I was in my neighborhood bank today and as I was coming out, I noticed a sign that read We hope your experience with us today was extremely satisfying. I thought it a bit odd. Most of my banking is pretty perfunctory. As long as the ATM doesn’t screw up, I’m pretty delighted. But the sign got me thinking. What would make your personal history service extremely satisfying for clients? Here’s what I think… Read more.
Posted in Business, How to, Marketing, Personal historian, Tips
Tagged Business, client service, clients, exceptional service, How to, Marketing, Personal historian, small business, Tips
It might seem odd to include a Christmas item in this Monday’s Link Roundup, but be sure to check out 25 years of Christmas. It’s a touching home movie compilation of one family and the changes over a quarter of a century. For the bibliophile in your life, have a look at Top 10 Gifts for the Bibliophile. You’ll find some very whimsical gift ideas.
- Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. “It has become something of a literary cliché to bash the thesaurus, or at the very least, to warn fellow writers that it is a book best left alone. Some admonitions might be blunt, others wistful, as with Billy Collins musing on his rarely opened thesaurus. But beyond the romantic anthropomorphizing of words needing to break free from “the warehouse of Roget,” what of Collins’ more pointed criticism, that “there is no/such thing as a synonym”? That would suggest that the whole enterprise of constructing a thesaurus is predicated on a fiction.”
- Should You Open a Personal History Business? “Are you looking to go into business for yourself but having difficulty choosing the type of business to open? Have you previously worked as a writer, editor, storyteller, or are you a history buff? Do you love talking with new people? Opening a personal history business may be perfect for you! In fact, even if you haven’t worked as a personal historian before, you may already have the transferable skills to run a successful business in this rapidly expanding industry. For example, excellent communication skills and being adaptable to new situations are qualities that will help you as a personal historian.”
- Microsoft Builds a Browser for Your Past. “Mining personal data to discover what people care about has become big business for companies such as Facebook and Google. Now a project from Microsoft Research is trying to bring that kind of data mining back home to help people explore their own piles of personal digital data.”
- How to Write Headlines That Work. “Your headline is the first, and perhaps only, impression you make on a prospective reader. Without a headline or post title that turns a browser into a reader, the rest of your words may as well not even exist.”
- Native Tongues. “The scene is a mysterious one, beguiling, thrilling, and, if you didn’t know better, perhaps even a bit menacing. According to the time-enhanced version of the story, it opens on an afternoon in the late fall of 1965, when without warning, a number of identical dark-green vans suddenly appear and sweep out from a parking lot in downtown Madison, Wisconsin…The drivers and passengers who manned the wagons were volunteers bent to one overarching task: that of collecting America’s other language. They were being sent to more than a thousand cities, towns, villages, and hamlets to discover and record, before it became too late and everyone started to speak like everybody else, the oral evidence of exactly what words and phrases Americans in those places spoke, heard, and read, out in the boondocks and across the prairies, down in the hollows and up on the ranges, clear across the great beyond and in the not very long ago.”
- Top 10 Gifts for the Bibliophile. “The classic bibliophile collects and treasures books, it’s a person who makes them an important part of their lives. This may sound all too familiar; you may consider yourself one or perhaps it just describes someone you know. Today, we take a look at 10 gifts that were made for that person. In fact, they’re sweet and clever gifts that the reader in all of us can enjoy.”
- 25 years of Christmas. [Video] “Every year, our dad would tape us coming down the stairs. This is a compilation of all the videos I could find. Relatives and pets grow up and disappear, and new extended family members appear in their place. The song is “Christmas Time is Here”, played by Vince Guaraldi”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged bibliophile, Business, Christmas, English Words, gift ideas, headlines, home movies, home videos, How to, Microsoft Research, oral history, personal digital data, personal history, Thesaurus, Tips, top 10, United States, Writing
How should you start your new business? I know this is going to sound heretical but forget the business plans, brochures, business cards, and website. All that stuff can come later. Believe me. Here’s what you need to do right now… Read more.
Posted in Business, How to, Personal historian, Tips
Tagged Business, business start-up, crucial steps, How to, Personal historian, small business, starting, Tips
In this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup, I was particularly touched by Bowl full of memories. Involved as I am at the moment in sorting through my late mother’s possessions, I’m acutely aware of the power of the stories evoked by even the simplest of objects. And for you wordsmiths, don’t pass up I like words. It’s one tasty treat!
- Wikipedia Didn’t Kill Britannica. Windows Did. “Print will survive. Books will survive even longer. It’s print as a marker of prestige that’s dying. Historian Yoni Appelbaum notes that from the beginning, Britannica‘s cultural project as a print artifact was as much about the appearance of knowledge as knowledge itself. Britannica “sold $250 worth of books for $1500 to middle class parents buying an edge for their kids,” Appelbaum told me, citing Shane Greenstein and Michelle Devereux’s study “The Crisis at Encyclopædia Britannica.”
- How the art of eavesdropping is fuelling boom in oral history. “Last week the British Library announced it is to work with local BBC radio stations to set up The Listening Project, a Radio 4 programme that will create an oral survey of the nation by putting together thousands of recorded conversations from across Britain. Selected daily excerpts will be broadcast on Radio 4 before news bulletins from the end of this month and an omnibus edition will be aired at the weekends.”
- Man Who Learned to Read at 91, Writes a Book at 98. “For 91 years, James Henry, a lifelong fisherman, did not know how to read and write and carried the shame of not being able to order from a menu. It had been his life’s ambition to read. Now 98, the Connecticut captain has achieved that, and more, penning a memoir of short stories about his life at sea.” [Thanks to Paula Stahel of Breath & Shadows Productions for alerting me to this item.]
- ‘Your Playlist Can Change Your Life’: Can music boost your brain? “Anyone who’s had a bad day, then flipped the car radio on and caught the first notes of a favorite song knows how quickly music can lift the spirits. But can that momentary burst of musical power be tapped more strategically to make you a better, happier, more productive person?”
- 15 Books That Should Be On Every Grammar Geek’s Bookshelf. “People writing “your” when they mean “you’re” makes you cringe. The song “The Way I Are” makes your hair stand on end. You can’t read user comments on websites anymore because you can feel brain cells dying off just trying to make sense of them. You, dear friend, are a grammar geek. As such, there are books that constitute required reading for those of your ilk. After you’re done editing this article, proceed to your nearest bookstore and purchase these must-have titles for rolling in the depths of grammar.”
- I like words. “When copywriter Robert Pirosh landed in Hollywood in 1934, eager to become a screenwriter, he wrote and sent the following letter to all the directors, producers, and studio executives he could think of. The approach worked, and after securing three interviews he took a job as a junior writer with MGM. Pirosh went on to write for the Marx Brothers, and in 1949 won an Academy Award for his Battleground script.”
- Bowl full of memories. “…we are defined by so much more than our possessions, despite our rampant consumerism. Yet I believe that for each of us, there are one or two objects that resonate so much, they indeed cut to the heart of who we are.”
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Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Academy Award, application, BBC Radio, benefits, Book, Britannica, British Library, Encyclopædia Britannica, grammar, How to, letter, Life stories, memoir, memories, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, music, Resources, Robert Pirosh, Tips, Wikipedia
A previous article of mine, The Introvert’s 12 Step Plan for Painless Networking, hit a responsive chord among my fellow introverts. This got me thinking that marketing for introverts was a natural follow-up… Read more.
Posted in Business, How to, Marketing, Personal historian, Tips
Tagged Business, Extraversion and introversion, Guide to Networking, How to, intoverts, Marketing, painless networking, Personal historian, small business, Tips
This Monday’s Link Roundup has its usual collection of eclectic gems. One of my favorites is The QWERTY Effect: How Typing May Shape the Meaning of Words. I’m wondering if this effect only applies to touch typists. What about those of us who peck away with a couple of fingers? 
Another story I love because it’s absolutely serendipitous is MacDonald clan photos found by great-great grandson in antique shop.
- This Is My Home: Inside Anthony’s Parlor of Curiosities. [Video]“…a friend and I were strolling down a street in the East Village when we stumbled upon a whimsical place — a kind of curiosities parlor that stretched, narrow and full of unusual objects and private memories, from the street site of the building to the backyard. Inside it was Anthony Pisano … We, it turns out, we not the only ones mesmerized by Anthony’s curiosities and unusual lens on the world. This Is My Home by filmmakers Kelsey Holtaway and Mark Cersosimo is a beautiful short film, in the vein of This Must Be The Place, that captures Anthony’s singular character through the contents of his home and his heart.”
- Tiny Libraries, DIY Reading Rooms, and Other Micro Book Depots. “We wanted to venture into DIY territory and visit some of the tiniest — but gutsiest — libraries around the world. These are unusual places where lit lovers ventured to create a mini community athenaeum, and guerrilla librarians have set up camp in the face of budget cuts and closing institutions. Each micro library’s aim is different, but whether they’re promoting independent/alternative presses, or simply trying to encourage reading, these plucky, little libraries deserve your attention.”
- Parting Words. “When Brenda Wineapple closed her laptop on “Sister Brother,” her dual biography of the siblings Gertrude and Leo Stein, she cried. Stacy Schiff, having written the final words of “Cleopatra,” was still worried. “I lived a little bit in fear of her,” she explains. When Doris Kearns Goodwin finished “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” she built more shelves in her library annex (once the family garage) to hold all the books she had acquired. Each of these distinguished, prizewinning, best-selling biographers was saying goodbye to a subject with whom she had been living for a long time. For authors of biographies, this intimacy is normal, almost inevitable.”
- MacDonald clan photos found by great-great grandson in antique shop. ““If you are an antique collector and somebody asks would you like to look in the back, you jump at it, because it is where the treasures are hiding.” Alas, the backroom was more disappointing than the front. That is, until Mr. MacDonald spotted a stack of black and white photographs in Edwardian and Victorian frames. He was intrigued. And then astonished. The faces staring up at him belonged to his long dead relatives, an influential Halifax clan of MacDonalds bound by marriage, friendship and political alliance to Sir Charles Tupper.
- Finding Your Book Interrupted … By the Tablet You Read It On. “Can you concentrate on Flaubert when Facebook is only a swipe away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy while Twitter beckons? People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.”
- The QWERTY Effect: How Typing May Shape the Meaning of Words. “A keyboard’s arrangement could have a small but significant impact on how we perceive the meaning of words we type. Specifically, the QWERTY keyboard may gradually attach more positive meanings to words with more letters located on the right side of the layout (everything to the right of T, G and B).”
- The 10 Best Movies Adapted from Memoirs. “Though hundreds of movies made each year are adapted from novels and short stories, relatively few are built from memoir — despite the fact that the form has been at least as popular as novels in the last two decades, and may be more beloved by the general public…we got to thinking about the few really great films adapted from memoirs. Click through to see our picks, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged 10 best, biography, Brenda Wineapple, DIY, Doris Kearns Goodwin, e-books, Kelsey Holtaway, life story, Mark Cersosimo, micro book depots, movie memoirs, QWERTY, reading, tablets, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, This Is My Home, tiny libraries, video, Writing
I’ve just finished Jennifer Campbell’s recent book Start and Run a Personal History Business published by Self-Counsel Press. If you’re thinking of making personal histories a business, you owe it to yourself to get this book. Jennifer knows her stuff. She’s been a professional personal historian since 2002 and prior to that had a 25 year career as an editor, writer, and interviewer… Read more.
Posted in Book reviews, Business, Home Office, How to, Life stories, Marketing, Memoirs, Personal historian, Promotion & Publicity, Resources, Self-employed, Tips, Writing
Tagged Business, Employment, family stories, free resources, Home Office, How to, Jennifer Campbell, memoir, Personal historian, personal histories, personal history, personal history business, self employed, small business, start and run, Tips, Writing
This Monday’s Link Roundup will tickle the fancy of typography geeks. If you’re one who loves fonts, check out A Periodic Table Of Typefaces and 6 Variations on Drop-Cap Typography.
One of my favorite articles is Memories of Mom’s cooking. For those who are working with or caring for someone with dementia this is a must read.
- What It’s Like To Write A Woman’s Life. “Women’s History Month starts on Thursday. All through March, Tell Me More will dig into inspiring, bold and sometimes disturbing stories of notable women — from Cleopatra to Coco Channel. To launch the biography series, host Michel Martin talks with two essayists about why it’s important to tell women’s stories, and how that storytelling has evolved.”
- Why Memoir Matters. “… memoir can also be looked at as the most literary form of something most of us engage in, actively or passively, most of our lives and even after our deaths. I refer here to what academics call “life writing”…[it] refers to all the forms in which human lives get inscribed or represented, whether public or private, written or graphic, print or electronic, static or interactive. And the forms are constantly evolving and proliferating.”
- Character Witness. “A far cry from staid desk jockeys, biographers regularly court ecstasy, terror and obsession in illuminating their subjects.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
- Memories of Mom’s cooking. “It’s a cold, blustery day and I’m planning to cook a hearty beef stew with the help of my elderly mother. This may not sound remarkable, but it is when you consider she lives several hundred kilometres away in a complex care facility. With advanced vascular dementia, she spends much of her time roaming the halls in her wheelchair, asking the care aides if they’ve seen my father. He passed away two years ago.”
- For Typography Geeks, A Periodic Table Of Typefaces. “USA-based designer Cam Wilde of Squidspot created a Periodic Table for typeface junkies.The ‘Periodic Table of Typefaces’ is “the style of all the thousands of over-sized Period Table of Elements posters hanging in schools and homes around the world,” according to Wilde. The Periodic Table features 100 of the most popular, influential and notorious typefaces of today.”
- How Not To Hurry. “…often we compete by trying to show how busy we are. “I have a thousand projects to do!”, “Oh yeah? I have 10,000!”. The winner is the person who has the most insane schedule, who rushes from one thing to the next with the energy of a hummingbird, because obviously that means he’s the most successful and important. Right? Maybe not.Maybe we’re playing the wrong game—we’ve been conditioned to believe that busier is better, but actually the speed of doing is not as important as what we focus on doing.”
- Book Design: 6 Variations on Drop-Cap Typography. “The tradition in book design of making the first letter in a paragraph larger than the rest of the type goes back pretty far. In fact, it predates printing entirely. This practice started with scribes…Today, this practice survives in the drop capitals we see at the beginning of chapters. But like everything else in book design, it’s best to be guided by the long traditions of bookmaking when deciding how to use them.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged biography, book design, cooking, dementia, family stories, Geeks, How to, memoir, memories, Michel Martin, not rushing, NPR, Periodic Table, recipes, slowing down, storytelling, Tips, typography, Women's History Month, women's stories
I was in my neighborhood bank today and as I was coming out, I noticed a sign that read We hope your experience with us today was extremely satisfying. I thought it a bit odd. Most of my banking is pretty perfunctory. As long as the ATM doesn’t screw up, I’m pretty delighted. But the sign got me thinking. What would make your personal history service extremely satisfying for clients? Here’s what I think… Read more.
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