Associated Press opens news bureau in North Korea | World news | guardian.co.uk.

…As if the news business wasn’t already Kafkaesque. Well, AP is an appropriate choice for this. 

Having done some critical coverage of several boneheaded AP strategies in digital media over the last few years, I think they see eye to eye with NK regarding the dangers of criticism, and how to respond to it.

I’m not kidding: See the response from Paul Colford, AP’s director of media relations, to a 2010 KDMC story I wrote about the controversial AP News Registry program

Santorum Google screenshot

When you Google for "Santorum," this is the top search result. (Click to enlarge - but only if you're not too squeamish.) You can help keep this brilliant effort working.

It’s time to use my power for good.

Yesterday NPR reported on how the batshit crazy social conservative former US senator Rick Santorum is pulling ahead in Republican polls for the presidential race.

Santorum has always annoyed and amused me. But with this, he’s officially scaring me.

Today, Marketplace Tech Report reminded me about Rick Santorum’s Google problem — so I decided to take action.

So here I am linking to SpreadingSantorum.com, a Google bombing page that writer Dan Savage set up in 2003.

Furthermore I encourage everyone else to do likewise.  Especially if you’ve had your own web site or blog under its own domain name for several years. But even if your only online presence is via a third-party service like Facebook, WordPress.com, or Tumblr (where you don’t have your own domain), I still encourage you to post a link to SpreadingSantorum.com.

Talk about a long-term investment in search visibility that is REALLY paying off! Here’s how it works…

When a website or page has been on the web and attracting links for several years, Google promotes it in search results so it ends up near or at the top of the first results page for relevant Google searches. This ultimately raises the destination site’s Google PageRank — especially when it’s linked to by sites with PageRank that exceed its own.

So far, SpreadingSantorum.com has a PageRank of 5 — but it’s already showing up at the top of Google searches for the term Santorum. (See screenshot at the top of this post.)

My site, Contentious.com, has been online and publishing fairly continuously since 1997. I currently have a PageRank of 6 (out of a possible 10 points). Not to be self-congratulatory, but that’s pretty good for a blog run by one person. That’s the power of a site being online under the same domain for nearly 15 years.

This also means that when I link to other sites with a lower PageRank, my inbound link helps their search visibility in Google. Right now, SpreadingSantorum.com has a PageRank of 5. So in fact, my inbound link helps this site maintain its search visibility.

Why link to SpreadingSantorum.com now? 

Now that Santorum is pulling ahead (however moderately) in Republican polls, it’s likely that Republicans and social conservatives — who have a pretty good track record for unified action — will try to undermine SpreadingSantorum.com‘s search visibility by linking like crazy to the official Santorum campaign site. (Yes, I am deliberately NOT linking to that site here.)

Also, mainstream news sites, political bloggers, and others are especially likely to link more often to the official Santorum campaign site, now that his viability as a candidate is increasing. (I’m gonna go wash my hands, now that I’ve typed that sentence, ick…)

All of this means that this brilliant social/political/search hack is currently under threat and needs your support. So link now, and keep linking! The more links on more days from more sites, the better!

What kind of power do your links wield?

Here’s how to check PageRank for your site or any site:

• Google Chrome users: I use this Chrome Pagerank addon. It displays the PageRank of any page displayed in my browser.
• Google toolbar users: If you use Internet Explorer or Firefox, here’s how to view PageRank in the toolbar. (Install Google toolbar)
• Safari users: There’s a Safari PageRank addon.
• Everyone else: You can check PageRank by pasting the URL for any site or page at CheckPageRank.net.

GO FORTH AND LINK TO SPREADINGSANTORUM.COM! And do your part to undermine an increasingly powerful politician who denies evolution (and thinks scientists are amoral), wants to eliminate birth control and opposes abortion rights (thus indicating he thinks women’s most important role is as an ambulatory incubator for male sperm), and who has compared homosexual sex to bestiality and child rape.

Yeah. Really. No kidding. Batshit crazy has no business in government — especially in the White House.

I realize this perspective flies in the face of reality, but I have a dream… of sanity…

Case in point: Here’s a screenshot of a link that one of my Facebook friends shared, which I tried to click on:

shared link

Click to enlarge.

When I tried to click that link, here’s what I got:

yahoo FB app request

Click to enlarge

No, I don’t want to install that stupid app. But this request gave me no option to just follow the link — neither in this window, or when I hit “cancel.”

#sharing #fail

I just went under account settings -> privacy and worked my way through the list. Under “apps and websites,” I saw several dozen sites and apps listed that could connect to my Facebook account. Most of them I never use or didn’t even recognize. So I went through deleting Facebook access to all but about 6 services I currently use in conjunction with Facebook.

One of these services was Scribd.com — which I sometimes use to post documents that I want to be shareable and embeddable.

I figured that these Facebook connections with sites and apps mainly enabled easy sharing from those sites to Facebook. But apparently I figured wrong.

After I finished this exercise on Facebook, I had an e-mail from Scribd.com saying that my account there had been deleted.

Huh?

Granted, they gave me an easy option to “restore” my Scribd.com account — which basically meant creating a new username and password. I did that, it seems to work.

But…

I checked, and this process broke existing embeds of my Scribd.com documents.

That’s right: I now have to go back and redo in a few different blogs all the embeds of my Scribd.com documents that I’d previously created.

And that’s just wrong.

I’m assuming that I probably made the mistake of using my Facebook login to create my Scribd.com account in the first place. Which goes to show how problematic it is to rely on Facebook to create an account, or log in to an account, anywhere else. I don’t actually recall whether I first created my Scribd.com account with my Facebook login, I’ve had my Scribd account for years. But it’s possible I did that. Lesson learned.

Scribd.com, I hope you fix this issue. I didn’t see this coming, and I’m annoyed.

Recently Google maps changed something, I don’t know what, and it’s broken a feature I use a lot. Very annoying.

I keep a custom google map where I mark the locations I need to be for upcoming appointments and events. I list them in date order. This has worked great for me, with all the running around I do, for the last year — especially via mobile.

BUT… Sometime in the last couple of weeks, Google maps stopped respecting the order I specify for places on my map. It’ll let me reorder locations in my map, and save them — but that order only last the session. When I reload the map, all my newer locations are back down on the bottom of the list!

There’s a Google Maps Forum thread on this, but so far no help.

Does anyone know how to fix this problem or get around it?

It’s even more annoying because Google Maps’ “starred places” function doesn’t let me add notes, or specify a custom order. So that’s not really a solution for me.

Case in point: Yesterday a clueless media relations professional whom I do not know sent me an e-mail with the subject line: “I sent a poem to a wannabee crotchety old bitch.” He was alluding to my recent birthday post, in which I reflected on aging.

The comment this person attempted to append to that post — which I did not approve — was the poem When I am an old woman I shall wear purple. That was in itself a mistake, though not a fatal one. If ever there was an overused, reflexive cliche response to any woman who mentions aging in a positive light, that poem would be it.

So this PR guy e-mailed me to let me know he’d tried to post that comment. Here’s the start of his message, and where he really screwed up…

He wrote:

“Hello Amy. I don’t think I’ll ever get to put the word ‘bitch’ in a corporate email subject line ever again but happy birthday. I hope you like the purple dresses poem that I commented with on your blog. It has stuck fondly in my memory since I was 13 and while I probably won’t wear purple dresses when I’m older, I aspire to that living.

“Anyway, here’s a pitch with some findings further below…”

And he did, indeed, follow that intro with a PR pitch. The real reason he was contacting me was that he wanted me to write up for CNN.com (where I blog about mobile technology) a study that his company recently released.

What can I say, but: Ick! No! Not in a million years!

I bear no personal animosity toward this media relations rep. But his note squicked me so much that I think it’s worth offering as an example for what people should generally not do when reaching out to strangers in order to try to get them to do something for you.

What was wrong with his approach?

• Transparently slimy.I have no problem that he read a post on my personal blog that contained personal information. I wouldn’t have published that post if I hadn’t intended it to be public. However, using my personal disclosures as a basis to try to ingratiate himself, and then launch straight into a PR pitch, lacked finesse and forethought.
• Presumptuous.If he wanted to comment on my personal post — even with that cliche — fine. Other people who I don’t know commented on that birthday post, and I welcomed (and published) those responses. But it was presumptuous for him to assume that leaving a comment on my personal blog post actually created some kind of personal connection between us that might encourage me, more than otherwise, to use his pitch for a CNN.com story.Granted, I have sometimes struck up meaningful personal connections and friendships via blog comments, and sometimes these cross over with professional matters. This is a process that happens organically over time. Trying to engineer that in a single e-mail is a really bad idea.
• Inappropriate/rude. When I saw the word “bitch” in the subject line of an e-mail from a person with a male name whom I don’t know, I nearly deleted it as spam immediately. That’s not the kind of thing a man should ever say to a woman who doesn’t already know him and consider him a friend. Even if she recently used that word in a blog post. And especially if you’re trying to contact her for professional reasons. No matter what you do, that language just won’t look friendly or funny. Gender power dynamics suck, but they do exist. So it’s dumb to act like they don’t, especially when you’re trying to build bridges.

What could he have done instead? If he felt so moved, he could have left his blog comment. Really, that would have been fine. Cliche included.

Then if he wanted to pitch me, he should have sent me a separate e-mail that did not refer to his blog comment, and that did not use language which could easily be mistaken for a gender-based insult. From there, if I recognized his name, I might have noted or asked him about his blog comment. But it was inappropriate for him to draw this connection, since it implied that I should give his pitch special treatment in a professional decision.

There’s a huge fuzzy gray area between the personal and the professional realms, especially online. So I can understand why these missteps happen. Personally I think it’s futile (and fundamentally not credible) to try to separate the personal and professional spheres entirely. It’s better to blend them thoughtfully in a way that suits you. That’s what I’ve been trying to do since I got online way back in the early 90s.

Being ignorant of, or choosing to ignore, the emotionally and socially crucial distinction between personal and professional information (and how they might imply relationships and influence) leads to overstepping that can look invasive or offensive.

In light of this reality, it’s more important than ever for everyone (especially media pros of all kinds) to be aware that there is still a difference between personal and professional, and to use those different kinds of information mindfully in pursuit of your goals.

In my opinion, journalists should be equally mindful of this pitfall when scouring personal posts on blogs or social media in order to find sources to contact, especially regarding breaking news with deeply personal angles like a murder or arrest. If you want to use digital communication tools to build those kind of community connections, do that up front as much as possible.

If a journalist must approach someone they don’t know about a sensitive personal matter in order to cover a story, be very very sensitive to the personal/professional distinction. Don’t use their available personal info to ingratiate yourself by pretending to be their friend, or that you care for personal reasons, and then try to get them to give you the information for your story. That tactic can work, but it’s unethical and slimy. And from a practical standpoint, it can easily backfire in a way that not only thwarts your goals but undermines your personal and professional reputation in a very public, findable way.

I chose not to publish this PR guy’s name or employer because I really don’t want to smear him personally. He made a mistake, and this is a “teachable moment.” We can all move forward from that.

He just did a blog post that addresses one of the banes of my existence: e-mail overload. I hate e-mail for the purpose of sharing links, collaboration, coordination, or keeping up with tasks and project. But I can’t seem to wean from e-mail the people I need to connect with on that stuff. Everyone uses different tools and services to manage their own processes, and too often the lowest common denominator is e-mail.

In Inbox Zero and the Critical Mistake That Saps Productivity, Stever writes:

“I believe that an empty inbox just means you’ve ceded control of your thinking and priorities to everyone who emails you. They control the volume, order, and substance of your attention for the time you’re processing your email. It *feels good* to have an empty inbox, but it also feels good to gorge on Oreo ice cream cake. That doesn’t mean that Oreo ice cream cake is good for you, only that it feels good. Inbox Zero has the extra sugary bonus that since *some* email is an essential part of our job, it’s easy to believe (with no evidence at all) that therefore it’s useful to spend some time on *all* email.

“Rather than striving for inbox zero, I advocate learning to identify the truly relevant emails very, very quickly, with an absolute minimum of cognitive load or context switching.

Whew! I don’t feel so bad now about the nearly 1000 items in my Gmail inbox…

I actually do a pretty good job of using gmail labels, filters, and other tools to identify my high-priority e-mails as they come in and handle them. I also do a good job of killing the messages that I just don’t need to deal with.

That leaves a vast pile of messages that either don’t need to be dealt with quickly, or that couldn’t be quickly parsed into tasks or other actionable items of useful buckets.

Some of these are lower-priority messages that I might need or want to review, and some may be higher priority but the sender just forwarded me stuff with little/no thought of how to make the content easy for me to parse.

And frankly, if it lands in my inbox, MY needs and priorities are what matters.

With very few exceptions, I take the approach of just letting hard-to-parse e-mails fall through the cracks. And if people get annoyed that I didn’t respond or do what they wanted, tough. They need to learn to communicate more effectively through e-mail. I can’t keep taking up the slack.

What works:

1. Craft a clear, intuitive, action/purpose-oriented subject line. Don’t just forward something to me without changing the subject line. If I’m not expecting it and I don’t know why I should care, I probably won’t open it.
2. Get to the point. Explain in a sentence or two up front why you’re sending it *to me*, what you expect me to do with it, and whether it relates to an existing project or topic we’ve been discussing or something new.
3. Set the time frame. If you want me to do something in response, indicate by when you want me to take action.
4. Send ONE e-mail per topic/project, ideally only once per day. If we’re talking about several different projects, topics, etc., don’t make huge switches of topic midway through an e-mail and expect me to read the whole thing. Break it up into one e-mail per project or topic. Similarly, if you have several things to tell me about a project or topic, don’t pelt me with 50 separate e-mails about it – especially if they’re forwarded. Gather all those loose ends together into one e-mail and send me that. If we need to be talking about this project or topic more than once/day, e-mail is probably not the best way to handle that communication. Chat, social media, or phone might work better.

I get anywhere from 100-500 e-mails daily, not counting spam. I have to be a hardass about this. I know it pisses off some people. I’m sorry. It’s the only way I can keep my head above water with e-mail. If I can’t wean you off e-mal,

Why? I prefer diversity. I’m a fairly casual Facebook user, but I do use it as a way to connect with people, organizations, and communities for whom Facebook is really the best way to keep up with them. This includes many community groups, people whose social/professional circles really don’t overlap with mine otherwise, and even people/orgs with whom I disagree.

This is because, as I’ve written before (and so has Ethan Zuckerman), I think too much homophily is a problem — not just online, but in life.

But so far, Facebook seems to want to give me no choice but homophily — at least, they won’t respect my preference on an ongoing basis.

Here’s what I mean, based on what Vadim Lavrusik of Facebook told me this morning….

To recap, when you log into Facebook, the main feature on the home page is the News Feed — a running column of recent status updates and other items/activities from the people, pages, and groups you’ve chosen to connect with on Facebook. Items appear in reverse chronological order, with the newest on top.

There are two settings for your Facebook News Feed:

• Top News, which shows only items from the FB connections with whom you interact most. (I personally find this title slightly misleading.)
• Most Recent, which display all recent items from all your Facebook connections.

“Top News” currently is the default setting for all Facebook users. An individual user can select “Most Recent” as an option. If you just do this by clicking “Most Recent,” that view will remain temporarily (maybe just until you refresh the page, close the browser tab, or log out, I’m not sure which — but it does revert pretty quickly).

As I showed yesterday in this video tutorial, Facebook appears to offer a way to make this News Feed choice more persistent, by changing what appears to be some kind of account setting.

But appearances can be deceiving.

Today, I turned on my computer, and eventually brought up Facebook. I was surprised to find that, despite changing the setting I showed in my tutorial, my news feed had reverted to “Top News.”

Effectively, I can tell Facebook, “show me the diversity I’ve deliberately cultivated here” — but their response is, “OK, for just a little while, but we don’t seriously think that’s what you really want so we’ll switch you back later when you’re not looking.”

I reached out via Twitter to the person who handles Facebook outreach to journalists, Vadim Lavrusik. He shed a little light on the situation — although, frankly, not a very good light. Admittedly, We both pushed each other’s buttons a bit — but I bea him no personal or ongoing ill will.

THE BOTTOM LINE, FOR NOW:

Currently there is no way for a Facebook user to set a persistent preference to see their full news feed (“Most Recent”). According to Lavrusik, Facebook is “considering making the selection sticky.”

Lavrusik claimed the “Most Recent” setting reverts when Facebook users log out. That was not my experience. Last night, before I went to bed, I closed my browser tab with Facebook and let my laptop go to sleep. I did not log out of Facebook or clear my browser cache. This morning, my Facebook News Feed had reverted to “Top News.”

I will update this story as it progresses.

Full background and my exchange with Lavrusik so far:

I use Facebook strictly as a casual way to communicate with people I know. I’m not a heavy Facebook user because their interface sucks, and it keeps on sucking. But there’s one thing about Facebook that was really bugging me, and I finally just figured out how to fix it.

The Problem: The default setting for your Facebook news feed (list of recent updates) is “Top News” — which is somewhat misleadingly named, since it’s really only updates from the friends and pages that Facebook’s algorithm, in its infinite and inscrutable wisdom, believes you interact with the most.

In order to see in your news feed updates from ALL the people and pages you’ve chosen to connect with on Facebook, you need to select the “most recent” option. Totally unintuitive, but that’s par for the course with the Facebook interface.

BUT: In order to routinely see updates from all your Facebook friends and pages, you must change that default setting. Facebook doesn’t make this easy — again, par for the course for Facebook.

I figured out how to do it. Below is my quick video tutorial.

WATCH VIDEO TUTORIAL: Facebook News Feed settings

…You’d think that with all the money they’re making, Facebook could afford to hire some good UI designers and do some usability testing! I think I might mail them a copy of Don’t Make Me Think (old by internet standards, but the principles are timeless).

I’m reading it because I’m fascinated and concerned why people (sometimes in large numbers) tend to cling to beliefs/positions fiercely long after they’ve been factually debunked/disproven, whether by science or by journalistic, legal, or other systematic investigation. (WMD, anyone?)

This kind of anti-fact, anti-science backlash tends to really confuse and frustrate journalists and scientists.

It sucks when you work really hard to do the fairest, most systematic investigation of a topic that deeply affects many people’s lives — but the very people who are suffering most from the topic of your research refuse to believe what you have to say, or accuse you of being part of some conspiracy to hoodwink them. And meanwhile, your less skilled or less ethical colleagues are producing their own research and reports designed to foster fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

That generates considerable friction, controversy, and conflict. And worse, it delays the discovery and implementation of real solutions.

Why does this happen — and what can journalists and scientists do about it?…

Panic Virus isn’t a great book (I found most of it tiresomely redundant, like a heavily padded feature article), but the 2nd half of ch. 16 on cognitive biases is relevant here.

There (starting at about location 3100 in the Kindle edition), Mnookin explains psychological phenomena such as pattern recognition, the clustering illusion, cognitive dissonance, and availability cascades. They’re just part of how our brains work, and the practices of science and journalism often act as counterbalances to these innate tendencies. That’s why science and journalism are fundamentally uncomfortable and controversial professions.

But these quirks of how brains work are why just presenting facts and information often has the opposite social effect that journalists hope for.

I think if our goal as journalists is to help people understand how things really are, how they got that way, what might happen next, and what people might do to steer the future or protect their interests, we need to think hard about how to accommodate — not deny — these psychological tendencies.

These phenomena evolved into our brains’ hardwiring for good reasons — but like many evolved tendencies, they present drawbacks when the environment that people exist within shifts quickly and radically.

I’m not sure what might be the best way to adapt journalism/media in ways that accommodate these neurological tendencies constructively (rather than simply dismiss or denigrate them). But I’m pretty sure that the standard journalistic approach of posing as a detached, uninvolved observer who makes no decisions or judgments only feeds the kind of passionate anti-fact backlash these neurological tendencies produce.

I realize it’s hugely controversial to suggest that it might be a good thing for society if journalists were to present themselves as less detached and more human. Usually when I have that conversation in a community of journalists, it generates a lot of passionate backlash.

But maybe such a fierce reaction, in itself, might be an indicator of these very phenomena at work in journalists’ own brains.

UPDATES:

June 18: On a related theme of collective cognitive dissonance, watch this short, brilliant video rant by NY hip-hop radio show host Jay Smooth: How Lebron James Broke the Golden Rule of Sports.

June 16: In B2B Memes, John Bethune wrote an excellent followup to my post. Here’s an excerpt:

I wonder: when you’re dealing with anosognosics—people who can’t recognize their own cognitive failings—is there any way to get them to accept reality without wrapping it in deception? Can you give such readers what they need without, perhaps impossibly, also giving them what they want? Does your goal of truth telling somehow imperceptibly slip into propaganda?

Faced with such questions, I tend to throw up my hands in despair and fall back on a selfish impulse: “This is my search for truth here. You can take it or leave it.”

That’s fine for me, but not for journalism. Truth-telling is transactional. As Gahran suggests, if journalists can’t find ways to get people to listen, they will have failed. The trick will be to do so without bending the truth in the process.

Also, about the anti-vaccination movement: My friend Mary Mactavish pointed me toward this week’s USA Today story noting that the US is in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in 15 years. Salient point: “Granting exceptions to vaccine requirements has helped foster outbreaks, research shows.”