October 28th, 2009, 6 Comments »
Our book’s release is imminent. We should have it in our hot little hands on November 20 or so, and it will be in stores virtual and actual shortly thereafter.
We’ve been doing some marketing for the book–mostly soliciting blurbs and reviews. However, we’re going to fire up our book blog for at least a couple of months (here’s the RSS feed), and have plans to make a short-lived podcast that will feature readings from the book.
We adapted our book site from our old ebook site, which is why it may look familiar to a few of you. My first blog post over there is about a lack of magic beans:
We can often, however, divide our students into two big groups: those who get it, and those who don’t. Those who get it nod when we talk about the exciting possibilities of Foursquare, and say they’re inspired by the case studies we share. Those who don’t tend to fret about and focus on perceived barriers like copyright and privacy. They look for reasons to discount social media as a viable marketing channel.
On a related note, we were debating as to whether we should set up a Facebook page for the book. I wonder if it’s worth the effort, given that we don’t have the bandwidth or attention span to make it a longterm, sustained online community.
A Matter of Priorities
On another related note, at BookCamp Vancouver, I participated in a panel with the lovely and super-smart Monique and Deanna. Somebody asked me why, when they visited this site, they couldn’t find any information about the book. Given that we were advocating that authors need to become more engaged online, they asked it with a certain amount of relish. I may have even seen them high-five their colleague at the back of the audience.
I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the way I answered the question, and wanted to give it another crack. To me, the stuff I promote on my site is a balancing act. I don’t want to inundate people with ‘asks’, so I generally try to limit myself to one item at a time. Before October 15, I was running a Blog Action Day badge. Now, on internal pages at least, I’m running a banner for TckTckTck.
Will I eventually stick up a little ad about the book? Yep, though if you’re a regular reader, you already know about the book. You’ll buy it, or you won’t, and the ad probably won’t change your mind. Besides–and I don’t want to sound ungrateful here–the book is just one project among a bunch of things I’m doing. So I don’t feel a need to pimp it more aggressively than I am.
6 Comments »
December 4th, 2008, 5 Comments »
I still have a Google Alerts feed set up for the all-too-common title of our ebook, “Getting to First Base”. As you might imagine, the results it generates are quite varied. I’ll be happy when we finally decide on a name for our forthcoming dead-tree edition, so that I can monitor the web for something a little more unique. Fingers crossed on that front.
Yesterday Google Alerts served up a link to this post on a blog entitled My Life. As Impacted by Neve Campbell. From an introductory entry:
Neve Campbell and I were students together for five years at Vista Heights Public School. We were enrolled in a French Immersion program in Mississauga Ontario, a suburb of Toronto, Canada. The following is the story of my life as it relates to her.
Weird, eh? Almost all of the entries were written in April, 2007, and they’re quite exhaustive. They include a couple of class photos and extensive tales of life near Neve. They’re quite detailed:
I remembered her telling me that her younger brother had been diagnosed with asthma. We were sitting in class at the time and she began asking me all these questions about what it was like for me growing up with asthma. As she led me away I had this bad feeling she was going to tell me this brother of hers had died.
When she finally spoke, she told me that she had made arrangements to go to a private school the following year and she wouldn’t be coming back for grade 5. This was bad news, but it wasn’t the kind of ‘end of days’ news that warranted this degree of seriousness.
It’s all a bit creepy, and there’s a certain tone of Penthouse-Letters-Without-the-Sex to the whole thing. There’s no easy way to confirm the veracity of the blog, but if its faked that takes some serious dedication. Also, if it was fake, the author might have done a better job of promoting it.
5 Comments »
July 11th, 2008, 6 Comments »
Why has the idea of ‘fail’ risen to prominence in the murky soup of web culture? It obviously originated with the idea of applying the term ‘FAIL’ (and, later, ‘EPIC FAIL’ to photos of screw-ups, accidents and douchebaggery. In one sense, it’s just a more distilled version of America’s Funniest Home Videos, except ruder and more sardonic.
I wonder where that practice began? Usually these memes start in an obscure online discussion group, but my 76 seconds of research couldn’t turn up anything definitive. This sounds like a job for Anil or Andy, master investigators of internet memes.
The ‘fail’ meme feels like a distant cousin of LOLcats, as well as demotivational posters. Oddly (or not), there hasn’t been a similar plague of images tagged with ‘SUCCESS’ or ‘WIN’.
In any case, it’s spawned a number of blogs, including FAIL blog, Shipment of Fail and Fail Dogs (there are also, I’m sure, Fail Octopi, Fail Emu, and so forth). The infamous Twitter-is-b0rked image is known as the Fail Whale. And now, at long last, there’s Fail Camp in Philadelphia. From the camp’s Upcoming page:
This isn’t about finger pointing. It’s about having a safe place to admit YOUR mess - ups, small and large and most importantly, what you learned.
We all make mistakes. The best of us learn from them. The best of the best help others learn from their mistakes.
These can be business failures. These can be life failures. We want your fail.
To paraphrase good ol’ Santayana, those who fail to study failures are destined to repeat them. Or, as George Bernard Shaw once said, “my reputation grows with every failure”.
6 Comments »
February 19th, 2008, 2 Comments »
A few weeks ago, Derek Powazek (formerly of the excellent JPG magazine) launched Pixish. From Emily Chang’s description:
Pixish is a new site where you can create image contests. Artists will find assignments from people who need visual art for all kinds of projects. Each Assignment will have different requirements and rewards. If one inspires you, you can submit. The Pixish community can then vote up the best submissions. In the end, the Publisher who started the Assignment will choose a winner and give out any listed rewards.
It sounded like a fun idea, so I posted an assignment. Here’s the gist:
I’m looking for source art. It’ll be used in creating a new blog header, and as inspiration for the site’s new colour scheme and other design elements. I’ve got a web designer who will build a template based on your work. You don’t have to meet exactly parameters in terms of pixel size.
I’d like the image to integrate two elements:
You can combine these two elements as you see fit.
As a ‘reward’, I’m offering:
I’ll pay CAN $200 (US $198.63) and include a permanent link to your portfolio on my About page. I’ve referred work on several occasions based on queries about my current site’s design.
Some have been critical of Pixish as a hotbed for spec work. I really don’t have an opinion on this subject. Or, at least, I don’t feel strongly enough not to give it a try. There’s some thoughtful discussion about it on MetaFilter. What do you think?
2 Comments »
December 27th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Like many a blogger, I regularly find myself wanting to take a screenshot and cite a particular aspect of another website. I usually use Skitch or Photoshop for this, and then upload the screenshot to Flickr.
Kwout offers a faster, easier alternative. No registration necessary–you just use a bookmarklet to identify and crop the page you want to excerpt, and the image gets hosted on Kwout’s site. You can apply some minor adjustments to the style of the output. Here’s an example of an image map generated from Kwout:
Playing Ball in Belgium, Israel and Australia
This isn’t a very good example–just a random screenshot. I’ve been meaning to mention this blog, Pro Ball Worldwide.
Like a good marketer, I’ve been monitoring the web for stuff like “getting to first base barefoot” for mentions of our ebook. I got this false positive for the aforementioned blog.
It belongs to Justin Prinstein, a professional baseball player who’s plying his trade, literally, all over the globe. If I have this correct, over the course of the last year he’s played in Belgium, Israel and Australia.
There’s a tier of professional athletes who do this–play North American sports in other parts of the globe. They can make a half-decent living, see the world and have lots of time off. It’s a young man’s life, I think, but it’s got some appeal if you’re never going to make it to the big leagues back home.
Anything but Kwout
So my early impressions of Kwout are positive. It’d be cool if each item I, uh, kwouted, could have its own permalink, so that I could refer to the page later on. My only other concern is for the potential of the service to go belly-up. As there’s no registration or identity management, there’s no way to track down (and replace or download) the images I’ve generated. That’s a problem with Flickr too, but I have more confidence in their longterm viability.
Finally, I can’t ignore that lousy name. If you’re going to make up a word, at least pick one where the spelling is reasonably unambiguous. Skitch, for example, isn’t a perfect name, but you could probably spell it correctly if you heard it (and particularly if you understood the ‘digital sketchpad’ aspect of the tool).
Kwout just seems fraught with potential confusion. Not only is it hard to spell, it’s confusing to say. Plus, it immediately suggests ‘kraut’ for me. Not a great association. I’d have picked a combination of two existing words that maybe evoked something about the service (and satisfied my criteria for domain names). EchoTrap.com, for example, is available. That’s not a grade-A domain, but I’d take it over Kwout.
1 Comment »
November 30th, 2007, 6 Comments »
Carrie Brownstein is the guitarist and vocalist for Sleater-Kinney, “a critically acclaimed, politically charged indie rock band”. The band’s on hiatus, and one of her current gigs is writing a blog on NPR’s site. It’s pretty entertaining.
I learned about her blog via Waxy, who links to Ms. Brownstein’s verbose review of Rock Band on Slate:
Brad wanted to make sure everything was working, so he got on drums, I picked up a guitar, and we started the game. I quickly discovered, as other real guitarists have, that knowing how to play guitar in no way qualifies you to play Rock Band (or Guitar Hero). It’s the same way that being a doctor doesn’t make you good at the game Operation.
I’ve always had a bit of a crush on Ms. Brownstein, because she’s my wife Julie’s celebrity doppleganger. I’m not alone in thinking this–a couple of people have mistaken her for the musician. Check it out:
6 Comments »
November 8th, 2007, 3 Comments »
Lately I’ve been reading Jennifer Hawke’s blog. She’s another Canadian living abroad–she’s attending medical school in the Caribbean. I always like blogs about professions and hobbies that are totally foreign to what I do, and hers is no exception. Today she writes about an anatomy exam:
our class is divided into two sections of about 44 students each. the cadavers and various tables (with bones and models) around the lab are set up into 44 stations with 44 tags and 44 lists of multiple choice answers. you are assigned a number to start (ie: “go stand at #23.”) and given 60 seconds to look at the structure, figure out what it is, and complete that question by filling in your multiple choice answer on a scantron sheet. then a little buzzer goes and you rotate to the next question (ie: #24) while the person at #22 moves to the station you were just at.
The title is another quote from the same post. I explained in a comment that she certainly wasn’t the first person to be screwed up by that region, even when the skin’s still on it.
3 Comments »
August 27th, 2007, 2 Comments »
Via Mark Evans, I encountered a new fun blog entitled Four (or Five!) Reasons Why. It’s structured randomness appeals–they cover everything from why dollar stores are evil to why James Bond will never die. A reason from the former list:
It’s generally derived from municipal water supplies. Let’s see – buy a cheap license from a local government, pilfer their water supplier, charge a fortune for it and make a mint. Great for the bottler. Bad, bad, bad for everyone else. By the way, Pepsi’s Aquafina bottled water is made from treated tap water. Ha!
The formula enables shooting from the hip writing and constant courting of controversy–great blog fodder.
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