Archive: Posts from November, 2009
November 30th, 2009, 3 Comments »
My background in technical writing has apparently made me highly sensitive to how devices and control mechanisms are labeled. I always get a little perturbed when technology doesn’t make sense. Here’s the latest example:
What happened to the ‘Large’ setting? Did the user interface designer go to the Starbucks school of sizing? Hmm…I suppose if they had, the sizes would just be Medium, Large and Extra Large.
This is a classic ‘level of abstraction’ problem. I assume that the washer uses this setting to determine the water level in the tank. Why not just show the water levels and trust humans to correlate their pile of laundry to the level of water in the tank?
3 Comments »
November 27th, 2009, 39 Comments »
Earlier today I tweeted the following message. For the acronym-deficient, ‘OH’ stands for ‘overheard’:
A few minutes later, I received this reply from @TransitPolice, run by a sergeant who’s the Media Relations Officer for the Transit Police Service:
Here’s the brief conversation that ensued:
Does this strike anybody else as just a little creepy? I should know better, but I was a little taken aback. It wasn’t my intent to report a potential crime, to “let them know” as Sgt. Seaman put it. I was just recounting a little nugget of an interesting overheard conversation.
And there’s no question as to whether these guys were actually going to vandalize a bunch of cameras. They were, if you’ll forgive the phrase, just shooting the shit. They were really just talking. These were two heavy-set, balding middle-management types who, to look at them, have never dared disturb the universe.
Not Carefully Mitigated Enough
I should know better because I’m voluntarily broadcasting updates to a bunch of people over the web. And I’ve been doing that sort of thing for quite a while. I always tell people, blog (or tweet or whatever) like everyone is listening in.
I’ve been largely comfortable with the carefully mitigated content I push to the web. And yet this little incident gave me pause. The irony is that the Transit Police’s monitoring of Twitter is very like what closed-circuit cameras do. The authorities are using technology to seek out wrong doing. I’ve never been particularly comfortable with CC cameras in public spaces, and so this Twitter monitoring weirds me out a bit, too.
Not to sound all paranoid, but it would be easy enough for the Transit Police to determine roughly where I was when I tweeted that message. Then they could use video from inside the train to identify where I was sitting, and thus identify the two clueless dudes who were talking nearby. I’m pretty sure the Transit Police won’t do that, but I don’t ever want to be complicit in that possibility.
What’s the Lesson?
Take care when publicly publishing any messages that might be of interest to the authorities. Assume that they’re listening.
I don’t write this to demonize law enforcement. I think they have a tough job and, like any other group of people, most of them do it well most of the time. Their failures are necessarily public, and that doesn’t help their reputation.
Still, we live in an increasingly surveilled world. The authorities don’t need my help in watching over us.
39 Comments »
November 26th, 2009, 3 Comments »
Last night I went to the Centre to watch a great, joyful set by The Swell Season (here’s a video from their new album–that must have been uncomfortable to shoot).
The opening act was Thomas Bartlett, the lead singer of Doveman. Meme-trackers may recognize him from his charming 2008 cover album of the entire Footloose soundtrack. He was a chatty performer, introducing each song with an explanation or anecdote.
He told the story of a song called “Angel’s Share” off the new Doveman album (you can hear it on their MySpace page). The Angel’s Share is the name of a tiny bar in Manhattan’s East Village, which is what Bartlett was originally writing about. He discovered that the bar is named after a piece of distillery jargon. From Wikipedia:
Angels’ share is a term for the portion (share) of a wine or distilled spirit’s volume that is lost to evaporation during aging in oak barrels. The barrels are typically French or American oak. In low humidity conditions the loss to evaporation may be primarily water. However, in higher humidities, more alcohol than water will evaporate, therefore reducing the alcoholic strength of the product. In humid climates, this loss of ethanol is associated with the growth of a darkly colored fungus, Baudoinia compniacensis, on the exterior surfaces of buildings, trees and other vegetation, and anything else that happens to be nearby
Comparing the Wikipedia article to the name of the bar and song, I see there’s some disagreement over where the apostrophe goes. I suspect that Wikipedia is correct, in that this is brandy or wine or whatever for all the angels, not one in particular.
3 Comments »
November 25th, 2009, 2 Comments »
At the book launch last night, my brother reminded me of this awesome New Yorker piece entitled “Subject: Our Marketing Plan”. It’s written as an email from an intern to a book author, and simultaneously pokes fun at so many things:
- Web marketing and its endless jargon.
- Authors’ very common anxiety around promoting their books.
- Tightening belts, cost-cutting and staff turnover at publishers.
- General workplace incompetence
Here’s my favourite bit:
Do you blog? If not, get in touch with Kris and Christopher from our online department, although at this point I think only Christopher is left. I’ll be out of the office from tomorrow until Monday, but when I get back I’ll ask him if he spoke to you. We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click “Endless,†and under “Contacts†just list everyone you’ve ever met. It would be great if you could post at least six hundred words every day until further notice.
I should mention that, perhaps because our publisher handles mostly technical books, they ‘get’ the web, and have been very pleasant to work with on a promotional (as well as every other) front.
2 Comments »
November 24th, 2009, 20 Comments »
As regular readers know, I recently co-authored a business book. Though I once wrote some humongous manuals as a technical writer, and we previously wrote a 100-page ebook, this was my first grownup book. As you might expect, I learned some lessons about the process. On the day of our book launch, I thought I’d share eleven lessons with you:
- It’s way more work than you think it will be.
- A co-author is an excellent idea.
- This may be obvious, but if you get a publishing deal, you’re immediately on a schedule. There’s no looking back. If you want to write the book on your own time, write it first and then look for a publishing deal.
- There’s probably just enough time to write the average book in a year and a half of evenings and weekends.
- If I had to divide up the process, I’d say it’s 40% thinking and research, 30% writing a first draft, and 30% rewriting and proofreading.
- Don’t be precious. As a professional writer, the more I’m paid to write something, the less likely I am to receive credit for it. So I’ve learned to be fairly fire-and-forget about my writing. It’s probably not worth the emotional effort to argue with your editor or publisher about small stuff. Win the big battles, and let go of the rest.
- Once you submit a first draft, a ton of people touch your book. Our book had an editor, technical reviewer, copy editor, proofreader, production manager, graphic designer, cover designer and indexer (a soul-destroying job–I speak from experience). That excludes the marketing people and the publisher himself.
- You’ll never have enough time to make the writing as good as it could be.
- I forget where I heard this, but there’s so much truth in this quote: “Publishing isn’t an industry, it’s an organized hobby.”
- Amazon punishes publishers for missing publication dates. So publishers tend to initially set a publication date which is strikingly far into the future. Don’t let this panic you.
- This was something I already knew, but it’s worth mentioning: don’t write a book to make money. For the vast majority of authors, it’s not a moneymaking proposition. Write a book to spread your ideas, to earn ‘because-of’ income through speaking, consulting and so forth, or to get the perceived endorsement as a capital-a author.
20 Comments »
November 22nd, 2009, No Comments »
Over on our book blog, I wrote a longish post about the hot social media topic du jour: sponsored tweets in your Twitter stream. Here’s an excerpt:
Things get punchy whenever people explore monetizing a new channel. Let’s begin by thinking about some other controversial forms of advertising in social media, and how sponsored tweets might relate:
- Static ads on blogs – Not particularly relevant. In my experience, the majority of income from blogging comes from one’s archives, not the front page flow.
- Sponsored posts – The blogosphere dabbled with these for a few years, but I rarely see them anymore. This could be because I don’t read the sort of blogs that would employ sponsored posts, or because they’re utterly forgettable, but I don’t think they’ve caught on in any significant fashion.
- As in RSS feeds – This is somewhat germane, though I usually see these ads not as separate feed items, but rather as add-ons to existing posts. Sponsored tweets are standalone units of content.
- Ads in IM conversations – In a way, this seems like the most relevant comparison. That said, I’ve never actually seen an ad in an IM chat. I mostly use Skype or Google Chat, though. Maybe something like Omegle will start inserting one-line text ads into its hosted, serendipitous IM conversations.
There’s also the Facebook Beacon debacle, among others. In short, people’s tolerance for advertising in their social media channels feels pretty low.
I know it’s a bit lame to excerpt and redirect you, but what can I say? It’s a busy week ahead.
No Comments »