blogging

Indefinite Leave

After a lot of thought and consideration, I’ve decided to put All About Work on indefinite leave.

I started writing this blog in March 2012. I wanted a place where I could write about topics related to my academic work, but in a less formal, more accessible style. Business media are dominated by conservative voices that generally support employers, so I also wanted to provide an alternative, worker-focused perspective on work and organizations.

I’m very mindful that the education I’ve been so fortunate to acquire has all been acquired in publicly-funded institutions. In my view, that creates a responsibility for me to give back to the community and the public. All About Work is one way for me to do that: by sharing news, information and opinions that might help people, or encourage them to think about things in a different way.

All About Work was not set up to generate income. I pay for the site hosting and for WordPress features like an ad blocker, so ads won’t be randomly inserted into posts that you’re reading. But I don’t include affiliate links in my posts, or use any of the other methods of monetizing blogs. All About Work is very much a labour of love, and I’ve continued running it because I enjoy doing it.

However, in the last six months or so, I’ve seen increasing numbers of referrals – the sources of clicks on posts – from AI-driven tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. These tools scrape and synthesize information from publicly available sources on the Internet, without any compensation to authors and creators. Sorry, AI tech bros, but “exposure” is not enough – and the amount of content from this site that shows up on AI searches goes far beyond any reasonable definition of “fair use“.

The content on All About Work is publicly available for free, but it’s also copyrighted. I strongly object to for-profit sites and services using my copyrighted work without my permission, without credit, and without payment.

In my limited experience with AI, I’ve also seen my work misrepresented. I’ve seen posts on All About Work cited as sources for information that is misleading, or even worse, completely wrong.

Unless WordPress comes up with an AI blocker, I can’t stop AI from stealing my work. But I also don’t have to feed AI by creating even more content for it to steal.

I thought about closing the All About Work site and deleting all 373(!) posts, but I’ve put a lot of effort into this blog and am proud of what it’s accomplished. Also, there is content on the site that as far as I know is very difficult to find anywhere else (such as the diagrams of figures from figure skating tests that no longer exist).

So the All About Work site will stay online. The posts that are already posted will still be available, and I can still be contacted through the site. And I’ll continue to run my other blogs, which for some reason attract almost no AI activity. But until there are some significant changes to how AI operates, I won’t be posting anything new on All About Work.

Thanks to all of the blog’s many supporters and readers over the past 13 years.

 

“All About Work” is 10 Years Old

March 2022 (March 16, to be exact) is the 10th anniversary of All About Work.

It doesn’t feel like 10 years have gone by, but who doesn’t say that on an anniversary? When I started this blog, I didn’t have any goals about keeping it going for a certain length of time. I decided to just start it up and see what happened. I wanted to have a place to discuss work and organizational issues in a more informal style than academic writing uses, and where I could write for whatever length I thought was appropriate, without external editorial constraints like the dreaded Reviewer #2.

Writing and running All About Work has been an incredible education. I’ve learned a lot about how online publishing works, and about how to communicate ideas in different ways and to different audiences. I’ve written nearly 350 posts on this blog over the past 10 years. Some of them have had almost no readers, and some of them have had thousands of readers. All About Work has also been an opportunity for me to explore ideas and information beyond my work-related interests, and I appreciate the faithful readers who are willing to take a look at a post regardless of its topic.

I learned enough from running this blog to start a second blog, Writing On Music. As its title suggests, that blog is more focused on my freelance music writing career. In the 10 years since this blog started, some bloggers have moved over to more writing-focused sites like Medium, or started producing email newsletters using something like Substack. But I like the format of blogging on WordPress, and I like not being tied to a regular schedule and having the flexibility to post whenever I have something to say.

All About Work has been a little quiet of late because I’ve been working on a major project. I hope to wrap that up soon and start posting more regularly. But in the meantime, I want to express my thanks to everyone who’s read, shared, or commented on All About Work posts over the past decade. It’s been a trip, and it’s one I intend to continue.

All About Work’s 7th Anniversary

March 18 marks seven years since I started All About Work. It doesn’t seem that long ago, but I guess time really does fly when you’re having fun.

On every anniversary, I compile a list of the five blog posts that have received the most hits ever on All About Work. The list hasn’t changed significantly over time, but it’s nice to see that people are still finding and enjoying these posts.

Thanks to everyone who reads, posts, and comments! I appreciate the support.

The All-Time Top Five Posts on “All About Work” (more…)

All About Work’s 6th Anniversary

All About Work turns six today – an anniversary which I’m celebrating with a graphic from one of my all-time favourite TV shows, The Prisoner.

Writing this blog has given me the opportunity to explore a lot of ideas and also to interact with some fascinating people. The most popular All About Work blog posts to date are: (more…)

Paris’ street-sweeping heroes

“A seemingly humble job often belies the richness of a man’s life.” Words and photos to remind us of the importance of work that is often undervalued or unnoticed, and the workers who take pride in doing that work.

All About Work’s Fifth Birthday

From “Scriptores historiae Augustae” (Milan, 1475). Photo credit: University of Glasgow Libraries on Flickr

All About Work turned five years old on March 18. Usually I do a photo with my minikin to mark the blogiversary, but this year has been exceptionally busy – so in the meantime, I hope you enjoy this beautiful Roman numeral five from an Italian illuminated manuscript.

To date, the blog has had more than 148,000 views. The most-read posts of all time are: (more…)

Friday Follow-Ups

Updates on two posts from earlier this year:

  • And on a related note, two weeks earlier the CBC ombudsman issued a ruling that Lang violated the CBC’s conflict of interest policy, by not revealing personal connections to the Royal Bank of Canada before she interviewed the bank’s CEO. The text of that ruling is here.

Small Business letter to the Telegraph; an attempt to defraud the electorate?

I’ve written a couple of blog posts about media outlets mindlessly reporting information without bothering to verify it first. Here, sadly, is another example. The Daily Telegraph newspaper in England ran a letter it claimed was signed by “5000 small business owners” expressing support for Prime Minister David Cameron and the Conservative Party in the upcoming UK general election. Blogger Alex Andreou decided to follow up some of the names of the signatories to the letter, and discovered….that it was not quite what was claimed. And now other bloggers and writers are finding other discrepancies and errors. Good on Alex, and shame on the Telegraph for its carelessness.

sturdyblog's avatarsturdyblog

How the letter from small business owners to the Telegraph in support of the Tories fell apart

UPDATE 21:00 The list is back up. Scanning it for changes. It was down for a good twenty minutes, then briefly up then disappeared again and now it is back up. No possibility of mistaken http, as it was open on my desktop when it suddenly refreshed to this. What is going on?

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UPDATE 20:30 on 28/4: The Telegraph has finally taken down the list of businesses which purported to have signed the letter. The link is now dead. The letter is still on their website, but the link to the signatories leads nowhere. No statement or apology has been issued as far as I am aware – from The Telegraph, CCHQ or Karen Brady.

The Charity Commission has become involved now, writing to charities it has identified from the list. A spokesperson…

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All About Work’s Third Birthday

Today marks the third anniversary of the launch of All About Work. Writing and managing the blog has been a tremendous learning experience for me, as well as being a lot of fun.

In the blog’s three years of operation, its posts have received a total of nearly 95,000 hits. The most popular posts to date have been: (more…)

“All About Work” Is Taking a Holiday Break

For the next few weeks, All About Work will be taking its annual end-of-year holiday break.

The blog has been a very busy place this year; thanks to all the readers and supporters that visited it and participated over the past 12 months. The five most popular posts of 2014 are: (more…)