If you’re searching for a way of creating a free professional promotional video for your business, look no further. Check out My Business Story in today’s Monday’s Link Roundup. And reenacted photos in Back to the Future will forever change how you look at childhood pictures of yourself.

• Moby Offers Up Free Music to Filmmakers. “If you’re an indie filmmaker, non-profit filmmaker or film student, you can head to MobyGratis.com, register for the site, and then start browsing through a fairly extensive catalogue of recordings — 120+ recordings in total.”

• The Late Word. “When we speak of literature, we should not imagine that we are speaking of some stable and enduring Platonic entity. The history of literature has always been about its highly mutable institutions, whether bookstores, publishers, schools of criticism, or, for the last half century, the mass media.”

• StoryCorps Gives Voice to Critically Ill. “[StoryCorps]has created the StoryCorps Legacy initiative. Partnering with hospitals, hospices and cancer centers, it helps people with life threatening medical conditions record their stories.”

• My Business Story. “Google and American Express know every small business has a BIG story. So we’ve created MY Business Story to help you make a professional-quality video. It’s free and easy. Just tell your story and we’ll take care of the rest.”

• A Plethora of Writing Prompts for Creative Writing and Journaling. “Having a list of prompts that you can pull from every day in order to help you practice your craft, even if it’s just for ten minutes a day, can be very helpful. In addition, sometimes creative writing prompts can help spark an idea when you’re stuck on a short story or some other fiction piece that you’re writing.”

• Back to the Future. “I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it’s imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today… A few months ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future.”

• miniBiography and the 99%. “David Lynch’s Interview Project,[is] an online series of short video documentaries centering on the lives of “normal” people across America. In Interview Project’s 121 mini-biographies, the filmmakers (including Lynch’s son Austin) ask complete strangers piercing, existential questions. It is a source of ever-renewed wonder that each stranger has an answer, and that the answers are so often so rich and brimming with hard-luck stories and lived experience.”

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In this Monday’s Link Roundup, don’t pass up Affirmation, Etched in Vinyl. It speaks passionately to why personal historians do the work they do. As someone who loves a pen in my hand, I was intrigued by Why creative writing is better with a pen. For a little blast of nostalgia, take a look at What Record Stores Looked Like in the 1960s.

• How Do You Spell Ms. “Forty years ago, a group of feminists, led by Gloria Steinem, did the unthinkable: They started a magazine for women, published by women—and the first issue sold out in eight days. An oral history of a publication that changed history.”

• 3 Great Typeface Combinations You Can Use in Your Book. “In most nonfiction books, we use a combination of display and text typefaces, and the interaction between the two designs, when they are complimentary, is like a harmony of voices.”

• Getting Ready for Next Year–Now. “While the end of the year is likely not in the minds of many, it’s closer than you may think.So before the ball drops and that tax deadline gets even closer, it’s a good time to think about the many things you can do to prepare for the end of the year–and the promising year ahead.”

• Why creative writing is better with a pen. “In a wonderful article published on the New York Review of Books blog the poet Charles Simic proclaimed “writing with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper is becoming an infrequent activity”. Simic was praising the use of notebooks of course, and, stationery fetishism aside, it got me thinking about authors who write their novels and poems longhand into notebooks rather than directly onto the screen.”

• Affirmation, Etched in Vinyl. “For years I tried to construct a viable idea of my long-gone father by piecing together scraps of other people’s memories. I was only 6 when he died,…My father’s death stole many things from me, including the sound of his voice. For instance, I have tried to remember his laughter from that final night — its timbre and roll — but my mind is an erased tape. I possess the knowledge of his laughter and of Angie and Johnny’s bubbly white noise but have no memory of the sounds themselves. It’s as if I have garnered these details by reading a biography penned by a stranger.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]

• 7 Little Things That Make Life Effortless. “Life can be a huge struggle, most of the time, and for years it was a struggle for me.I’ve gradually been learning what causes that struggle, and what works in making life easier, better, smoother.Life can feel effortless, like you’re gliding along, if you learn to swim smoothly, to glide, to stop fighting the waters of life and start using them to buoy you up.”

• What Record Stores Looked Like in the 1960s. “Just think: kids being born today will probably never see the inside of a record store. And why would they? Buying music used to involve wandering around a store browsing, picking things up based on cover art, putting them down based on scornful glares from record store employees, and generally being outside your house. Now, buying music usually amounts to nothing more than a click of the mouse from the safety of your couch.”

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Where do you start to learn some of the basics of Photoshop? There are a bewildering array of Photoshop tutorials available online. But most personal history newcomers want lessons that relate more specifically to their work.

With this in mind I’ve selected these 20 free tutorials. Let me know if you’ve found a site, not listed here, that’s been particularly useful to you.

1. Giving your Photograph an Antique Look
2. Remove an object from background using content aware filling in Photoshop 
3. Color Correction Basics in Photoshop  
4. Old Paper Background Texture In Photoshop
5. How To Repair Scratches, Tears, and Spots on an Old Photograph
6. Local Contrast
7. Super Fast and Easy Facial Retouching  
8. Classic Vignette Photo Effect In Photoshop 
9. Correcting a Red Over-Saturated Photo
10. Overlapping Text With An Image In Photoshop
11. Using Photoshop to Color a Black & White Photo From Scratch
12. How to Change Skin Tone in Photoshop
13. How To Straighten Crooked Photos
14. Darken Overexposed Photos With The Multiply Blend Mode
15. Brighten Underexposed Photos With The Screen Blend Mode
16. Crop, Straighten and Open Multiple Scanned Images
17. Fix Tone and Color with Levels In Photoshop
18. Restore An Old Duo Tone Photo
19. Shadow Recovery of Backlight Problem
20. Worn, Torn Photo Edges Effect In Photoshop 

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Photo by Bart van de Biezen

To get your week started, this Monday’s Link Roundup has a little something for everyone. For the technology inclined, check out Edit Photos In the Cloud and The DV Show. For nostalgia buffs, don’t miss One Big Collection of 300 Vintage TV Ads.  It’s fabulous! If you love typography, you’ll love 10 Essential Books on Typography.  Do you like to tidy up loose ends? Then Wake-up Call: Write Your Obituary may be just what the doctor ordered.

• Edit Photos In the Cloud. ” As more and more people and internet companies turn to The Cloud (a non-local storage location for data) for their daily computing activities, massive storage systems in personal computers are becoming less and less necessary. But the process of photo editing is still typically done the old fashioned way — by importing pictures onto your computer’s hard drive and editing them with a specialty (read: expensive) piece of photo editing software. But that’s all starting to change with the advent of cloud photo editing sites and apps. This guide will walk you through how to use our favorite web-based photo editor, Feather, by Aviary.”

• Amazon Simple Email Service. “…a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service.”

• Wake-Up Call: Write Your Obituary. “Although it sounds a bit macabre, writing your own obituary—or asking a friend or a family member to do it for you—can be an excellent wake-up call that can help you make important changes in your life. There’s more on this below.”

• The DV Show: Podcasting the INs and Outs of Digital Video. “Hosted by Brian Alves, a 22-year veteran of video production, a crack team of 12 seasoned media professionals and one Entertainment Attorney, the shows feature answers to listener questions, careful reviews, product news, tips, tutorials, contests and high-profile interviews with industry professionals — all in a quick and engaging format for thousands of listeners to enjoy worldwide.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]

• A Crash Course in Marketing With Stories. “If you want your marketing to really sizzle, if you want people to remember it, you need to turn your marketing messages into stories. I’ve broken down the classical elements of story below so you can begin to think like a storyteller, and make your marketing messages stick.”

• 10 Essential Books on Typography. “Whether you’re a professional designer, recreational type-nerd, or casual lover of the fine letterform, typography is one of design’s most delightful frontiers, an odd medley of timeless traditions and timely evolution in the face of technological progress. Today, we turn to 10 essential books on typography, ranging from the practical to the philosophical to the plain pretty.”

• One Big Collection of 300 Vintage TV Ads. “Thanks to vintage advertising we can get at least some idea of what TV used to be like, which features used to be a big deal, what technology was exploding onto the scene, and what ad managers thought would sell the latest in entertainment.”

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In this Monday’s Link Roundup don’t miss  Jonathan Harris: The Storytelling of Life. What a unique way to tell your life story! For something to get your week off to a smile be sure to check out Photos of Famous Writers (and Rockers) with their Dogs. Now  for us cat lovers all we need is Photos of Famous Writers with their Cats! Let me know if you come across such a collection.

• The Long Goodbye. “Meghan O’Rourke’s memoir about the death of her mother, The Long Goodbye, is out this week [February 16,2009]. The book began as a series of essays for Slate, which we’ve republished below.”

• How Genius Works. “Great art begins with an idea. Sometimes a vague or even bad one. How does that spark of creativity find its way to the canvas, the page, the dinner plate, or the movie screen? How is inspiration refined into the forms that delight or provoke us? We enlisted some of America’s foremost artists to discuss the sometimes messy, frequently maddening, and almost always mysterious process of creating something new.”

• Tech Tips with Lisa Louise Cooke: WDYTYA Revisited & Photo Gems. “Photographs capture once-in-a-lifetime moments and treasured family memories that we certainly don’t want to forget. But assembling them in a way that can be enjoyed for years to come is not as simple as it was in the old days when we sat down to our scrapbooks and prints. Here are three tips for assembling your precious pics in a way that will delight you and those you share them with.”

• Photos of Famous Writers (and Rockers) with their Dogs. “Courtesy of New York Social Diary, here is a lovely series of photographs featuring famous authors and their dogs. If you’ve ever wondered which breeds have served as muse to William Styron, Stephen King, William F. Buckley, Kurt Vonnegut, then this collection is for you.”

• Jonathan Harris: The Storytelling of Life. “When he [Harris]turned 30, he decided to start taking one photo every day and posting it to his site before going to sleep — a seemingly simple, private project that soon turned into a fascinating exploration followed by thousands of people around the world. Our friends from m ss ng p eces — you remember them, right? — are back with another lovely documentary, capturing the project and the vivid, earnest curiosity with which Harris approaches the world.”

• 14 Strategies for Creating a Workspace that Kicks Ass and Keeps You Creative. “If you haven’t thought about creating a personal headquarters for great work, now’s a good time. And if you have, there are probably a few tips below you can use.”

• 3 Great Typeface Combinations You Can Use in Your Book. “In most nonfiction books, we use a combination of display and text typefaces, and the interaction between the two designs, when they are complimentary, is like a harmony of voices.”

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For my grammarian friends, this Monday’s Link Roundup has an article you’ll love: Colonoscopy: It’s Time to Check Your Colons. Also, I was particularly moved by Hanishar, or What Remains, photographer Yuri Dojic’s poignant exhibition of Jewish books that survived the holocaust.

• A Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials. “AdViews is a digital archive of thousands of vintage television commercials dating from the 1950s to the 1980s. These commercials were created or collected by the ad agency Benton & Bowles or its successor, D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B).”

• Through the Middle: Barber vs. Impermanence. “Last year, we featured 7 short films about near-obsolete occupations, which went on to become one of our most enjoyed pickings all year. Today, we add to that collection Through the Middle — a beautiful observational documentary about an aging barber named Mr. S and the slow decline of his business. The film follows his profound reflections as he confronts his retirement, the loss of his patrons, and the ever-changing face of the city.”

• 109 Ways to Make Your Business Irresistible to the Media. “Getting a mainstream media outlet to pay attention to your business seems like an impossible-to-solve mystery…After 10 years as a journalist, I’ve seen just about every bad pitch you can imagine. And I’ve also come up with 109 foolproof ways to entice the media in your city to highlight your business — approaches that make the mainstream media unable to resist you.”

• Hanishar, or What Remains. “For the past fourteen years, the photographer Yuri Dojc, who was born in what is now Slovakia, has been scouring his homeland for Jewish books that survived the Holocaust. When he recently showed one of the photographs to the Israeli scholar Moshe Halbertal, though, Halbertal assumed it had been digitally altered. In this particular photo, just one Hebrew word, Hanishar, was legible, written on a page in a prayer book. Dojc doesn’t speak Hebrew, and so it was up to Halbertal to translate. Hanishar, he told Dojc, means “what remains.” [To see the video What Remains click here.]

• The Art of Handling Criticism Gracefully. “If you’re going to do anything interesting in the world, criticism is an unavoidable fact…The trick to navigating the icebergs of criticism is to figure out which are helpful, and steer clear of those that aren’t.”

• WhatWasThere: See How Cities and Towns Looked In The Past. “One web site should interest any genealogist or historian. WhatWasThere.com has a simple purpose: provide a platform where anyone can easily upload a photograph with two straightforward tags to provide context: Location and Year. If enough people upload enough photographs in enough places, together we will weave together a photographic history of the world.”

• Colonoscopy: It’s Time to Check Your Colons. “Sampling a single week in April from the New York Times, colon use appears both rampant and revisionary.”

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In this Monday’s Link Roundup, if you’re a videographer, you’ll definitely want to read Three remarkable films shot on a Digital SLR. Is this the beginning of the end for video cameras?  And if you’re just looking for something entertaining, don’t miss Corpus Libris. It’s very cool.

• 4 Top Book Formatting Mistakes to Avoid. “Looking at the actual files we print books from, like the Adobe InDesign files I produce, can be quite revealing … here’s a list of the most common formatting mistakes I’ve come across, and why you should avoid them.”

• Three remarkable films shot on a Digital SLR. “… you might have overheard some buzz about the potential of digital SLR’s for shooting video. In particular I’m talking about the Canon 5D Mk II and the Canon 7D: both capable of shooting High Definition video as well as taking photographs.”

• Comparisons of Genealogy Software. “Wikipedia has great, although abbreviated, comparisons of nearly all the current genealogy software. The list of software is impressive. I thought I knew about all the programs available today but must admit I have not previously heard of HuMo-gen.”

• Corpus Libris.“…began as a fun little photo essay. As we kept going and going, I realized that many, many more people could enjoy and create similar photographs. The possibilities are practically endless! So, send me your Corpus Libris (body/book) photos …”

• What Really Makes People Buy? “It’s the ultimate sales and marketing question, isn’t it? You work hard at marketing to make contact with potential clients for your professional services. Then you work even harder to get a chance to speak with them about what you have to offer. But how do you actually get them to hire you? The answer may not be what you think.”

• Where the Cover of Your Favorite Novel Comes From. “The Farrar, Straus and Giroux art director behind the jackets of Freedom and 2666 explains what goes into designing a book.”

• EBook Conversion Services Directory. “The Ebook Conversion Services Directory is the place to find someone to convert your books into ebook formats. For books in Microsoft Word, Adobe InDesign, PDF or other formats, you’ll find people who can convert one book or many books at a time. Conversions are provided into ePub, Mobi, and many other formats for use in every eBook reader available today. When you need to get your products onto the shelves of the Kindle Store, Apple’s iBookstore, or BarnesandNoble.com, you’ll need one of these ebook conversion services.” [Thanks to Nancy Barnes of StoriesToTellBooks.com for alerting me to this item.]

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This Monday’s Link Roundup has some items that are a  feast for the eyes. My favorite is Creative Cartography, a site showcasing a dazzling collection of unique maps, the likes of which you’ve never seen. We have lost Kodachrome but the images live on. Be sure to drop by A Tribute to KODACHROME: A Photography Icon. The images are luscious!

• PBS Director’s Cut Interview with “Typeface” producer. “In a time when people can carry computers in their pockets and watch TV while walking down the street, “Typeface” dares to explore the twilight of the analog craft of wood type printing that is freshly inspiring artists in a digital age.”

• Oral History Methods – U.C, Davis Extension Course. “Learn to conduct and record an oral history project at your own pace, in your own community, following the complete process of historical documentation. Create historical context, plan and organize interviews to meet your objectives, and decide on materials to use during interview sessions. Enroll now through Feb. 9 and complete by March 30. Fee: $325.00 ($345.00 if postmarked after 01/19/2011).”

• Last Words by George Carlin. “For more than a decade before his 2008 death, groundbreaking stand-up comedian Carlin had been working on his autobiography with writer Hendra (Father Joe), who finished it by distilling hours of conversations with the irascible social commentator. Armed with an eye for detail and a seemingly photographic memory, Carlin retraces his life in full, chronicling petty crimes and stolen kisses, escalating drug problems and the death of his wife with unflinching honesty.”

• The Gift. “Famed editor and author, Diana Athill, 93, reads her poem about her mother’s death, that was included in her best-selling memoir ‘Somewhere Towards the End’, published by Granta in the UK and Norton in the USA.”

• Creative Cartography: 7 Must-Read Books on Maps. “We’re obsessed with maps — a fundamental sensemaking mechanism for the world, arguably the earliest form of standardized information design, and a relentless source of visual creativity. Today, we turn to seven fantastic books that explore the art and science of cartography from seven fascinating angles.”

• Travel Film Archive. “Want to see what the world was like for your ancestors? Perhaps you wish to catch a glimpse of where they lived? Need videos for an archival documentary? You might even see a place you remember when you were younger if you look at a film on the Travel Film Archive.”

• A Tribute to KODACHROME: A Photography Icon. “They say all good things in life come to an end …It was a difficult decision, given its rich history …We at Kodak want to celebrate with you the rich history of this storied film. Feel free to share with us your fondest memories of Kodachrome.”

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If you’re like me, you’ve inherited old photo albums with the pictures held down on so called magnetic pages. The trouble with these albums  is that the adhesive used and the plastic liners damage the photos over time. Removing the photos is a priority. I went looking for help and boiled my research down to these seven essential steps. Step 1. Before attempting any photo removal make certain to scan digitally  each album page so that should a … Read More

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4. 5 Print-On-Demand Sites You’ll Want to Consider.
5. #1 Secret to Getting More Clients.
6. 5 Top Sites for Free Online Videography Training.
7. How to Interview Someone Who Is Terminally Ill: Part One.
8. How to Salvage a Damaged Audio Cassette.
9. Warning: Using Copyright Music Without Permission Is Illegal.
10. How to Make Your Life Story Workshop Memorable.

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