This One Is Full of Keywords: SEO, RSS Aggregators, Dissertation Writing Services

Happy Noodle Boy is not pleased with you. (by Jhonen Vasquez of Slave Labor Graphics)

EO spam is a cancer on the internet, and those who engage in it shouldn’t be trusted. People who use RSS aggregators to scrape topical content and repost it verbatim for their SEO spamming purposes are just the worst sort of people. And don’t get me started on dissertation writing services. If you’re reading this on a website other than LMGMBlog, report the site to Google as SEO spam, close the window, and notify me at my Gmail address (theluisgarcia).

See what I did there? According to Internet Wisdom, websites such as the one that copied an entire blog article of mine yesterday use underhanded SEO (Search Engine Optimization) methods to game the search-engine system and give them high page rankings. If they manage to appear on the first page of Google results for a topic like “dissertation writing services,” for example, they’ll get tons of traffic to their page, which will drive up the numbers of “eyeballs” and “clickthroughs” on their ads, while perhaps also allowing them to sell some snake oil to the more gullible visitors.

To build content and generate incoming links to the site, the administrators of these sites often use programs that aggregate RSS feeds (from blogs, newspapers, etc) and scan them for particular keywords and/or other characteristics. When the desired conditions are met, this program “scrapes” the entire post from the RSS feed and reproduces on their own site. They’ll often include a link (hidden at the bottom of the page) which points to the original article. This will usually create a “pingback” or “trackback” on the original blog, which creates a link from the original source to the copied article on the new spam site. Now, they’ve got many pages, a lot of content, and a growing set of both outgoing and incoming links. All of these are things that Google’s search engine measures when it creates its page rankings, and thus this mostly useless and ad-smeared website crawls up to the top of Google’s search results.

So, all of my first paragraph is going to appear in the RSS summary of this article, with several keywords that will hopefully trigger RSS aggregators for “SEO”, “RSS Aggregators,” and “Dissertation Writing Services.” My hope is that, since many of them seem to have automated content-scraping, this’ll result in a post that undermines some of their own purposes.

In any case, I’ve adjusted my RSS feed to only post summaries instead of full articles, and I’ll be back to writing about my dissertation soon!

That Blog Be Yankin’: Plagiarism-y Developments Halt Dissertation Series

UPDATE: See comments for details. Short version: the offending page is down, it seems.

Hey folks, just to let you know that this “dissertation writing service” (Google Cache of the page)website has reposted the entirety of my last post in the series that I have been writing on my dissertation. This looks to be a form of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam, and it’s a problem for a number of reasons: 1) I was never contacted to ask permission (and I certainly wouldn’t have given any to this site); 2) it quotes the entirety of the original work, which is in violation of “fair use” (US IP law) and most other legal guidelines for acceptable use of intellectual property without permission; and 3) since it’s a “dissertation writing service“ website, the framing of this post (me writing about the preparation of my dissertation) in this context gives the impression that either I paid for their services to prepare my dissertation or I’m trying to sell my dissertation to them—either interpretation could harm my future career as an academic and could thus be a form of libel.

In any case, this means I’m going to be putting a halt to the dissertation-in-blog-post series, until I can figure out what to do about this. In the meanwhile, I’ll add occasional updates in the comments below; sometime later, I might write a whole blog post on this experience. If you have any expertise or advice to share about this sort of situation, you’re welcome to contact me through the comments below or by e-mail. Sorry for the interruption, folks!

Introduction, Part 2: Fieldwork Sites and Methods

A ubiquitous tag in Lima, Peru, found near the Bajada de los Baños in Barranco

his is the third installment in my series of posts summarizing my dissertation, chapter by chapter (first post here). Today’s post completes the second half of the introductory chapter (first half here), which introduces and describes my main fieldwork sites (i.e., Paris, Chicago, and Berlin), and outlines my methods for conducting research.

(Note: The image for today’s post has nothing to do with my dissertation project and everything to do with the fact that I’m in Lima, Peru, right now. But the image has a cute graffiti tag, spanish-colonial architecture, and pretty flowers, so quit yer whinin’)

Cities and Scenes

My fieldwork took place in

Introduction, Part 1: The State of EDM Studies

Peeps Hunting Trophy, Shit Show 01, DEMF @ Detroit, 2010

his is the second installment in my series of posts summarizing my dissertation, chapter by chapter. In the first post, I gave an overview of my dissertation project, elucidating the main research questions, highlighting some overarching themes, and giving an overview of the chapters to follow. Today’s post covers the introductory chapter, where I review previous scholarship on similar topics, introduce and describe my main fieldwork sites (i.e., Paris, Chicago, and Berlin), and outline my methods for conducting research. This chapter also includes the chapter-structure of the rest of the dissertation, but since that was already covered in my previous post, I’ll skip over that here.

Brief Recap: this dissertation aims mostly to make sense of scenes like this,

‘Can You Feel It, Too?’: Affect and Intimacy at EDM Events in Paris, Chicago, and Berlin

Steve Bug at Freak n' Chic (in Batofar, Paris), September 2008

s I had mentioned in my last so-sorry-I’ve-been-gone post, I’m still putting the finishing touches on my dissertation ahead of my defense (which will happen in July, it seems). But I don’t want to slip away into another 2-month period of blog-silence, so I’ve given myself a dissertation-related blog project for the next couple of weeks.

Every couple of days, I’ll be posting brief summaries of parts of my dissertation, beginning with today’s overview and then following chapter by chapter. These will be written in plain English and in the informal style typical of most blog posts. These summaries serve three purposes: 1) as reading guides, to help non-specialist readers read my dissertation when it is published; 2) as practice for my defense, since this forces me to review all of my arguments and organize them in my head; and 3) as “reading excerpts” for people who might be interested in reading the full dissertation, but aren’t sure. In any case, my goal is to make these all short and easy to read.

Today’s post is about the dissertation as a whole, and gives you an overview of what the dissertation is about, how it’s structured, what my methods were, and so on.  My dissertation project arose out of a relatively simple observation:

Back to Blogging & the DissertationDistraction Podcast

Somewhere in Chicago

‘m back! Well, sort of.

 

As you probably noticed, I’ve been rather silent on this blog for the past couple of months. Sometime around mid-April, I realized that the deadlines for the submission of the final draft of my dissertation aligned with travel plans for both me and my committee members in such a way that I needed to either defend my dissertation in mid-June (with plenty of time to revise post-defense) or in mid-July (with barely a week to do all revisions). I went into Emergency Dissertation-Finishing Mode

Party in Chicago? Survey Time!

ey folks, do you party in Chicago? Are you (or were you) a part of any of Chicago’s Electronic Dance Music scenes? Well, then LMGM’s Super Funtastic Surveygasm is just the thing for you!

Well, OK, maybe it’s not as funtastic as the title suggests; and it’s probably not going to give you an orgasm (if it does, don’t tell me). But you will be helping me out and contributing to a better understanding of the Chicago scene(s). This survey is primarily background research for a magazine/journalism article I’ll be writing soon on “Clubbing in Chicago,” but I’m also planning to use the results as another source of data for my own dissertation research (for which Chicago is one of 3 main research sites). As an added plus for all those who participate, I’ll be publishing some of the preliminary data on this blog; also, on the survey form, you can opt-in to be contacted when I publish the results.

The survey is anonymous and should take no more than 15 minutes. So, grab a drink, make yourself comfortable, and click on the image of Mr. HappySurvey below to begin:

Pathologizing Crowds: Love Parade 2010, Death, and the Problem of Crowds

es, yes, I’m a bit late to be commenting on the tragedy at Duisburg. The story has been covered in print and online endlessly since the event last Saturday, and the German press has been reporting daily on the personal and political aftermath. There’s even a Wikipedia page devoted to the disaster already. In a nutshell: there was a huge turnout at the Love Parade last Saturday (July 24), which was held in Duisburg this year, and overcrowding in the tunnel which served as the only entrance and exit to the even site led to a panic and a stampede, killing 21 and wounding more than 500 (note: initial reports counted 19 dead, but two others succumbed to their wounds a few days later).

I’m not planning to describe the event in any detail. Der Spiegel has been providing thorough English-language and German-language coverage of the event and its aftermath, including descriptive details and arresting photography. I’m also not writing here to respond to the disaster from the point of view of the Electronic Dance Music community; Will Lynch has already provided a clear and concise report of the event at Resident Advisor, and Emmy over at What Time Is Your Flight? has reflected on the impact of this event on dance music/festival communities and has gathered together news coverage and video from the event.

What I want to talk about here is crowds.

Nigel Thrift, gatherings, and light-touch intimacy

ne of the things I’ve promised on this new version of my blog is reviews/summaries of scholarly texts that I’ve been working with, so here is my first attempt. Lately, I’ve been really inspired by Nigel Thrift’s work. He’s a UK sociologist geographer (thanks, LB!), working in urban studies, who has been championing what he considers a non-representational theory of urbanity—that is, a concept of the urban that takes into account things like affect, speed, and spaces animated by action. I’ve been particularly interested by his concept of “light-touch intimacy,” which appears in his essay:

Thrift, Nigel. 2005. But malice aforethought: cities and the natural history of hatred. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2):133-150.

[This essay also forms a chapter in his monograph: Thrift, N. J. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London and New York: Routledge.]

Thrift begins by noting that there is a long history to the trope of the city as doomed;

Uncertainty Feels Better

his is the story of why I’m glad that I got a late rejection letter.

[Hi! I’m back. This is my new blog, where I move away from the old post-every-day model, and instead focus on a few specific things. See the “about” page for more details.]

So a lot has happened since the last time I posted something on my old blog, and a lot of can’t really be recounted in a public forum like this one. What I can say is that:

• I’ve written two more chapters. Four in total so far. Yay!
• My sense of being supported and respected by my program has been profoundly damaged, and the events that led to that damage also led me into a financially precarious situation for next year (when my funding runs out).
• The month of March has been particularly cruel in this regard, since this is when results for fellowships and job searches usually arrive. I’ve become something of a connoisseur of rejection letters.

Now to the story.

This past weekend, I put myself in a 5-day lockdown to finish my fourth chapter in time for a March 30th due date. At the beginning of this period, my stress levels had become such that I was only sleeping a couple of hours a night and I had erratic episodes of elevated heartbeat (which I think is what a low-level panic attack is supposed to feel like, but I digress). In sum, I was under a lot of stress and was feeling defeated both by events in the recent past as well as challenges looming on the horizon ahead of me.

Then, I heard from a couple of classmates that they received their rejection letters for the ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship the week before. Where’s my rejection letter? Why is the response taking so long? Is it maybe that I’m going to get a fat envelope instead of a thin one this time? Excited by the possibility of securing $25,000USD to support my dissertation work next year, I scoured the internet for information on when the award letters were sent out. I looked at several wiki pages dedicated to humanities fellowships and discovered that the response letters had been sent out almost two weeks earlier. Clearly, my (hopefully good) news would be arriving in the mail any day now.

This morning, when I went to campus to take care of some paperwork, I discovered that my letter hadn’t been delayed; it had just been sent to my academic mailbox. As you might’ve guessed from the first line of this blog post, it wasn’t an acceptance letter.

But here’s the funny thing. As depressing as the news was, I was really glad to learn of this news today and not five days ago.