Amazon Kindle Redux

Browsing books to buy on Amazon, I suddenly wished for a Kindle — if just for a moment tonight. The ability to download books on a wireless device is brilliant if you want something now.
Remember the hype and Newsweek cover story two months ago? The product was out of stock less than six hours after [...]

Penny for Your Clicks: 5 Ways to Compensate Blog Writers

An interesting memo was published in Valleywag.  The subject of writer pay at a tech blog provoked additional questions on Publishing 2.0. It will fuel a few more blogger keystrokes until the Consumer Electronics Show and MacWorld.
Here’s the rub: Measuring the value of content.
Old media was simple. Great reporting and writing usually won the front page or magazine cover. Pulitzer Prize journalists went on to write books. Audited sources [...]

The Magic of Three

Copyblogger has a very good post about keeping lists short when writing — try to keep them to three. Why three?
Because 10 is too many, two is too short and every other combination in between throws our brains off. We’re used to three. We’ve been brought up to appreciate three. It goes as far back as 17th century Japan [...]

So You Want to be a Writer?

I have strong memories of my first Page One byline article for the Los Angeles Times in 1988 (gasp). The thud of the newspaper hitting my apartment doorstep at 5:30 a.m. never sounded better. Today newspapers as a printed medium are dying and we’re all bylined writers in one way or another, our names attached to words: texting, emailing, blogging.
But these missives don’t carry prestige and [...]

Japan: Quietly Blogging to #1

Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, points out this story in the Washington Post on the huge but quiet blogsphere that is Japan. According to Technorati, Japanese language blogs outnumber those in English, even though the global ratio of English to Japanese speakers is 5:1. As much as 40% of Japanese blogging is done via mobile devices on trains and subways [...]

Six Stages of Email: Excerpts of Nora Ephron Column in NYT

SIX STAGES OF EMAIL
Stage One: Infatuation
I just got e-mail! I can’t believe it! It’s so great! Here’s my handle. Write me! Who said letter writing was dead? Were they ever wrong! I’m writing letters like crazy for the first time in years. I come home and ignore all my loved ones and go straight to [...]

Southern California Blogging

A nifty to way to keep people up to date — with words and pictures no less! Time to keep a blog, journal, record, scrapbook… Call it what you may. No blathering. Pledge to post concise entries. If it becomes too much to maintain — or starts feeling stale, I’ll turn out the lights. For [...]