Having now written two books about my failures in work, life and love, I think I’m qualified to say that the only difference between a memoirist and a prostitute is timing.

A prostitute sells sex for money – that money being payable either immediately before or immediately after the act. A memoirist also receives money for having sex – but our payment comes via a publisher, months or years later, once we’ve recounted the amusing or titillating details in print. In the final analysis, really, we’re all whores.

And yet, in terms of public perception, the distinction of payment and timing is vital. Actual prostitutes are – generally speaking – looked down on by society: labels like ‘whore’ and ‘hooker’ being, almost without exception, used pejoratively. Memoirists, on the other hand, tend to be reasonably well regarded, not least by themselves. For that reason, accidentally calling a hooker a memoirist is unlikely to cause offense, but accidentally call a memoirist a hooker and… hoo boy…

This time last week, my friend Zoe Margolis – who writes as the Girl With A One Track Mind – was asked by the UK’s Independent on Sunday (IoS) newspaper to write a column about how she went from being an anonymous sex blogger to a widely-recognised advice columnist and memoirist. Zoe, I should emphasise, does not have sex for money. I know this for a fact: we shared a house at SXSW a couple of years ago and she stubbornly refused to sleep with me, despite the fact that I paid for all of our groceries at Whole Foods.

And yet, thanks to an astonishing but – I hope – innocent piece of lazy subediting, when the IoS published her column they did so under the unambiguously libellous headline “I was a hooker who became an agony aunt“.

Hoo boy.

Read on at TechCrunch…

Hello from SFO where I’m waiting for my delayed flight to Austin, Texas and my one day trip to South By Southwest Interactive. My thoughts on which you can find here.

The purpose of my visit is to moderate a panel called “Unsexy & Profitable: Making $$ Without Hype” at 3:30pm on Saturday in Hilton A/B.

You should come along.

Later this week, thousands of ironic t-shirts will be arriving in Austin for the 16th annual South By Southwest Interactive festival.

At about this time, it’s traditional for tech publications to publish handy guides to “surviving SXSWi” – packed with useful advice that’s basically interchangeable with that for any other festival since the beginning of time.

“Drink plenty of water!” “Prepare for some late nights!” “Plan ahead to make sure you don’t miss anything!” “Pack sturdy shoes!” “Always use a condom!”. Useful advice for SXSWi, certainly, but also applicable for Oktoberfest, Glastonbury, Woodstock and the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia (although for the latter, replace ’shoes’ with ’sandals’ and ‘condom’ with ’sprig of silphium’).

This year, though, I decided to use my experience of past SXSWi’s to produce something more useful. A very specific and completely foolproof guide on surviving this year’s event. And here it is…

Tip One: Don’t go to South by Southwest Interactive.

Read more at TechCrunch…

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the DMCA.

On the one hand, as an author, I like that it gives me a way to stop illegal copies of my work being distributed in the US, so ensuring that I can continue to make a living without having to get a proper job. On the other hand, as an occasional journalist, I hate that it can also be used by trigger-happy lawyers to prevent certain embarrassing documents entering the public domain.

Thus conflicted, it was with some trepidation that I received news from the old country that Gordon Brown’s government is getting ready to enact its very own version of the DMCA. Called the Digital Economy Bill (DEB), the new statute aims – amongst other things – to halt the rising tide of intellectual property theft on the Internet. But unlike the DMCA, its reach won’t be limited to national borders: any site anywhere in the world that’s accessible from the UK needs to obey the law or else it’s liable to find itself blocked from the entire country. I’m not kidding, this is China-level enforcement.

Read on at TechCrunch…

This time last week, prompted by Luke Wroblewski’s research, I asked you to suggest Mad Lib style sign-up text for your favourite websites. By way of encouragement, I promised to dig around my hotel room and find some kind of prizes; a signed copy of my eBay-auction-winning book, a TechCrunch tshirt, a little bottle of shampoo – stuff like that.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the quality of the prizes on offer, the competition was flooded with entries. Over 30 of them in fact, almost all of which were from people who had actually understood the entry requirements. Some had even got within a mile of being funny. Well done, them.

And so to the winners, in reverse order of funniness…

For effort alone, third prize goes to Tommy Vallier for this suggestion for LinkedIn:

Hello! My name is ____ and I’d like to join LinkedIn. My email address is ____, my website is ____, I have an RSS feed at ____ and I am on twitter as @____. I’m interested in ____, ____, ____ and expertise requests.

I am currently employed as ____ at ____ and as ____ at ____. Before that I was employed as a ____ at ____ and prior to that I did ____ for ____.

I went to school at ____ where I received a ____ in ____ and also at ____ where I received a ____.

Because I worked with ____, ____, ____ and ____ at various points in my life, I’d like to be connected to them – even though I hardly speak with them anymore. Oh, and connect me with ____, too, as they’re my current boss and I don’t want to look unprofessional.

In the last short while I’ve worked with ____ and ____, so please send them a message telling them I’ve signed up and ask them to give me recommendations for the ____ I did for them. I’d like give my own to ____ for ____.

I want to join a group devoted to ____ – because that’s what I currently do, and ____ because that’s what everyone thinks I should be doing. Have me join a ____ group too, because everyone else is doing it.

I think that’s everything about me. Please let me know when you’ve found me a new career.

Thanks.

Second prize, largely thanks to the dig at Yahoo!, goes to ‘Laura’ for her Flickr sign-up suggestion…

I feel dark inside, like this photo of a ______ with an emphasis on the shadow(s).  This is the only reason I would conceivably have a Yahoo ID, and it is __________.  Please make my password an anagram of Ansel Adams or ________.

And last, but the exact opposite of least, the winner. An entry that understood the spirit of the competition, right down to the use of punctuation as comedy timing. For that, and for masterful use of tautology, take a bow Matt Shaw. You win first prize for your proposed sign-up text for DeviantArt…

My name is __________. I feel the dark powers compel me to join this site, to post my angstily-drawn pictures of half-naked ________s and faeries, all of which are elaborate metaphors for the constant state of _________ in which I perpetually, endlessly, forever find myself. I don’t expect you to understand; no one understands. Please make my password “unicorns”.

Kudos Matt, Laura and Tommy. Assuming the email addresses you used when you commented are genuine, you’ll be genning an email from me in the next day or two to make prize arrangements.

Read on at TechCrunch…

Time was, companies knew how to keep track of their important customers.

First, they set up loyalty programs: computerised systems that tracked the monetary value of everyone who shopped in their stores or flew on their planes or ate at their restaurant. When a high spender made a booking, the company was alerted to their status and they were treated accordingly. Frequent fliers got upgrades and champagne, frequent diners got a visit from the chef at their table – that kind of thing. Anything to ensure that the money kept flowing.

And then there was the other way of measuring worth: celebrity. It was understood that if you were (in order of importance) in movies, or on television or a journalist with a significant audience then you would get special treatment too, often for free. Brad Pitt doesn’t have to mingle with the plebs in the American Airlines lounge, Courteney Cox doesn’t wait in line at the bank, and the New York Times restaurant critic never has to wait a month for a table at Le Bernardin. If you’re a business, all of this makes perfect sense: high paying customers are the ones who keep you in business, and celebrities are the ones who guarantee positive mentions in the press. No one messes with Oprah.

And for decades the system worked.

Sure, the rest of us often found ourselves treated like crap but what were we going to do about it? Write a letter to the company’s complaints department? Write a furious blog post? Post a negative review on Yelp? Ooooh – scary! The fact is that, even with Google making it easier than ever to find negative reviews, most large companies couldn’t care less about individual complaints. The average customer simply didn’t have the value, the cachet or the audience to cause more than the tiniest PR blip. A $10 gift certificate and a form letter from the head of customer services was enough to make everything better.

Frankly, I had absolutely no problem with this system. In fact it suited me just fine. For a start, I’m a journalist, so people are generally nice to me. But more importantly I’m a Brit and, as such, any reminder of our old class system – hereditary peers making the rules and peasants knowing their place – makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. None of your Thomas Jefferson ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’ colonial bullshit.

So can imagine how horrified I was when I picked up a newspaper and realised that something was starting to go very wrong with the established order of things.

Read on at TechCrunch…

Yesterday, Luke Wroblewski – Chief design architect at Yahoo! – wrote a blog post singing the praises of audiosharing site Huffduffer. But it wasn’t Huffduffer’s service that got Luke W animated, so much as their sign-up page.

While most sites use a standard form with text-boxes and radio buttons for new sign-ups, Huffduffer presents its questions as a ‘Mad Lib’ style statement…

“I would like to use Huffduffer. I want my username to be _____________ and I want my password to be _____________. My email address is _________. By the way, my name is ______________ and my website is ___________.”

…which is kinda neat.

But Luke, being a ‘chief design architect’ (one of the world’s more tautological job titles), wanted to find out more. Specifically, he wanted to know if this style of form actually encourages more people to sign up than the usual Name: ___________ / Email address: __________ format. So he persuaded Ron Kurti at Vast.com to do some A/B testing and, whaddya know?, it turns out the conversational fill-in-the-blanks form increased conversion by 25-40%.

Given those impressive numbers it’s a cast iron certainty that in the next few months dozens of sites, starting probably with Yahoo!, will consider upgrading their sign-up pages to this new, friendlier format. The trick, of course, will be to get the wording just right – to customize each sign-up page for the site’s particular audience.

…which has given me an idea for a ‘fun’ weekend contest! Hurrah!

Read on at TechCrunch…

Every entrepreneur is familiar with the moment. The moment when you stumble across an annoying problem – a problem that you’d pay money to solve – and suddenly a synapse fires in your brain.

“Holy crap, if I’d pay money to solve this, so would other people. There’s a business here!”.

It’s the moment that has kick started a million businesses and generated billions of dollars over the decades. And on Sunday evening, not for the first time in what I laughingly call my career, I experienced it.

I’d filed my TechCrunch column earlier in the day and with little else planned, I decided to relax by watching some old episodes of Jonathan Creek: the BBC comedy drama about a magician’s assistant who solves seemingly impossible crimes. The show ran for four series in the UK between 1997 – 2004 and, I think, was also shown on BBC America. I’ve looked for the DVDs over here but I can’t find them, nor can I find a legal way to view them online. Like the petty criminal that I am, then, I headed to YouTube. Sure enough all four series were there, as was a recent one-off reunion special.

As I worked my way through the entire back catalogue, I remembered just how great a show Jonathan Creek is. David Renwick’s scripts are brilliant – apparently each one took him several months to write, thanks to the intricacies of the puzzles each episode contains. The show is so good in fact, that I started to feel guilty: I know that Renwick isn’t going to receive a single penny of residual payment from my YouTube viewing. If only there was some way to contact him, tell him how much I enjoy the show, and offer to send him some money for the lost DVD sale. (Note: it’s not the BBC I care about losing money – they can afford it – but Renwick himself.)

And then I realised that I’m not alone in having this desire, or alone in wanting to pay money to solve it. In fact several times recently I’ve found myself on the other side of the equation. Back in December, I decided to give away the US ebook edition of my last book for free, online. My reason for doing so are outlined here – basically it wasn’t widely available in the US and I wanted people here to read it so they might buy my next one.

Since then I’ve had several dozen emails, tweets and other digital notes from people who have read the book for free, asking if there’s any way they can retroactively pay me some money to say thank you. No, really. Most asked for my Paypal details, or a way to send a check for the ebook cover price of $9.99. Others offered to buy me $9.99  worth of beer at events they knew I’d be attending; an offer which would have been much more enticing had I not given up drinking last October.

And that’s when I had the moment. I want to pay David Renwick for work of his that I’ve already enjoyed, but I can’t. People want to pay me for work of mine, but – expect through some tortuous email exchange, which resulted in me turning down the dozens of offers of money because it seemed somehow weird – they can’t.

Read more on TechCrunch…

When I was at school, I almost never took sick days. This wasn’t because I enjoyed going to school – I really, really didn’t. Rather it was because I knew exactly what would happen if I dared to skip even a day of classes.

A duck would somehow get into the school dining hall.

Or an explosion would destroy the chemistry lab.

Or two of my teachers would be caught having sex.

Or someone would die.

The specific incident isn’t important; the point is that I could guarantee that the one day I decided to skip school would be the day that something extraordinary would happen. Something that all of my friends would be talking about for the rest of the year while I was left to sit and sulk at having missed out.

It’s a curse that has followed me through life: I could go to parties six days a week and you can be sure that the seventh is the one where the knife fight happens. The conference I skip is the only one where the wifi doesn’t suck ass. The episode of Quantum Leap I miss is the one where Sam Beckett briefly makes it back home. And so apparently it is with my gig at TechCrunch.

Regular readers may have noticed that I didn’t file a column last week. This was because for the past ten days or so I’ve been completely out of circulation: racing to finally submit the very, very delayed manuscript for my new book. I finally dragged myself over the finish line on Tuesday and since then I’ve basically been recovering: catching up on things like sleeping, eating and experiencing daylight. During that time I’ve barely glanced at the Internet – or at least not at any technology news. All hell could have broken loose in the past few days and I wouldn’t have had a clue.

And so, of course, it did. Knowing that I was out of action for a few days, the tech world took the opportunity to go absolutely ape-shit mental.

Read more on TechCrunch…

“… So, yes, the manuscript is done and is with my editor. Nothing I can do now but wait. Like eating in a Wimpy or (I’m told) childbirth, it’s amazing how quickly you forget the pain of the actual experience and start yearning to go through it again. I’m Patty Hearst and Microsoft Word is my Stockholm Syndrome…

…One last thing: lots of people have very generously offered to read through the m/s and give me their verdict. Others have been more open in wanting to know what / if I’ve written about them. The truth is, I’m as keen as anyone would be to know what the verdict is. I honestly have no idea whether it’s a sack of shit, or whether it’s struggle-through-able…”

I wrote those words just a bit more than two years ago in a blog post entitled “Save > Attach > Send > Vomit“. I’d just submitted the manuscript of Bringing Nothing To The Party and was in a horrible limbo phase, waiting for my publisher to give his verdict.

The funny thing is, I don’t remember anything about those few days – or the previous week or so of writing. I almost certainly spent most of the week that followed drunk. I’m pretty sure the blackout thing was a subconscious decision: a shortcut to my forgetting how much I hate the actual act of book writing, especially as I head towards – and then past – my deadline.

Two years later and I’m back in that same limbo; the manuscript for the new book landed with the very same publisher three days ago, and there’s nothing to do – again – but wait for his verdict. Again I’m already starting to forget the pain of the actual experience and again I’m starting to think about what to do next, beyond the shit-ton of admin that will come between now and publication day in (I think) July. Assuming that the thing is at least publishable.

The difference this time, of course, is that I can’t even get drunk. Instead I’m just taking some down-time; catching up with reading, seeing friends I haven’t seen for weeks, remembering to eat lunch, all that stuff. One other thing I’ve finally got round to doing is putting the rest of Bringing Nothing To The Party online. You can now read the full contents chapter-by-chapter, complete with clickable footnotes and commenting here.

Right! I have about 24 more hours left of break time (Mike kindly gave me a week off from writing my TechCrunch column) before I have to go back to work. I’m going to download a couple of old episodes of Jonathan Creek and order a takeaway.

I mention that not because I think you’ll care, but rather so that when I look back in another two years, I have at least some idea of where this time went.