What are the differences between traditional publishing, vanity press, and self-publishing? How do the newer print-on-demand options compare?
Writer Carla King takes a look at the issues in her PBS MediaShift column, Self-Publishing, Author Services Open Floodgates for Writers.
From the nation of Georgia comes an example of what not to do with your media.
French television station TV5Monde reported last night that a Georgian broadcasting station had perpetrated a hoax on the order of Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds.
A news broadcaster at the station had falsely reported that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had been killed and that Russian tanks had begun to invade the nation.
The French station reported that Georgians had panicked, causing a run on food supplies at markets, and that calls for emergency medical help had skyrocketed as a result of the so-called news. But it was all a hoax.
In the article Panic in Georgia After a Mock News Broadcast, Andrew Kramer of the New York Times gives some details.
Working with a new tool requires patience. Learning how to use it often takes time from the very thing that you wanted to use the tool for.
I recently worked with five busy professionals to put together a panel discussion on freelancing. Tiny decisions about who, where, when, what, and how had to be made around multiple schedules and across geographical distances.
At first, we communicated by email. But the volume of email soon got out of hand, and some information got lost in the shuffle.
I set up a Google Sites wiki as a virtual meeting place. We were able to write updates, introduce ourselves to one another with short biographies and photos, store contact information, post target dates, and work together on the questions that we would discuss. Best of all, each panelist could check in at his or her convenience to see what others were saying.
But some panelists hesitated to add to the wiki, perhaps intimidated by not knowing how to use the tool. Others were not checking in regularly. So we reverted to emails that said things like “Don’t forget to check the wiki!”
Although everyone agreed that we should meet before the night of the panel discussion, finding a time and place to meet in person proved too complicated.
To schedule a meeting time that would work for the greatest number of people, I set up a poll through Doodle.com. The panelists and our helpers could then vote on when they could attend.
We eventually held two conference calls on FreeConference. The service was not quite free, but setup was relatively simple and the call automatically recorded for later use.
The February 24 panel discussion, Tips for Surviving and Thriving as a Freelancer, went very well, with 75 people seated in the Mechanics’ Institute meeting room and café for the meeting.
Publicity had reached Bay Area Editors’ Forum, the Northern California Translators Association, the Northern California Science Writers Association, San Francisco Women on the Web, readers of the Sin and Syntax site, and likely a few others.
Getting Things Done
Three Ways to Network Without Getting Sweaty Palms
“Blogging has become so 2006,” writes tech journalist Benny Evangelista, citing a Pew Center Research report titled Social Media & Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults, a group also known as the millenials.
. Benny Evangelista, Blogging Is for Old People, Pew Report Finds (published as “Teens Prefer Facebook, Report Finds” in paper/hard-copy edition), San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 4, 2010.
. Scott Keeter and Paul Taylor, The Millennials, Pew Research Center, Dec. 11, 1009.
. Amanda Lenhart, Kristen Purcell, Aaron Smith, and Kathryn Zickuhr, Social Media & Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults, Pew Internet & American Life Project, Feb. 3, 2010.
Emily Pilloton works with Project H Design to create, refine, and publicize useful objects for “planet, people, and profit,” a field that she calls humanitarian design.
She recently demonstrated these items for Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report:
Pilloton and others are taking their design show on the road beginning Monday, February 1, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Here’s the itinerary. For more information, see the Design Revolution Road Show site.
Thanks to Nancy Noble, my former professor in the Design and Industry department at San Francisco State University, for the link.
William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well and other wonderful how-to books, tells international students at Columbia University: “As you start your journey…, you may tell yourself that you’re doing ‘communications,’ or ‘new media,’ or ‘digital media’ or some other fashionable new form. But ultimately you’re in the storytelling business.”
William Zinsser, Writing English as a Second Language, The American Scholar, Winter 2010.
If a police investigator finds Facebook photos that prove that you were in a Hawaii triathlon last month, at the same time that you were receiving disability payments from your home state, has the investigator broken the law?
San Francisco Chronicle journalist Bob Egelko examines a few such cases and writes that the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed suit this week to help define those legal limits. Along the way, he speaks with Shane Witnov, who has helped write “guidelines for lawyers’ use of social networking sites.”
. Bob Egelko, Suit Wants Details About Cops’ Online Probes, San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 5, 2009.
. “Social Networks: Friends or Foes? Confronting Online Legal and Ethical Issues in the Age of Social Networking,” a conference held on Oct. 23, 2009, UC Berkeley School of Law, MP3 recordings and readings.
. David Lee and Shane Witnov, Handbook on Conducting Research on Social-Networking Websites in California, Dec. 1, 2008.
Jakob Nielsen provides some interesting information about computer users’ tolerance for interactions on web sites in the Alertbox posting “Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience.”
Writes Nielsen: “0.1 second is the response time limit if you want users to feel like their actions are directly causing something to happen on the screen.”
Worse yet: “The average page visit lasts about 30 seconds, but the more experienced the users are, the less time they allocate to each Web page.”
If you’re posting a video, he writes, don’t run anything longer than 1 to 2 minutes.
Lighten up, babe.
Jakob Nielsen, Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience, Alertbox, Oct. 5, 2009.
Companies lay off workers in an effort to cut costs and raise the value of their publicly traded stock. News of a layoff, downsizing, or reduction in force (RIF) is usually welcome to a company’s investors, but it is much less so to the people who are laid off.
Here are three people who have changed a layoff into something more positive.
After her husband was laid off from Sun Microsystems in 2008, Katy Dickinson wrote this excellent list of things to consider before and after you are laid off: After the RIF Notice, Before You Leave. Skip the Sun-specific stuff if you’re not an employee of that company, but you may find some of the rest useful.
Laurent Bridenne wants a job, and to prove just how much he wants that job, he’s offering to give the first paycheck to the person who helps him find the new position. If you’d like to keep up with his further exploits in the world of digital media, take a look at his new blog.
In the article East Bay Man Turns Unemployment into Opportunity, journalist
Linh Tat of the Oakland Tribune writes about Chuck Castagnolo, who decided to use his experiences with downsizing to help others deal with unemployment and find new work. In the process, he found himself a new job and a new direction.
Laurent Bridenne, Welcome to the Program, Nov. 5, 2009.
Katy Dickinson, After the RIF Notice, Before You Leave, Jan. 15, 2009.
Linh Tat, East Bay Man Turns Unemployment into Opportunity, Oakland Tribune, Nov. 9, 2009.
In a recent short article, James Temple of the San Francisco Chronicle gave a pointer to Bloggers’ Legal Guide, published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The EFF bills itself as “the leading civil liberties group defending your rights in the digital world.”
James Temple, The Tech Chronicles: “Skank Case” Precedent Worries Privacy Groups, San Francisco Chronicle, August 20, 2009.
Jacqui Cheng has written Facebook Privacy: A Guide, with detailed instructions and screenshots for how to limit who sees what in your Facebook postings and profile.
Here’s the article teaser: “Facebook has decent privacy controls, but most users don’t realize how to take full advantage of them. Ars guides you through Facebook’s privacy settings so that you can be both social and respectable at the same time.”
Jacqui Cheng, Facebook Privacy: A Guide, from Ars Technica, August 14, 2009.
Instead of suing a young couple whose YouTube video of their spirited wedding entrance featured a Sony-owned soundtrack, writes Dana Oshiro of ReadWriteWeb, Sony is riding on the back of the video’s popularity.
Dana Oshiro, Build Profit Not DMCA Suits: YouTube and the Wedding March, ReadWriteWeb, July 30, 2009.
According to an article in the April 24 issue of the Guardian, it’s now possible to have a machine print you “any of 500,000 titles while you wait.”
On Demand Books, the manufacturers of the Espresso Book Machine, known to its friends as EBM, call their device “an ATM for books.” The brochure and spec sheet for the device claims that EBM “can automatically print, bind, and trim on demand at point of sale perfect-bound library-quality paperback books with 4-color covers … in minutes for a production cost of a penny a page.” The brochure mentions that EBM has a “strategic alliance” with major book distributor Ingram Book Group.
Print on demand (POD) publishing has been around for a while now, with companies such as Cafe Press and Lulu.com, among others, giving ordinary people a chance to publish and distribute their books of memoirs, poetry, scholarly research, artwork, or just about anything. The EBM itself has been in use since 2007, though primarily in libraries and bookstores.
EBM offers access to 500,000 titles, with plans to offer “nearly two million titles.” Google Book Search already offers online access to over two million books.
Thanks to my friends at Sonoma State University Library for the pointer to this article.
Alison Flood, Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine Launches in London, Guardian, April 24, 2009.
Espresso Book Machine 2.0 brochure and spec sheet and FAQ, On Demand Books, 2009.
At SnagFilms.com, you can choose from more than 550 documentary films to view. If you’d like to promote one of them, you can use a SnagFilms widget to host the film on your own web site, blog, or Facebook page.
The PDF media kit lists the SnagFilms executive team as Ted Leonsis, former vice chairman of AOL; Steve Case, former chair and CEO of AOL; and Rick Allen, former CEO of National Geographic Ventures and of Discovery.
The media kit conveniently asks: “What is SnagFilms’ business model?”
The answer: “SnagFilms pays out to the rights holders an equal share of advertising earned from streaming their film on the SnagFilms web site, via a SnagFilms virtual movie theater widget, or a SnagFilms distribution partner. Additional revenue for the rightsholder is earned from links to buy the DVD or pay to download.”
Among the current list of most discussed documentaries are Super Size Me, a journey into fast food; Paper Clips, about schoolchildren in Tennessee who collected six million paper clips as part of a project to understand the magnitude of the Holocaust; and In Debt We Trust, about the stranglehold of credit-card debt on U.S. consumers.
SnagFilms makes liberal use of banner ads and short ads that play before the feature you select. But perhaps access to these films makes the price of admission worthwhile.
Allison Takeda and Jonathan Witherspoon, Parade Picks: Websites, Parade Magazine, April 5, 2009, p. 19.
Journalist Verne Kopytoff of the San Francisco Chronicle had two articles related to Google Maps and Earth in the March 30, 2009, issue.
In Google Carves Out Its Corner, Kopytoff looks closely at Google Maps and Earth and talks with John Hanke, formerly of satellite-mapping service Keyhole.
A related piece, Mappers Give Critical Eye to Aerial Images, discusses some of the issues that Google’s mapping team faces. What appears on your screen as a single satellite image is a compilation of many images taken at different times. And there are concerns about giving too much detail: “In some cases, Google is asked by government officials to blur aerial images of sensitive buildings … for security reasons.”
