Fury, by Robert K. Tanenbaum; Dead Run, by p.j. tracy and School Days, by Robert B. Parker (the new Spenser novel).
Category Archives: Books
Library Thing
Most folks have a couple of John Grisham novels on the the shelf but what would it be like to chat for a couple of hours with someone who has read all or most of the same books that you have? The Library Thing lets you browse the libraries of others that share your taste in books. It’s cooler than I can describe.
More than 6,000 users have signed up since August 29, 2005. And some of them have catalogued thousands of books. Mary Elizabeth Burstein –an associate professor of English at the State University of New York– has 3,424 titles in her library.
I’m not even at the half-way mark of my 500 titles but I’m getting there. Once I’m caught up, it’ll be time to give a holler to some of the folks that share my taste in fiction.
Wonderful Library Thing
Regular readers know I love lists. A couple of years ago I made a list of my books at the time, but it’s a paint in the ass to do without a database. Now, a clever guy named Tim Spalding (a web developer, web publisher and search-engine optimizer based in Portland, Maine) has solved this problem and the world is a better place for it.
LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. A free account allows you to catalog up to 200 books. A paid lifetime account allows you to catalog any number of books. I’m just getting started and it’s going to take me a bit to enter all of my titles but once it’s done I’ll have something so much more useful. Thank you, Tim.
Incomplete Guide to Blogs and the New Web
Seth Godin’s latest ebook, Who’s There? Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Blogs and the New Web, is just a little 46 page PDF file but it’s packed with lots of small but profound insights. The kind of stuff you read and think, “You know, he’s right.” Some of my favorites:
We’ve become astonishingly picky. Picky about what we buy and picky about what we watch and picky about what we read. In a world where there’s a lot of clutter and where everything is good enough, most of the time we just pick the stuff that’s close or cheap or familiar. But when it’s something we care about, we go to enormous lengths to find the very best.
Radio is officially dead, especially when wireless internet access comes to your car.
The stuff you’re putting on your marketing site or in your blog or even in your brochures or in your business letters is too long. Too much inside baseball. Too many unasked questions getting answered too soon. The stuff you’re sending out in your email and your memos is too vague.
It used to matter a lot where an idea came from. When an idea came from a mainstream media company (MSM) or from a Fortune 500 company, it was a lot more likely to spread. That’s because media companies had free airwaves or paid for newsprint, while big corporations had the money to buy interruptions. Today, all printing presses are created equal. And everyone owns one. Which means that a good idea on a little blog has a very good chance of spreading. In fact, an idea from outside the mainstream might have an even better chance of spreading.
If you write something great, and do it over and over and over again, then you’ll be unstoppable. Whether or not someone helps you.
The problem is that the very things big companies, public companies, stable companies and established companies are good at are the things that make a blog boring.
Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.
If you care about your personal brand and career and impact, you need a blog. And you should start the cycle of getting better at blogging.
Gibson’s Virtual Light forsaw 7-Eleven take-over
Seven-Eleven Japan –Japan’s largest convenience store operator with more than 10,000 locations– is going to try to buy 7-Eleven USA. William Gibson predicted this in Virtual Light several years ago but I am damned if I can find my copy so I can illustrate this properly. So, tomorrow, I’m going down to Barnes & Noble and buy another copy so I can properly make this point. Stay tuned.