NabaTech

Book Promotion—Harder Than Writing the Book

Recently I bought two non-fiction books after I heard about them—the first one through a TV appearance and the second when the author spoke at a conference I attended. I must confess that until recently I have not done much to promote any of my computer books, nor have I taken advantage of my "already published" status to establish what Joe Wikert called an author platform. I honestly can't tell if the lack of an author platform hurt the sales of my books, but the lack of any promotion certainly did not help sales. After I began this blog, I got reeducated on how book promotion is ultimately in the author's hand. I accept this responsibility at face value, but I am not sure what specifically a computer book author can do to help promote books. The publisher certainly does the necessary work to make sure the book appears in catalogs and is available at both brick-and-mortar and online bookstores. For my part, I now have this blog and I am setting up an online presence, and perhaps I can gradually establish an "author platform" with my efforts. However, none of these steps address the problem of simply making the existence of the book known to prospective buyers. I don't think I have enough visitors to my blog and website to make a difference. Someday, in the future, I'll find out first hand if having a blog and a web presence makes any difference in book sales, but in the meanwhile I wish there were some other ways to promote an upcoming book—without spending too much money, of course :-)

Tags: books publishing promotion author platform presence blog online sales marketing

Blog Search Engine—Technorati Beta

Visitors often reach blogs through search engines and mine is no exception. The only surprise, at least to me, was that when it comes to searches that landed someone on my blog, it seems to be about 50-50 between Google and Technorati. I was surprised by this because I use Google extensively, but I had not realized so many people use Technorati as well. I had tried Technorati a few times, but gave up because it was too slow. Then I heard about the new Technorati beta and tried it out. The beta site looks better than the old site, but the response time is mixed—I had good response over the weekend, but the site seems sluggish during the workday.

Search for a keyword or a tag at Technorati beta and you get all the recent matching blogs along with supposedly related photos from Flickr. I found the tag search results more relevant than the keyword search, probably because blog posting tags are more relevant than whatever the keyword search is picking up. The Flickr photos don't typically relate to the search results, so I don't know what value they add. Displaying the most recent blogs seems like a good idea, but I wish Technorati would also display those blogs that are considered authoritative for a keyword—the problem is figuring out the "authoritativeness" of a blog; they have to figure out some kind of ranking system and number of links alone would skew this to the top few blogs. Maybe Technorati should add a "feedback/rate this" link to each search result so that users can give feedback and then factor that (along with number of links) into calculating what users find most relevant. Overall, I think I'll continue to try Technorati along with Google and also send them my feedback for the improvements.

Tags: tags tagsonomy Technorati technorati blog rank search flickr google feedback rating beta

Preview of Latest Microsoft Start

I had tried out the two versions of Microsoft's online RSS aggregator/reader—http://www.start.com/1/ and http://www.start.com/2/ a while back and now there's a third preview version of Microsoft Start that combines various features from the previous two versions. To try the preview version, go to http://www.start.com/3/ and answer the five questions to get the new version's URL (don't worry, if you don't know the answers, you can click the search link to get each answer from MSN Search). Here's a typical screen shot of the new Start:

When you first go to Start, the initial RSS feeds appear organized in blocks in a dashboard (you can toggle the dashboard on or off by clicking the link in the upper right hand corner). Click Show next to Start in the upper left corner to see the feed categories. Click the arrow to the left of My Feeds to open it up and then click [add feed] to add your own feeds. After typing in the feed URL and clicking Add in a dialog box, you can pin that feed to the dashboard. You can drag the blocks by their title bar and move around to rearrange the dashboard. When you click a link in a block, a few more lines of that item appears in a popup dialog box. The new version's user interface is a mixed bag for me. I wish that clicking an item expanded it within its block in the dashboard instead of showing another popup. Clicking more... in the expanded view of an item brings up that item's full content in a separate browser window. I don't know what a good solution is, but when I click a link, I would rather have the content appear in the dashboard area and then I can click Back to return to the dashboard again. I think they could divide the box on the left hand side into two scrolling vertical panes and make use of the lower pane as a placeholder for the current dashboard when that area is showing an item's full content. They could offer a link on that lower left pane to revert to the dashboard view again. Anyway, I noticed a feedback link at the bottom of the window—I guess I better click that link and give my feedback directly to the development team!

Tags: RSS aggregator Microsoft start trends MSN

In Praise of Glue People

By Glue People, I don't mean the 1996 Mad About You episode with the same title, nor am I referring to anything related to glue sniffing. What I mean by "glue people" is similar to the way Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, used the term. In any organization or any major endeavor, glue people are the ones who hold things together and keep everything going. These are people who welcome and listen to multiple viewpoints, bridge gaps between differing opinions, and, without really forcing themselves onto anyone, keep people working productively together. It's not one person that does this, but many people throughout the organization fulfill the glue person role. Most people are glue people to some degree; some are just better at it and can sustain the glue role continually and more effectively.

If you stop and think about it for a moment, I bet you can sense who the glue people are in your own organization. They generally don't crave the limelight and their work is done behind the scenes, but if you are in a position to bestow recognition and reward performance, you should keep the glue people in mind and try to nurture them. We need more glue people—they're a truly invaluable resource for any organization.

Tags: glue people gluepeople

Blogosphere—Hierarchies and the Long Tail

I am new to the blogosphere and soon after my first few postings I was noticing the hierarchy among the blogs based on their popularity as measured by number of links, traffic, etc. I thought for a bunch of people dedicated to expressing our thoughts and opinions independently, we bloggers seem strangely attracted to hierarchies. We want to know who links to whom? We have services that count links, rank blogs according to whatever is considered the current best measure of importance of a blog. Shouldn’t we be just happy to have a medium where we can put down our thoughts and other (maybe just a few) like-minded souls can drop by accidentally or purposefully and read what we wrote? That ought to be good enough, but somehow of our obsession with pinging all the aggregators the moment we put down a few new words belies that.

I knew I was not onto anything new and a quick search proved that. I found Clay Sharky's February 8, 2003 post on Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality where he uses the power law distribution to explain that the affinity for developing a hierarchy is perfectly normal behavior for the blogosphere. There is, of course, no enforced hierarchy in blogosphere, but one emerges nonetheless. The nice part is that although the hierarchical structure is there, who occupies what position is shifting constantly, so you have as good a chance as anyone else to get to the top! Besides, if you can't make it to the top few, there's always The Long Tail :-)

Note: To read more about the "long tail" (the term refers to the tail of the power law distribution), see Chris Anderson's The Long Tail blog.

Tags: blog weblog conversation writing blogger writer hierarchy power law long tail longtail powerlaw blogosphere

Blogging is Not a Conversation, But That’s Fine With Me

I have been blogging for about a month now and I thought it’s time to capture the essence of my experience so far. Overall, I like blogging as a forum for expressing my thoughts and opinions. I think of my blog as a public storage for my observations so that anyone can read them whenever they want. Initially I thought the blog was going to be a way to initiate conversations and receive constructive input. That has not turned out to be true—it’s hard to have a conversation through comments and, in retrospect, I think I was mostly interested in putting the seed of my thoughts into the reader’s thought stream, which I can achieve by simply writing the blog.

When I first started, I also got quite caught up in promoting the blog—submitting the blog to various blog aggregators and search engines, commenting on other blogs, sending trackbacks to others, all in an attempt to drive up traffic and get linked :-) Some of my enthusiasm was due to the novelty of it all, but much of it is because of my continuing desire to find readers for my blog. I am sure everyone else has the same itch. I know I’ll continue to promote the blog and probably even set up a Web site as well to promote by books.

Of course, I am not the only one making these observations about blogs not being conversations. A quick Google search brought some similar musings from others. Here are two interesting examples: Blogging: Conversation or Soliloquy? and Why "Blogging" Sucks (it's the nomenclature of "blogging" that the author days sucks because a blogger is just a writer).

The bottom line is that I like blogging and I plan to continue writing. As for the reasons why, I point you to David St Lawrence’s Ripples blog where he explains his reasons for writing in Why I Write. All I can add to his thoughts is, my feelings, exactly!

Tags: blog weblog conversation writing blogger writer

Google, Amazon, Yahoo, ... as the New Content Intermediaries

Commenting on one of his recent posts on whether self-publishing changes all the rules, Tim O'Reilly's noted that the middlemen never go away; technology just changes the middlemen. His observation certainly rings true and it’s really not a problem because we need the middlemen. As someone capable of producing content that the market might want, I have been wondering how I could get paid for at least some of my content in the new world of tagged content. It seems easy for authors to become online content creator/provider, but we need intermediaries to get content to the paying customers, deliver the content in a format that the customer wants, collect the payment, and apportion the payments among various content creators/providers. Here’s a simplified diagram illustrating the new content intermediary:

The content still stays under each author’s control, but I am envisioning an automated process where the intermediary’s systems can gather relevant pieces of content from different providers based on what a customer needs. The intermediary enables customers to search the content, browse catalogs, view rankings based on third-party reviews or sales rankings, and mix and match to create a custom set of chunks of content. Perhaps the customer can even decide in what format she wants the content—print or any one of several eBook formats—and all these are generated on the fly from the tagged content. (Print version could be done by the intermediary’s print-on-demand system.) The intermediary takes care of accepting payment from the customer and keeping track of sales for all content providers, and making payments to the providers. Nothing that revolutionary in the concept except that we probably need some tags for providing pricing information for content. Do we also need any standard taxonomy for the tags or could the intermediary discover these through online indexing of the content? These are some of the details that a prospective content intermediary needs to work out.

Who could be these new content intermediaries? Well, you know the potential players already—Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc. and perhaps some of the current book publishers would become the new intermediaries (publishers could also be content aggregators that feed the content intermediary that sells to the public). The new twist is that we’d have a new way of selling smaller chunks of content instead of today’s model of one bookful at a time.

Tags: self publishing epublishing ebooks books content intermediary trends

Expect More Subscribers as More Web Browsers Include Built-in RSS/Atom Support

Subscribing to RSS/Atom feeds has really changed how I keep up with online information. After I started my own blog, I also started subscribing to other blogs—on topics such as news, book writing (computer books as well as fiction), publishing, and much more. I still search for information when I need, but because the feeds are updated periodically, I can easily catch up with the latest wave of thoughts and opinions (and only the ones I specifically want to keep up with). All the latest posts are right there in my RSS reader/aggregator. I like the idea of not having to go to individual specific Web sites to get my news and read about what's the latest in my areas of interest. Now I understand why you need an RSS feed for any online content. Without an RSS feed, you'd simply miss out on many in your potential audience who wants the steady, soothing drip-drip of their daily dose of syndicated content :-)

Speaking of subscribing to RSS feeds, the first thing I needed was an RSS reader and I did what any self-respecting Web aficionado would do—Google for "RSS Readers". In a few minutes I found out about all the popular RSS readers for the different platforms—Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Web (Web RSS aggregators are Web sites where you can read your feeds using your Web browser). I did not want to run yet another stand-alone application. Because I have several Web browsers always running, my choices were between a Web RSS reader or a reader that plugs into the Web browser. For reading feeds on the Web, Bloglines seemed like a good choice. As for a browser plugin for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), I accidentally found Pluck. After a quick download and an easy install, Pluck added a toolbar to IE6 (see figure).

I organized my subscribed feeds into folders and now I browse the feeds from a sidebar that I can toggle on or off. Anytime I visit a blog or a Web site with any XML feeds, the Feeds button on the toolbar gets activated and I can subscribe to the feed by clicking that button. All in all, Pluck seems to be working quite nicely for me, but all the extra steps of downloading and installing may be too much for many users. Luckily for those of us in blogosphere who dispense information through RSS/Atom feeds, the trend seems to be for Web browsers to support RSS/Atom feeds directly in the browser. Apple has even put RSS right in its Web browser's name: Safari RSS. And the recently-released Opera 8 Web browser lists "RSS/Atom newsfeed reader" as part of Opera Mail. Most likely Internet Explorer 7, which is in Beta 1 now, would probably include some sort of built-in support RSS/Atom feeds. That should really bring RSS/Atom feeds to the masses and with it an avalanche of new subscribers for the feeds.

This is Not Your Daughter's Blog

The saying goes: "this is not your father's <fill in the blanks>." When it comes to today's blogs, I think the saying goes the other way around—"this is not your daughter's blog." I have been trying to coax my daughter Ivy to start a blog and use it as a forum for her daily writing about art and film and anything else that interests her. She already writes me email messages with her thoughts on a movie she has seen or a museum she visited. All she has to do is write those same thoughts in a blog. I told her a blog could be the daily column she always wanted—a place of her own where she could write about anything she wants. Her reaction has been somewhat lukewarm. She feels that she knows blogs, knows where and how she could start one, but doesn't see why they are useful. My hypothesis is that the blogs she knows are not the ones I know. My daughter's world of blogs is the world of daily journals. There is still plenty of daily journal blogs, but we also have blogs that focus on thoughtful discourse about specific topics. Then there are ones that aim to provide the latest breaking news, ones that provide political opinions, and ones that promote themselves, and so on. It takes all kinds and we have all kinds in the blogosphere.

The best part about blogging today is that you can make your blog whatever your heart desires. It could be your daily writing exercise. It could be a place to capture your thoughts about whatever interests you at that moment. It could be for promoting yourself, polishing your image, gathering an audience for your words of wisdom, but then again, it could be just for your own satisfaction. Writing for my own satisfaction is what I want from my blog. I started my blog thinking how I would write about technology and get lots of people to subscribe and read my blog, but now I feel content just to write—write about anything that interests me and any subject about which I have something thoughtful to say. Of course, if someone stumbles upon my blog and finds it interesting, I hope they'd stop by to read just as I have done in my meanderings through the blogosphere.  Happy blogging!