If you didn’t catch these gems in previous Monday’s Link Roundup posts, now’s your chance to see what you missed.
- A Brief History of Film Title Sequence Design in 2 Minutes. “In his graduation project, an absolutely brilliant motion graphics gem, Dutch designer and animator Jurjen Versteeg examines the history of the title sequence through an imagined documentary about the designers who revolutionized this creative medium.”
- The Power of Simple Words.[Video] “Long, fancy words designed to show off your intelligence and vocabulary are all very well, but they aren’t always the best words. In this short, playful video Terin Izil explains why simple, punchy language is often the clearest way to convey a message.”
- Noah St. John’s ‘The Last Mile’ [Video] “This is the first of series of stories from a new partnership between The Huffington Post and NPR’s new hit storytelling program, “Snap Judgment,” hosted by Glynn Washington. And it’s a good one.” [Thanks to Sally Goldin of Tell Me A Story for alerting me to this item.]
- The clues to a great story. [TED talk] “Filmmaker Andrew Stanton (“Toy Story,” “WALL-E”) shares what he knows about storytelling — starting at the end and working back to the beginning.”
- The Old Man and the Sea Animated. “In 1999, Aleksandr Petrov won the Academy Award for Short Film (among other awards) for a film that follows the plot line of Ernest Hemingway’s classic novella, The Old Man and the Sea (1952). As noted here, Petrov’s technique involves painting pastels on glass, and he and his son painted a total of 29,000 images in total.”
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Tagged Aleksandr Petrov, Andrew Stanton, Ernest Hemingway, film history, film wisdom, future, Huffington Post, link roundup, Noah St. John, NPR, Old Man And The Sea, predictions, simple words, storytelling, The Old Man and the Sea, Tips, Toy Story, WALL-E, wisdom
In this Monday’s Link Roundup I was particularly impressed by Advice on Living the Creative Life from Neil Gaiman. For all of us involved in creative work this is a must read. I’m not an etymologist but I was fascinated by On the Origin of ‘Shyster’. Do you know the origin? You don’t? Well then be sure to check out this article.
- Remind you of anything? Simple typography for non-professionals. “Setting type used to have just one function: is it readable? Then, to save money, a new question: Can we get a lot of words on a page? The third question, though, is the most dominant for most people making a presentation, designing a website, scoping out a logo or otherwise using type to deliver a message: How does it look?”
- Advice on Living the Creative Life from Neil Gaiman. “On the heels of last week’s timeless commencement addresses by icons like David Foster Wallace, Ellen DeGeneres, and Ray Bradbury comes this fantastic speech by Neil Gaiman, addressing the 2012 graduating class of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia…. Gaiman himself never graduated from college — in fact, he never even enrolled in college — yet he earned his place in literary culture as one of the most celebrated and prolific writers working today. Here, he imparts several pieces of life-wisdom on young people beginning a career in the arts, summarized below.”
- Email Signup Forms: 4 Things That Lead to Huge Success or Total Failure. “To succeed in email marketing, you need to build a great list. To build a great list, your site needs a good email signup form. This post is about email signup forms and how they affect email subscriptions. This is very important to anyone doing email marketing. There are four main factors in visitor subscriptions. Coincidentally, they all start with P.”
- On the Origin of ‘Shyster’. “Master etymologist Gerald Cohen knows how jazz got its name, why they’re called hot dogs, and much more.”
- The Unexpected Antidote to Procrastination. “A recent early morning hike in Malibu, California, led me to a beach, where I sat on a rock and watched surfers. I marveled at these courageous men and women who woke before dawn, endured freezing water, paddled through barreling waves, and even risked shark attacks, all for the sake of, maybe, catching an epic ride.”
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Tagged antidote, book design, Chip Kidd, creative life, creativity, death, email, Email marketing, email signup forms, etymology, Gerald Cohen, Greil Marcus, How to, link roundup, Make Good Art, Marketing, Neil Gaiman, Procrastination, rationalist, School of Visual Arts, Tips, typography
Happy Victoria Day to my Canadian compatriots. For those of you who have the day off, what better way to idle a few hours away than immerse yourself in my Monday’s Link Roundup. 
- Oral history and hearing loss. “I rarely consider the basics of oral history collection and production, the act of sharing someone’s story with a wider audience. That is one of several reasons I so enjoyed Brad Rakerd’s contribution to Oral History Review issue on Oral History in the Digital Age, “On Making Oral Histories More Accessible to Persons with Hearing Loss.” In his piece, Rakerd discusses the obstacles people with hearing loss or other limitations on speech understanding face when engaging with oral history, and offers several recommendations to allow scholars to make their material more accessible. Mad with the power of the OUPblog post, I contacted Rakerd to prod him for more information.”
- How to Write a Simple Business Plan. “Simple is always best. So with this in mind, here’s our guide to writing a business plan that won’t make potential investors want to tear their hair out in confusion.”
- The Stories That Only Artists Can Tell. “…it seems to me that artists talk about different things when describing themselves than do their biographers and commentators. Biographers focus almost exclusively on the artwork, who taught and influenced the artist, changes in the artist’s work, an estimation of the artist’s work. Who the artist knew and spent time with, as well as notable events in the artist’s life, are detailed to the degree that they explain the evolution of the artwork.”
- Walking Across America: Advice for a Young Man. “It’s rare we take the time to listen to hour-long radio stories anymore, but I hope you’ll listen to this one, maybe twice. It’s an epic journey, a coming of age story, and a portrait of this country–big-hearted, wild, innocent, and wise…Andrew Forsthoefel, a first-time radio producer, who set out at age 23 to walk across America, East to West, 4000 miles, with a sign on him that said, “Walking to Listen.” Eventually, he showed up here in Woods Hole.Andrew didn’t intend to make a radio story–he just wanted to listen to people. You’ll hear in Andrew’s interviews his quality of attention. He is a magnet for stories and for the desire to connect.”
- The Einstein Principle: Accomplish More By Doing Less. “Einstein’s push for general relativity highlights an important reality about accomplishment. We are most productive when we focus on a very small number of projects on which we can devote a large amount of attention.”
- Why You Should Give A $*%! About Words That Offend. [NPR Interview] “If you said the “s” word in the ninth century, you probably wouldn’t have shocked or offended anyone. Back then, the “s” word was just the everyday word that was used to refer to excrement. That’s one of many surprising, foul-mouthed facts Melissa Mohr reveals in her new book, Holy S- – -: A Brief History of Swearing. Though the curse words themselves change over time, the category remains constant — we always have a set of words that are off-limits. “We need some category of swear words,” Mohr says. “[These] words really fulfill a function that people have found necessary for thousands of years.”
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Tagged Albert Einstein, Andrew Forsthoefel, artists, biography, Brad Rakerd, Business plan, Deafness, digital age, English language, hearing loss, history, How to, Information Age, interview, link roundup, literature, Marketing, Melissa Mohr, NPR, oral history, productivity, Rakerd, simple business plan, stories, storytelling, swearing, Tips
I’m a “closet” designer. In this Monday’s Link Roundup I’ve posted a treat for other designer “wannabees”. Be sure to check out The Designer Says: The Collected Quips and Wisdom of Famous Graphic Designers. And if you’re concerned about the democratization of criticism in the Internet Age, be sure to read Star Wars. Do we still need experts and critical authority? I think we do.
- The Internet dilemma: Do people have a right to be forgotten? “Human forgetting actually performs a very important function for us individually as well as for society,” Prof. Mayer-Schönberger says. “It lets us act and think in the present rather than be tethered to an ever-more-comprehensive past. The beauty of the human mind and human forgetting is that, as we forget, we’re able to generalize, to abstract, to see the forest rather than the individual tree. And if we cannot forget, then all we will have are the individual trees to go by.”
- The History of Typography. “The history of typography, in a stop-motion animation made of 291 cut-paper letters and 2,454 photographs. Pair with a peek inside the sketchbooks of the world’s best type designers and 10 essential books on typography.” [Thanks to my friend Bill Gough for alerting me to this item.]
- Is It Time to Reset Your Marketing Plan? “Is your marketing plan producing the results you need? When was the last time you evaluated your plan to see if it is leading you toward success? Are you even using a marketing plan at all? Here are four questions to help you determine whether it’s time to reset your plan.”
- Star Wars. “…there are complications with this idea that the Internet has obviated the need for experts and for critical authority. One question is what is happening to criticism itself when the evaluative architecture on a site such as Amazon is the same for leaf blowers as it is literature, when everything seems to be quantifying one’s hedonic response to a consumption activity; when we are forced into a ruthless dyad of thumbing up or thumbing down, or channeled into expressing a simple “liking” for something when the actual response may be more complex.”
- The Designer Says: The Collected Quips and Wisdom of Famous Graphic Designers. “On the heels of last year’s tiny gem The Architect Says comes The Designer Says: Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom (public library) — a charming, similarly-spirited compendium of more than one hundred beautifully typeset remarks by some of today’s and yesteryear’s most celebrated graphic design minds, including favorites like Saul Bass, Charles Eames, Debbie Millman, Milton Glaser, Louise Fili, Paula Scher, and Maira Kalman.”
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Tagged Book, books, Charles and Ray Eames, criticism, Debbie Millman, evaluation, experts, graphic design, graphic designers, History of Western typography, How to, Internet, link roundup, Louise Fili, love of books, Maira Kalman, Marketing, Paula Scher, rights, Saul Bass, Tips, typography
In this Monday’s Link Roundup my favorite piece is Why there really is no place like home. For those of us who interview people about their lives, this lovely essay reminds us of the richness of stories wrapped up in our homes. Speaking of life stories, don’t miss A Story for Generations: Home Front Girl. The author recounts what it was like writing her mother’s personal history.
- A Story for Generations: Home Front Girl. “Imagine this: you have access to the diaries of your mother or father: Windows into your family’s past. Snapshots of moments of history. What would this process be like? To sift through documents, to piece together a life — and, ultimately, your own family history? Susan Morrison, the blogger and author at Home Front Girl Diary, has this very story to tell.”
- How Can I Record Calls on My Smartphone? “As long as you’re just looking to record your consensual conversations with coworkers, you should be fine, but for everyone else, it’s a good idea to brush up on when it’s legal to record calls first. That being said, you have a few options.”
- Why there really is no place like home. “Houses are such complex repositories. Everything we have lived and felt is there in the frame of a window that looks out to the trees, in the folds of the curtains, the cushions of a sofa, in the bathrooms we never liked and in the kitchens we adored, in the slope of a deck and in the sound and feel of the door that slapped shut when we let it close behind us. Purposeful and pragmatic and calming with their sensible roofs, their square proportions, their sturdy heft, the serious, watchful eyes of their windows, they have heard and seen everything.”
- The Bookstore That Changed My Life. “The sign on the door said EXPERIENCED BOOKS. I found the store while wandering around my new neighborhood after moving to Salt Lake City. The door opened and a guy walking a dog exited. He said, “Go in man, you’ll definitely leave with something.” This reminded me of the shop in Stephen King’s Needful Things. But then, books remind me of everything, and everything reminds me of books.”
- How to Use LinkedIn to Your Best Advantage. “While I don’t actively think about it, I do have goals for how I use LinkedIn. As a consultant, I want to be sure that prospective clients can find me. I have also used the site to ensure that potential employers or recruiters can find me, as well as to find employees or partners. I want to be seen as knowledgeable in my area of expertise, and connected both geographically and in my profession (digital content strategy). I’m also a big believer in karma, so I am happy to forward introductions or share prospective leads for jobs or projects. It may be odd, but I believe that “competitors” are extremely valuable people to know. Here are my recommendations about how to use LinkedIn to your best advantage.”
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Tagged bookstores, conversation, diaries, dying, family stories, Home, How to, Life stories, link roundup, LinkedIn, loved ones, memories, Mother, nostalgia, recording calls, Smartphone, Tips, Writing
In this Monday’s Link Roundup don’t miss Humorous tombstones: Making your last word a funny one. It’ll put a smile on your face. On a more serious note you might want to read 9 things you wish you knew before your first TV interview. Excellent advice before your big interview.
- First Person Project brings a new take on history. “The First Person Project, located in the University of Georgia’s Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, allows everyday people to come into the facility and interview each other in pairs, usually friends or family, about their personal history and experiences with larger historical and cultural events, according to FPP’s website.” [Thanks to Lettice Stuart of Portraits in Words for alerting me to this article.]
- 9 things you wish you knew before your first TV interview. “There are few moments more exciting for an author than when you schedule that first television interview with a local talk show. After you stop grinning and sharing the good news with your social media networks, you realize that you’ve never been interviewed on camera before . . . and panic sets in.”
- Humorous tombstones: Making your last word a funny one. ” Eleanor Herman, a historian and author who lives in McLean, feels most people take death far too seriously. Where is the levity? Where is the humor? Where is the winking admission that death is the final joke in this long-running sitcom we call life? Well, on her tombstone, for starters. She’s determined to have the last laugh.”
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Tagged cold-feet, Digital Public Library of America, DPLA, Fear, First Person Project, Headstone, How to, humor, humour, libraries, Life stories, link roundup, Marketing, on line, overcoming, personal histories, Public library, skills, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Tips, tombstones, TV interview, University of Georgia
In this Monday’s Link Roundup there’s lots of practical advice. In particular, I recommend Freelancing: a Complete Guide to Setting and Negotiating Rates. It’s useful no matter what kind of service you provide. For something to feast your eyes on, take a look at Best Bookstore In The World? It’s stunning!
- Google Death: A Tool to Take Care of Your Gmail When You’re Gone. “It’s always seemed to be the case that the difficulty of planning for one’s “digital afterlife” isn’t so much the logistics of it but the psychological effort it requires to deal with one’s own mortality in a utilitarian, businesslike way. Perhaps the greater service Google has provided here isn’t so much the functionality of the tool — that it will execute your plans without you once you’re gone — but that they’ve made making those plans simple, requiring few decisions on your part.”
- Discover Your Strengths and Supercharge Your Business. “What are strengths, anyway? Until recently, I never realized this was a trick question. I thought that your strengths were things you were good at, and your weaknesses were things you sucked at. But Marcus Buckingham, who’s made a career out of writing about strengths, put it this way:”
- In China, Fake Apple Products Are an Acceptable Offering for Your Ancestors. “During this year’s Qingming Festival, fake Apple products made out of paper and cardboard were one of the biggest hits. One man, who makes cardboard replicas of luxury products like cars and houses, added Apple goods to his repertoire this year and said they were a hot ticket item. For just $7, you can offer your ancestors a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad, but if you want an iPhone 5, you have to pay an extra 50 cents.”
- Freelancing: a Complete Guide to Setting and Negotiating Rates. “Setting and negotiating rates can seem like one of the most complicated and intimidating parts of freelancing but it really doesn’t have to be. Today I am going to give you an in-depth overview of how to set and negotiate rates with prospective and existing clients. Although I am a freelance writer, I believe that most of the following advice applies to any service-based business.”
- Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl: the digital edition. “A introductory film for the new digital edition of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, a classic book that has played a key role in the world’s understanding of the Holocaust. The app takes the original text, published 65 years ago, and adds video interviews and other background material. The Diary of a Young Girl app, made by Beyond the Story, is available on iPad via Apple’s AppStore.”
- Best Bookstore In The World? “…Dutch bookstore Selexyz might just be the prettiest bookstore we’ve ever seen. Housed in a seven hundred-year-old former Dominican church, it’s a stunning house of worship now devoted to the cult of physical books. El Ateneo in Buenos Aires is pretty special, but right now we’re leaning towards Selexyz.”
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Tagged Ancestors, Anne Frank, Apple, best bookstore, Business, China, death, Diary of a Young Girl, digital afterlife, fake Apple products, freelancer, freelancing, Google, How to, iPhone, iPhone 5, link roundup, negotiating, offerings, Qingming Festival, rates, setting, small business, strengths, supercharge, Tips
In this Monday’s Link roundup I recommend taking a look at Lost Cat: An Illustrated Meditation on Love, Loss, and What It Means To Be Human. I love cats and can’t wait to read this unique memoir. With the arrival of Spring on the West Coast, I’m valiantly trying to throw stuff out. That’s why I thought How to Speed Up, Clean Up, and Revive Your Windows PC seemed the perfect How to.
- Massive Volunteer Collective Proofreads 25,000 Public-Domain Books. “Give these people a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records, because they surely deserve one: As of today, 100,000 people around the world have taken part in a massive proofreading project to correct the electronic texts of 25,000 publicly available books on the Project Gutenberg site.”
- The Key to Getting Motivated: Give Up. “…trying to “get motivated” can often make matters worse. The real problem isn’t that you don’t feel like taking action. Rather, it’s the underlying assumption that you need to feel like taking action before you can act. Which explains the hidden pitfall of most “motivational” advice: it’s not about how to get things done, but about how to get in the mood for getting things done.”
- Lost Cat: An Illustrated Meditation on Love, Loss, and What It Means To Be Human. “…a tender, imaginative memoir infused with equal parts humor and humanity… Though “about” a cat, this heartwarming and heartbreaking tale is really about what it means to be human — about the osmosis of hollowing loneliness and profound attachment, the oscillation between boundless affection and paralyzing fear of abandonment, the unfair promise of loss implicit to every possibility of love.”
- How to Speed Up, Clean Up, and Revive Your Windows PC. “Flowers are blooming and birds are chirping, which means it’s time to start your yearly spring cleaning extravaganza. While you’re emptying your closets, decluttering, and getting rid of the bloat in your life, why not do the same for your computer? Here are some simple, easy to follow tips to give your trusted Windows PC a little spring cleaning of its own.”
- I do not fear death. “Roger Ebert was always a great friend of Salon’s. We’re deeply saddened by reports of his death, and are re-printing this essay, from his book “Life Itself: A Memoir,” which we think fans will take particular comfort in reading now.”
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Tagged bookshelf, cats, death, film reviews, give up, How to, Inspiration, link roundup, Lost Cat, memoir, Microsoft Windows, motivation, motivational advice, Project Gutenberg, proofreading, public domain, Resources, revive, Roger Ebert, spring cleaning, Tips, virtual, volunteers, Windows PC
In today’s Monday’s Link Roundup don’t miss Why obituaries seduce us. It examines why the best obituaries are mini biographies. And whether your interviewing, writing, or promoting you’ll definitely want to read The psychology of language: Which words matter the most when we talk.
- Bookstore Of The Year 2013. “Every year, industry bible Publishers Weekly names a Bookstore of the Year, and it announced yesterday that the 2013 award would be given to to Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, “the center of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in William Faulkner’s novels.”
- StoryPress for the iPad. “StoryPress is an iPad app (with an Android version promised “real soon now”) that helps you preserve your memories in your own voice by recording spoken history…Subscribers to StoryPress are greeted with a sequence of questions to help them create a story. The app uses a book metaphor for each story, allowing the user to enter the author’s name, date of birth, and story title. Users also can use a photo from their iPad photo libraries for cover art on their story.”
- Why obituaries seduce us: They’re a door on a world that’s vanishing. “Properly done, obituaries are “biographical essays that set a life in context, pay tribute to achievements, and account for failures and faults,” as Sandra Martin, who has produced many great ones for this paper, wrote in her recent collection, Working the Dead Beat: 50 Lives that Changed Canada.”
- Free “Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving” Publication. “We [Library of Congress] are very excited to unveil our new e-publication, Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving! This is something new for us: a published compilation of selected blog posts published in The Signal. All of these posts are written by NDIIPP staff as well as guest bloggers from inside and outside the Library of Congress. This resource can serve as a primer for the digital archive novice, as well as a refresher for those with more experience.”
- The psychology of language: Which words matter the most when we talk. “Recently, a lot of the long standing paradigms in how our brain processes language were overthrown. New and cutting edge studies that produced quite startling and different results. The one study I found most interesting is UCL’s findings on how we can separate words from intonation. Whenever we listen to words, this is what happens:”
- Too busy? Maybe you’re procrastinating. “Here’s the thing: when we’re busy we can easily trick ourselves into thinking that all of that activity means that we’re not procrastinating. We’re busy, sure, but we’re not focused on the things that should really have our attention. If someone were to tap us on the shoulder and say, “that thing you’re doing, is that the best use of your attention right now?” we would hesitate to agree. We’re busy procrastinating.”
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Tagged App Store, biography, bookstores, E-book, free, How to, iPad, language, Library of Congress, link roundup, National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, obituaries, personal archiving, processing, procrastinating, Procrastination, psychology, Publishers Weekly, Square Books, StoryPress, Tips, William Faulkner
For first time visitors to my Monday’s Link Roundup, welcome. This is an eclectic list that features articles I find engaging, whimsical, and educational. And I hope of interest to other personal historians, biographers, videographers, family historians, and memoir writers. Enjoy!
- What Is the Business of Literature? “As technology disrupts the business model of traditional publishers, the industry must imagine new ways of capturing the value of a book.”
- 7 Ways to Summon the Courage to Say “No”. “What do you do when a freelancing project just isn’t right for you? Do you turn it down, or do you take it anyway? Most freelancers already understand that they should say “no” to some clients. But often we freelancers just keep on saying “yes” when we know that we shouldn’t.”
- Why You Should Fire Yourself. “What would you do if you discovered that the secret to your success online lay in firing yourself? Would you do it? That’s the question Alex, a freelance copywriter, had to face.”
- Hey, at Least You Can Be Virtually Immortal. “NO one will confuse typical retirees today with the Emperor Augustus, who constructed a huge mausoleum to celebrate his life for eternity. And yet they belong to the first generation of elders within easy grasp of something once so rare and valuable that relatively few historic figures could enjoy it until now: virtual immortality.”
- The Best Ways to Be Sure You’re Legally Using Online Photos. “Using images in our online work is crucial. It’s a visual medium and how better to tell your story or draw in your audience than with a compelling photo? But while some may be flattered you’re using a photo they took or image they created, most are not. Besides all the SEO and search-engine ranking reasons, using someone else’s work without their permission is not only wrong but also may be illegal.”
- Getting Media Coverage: 5 Things You Need To Know. “Any publicity is good publicity, the saying goes, which makes free publicity even better. A mention in a magazine or buzz on a blog can put your company on the map and help boost sales, in most cases, without costing you a dime. But how do you get on journalists’ radar screens?”
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Tagged benefits, Blog, books, Business, copyright, digital, firing, freelancer, How to, illegal, immortal, journalist, legality, link roundup, literature, Marketing, media coverage, No, online, photo use, publicity, publishers, saying no, small business, Tips
