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Thursday, June 28, 2012
A Geek's Guide to Budgeting Hobbies
June 28th, 2012Top StoryA Geek's Guide to Budgeting HobbiesBy Thorin Klosowski
All work and no play isn't good for anyone. A good work-life balance hinges on getting in the time to do what's important to you. If you don't already, it's time to start treating your hobbies with the same respect you give your career (although a hobby can also help your career, in certain cases). That means budgeting your time and your finances to accommodate your variety of interests. Budget Your Hobby TimeYou probably have a hard enough time keeping up with your day to day, but finding time for hobbies is just as important as getting your errands done. The first step is to prioritize your hobbies so you know what's really important. Organize and Prioritize Your Hobbies
Personally, I'm a fan of single-tasking hobbies. Doing so means I dedicate a good amount of my mindshare to each hobby. Once every couple of months I take a look at each hobby or project I want to do and organize them in a prioritized list. The list is based around what I already know about myself. In the summer months, for instance, I read a lot, so I stack a bunch of books at the top of the list. I also try to learn one new skill each summer (this summer is about learning to draw more than a stick figure), so that sits near the top as well. The goal is to dedicate your attention to one main hobby project at a time. As frugal living blog The Simple Dollar points out, it's cheaper and more fruitful to concentrate on one or two things at once. You can mix up several hobbies, but if you really want to enjoy yourself I find it's best to concentrate on one at a time. Create a Project or Entertainment To-Do List
Here's what I do: I write down a list with media release dates I'm interested in (movies, games, books, etc). Then, I fill in the gaps with start dates for other hobby projects. It's that simple. The benefit is twofold: I always have something productive to do with myself instead, and I have a to-do list to keep me on track. Yours will differ, but the premise is the same: make a to-do list and calendar and stick to it. Budget Time Every Day, No Excuses
You can apply this to nearly any hobby you can do in your own house. Learning guitar? Dedicate at least 15 minutes to it. Reading a book? Playing a video game? Drawing a comic strip? 15 minutes daily—no excuses. For hobbies that require longer stints of time, focus on what you can do during those short 15 minutes to practice or prepare. This obviously can't work for everything, but it works for a good chunk of hobbies. You can also take The Information Diet author Clay Johnson's advice and schedule in your media (in this case also a hobby) just like you would a meeting. You might find that when you put that time on your calendar you're more likely to do it instead of wasting time elsewhere. Photo by Iain. Give Yourself Mini-Hobby VacationsTaking a vacation to go fishing isn't a new idea, but it's worth noting that you should do it for other hobbies as well. Going somewhere on vacation is awesome, but taking a day here and there to work on a hobby exclusively is a great stress reliever as well. Plus, too many of you are leaving your vacation time on the table. Use that leftover time to take a long weekend and dedicate your full attention to a hobby. Feeling the need for some binge TV series watching? Take a day off and enjoy it. No checking work email and no catching up on errands. Hide your phone if you have to. Do whatever it takes to put yourself in the vacation mentality. Budget Your FinancesHobbies typically have the unique characteristic of being easy to plan expenses around because they're all about preparation. In effect, budgeting for a hobby is all about forward thinking. The good news? You've already done most of the work above with your to-do list. Now all you have to do is make sure you have the money. The Initial Dip: Don't Overspend
The idea is that you start with enough to get you going, and then supplement what you need along the way. When you plan out projects ahead of time you have plenty of time to prepare the money, learn to work with what you have, and decide if expenses are worth the extra cost. Photo by Robert Couse-Baker. Use Your To-Do List as a Budget Tool
To do so you can use any budgeting technique or software you like. We're fans of Mint for its ease of use and its goal setting options, but you can budget any way you prefer. For example. Let's say on your hobby to-do list is "record music in October." Ask yourself what you need to accomplish this. Do you need new cables? New music gear? Tally up the list, check out some basic prices, and come up with a sum total. When you're done, divide that total by how many months you have until your start date and save a little money every month. Some hobbies make this easy by operating in seasons. Summer is known for blockbuster movies, fall and winter are dominated by video games, and sports stick to their respective seasons pretty strictly. For everything else, use your best judgement to find a good start date. If you're looking to upgrade certain gear for a hobby, don't forget to check out our guide to the best time to purchase anything in 2012 for ideas on when you'll get it the cheapest. Also, don't forget that you can always find good deals, whether it's shopping on Craigslist, or elsewhere online. Depending on the type of career or job you have, you're either defined by what you do from nine to five, or what you do the rest of the time. Maybe you're lucky and it's both. If your hobbies define you as much as my professor once implied, then they're worth fighting for the time to appreciate them. How about you? Do you find yourself out of time and money for hobbies after life gets in the way? Share your tricks for budgeting and managing in the comments.  |
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Remix Everything: BuzzFeed and the Plagiarism Problem
June 28th, 2012Top StoryRemix Everything: BuzzFeed and the Plagiarism ProblemBy Adrian Chen
Internet culture wonks have been hashing over an article by Slate's Farhad Manjoo that revealed BuzzFeed's popular lists are often not original flashes of viral genius. Many are highly derivative rip-offs from other sites, cleaned up and reproduced without crediting their sources. Most commonly, Manjoo found, ideas for listicles first appear on social news site Reddit, or lesser aggregators. For example, the BuzzFeed listicle "21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity," appears to be an almost exact replica of a couple of posts on an obscure site called Nedhardy: "7 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity" and "13 Pictures to Help You Restore Your Faith In Humanity." BuzzFeed slapped together many of the same pictures, presented it as an original idea, and it went Avian-Flu-level-viral, ending up with more than seven million page views. While BuzzFeed has assembled "serious" sections of traditional journalists reporting on technology, fashion and politics, it's the lists and viral video scavenging that bring in the most traffic. This has set off some chin-scratching over whether what BuzzFeed is doing is actually bad, or whether repackaging funny things found on Reddit is just how the internet works these days. (As of today, BuzzFeed seems to be giving more credit to the site, anyway.) Can you really rip off the idea of putting cheesy feel-good pictures in a list? Some say BuzzFeed's failure to cite the sources of ideas for its listicles is simply an example of "bad nettiquette." But if failing to cite memes found on Reddit is bad netiquette, what is lifting whole sentences from IMDB? After reading Manjoo's article, I dipped into the BuzzFeed archives and found they're filled with passages copied from other outlets with no credit. Consider the output of BuzzFeed senior editor Matt Stopera. Stopera's one of BuzzFeed's most popular editors; he makes regular appearances on Headline News and was the subject of a Businessweek profile, which lauded his ability to assemble massively viral lists at lightning speed. "It suggests somebody has cracked a code," wrote Businessweek. A key part of that code is copying and pasting chunks of text into lists without attribution. For example Stopera's "13 Things You Probably Didn't Know About the Movie 'Clueless" is comprised almost solely of sentences copied from the IMDB trivia page for Clueless, with no sign that they are anything but his own words. Stopera:
IMDB:
It's the same with "33 Things You Probably Didn't Know About the 'Toy Story,' Trilogy" and "12 Things You Probably Didn't Know About the Movie 'Home Alone.'" Stopera doesn't just lift from IMDB. A 2011 post "26 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Elizabeth Taylor," is cribbed from a number of sources. Stopera:
Stopera:
Then there's 2010's 38 Facts About Reborn Dolls, which basically just transforms the sentences of this 2008 Today.com article into a list, again with no credit. (Note, some of these may have had credit added to them since we published this post.) After seeing this, I was ready to brand Stopera with the big P-word. But the story of the older media outlet accusing the upstart of parasitism is sadly familiar: Gawker's been at the receiving end for years. There was the time Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira wrote his screed "How Gawker Ripped Off My Newspaper Story," complaining that a post had 'stolen' all the good parts of his story with little credit, and then-editor Gabriel Snyder's eloquent response. Playboy got pissed over a post where we quoted liberally from a Playboy article about a horny weatherman. As the accusations against Gawker showed a tin ear against how the internet works, the label of plagiarism seems anachronistic in the case of a listicle. Stopera's lifting is the result of an extreme aggregation logic that approaches words as just another form of content, to be remixed and copied without worrying about their source. The whole internet is trending in this direction: The top story on Reddit on any given day is likely to be some image scanned from a newspaper, a quote misattributed to Ghandi, or a Youtube video of a '90s cartoon. But BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith, who joined BuzzFeed from Politico last December, said he's moving the site away from this free-for-all approach: "[BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti] started BuzzFeed as a tech company and a kind of a content laboratory, and initially had a heavy aggregation focus," he wrote in an email. "They were moving toward more traditional standards of sourcing when I got here, but I certainly have made those traditional reportorial standards a lot clearer." And Stopera has been more careful about sourcing since Smith became EIC of BuzzFeed. Two recent lists, "10 Things You Might Do While High on Bath Salts" and "14 Things You Need to Know About Drinking Hand Sanitizer" cite sources amply. "Matt is one of the great Internet originals, as I think is pretty clear from the body of his work," Smith said.
The best argument against this context-free viral culture actually comes from that goddamn "21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity" list. The first picture in the list is a "picture of Chicago Christians who showed up at a gay pride parade to apologize for homophobia in the Church," according to the caption. But the real story is more complicated, and not so uplifting. The Christians apologizing are members of a group called The Marin Foundation, run by Andrew Marin. Marin's an evangelical Christian who claims to be trying to create a bridge between gays and Christians. But Marin refuses to say homosexuality is not a sin, and critics argue he's disingenuously using the LGBT angle to boost his own profile. You would never learn that from the list, which includes only a link to the website of the photographer who took the picture, added only after it went viral. BuzzFeed just hired Metro Weekly's Chris Geidner, one of the best reporters on LGBT issues in the country. Maybe he could do a story about it.  |
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