowse.  It was monetizing that traffic through it’s affiliate links to AN Hosting and made a big point out of how he wasn’t using extensive advertising like those other guys over there.  Then he got a spike in revenue with Twitter Genesis Rocket.  But the rocket crashed, and so did other attempts at using some product to monetize the site.  Back to the AN affiliate link again.  Except now, he’d alienated his regular readership (which doesn’t actually matter, since those people probably aren’t going to hit the affiliate link anyway) and had nothing to show for it.  Attempts at getting other people to blog for him failed when suspicious activity started happening in the comments to increase the drama…and the hits.  The downside of that is that all his bloggers are volunteers, he’s not actually willing to pay anyone (despite this post).  How could he, if he needs new authors to write the content that will bring the traffic that will increase the clicks on his affiliate links?

Thus, the squeeze page.  A single page website designed to get your attention and drive you to click the button or sign up for the newsletter or buy the product at the bottom of the page.  In this case, the product is the AN Hosting referral, despite what the copy says.  He doesn’t care about your blogging experience, he just wants you to click the freaking link.  Just click the link! It’s what he’s been waiting for since January.  If you won’t click the link, well, he’ll just make it that much harder to find any relevant or valuable content on the site whatsoever by replacing the front page (formerly a normal blog layout) with a static page with sales copy.  Ha! Got you now, suckers!  Now you have to click on the link!  I hope for his sake, and for the sake of premium WordPress theme developers (to which I claim membership myself), that the “premium themes” included in his 100 theme package do not include the WooThemes he’s been so fond of (enough to base several of his own themes on), or any other actually premium WordPress themes (you know, the ones you pay money for).  If he was doing that, he’d make a whole lot more enemies than just one dude with a blog.

The bitter truth is this: Upstart Blogger is a money pit.  It’s a failed investment.  If it was ever able to reach profitability to the point where it paid itself back, it certainly isn’t there now if we have to resort to tired marketing tactics to squeeze any bit of revenue we can out of the site.

Apparently, in spite of previous suspicions, the fall of Upstart Blogger is not done.  And the story continues.

whatever happened to…

Remember that 10000in24 Twitter account from a while back?  There was the big reveal on Upstart Blogger about what a sham it was that he was going to “create” a Twitter account that acquired 10,000+ followers and then he’d “give it away” to the first person who grabbed it?  And remember how — you saw it here — the game was rigged from the start? (Anyone who uses Twitter would know that the username should have been 10000in24, not “Paul”…by the way, if you’re not in the UK or aware of obscure British magicians illusionists, Paul Daniels, well, is one.)  Maybe you were wondering who ended up with the Twitter account after Upstart Blogger “gave it away”.  Well, wonder no longer.

He gave it to himself.  Oh, I’m sorry, let me clarify: “Upstart Blogger” “gave” @10000in24 to Ashley Morgan.  If you were following 10000in24, you’d notice the username switcheroo.  If you were attentive to follower counts and the 54 lists the account was on, you could make assumptions.  Personally, I blocked 10000in24 and reported it to Twitter as a spam account (which, if you go to @447ashleymorgan today you’ll see he’s doing just that, spewing auto-generated jazz-related tweets to crank up his search engine relevancy for his new! improved! target niche).  I’ve said it before, he goes through Twitter usernames like candy, this one was previously 447ashley before it was 447ashleymorgan, and, of course, he can’t have @ashleymorgan because that account is being used by this guy.  And he can’t have @ashley_morgan either, because that’s this guy.  His last official Twitter account, @morganzero, was suspended for violating Twitter’s terms of use (e.g. spamming).  This is extremely boring and tedious to anyone who doesn’t care about his Twitterventures, although it does, once again, reveal the duplicitous nature of any so-called “contest” hosted on upstartblogger.com.

Back to his old tricks

Disclaimer: Geez, guys…if I realized I was going to inadvertently earn the ire of a nation of Stay at Home Babe fans, I might have thought a moment before I wrote that I thought she might not be a real person. Then again, I probably wouldn’t have changed my opinion if she hadn’t emailed me and convinced me otherwise. So, I get it. She’s real. Probably most of the other “bunnies” are real, too. As suggested in the comments of this post, however, the heckling and comments directed at her and the other female bloggers on Upstart Blogger may have been staged to rack up drama (and therefore hits). The subject of this post is not Stay at Home Babe’s identity but that of the person currently blogging as “Upstart Blogger”.

You ever get really strong deja vu?

September is, apparently, going to be a big month in the Upstart Blogger empire…AshleyMorgan.com, EnormousReloaded.com (now relocated at Enormous.co) and his new record label…thing (not to be confused with his old record label), 447 Records, are all slated to launch this month.

So, it’s not surprising that — keeping with the tradition of doing everything at once across all his blogs — he chose right now to try his latest traffic-bait post on a little Twitter “trick” that he’s been practicing for the last 6 months or so.

But wait, you say, isn’t Upstart Blogger under new management? Let’s take a look at that, and, in the process, revisit some ancient history.

First of all, let’s rewind the clock a couple years to probably shortly after Upstart Blogger was purchased from its original owner.  Around that time, another blog surfaced that was supposedly written by a teenager living in his parents’ basement in the UK trying to make it rich by trying every scheme he could BitTorrent the ebook for.  His name was Avon Blake.  He, of course, was a work of fiction.

Avon Blake’s initial claim to fame (such as it was) was by bashing big names in blogging.  He posted a link to a .torrent file of Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week and earned the ire of Ferriss and his peeps.  He slagged on Chris Pearson (okay, not a difficult thing to do), founder of DIYThemes and Thesis.  Apparently, this wasn’t generating enough traffic, so he turned to porn.  He wrote about scoring a hot new girlfriend at a party who wouldn’t have paid any attention to him at all if he hadn’t said that he was a superstar blogger and suddenly she wants to sleep with him and pose naked for him for his blog and his future porn empire.  No, seriously.  Eventually, this leads him to Lindsey Dawn-McKenzie, an actual UK porn star, though for the purposes of this blog, she’s actually a fictional representation of a real person.  Then he gets a letter from a girl named Hannah who wants him to help her make tons of money, too, with her blog, and join in the porn-fun.

Hannah, though her character would change a bit, eventually evolved into Hannah Solo, who later became the Evangelist-in-Chief of AM’s ebook, Twitter/Genesis Rocket.  But that’s not how HannahSolo.com started.  Hannah started off being a male version of Avon Blake, only lighter on the blogging tips and heavier on the porn posts (though she never actually posted porn on her site, it was obvious it was ramping up to it).  And here’s another catch — Hannah Solo, obviously an assumed internet pseudonym, was actually Lindsey Dawn McKenzie.  *aaaaahhhh*error*error*continuity breach*  Yes, one of Hannah’s earliest posts was about how her name was actually Lindsey Dawn McKenzie (but not that Lindsey Dawn McKenzie) and so she had to change her name to avoid being confused with the porn star.  Obviously.  But despite that, she wasn’t above linking to, blogging about, and later stealing the domain from the actual Lindsey Dawn McKenzie.  And while there was no later connection to Avon Blake despite the “letter from a poor girl named Hannah” which later disappeared from the internet after the site was pulled down, they did chat back and forth on Twitter and on each other’s blogs and both happily linked back to Upstart Blogger (and each other) whenever possible.

Upstart Blogger’s author treated the two blogs with a sort of paternal “oh those crazy kids” attitude (which is not exactly how I would respond if my kids were trying to build a porn empire), linking to them when it benefited UB, but not when they posted the pr0n.  Eventually, AvonBlake.com was pulled by its host, and all the porn-related posts on HannahSolo.com were removed to make room for Twitter Rocket, because you can’t have your leading advertiser talk about how she wants to get rich posing nude when you’re trying to sell the case that she is rich from selling Twitter Rocket.

What ties these characters together is our friend at Upstart Blogger.  Both Hannah and Avon are fictional characters created by AM to push more traffic to Upstart Blogger.  So now, let’s revisit the question of Upstart Blogger’s current ownership.

At the end of 2009, AM said he no longer wanted to be involved in Upstart Blogger, and put it to the readers to fill the site in with content.  I wrote one introductory post which I later pulled down after I saw Upstart Blogger being used to promote and sell yet another scammy product (more than one, actually), and I started writing The Rise and Fall of Upstart Blogger.  Allowing a blogging free-for-all didn’t work out so great.  There was a small handful of real people who blogged on this “new” Upstart Blogger (myself included) and several other new fictional authors.  Early in March 2009, he started writing about just selling Upstart Blogger (note: most of those posts have been pulled down now).  But he didn’t actually want to sell it sell it, he wanted to retain executive control while remaining hands-off.  Sort of reap the benefits and let someone else deal with the hard work of running the site.  On April 26, one of the few real UB posters, David Corti, posted that he was the new owner of Upstart Blogger, and would be working on revamping the site and changing the design.

Among the things he did in his brief ownership was create a new Twitter account for UpstartBlogger, @upstart_blogger and create a new theme for the site.  @upstart_blogger has been removed (although there was a period of time when it existed at the same time as the new Upstart Blogger Twitter account @weareupstart and you could see the date that @upstart_blogger stopped tweeting was the same day that @weareupstart started), and the theme has been changed back to something that is characteristic of AM’s library of other blog themes, in particular signaly 37 and Genesis.

Then one day, David Corti stopped posting, and “Upstart Blogger” started posting.  This wasn’t just a username switch, you can still see the posts by David Corti, and it’s not a renaming of AM’s account, either, since his posts are all accessible as well.  Nor is either of those humans saying “oh yeah, I’m posting as Upstart Blogger now” but, still, the Upstart Blogger user is posting as if it is the new owner of Upstart Blogger, and as if it has been given a bunch of stuff from the old owner of Upstart Blogger (whose name we don’t mention anymore).

And among “the box” of stuff given to the “new” owner from the “old” owner was several hundreds of Twitter accounts, which brings us to the post from a few days ago where he said he would give away a Twitter account with over 10,000 followers and reveal how he was able to create an account with that many followers in 24 hours.  If you followed AM’s Twitter account over the last year, you would have seen him bouncing from one username to the next, before finally settling on a completely new profile that — suddenly — had the same number of followers as his old Twitter account while not actually being that Twitter account.  Which is, apparently, a trick of building one Twitter account, doing the aggressive following tricks he is known for from Twitter/Genesis Rocket (and then dumping all the users the account is following), and then doing a bait-and-switch technique of renaming the old account and creating a new account with the same name.  Before Twitter’s servers are able to process that those are two separate accounts, they, instead, assume they’re actually the same account and magically you get however many followers the other account had.  Clever. Update: It’s actually not nearly as convoluted and tricksy as I thought. Really, the only trick with 10000in24 was creating a new account as 10000in24, then changing the name and taking an old account and changing that to 10000in24, making it appear as if @10000in24 earned 10,000 followers overnight (when, in actuality, it did no such thing — that user is now named something irrelevant and those followers came from someplace else, which is exactly what AM’s been doing with his Twitter accounts).

Now.  Given this particularly sneaky trick, and his past sneaky tricks, fake authors, and bait-and-switches, is there any question who the identity of the mysterious “Upstart Blogger” user is?  No, I didn’t think so either.

And don’t bother trying to grab the 10000in24 Twitter account, he’s already rigged it — like all his other “giveaways” — so that no one can win.  Take a look at this screenshot and see if you can figure out why:

As Admiral Ackbar said, IT’SATRAP!

So, what’s the hook attached to the juicy new bait that’s been pushed in the new “I’m giving everything away for free” attitude of Upstart Blogger?  If what he’s told me personally is to be believed, all he’s really after is traffic, something the site has been losing steadily since December.  Posting new Twitter hacks is certainly in line with that, as are the new (fake possibly fake) authors trying to pull in a different type of audience. Or maybe we’ll see something new and fabulous (also fake) like the Genesis Arc program that was supposed to be a fantastic network of Twitter accounts pushing traffic back and forth which never actually existed.  I’m cynical enough to believe that there’s ulterior motives to his magnanimous sharing of everything for free.

Update: Okay, so there are a few humans in the world.  One of them, I’m fairly sure, is here.

the end?

could this be the end of Ashley Morgan on Upstart Blogger?  well, certainly Upstart Blogger isn’t going anywhere.  i have my doubts whether any actual funds changed hands during the recent “sale” of upstartblogger.com, so i doubt that he’d just give up on a $14k investment.  and we’ve seen this before (and by “we” i mean me…and anyone else who pays enough attention to his movements), this “i’m going away and not coming back.”  usually it’s followed by a new grand scheme in about a month or two.

the thing that seems to give this away the most is hiding it on an offshoot blog, Musicians Who Blog, which has nothing to do with the now defunct Brass Revolver, his own solo page, or Upstart Blogger — essentially hiding it off in some corner where very few people will see it.  not really a big sendoff.  i would think if this was really the last farewell of ashley morgan to upstart blogger it would at least be a thing on, perhaps, upstart blogger.

maybe he just wants to know how many people are paying attention.

there’s at least one.

update: it’s been a while since i had checked brass revolver.  apparently he resurrected that blog for a last hurrah as well…

but given the emergence of the new netjelly site, and the new look for my name’s ash, i doubt he’ll be very far away, and i doubt seriously that he’s really “given up blogging for good”.

update again: also, you’d think if he was really giving up UB for good, he would have mentioned it somewhere, even briefly, in his twitter stream.  i should point out, too, that the social media links at the top of Upstart Blogger — to LinkedIn, Virb, FriendFeed, Identica, Plurk, Twitter — are a fairly recent addition, certainly weren’t there when the site was “for sale” the last two times and all point to Ashley’s profile on those networks.  so, claiming he is no longer is involved with Upstart Blogger is kinda funny.

fact check (4/16/2010): after having a conversation with zach hornsby in chat, i still wasn’t entirely convinced he wasn’t just another ashley creation (like hannah solo, avon blake, zoe pattison, karl fawkes, etc, etc, etc).  so i managed to track zach down on facebook.  given that his social network on fb has a large number of kids from the same high school, i’m willing to acknowledge the fact that he is, in fact real.  so’s ashley cooper, for that matter, who was also in his network and had a similar friend list.  so, okay guys, i’ll stop saying you’re ashley morgan.  they’re obviously students of his, much like i was, following his example in blogging and social media marketing.  there’s nothing wrong with that provided you don’t then take advantage of other people, luring them in by establishing a false sense of credibility built entirely by personalities that are fictional.  it’s much better, and more effective, to build an actual sense of credibility by bloggers and peers who actually exist.  rather than selling a product that is based on defrauded and exposed techniques of previous scams, wrapped up in silver-tongued new copy to make it appear as though it’s nothing like those other things, and then advertise said product by bullying detractors and evangelizing yourself and your product with alternate identities spread throughout the web, how about providing something of value that is actually new and worth the cover price.  or better yet, offer it up as an open source project, throw it out there and let the crowd use it, build upon it, and do with it as they will.  long ago, i told ashley that he should make twitter rocket free, that it would save him a lot of trouble and headache and then anyone who said it was a scam would be silenced, because you can’t scam someone with something that’s not generating any revenue.  i suggested he, instead, focus on related add-on type products — here’s twitter rocket, for free, and over here is the paid subscription to the inner circle network, or the genesis arc, or whatever the plan was.  but he never had a plan, those other products never existed and he was reluctant to give up the last vestiges of his dwindling income stream.  let us hope that you guys don’t follow in his footsteps.

~c

adventures in the alternate reality universe of upstart blogger

let me preempt this by saying that, although this is posted on april 1, this is not a joke.

but it is funny.  to me, anyway.

the other day i discovered, and blogged about, twitter fireball, which i reported to be the latest reincarnation of twitter rocket.  i knew the author was watching, in fact, i expected an email from him within 30 minutes of posting it.

the email never came.

instead, i learned last night that, in fact, the whole thing was an elaborate april fool’s day prank.

you know, sometimes i think i’m insane and possibly incredibly self-centered to think that entire blog posts are written solely for my benefit.  and yet the title of the post, “An early April Fool’s Day present that will make some of you smile and some of you curse” seemed to be just that.  i mean, who would be amused by Twitter Fireball, at least in a April Fools sort of way and not in the laughable attempt at recapturing the lost revenue stream of Twitter Rocket?  and who would curse, other than me if, presumably after reading this, i discovered that my claims at Twitter Fireball being the latest incarnation of Twitter Rocket were (at least publicly) proven to be false and unfounded?

the thing is, that after he posted that it was all actually a big joke, i discovered that he had already rewritten some of the content on his band’s website Enormous Reloaded to say that, in fact, Enormous is using Twitter Fireball to connect with fans and earn extra income.  really?  funny, because that’s exactly what you said about Twitter Rocket.

that feeling of being the star of Upstart Blogger’s posts was only intensified this morning when i discovered the offending “april fools!” post was pulled down.  what’s that you say?  an april fools day post pulled down on april fools day?! i can only assume that, having no witty or clever rebuke to having caught him with his pants down via Enormous’ website, that he was forced to abandon this sortie.  don’t worry, though, for a limited time, you can still read the original post via google’s cached pages, and anyway, i kept a full screenshot of the post, just in case:

but that’s not all…

in addition, visiting upstartblogger.com today won’t even give you the most recent posts.  instead, all you see are the various WordPress themes (most of them not even Ashley Morgan’s but, rather written by Robert Ellis, the previous owner of Upstart Blogger) that have been released on Upstart Blogger.  The intro text says that it’s the most popular 10 posts, although the navigation of the Upstart Blogger theme is so badly designed, that the link to get to the actual posts on the site is hidden at the bottom of the page under a bunch of post excerpts for WordPress blog themes — that is to say, buried under content that anyone who actually wanted to read anything relating to the tagline “blogging made simple” wouldn’t care about, and hidden in the part of the page where users don’t pay as much attention to things.

digging in the archives shows that the post hasn’t just been obscured by the 10 most popular posts, it was, in fact, pulled entirely.

for casual visitors, the only thing you’ll notice is the lack of recent posts on the front page, requiring you to dig in the archives for new posts.  but rss subscribers like myself will see another story.  we will see a blog post that, mysteriously, 404s when we try to click into the article.  for many rss subscribers, this won’t be a new thing — all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again — there have been many occasions in the past where he’s gone through and edited old posts, deleted posts, added new backdated posts, etc, all of which is trackable in an rss viewer because it sends out an update to the rss xml file and registers as a new post (even if it’s just an edit of an old post).  alas, i’m afraid i’m letting the cat out of the bag by admitting that this is how i’ve caught some of his inconsistencies in the past.

but wait, that’s still not all.  having conceded defeat, he’s pulled down both Twitter Fireball and the blog Sonic Fireball which are both now sitting at parking pages.

this just only serves to prove beyond a doubt that everything i’ve said above, posted originally, ranted about some more, and then called out again when he made it into an april fool’s joke is all true.  in a way, ashley reminds me of a different character from UK television: Black Adder.  his unending stream of nefarious, but ill-fated schemes resemble those of The Black Adder in that in both cases, the schemer fails to anticipate all circumstances and finds himself in awkward and embarrassing situations.  but both ashley morgan and the Black Adder are intoxicated by their own cleverness, their sense of entitlement and invincibility.

the truly curious thing about all this is just how scared of me  he is.  compared to me, with a lowly PR 3 blog on a good day, i’m just an insect — like a fly that gets inside your car as your driving.  a minor annoyance, incapable of causing any real damage.  then again, if you’re on your cell phone, distracted by music and reading your email on your laptop all while you’re driving, that fly could cause an accident.  so maybe i’m that fly — certainly, if nothing else, i’m that fly in his mind.

when i used to play little league baseball as a kid my dad used to toss out a quote at me (it might be yogi berra, it sounds like something he’d say): “winning isn’t everything, but losing is nothing.”  i think it was supposed to be both inspirational and also make it feel okay to not have to win all the time, but what it did was instill an intense sense of competition in me that i’ve carried with me my whole life.  maybe that’s why i’m so keen on tearing upstart blogger down.  it’s not even about tearing upstart blogger down, it’s really about tearing the subsequent and related scams that come out of ashley morgan down.  but they sort of amount to the same thing.

the whole thing has become like a game to me.  it’s amusing to watch him move his pieces and anticipate his next move, and then watch as he retreats and regroups.  right now is another regroup period.  we haven’t heard the last of ashley, upstart blogger, or twitter/genesis rocket/fireball (genesis fireball?  hey, that has a pretty good ring to it…).  i’m sure we’ll see it crop up again soon enough.  and when it does, i’ll be there.

because i like winning.

beware of fireballs

upstart blogger is at it again.  beware of “twitter fireball” — don’t let yourself get lured in.  it’s a rebranded version of the instant-spammer kit formerly known as Genesis Rocket (which was formerly known as Twitter Rocket).

Reverse-Engineering a joke

When I was a kid in kindergarten, my dad had a few friends he would regularly hang out and drink beers (and do shots) with.  Most of these excursions were distinctly not for kids, and I would be dropped off at my grandparents’ house for the night.  On these occasions, I would hope that, at the very least, my dad would wait to drop me off until after the guys started arriving.  I always liked hanging around them.  I think I probably idolized them a little.  Occasionally, however, he’d go to dinner with a few of them, and, assuming the restaurant wasn’t a Hooters or something (note: as far as I know, they never went to Hooters), there was a chance that I would be invited.

While all of my dads’ friends were, in my mind, infinitely cool in various ways (there was Rich, the one who knew everything there was to know about sports, esp. the San Francisco 49ers; Paul, the guy who was always cracking jokes and laughing boisterously and telling stories about his ridiculous misadventures; and Mike).  However, there was one of my dad’s friends who, I felt, was on a whole different level of coolness than the others, and that was Mike.  Mike had thick black hair and a dark black beard, and invariably arrived in a leather jacket.  He had a deep, intimidating voice and, as far as I could tell, he hated me.

He wasn’t outright mean to me…okay, that’s not entirely true: one thing I remember him saying to me was “children should be seen and not heard.”  And yet, I always looked forward to seeing him more than the others.  Maybe it was the sheer, masculine bad-assedness that drew me to him even though I knew he had no idea how to behave around the under-legal-age-and-male crowd (based on his track record, I have no doubt he’d have few problems talking to high school jailbait).

So, one night, I get to go with my dad and his friends to a restaurant.  Presumably it was a Mexican restaurant by the SFO airport, overlooking the bay – the Bayshore district was a frequent spot for such gatherings.  And on this occasion, Mike shared a joke with the group:

“A guy walks into a bar.  He’s huge, like Arnold Schwarzenegger huge, built like a football player.  But he has a tiny head, it’s probably about the size of this.” He cups his hands around a small, glass, teardrop-shaped candle holder about the size and shape of a small water balloon.  “So he sits at the bar and says [switching to a falsetto voice] ‘Pour me a shot of bourbon.’  The bartender eyes him nervously, and pours the drink.  He asks for another, and the bartender pours another.  Finally, the bartender says, ‘okay, I’ve got to ask, what’s up with your head?’  The guy looks at him, sighs, and says:

“’I didn’t use to look like this.  I used to be a geek, working in an office making photocopies.  I was on a plane when it crashed in the middle of the ocean and I drifted onto this deserted island.   The only thing there was this strange bottle.  I dusted it off to get a better look when this gorgeous, naked woman appeared.  She says ‘I will give you three wishes.’  So, I’m like ‘holy shit!’  My first wish is to get off this island and into a lush mansion in the Hollywood hills with millions of dollars.  Suddenly, I’m in this palace with butlers and maids and more money than I can throw.  My second wish is to be built like a bodybuilder, the envy of all men and the desire of all women, and she gives me most of what you see here.  So then, I look at her standing there, and I say…”

That’s it.  That’s all I got.  Because the rest was whispered and I was instructed to cover my ears.  And later, I figured that I had actually even heard the punchline, but it didn’t make sense to me.  Nevertheless, my dad and his friends burst into uproarious laughter.

I was never the cool kid in school.  I was pretty much always the geeky kid.  So, when my dad’s super-cool friend Mike tells a joke and I’m allowed to listen to 9/10 of it, and the joke is apparently the funniest thing anyone has heard in a long time, I’m going to try to figure out what the joke is.

I spent the next couple years telling and retelling the joke, trying to insert a punchline that made sense and fit with the rest of the story.  But me retelling the joke to my friends never had anything near the result that the joke had that night.  I kept revising and retelling and finally I gave up telling it, deciding that the one element that was always missing was the one thing I didn’t have, and, for whatever reason, couldn’t conjure: the punchline.

Maybe ten or so years later, my mind appropriately dirtied by adolescence and porn and television, I figured out the punchline: “can you give me a little head?”

Looking back at Twitter Rocket and my experiment in trying to reverse-engineer it, I wonder if my reverse-engineering attempts weren’t similar to trying to reverse-engineer a joke without knowing the punchline.  I knew the result, I knew the components, I had some ideas about what should and should not go into it, based on other things Ashley Morgan wrote on Upstart Blogger.  And, in retrospect, my reverse-engineering attempts largely succeeded with one major caveat: I underestimated how much Twitter Rocket actually borrowed from the things that Upstart Blogger had previously exposed as scams – I assumed that Twitter Rocket must be different from those, and therefore as superior as he (and everyone else writing about it) said it was.  And, in that, I was very mistaken; Twitter Rocket was no different from its predecessors – it just wanted you to think that it was.

The basic theory, and the theory I put into my version, was that if you follow a bunch of people, you will get followed back.  I chose a method to do that and get followers related to things I was interested in that, on the whole, wasn’t all that different from what Twitter Rocket suggested.  The automation, the various websites – sure, those were things that were ultimately the most valuable to me, having not found those things on my own, but those were things that I had already started discovering on my own and could have been found with a Google search.  The real secret to getting thousands of followers was the part that wasn’t a secret: follow hundreds of people every day, and get hundreds of follows a day.  How to do that and not be a spammer was the part I was overthinking.  Because Twitter Rocket never made that distinction.  What it did was convince you that what you were doing was not equivalent to becoming a spammer.

Which, of course, was exactly what you were if you used it

redirection

taking the book in a new direction.  rather than being a straight confessional (and probably a fairly boring read), now that the details and facts and whatnot are laid out, i’m going to make it into a (hopefully) more entertaining, snarky, faster read.  the exact phrase we’ve been talking about is making it into “a sort of Office Space“…

alternate covers

i’m still somewhat undecided on the cover.  i sort of go back and forth between liking it and thinking it’s too abstract or hard to recognize (and then i go back and forth about whether or not i care about recognizability).  i was playing with the levels and came up with an alternate.  don’t really like that either.  anyone want to vote on their favorite?

the first concept was to use the image of the Tower from the Tarot. i think it was mixing metaphors too much, and the image was hard to recognize (and would be obscure even if you could recognize it)

this is the current idea. it uses the iconic avatar image with the various incarnations of typography and graphics overlaid on top

this is after messing with the hues and saturation of the current cover. red doesn’t look hardcore when it’s desaturated — it’s just pink. and that’s not hardcore.