The Hugo Award nominations are now open; attendees at last year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne or next year’s in Reno are eligible to nominate. I usually wait until the annual Locus List of notable publications to help me make my choices and jog my memory, but in case you’re wondering, yes, indeed, I do have some items eligible for this year’s ballot:

* Novel: For the Win (Tor, 2010)
* Novella: Chicken Little (Gateways, edited by Jim Frenkel, Tor, 2010)
* Novella: Epoch (published in With a Little Help, Sweet Home Grindstone press, 2010)
* Novella: There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow Now is the Best Time of Your Life (published in Godlike Machines, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Science Fiction Book Club, 2010)
* Short story: The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening, (Shareable.net, 2010)
* Short story: Ghosts in My Head (Subterranean Press, 2010)

2011 Hugo Award Nomination Period is Open

My latest column for Locus magazine is “Net Neutrality for Writers: It’s All About the Leverage,” a piece about the risks to artists of allowing network carriers to demand bribes for “premium carriage” of our content.

Not that the telcos really care about this. Art, schmart. They just want to get paid, and paid, and paid. First they get paid when a company like Google buys a heptillion dollars’ worth of Internet access for a service like YouTube. Then they get your $10-$80/month for your home broadband. Then they get paid a third time by charging Google to send bits to your broadband link.

But the entertainment giants aren’t all that upset by the idea of having to pay twice to access their audience. For one thing, they can afford it. That’s what the ‘‘giant’’ in ‘‘entertainment giant’’ means. But more importantly, that’s how they’ve always done it. Fanning out a horde of business-development gladhanders to sort out the details of distribution deals with disparate channel operators around the world is second nature for them. There’s a floor of their corporate headquarters devoted to this kind of thing. They’ve got their own annual picnic and everything.

Two-gals-in-a-garage do not have this asset. They have two gals. They have a garage. If Net Neutrality is clobbered the way the telcos hope it will be, the next Web or YouTube won’t come from disruptive inventors in a garage; it will come from the corporate labs at one of the five big media consortia or one of a handful of phone and cable companies. It will be sold as a ‘‘premium’’ service, and it won’t upset anyone’s multi-million-dollar status quo.

Net Neutrality for Writers: It’s All About the Leverage

Hal Stern got one of the first batch of limited edition hardcovers of With a Little Help, and he received it in time for Christmas. He’s lavishly documented his unboxing experience, and is clearly delighted with the book! I’m about to leave for Christmas holidays but I’ll be back to shipping new batches after January 10. Thanks to everyone who ordered the book so far — about 70 copies of the 250 have been sold!

My first thought, like any kid with a wrapped present in hand, was to tear open the packaging. However, the burlap sack is just wonderful. “Fondled” is too strong; I slowly unrolled the sack ensconcing my book, stopping to take pictures and note the defects in the burlap, the dyes and paints announcing its provenance, and to wipe up the floatsam left behind on my desk. I’ll never look at Amazon’s shrink wrap or packing peanuts with only minor disdain again. This was a labor of love. I saved the burlap sack for reasons that will (I hope) become clear when we finally move out of this house and I have to clean up my office.

What’s inside? Goodness, oh goodness. And a surprise.

Unboxing Cory Doctorow’s “With A Little Help”

In my latest Guardian column, “Keeping an email address secret won’t hide it from spambots,” I explain why I don’t bother to hide my email address from spambots and what I do instead to stay on top of spam:

I don’t really care how much spam gets eaten by my filters – all I care about is how much spam gets through; that is, how much spam I have to clear out by hand. If the server is culling 16,000 or 160,000 spams a day, it makes no difference to me. On the other hand, if the 100-300 spams I manually kill every day turned into 1,000-3,000, it would seriously undermine my productivity.

So I publish my email address, because I have yet to see any compelling evidence that hiding your email address or using silly techniques like spelling it out (doctorowATcraphoundDOTcom) is any proof against email harvesters. I can think of a way of detecting and converting such obfuscated email addresses, and if I can think of it, so can some spambot author, and she can write the code to do it.

I also have yet to see any compelling evidence that each additional publication of my email address accounts for any uptick in the amount of email that penetrates my filters. Surely after more than a decade, my email address is already in the databases of the world’s greatest and most prolific spammers. Re-adding it doesn’t make their spam any better at puncturing my defences.

Indeed, the main category of spam that makes it through the filter comes from PR people who have bought it as part of a list of journalists who they might pitch and who are hoping to get a product mentioned on Boing Boing. This is the hardest stuff to filter, since it comes from so many valid email addresses, each message containing unique body text that mentions me by name.

Keeping an email address secret won’t hide it from spambots