Category: general
Overheard @ Pritchard Park
“I lost my rune stone…”
Why we buy books
From The Penguin Blog:
Two of his arguments seem particularly relevant to me as I think about selling Classics:
1. Context is key.
(a) Give people too much choice and conversion from browsing to buying reduces…(b) People find it difficult to judge the value of something in isolation…. the story of the first bread-maker on the market. It didn’t sell until they introduced a second, bigger and more expensive model and positioned it in store next to it — then the cheaper model flew off the shelves as customers had a context and could put a value to that product.
2. Imprinting habits. Once we start to buy something (say, coffee from Starbucks, or Classics by Penguin), it becomes much easier to do it again and again. It becomes a habit.
You hear a lot of talk about “The Cloud” nowadays…. But nobody seems to be talking about Power Laws.
Hugh MacLeod
Link.
I don’t watch TV and I don’t go to meetings. You’d be amazed at the difference it makes…. I would imagine we’re going to see a rapid acceleration in the quality and meaning of things we manage to create with our new-found time. At least I hope so.
Seth Godin.
(via gaping void) Link
The big story is not about blogging. It’s not about Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Friendfeed or whatever.
It is about..
Cheap. Easy. Global. Media.
CheapEasyGlobal is the big story.
(via Gaping Void) Link
another decision the company has made which has ‘…lead to the watering down of the Starbucks experience, and, what some might call the commoditization of our brand.’
brand autopsy
“The biggest disappointment was that I found so little “poetry” in Poetry…. Very little of it was readable, enjoyable…. many of the poems were burdened with unnecessarily complex, high-falutin’ diction… as well as obscure references to literature and literary figures; abstract, illogical metaphors and comparisons (”postage-stamp bright” and “chasms of flatness”); tin-ear rhymes (”state/copulate” and “drowses/blouses”) and hamstrung syntax (”surfeit of distance and the wracked mind waiting”).” Link
PLOTUS: Kay Ryan
I would rather read a book
Betty Adcock is an excellent North Carolina poet.
From the Charlotte Observer:
[Betty] Adcock tells me that she is not connected to the Internet and would “rather write a long letter than answer multiple e-mails, would rather look in books for information than be over-informed by Google.”
Further, she says, she belongs to few organizations and is active in none.
“I rarely attend conventions of writers or conferences. I do not e-mail,” she says.
Link.
U.S. Gas Prices
A heat map visualization via Gas Buddy
Society… did not favor the reading of poetry…. By the ’90s, it was all over…. consider that poetry is the only art form where the number of people creating it is far greater than the number of people appreciating it…. People don’t possess the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold….
I am part of a world that apotheosizes the trendy, and poetry is just about as untrendy as it gets. I want to read books with buzz… and I can’t remember the last book of poetry that created even a dying mosquito’s worth of hum. I am also lazy, and poetry takes work.
Bruce Wexler
Coffeehouse Junkie 