PayPal has recently stepped into some deep shit with their poor handling of Regretsy’s toys-for-kids campaign, but this certainly isn’t the only issue that’s come up. In fact, just yesterday there was a big story about my friends at Zivity losing their account… then there’s George RR Martin, Wikileaks, PirateBay, and many others.

Rather than a straight up boycott (or signing another useless petition), I’ve decided to try to affect change on a more immediate level by writing sites that I love to use, but only accept PayPal payments. After all, it’s hard to boycott PayPal when so few popular sites offer any alternatives. Below is a copy of my recent email to the awesome folks at Bandcamp.

Hi guys!

I’ve been a longtime fan of BandCamp, and have nothing but good things to say when describing it to other musicians. The only problem I sometimes have is that Bandcamp only takes Paypal for payments. I’ve long wanted additional payment options, especially since PayPal started shutting down accounts of Wikileaks, Regretsy, Zivity, and even a few close friends of mine.

I know that PayPal is just too big for me to influence directly, but I’m hoping in writing this letter that Bandcamp would consider adding PayPal alternatives, such as WePay. Though I certainly plan on continued use of your site, I am currently shutting off the payment options for all of my albums on Bandcamp (http://docpop.bandcamp.com/) and keeping my fingers crossed that you’ll soon offer different payment alternatives. To be clear, I’m not trying to get you guys to remove PayPal, I’m simply asking that you consider offering alternative payment methods. I’d hate to think of the number of sales that you and I could both be missing due to only accepting PayPal.

Thanks!

–
-Doctor Popular
Mobile Phone Musician and Photographer
www.DocPop.org
www.ObjectiveScenes.com
www.BeepsAndSmudges.com
www.twitter.com/docpop

update: I received this email from Ryan at Bandcamp

Hi Doc,

Thanks for the message and the love. We’re exploring alternate payment systems for the future, but there isn’t a set timeframe yet. Please watch the blog (blog.bandcamp.com) for updates.

FWIW, after the earthquake in Japan, charity compilations on Bandcamp raised over $75K for the survivors. Another album recently raised several thousand dollars for the families of FDNY firefighters killed in 9/11, and dozens of other charity releases have raised funds to support PTSD therapy, cancer treatment, and the building of schools, among many other causes. All of these transactions were processed by Paypal.

Regarding the Regretsy situation, PayPal has been in top form. Please check this out and balm your mind: https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2011/12/regretsy-issue-resolution/

Thanks,
Ryan
Bandcamp

Rather than bore you with my full response, I’ll just summarize by saying that I 1) thanked him for his quick response, 2) stressed that this issue is not specifically related to Regretsy, but more about offering alternatives for whenever a company like PayPal starts to piss people off, & 3) mentioned that PayPal may have done the right thing in light of public reaction, but other services that get poor treatment may not be so lucky. The last part was maybe unnecessary, but I think I felt somewhat defensive about the charity paragraph.

November’s drink up was a ton of fun, so let’s do it again! The next together at Bender’s Bar And Grill on Monday. For those who haven’t made it to one of these get togethers (which we still need to find a good name for), I hope you can make it out to one sometime. my personal goal is to meet and hang out with several folks that I may have had interactions with on Twitter/Instagram/Reader/DocPop.org but may not have actually met in real lifehole. If you happen to be shy type, don’t worry, just find me and I’ll introduce you to some of the other cool folks. If it’s anything like November’s meet up, there will probably be a table of artists jamming, another table of musicians and scientists exchanging ideas, and another table of folks just chatting about food and drinks.

Oh and Monday night is sushi night at Benders! So get there early if you want some fantastic food and drinks for cheap! Hope to see you there.

Bender’s Bar and Grill, 806 South Van Ness, San Francisco, CA.

6:30 till about 9. I suggest getting there by 7 if you want to buy some sushi though.

We cover a lot of music on Laughing Squid, so there’s a lot of work to choose from, but this mixtape feels like someone reached into my rss feed reader mashed it up into an album. I really can’t recommend this mixtape highly enough.

Reader already has some fantastic features in place, but below I’ve posted some feature requests that I’d like to see added to the growing service:

Filters- Many of these features requests can be tracked by to my other favorite Google service, Gmail. I’m not a heavy filter user for mail, but I could filters being an awesome tool when following feeds. Say for instance that I was an Android user who enjoyed reading Gizmodo, but wasn’t interested in iPhone news. I should be able to subscribe to the main Gizmodo feed, then add a filter to Reader to never allow any posts tagged with “iPhone” into my feeds. This filter could later be changed or removed. Filters, like Gmail, could be set up to “only allow” or “filter” keywords in categories such as author, tags, subject, or body. When viewing an item in Reader, there could be a “filter items like this” button that will auto fill out a filter based on certain suggestions. I’m thinking about how much more useful some local blogs could be if I could filter any post that ever uses the overly used word “hipster” for instance. If only I could filter snark from a feed.

Auto Send- One of my favorite new iPad apps is Instapaper. Instapaper is a service that allows you to take content from the web and send it to your App to be saved for offline viewing. So if you find a lengthy New York Times article, you can click the “Read Later” bookmarklet to have the content of that article sent to our iPad to read later. Reader has added a “Send To” button that allows you to send items to Instapaper, email, or many other services easily. It’s a great feature for lengthy reads, but imagine how cool it would be to automatically set certain items to automatically send items to another service. I’d love to automatically have Daring Fireball posts sitting in my Instapaper to read during my morning commute.

Report Spam- As Reader becomes more popular and more open, it’s going to encounter issues with spam. Luckily Google already has some experience with spam prevention. I only follow a few people’s shared items, but I’ve set up my Account to allow anyone to comment on my shared items. This has rarely been a problem, but in the few cases of spam I’ve seen, it would be nice to have a “report spam” button. This would automatically delete the comment, block the user from commenting on my feed again, and raise a flag for Google to identify spam.

Dislike button- At first, the desire to have a dislike button was born out of a need to let out some steam. Similar to the “Like” button, disliked items would have a public folder for others to see. The real functionality for a dislike button, however, would be for Google to better develop algorithms to suit your tastes. If you dislike three posts from the same author, maybe Reader could suggest a filter to remove that authors feeds from your view.

Show when objects are missing- Usually the content of Reader items is identical to what you would be reading on the actual site your feed is coming from, but sometimes an item shows up without the pictures, video, or other media. It would be great for Reader to alert you when something might be missing from your feed. I guess the ultimate goal is to never have missing data, but if that’s not possible, it’d be good to know when there is more data that you might be missing.

Better new followers page- Reader alerts you anytime you have a new follower, which is a great tool for finding friends, but the problem that message only shows up once. So if you accidentally click on the “new followers” link when you didn’t mean to, you won’t get another chance to see your most recent followers. If Reader had a list of followers based chronologically (with newest up top), then I could always go back in to see if any of anyone I Know has just found me on Reader.

Attribution- this is the feature I’ve been wanting the longest, and it’s probably just an unnecessary Twitter throwback, but it would be nice to more easily give credit where it’s due. If I share an item that I found via another user’s shared items, it would be nice to have a “Via username”. If the user’s profile is public, then there would be a clickable hyperlink to there Reader profile. This would only occur in the case of looking at shared items and could be opted out of. This also wouldn’t pop-up if I already had a subscription to the blog where that article came from.

I bet there are some other cool ideas I may have left out. Feel free to add them to the comments below, and if you’d like to follow my shared items on Reader, you can find them here.

This flash toy is actually pretty cool. It allows you to create a Star Trek character based on a photo of yourself. What’s interesting is the way it animates your face to talk, blink, or look in the direction of your cursor. I suggest you try it out.

Too bad it won’t allow users to embed their finished creations.

A few weeks ago I dated someone who just didn’t feel as into “dating” as I did. Instead of just saying “that’s it, we’re through” we decided to try to stay good friends, but I knew I’d need a little time to shift back in to thinking of them only as a friend. Unfortunately our online friendship made that shift quite difficult… while I was trying to keep my distance, her day to day updates were still permeating my social sites (like Twitter and Flickr). After one of her updates, in which she wrote about a cute guy she met, I flipped out. All I could wonder was what was so wrong with me that I would remain so un-dateable. Obviously I was just being a very stupid boy. Perhaps the right thing would have been to just cut off all access to this person for a while, but I have so few friends in the city that I really didn’t want to lose another. Our friendship actually began online and I was worried completely “disconnecting” would cause some sort of resentment. That’s when I wrote this tweet and started drawing the sketch above.

After one hell of an emotional collapse caused by her innocent tweet, I did finally “pull back” electronically which has unfortunately seemed to have caused resentment. It really makes me wonder if it’s just ridiculous to let what happens online affect relationships IRL or if it’s something I just need to get used to. I believe online friendships can be just as meaningful as real world ones but may sometimes be harder to navigate. I wonder if my Blue Cross plan covers web2.0 psychiatry?

The painting above was made with my cheap watercolor sets and refers to “hahlo” instead of “twitter” which tends to confuse some people. Hahlo is a site I usually use to twitter from my iPhone.

The rules would be simple: Fonts must be created start to finish in less than 4 hours. Each person can submit up to 2 fonts in to the battle. On Tuesday morning all of the fonts will be judged against each other and a winner will be announced. Each font must start with hand drawn lettering of some type, but can be digitally edited or manipulated in any form. Only YourFont.com or Fontify.com are acceptable for font creation.

Judging: We need to find some judges, post ideas for judges below. Judging will be based on Cleanliness (how readable the font is), Uniqueness, and Print (how it looks on paper). The font will be judged on random text fed in to the Lorem Ipsum generator.

I would also like to propose that each font be made available for a free download as part of a 4 Hour Font Battle package after the battle is over. Does that sound cool, or should the TTF files only be shared by those who enter? Share any thoughts, ideas, etc in the comments and I will make ammendments to this entry as I see fit. If you want to enter, sign up in the comments below (just say if you are doing it) then email me your font file when you have finished. The battle starts officially right now and ends Monday at midnight.

edit 1: changed the submission date to Monday at midnight

For those interested, www.documentaryclub.ning.com is online now, so feel free to sign up and start pitching ideas. The ning page was built by my friend Scott Stead who has also wanted to start some sort of documentary club for a while now. Thanks Scott.

It will probably take us a few days to figure out how we should move forward with the club, but the basic idea is that we’ll pick 2 films a month to watch and discuss as a group. We’ll probably build some sort of polling page and work on other bells and whistles. I think we’ll also try to find a way to work with the cool features on SnagFilms, the cool new documentary video site.

BoingBoing’s official response, written by BB moderator Teresa Neilsen Hayden on behalf of the BB crew, did little to put out the flame(war)s. It seems that BoingBoing’s strategy is to just hope that everybody will ignore the whole debacle. Even the blog post’s title, “That Violet Blue Thing“, screams to the reader to just move on and forget about the whole thing. Unfortunately, the tone that Teresa has chosen sounds exactly like the type of corporate spindoctor speak that BoingBoing readers are taught to ignore. Instead of saying these posts were deleted for personal reasons that we just don’t want to get into, Teresa decided to focus on using the word “unpublished” and further stating “There’s a big difference between that and censorship.” Teresa also stated “Boing Boing’s past content is indexed on the Wayback Machine, a basic Internet resource; so the material should still be available for those who would like to read it.” In other words, “here is a link to the stuff that we couldn’t delete from the web”.

I’m obviously not the only person who is captivated by BoingBoing’s actions. By the time I post this, That Violet Blue Thing will probably have reached 1,000 comments. I was strangely captivated as I watched the posts accumulate yesterday, especially when they surpased BoingBoing’s second and first most commented blog posts. At this rate, ” “That Violet Blue thing” will probably have more comments by the end of the week than ALL the other BoingBoing comments totalled!

So, why is this thing pulling out such emotion from all across the internets? Probably because BoingBoing is seen by many as the great bastion against censorship, so the “unpublishing” of any posts pertaining to Violet can obviously by interpreted as hypocrisy by many of us who have bought into that philosophy. While I’m sure, BoingBoing had it’s reasons, there is a lot of good perspective in the comments (mixed in between a bunch of douchery [from both sides]). Check out this comment from Joel Johnson in which it sounds like he’s not totally inline with the official stance.

Personally, I don’t think there could have been a worst time for BoingBoing drama. At a time when half of BB’s posts seem to be reposts of MakeZine links (which are often just reposted from CraftZine) and the other half are plugs for Cory Doctrow’s books, it sometimes feels as though BB is fast becoming “a directory of wonderful things… that we can sell you”.

The irony of all this, as Tom Phillips from Flashboy.org points out, is that if Teresa Neilsen Hayden had been able to FOLLOW HER OWN ADVICE regarding straight talk and pr, this whole kerfuffle would probably have been nothing more than a flash in the pan.

Hell, BoingBoing is still a wonderful directory of the internets, and I doubt in the grand scheme of things this issue will hurt their traffic. I’m sure that both sides are benefiting from the extra site hits they’ll see throughout the week. Although I’ve be bored silly with Monochrom videos, daily Cory Doctrow readings, reposts from other O’Reilly blogs, and Russel Porter interviews, the site’s rss feed is in no danger from being unpublished from my news aggregator anytime soon.