I am not sure if you remember the hologram cover that National Geographic did 20 years ago, but it ruined the magazine. It cost so much money, they had to drastically reduce the number of photographers they employed and they brought in the bean counters. Things were never the same since.
Esquire magazine is reminding us [...]
Thanks Brad.
I learned two new words this week just by reading Kottke…
Grawlix — that string of typographic symbols that substitute for swearing in cartoons.
Qualia — properties of sensory experiences. “I see red!” or “I see @#$%&? red!”
Pamela McClintock over at Variety.com noted “In five of the last seven recessions, box office revenues increased; in three of those, so did attendance.” Admissions are up a whopping 17.3% over June 2007. McCintock speculates it is the poor economy…
“The fact that the box office has held up as well as it has, even in [...]
Caleb Crain took the text from Moby-Dick and pasted them into Wordle.
The 75 words that appear most often are in the included image.
Jason Kottke pointed to this post last week at benandalice.com — what the poor, hip litsters do for fun in New York City — they read the New York Review of Books Personals, where know thyself is a spectator sport.
“This woman sounds like she was born from that stuff white people love website.” After all, [...]
The esteemed Kevin Kelly posted a list of books that changed his life.
The one book on his list that I hadn’t heard of was Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. This is from the book’s wikipedia entry…
His idea is that when a person sees themselves as “playing” in “games” usually seen as serious events, [...]
The Book Design Review is showcasing two covers I really digg. Maybe I am just thirsty.
Ethan Kaplan is pointing to an epic email rant from Bill Gates regarding usability. This has nothing to do with book publishing in Canada, but I, for one, have worked for that founder that throws grenades around via email — sometimes those emails unexpectedly hit on the truth. Here is a sarcastic morsel…
These 45 names [...]
Paid Content is reporting that…
Leonard Tow is pledging $5 million to the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and $3 million to the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, to fund R&D and innovation efforts and figure out the future of newspapers, both in print and online.
Hmm. I guess the first step [...]
Rob Horning’s great Marginal Utility post at PopMatters called the time cost of free goods got me thinking how great it would be to be able get a book for free then only pay when you use it. If your attention wanes at page 23 of that new novel, then you would pay a fraction [...]
The Book Expo Canada session called Another Country: Creative Borders, Globalism and the Age of Collaboration saw Monique Trottier of Boxcar Marketing offer advice on author websites. Here are some of her thoughts…
We can turn our websites from expenses into investments.
We can treat our website like a top sales and marketing person.
We can demand and [...]
I just picked this up from last week’s Publishers’ Lunch…
Business/Investing/Finance
Dubbed the “Rock Star of Digital Marketing” by Marketing Magazine, Mitch Joel’s SIX PIXELS OF SEPARATION, teaching entrepreneurs and individuals how to have a global audience and consumer base in a world where we’re all connected (using methods almost all free), to Rick Wolff at Business [...]
Once pocket storage gets to the tera-byte level and the net is policed for infringing technology — not infringing activity — you get…sneakernet 2.0.
Right. I had forgotten about that…
The sneakernet will come back if needed. “I believe this is a ‘wild card’ that most people in the music industry are not seeing at all,” writes [...]
Allan Fotheringham once told a story about an editor of his that rewarded his writers by how popular the writers’ stories were. Before the days of internet analytics, the editor gauged story popularity by the amount of mail the story prompted. Fotheringham noted that if a writer meddled with the facts a wee bit — [...]
The Osprey blog is talking about a Peter Jackson remake of The Dambusters. I remember seeing this on television some Sunday afternoon when I was a kid. Sure, a remake would be interesting, but is it necessary? I am skeptical, but I did enjoy 2001’s Enigma. Call me a sucker for the period. Thanks Ira [...]
Watching this video (beware the sound isn’t that great) I was struck by how transactional information retrieval has become. The company with the fewest barriers between you and the information you want will be the winner. Travel guide companies (Lonely Planet, Frommers) can’t rely on their pedigree anymore.
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I have recently become a fan of Merlin Mann’s web show You Look Nice Today.
The guys on the show have invented a new dance. Adam Lisgar demonstrates below.
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A couple of weeks ago I was talking to a teacher who was about to retire. She remarked that the younger teachers in their 30s didn’t dress appropriately. The ones in their 40s weren’t very focused. She laughed. One group doesn’t have any money and the other has kids.
I thought of that conversation when I [...]
I am listening to the podcast from the keynote panel from this year’s Publishing Business Conference. I captured points that interested me (and my own thoughts) below …
Shatzkin points out that companies need to shift the way they are organized to survive. Horizontal-reaching content factories are doomed. I wonder how you would reorganize a publisher [...]
Carolyn presented some details about the experiments going on at Harper including their browse inside widget that they use on their own site as well as to populate social networks. The widget unfortunately only supports scanned books but it is a start and analytics coming out of the experiment are promising. Other strategies that Harper [...]
I wonder if CBS will steal away the news.com domain for their own purposes. I wonder if they are buying cNET for the technology not the audience.
Since starting this blog I have posted creative commons photos with credit, I have posted photos I have taken screen captures of, and I have deep-linked to photos on other sites — all the while not really thinking about the ethical nuances between each. That is why I was interested to read a post on [...]
New York announces an anti-camcording law and Harper Collins will create video content in-house. Did they listen to This Week in Media?
“1998 called and it wants its Seinfeld episode back” — a great Merlinism from this week’s Macbreak Weekly that focused my thinking on the last mile problem for GPS technology. I changed some tactics on a SEO project I am working on as a result.
Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is “why should we do that—we don’t have any skills in that area.” That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company…
From Business week via Radar
Mitch Joel just posted a great video from Common Craft called Podcasting in Plain English. It reminds me of another video series Mitch put me onto last December — also on youtube. I shared that series with colleagues at work because I thought it was a brilliant way to do book promos — give me [...]
I was annoyed when someone jacked my copy of the Economist from my mailbox. It was the issue about food inflation (sounds fun when you think about it). I was keen to learn more about how the food pinch was causing riots in far away places. Then I read someone jacked a whole truck load [...]
One of the things I learned from reading Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation was what a kinshp there was between Walt Disney and Ray Kroc — the life force behind MacDonalds Corp. Both were geniuses marketing to kids.
Hook em early, get them for life. Diabolically brilliant.
Audible has learned that lesson too. They have launched Audible [...]
I don’t have very high expectations when Wired magazine shows up on the door step. The signal to noise split means I often put off reading it. Seeing that Steve Carell wrote the cover story this month made me groan. I blame you Conde Naste. Fist shake. Argh!
Having finished Gary Wolf’s story in the May [...]
My friends at Live Current have been getting a lot of attention this week after they purchased rights to broadcast cricket. Arrington original wondered if he would remember them at all. A lesson in go big or go home. I thought is was interesting that DestinationHub is a registered trademark for the company. Their business [...]
Wildly Popular ‘Iron Man’ Trailer To Be Adapted Into Full-Length Film
Dummies parodies are all over the place. Normally they are mocking. The tone of Lakai’s spring catalog is straight-up. Lakai is so cool and the Dummies brand is so not — Lakai doesn’t have to rib. I would be happy if Lakai, the hottest of the hot, associated with my brand at all. We’ll see [...]
Colin Brush over at the Penguin Blog talks about new copy for 1984 and Animal Farm. It made me think of my frustration when I was nine or ten looking for something to read. The book jacket wouldn’t say what the book was about. It would instead tell me how good it was. I hated [...]
Nice to see Julia Rivard, a classmate of mine from junior school through university, looking glam in this weekend’s National Post. She has started a studio in Dartmouth, N.S. for creative types. (the photo links thru)
Communicate.com buys startup, change name to Live Current Media (TechCrunch).
Exhale. It’s done.