That’s my prediction.
Books are seldom an impulse buy. That’s because it’s difficult to make a buying decision by browsing through a store or Amazon. You generally buy a book because of a recommendation, especially with fiction, or a need for information.
However, the advent of digital readers like Kindle (soon to die) and the, to date, [...]

Apparently doesn’t exist. A few years ago I saw a bad bug in Gmail. I searched through the Google sites fruitlessly looking for a way, any way to report it. I eventually found an email address for something else and sent them a message asking the recipient to forward my bug report to the relevant [...]

It may already have. First, about that metric, ‘time spent on site’. This metric is very important in social media because we don’t typically have many page views- most blogs are a long scroll of stories that analytics engines read as a single page view. Same with platforms like Facebook. So the operative metric to [...]

Can a book project be a start-up?
I’ve been looking for a start-up to get involved with in 2010. I’ve also been working on a book proposal. It dawned on me that the book proposal is my start-up. The proposal is a business plan. The literary agent is a business development person. The publisher is both [...]

Been slamming all summer on projects so put the blogging on hold a bit. Today I responded to this very interesting job listing from Craigslist- I love the attitude and it’s truly keyword dense:
YOU:
Live and breathe the Interwebs (but won’t spend 6 hours a day surfing it)
Have Twitter, Facebook, MySpace (which you never use), Linked [...]

I’ve never been a big TV watcher- a bit of golf for relaxation and a few shows that I get hooked on. With radio I’m pretty much limited to NPR in the car. However I’ve realized that there is a fundamental shift going on. I’ve reached the point where I really can’t stand broadcast media [...]

I’ve been reading about Wave, Google’s new, not yet available, open-source communications platform and I’m thinking that this thing looks an awful lot like the Facebook feed on steroids. Real time communications with groups of friends or individuals, recordable, searchable, easy to incorporate any kinds of files, accessible anywhere, integrates IM, Facebook and Twitter, and [...]

Note: This post also appears on BurnerTrouble, my blog on personal change after 40.
I’ve spent the last five or six years in various senior marketing and management roles for start-ups (software) and an agency. With all the job losses in the past year, including mine, I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone is, in essence, [...]

Business success in a recession?
Recessions have the effect of showing up poorly conceived business models. It’s one the reasons that more long term successful businesses are started during downturns. When the economy is giddy and people are spending, businesses that are providing luxury products or services will thrive as will businesses providing incremental improvements to [...]

In the silly pop culture department, we may see the beginning of the mainstreaming of Twitter when Oprah brings her omnipresent personal brand to the microblogging service. Does his mean anything? I doubt it. Twitter is not as obviously valuable to the average Jane (or Joe) as Facebook with its social attractions. The more [...]