How They Scored

An American startup is paying people in India to sign up for its service so it can show it has 1000s of users.

Second full day in Chicago. I didn't get much done yesterday; I was feeling kind of sleepy. I managed to go through a number of Christy's comments, but I didn't even finish them. Actually, Christy's individual comments are not what I'm concerned about; most of them deal with small issues and are easily dealt with. What I'm concerned about is the rewriting I have to do, and yesterday I didn't do any of it. One of the scenes that needs reworking is the story about "Cara" in chapter 10. I based it entirely on C___, and I think it's too close to reality. What I have is a French immigrant who wanted to be monogamous and I have put in all the intimate details of her sexuality. I need to change the former so I can keep the latter. It doesn't matter that the character be a French immigrant, what matters are the compelling details of her body and her sexuality. Since I have a few hours free, I'll try doing that now. 7:00 -- I made it all the wa...

I'm in a hotel in downtown Chicago, and will have a few days here to work on HOW THEY SCORED. It's a version of the retreats I've taken in past years -- almost always in December or right before or after New Year's -- to work on or finish books. The difference here is that I'm staying in the hotel room of A., who is in Chicago to attend a conference. ... Since I finished the first draft 12 days ago, I haven't worked on the book at all, except for a couple of hours yesterday. Christmas intervened, and before that it was the tech manual project that refused to die, so that my initial plan of taking much of the week before Christmas to goof off and work on this book was a complete bust. It was a good thing I finished it on the 15th, because I sure didn't get a chance to even look at it between the 15th and the 26th. Well, the break was good. It occurs to me that one of the weaknesses of the book is that the whole theme of privacy and security is not integrated ...

I had a dream that I was at a place like Holden Village, the church camp that is mentioned in passing in How They Scored. It's a Lutheran church camp but in my dream an Episcopal priest I know was there, offering armloads of peach pie to all comers -- a dream of abundance and hospitality. I visited Holden Village in real life three times, the longest for a six week stay which I recorded in the form of an edited journal I posted on my main website. While I was up there, I was working on my first (as yet unpublished) novel Make Nice .

From a NYT column on advertising and marketing by Christopher Caldwell : In early November, Facebook's 23-year-old C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, rolled out an advertising program called Beacon. It would track users onto the sites of Facebook's commercial partners -- Coca-Cola, the N.B.A., The New York Times and Verizon, among others -- and keep their friends posted about what they were doing and buying there. Did it ever. A Massachusetts man bought a diamond ring for Christmas for his wife from overstock.com and saw his discounted purchase announced to 720 people in his online network. What if it hadn't been for his wife? What if he had been buying acne cream? Pornography? A toupee? You could go on. Researchers at Computer Associates, an information-technology firm, discovered that Beacon was more invasive than announced. MoveOn.org started a petition movement against Beacon that rallied 75,000 Facebook subscribers. ... The Beacon fiasco gives a good outline of what future confl...

From an interview with a privacy expert on the Google-DoubleClick merger : There are two key elements to a profile. Most people tend to focus on the Big Brother data collection side, and that's simply taking information about a person from different aspects of their private life: their medical records, their financial records, where they go online, what they put in e-mail, who they call -- all that kind of information that can be put together to create a detailed profile of an individual. But the second part -- which I don't think people think about very much but in many respects is becoming more important -- is the algorithm that is put on top of that data and the decisions that are made [based on an analysis of the information]. That's actually an area that EPIC is spending a lot more time on these days, because if you look at such questions as which banner ads an Internet user sees when they visit a Web site, or whether an airline passenger is pulled aside for secondary ...

This prototype phone from Nokia would be able to track your health and other "conditions." Apparently you strap on a sensor that monitors your vital signs, sends the data to the phone over a wireless signal, and then God knows what happens to the information.

This is just astonishing: The next time you visit your doctor for your appointment and flip through the pages of the magazines kept in the reception room, you might not be aware of the fact that a watch is being kept on your reading habits using RFID. Mediamark Research & Intelligence and DJG Marketing have come together to use RFID for measuring magazine readership in public waiting rooms. More here . RFID is the little bitty chip already used to track library books, merchandise, and in some localities, children.

I should totally finish the first draft today. I'm just not really up for it. As I just wrote on my blog, as part of several hours of work-avoidance: I meant to finish the first draft of HOW THEY SCORED last weekend, but I stopped a couple of pages short. I didn't want to rush into it, and -- typical -- I had to be somewhere in the early evening, so I cut my writing day short. Then I thought I would be able to grab a few hours during the week, ideally on Monday, and finish. It was only a few pages. But instead I got utterly hammered at work. In my 12 years in the high tech industry, I don’t think I've ever been as snowed under as I was this week. In fact, I'm seriously considering going in to work on Sunday just to get a head start on the next week. ... Meanwhile, I read a little piece of this book I'm working on for the first time last night to a few people at a dinner. It was a very interesting experience. When you're reading out loud you can instantly tell wh...

I found this interview with author William Gibson , who like many science fiction writers is a futurist who uses fiction to explore his ideas rather than non-fiction, very pertinent. My favorite quote: Technologies don't emerge unless there's someone who thinks he can make a bundle by helping them emerge. One of the things I explore in How They Scored is exactly that dynamic: a software entrepreneur senses he can make a bundle -- to use Gibson's apt phrase -- on a certain idea he had about data mining and aggregation. During the book's action, he recruits both money and expertise from the other characters.

Right, I handled that with no problem. I got all the way home with Hap and Meeghan about to go to bed for the final time (in the book). When I went to bed last night I told myself to think about Chapter 10, the chapter where Hap relates his failed marriage to Cara. All along I've been thinking that the best thing I have in real life to use is , of course, my failed marriage to C___. Most of the external details will change, i.e. the whole foreigner-green card marriage aspect, but I want to keep the intimate details. I've never written about C___ before and this is an opportunity to do it in a respectful and complete way. I want especially to use the tender details I remember about her body and her reactions during sex, and also to use her emotional goodness and sweetness. The one thing I don’t have is the exact way they break up, though I might simply use what is close to the truth: instead of Je___, use the affair with S___ that broke up my relationship with S___. It's 9:0...

Who stays with Don: Bart, Seth (because of Bianca) Who goes down the mountain: Seth drives; Hap, Greg, Shaun, Denny. Q: What is the conversation with Denny on the boat home about? A: I have no idea. Q: Why do you even want to show it? A: I want to give readers an idea of what happens to Denny, where he goes next. Q: And where is that? What do you want to demonstrate by it? A: I think I just want to remind people of the idea of "home" that Hap takes advantage of later. Maybe I'll have them bring up the grad student girl.

While reading Henry Miller tonight -- I'm almost to the end of the Rosy Crucifixion, which I have inhaled, along with the Tropics, in order to give energy to my voice in "How They Scored" -- I had the idea that I can skip the entire trip down the mountain. What a bore! Instead, end the current chapter 12 with Bianca popping out of Seth's room, and then cut to the boat. There you can have one last conversation, with Denny -- because I have an intuition that Bart stays behind with Don to lay plans for Dreedle -- while Greg tries to make time with some hikers. Then the whole trip home in two pages -- no, one! The point is to get to the end. I see it clearly. The conversation with Denny can set up, to some degree, the ending, the thing about where your home is. But not too much of that. Lightly, lightly.

Man, really hard to get started today. I wore myself out a little bit yesterday, perhaps. It's after 3:00 already, and in the three hours I’ve been here at my office at Bob's, all I've done is a little additional cleanup of the reorganization of chapters 10-12. At this point I can either: write the long bit on Hap's marriage to Cara (I did decide to spell it with a C, other notations notwithstanding) or: go on in chapter 12, which is where I am. I really should do the latter. I think the Cara thing will have to require special circumstances, such as me taking a whole day off work and going to a motel or something. OK, so onward in chapter 12. They've just eaten dinner and the chickens are about to come home to roost. I had a moment today when I thought -- maybe it should be Don who gives the "Citizen Kane" speech. But no -- Denny has clearly been established as the person who makes film references. Note on (c) from December 1 -- "Hap finds himself re...

I'm working at home one more day. Since I have a date tonight, I don't want to be gone all day. Tomorrow I'll try to work from my office at Bob's, where I haven't worked in like three weeks. I had this thought the other day: Once Don directly asks Hap to recruit Bart, instead of the way I have it now where Hap goes straight to Bart and does that, it should go like this: Hap should do everything he can to keep from doing what Don wants. He runs the other way because he already doesn't like the Dreedle idea. But the comedy is that Bart actually asks Hap for advice, and does it in a way that Hap finds himself talking about the advantages of joining Dreedle. Then later, even though he's tried to do nothing to encourage it, when Bart does announce he’s joining Dreedle, Hap gets credit for it. So in summary: a. Don asks Hap to recruit Bart. b. Hap doesn't like the idea, and does the opposite. c. Hap finds himself doing it despite himself. d. Hap gets credit fo...