Facebook is a social utility to connect to your real world friends. But negotiating personal relationships on Facebook is an interesting challenge. In real life, we can deal with people individually. We decided what we want to share.

In real life, you can be friends with Amy, Sally and Susie. You’re friends with all of them, but each of them may know different things about you.

On Facebook, you have a full profile and a limited profile. If Sally and Susie are in a limited profile, you can’t share photos with just Sally. Sally is part of a limited profile. If you share with Sally, you are also sharing with Susie.

So what do you do?

Reject Friend Request is what Philip Jeffrey does, but he extends an invitation to LinkedIn instead.

Hmmmm.

Facebook is a crazy thing for me. I would like to share certain things with my active friends. At the same time, I do pretty much nothing on Facebook because I don’t want to manage the complexity of limited profile, full profile.

I’m paying attention to Philip’s presentation now.

Here’s what he says about creating and promoting groups on Facebook:

1. Search and find most popular group within the subject.
2. Decide what name are you going to use.
3. Figure out if that group & name exists.
4. Make sure you are spelling the name correctly.
5. As creator of group, you’re associated with that group. Set for life. You can let other people be administrators, but you’re always associated with that group.
6. There is no one set solution for directing traffic to your group.
7. Concentrate on search optimizing the title of the group.

Ma.gnolia.com uses Twitter.com to generate feedback from their community and to get immediate feedback on development and new features. They also use it when they have service disruptions. Instead of having lots of people in the community trying to email notifications when the site is down or something is not working, Ma.gnolia can keep the community up to date on what they are working on, and they can get real time feedback on errors and services disruptions that the community is experiencing.

James is doing an session on AdHack.com and creating ads with people power and the skills in the room.

This is a hands-on session and I’m supposed to help James.

Ok, paying attention now.

UPDATE:

The ads are up! In James’ session we talked about design briefs and how to go from concept to ad in less than 60 seconds. I admit that our ads still need some work and fine tuning, but I think we came a long way in 60 minutes.

Topic: Uncle Fatih’s Pizza

Watch our ads for amusement.

Lee LeFever and The Common Craft Show.

Common Craft is the specialist in non-geek explanations of geekdom.

Check out Social Bookmarking in Plain English.

Behind the scenes:

* What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?
* They script it out. This is the most important thing. They get that right.
* They’ll do storyboards and then divide it into scenes.
* They film it.

Lee says the first couple of videos were harder to film. They are now refining their style.

Rules:
* No video over 5 min.
* No external sound effects. Lee hums.
* Try to stay copyright-free.
* Educational
* Constraints are good: hands, humming, paper, whiteboard
* Low tech to explain high tech

Common Craft is focusing their business on being good storytellers. It’s not about being good high-end video producers.

So who’s watching these?

Everyone. Lee also says librarians seem to get and like these videos.

Things that are good to get right: sound quality and visual quality.

Here’s how they started making this a business:
“Problems get solved when they need to get solved.”

Lee showed photos of their great, home set-up. Very MacGyver.
They use strings to move things across the screen.

Technical stuff:

* Edit video in FinalCut Express.

* Edit audio first to get it down. Then place video.

* Use Blip.tv to host videos. Lee likes Blip because the player isn’t branded. Better quality.

* Dotsub.com Uploaded video to dotsub so that you can upload video and add subtitles. Then anyone can translate it.

* Vimeo is how they share video with client. It’s never exposed. Client can download video. Secure.

Good books that influenced Common Craft:
Made to Stick

The Paradox of Choice

Other ideas:
Lee has an idea about explaining other things, like solar energy.

Barcamp Vancouver, August 18.

These Are a Few of My Favourite Things by Tod Maffin
Cool little applets, widgets, haxies, and gadgets that don’t cost much (at all) but make our everyday computing life so much easier!

Here’s the wiki and the links to these tools.

Built in Zoom:
Universal Access. Set Zoom on.
Keyboard hold ctrl option and + or –

Tiny Alarm: add alarm
TinyAlarm

Address Book on Mac and Facebook.
Update info on Facebook, but then have to manually update

FacebookSync: goes through friends’ list and then checks if anything missing in Address Book, including creating new listing.
Plaxo for PC does this too.

FileChute
Big file and can’t send it by email. Send large files easily. Take file want to send, can zip. Creates URL for them to go and collect file.

ImageWell
Take photo and post on blog. Easy upload. Set up locations in advance. Can edit, crop photo if you want, nice dropshadow, adjust size. Hit send. Now uploaded it. URL is copied to clipboard. Free.

OmniDiskSweeper
Checks where your damn disk space has gone. Can see who the worst offenders are so you can get rid of the crap.

Paparazzi
I love this tool. Takes a full screen shot. If log in with Safari, might be work around for sites requiring login.

Textexpander
If you have to type something all the time, this is great.

Menu Master
Change menu shortcuts on the fly. If you’re used to keyboard shortcuts and switch programs (different shortcuts), who cares! Just set your own with this.

Silicon keyboard protector. London Drugs. $15. Save your keyboard.

Huckleberry Mirror. Little periscope that is angled to turn build-in camera to shoot in front of you.

Quicksilver from Blacktree
Control space gives you the search box. Type name of any program and it starts it up. Has all bookmarks. Type and open.

Adium
Multiple IDs for instant messaging? Use Adium. Lots of not-well-known features. Consolidates everyone under one listing. Logs and archives everything.

WeatherPop
Sits in menu bar and tells us the weather in all sorts of places.

BluePhoneElite
Phone and computer talks together. $10 app.

Oh and Tod has an iPhone. My second sighting and touching.

Blackberry sync sucks. Better app is MissingSync.

View PDF as webpage. Hate Adobe. Use Firefox Add-ons.

Ok, PC guys?

Here’s the equivalent in PC.

Want Facebook Sync use Plaxo.com. Sync with thousands of contacts in no time.

FileChute equivalent is YouSendIt.com. Some similar stuff. Or use Pando. Send up to 1 GB. Sends email and can download. Free
http://www.yousendit.com/
www.pando.com/

ImageWell, try www.Quama.com and drag and drop stuff.

Problem trying to sync up more than one friend. www.doodle.ch is swiss tool for helping schedule lots of people.

CRM app. www.freecrm.com for lead management

PictureSync. Syncs all photos to all places you send your photos. Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, Smugmug. Whereever your photos go, you can upload them.

Facebook pluging for Firefox. Share links from the tool bar. Gives little status flash.

Delicious Firefox add-on that lets you add your tags.

Boost is Facebook plug-in that right in toolbar lets you skim Facebook.

Firefox extensions: Web developer toolbar. Let’s you see site without styles. Can disable images.

Firebug. Jump in and explore, edit stuff on fly. Play with CSS without editing things. Can play with other sites to see how they did it. See CSS associated with, for example, the h2 tag. It’s like viewing source but it does it right in split screen. Kind of like Dreamweaver. See what it would look like. Good for quick, dev. elements.

GMail notifier in top menubar.

Firefox also restores closed tab.

Voodopad from Flying Meat for taking notes in an incredibly crafty way. Link all your thoughts together.

Lynda.com is $25 per month US. It’s online training program. Movie library of any program known to man. It’s the “show-me” tool. This is awesome for courses.

Coda. FTP client with preview, edit, manages sites. Visual CSS. Terminal. Reference books. Good text editor. Auto-completion.

VisualHub takes any video file and converts anything to anything.

VLC. Swissarmy knife of video players. Will play any video.

I’m not a first-time author but having worked in the publishing industry, I get a lot of questions from writers who would like to get published. The process is fairly simple: You have to get in the door. This is usually by knowing someone in the company, meeting an editor at a conference, having a great agent or writing a compelling query letter.

Simple in theory. Hard in practice.

I read in the Vancouver Sun today that Robert Scott, a 60-year-old Langford resident, is being published by Avalon Books. Bob decided to write a mystery novel in a month. He took it to a writers’ conference, got a 10-minute pitch interview with a New York publisher’s editorial director and, nine months later, signed a three-book contract.

A dream-come true story, and one that is fairly atypical.

The Sun article tells an interesting story about Bob’s experience, but it also includes some helpful tips on what Bob did to position himself.

Quote:
1. He joined the Crime Writers of Canada: “It was the best 100 bucks I ever spent.” Besides all the resources on their website, the organization provided priceless publicity and contacts.

2. He signed up for the magazine Writer’s Digest, joined its book club and immersed himself in other writing-related sites, listservs and research books. By the time he got to the pitch, he’d already read advice on how to do it.

3. He belongs to a writer’s group that meets weekly from September to June. Shirley read his manuscript, too, and, Scott says, “does a good job of pointing out basic errors” as well as helping with syntax and spelling.

4. He’s dedicated and has good work habits. Scott’s preferred writing time is midnight till 4 a.m. For example, on Wednesday he might write from midnight until 6 a.m. the next day, go to his Rotary meeting, come back, sleep a little, and then write in the evening. He feels comfortable if he’s written 2,000 words a day.

5. He goes to the annual Surrey International Writers’ Conference. Scott says it’s a standout among these types of events, and it’s where he pitched his manuscript.

6. He offered what an in-house editor wanted. He says of Cartwright-Niumata: “I’ve heard comments from her like, ‘Your stories are well written.'”

When she was asked about Scott, she sent back this message through her assistant Faith Black – and there’s hope in it for all aspiring writers:

“Erin met Bob at the Surrey writers’ conference in Vancouver, and they had a great meeting. Bob delivered a great pitch on his book, and Erin knew she wanted to work with him before even reading anything. It was a good, short pitch that reeled her in and got her interested in the project.

“If you write well and you submit properly (following the correct guidelines for submission), anyone can write for Avalon. We are always looking for new and first-time authors.”

All good advice.

(I’d love to link to the Vancouver Sun article but because Canada.com is such a shitty site, I can’t find the article online, and in the unlikely event that the search worked, I’m sure the article would be password protected and viewable only to subscribers. There’s an online strategy for you.)

Better Books is a conversation in multiple parts between me and Raincoast publicist Dan Wagstaff.

* Introduction
* Part 1. Market challenges.
* Part 2. The music industry and the book industry.
* Part 3. We go on a bit, discussing what we’ve learned.
* Part 4. Ebooks and POD.
* Part 5. POS materials.
* Part 6. Marketing plans.
* Part 7. Innovation.

It’s been a struggle to close up this series because both Dan and I feel that we have too much to say yet lack the words to say it. In the end, Dan finds the perfect words.

Here’s Dan:
Quote: We have covered so much ground that it is difficult to come to wrap this up succinctly isn’t it? And the issues surrounding technology are constantly changing (who knew book trailers were going to rise from the dead?),

I guess the problem with these questions is that they only look at part of the picture, focusing on issues of delivery and marketing, on the assumption that we already publish books people want to buy (if only they knew it!).

But what if we’re publishing too many books that people don’t actually want? Then the whole problem looks a little different, and digitisation and better marketing can only help so much.

Perhaps this is the issue facing the music industry too? Could the downloading issue actually be a sideshow? I guess blaming customers is easier than improving your product,

In any case, there’s no use in thinking about any of these issues in isolation. We need to think about them holistically. Just as hyping crap e-books isn’t going to work, producing unknown masterpieces that no-one can buy isn’t going to cut it either. We need to look at the whole process. How we can publish smarter, AND improve our marketing and delivery? Certainly, technology can help us with this, but ultimately it is only a tool.

Thank you for following the Better Book series.