Month: July 2010

Learn what your social media specialist should know

In a recent podcast workshop, a social media strategist said, “Just because you build it doesn’t mean anyone will hear it.” Today I spent the morning writing a report on podcasting with that thought in mind. Here’s a summarized, abridged version of Erik Deckers’s list of questions to ask your social media expert:

  1. Does your social media consultant avoid using Twitter?
  2. Who are your social media followers?
  3. Do you have a social media strategy?
  • 5 Questions To Ask After Your Social Media “Expert” Has Started

Keep in mind that social media isn’t a cheap promotional tool. It’s a conversation.

What will you spend your minutes doing?

I love these lines from Rachel Zucker’s poem:

With my minutes, I chip away at the idiom,
an unmarked pebble in a fast current.

Link: “After Baby After Baby” by Rachel Zucker

Are your paint chips calling you?

Okay, the 30 poems in 30 days challenged hasn’t been completed yet and I found my next assignment (if I chose to accept it). Rachel Berger, a graphic designer in San Francisco, wrote short writings inspired by paint chips. Read some of her samples.

Link: 100 Colors, 100 Writings, 100 Days

30 poems in 30 days: update four: targeted venom

Days six and seven
Days six and seven

Somewhere around day ten or eleven I fell off schedule. A lot of distractions and stress hit me like one tsunami wave after another. Last night I caught up with a binge writing session at a local bookstore. While having lunch (if a bagel and coffee qualify as a lunch) this afternoon at a cafe, I read through what I wrote last night and discovered some emotionally raw lyrics. Some of it is so personal it is not accessible to a casual reader. A closer investigation of the poem sketches reveal a controlled form providing a vehicle for anger. Whereas a poetic rant is the literary equivalent to vomit or oil gushing from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, an angry poem attempts a focused avenue for venom much like a fire hose targets the base of a fire. Not all the poems composed last night are angry poems; only a couple. However, the angry poem sketches I composed shift from formal to informal dimeter (an example of dimeter is “The Robin” by Thomas Hardy or the use of dactylic dimeter in Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”). I wonder if editing the poems with longer lines, maybe like Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” or Ginsberg’s “Howl,” would change the tone dramatically.

Learn how to transfer files the old school way

An antique 100 Mb Zip disc

This takes me back almost a decade. But this morning I had to scan an illustration. The only machine in the office with a scanner is an old beige Power Macintosh G3 minitower with Zip drive. Because the machine is an antique it doesn’t connect to the network. So I dug up an old 100 Mb Zip disc, scanned the illustration using Photoshop 6.0 (it took two scans because the image is larger than the 8″x10″ scanner bed), transferred the art files to Power Mac G4 minitower with Zip drive, stitched the two scans together using Photoshop CS, and emailed the art file to my MacBook Pro.

The question you may be asking right now is why all the trouble? Good question:

  1. The scanner is so old it doesn’t have a USB connection.
  2. The Zip drives do not have USB connection.
  3. It’s Monday.

Sometimes I feel so used

Five Magazine Direct Mail Envelopes

Last week I received five direct mail envelopes from five different magazine publishers. Only two of those magazines have I actually had subscriptions (guess which ones). That means those two magazine publishers sell my name to other publications with similar demographic audiences.

How to improve your social media agenda

If you’re stuck in a traditional media organization where executives thing Twitter is something birds do or look blankly at you when you suggest posting videos to Vimeo, then check out Mashable’s tips list.

1. Share Content
2. Curate Conversations
3. Engage Audiences
4. Promote Your Presence
5. Customize the Experience
6. Track Everything

You’ll find links to all sorts of social media tools and resources.

Link: 6 Crucial Social Media Tips for Traditional Media

Coffeehouse Junkie Podcast

http://assets.tumblr.com/swf/audio_player.swf?audio_file=http://www.tumblr.com/audio_file/850012187/tumblr_l5za0v570O1qz6sbe&color=FFFFFF

Coffeehouse Junkie Podcast – Episode 15

This episode features an audio version of the three most viewed blog posts of the last week, including:

  • Writing Tips from C.S. Lewis. Link
  • 30 poems in 30 days. Link
  • Mechanical, thoughtless and unengaged: a Facebook story. Link

The most read story from the archives:

  • An interview with River District artist Eva Scruggs. Link

For questions or comments about the podcast, email me at coffeehousejunkie[at]gmail[dot]com.

You want to earn money as a webcomic producer?

Then cut out the middle man. Apparently that is what Scott Kurtz, of the popular webcomic PvP. His reason for leaving Image Comics (notably the fourth largest comic publisher in America) and Diamond (the primary distributor of comics in the U. S.):

Sales through brick-and-mortar stores are declining and online sales are increasing…

Well, I could have told him that. Almost all the books I’ve helped authors publish have been released online exclusively.

Link: PvP Goes It Alone for Publishing, Leaves Diamond as Well

Field notes

while walking this morning in the foggy dew… i wonder if norway has mornings like this?

30 poems in 30 days: update three

30 poems in 30 days: day 5
pages of a poem for day five

As stated previously, Deborah offered a challenge to write 30 poems in 30 days. So far, I’ve been able to keep up with it in spite of a summertime cold and an urgent freelance job that evolved into a larger project than I anticipated. Still, the discipline of writing a poem a day, or at least a poem sketch a day, has proved to be rewarding in and of itself. Two benefits have come out of this exercise so far:

  1. the generation of new material and
  2. brain dumping stuff that’s been cluttering my mind.

At least one poem sketch so far helped articulate something I’ve been struggling with for a few months. Forcing myself to write at least once a day brought that struggle up from the subconscious and allowed me to form it into a personal poem. Somewhere in my reading I came across a poet, or writer, that said writing every day, even if it’s only for your own eyes, is good practice in writing content for others. My writing professor at the university encouraged students to write a novel for yourself first. Even if the novel is intended only for you, it is worth writing it. And sometimes it may find audience elsewhere.

Learn which company provides the best photo books

While searching for a place to print a family photo album I came across a couple photo book companies. I’ve used both Blurb and Shutterfly and am not particularly fond of either of their final product. Maybe I’m too much of a graphic design snob, but I really don’t enjoy the out-of-the-box templates and the poor image quality of the final printed photo book. Of the two, I prefer Shutterfly, but only because iPhoto makes it easy to order photos. Digital Home Thoughts provides a detailed product review of 10 other photo book companies and their top picks. I may try their top pick for my next photo book project.

Link: The Great Photo Book Round-Up Review: Who Makes The Best Photo Books?

Editors and publishers as midwives

Publishers typically sign on new projects, do some big-picture editing, then pass the project to the editor, who does the more painstaking work of carrying the project from its detailed editing and design stages to production. The life of an editor and publisher involves more reading than you can fit into a day at the office. We have to keep up with the publishing world, know what people want to buy, work closely and diplomatically with authors, and lug around heavy satchels of manuscripts. People often liken editors and publishers to midwives. The industry is dominated by women who aren’t paid all that well, but who are working in this helping, nurturing role, counselling authors and helping bring their “baby” into the world.

The scoop on working in publishing (via fluffynotes)

How to Take Command of Any Meeting

How do you like that emotionally rich, evocative headline? Copyblogger offers 12 other emotive headlines with emotional benefits explained after each headline. The emotional benefit to the above headline, How to Take Command of Any Meeting” is “feeling respected.”

Link: 13 Emotion-Based Headlines That Work

polyglot

wordjournal:

adjective • 1) containing, or made up, of, several languages. 2) versed in, or speaking, many languages.

noun • 1) one who speaks several languages. 2) a book containing several versions of the same text, or containing the same subject matter in several languages. 3) a program written in multiple programming languages (programming).

From Greek, πολύς (many) + γλῶττα (tongue, language)

30 poems in 30 days challenge: update two

30 poems in 30 days: days 3 & 4
pages of poems for days three and four

Deborah offered a challenge to write 30 poems in 30 days. I took up the challenge and so far I’m on schedule with one poem a day. Maybe after the challenge I’ll translate the poems from handwritten form to digital, but for me the urgency is to get it all down first. It’s kind of like catching butterflies or lightening bugs.

One interesting item is that the poems have developed a theme. When I accepted the challenge I wasn’t planning on writing 30 theme-based poems, but somewhere under the surface it appears in each page of the poems I’m composing. I guess I’ll find out if it changes course by the end of the challenge.

Poem: Inland

I could swim in these lines from “Inland” by Chase Twichell for days:

Above the blond prairies,
the sky is all color and water.

It’s as if the poet read the pages of my mind and wrote a poem based on the reading.

I love painting more than poetry.

The spare details used created such enduring images that’s hard for me to let go of the poem.

love is folded away in a drawer
like something newly washed

T-shirt design: Why I am a designer

Interested in a "why i am a designer" t-shirt?

A couple years ago I stumbled upon this graphic on my Tumblr dashboard. Recently, I contacted the designer behind the art and asked if he planned to release the design as a poster or t-shirt. He replied he might if more people were interested in a t-shirt.

So, David Sherwin wants to know if anyone, beside myself, is interested in ordering this design as a t-shirt?

30 poems in 30 days challenge: update

30 poems in 30 days: day 1 & 2
Poems of days one and two

In spite of a very crazy week I’m still on track with the 30 poems in 30 days challenge. The rain delays on Monday afforded me time to compose a page-length poem. It’s no where near the ideal of composing 75 lines of poetry per day, but it’s a much needed discipline just to fill a page in my moleskine notebook.

Business: Growth versus Innovation

Recently, I heard, or read, someone responding to the question of which is more important: growth or innovation. The person responded innovation, because innovation feeds growth and not the other way around. HBR provided the following points of innovation:

  • population
  • penetration
  • price
  • purchase

Link: The 4 Ps of Innovation

Poem: Beginning with Two Lines from Rexroth

Ray Gonzalez’s prose poem “Beginning with Two Lines from Rexroth” begins with the opening line:

I see the unwritten books, the unrecorded experiments, the unpainted pictures, the interrupted lives, a staircase leading to a guarantee, the glowing frame of wisdom protecting me from harm after I escape the questions of a lifetime.

There’s an urgency to these lines that remind me of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Also, there is a strong collision of abstract ideas and images as in the following line:

There is no agony and waste, only the steps into the frontier where it is easy to hide.

There’s an interview with Ray Gonzalez on Bombsite where he discussed who he crafts line and prose poems.

Mechanical, thoughtless and unengaged: a Facebook story

A writer laments that he has a huge Facebook following, but it doesn’t convert to readers of his book. From AdPulp:

Gregory Levey, communications professor and author of Shut Up, I’m Talking, says, “if my online fans can’t even grasp that the fan page they’ve joined is for a book, I’m not particularly optimistic that they’ll read the book in question – or any books at all, for that matter.”

Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco opines: “Facebook has become such a burden and a time-suck that they’re only able to devote a fraction of their shattered attention spans to it. They’re reacting to friends’ updates and clicking ‘like’ buttons and joining fan pages like Pavlov’s dogs — it’s becoming mechanical, thoughtless. The opposite of ‘engaged.'”

(Link: Yet Another Facebook Story: A Mile Wide But An Inch Deep)

After reading this I may just pull the plug on my Facebook account (though I know, like the Hotel California, Facebook doesn’t really let you leave).

Poem: If My Voice Is Not Reaching You

If my voice is not reaching you
add to it the echo—
echo of ancient epics

Afzal Ahmed Syed‘s poem “If My Voice Is Not Reaching You” offers such a great opening stanza. A poet can go almost anywhere with those opening lines and a reader will follow with intrigue.

E-readers take longer to read than books

The title says it all: Kindle and iPad Books Take Longer to Read than Print:

…reading speeds declined by 6.2% on the iPad and 10.7% on the Kindle compared to print.

(Link: Kindle and iPad Books Take Longer to Read than Print)