With Christmas near I couldn’t resist including 1937-1966 ‘Post Early for Christmas’ posters in this Monday’s Link Roundup. If you’re a nostalgia buff, don’t miss these. I’m a big fan of simple words when it comes to conveying a message so I was delighted to find this short animation, The Power of Simple Words. If you’re planning to launch your business in 2013, take a look at The Entrepreneur’s Handbook: 101 Resources for First Time Entrepreneurs. It contains a wealth of information.
- Can Immigrants Heal Through Storytelling? “Renowned journalist and storyteller Ira Glass says “Great stories happen to those who can tell them.” Newcomers to Canada have some of the richest stories of all;…Pah Wah was born in Burma (now Myanmar)…Her story was created in an innovative program from NYCH [North York Community House] called digital storytelling that captures the stories of newcomers to Canada.”
- 8 Mistakes to Avoid When Starting a Business From Home. “Launching a business from home can provide tremendous flexibility and the kind of work-life balance that we all crave. But the reality is that home businesses bring their own set of challenges, says Caroline Daniels, lecturer for entrepreneurship and technology at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. For example, “doing your business on your own from home can get stale. It’s hard to keep feeding the imagination all on your own.”
- 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.”
- Library of Congress releases 1,600 brilliant photos of America’s World War II-era past. ” A government photo album is giving viewers a rare invitation into America’s colorful past. The Library of Congress has released over 1,600 color images of American society, all snapped during the World War II era.The nostalgic photos, taken between 1939 and 1944, give viewers a look at different slices of life in the then-48 states, from women working at an airplane plant in California to farmers surveying their property in New Mexico.”
- The Entrepreneur’s Handbook: 101 Resources for First Time Entrepreneurs. “Are you looking to take the leap into starting your own business in [2013]? If you’re just starting to think about it, or if you have been planning it for a while, you still may have lots of unanswered questions. The following 101 resources will help you learn more about entrepreneurship, startups, small business, and much more.”
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In this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup, if you’re an introvert like me, you’ll want to read 5 Ways an Introvert Can Build a Thriving Audience Online. And for a unique perspective on capturing personal histories, take a look at Photos of Very Old, Very Loved Teddy Bears.
- The Dual Lives of the Biographer. “The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands. The first is a muddle of misgivings and misapprehensions, hesitations and half-chances, devoted to the baggage carousel or the Netflix queue or wherever the empty calories of existence are served. The second — the life the biographer pins to the page — has themes. It has chapters, a beginning, middle and end. Intentions align with actions, which bloom into logical consequences.”
- Pranks, Ghosts, And Gore: Amazing Photo Manipulations Before Photoshop.”New York’s Metropolitan Museum is the largest (and at 150 years old, almost the oldest) museum of art in America, exhibiting some of the best examples of pre-Modern art this side of Europe. Which makes it a fascinating stage for a current exhibit examining the legacy of Photoshop, a tool that has done much to undermine traditional thinking about photography over the past decade.”
- 5 Ways an Introvert Can Build a Thriving Audience Online. “Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, clarifies that introversion is different from shyness, which is a fear of social judgment. Introversion simply means you are more energized and at your best in less stimulating and quieter environments. So, how can introversion help you achieve world domination, how can you — the introvert — capture the hearts, minds, and trust of an audience?”
- Photos of Very Old, Very Loved Teddy Bears. “For his MuchLoved series, photographer Mark Nixon has shot minimalistic portraits of some well-loved stuffed toys and collected their stories. Spotted by Laughing Squid and on view now at the Mark Nixon / STUDIO in Dublin, Ireland, here are some of plush friends loved a little too well. I mean, seriously, some of them are missing limbs and have their woolen little guts spilling out. That’s, uh, some lovin’ right there.”
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Tagged 2012, best, biographer, biography, design books, Extraversion-Introversion, freelance, freelancer, How to, introvert, link roundup, Mark Nixon, Metropolitan Museum, MuchLoved, New York, online success, Photo manipulation, Photos, Photoshop, small business, Susan Cain, Teddy Bears, Tips, wages, women
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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In this Monday’s Link Roundup I couldn’t resist Photographer Turns His Grandmother Into a Not-Yet-Retired Superhero. Forget the video and book legacies. It’s time to break out the spandex! And speaking of grandmothers, take a look at Arlington’s Martha Ann Miller, 101, publishes her autobiography, just as she said she would. Now there’s no excuse not to start writing your memoir. If you’re working up a sweat over your work, take a look at Effortless. Seth Godin always seems to say so much in so little a space.
- Untrack: Letting Go of the Stress of Measuring. “There are a few old management adages that seem to run like a current through our society, powering our work and personal lives: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” and “You are what you measure” and “You get what you measure”. And I’ve fallen for it myself…Measurement and tracking are tools, and there’s nothing wrong with using them. I’ve obviously used them many times, and still recommend them to most people. I just think we should consider whether there are alternatives, and question our dogma, and experiment to see what works best for us.”
- Effortless. “Sometimes, “never let them see you sweat,” is truly bad advice. The work of an individual who cares often exposes the grit and determination and effort that it takes to be present.”
- Photographer Turns His Grandmother Into a Not-Yet-Retired Superhero. “When most people try to lighten their grandmothers’ spirits, the effort often takes the form of Sunday afternoon phone calls and perhaps the occasional visit. Not so with Sacha Goldberger, however. After the French fashion and advertising photographer found out his nonagenarian grandmother was feeling blue, he came up with a rather adventurous solution for restoring her good cheer: spandex. He decided to enlist her to save the world, or at least depict her doing so on film.”
- Arlington’s Martha Ann Miller, 101, publishes her autobiography, just as she said she would. “When a 100-year-old woman tells you she’s writing her autobiography, you nod politely and think, “Yeah, right.” So here’s Martha Ann Miller of Arlington, now 101, and here’s her polished, published autobiography: 255 pages with great photos throughout, featuring the inside story of how Arlington became the first district in Virginia to desegregate its schools. And how Miller was one of the first teachers to participate in that desegregation.”[Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
- Baby boomers are obsessing publicly about their mortality. “Not only are baby boomers getting old, many of them are hearing bad news from their doctors. And as with everything else that has happened to them – careers, marriage, children, divorce – they are obsessing about their mortality, and often in public. Many of them are even preparing pre-death testimonials so that they can control their posthumous images.”
- Personal memoir as social history. “[The World in Our Time]… is a memoir par excellence. It recaptures the life-experience of one of India’s leading historians, who experienced the mutation of India’s rural society under colonialism and then witnessed his country’s birth as an independent nation, associated as it was, with some of the most painful facets of human experience. But each turning point in the author’s life is presented with a historical hindsight, which also makes the memoir a history of his time.”
- Famous Canadians, revived by their obituaries. “As cub reporters, we felt sorry for the veterans of the newsroom when they were relegated to writing obituaries, presumably as a preamble to their own professional demise. Globe and Mail features writer Sandra Martin’s Working the Dead Beat: 50 Lives that Changed Canada, thoroughly demonstrates how wrong we were: Capturing the landscape of an entire life in a single column, on deadline, is among the most challenging – and sacred – of assignments.”
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In this Monday’s Link Roundup I’ve listed several book reviews that I think you’ll find interesting. If you’re concerned about digitizing your precious family history, you’ll want to read Digital Imaging Essentials. For an understanding of what it’s like to be supportive parents of a gay teenage boy who tried to commit suicide, be sure to read Oddly Normal. And for John Lennon fans, don’t miss The John Lennon Letters.
- No sunlit room, no last words. “As Luke Allnutt watched his father die, he thought the time for a meaningful conversation and emotional epiphany was at hand. His father had other ideas.”
- The best way to get unstuck. “Don’t wait for the right answer and the golden path to present themselves.This is precisely why you’re stuck.”
- 10 Essential Marketing Skills for Freelancers. “As a freelancer (or potential freelancer), you live and die by your ability to sell your services. And uOddly Normal is not Joseph’s story. It’s the story of his parents, who struggled for years over how best to raise a child whom they knew was gay, who wasn’t out to them or the world, and whom they thought was mentally crumbling under the pressure of that secret.nless you’ve got some kind of agent or marketing firm doing your marketing for you, you’ve got to be your own marketer. If you’re like me, that doesn’t come naturally.”
- Digital Imaging Essentials by Geoff Rasmussen. “Genealogists use digital imaging technology every day. But what they do not know about it can harm their digital treasures. They have needed a comprehensive, easy-to-read guide, full of illustrated step-by-step instructions to learn how to digitize, organize, preserve, share, and backup their digital collections.”
- The John Lennon Letters, Edited by Hunter Davies. “The triumph of these 200 or so letters is that they are not just about John and Mimi, or John and The Beatles, or John and Yoko. They are all of that but, within the framework editor Hunter Davies gives them, they’re also about a time and place, and Lennon’s role within it. It is hard to distinguish whether the honestly and innocence of some of his correspondence reflects his personality, or his era.”
- Translating from speech to prose. “Terkel’s books consist of tape-recorded conversations with mostly common people; after a brief introduction from Terkel, each text unspools almost seamlessly, with only an occasional nudge from the questioner. But here’s the thing: most people don’t talk that way.” [Thanks to APH member Pattie Whitehouse for alerting me to this article.]
- Book Review: Oddly Normal. “Thirteen-year-old Joseph Schwartz …came out at school one spring day in 2009, rode the bus home, shut himself in his suburban New Jersey bathroom, and downed way too many capsules of Benadryl. He had never been subjected to overt homophobia, was only a few years away from hearing the president of the United States express unequivocal support for gay marriage on national television, and was the son of two very supportive, loving parents. But no matter his direct relationship with what it meant to “be gay,” Joseph carried the weight of his difference… and it almost killed him. Joseph’s dad, New York Times national reporter John Schwartz['s],… new memoir, Oddly Normal: One Family’s Struggle To Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms With His Sexuality… is not Joseph’s story. It’s the story of his parents, who struggled for years over how best to raise a child whom they knew was gay, who wasn’t out to them or the world, and whom they thought was mentally crumbling under the pressure of that secret.”
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Tagged Business, digital imaging, End of life, freelance writers, freelancer, genealogy, guide, homophobia, How to, Hunter Davies, John lennon, John Schwartz, last words, letters, link roundup, Marketing, New York Times, Oddly Normal, Parenting, sexuality, skills, small business, Studs Terkel, Tips
In this Monday’s Link Roundup, do yourself a favor and read My 6,128 Favorite Books. It gives a whole new meaning to “avid reader”. And for those of us who are trying to improve our marketing abilities check out How to Generate Attention and Interest. Forget the “elevator speech”.
- Leo Baeck Institute Launches DigiBaeck German-Jewish History Archive. “Leo Baeck Institute (LBI), the premiere research library and archive devoted exclusively to documenting the history of German-speaking Jewry, has completed the digitization of its entire archive, which now provides free online access to primary source materials encompassing five centuries of Jewish life in Central Europe.”
- Dropbox makes the easiest way to send photos. “Dropbox (site) adds a higher level of automation to digital-image sharing. All you have to do is snap the picture; if you’re connected to the Internet, Dropbox immediately uploads the image to its servers, then downloads it to a folder on your computer and to other Dropbox-capable devices. Once the photos are on your computer, sharing them with friends and family can be just as automatic.”
- How to Generate Attention and Interest. “Someone asks you what you do and you respond with your best “elevator speech” but nobody seems to be interested. You write emails and marketing materials that seem to say the right thing, but very few people respond. You’re confused because you’ve targeted your market, talked about all your benefits and value and still you don’t get the response you want.”
- 100 Ideas That Changed Photography. “[a]…concise and intelligent chronicle of the most seminal developments in the history of today’s most prevalent visual art. From technical innovations like the cyanotype (#12), the advent of color (#23), the Polaroid (#84), and moving pictures (#20) to paradigms like photojournalism (#66) and fabrication (#93) to new ways of looking at the world like aerial photography (#54), micro/macro (#55), and stopping time (#49), each of the ideas is accompanied by a short essay contextualizing its history and significance.”
- My 6,128 Favorite Books. “I started borrowing books from a roving Quaker City bookmobile when I was 7 years old. Things quickly got out of hand. Before I knew it I was borrowing every book about the Romans, every book about the Apaches, every book about the spindly third-string quarterback who comes off the bench in the fourth quarter to bail out his team. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but what started out as a harmless juvenile pastime soon turned into a lifelong personality disorder.”
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In this Monday’s Link Roundup there are so many wonderful articles to dip in to. I highly recommend ‘Born This Way’. It’s an important sharing of life stories from the childhood memories of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. And for those who still treasure getting or sending a handwritten letter, be sure to read Why handwriting matters.
- Storied: Capture and Share Family Stories. “The goal of Storied is to make the process of capturing and sharing meaningful family stories easy and accessible for people of all ages. With the app installed on your iPad*, you can easily scan in printed photos directly from the iPad, or import them from popular networks like Facebook, and then record interviews with yourself or your family about the events in the photo.”
- Long Live Paper. “As both a teacher who uses paper textbooks and a student of urban history, I can’t help but wonder what parallels exist between my own field and this sudden, wholesale abandonment of the technology of paper.”
- Why handwriting matters. “Does handwriting have a value that email and texting can’t replace? In this extract from his new book, The Missing Ink, Philip Hensher laments the slow death of the written word, and explains how putting pen to paper can still occupy a special place in our lives.”
- ‘Born This Way’: The Radical Possibilities in Sharing Our Stories and Photos of When We First Knew We Were Queer.”This summer was the first time I’d publicly written about my childhood and how difficult it was to grow up gay in a small, industrial city in southern Wisconsin. I didn’t really think too much about it. I was, after reading some particularly vicious comments about queer people, simply sharing what I’d been through in hopes of feeling less hopeless and helpless…Tomorrow an amazing new book will reach stores and add over 100 voices to this conversation. Born This Way (Quirk Books) was edited by DJ Paul V. and inspired by his website of the same name, a photo/essay project for gay adults of all genders to submit their childhood pictures and stories and share their memories of growing up LGBTQ.”
- Skype for Interviews. “From The Conversations Network, Doug Kaye and Paul Figgiani explain the tips and techniques for recording high-quality interviews using Skype.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt’s Controversial Love Letters to Lorena Hickok. “In the summer of 1928, Roosevelt met journalist Lorena Hickok, whom she’d come to refer to as Hick. The thirty-year relationship that ensued has remained the subject of much speculation, from the evening of FDR’s inauguration, when the First Lady was seen wearing a sapphire ring Hickok had given her, to the opening up of her private correspondence archives in 1998. Though many of the most explicit letters had been burned, the 300 published in Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters Of Eleanor Roosevelt And Lorena Hickok (public library).”
- How to Use Twitter to Grow Your Business. “Can Twitter actually help my business or is it a complete waste of my valuable time? This was the very question I asked myself only a few months back. Perhaps you’ve pondered the same?…This article reveals how bestselling authors and business professionals use Twitter to grow their businesses and reveals ideas you can employ to achieve Twitter success.”
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Tagged Born This Way, childhood memories, Conversations Network, Eleanor Roosevelt, handwriting, How to, Interviewing, Interviews, LGBTQ, Life stories, link roundup, Lorena Hickok, paper, Philip Hensher, Queer, Roosevelt, Skype, small business, textbooks, The Missing Link, Tips, Twitter, video
Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian compatriots! In this Monday’s Link Roundup, be sure to check out Top 10 ways to Ditch Your Clutter and Digitally Organize Your Life. It provides some pretty interesting ways to reduce the mound of stuff squirreled away in our boxes and filing cabinets. And on a similar theme, you might want to avail yourself of the services of PeggyBank.com. You can read about them in Bringing Your Old-Media Memories Into the Digital Age.
- Banished Words. “As it has every year since 1976, Lake Superior State University has released its latest “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse, and General Uselessness.” The annual list, the impish brainchild of LSSU’s Public Relations Office, contains the twelve most nominated words among the thousands sent mostly by folks from the United States and Canada. The 2012 list of unfriended words includes the following: amazing (the most nominated), baby bump (a close second), shared sacrifice, occupy, blowback, man cave, the new normal, pet parent, win the future, trickeration, ginormous, and thank you in advance.”
- The 10 Greatest Biographical Poems (Part 1). “My work documenting lives on video always has me on the lookout for enduring biography in other formats, like great biographical poems. I can’t claim to have boiled the ocean, but here are the first five of my personal faves.”
- The Neurochemistry of Empathy, Storytelling, and the Dramatic Arc, Animated. “Paul Zak [is] director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies and author of The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity. In this short film on empathy, neurochemistry, and the dramatic arc, directed and edited by my friend Kirby Ferguson and animated by Henrique Barone, Zak takes us inside his lab, where he studies how people respond to stories.”
- Bringing Your Old-Media Memories Into the Digital Age. “Lots of people have memories locked away on old, deteriorating media: home movies, audio and video tapes, printed photos, negatives and slides…Now, a small company in Omaha, Neb., called PeggyBank.com, is offering a service where you send in all your old media (it will even provide the boxes) and the company will convert all of these items, for a fee, into digital formats and upload them to a free online “vault,” usable from any computer with Web access.”
- Is It Worth Converting an Old Book Into an eBook? “Although ebooks are exploding in popularity, the tools we have to create them favor straight text books like novels, memoirs and literary nonfiction. With complex books that include all three kinds of content, we’re still a long way away from being able to easily and inexpensively re-launch the books of the past.”
- Fall fashion – women in veils 1880s-1930s. “Looking through the new fall fashion magazines this weekend, I noticed hats, but few veils. Women have been wearing veils since at least the 13th century B.C. in Assyria. Classical Greek & Hellenistic statues sometimes depict Greek women with both their head & face covered by a veil. Statues of Persian elite women from Persepolis show examples of some women wearing veils & some without. Here are a few from the 19th & early 20th century, which I find fascinating.”
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Tagged 19th & 20th century women's veils, banished words, biographical poems, clutter, Compact Disc, digital organization, DVD, E-book, e-books, empathy, fashion, How to, Information Age, Lake Superior State University, link roundup, neurochemistry, old media, Paul J. Zak, PeggyBank.com, preserving, Resources, storytelling, Tips, veils
My favorite article in today’s Monday’s Link Roundup is Reading Cookbooks as Life Stories. One of my prized possessions is Mom’s 1945 Purity Cookbook. Thumbing through the grease-stained pages and reading her handwritten notes is like stepping back into Mom’s kitchen. Also, be sure to take a look at Boring Is Productive. I can now feel justly proud of my “boring” morning routines! 
- An Illustrated Homage to Grandparents and the Art of Looking Twice. “As a lover of vintage and vintage-inspired children’s books, I was instantly enamored with The Frank Show (public library) by British illustrator and designer David Mackintosh — a charming homage to grandparents and the art of seeing beneath the grumpy exterior.”
- The simple power of one a day. “There are at least 200 working days a year. If you commit to doing a simple marketing item just once each day, at the end of the year you’ve built a mountain. Here are some things you might try (don’t do them all, just one of these once a day would change things for you):”
- The Top 10 Social Networks for Creative People. “I begin by looking at WHY networking is critical to your success as a creative professional. Then it’s onto the networks themselves, with quotations from the founders of some networks and success stories from users, explaining the networks’ individual cultures, how to use them, and how they can help your creativity and your career.”
- Reading Cookbooks as Life Stories. “…cookbooks tell us something much more personal about their readers,..The problem is, we often only come about this information by inference – particularly when we know nothing about the original owner. Still, many cookbooks do offer at least a few tantalizing clues who owned them and how they were used.”
- Data Lives Forever in Quartz Glass. “Hitachi has discovered a way to store digital information on slivers of quartz glass. This data can seemingly exist forever, enduring extreme temperatures and hostile conditions without degrading… at least until the sun begins to die and expend to consume the earth, that is.”
- Using WorldCat to Find Genealogy Books. “WorldCat is the world’s largest network of library content and services. It is an online library catalog that lets you look up items in libraries around the world. The items available include books, electronic documents, journals, microform, and audio and video recordings. Best of all, WorldCat is available to everyone free of charge.”
- Boring Is Productive. “Making too many decisions about mundane details is a waste of a limited resource: your mental energy. In the late 1990s, Roy Baumeister (a professor at Florida State University) and colleagues performed several experiments showing that certain types of conscious mental actions appeared to draw from the same “energy source” — gradually diminishing our ability to make smart decisions throughout the day.”
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Tagged boring, Cookbook, cookbooks, creatives, data, Florida State University, Frank Show, Fused quartz, genealogy, grandparents, Hitachi, homage, How to, Life stories, life story, link roundup, Marketing, productivity, Quartz Glass, reading, Roy Baumeister, simple, social networks, Tips, top, WorldCat
Did you know that genealogy ranks second only to porn as the most searched topic online ? I didn’t! In this Monday’s Link Roundup you can read more about this and other fascinating topics. A favorite of mine is Negative Space in Logo Designs. You’ll find some dazzling designs here that will make you want to create your own unique logo. And just for a lark, be sure to check out 25 (more) words that are fun to say.
- Why We Procrastinate, and How to Stop It. [Video} “We all procrastinate from time to time, but beating it isn’t as easy as recognizing that we do it. This video from the folks at ASAP Science does a great job of explaining the mental processes behind why we procrastinate (you may be procrastinating right now by reading about procrastination) and how you can use them to your advantage to get things done.”
- Telling Stories About the Stories We Tell. “On July 25, Philip Gourevitch gave the keynote address to the Human Rights Lecture Series at Stanford University…We met over drinks before his lecture to discuss the challenges of writing about the history that we are in the midst of making, the burdens of memory and the appeal of forgetting, the dangers of narrative simplification, the limits of humanitarianism, and the messiness of politics.”
- The War of the Words: How to Update a Dictionary. “David Skinner’s The Story of Ain’t is not the history of that word, but an exploration of the scandal over the publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language. Like the crowdsourced Collins, Webster’s Third was premised on a new direction; one that struck many as giving in to new forces “blowing in the wind.” Its editor, Philip Gove, operated under a seemingly reasonable impression: that a dictionary for post-World War II America could dispense with lists of English kings, quotations from Tennyson, and the breezy disparagement of colloquial speech.”
- QR Codes Make Memories Come Alive. “The cool thing about QR codes on headstones is that you can scan the code and immediately learn more about the person than simply their date of birth and death. You can see a video of the person while they were alive, maybe dispensing words of wisdom. You can see photos, read or hear stories, and list the family tree. Just about anything you can put on a website can be incorporated into a site associated with a unique QR code. This is storytelling from beyond the grave.”
- Negative Space In Logo Design. “Great logos do more than just say the name of the company—they capture the personality, tone of voice and style of the brand…But some of the best logos of all are remarkable because of the hidden details they contain through the clever use of negative space…We’ve brought together a collection of beautifully designed, ingeniously crafted logos that all use negative space to help fill out the image and add an extra level of depth, style and cleverness.”
- Ancestry.com’s Genealogical Juggernaut. “Today, genealogy ranks second only to porn as the most searched topic online. According to a January 2012 report by market research firm Global Industry Analysts, an estimated 84 million people around the world spend anywhere from $1,000 to $18,000 a year in search of their ancestors. Visitors to online genealogy sites are mostly white women, 55 and older, who browse the Internet from home—or, says Pate, “your Aunt Betsy, who’s got a real rabid appetite for digging into family roots.” It’s a demographic projected to grow 36 percent by 2020, three times as fast as any other group.”
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