How They Scored

This article on Streetsblog , a progressive pro-bicycle and transit website, is fascinating. The lengthy piece, worth reading in its entirety, explains how Streetsblog staff uncovered the identity of a hyperactive negative commenter with his own website, Commuter Outrage. Evidently the man behind Commuter Outrage, a twenty-something conservative who works in a civilian job at the Pentagon, was digging up material for his screeds during work hours using his employer's (and the government's) resources, and Streetsblog's questions about these practices quickly led the secretive fellow to disappear the entire Commuter Outrage website. Instructive were the easy-to-understand steps taken by Streetsblog staff to uncover the man's identity, along with evidence that suggested he was blogging on his employer's time. Also interesting was the fact that the attacks by Commuter Outrage and its putative staff (really just this one fellow, apparently) were not some right-wing consp...

My friend Lisa B wrote a very nice review of HOW THEY SCORED . An excerpt: After the men gather, the plot picks up steam and their interactions increase, with Pritchard quietly portraying a shifting dance of male alliance and competition. Their picaresque sex tales start to cast a subtler light on their characters. The story of the Serbian fashion model ends poignantly. A tale of a threesome takes an unexpected turn, with the storyteller unable to perform, feeling both sentimental about an old girlfriend and ambivalent about the suddenly aggressive behavior of his current one. In short, the scorekeeping of these men becomes less about tallying up sexual conquests and more about assessing their own strengths and weaknesses -- and the elusiveness of their desires. Wow, thanks Lisa!

Just in case you wanted to have a standard system for bragging to the internets how often you bang, now there's Bedpost , an online sex tracking tool. The rest of this post writes itself.

According to this article , some employers not only are searching the internet for discouraging information on you, but a few companies have asked interviewees for their passwords to their social networking accounts. What in holy Christ. For many people, I think the choice would not be whether or not to give up this information. It would be whether or not to reply calmly, "Why do you want that?" or flipping the bird and walking out. I accept that whatever I put on the internet has to be regarded as public knowledge. If I post it, it's there for anyone to see. I might put a warning on it, or I might hide it behind an obscure or invisible link, but some search bot will find it and display it on search results. I accept that. Indeed, I'm more concerned about someone getting me mixed up with the other Mark Pritchards of the world than I am of someone finding something I did in the past. That's because I've always lived an open life. I'm bisexual, I write porn...

Just as I predicted in How They Scored: Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines. -- Kara Swisher, All Things D

Here's a nice discussion of authentication , an information technology concept I mention in "How They Scored," and its implications for online identity.

I redid the cover so it's nicer, and I also fixed a page bug so that all the chapters properly start on odd pages. Man, this self-publishing thing is a lot of work. I really like the picture of the highway, which I took from a State of Texas government website. The whole first half of my book is a road novel so I thought it captured the feeling. The trip is not to Texas but to the mountains of Washington state, but I really like this picture.

Not long after I started using Twitter, I started to wonder: Why? Imagine the familiar movie scenario where a detective is desperate to track and find a suspect, or where a detective is hired by a suspicious spouse to trail their errant husband or wife. Or an alternate scenario from the Cold War, where the secret police manipulate ordinary citizens to inform on one another (cf. the film The Lives of Others , pictured at left). Or the horrible situation of a controlling husband who wants to know where his wife is at every minute of the day. In those situations, one person wants to track another; the person who is tracked would rather not be tracked and sometimes would do anything to avoid it. Now consider yourself, or any ordinary bourgeois, and how much you are tracked on a daily (and sometimes minute-to-minute) basis. Credit card companies and credit reporting firms register every purchase you make with something other than cash. Airlines, grocery stores and other businesses with rew...

When I was asked to write a book of sex stories in which the narrators were all straight men, I faced a challenge: What was interesting about straight men? For years I'd written erotica in which the whole point was to blur the boundaries of traditional sexual identities, to take people who thought they were all one way and show how they could, given the right situation, go the other way and enjoy it. I showed straight men blowing other men, gay men getting off on women watching them masturbate, and tops opening up to being topped by somebody else for the first time. In other words, people losing their inhibitions and having new fun -- the basic currency of erotica. But what could I do with a group of straight men sitting around talking with each other about sex? (Every time I write that sentence, I start out by saying "talking about sex with each other," then have to reorder the clauses.) Men who really are straight, who won't get all hot and bothered by the storyte...

A survey rated companies on privacy , with Google "conspicuously absent" from the top 10. I love that the US Postal Service was included. Frankly, I do trust the post office more than, say, Google. A vast bureaucracy plus a unionized workforce equals nice slow responses to court orders.

This article in Scientific American says: The problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans. So there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.

How They Scored is now on sale from the Lulu Print on Demand website. They produce a nice product, and it's a book I'm proud of. Buy the book. It's funny, sexy, and you're probably in it.

This story on wired.com , about the difficulty of losing your identity and taking up another, is something I wrote about in How They Scored. The characters are looking at the business possibilities of a proposed business named Dreedle, which would compile vast databases of consumer behavior; the narrator reflects on how such databases would make it difficult to disappear, as you used to be able to in the old days. There were plenty of things about me I didn't want rolled up into some online repository. One or two of these things I might confide to a lover -- that I liked to watch a certain kind of porn, for example (though I wasn't sure Meeghan was ready to know that). Another, less embarrassing detail I might write about on a blog -- my appreciation of the Giants infielders, say, or my enthusiasm for Russian composers. Other things I wouldn't mind mentioning in a phone call to my mother. But put them all together, combined with the records of everything I buy, books I rea...

This is just the kind of thing I wrote about in my book: Microsoft ponders offline profiling of Web users By John Letzing, MarketWatch Last update: 7:02 p.m. EST Jan. 23, 2008 SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Microsoft Corp. is developing a method of using personal data such as credit-card information to target Internet users with advertising once they connect to the Web, according to a patent application filed by the company. In an application disclosed earlier this month, a Microsoft team including Chairman Bill Gates presents a method of collecting information about users' "cell phones, geolocation systems, credit-card information" and other data sources to select and display "targeted advertising." The technology described in the patent application touches on a delicate issue for Microsoft and other online companies such as Google Inc. Microsoft and its rivals have all sought to gather increasing amounts of personal information about Internet users to deliver...

I have a Technorati Profile .

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...