Archive: Posts about Link Round-Up

A Sunday Link Stew

July 10th, 2011, Comments Off

If you’ll indulge me, here’s a mish-mash of announcements, giveaways, entertaining links and other minutia:

  • This Friday, I’m going to be telling a story at Rain City Chronicles. It’s a local storytelling series in the style of The Moth. If you don’t know The Moth podcast, give it a listen, it’s superb. This Friday’s event will be at the Museum of Vancouver, and admission includes access to their Bhangra.me exhibit.
  • My friends the Giant Ants, of Giant Ant Media, are looking to sublet their excellent Gastown office space for a year, as they’re moving to a larger space. It’s about 750 square feet at 319 West Pender St. Here’s a photo. Contact me if you want to know more.
  • Want to win a trip to Nahanni National Park Reserve in the Northwest Territories? We’re doing some work with CPAWS and Parks Canada on a contest aimed at building Canada’s first national parks bucket list.
  • Over at my One Year, One Canadian project, I’m giving away a laptop stand.
  • One movie I can’t watch (because it’s Danish, and not Canadian) but would like to this year is Into Eternity. It’s about the long term storage of nuclear waste, which sounds incredibly dull, but is actually a fascinating thought experiment. It seems inspired, at least in part, by something called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. I wrote about it back in 2007.
  • Two interesting pieces on the state of journalism from Kai Nagata and Clay Shirky. My favourite line from the Shirky piece: “markets supply less reporting than democracies demand”.
  • And finally, cat pants.
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My New Storehouse of Internet Miscellany

July 6th, 2010, 2 Comments »

As you may have noticed, I’ve blogged less often on this site, but, I think, more contemplatively. Your mileage on that may vary, but it seems like a natural evolution of my online creative expression. If you’ll pardon the phrase.

But what of all the random stuff I used to link to?

A Boring History of Curating Ephemera

A little history. Way back when I started this blog, I wrote a lot of short posts, kind of mimicking (and routinely referencing) Boing Boing. These often pointed to bits of Web ephemera that I encountered in my work or personal time online.

There are links that I want to share, but I don’t care to write a full blog post about. Things like a semi-amusing nerd joke, an unlikely tattoo or a risque advertisement.

I eventually started serving up periodic lists of links instead of dedicating blog posts to them. Then I tried a link blog (the RSS feed still seems to be around) for a while, but Ma.gnolia’s implosion and my own waning interest put an end to that.

Then Twitter came along, and it seemed like a very natural form for sharing these web souvenirs. However, Twitter does a very poor job of archiving old tweets, and making them searchable (for example, I’ve tweeted way more than three times about the Canucks over the past three years). Occasionally, I actually want to find something I shared six months ago, and Twitter is no help. So, I have the sense that there’s no permanent record of this silly curation I do.

I started a Tumblr blog in which to store all this stuff. You can find it here:

http://darrenbarefoot.tumblr.com

There’s pretty much no original thinking there, just a river of stuff I find and probably tweet about. If you’re immersed in the web, you’ll have seen most of this stuff.

I’m still tweeting all these items–I’m just also going to push most of them to this site. It may prove of no interest or use to anyone but me, but I just thought I’d mention it. I also make no guarantees of its longevity–I reserve the right to abandon it at any time. If I stick with it for a couple of weeks, I might embed a view of it in the sidebar of this site.

Tumblr is Highly Presentational

This also, finally, provides me an opportunity to mess around with Tumblr. I’ve spent some time with it here and there, but I’ve never actually launched a site or anything. It’s remarkably stripped down. There’s no interaction without a Tumblr account, and even then they’re limited. There’s no native statistics package at all, and adding Google Analytics is a little clunky. There’s not even the identity widget that comes with Blogger sites. In short, it’s a really presentational form. I’m not sure what the obvious benefits are–but maybe they’ll make themselves apparent in time.

But it is searchable (at least by me), and I rather like the theme I picked. If there are any Tumblr users out there, I’m all-ears for tips. Check out my latest attempt at capturing the web’s most gossamer bits, and let me know what you think.

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A Quick Book-Related Roundup

December 9th, 2009, 4 Comments »

It’s a nutty week, so indulge me here if I spend a post on some lazy aggregation instead of original thought. I’ve been meaning to gather some of the more interesting bits of publicity around our newly-launched book. To start, two random online marketing notes:

  • When you search for ‘friends with benefits’ on Amazon, our book is the top result. Take that, erotica.
  • Our book site is FriendsWithBenefitsBook.com. I count myself very lucky that there’s currently nothing more than a domain squatting page at FriendsWithBenefits.com. I recently talked to an author who failed to renew her personal domain and had it snapped up by a porn star who shared her name. What could she do? I didn’t have a lot of good ideas, save the fact that most porn careers are surely short-lived.

I did a couple of short TV pieces with GetConnected, talking about business blogging. I know, I know, I’m as surprised as you that we’re still talking about this stuff in 2009:

The second piece is about how to set up a blog. If you want to hear still more about self-publishing an ebook, here’s a short interview I did back at BookCamp Vancouver.

There have been a bunch of reviews of the book, all surprisingly positive so far. I’m still waiting for one that tears a strip off the book. After all, the negative ones are more fun to write. This one initially had promise of satisfying my need for abuse:

I really wanted to dislike this. It was sent to me by the publisher without my requesting it and I’m sure I groaned out loud when I opened the package and saw the subtitle. Social Media? I HATE social media!

Aaargh! OK, I’ll read the damn thing, I thought. Maybe there’s enough fodder here for a scathing review – tear the skin right off the authors and roast them on a spit! That’ll teach that publisher not to send me junk when I don’t want it. I sat myself down on the couch and started reading.

Hmmm. Something’s wrong. Where’s all the crap about getting 4 zillion Facebook followers? Where are the shady tricks, the spammy tactics? What’s WRONG with these people?

I guess I’ll just live in hope. Here, also, is an interview that Julie and I did for The Engaging Brand podcast.

Lastly, last night I sat on a panel on social media and ROI for the International Internet Marketing Association. I typed up a few notes, and then heavily marked them up before and during the panel. I said I’d share them with the audience, but I wanted to annotate them with links first. I’m using Flickr to do this, but you have to visit the actual pages to see the Flickr Notes I’ve added.

Notes from IIMA Talk on Social Media and ROI - Page One, Top HalfNotes from IIMA Talk on Social Media and ROI - Page One, Bottom Half

More Notes from IIMA Talk - Page Two, Top HalfMore Notes from IIMA Talk - Page Two, Bottom Half

Incidentally, I was looking around for a tool like Flickr Notes that would enable me to add linked notes to a much larger image. Flickr only permits you to work with the 500-pixel wide image, and I could do with something twice that size. No, sorry, I have too much self-respect to make an image map.

UPDATE: Long time blogger and podcaster Joseph Planta did an interview with us about the book.

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Link Round-Up: Local Stuff

July 19th, 2009, 1 Comment »

Just a mini link round-up, as there’s a few items I’ve been meaning to mention:

  • Rebecca, along with about 25 other local bloggers, is participating in a Blogathon on July 25. It’s “24 hours of blogging every 30 minutes for a cause”. An excellent idea, and had I a more formidable constitution (and time to recover), I’d do it too. I’ll just have to satisfy myself with donating to the cause. You should, too.
  • The Canada West Coast chapter of the Society for Technical Communication–I used to be a member–its annual Technical Publications Competition. I wonder what I have that I could submit in the ‘Technical Art’ category?
  • Capulet is currently a cog in the giant advocacy machine that is TckTckTck. More on that later, but in the meantime, they’re hiring for a blogger/online campaigner role. It would be a kick-ass job for the next six months.

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Link Round-Up: Release the Charts Edition

July 10th, 2009, Comments Off

Over the past few days, I’ve encountered a number of excellent charts and graphs. And, as regular readers know, I love a good chart:

  • Where does the average American’s after-tax income go to? On Reddit, people were remarking that $1800 was too much for ‘apparel and services’. I disagreed–it felt about right if I add in clothes, shoes, haircuts and such. Maybe I’d be a bit below that figure, but not by much.
  • Grant McCracken reports on the success of True Blood, the charming HBO show featuring Anna Paquin and a lot of vampires.
  • Not a chart per se, but a fantastic list of the songs people have deleted from their Last.fm account. These are, presumably, the songs that people are embarrassed about other people knowing they like or listen to them. As Paul points out, these are the guilty pleasure songs.
  • Lastly, there’s the highs and lows of male development. It pretty much speaks for itself.
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From the Archives

November 19th, 2008, 1 Comment »

It’s a busy day, so I thought I’d hit up some six-year-old blog posts and see which links are still alive and interesting. It’s not surprising that the link decay rate is at least 50%. What is shocking is how of the broken links go to mainstream media sites. All links but the last one go to external sites:

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Link Round-Up: The Social Change Edition

September 30th, 2008, 6 Comments »

Because Tuesday is social change day. Right?

And to my Jewish readers, let me say “shana tova umetukah”. Or, at least, that’s what Wikipedia says I should say. I was going to go with ‘mazel tov’, but what do I know?

6 Comments »

Friday’s Totally Random Link Round-Up

September 12th, 2008, 6 Comments »

So many inputs, just one output:

  • First, a great idea from Springwise (a site I recently discovered when they wrote about DreamBank). IncSpring (no relation to Springwise, and, arg, the brand misspelling rages on unabated) is an online marketplace for unused brands. Back when we did more brand development for clients, we left a ton great design work on the cutting room floor. We could conceivably post some of that work on IncSpring.
  • Yet another greatest hits album from Sarah McLachlan. The hugely-popular singer has released just five albums of original material (plus one Christmas album of covers) in twenty years. On the other hand, Wikipedia lists 14 re-releases, ‘b-side’ albums, remixes, live concerts and so forth. As I’ve said before, she is extraordinarily mercantile with her meagre back catalog. Hilariously, Ms. McLachlan’s website claims that the new album features songs “personally selected by Sarah”. Not surprisingly, she chose all her hits.
  • Adam Saab is the Green Party candidate for Victoria. Here’s a Facebook page for him, and his MySpace page (he’s apparently also a musician). I looked, but couldn’t find his campaign website. I’m sure he’s pretty busy, but hopefully one is forthcoming. That seems like a priority.
  • Zoocasa looks like Canada’s Zillow. I like its functionality a lot, and that’s a fun (if slightly American-sounding) name. I expect they’re focusing on urban regions to start, as I just did a search for Pender Island and its listings were woeful (compare with, say, MLS.ca). I’ve got an email in to them about the comprehensiveness of their listings and when we might expect to see more exhaustive ones.
  • MyLifeofTravel emailed me about a contest they’re running. The prize: a trip around the world.
  • UPDATE: Via Gillian, I just watched the trailer for The Lucky Ones. Rachel McAdams: hottest Iraq war veteran ever. The trailer feels a bit muddy to me, like it doesn’t know what kind of movie it wants to be. And, speaking of Ms. McLachlan, the trailer features her ballad “I Will Remember You”.

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