In this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup, don’t miss I Will always be there with you. If you teach Ethical Will writing or are thinking of composing your own, this letter from an American soldier is a must read. Given the recent destruction brought on by Hurricane Sandy, you’ll find some timely advice in Emergency Salvage of Flood Damaged Family Papers. Finally, someone has touched on what is missing for me with an e-reader. If you feel the same, take a moment to read Out of Touch: E-reading isn’t reading.
- Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook. “As a lover — and keeper — of diaries and notebooks, I find myself returning again and again to the question of what compels us — what propels us — to record our impressions of the present moment in all their fragile subjectivity. From Joan Didion’s 1968 anthology Slouching Towards Bethlehem (public library — the same volume that gave us her timeless meditation on self-respect — comes a wonderful essay titled “On Keeping a Notebook,” in which Didion considers precisely that.”
- Social Media Isn’t Dead: It’s Boring. “Social media are a set of tools. They’re not all that interesting to talk about in and of themselves. The “gee whiz” has left the station. We want to talk about action– or if you’ll pardon the self-reference, impact. There are details and technologies you must master if you want to succeed. But that’s the keyboard-level and tactical part of what you’ll do. We wanted to give you something more encompassing.The strategies around and behind The Impact Equation boil down to 5 Cs.”
- Emergency Salvage of Flood Damaged Family Papers. [National Archives] “During the mid-west floods of 1993, the staff of the National Archives developed some technical tips to guide individuals in emergency stabilization and salvage of damaged documents, photographs, books, and other personal papers. It is important to note that flood damage to some items may be irreversible. The treatment of objects of high monetary, historic, or sentimental value should only be performed in consultation with a conservator.”
- New eBook: Bring Your Ancestors to Life Using Newspapers. “EasyFamilyHistory.com has announced a new e-book by Paul Larsen called Bring Your Ancestors to Life Using Newspapers. The announcement for the new book states, “Archived newspapers allow you to tap into a reliable source of hundreds of years of history, and give you the remarkable ability to see it through eyewitness accounts. You can easily explore your family tree and bring your family history to life for free using historical newspapers… if you know where to look.”
- Out of Touch: E-reading isn’t reading. “Amid the seemingly endless debates today about the future of reading, there remains one salient, yet often overlooked fact: Reading isn’t only a matter of our brains; it’s something that we do with our bodies.”
- Google engineer builds $1,500 page-turning scanner out of sheet metal and a vacuum. “For the past eight years, Google has been working on digitizing the world’s 130 million or so unique books. While the pace of new additions to the Google Books initiative has been slowing down, members of the team have come up with a new automated scanner design that could both make the project much more cost efficient and give everyone with $1,500 and a little know-how access to a page-turning scanner of their very own. In the video below, Google Books engineer Dany Qumsiyeh presents the prototype design that he and other teammates created during the “20 percent time” that Google (and now Apple, among others) allocates for personal projects, showing the design challenges he overcame along the way.”
- I Will always be there with you. On May 1st of 2003, just weeks after being deployed to Iraq, Army Pfc. Jesse A. Givens, of Springfield, Missouri was killed when his tank fell into the Euphrates river. He was 34-years-old. Shortly after his death, the following farewell letter was delivered to his bereaved wife, Melissa, and his 6-year-old stepson, Dakota (“Toad”).
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Tagged Ancestors, DIY, E-book, e-readers, Ebooks, Ethical wills, family papers, farewell letter, Flood, flood damage, genealogy, Google Books, How to, Hurricane Sandy, Inspiration, Iraq, Joan Didion, journaling, link roundup, National Archives, newspapers, notebook, page-turning scanner, Preservation, preserving, reading, scanner, social media, Tips
In this Monday’s Link Roundup don’t miss Why Killing Time Isn’t a Sin. It’s by Leo Babauta at Zen Habits, a favorite of mine. His wise words are worth reflecting on. And if you get high on grammar and enjoy a good chuckle, then you’ll want to check out The 9 Best Funny and Helpful Blogs About Grammar.
- 7 Things You’re Doing Wrong on LinkedIn. “Today, LinkedIn is the No. 1 social media platform for professionals. Estimates of professional participation in LinkedIn are as high as 83%…social media expert Alexandra Gibson…told me that she sees too many professionals making a lot of mistakes. Here are the seven she sees most often.”
- What multitasking does to our brains. “We all know this and have heard it hundreds of times. To work efficiently we have to single task. No multitasking.And yet, we let it slip…Why the heck is it so hard to focus on just one thing then? To understand what actually goes on in our brains and see if it all makes sense, I went ahead and found some stunning research and answers to these questions.”
- Why Stories Sell: Transportation Leads to Persuasion. “Research suggests that trying to persuade people by telling them stories does indeed work (Green & Brock, 2000). The question is why? Because if we know why, we can make the stories we tell more persuasive.”
- Epilogue: Book-Lovers on the Future of Print. “Epilogue is a lyrical student documentary about the future of books by Hannah Ryu Chung, featuring a number of interviews with independent bookstore owners, magazine art directors, printers, bookbinders, letterpress artists, and other champions of bibliophilia.”
- Why Killing Time Isn’t a Sin. “I have no objections to reading books, learning languages, or writing to friends. It’s the idea that downtime must be put to efficient use that I disagree with. While I used to agree with it completely, these days I take a completely different approach.Life is for living, not productivity.”
- The 9 Best Funny and Helpful Blogs About Grammar. “There are numerous blogs about grammar available if you poke around. They can be instructive, amusing, helpful, or hysterically funny. I prefer the latter, since I find a little laughter makes learning a whole lot easier.Here then are blogs for your entertainment, education, and enjoyment, all on the subject of grammar.”
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Start your week off with a good chuckle by checking out A Proofreader’s Value Summed Up in this Monday’s Link Roundup. On a more philosophical note be sure to read Orhan Pamuk’s museum celebrates transition, not vanity. It makes an argument for the reverence of ordinary objects. And if you’re in a more practical mood, take a look at The Best Photo Sharing Sites.
- Free VideoPad Video Editor. “Designed to be intuitive to use, VideoPad is fully featured video editing program for creating professional looking videos in minutes. Making movies has never been easier.” [Thanks to Bill Gough for alerting me to this item]
- Orhan Pamuk’s museum celebrates transition, not vanity. “He was born in 1952 to a wealthy but declining Istanbul family. After rising to prominence with his early works and receiving the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for My Name Is Red in 2003, Pamuk was pilloried and put on trial in Turkey two years later. In 2006, after decamping for New York, he received the Nobel Prize for literature. Now Pamuk is once again living in the city of his birth, and the city has embraced him. A road sign at a crosswalk, installed by the municipal government, points proudly to his newly opened Museum of Innocence. The museum is not so much a homage to his eponymous book of 2008 as an aspect of it…The museum’s aim, Pamuk says, is to suggest that there is no special reason an ordinary life and its ordinary objects ought not be viewed with the curiosity and reverence we bring to museums.”
- The Best Photo Sharing Sites. “There are many ways to share your photos with friends and family today, including social networking sites, photo communities and sites that sell prints and photo crafts. The key is finding a site that suits your photo sharing needs and sticking with it.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
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Tagged best, blogging, DARE, Death Penny, descendants, Dictionary of American Regional English, Ebooks, free, How to, humor, humour, Istanbul, Jim Romenesko, Museum of Innocence, Nobel Prize, orhanpamuk, Pamuk, photo sharing, proofreader, proofreading, publishing, sites, Tips, Turkey, video editing, Video Editor, VideoPad, WWI
Welcome to another issue of Monday’s Link Roundup. For those of you who are discovering this weekly roundup for the first time, a word of explanation. The links I select are those that I find personally entertaining, informative, amusing, thought provoking, and unusual. As well, they all have some connection to the realms of personal history, memoir, oral history, and biography. I hope you enjoy your visit here today.
- How a Book is Made: AD 400 vs. 1947 vs. 1961 vs. 2011. “I love books, their past and their future. Yet, while ubiquitous and commodified, books and how they come to be remains an enigma for most of us. No longer. From Discovery comes this 5-minute microdocumentary on how books are made.”
- Movellas democratises ebook publishing for Europe. “Movellas is bringing a popular Japanese concept for mobile partwork publishing to Europe. The publishing platform — which just won a Meffy for the Best Mobile Social Media Service — allows aspiring authors to write short novels chapter-by-chapter in a social and interactive environment.”
- Selling My Mother’s Dresses. “Some of my favorite things — including the sundress I’m wearing today and the Winnie the Pooh car that Jay is pushing our daughter in — are from someone else’s life. I find no joy in shopping at regular stores anymore…I love trying to sniff out a memory from a bud vase or a favorite song from a case of L.P.’s. The stains and broken switches, the bend in the knee of an old pair of jeans. Sometimes I just want to look at how many Mason jars one person can collect and imagine what they might’ve held. It’s comforting to know that someone has breathed and laughed inside a sweater before me. That I am part of a continuum.” [Thanks to Mary M. Harrison of Morning Glory Memoirs for alerting me to this item.]
- Helvetica: A documentary Film by Gary Hustwit. “Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which recently celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives.”
- World Wide Words. “The English language is forever changing. New words appear; old ones fall out of use or change their meanings. World Wide Words tries to record at least some part of this shifting wordscape by featuring new words, word histories, the background to words in the news, and the curiosities of native English speech.”
- Schools, beware the e-book bandwagon. “..schools may want to pause before jumping on the e-book bandwagon. In a study last year at the University of Washington, a group of graduate students were given Kindles, and their use of the devices was monitored through diary entries and interviews. By the end of the school year, nearly two-thirds of the students had abandoned the Kindle or were using it only infrequently. Of those who continued to use the e-reader regularly, many had “switched to a different and usually less desirable reading technique,” researchers said.” [Thanks to Paula Stahel of Breath and Shadows Productions for alerting me to this item.]
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The first Monday’s Link Roundup of 2011 and I couldn’t resist including a couple of links with predictions for the New Year. If you write memoirs, you’ll want to check out 11 Memoir Predictions for 2011. To get a sense of where Ebooks are heading I recommend Five Ebook Publishing Predictions for 2011. But my favorite article this week is The Life and Work of Street Photographer Vivian Maier. Undiscovered until now, her work is brilliant. Don’t miss this one!
- 20 Great Authors (and Actors) Read Famous Literature Out Loud. “Every now and then, we like to present vintage clips of great authors reading classic literary works – works they have often written themselves. These clips can be fairly revealing. Through them, you can recapture the voices of literary greats, most long since passed. And you can hear how they give character and expression to their own works … or those of others.”
- The Life and Work of Street Photographer Vivian Maier. “The North Shore families who hired Vivian Maier as a nanny came to know a kind but eccentric woman who guarded her private life and kept a huge stash of boxes. A chance discovery after her death by a man named John Maloof has spotlighted her secret talent as a photographer and led to a growing appreciation of her vast work.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
- Wreck This Journal [Paperback] by Keri Smith. “For anyone who’s ever wished to, but had trouble starting, keeping, or finishing a journal or sketchbook comes Wreck This Journal, an illustrated book that features a subversive collection of prompts, asking readers to muster up their best mistake-and mess-making abilities to fill the pages of the book (and destroy them).”
- 11 Memoir Predictions for 2011. “Welcome to 2011 from WomensMemoirs.com. Last January 1, we posted 10 predictions for 2010. This year, when Kendra and I talked about launching the new year, we decided to have 11 special posts for 2011. Beginning today and continuing through January 11, we’ll feature 11 lists for memoir writers, each with 11 items. Be sure to visit daily and get your memoir writing year well started.”
- Memory & Cats. “Memory, … is a very powerful song, with broad appeal, even to those who have never seen [Cats]. And for those who have, the song is attached to the imagery of the production and its storyline. But “Memory,” in any case, has deep emotional reach, appealing to certain universal truths and longings in many of its listeners – to that deep well of nostalgia, the longing backward glance, the wistful remembrance of nimble youth, and the feelings of vulnerability that come with aging.”
- “Rosie the Riveter” dead at 86. “Geraldine Hoff Doyle, one of the women who inspired the character of Rosie the Riveter, died today at the age of 86. In her honor, please enjoy this thorough and fascinating look at the history of women factory workers during World War II, and their portrayal in popular culture.”
- Five Ebook Publishing Predictions for 2011. “If 2010 was the year ebooks went mainstream in the U.S., 2011 will be the year indie ebook authors go mainstream. We’ve already seen this start to happen with some tremendous indie ebook author breakouts in 2010. A few weeks ago, I wrote here on Huffington Post about indie fantasy author Brian S. Pratt who will earn $25,000 this quarter selling low cost ebooks. Brian is but one of a growing cadre of indie authors whose ebooks are out-selling those of traditional publishers.”
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