Archive
Steal These Books? I’m not bothered…
Freakonomics and The Long Tail were two books which successfully used the web to market the ideas behind them, and ultimately the products. How did they do this? Well, of course the books and authors themselves were of a very high standard, and had the support of accomplished and professional PR companies. But also, the [...]
Published: March 29, 2007. Read more →
Reaching Readers Online :: Follow Up
It’s been a couple of weeks since the Bookseller’s Reaching Readers Online seminar. It was interesting, and I’ll be posting more about it soon - hopefully with a checklist of things that I think publishers should be doing with the web.
I’ve had a load of feedback from people who were there - unfortunately it wasn’t [...]
Are books becoming even less relevant?
Russell Davies, in conversation with Richard Huntington (again) and Mark Earls.
In this podcast (MP3 here) they pretend to talk about a specific planning brief set by Russell to readers of his blog (part of the “how to plan” series of posts). In fact, they end up revealing how smart people like them approach a [...]
Published: March 13, 2007. Read more →
Astroturfing, the income of crowds, and other fake stories
I’m about to be quoted in The Bookseller, I think, on how publishers run the risk of screwing their brands and authors long term - and devaluing their relationships with readers - by making the mistake of short-term astroturfing to appear as if they are popular with the kidz.
The idea of astroturfing goes hand [...]
Published: March 6, 2007. Read more →
Social Bookworking: the Karoo Test
It’s possibly heating up a little bit now. Just as AbeBooks.com announces that they are finally rolling in LibraryThing recommendations (which has to be a good thing), I thought I’d link to a few of the other sites doing similar things to Librarything.
Masterplan
Here’s a quick one. Great animation, interesting looking film, if a little paranoid. MasterPlan movie. (Follows on from last year’s - or even the year before’s GoogleZon)
Published: March 5, 2007. Read more →
A Period of Transition
What follows is a post I’ve had lined up for a while, which unapologetically asks a difficult question. My apologies in advance to all of you who have been offended by my improper language in the past - but I’m going to be swearing again in the bit that follows…
Published: January 19, 2007. Read more →
Happy Birthday Dr King
It’s MLK Day - the holiday to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, which was lobbied for by Stevie Wonder (among others) and also (not a lot of people know this) Gil Scott Heron. Gil’s next book - soon to be published and called The Last Holiday - outlines his involvement in the campaign [...]
Published: January 15, 2007. Read more →
The death of flash animation?
This follows from a thowaway line in the idea-packed conversation (part one; part two) between Russell Davies and Richard Huntingdon, two big brained thinkers on the future of communications.
Published: January 5, 2007. Read more →
Digg Canongate
Something interesting happened over the weekend: a fragment of a campaign I worked on 2.5 years ago got dugg (i.e. featured on Digg).
With (currently) 1552 diggs (individual votes for this as a cool thing online), “Names Of Things You Never Knew Had Names” has been one of the hottest things on the web for [...]
Published: December 11, 2006. Read more →