thoughtsignals

Advertising Age’s Bob Garfield is writing a book online titled “Listen.”

Because it turns out that all those guys with the PowerPoint presentations you’ve been sitting through for the past three years – you know, the ones insisting “The consumer is in control” – are absolutely right. The consumer (and voter and citizen) is in control: of what and when she watches, of what and when she reads, of whether to pay any attention to you whatsover or to make your life a living hell. This might be an excellent time, therefore, to listen to what she has to say. And it sure wouldn’t hurt to make her your friend.

Introduction to the project here, first installment, and second installment.

Warren Ellis has a short, but insightful, set of points on what he’s calling ‘burst culture.’ None of this, as he points out, is new. But many, many people in traditional print media still don’t get it. It’s all basic economics: low barriers to entry, easy monetization, etc.

I love print. I love magazines that commit and pay for long articles and long fiction. The web rewards neither approach. It’s a packeted medium, a surf medium. Short bursts are the way to go. The web isn’t a replacement medium — it’s *another” medium. That said, if your concept of a magazine is something designed in one-page bursts, or three pages that only carry 500 words due to the mass of images, then, really, you’re not doing anything the web can’t do better, are you?

Despite the success of magazines like the New Yorker in the last few years notwithstanding, many print publishers seem to believe the future is in imitating the kind of content the Web does best. Maybe we should be rethinking that approach.

Link.

How to make money from online real estate. Here’s a follow-up to yesterday’s post on domain name king Kevin Ham. Another domain name buy-up company, NameMedia, also has plans to turn some of its domain names into actual online media companies of some sort.

NameMedia recently finished building technology where visitors to niche sites — say, one on 1957 Mustangs — will be presented with links to other sites with similar images. The links will be between sites within the NameMedia network, but Mr. Conlin said that an unnamed Internet photo-sharing service with more than five million monthly users would soon join.

Link.

I would like to think I would have been smart enough to do something like this. As the Dire Straits song goes, it’s almost “money for nothing.” Kevin Ham has made a fortune, and seems intent on building a bigger business yet, based on Internet domain names.

Trained as a family doctor, he put off medicine after discovering the riches of the Web. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue. (Like all his financial details, Ham would neither confirm nor deny this figure.)

The Business 2.0 article includes a sidebar with tips for folks that still want to get in on the domain biz themselves.

Link.

Are you dreaming of a vacation in space? This doesn’t sound so fun:

For starters, any prolonged flight outside the atmosphere risks exposure of cells to sickening levels of radiation. The skin of a spaceship is not much safer. Space is littered with lithic debris, and a collision with a particle no bigger than a pebble could well be catastrophic. (Pockmarks from thousands of tiny impacts slowed the orbit of the Salyut 7 space station so much that it fell from the sky.) A state of microgravity for years will also take its toll on physical and psychic health. Between 3 and 13 percent of personnel on any space mission are likely to show signs of mental illness from claustrophobia, homesickness, chronic boredom and inactivity. The bacteria that causes tooth decay may grow faster in outer space, where dentists are scarce. Food will taste worse and be harder to digest.

Link.

Here’s something different. Hustler publisher Larry Flynt has published a rememberance of Jerry Falwell in the L.A. Times:

It was the first time since the infamous 1988 trial that the reverend and I had been in the same room together, and the thought of even breathing the same air with him made me sick. I disagreed with Falwell (who died last week) on absolutely everything he preached, and he looked at me as symbolic of all the social ills that a society can possibly have. But I’d do anything to sell the book and the film, and Falwell would do anything to preach, so King’s audience of 8 million viewers was all the incentive either of us needed to bring us together.

Link.

The LA Times finally brings some sense to the nonsensical discussion about whether the end of newspaper book sections somehow heralds the end of books:

INDEED, more than at any time in the last 40 years, there is a bounty of news, features, criticism and gossip about books in newspapers, magazines and journals, blogs, radio and TV, podcasts and an ever-growing number of book clubs and festivals. It’s by all appearances a flourishing literary moment in a culture that traditionally values other forms of entertainment, and it raises the question: Why should two key elements of that mosaic, litbloggers and book reviewers, be trading shots at all?

Link.

Yesterday, we went down to the Haw River Festival in Bynum, in Chatham County. We used to live in Chatham County, so on the way back we thought we’d drive by our old house just to see if there was anything new that had been done to the exterior or the yard. Instead of a new flower bed or a different paint job, though, we found crime scene tape and several Chatham County Sheriff’s Department vehicles. Our old home had been turned into a crime scene.

The News & Observer this morning has some details:

Deputies were called to 29 Red Pine Road about 9:10 a.m. to check on a woman whose parents hadn’t heard from her in a week, police said. What they found was the body of Tracy Lynn Baldwin, 38. Investigators consider her death a homicide.

We sold the house to Tracy in the summer of 2003, and I remember seeing her twice: Once when we closed on the sale, and again a few months or perhaps a year later at a restaurant in Chapel Hill where she was waitressing. She seemed happy with the house.

Our hearts go out to her family today.

Link.

Startup newspaper BostonNOW is printing excerpts from local bloggers in its print edition.

John Wilpers, editor in chief of BostonNow, a free weekday daily introduced last month, said he wanted to fill the paper with items that local bloggers submitted to the BostonNow Web site.

Last week, editors began culling posts and running excerpts next to articles from reporters and newswires. The blog items, which appear in gray boxes, are still relatively few, but Mr. Wilpers said he thought the feature would grow.

Mr. Wilpers, who previously edited two other free commuter newspapers, Metro Boston and The Washington Examiner, said he wanted to address what he believed was the news industry’s biggest problem: an inability to connect with the communities it covers.

I expect there will be a certain amount of moaning that this is another sign of the end of newspapers (no, their declining circulation, readership and ad revenue would be the sign of that). However, I also expect that we’ll see a lot more of that. Other newspapers are already doing this in one form or another, and many papers are printing excerpts from their own bloggers in the print edition (a sure sign that momentum has shifted from print to the Web).

Newspapers have a long history of printing things that aren’t really news — comics, recipes, letters to the editor, horoscopes, etc. This isn’t that new. But it is a good idea.

Link.

Authors and book publishers are using quickly recorded audio books to whip up publicity for book sales, sometimes releasing the audio versions before the print version.

Because audiobooks are so fast, inexpensive and easy to record, the dynamic seems to be changing, with publishers looking to the audio format to fuel interest in paper books that aren’t quite ready for the printing press.

And with the ubiquity of iPods, that interest can be generated quickly: recordings need not be pressed onto CDs and packaged, but can quickly be uploaded to iTunes. Sometimes these recordings will be made with well-known authors whose next release isn’t quite ready for bookstores, and other times with newcomers like Ms. Fogarty whose work has gained a following another way.

Ms. Fogarty said that when she was first contacted by Ms. Winfrey’s show, she thought, “I’m going on ‘Oprah.’ Gosh, I wish my book were done.”

Fogarty is the source of the online Grammar Girl podcasts, which can be found here. Two fairly obvious observations about this:

1. Technology changes everything.

2. It’s a good thing that publishers are focused on marketing, rather than on silly things like whining about the disappearance of newspaper book sections.

Link.