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YouTube Age-Restricts the News

After yesterday’s Boles.tv live stream I received a curious email from YouTube informing me I had violated some sort of community guideline, and they were “Age-Restricting” my entire VOD upload. That meant no viewers under the age of 18, and my video would not be shown to anyone not logged into YouTube. I wasn’t sure if they were dinging my previous live stream, and video podcast episode, about William Hurt Raping Marlee Matlin or not, but I quickly learned discussing rape is okay for kids, but showing the aftermath of a blood stain on a train platform from the New York City subway shooting yesterday is verboten. I wondered aloud if YouTube ever really checks the strange, and awful, videos that appear on their service that include nudity, and violence, and are not restricted.

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The Lashed Author

We, as authors, are lashed upon the whale we hope to tame; we are lashed by our publishers against the rail, who fail to tame us; we are lashed by our detractors upon the sun, and, they too, cannot tame our darkness — and yet! — we still try to thrive in the memorialization of what we hope to know, and what we know must be shared. In the light of that pitiful delight, the Authors Guild have released a new report concerning the overall mean income for authors, and the results are astounding, resounding, and, unfortunately for too many of us, sublimely familiar.

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On Branding, Own the Generic: Why I Became “David Boles” on the Internet

If you spend any time doing business on the internet — “Branding Yourself” — is an important part of the process even if it seems shameful and unseemly and selfish: Enjoy it! It’s what you’ve become by being here!

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Left Behind by Design: A Voice Command Future Silences the Deaf and the Other Disabled

Ever since the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 became law on July 26 of that year, disabled people have been in a steady decline in services, support and protection. Oftentimes — the struggle is more rewarding than the win — and once the day is won, everyone relaxes, and forgets what the real meaning of the fight for rights was all about, and things begin to decay into apathy against an upward, failing, expectation.

Evidence of this lack of accessible ubiquity in our technological futures for the Disabled is the rise of the “Voice Only” command system, be it an Amazon Echo, the Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, Xfinity Voice Remote, Apple TV voice command, Google Docs voice dictation, or even Apple’s Siri.

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Don’t Drone Me, Dude!

“Don’t Tase Me, Bro!” will soon be out-hollered by us all in a new plea against the machine: “Don’t Drone Me, Dude!” — completely performed in the outcry of public theatricality that now passes for national security. Where once our shoes had more dangerous derring-do than the hovering skies above us — today, we are forced to realize our ordinary, everyday, overlord drones are blackening our city skies and that they are inherently more dangerous than all the guns in heaven.

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On Bootstrap and HTML5: Redesigning Older Websites to be Google Search Mobile-Friendly

A year or so ago, Google dropped a bomb on all website designers, publishers and online content authors: Your websites had better not only be SSL-secure, but also “mobile-friendly” — and while the first edict is easy to solve with money, the second command costs you a lot of time and money and energy — especially if you’ve been publishing live content on the web for a long time.

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How to Make Your Non-SSL Website HTTPS Secure

Last month, Google shook up the hosted online content creator world with news that their search rankings will start to reflect HTTPS security. That’s big news. Google wants a secure web, and to get us all there — kicking and screaming, if need be — they will reward those who leap on the SSL bandwagon with higher visibility.

For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

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