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 Monday’s Link Roundup there’s so much good stuff to choose from. As a closet designer, I was particularly drawn to The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design. This is a must on every designer’s wish list. As someone who volunteers at our local Hospice, I was deeply moved by Hospice Hand Portraiture. And if your business involves the gathering or tellingof stories, you’ll want to read Telling Your Story: The Secrets To Content Branding.
- People Of The Bookshelf. “Alpha by subject … or by dinner party seating rules? Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks on a shelving obsession.”
- Are You Overwhelmed by Marketing? “Does it seem like there are just too many things to do to market your business? It’s easy to get overwhelmed by marketing ideas, plans, and tasks, especially when many of them involve learning new skills. And then people are always telling you about something else to do. But you’re only one person. You can only afford to pay for so much help. Is it really even possible to do everything about marketing that others say you should? Here are four steps to find a clear path out of marketing overwhelm.”
- Hospice Hand Portraiture. “As a hospice nurse and photographer I have the honor to witness and capture the unwavering expression of love that endures between people living with terminal illness… Hand portraiture preserves this important expression of love. Each hand is different; a symbol of identity that embodies character and tells stories. Hands reveal honest emotion. Hands are for holding.”
- The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design. “Every once in a while, along comes a book-as-artifact that becomes an instant, inextricable necessity in the life of any graphic design aficionado. This season, it’s The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design — an impressive, exhaustive, rigorously researched, and beautifully produced compendium of 500 seminal designs…”
- Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir No. 1.[Paris Review Interview] “The Liars’ Club, Karr’s 1995 memoir of her Gothic childhood in a swampy East Texas oil-refining town, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, sold half a million copies, and made its forty-year-old author, who was then an obscure poet, a literary celebrity…For a writer who has shared herself with the public in three memoirs, Mary Karr is an extraordinarily elusive interview subject. Nearly two years passed between our initial contact, in July of 2007, and our first session.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this aerticle.]
- 9 Of The Most Beautiful Words In The English Language. “I’ve riffled the pages of scores of old dictionaries and ransacked my father’s old army trunks, which now contain hundreds of my journals and notebooks. More than once during my restocking I’ve thought of the startling line in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, where Captain Hook is described: “The man isn’t wholly evil; he has a thesaurus in his cabin.” Recently, I felt even more vindicated about my ardent belief in the beauty of word books when I heard the deadpan comedian Stephen Wright say on late-night television, “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
- Telling Your Story: The Secrets To Content Branding. “Facts are boring but putting facts into a context with emotion makes them memorable. Stories help you connect with people on a sensory level…The late Steve Sabol, the man behind NFL Films, once said “tell me a fact and I’ll learn, tell me a truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.”
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Tagged Tips, life story, hospice, How to, memoir, Photos, storytelling, interview, stories, books, Marketing, solutions, book design, graphic design, words, English language, boohshelves, overwhelm, hand portraiture, The Phaidon Archive, Mary Karr, content branding, your story, Steve Sabol
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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Tagged change, Dropbox, history, How to, Internet, Jewish History, Jewish quarter (diaspora), Leo Baeck Institute, library, link roundup, map collection, photography, Photos, reading, Tips, Writing
In this Monday’s Link Roundup don’t miss Can a photograph be true or false? It’s a a thought-provoking interview with filmmaker Errol Morris. And if you want to improve your website’s credibility, and who doesn’t, check out How to Improve Your Website Trust Factor.
- The Ultimate History Project. “In recent years, an academic job crisis has led many highly trained historians to leave their profession. The Ultimate History Project draws on the skills of many of these scholars, providing them with an opportunity to publish and promote their scholarship. The Ultimate History Project also encourages faculty members to write for the general public and it provides a forum for academically trained historians to work alongside avid genealogists, independent historians, and collectors, enabling them all to collaborate and learn from one another.” [Thanks to Francie King of History Keep for alerting me to this item.]
- Dead Again. “Two decades ago, the Book Review ran an essay, “The End of Books,” in which the novelist Robert Coover questioned whether print could survive the age of “video transmissions, cellular phones, fax machines, computer networks, and in particular out in the humming digitalized precincts of avant-garde computer hackers, cyberpunks and hyperspace freaks.” Was the book as “dead as God”? …Every generation rewrites the book’s epitaph; all that changes is the whodunit.”
- Hints for Memoir Writers from Woody Allen. “A few months ago, I pulled a page from Bloomberg Businessweek. The article was called, “The Woody Allen School of Productivity” and the author was John Lopez. The premise was that there are valuable lessons in examining a career that has been as successful as Woody Allen’s. Between 1965 and 2012, 47 years, Allen has directed 43 films. Just about one a year…John Lopez researched Allen and came up with eight points. I’ve turned five of these into tips for memoir writers. With thanks to Lopez for this inspiration.”
- The Last Pictures: A Time-Capsule of Humanity in 100 Images Sent into Space for Eternity. “Inspired by cave paintings, Sagan’s Golden Record, and nuclear waste warning signs, MIT artist-in-residence Trevor Paglen set out to create a collection of 100 images, commissioned by public art organization Creative Time, to be etched onto an ultra-archival, golden silicon disc and sent into orbit onboard the Echostar XVI satellite this month — at once a time-capsule of the present and a message to the future.”
- How to Improve Your Website Trust Factor. “Is your website harming the trust and credibility of your business? Are people worried or put off when they visit you online? Could your site be working against you rather than working as a business asset? I’m sad to say that this is more common than we would like…The GOOD news is, a lot of the problem areas that cause mistrust or unease in your visitors are easy to fix. Check out these factors and see if improvements can be made in your own site:”
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Tagged Allen, book review, books, Collin's Dictionary, End of Books, Errol Morris, future, historians, history, How to, images, improve, memoir, new words, New York Times, photography, Photos, project, Robert Coover, Tha Last Pictures, time-capsule, Tips, Trevor Paglen, trust, truthfulness, website, Woody Allen, Writing
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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Tagged American Express, biography, David Lynch, End of life, free music, Google, How to, Life stories, link roundup, literature, memoir, Photos, promotional video, Resources, small business, stories, StoryCorps, Tips, videographer, Writers Resources, writing prompts
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.”
- 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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Tagged 1960s, Arts, book design, Charles Simic, Creative writing, Gloria Steinem, How to, link roundup, memories, Ms. Magazine, New York Review of Books, oral history, Pen, Photos, record stores, Tips, typeface, Writers Resources, Writing
Posted in How to, Personal historian, Photos, Restoration, Tips
Tagged Adobe Photoshop, Graphics, help, How to, Image, Image editing, Personal historian, personal histories, Photo manipulation, photography, Photos, Photoshop, Tips, Tutorial
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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Tagged Amazon SES, digital video, Editing, How to, link roundup, Marketing, obituaries, Photos, podcasts, stories, The DV Show, Tips, typography, vintage TV ads, Writing
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.”
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Tagged creativity, Home Office, How to, link roundup, memoir, memories, page design, Photos, storytelling, The Long Goodbye, Tips, typeface
