Sellin’ out to the Man
Alright, it’s time to tell you: in a couple of days, Shtetl-Optimized will cease its two-year independent existence, and become a part of MIT Technology Review. Please check out the new shtetl at technologyreview.com and let me know in the comments section, here or there, if anything is amiss. (Note: You have to register at technologyreview.com before you can post a comment there, but that should be pretty quick and painless.) If everything’s OK, then we’ll start redirecting the scottaaronson.com URL’s to point to the new location.
Naturally, selling out to an MIT subsidiary is not a step I took lightly. The following considerations are what finally induced me to say “yes”:
- I’d already sold my soul to MIT, so why not my blog too?
- As explained earlier, Bluehost (my current hosting provider) sucks: the sites they host routinely stop working, and when they do it’s always your fault and never theirs. Indeed, every webhosting company I’ve dealt with strikes me as basically a scam operation that does a tiny bit of hosting on the side. So when TR told me that they would be that at which the buck stops — and that if anything went wrong I could walk the two blocks to their East Cambridge office and yell at them in person — their pitch fell on receptive ears.
- From now on, TR’s expert staff will manage all technical aspects of the blog for me, leaving me free to concentrate on deeper, biting-vagina-related matters. This will be particularly welcome as the demands on my time shift from the “severe” to “ludicrous” range.
- “The Benjamins.” As explained earlier, as a matter of principle I accept bribes and kickbacks from absolutely anyone, trusting that the money from competing groups will cancel each other out, thereby leaving my overall judgment unbiased. Plus I can actually use the dough, now that I have a mortgage to pay.
- I’ll now be under contractual obligation to blog “at least twice a week on average.” I actually welcome this change, since it’s the only remedy I can think of for the blog-procrastination (i.e., work) that’s often afflicted me in the past.
- If this experiment doesn’t work, I’m allowed to back out on two weeks’ notice, retaining all the “rights” to my blog. Of course, I hope and expect that it’ll work.
- Most importantly, Jason Pontin, the editor-in-chief and publisher of Technology Review, has personally assured me that I will have complete intellectual freedom to blog about anything I want, exactly as I did when the blog was independent. You can rest assured that Jason will come to regret his guarantee in the days and weeks ahead. (TR does have a policy of fact-checking blog entries, but as I explained to them, the very concept of “fact-checking” is not particularly relevant to Shtetl-Optimized.)
Indeed, the only real disadvantage I could see to hosting the blog on TR was the amount of screen space taken up by ads. Sorry about that! Fortunately, the ads look pretty ignorable to me.
Follow
Comment #1 September 4th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
Grr …. making remember my alum password ….
Also: it’s not so much the space taken up by the ads, but the much smaller text size.
Comment #2 September 4th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
You know Scotland, you’re pushing it. Now we have to register!! That goes one farthing too far.
I get slapped around all day and i come here and i get slapped around some more.
Comment #3 September 4th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Also: it’s not so much the space taken up by the ads, but the much smaller text size.
Everyone: please complain away! List everything you don’t like about the new site. I will get TR to fix as many things as I can.
Comment #4 September 4th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
The RSS feed at the new site is content-free, and contains only headings. That’s an instant fail.
Any chance you could mirror posts you make there back here, which has a working RSS feed?
Comment #5 September 4th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
I second the RSS comment, what a drag.
Comment #6 September 4th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Since the RSS no longer has the full text, I know I’ll be less likely to read, or even subscribe at all.
Of course, if your old hosting provider doesn’t serve the content, then nobody can read it anyway.
Comment #7 September 4th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
I third the RSS comment: It’s a pain to only get headlines. Can you please see if this can be rectified, even if the full content feed has to have ads ?
Comment #8 September 5th, 2007 at 12:00 am
+1 for improving the RSS.
Another (tiny) annoyance: I initially subscribed to the RSS feed using the built-in RSS button in Firefox, which subbed me to the main MIT TR RSS feed, rather than the one just for your blog. I had to go back and find the little button in the page that linked the correct feed. It would be nice if the default RSS feed for the page was the right one…
Comment #9 September 5th, 2007 at 12:28 am
That sucks, Scott. Advertisements ftl.
Oh well, too bad for us I suppose.
Comment #10 September 5th, 2007 at 12:48 am
Congratulations Scott! Here’s an closing quote from Samuel Johnson:
Good luck! 🙂
Comment #11 September 5th, 2007 at 1:13 am
Yup. With the “headlines only” nature of the new feed, I’ll be unsubscribing with the transition. (I’ll wait a few days and see if the feed changes first though.)
Full text feed is preferable. I click through when it’s worthwhile to comment, or see the comments.
A few paragraphs (which seems to be what scienceblogs does) is workable. I click through when the content appears to be something I want to read more of.
A headline only feed is never enough for me to decide if it’s something I want to read more of.
Comment #12 September 5th, 2007 at 1:14 am
First the fancy new digs, and now this. You’re becoming so…so…bourgeois! You’re not going to turn into some mature, professorial fuddy-duddy, are you?
Comment #13 September 5th, 2007 at 1:29 am
Guys, I won’t hand over this blog until the RSS feed and everything else has been fixed. (I think it’s already set up so that new entries will appear in full in the RSS feed; will test tomorrow morning.)
Comment #14 September 5th, 2007 at 1:32 am
You’re not going to turn into some mature, professorial fuddy-duddy, are you?
There is the danger. Biologically I’m 26; mentally I fluctuate between 12 and 85.
Comment #15 September 5th, 2007 at 2:40 am
Good news about the RSS feed! The only other thing that’s really annoying about the new setup is that, if you want to read the comments, you have to click on Every Single Bloody One separately. My clicking finger is aching.
It looks as though it would be (technically, perhaps not bureaucratically) easy to make a clicky thing that one could click to pop the whole lot of comments open at once.
Comment #16 September 5th, 2007 at 4:04 am
I like the new rss feed. When I set it up in Thunderbird, it is formatted just like the website, and all the comments show up.
Maybe you can ask the TR gurus to add some LaTeX commenting capability? and not choke on the “less than” symbol? That would be cool.
Comment #17 September 5th, 2007 at 5:47 am
Compared to other media web sites, the fraction of screen space devoted to advertizing seems high to me. In my opinion, you didn’t negotiate that well on the balance in that regard. While I understand the magazine’s need for ad revenue (given that they’re paying you), my recommendation is that you renegotiate for an ad column of more reasonable width.
From what I’ve seen in TR in the past, I’m not crazy about the quality of their journalism. I view them as largely living off the buzz of MIT name.
Comment #18 September 5th, 2007 at 5:57 am
Another complaint about the new site: No links to commenters’ websites. The lack of such links will severely hinder attempts at procrastination — in addition to inhibiting such less important things as, you know, the easy access to information.
(I guess there’s an upside, in that if people want to engage in shameless self-promotion, they have to do so explicitly. But I think that’s outweighed by the disadvantages.)
Comment #19 September 5th, 2007 at 7:37 am
I prefer the present blog site. The words are not squeezed together!
Comment #20 September 5th, 2007 at 8:19 am
The text width in the new blog is much too small for me. It will be much harder to read the long posts from now on…
I fear change.
Comment #21 September 5th, 2007 at 10:11 am
What’s the address for the Scott-only rss feed?
Comment #22 September 5th, 2007 at 10:19 am
It would be nice if the headlines were permalinks, as they are currently.
Comment #23 September 5th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Let me chime in for full-text RSS feeds. I don’t know if this is an independent problem with the site or a reflection of my incompetence, but Bloglines doesn’t appear to like the RSS feed at all. The only RSS feed Bloglines will recognize on the page is the “headlines” feed at the very bottom.
Comment #24 September 5th, 2007 at 10:43 am
The only other thing that’s really annoying about the new setup is that, if you want to read the comments, you have to click on Every Single Bloody One separately.
Really? I’m seeing all the comments at once. Is anyone else having this problem, and if so can you provide a link? Thanks!
Comment #25 September 5th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Seeing all of the comments at my end.
Comment #26 September 5th, 2007 at 11:36 am
Does this mean there are discussions of biting vaginas on technologyreview.com now?
Comment #27 September 5th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
To anyone complaining about ads:
Please use Firefox with “ad-block” add-on to block annoying banners.
Comment #28 September 5th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Just go with it. You deserve some money for what you provide here, and everyone who’s complaining about it now will get you used to it really fast.
Comment #29 September 5th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
There’s a button which says “expand all comments”. If you click on it, it becomes “collapse all comments” or some shit like that.
Or, as Milton Friedman says, you’re free to click on comments one at a time.
Comment #30 September 5th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
I officially don’t give a crap if you move. I personally ping the site periodically from my “daily” tagged delicious bookmarks, and I’m used to ignoring ads. If the text is too small, I’ll type ctrl-+.
Congrats on making some extra cash from your blog!
Comment #31 September 5th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Does this mean there are discussions of biting vaginas on technologyreview.com now?
Right here.
Comment #32 September 5th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Good news: I have word from the editor that they’ll be able to fix almost everything people have been complaining about.
Comment #33 September 5th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
The new layout is extremely frustrating– there’s that huge block of dead space for no apparent reason to the right, and the text is all squeezed in. Dunno if that’s counted in the “almost everything people have been complaining about”.
Also if you’re taking requests, it would be a big improvement if the post titles would link to the permalink for that post, the way they do on your current blog.
Other than html I’ve nothing to complain about.
Comment #34 September 5th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
“trusting that the money from competing groups will cancel each other out, thereby leaving my overall judgment unbiased.”
So Caltech is bribing you too? Actually come to think of it, what is the opposite of “MIT”?
Comment #35 September 5th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Wow!
Thanks for tipping me off about ad-blocker. I had been hoping for such a program. I hope I don’t regret installing it. And I hope it works.
I googled up some debate about the ethics of ad blocking.
Obviously ads play a major role in supporting the web. I would be happy to have ads, and occasionally read them, if they do not:
1. have animation,
2. make noise,
3. spread over the top of what I am trying to read,
4. be otherwise beyond annoying.
Many respected companies, including IBM and Dr. Dobb’s Journal, have ads sufficiently annoying that I just close the window and go without. If you have some time to kill, it is entertaining to read the wackier ads, rather like stumbling onto Rush Limbaugh or the late night UFO guy on AM radio.
Raoul
Comment #36 September 5th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
So Caltech is bribing you too?
No, but they’re welcome to.
Comment #37 September 5th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
Congrats Scott! So finally you are making money off of your blog:)
Comment #38 September 6th, 2007 at 4:16 am
“I accept [contributions] from absolutely anyone, trusting that the money from competing groups will cancel each other out, thereby leaving my overall judgment unbiased.”
I believe this is the Hillary Clinton doctrine
Comment #39 September 6th, 2007 at 6:10 am
Only less than half of the screen width remains for
the actual blog text. Can you move your links and comments side bar ?
Comment #40 September 6th, 2007 at 6:29 am
Yes, we’re working on how to get the entries some more screen space.
Comment #41 September 6th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
“I accept [contributions] from absolutely anyone, trusting that the money from competing groups will cancel each other out, thereby leaving my overall judgment unbiased.”
The traditional statement of this is by a Judge:
“Counsels and members of the Jury: I have received a $6,000 bribe from the Plaintiff, and a $10,000 bribe from the Defendant. Therefore, I am returning the $4,000 difference to the Defendant and judging the case on its merits.”
Comment #42 September 6th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
Text size – please make the text size bigger on the new site.
Comment #43 September 7th, 2007 at 4:58 am
What is the advantage of moving to the new site? The small word size is what significantly decreases one’s interest in reading the blog in the new site.
Comment #44 September 7th, 2007 at 6:21 am
As regards to the “ctrl- +” suggestion for increasing the text width: This doesn’t change the total width of the text and results in less words per line. For me, the text size I preferred resulted in ~ 3 words per line…
Comment #45 September 12th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
Will the same RSS feed still work?
Comment #46 September 12th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
well, ill still read it. though will you forward this address there? because i would much rather only type in this address than have to learn to remember a whole new one.
Comment #47 September 14th, 2007 at 4:11 am
Its ok to move the blog, we will still read. Just dont stop writing !!
Comment #48 September 14th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Minor issue:
Each post on this blog has links at the top to the next and previous posts; the new one doesn’t… if for some reason I miss your blog for a few days, it makes it harder to read all the posts I’ve missed, because I have to click on each of them separately 🙂
Comment #49 September 16th, 2007 at 10:40 am
Good news: I have word from the editor that they’ll be able to fix almost everything people have been complaining about.
The only question is, when? Currently the RSS feed still just shows article previews.