So Misguided

Plain words, uncommon sense

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A Week of Quotables

This week was a hairy-eyeball week. The kind where you spend a lot of time doing work and very little time doing things like sleeping and eating. Every now and then, I can handle those types of weeks, especially when they bring about quotable gems like the following:

Quote:
* Don’t hire a dog and bark yourself.

* Spreadsheets aren’t strategy.

* What is the square root of Fuck All?

* Not a snowball’s chance in hell.

* Where there’s baloney, there’s a pack of baloney.

* I’m going to come back in and pretend the day is starting fresh.

It’s funny what you’ll say after 5 hours of restless sleep. Next week’s forecast looks like sunny days full of calm, deft precision, lots of sleep and less mania. I’m hoping to use some of these pearls from James & Co.

Quote:
* The only person who likes change is a wet baby.

* I’m not anti-social. I’m selectively social.

* Surely it’s no coincidence that the word “listen” is an anagram of the word “silent”.

And since we’re on the topic of quotables. Here are some of my favourite Dilbertisms.

Quote:
* I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow’s not looking good either.

* I love deadlines. I especially love the swooshing sound they make as they go flying by.

* Tell me what you need, and I’ll tell you how to get along without it.

* Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience.

And that my friends is the week past and the week ahead. Stand back, I’m coming through.

BPIDP Policy Changes

BPIDP?

For those of you not in book publishing, BPIDP (pronounced bippy-dip, not kidding) announced some policy and program updates.

http://pch.gc.ca/progs/ac-ca/progs/padie-bpidp/reports/bulletin-newsletter_e.cfm

My personal favourite is #3.

Quote: 3. Enhanced funding for new technology initiatives

After a successful six year investment in bibliographic data improvements through the Supply Chain Initiative for Publishers, BPIDP will be reorienting its support for new technology initiatives in 2008-2009. In keeping with the findings of several recent industry studies that have identified the need for increased training and professional development in this area, BPIDP will provide funding to support publishers’ acquisition of the knowledge and skills necessary to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by new technologies.

Starting in 2008-2009, BPIDP will fund up to 75% of eligible expenses for technology-based business planning projects and internships for individual publishers. Technology-focused professional development projects for publisher associations will also be eligible for the same level of support. This assistance will not be a permanent measure but rather a limited initiative to help the industry build the foundation for the effective application of new technologies.

Now if only I knew of someone with knowledge of the publishing industry and experience with technology! (About my services page.)

BC Book Prizes Finalists Announced

07 Lieutenant Governor's BC Book PrizesCongratulations to the BC publishers and authors who are shortlisted for the 2008 BC Book Prizes.

The full finalist list is available at 12:01 on the brand new BC Book Prizes website.

The BC Book Prizes website is what I’ve been working on for the last couple of months so I’m really pleased to see it live and corresponding to the announcement of the finalists.

And way to go David Chariandy of Soucouyant, Meg Tilly of Porcupine. and Douglas & McIntyre for Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs. These were 3 BC books that really stood out for me this year.

Go check out the new BC Book Prizes website. And if you like the new site, give them some link love. The BC Book Prizes are going to be blogging from the road this year.

Each year several authors tour the province, bringing BC books to communities across the province.

Are they coming to a town near you? Check the tour schedule.

And if you’re out of province, follow along with the tour blog.

Fun times! And, there’s some Flickr action happening too.

Beautiful Children: Free eBook from Charles Bock

Charles Bock and the fine folks at Random House are giving away a free PDF of Charles Bock’s novel Beautiful Children. It’s available until midnight this Friday (February 29).

I think it is a cool idea.

Quote: Galley Cat is reporting the following:

Bock’s reasoning for approving this giveaway is simple: “I want people to read the book. If that means giving it away for free on-line, great.” UPDATE: Not that he’s letting this “free” stuff go to his head; as an anonymous tipster pointed out, in tiny, faint lettering at the bottom of the website, there’s a little note that says “© Copyright 2008. Charles Bock. This is our intellectual property, so kindly don’t fucking steal it.”

Download the free eBook until Feb 29.

(Source: Dan Wagstaff, thanks Dan!)

Widgets by Susannah Gardner

Blogging expert Susannah Gardner got into the back-end of a couple of different blog systems and showed us how to add these widgets to sidebars and content.

(And David’s blog will be just fine–she’ll fix that little code error. I’m just kidding. Adding widgets is easy.)

Couple of widgets I learned about:
* www.polldaddy.com (cool surveys for your site)
* www.thisnext.com (cool this is what you want to buy next)

Matt Mullenweg: Keynote Speaker Northern Voice

Blogging & Social Media: Where do we go from here?
Presenter: Matt Mullenweg

I’m going to listen.

UPDATE:

Expression
* Most important thing about WordPress is the Presentation, ability to change the design (someone changes presentation every second)
* Facebook, most important thing is the Inbox, ability to send spam-free messages; 2nd is the photos (50% of the page views are to photo pages)

Public
Interaction
Validation
Form Dictates Writing: the tools affect the content people post.

Tools to Check:
Tumblr

Exhortations

4 million WordPress pages per [minute? day? month?] vs 2.1 Wikipedia pages.

photomatt.net is now ma.tt

Achilles Hell of Web 2.0 is spam.

Facebook’s “request” application crap is spam. This is their first big mistake.

Respect people’s time. Single guiding principle for any software development (for anything really: advertising)

Suggestion from recent research says advertising is clicked on by lower income, less education, spend a lot of time online.Let’s verify that.

Advertising needs to evolve. (Hello AdHack)

Megabrands are going to die or be the success model for blogs? Why do you put your brand name in front of everything? Why does each brand have so many sub-brands?

Yahoo’s Flickr, Yahoo News, etc.

Danah Boyd has a great post on this.

YouTube’s related video is their prized thing.

Wikipedia has in-line links as their key thing.

Open Source:
0. the freedom to run the program for any purpose
1-3 great “freedoms” of open source (study, redistribute, improve).

Firefox, Wikipedia (open source, open sourced)

UPDATE 2:
Listen to the podcast of Matt Mullenweg’s Keynote Address.

Robert Ouimet of At Large Media recorded Matt Mullenweg’s keynote address. I thought it was a great speech. He clearly thought about the audience and delivered a top notch address. I think Matt is a very smart cookie, and he totally whipped Boris and I at Wii Tennis. Next time you’re in Van Matt–I want a rematch!

CBC Canada Reads: Vote for Icefields by Thomas Wharton

Straight from the lobbyist for Icefields comes this message. It has my support but not my creative energy for writing something original today (trying to gather my thoughts for tomorrow’s Northern Voice panel).

Quote: The Canada Reads “People’s Choice” voting engine is up and running, on the bottom right corner of the page at:
http://www.cbc.ca/canadareads/

Cast your vote as soon as possible (from every computer at your disposal) for Thomas Wharton’s well-loved novel Icefields, the first book by an Alberta author to compete in Canada Reads!

The Canada Reads 2008 debates will be broadcast daily on CBC Radio One from February 25th to 29th at 11:30 am and 7:30 pm (EST/MST/PST).

Tune in and root for Tom (and Steve)!

Multi-Lingual Blogs and Websites

Jim DeLa Hunt

Canadian Tourism Commission should have a blog in multi-languages, in particular French and English.

Everyone here needs Hummingbird Translations, a great, local Vancouver translation company.

The plan is to talk about:

* Structure
* Content
* Tools
* Translation
* Process
* Politics

Good sites:
* Climb to the Stars (English and French, has summary of the article in the other language)
* Bank of Canada (official Canadian government bank, must publish exactly the same content in exactly the same moment)
* delicious tag of Nancy White on multi-lingual bloggers, Beverley Trainer developed Ruby on Rails platform to work, see ciaris.org
* Wikipedia is a massive, multi-lingual site
* Pop Montreal
* Global Voices
* Joi Ito
* Suw Charman
* Diego Leal, edu-blogger

Questions & Thoughts:
* The invisible posts that are not in your language.
* Tags are interesting way to allow for discovery, tag with multi-lingual.
* URL tells you content language, put in domain, i.e. google.jp
* Offer direction on language
* In URL, site.com/english/
* Joomlah “guess a language” indicator.
* Offer menu.
* Search engines, multiple URLs to same content.
* Ping translators of new content to translate.
* Dotsub comes up again.
* Network effects for translators, using IM

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