Over on what is now my main blog – MarkTzk.com – I wrote review of the e-book “Beyond Blogging: The Secrets of Blogging Success” by Nathan Hangen & Mike Cliffe Jones. If you’re interested in making money or building a business or enhancing your career via a blog, check it out: Review of Beyond Blogging.
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New Scientist has a pretty interesting article that goes over eight ways — supported by science — to effectively persuade people. It also examines, somewhat less thoroughly, how you can resist these techniques. It does not get into when you should use them, or when you should resist them, though — that’s the tricky questions.
Link.
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Yesterday my copy of Justin Catanoso’s “My Cousin the Saint: A Search for Faith, Family and Miracles” arrived from Amazon. Normally, this is not the kind of book I would read. I happily left the Catholic Church a long time ago. But Justin is a former editor of mine, and I’ve read many of his previous pieces on his cousin, and more importantly heard stories first hand about the Saint and about how he wrote the book. I’ve only had time to read the very beginning, a miracle story that opens the book, but I found myself touched by the story and the writing.
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I would have loved to have been at BookExpo in LA to see this panel with John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga about building online communities.
Scalzi talked about his experience establishing himself as the “benevolent dictator” of the conversational community that grew up around his blog, which has evolved into a culture that is capable of entertaining itself even when he’s not around, like when he’s up against a book deadline. Keeping the readers informed of deadlines and other parts of the writing process, he added, had an unexpected effect: “The community is kicking my ass to not blog so they can get the books.”
There’s nothing on YouTube that comes up in a quick search, but maybe somebody will post something. In the meantime, more details over at GalleyCat.
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I know I’m coming to this late, but I just saw this for the first time yesterday. It raises pretty compelling questions for anyone interested in the world and economy we’re going to be living with in a few years, and that our children will grow up in.
Here’s a related wiki.
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Jeri Rowe has a piece about a Greensboro writer still going strong at 92 — that is something to aspire to.
Link.
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The New York Times says that more retailers are permitting their managers and sales people to haggle over price with customers — even at big box retailers such as Best Buy.
Savvy consumers, empowered by the Internet and encouraged by a slowing economy, are finding that they can dicker on prices, not just on clearance items or big-ticket products like televisions but also on lower-cost goods like cameras, audio speakers, couches, rugs and even clothing.
The change is not particularly overt, and most store policies on bargaining are informal. Some major retailers, however, are quietly telling their salespeople that negotiating is acceptable.
“We want to work with the customer, and if that happens to mean negotiating a price, then we’re willing to look at that,” said Kathryn Gallagher, a spokeswoman for Home Depot.
Who knew? Link.
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Arthur C. Clarke, prolific writer, scuba diver, space enthusiast and inventor of the communications satellite, has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.
Link.
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Well, big news to me, at least. I’ve changed jobs. I left The Business Journal a couple of weeks ago and joined RLF Communications as a senior account executive. I just finished up my first week on the job.
In the newspaper world a shift like this, going from journalism to public relations, is usually called “moving to the dark side.” In fact, as a going-away gift, my Business Journal colleagues got me a little Darth Vader figure.
If you’re wondering, though, I left what was a pretty good job as a newspaper reporter because RLF, and this position, will provide me with new challenges. I’ll have more opportunities to put what I’m learning in business school to use and more opportunities to more deeply explore online media.
Speaking of online media, I’ll be at ConvergeSouth today. Come over and say ‘Hi’ if you see me.
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Where’s the boundary between you and machine, between the gray matter in your skull and the digital technology that governs the Internet and so much else in modern life? It may be harder to find than you think.
What is spreading through the Web is not exactly artificial intelligence. For all the research that has gone into cognitive and computer science, the brain’s most formidable algorithms — those used to recognize images or sounds or understand language — have eluded simulation. The alternative has been to incorporate people, with their special skills, as components of the Net.
Link.
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