This Monday’s Link Roundup article Grammar Freaks Really Are Strange bears out what I’ve always suspected. 
For those of you who blog professionally, be sure to check out 9 Keys to Blogging Success from A-List Bloggers. And for some really useful marketing advice from Seth Godin’s blog, don’t miss The circles of marketing.
- Immigration, The Gold Mountain And A Wedding Photo. [NPR] “Deep inside the National Archives in Washington, D.C., old case files tell the stories of hundreds of thousands of hopeful immigrants to the U.S. between 1880 and the end of World War II. Between 1910 and 1940, thousands of immigrants came to the U.S. through California’s Angel Island. For University of Minnesota history professor Erika Lee, one of these attachments turned out to be very special.”
- The circles of marketing. “Most amateurs and citizens believe that marketing is the outer circle.Marketing = advertising, it seems. The job of marketing in this circle is to take what the factory/system/boss gives you and hype it, promote it and yell about it. This is what so many charities, politicians, insurance companies, financial advisors, computer makers and well, just about everyone does.”
- 9 Keys to Blogging Success from A-List Bloggers. “In the years I’ve been blogging, I’ve built my site into a trusted resource for thousands of writers, designers, publishers, and authors. The following are some of the basic lessons that have guided me on my journey. I hope some of them will inspire you, too.”
- Simplify. “Simplify everything. That might sound hard, but with practice it’s actually fairly easy, and leads to a quiet, content, lovely life full of space, with only the things in it that matter to me: my family, my writing, with some reading and workouts thrown in. So how do you simplify? As simply as possible.Here are a few ways:”
- Do our lives need a narrative? “It may seem obvious that the story of our life to date is just what it is, and that we can only change it in flights of fancy. But the idea that the Lego bricks of our daily lives may be arranged into different buildings is not fanciful. If you re-examine how you make sense of past events, it will almost certainly turn out that your dominant narrative can be challenged by alternative stories.”
- Grammar Freaks Really Are Strange. “It used to be we thought that people who went around correcting other people’s grammar were just plain annoying. Now there’s evidence they are actually ill, suffering from a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder/oppositional defiant disorder (OCD/ODD). Researchers are calling it Grammatical Pedantry Syndrome, or GPS.” [Thanks to APH member Francie King of History Keep for alerting me to this item.]
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged Angel Island, best, Blog, family history apps, grammar, grammatical, How to, humor, immigrants, iPad, Life stories, narrative, National Archives, NPR, Seth Godin, simplify, successful blogging, Tips, World War II
The recent issue of the Journal of Marketing Research examined the correlation between relaxation and consumer spending. It turns out that all things being equal consumers are more willing to pay higher prices if they feel relaxed…Read more.
Posted in How to, Life stories, Marketing, Tips
Tagged Business, client relaxtion, clients, How to, Life stories, Marketing, marketing research, relaxation, Tips
In today’s Monday’s Link Roundup I have the perfect gift for the hard to buy for bibliophile. Check out A Perfume That Smells Of An Obscure Pleasure: The Printed Word. On a more serious note don’t miss the NPR interview with Arnold Weinstein, author of Morning, Noon, And Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books. This is definitely on my list of books to read.
- A Matter of Fashion. “Linguists insist that it’s wrong to designate any kind of English “proper” because language always changes and always has. A common objection is that even so, all people must know which forms of language are acceptable in the public sphere, at the peril of unemployability or, at least, social handicap. Fair enough – but there’s a middle ground.”
- Your Life As A Mini-Movie. “Ptch picks up where your static photo feeds on Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Viddy, Facebook, and Google+ leave off. Dreamworks, the animation studio behind Shrek, is backing the iOS app, which… lets users create, edit, and share 60-second mini-movies from their own photos and video clips. Then comes the movie magic. Ptch helps users add title cards, offers soundtrack help with one of more than 80 preloaded songs, and even integrates comments from your social networks. Like other outfits that do Instagram-like treatments for video, Ptch lets mini-movie makers wrap their creations in one of eight styles. You can share new creations on Ptch, as well as on your desired social channels.”
- Life Stages In Literature.[NPR Interview] “Guest: Arnold Weinstein, distinguished professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and author of Morning, Noon, And Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books. What Twain, Woolf, Roth, Morrison and more tell us about growing up and growing old.The stories and insights to place us, ground us, in our own lives. Literature can get at the heart of what we’re doing and the experience we share can be illuminated.”
- Best Online Language Tools for Word Nerds. “Beside the standard-issue dictionary and spellchecker offered by most word processors and operating systems, there are several web-based language tools at your disposal that can get you just the information you need. Let’s take a look at some of the best online language tools for word nerds and regular people who just want to say that word correctly in conversation.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged Arnold Weinstein, checklist, Comparative Literature, Dreamworks, email, English language, Life Stages, life story, literature, material possessions, NPR, online language tools, perfume, Ptch, The Burning House, The Printed Word, Tips, video
Are you considering the purchase of an HD camcorder? So am I. My trusty Panasonic DVC 30 is now over 4 years old and by today’s standards, almost obsolete. I’ve been doing some research on a possible replacement.
Here are some tips to point you in the right direction…Read more.
Posted in Camcorders, How to, Tips
Tagged buying, Camcorder, Electronics, hd camcorder, How to, JVC, Panasonic, Sony, Tips, video, video cameras, videography
My favorite item in this Monday’s Link Roundup is 500,000 Strangers’ Secrets: PostSecret Founder Frank Warren at TED. It’s funny, sad, and poignant. Not to be missed. And if you’re infatuated with periods, commas, and the like, you won’t want to miss Semicolons: A Love Story.
- 10 Marketing Secrets You Already Know. “Many people think of marketing as a mystery, something that is hard to figure out and even harder to implement. Everyone wants to know what to do when and how to do it for maximum results. Well, I have good news for you. Most of the so-called marketing secrets, you already know. Perhaps because they’re so obvious, you don’t realize how important they are. If you remember and practice these secrets, you’ll have about 90% of what you need for marketing success.”
- E M Ginger on Digitizing the Art of the Book. “At this weekend’s meeting of the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA), guest speaker E M Ginger of 42-line.com gave a remarkable presentation about the work she has been involved with over the past 20 years digitizing fine and rare books.”
- Preventing goof-ups: 10 proofreading tips. “I was born an editor, not a proofreader. And I’m convinced that good proofreaders are thrust into this world with a special and delicate piece of DNA that the rest of us are missing. It’s kind of like the math gene or the team sports gene, both of which I lack. As a result, when time and budget permit, I always hire a professional proofreader. When I can’t, I use the following tricks to help me (and my readers) survive.”
- Virginia Woman, Discovers Lost Family Photos At Antique Shop (Video). “Cathy Tyree was on the hunt for an old couch when she stumbled across something incredible at an antique shop in Richmond, Va. Tyree had been in the store for only 15 minutes when she discovered a lost picture of her deceased father among the glassware, furniture and old books.”
- Semicolons: A Love Story. “When I was a teenager, newly fixated on becoming a writer, I came across a piece of advice from Kurt Vonnegut that affected me like an ice cube down the back of my shirt. “Do not use semicolons,” he said. “They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”
- 500,000 Strangers’ Secrets: PostSecret Founder Frank Warren at TED. “Since January 1, 2005, strangers have been writing, drawing, collaging, doodling, and otherwise revealing their most tightly guarded secrets on anonymous postcards and mailing them to Frank Warren’s PostSecret project. Last month, Warren took the TED stage to share the remarkable story of this collective exercise in compassion and crack open the shell of the human condition.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged antique store, digitizing books, family photos, Frank Warren, grammar, How to, Kurt Vonnegut, library posters, lost, Marketing, postcards, PostSecret, proofreading, rare books, secrets, Semicolon, semicolons, TED, Tips, video, vintage
A key factor in whether potential clients will hire us as personal historians is trust. But how to build trust in an introductory meeting?…Read more.
Posted in How to, Marketing, Personal historian, Tips
Tagged ability, Business, clients, How to, Marketing, reliability, selling, Tips, trust, trustworthy, truth
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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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged 7 Things, best, clients, documentary, E-book, eBook, Ebooks, Epilogue, future, grammar, grammar blogs, How to, layout, Leo Babauta, link roundup, LinkedIn, Marketing, Monday, multitasking, persuasion, productivity, research, slowing down, social media, stories, Tips, Zen Habits
Most people when they consider a life story project think of a book. There are a lot of good reasons for producing a book. But I’ll be honest. I have a video bias because producing video personal histories is my specialty. I also produce books but video is my passion. To see a sample of my work click here. So why should you consider a video for your or someone else’s personal history? Here are five good reasons…Read more.
In this Monday’s Link Roundup I seem to have been intrigued by disappearing things. There’s Disappearing Ink Book, ideal for the procrastinator. Endangered Languages, an online resource to record languages in danger of disappearing. And Vanishing Languages, a National Geographic site containing some frightening statistics on the weekly disappearance of languages.
On a lighter note you might want to check out Top Punctuation Howlers.
- Disappearing Ink Book. “For less voracious readers and those with busy lives, finishing a book can be an elusive task continually pushed to the bottom of to-do lists, right along with reorganizing a closet and learning French. A small Argentinean publisher, Eterna Cadencia, has found a way to combat this: They created an ink that begins to fade away after only two months of interaction with light and air.”
- India’s paper trail runs for centuries. “Hundreds of years before the colonizers came, Indians were counting, sorting and filing with a precision that the British could only hope to envy. They went deh-be-dehi, or village-by-village, he [Mohammed Irfann] said in the mellifluous Persian of the Moghul Empire, and they made meticulous lists of everything from castes to trees. Dr. Irfann, archivist in the Oriental Division of the Indian National Archives, understands how monumental a task that was. He is near the end of more than 25 years of work cataloging a trove of 137,000 Moghul documents, known as the Inayat Jang Collection.”
- Endangered Languages. “…an online resource to record, access, and share samples of and research on endangered languages, as well as to share advice and best practices for those working to document or strengthen languages under threat.”
- Top Punctuation Howlers – The Comma. “What’s so great about the comma? It clears away ambiguity, confusion, and on occasion steers us away from cannibalism. For example: Martha finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog.“
- Vanishing Languages. “One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. What is lost when a language goes silent?”
- “I Am Allergic to Abstraction” by Carlo Rotella. “What does it mean to explore the world through stories? Martin Eiermann sat down with scholar and writer Carlo Rotella to talk about vivid characters, Bostonian accents, and the future of suburbia.”
- 11 Ways to Bore the Boots Off Your Readers. “I’ve collected the 11 most common mistakes bloggers make that bore the hell out of their readers. And of course, if you prefer to engage, entertain, and entice your readers … just turn these around, and make your content really work.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged blog tips, blogging, books, Carlo Rotella, disappearing, disappearing ink, Endangered language, How to, humor, Inayat Jang Collection, India, Indian National Archives, language, Moghul, National Geographic, National Geographic Society, online resource, paper trail, punctuation, storytelling, the comma, Tips, vanishing, Writing
