How many of you could use some further training to enhance your personal history skills? I know I can!
Whether you’re starting out or well established, here’s a select list of sites that can help. I’ve combed the Internet to bring you some of the best…Read more.
Posted in Business, How to, Personal historian, Resources, Tips
Tagged blogging, e-mail newsletters, Editing, How to, Interviewing, Marketing, Personal historian, personal history, photo scanning, Resources, social media, Tips, videography, Writing
Don’t miss Reflections in today’s Monday’s Link Roundup. It’s a powerful reminder that behind every aged face there was once a younger self with dreams and ambitions. If you’re a serious blogger, you’ll find some practical wisdom in 10 Lessons Seth Godin Can Teach You About Blogging.
- Robert Caro’s Big Dig. “Caro is the last of the 19th-century biographers, the kind who believe that the life of a great or powerful man deserves not just a slim volume, or even a fat one, but a whole shelf full. He dresses every day in a jacket and tie and reports to a 22nd-floor office in a nondescript building near Columbus Circle, where his neighbors are lawyers or investment firms.”
- Choosing Between Making Money and Doing What You Love. “…when you are facing the unknown, they only way to know anything for sure is to act. When you are dealing with uncertainty — and whether you are going to make any money from your passion at this point is definitely an uncertainty — you act. You don’t think about what might happen, or try to predict the outcome, or plan for every contingency. You take a small step toward making it a reality, and you see what happens.”
- Why Entrepreneurial Thinking Is For Everyone Now. “We need a new playbook,” says entrepreneur and author Ben Casnocha. “The world has changed. The world of work has changed. Many of the assumptions that have guided how we think about careers in America are no longer true.” The Start-Up of You, written by Casnocha and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, is that playbook. It argues that we can no longer expect to find a job, instead we must make our jobs. As Hoffman says, we have to “find a way to add value in a way no one else can. For entrepreneurs, it’s differentiate or die — that now goes for all of us.”
- Reflections. A poignant reconstructed portrait series where older people gaze into a mirror at a reflection of their younger selves . Created by photographer Tom Husey.
- Social media self-promotion scheme draws authors including Margaret Atwood. “As bookshops teeter and publishers sway in the shifting landscape of the digital age, authors are being urged to go out and find their own readers by a new $20m (£12.5m) fund that will pay them a dollar for every book sold. With early adopters including Margaret Atwood and FlashForward author Robert Sawyer – who claimed the scheme would have added $20,000 to his income from audio over the past two years – the fund is being launched by digital audiobook site Audible at the London Book Fair this weekend.”
- Book Design: Choosing Your Paragraphing Style. “Anyone who wants to do their own book design can spend some very worthwhile time studying books that are old. I mean really old, like going all the way back to the beginning of printed books. Early on, I found these books and the book typography that’s used in them very stimulating when thinking about how I wanted the books I was working on to look.”
- 10 Lessons Seth Godin Can Teach You About Blogging. “Ever since I started in business, I’ve always loved Seth Godin. He’s a brilliant marketer and a great writer. In fact, he runs one of the most popular blogs…And while many people view him as “America’s greatest marketer,” there is a lot to learn from him about blogging.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged Audible, Ben Casnocha, biography, blogging, book design, books, Caro, entrepreneur, How to, making money, paragraph style, publishing, Reflections, Robert Caro, Seth Godin, social media, Tips, Tom Husey, wisdom
Laughter is therapeutic. In this Monday’s Link Roundup you’re sure to brighten your day by watching, Who Says Machines Must Be Useful? Another whimsical piece to make you smile and think is The Bookshelf Rethought: 5 Innovative Designs. Be sure to check out Master brings books back to life. Paul Tronson, a master bookbinder, has spent 30 years trying to bring traditional bookbinding back as an art form.
- A social media update from beyond the grave. “While virtual memorial websites have been around since the mid-1990s, traditionally they’ve helped the living venerate the dead. The latest crop, including I-Postmortem, a Silicon Valley start-up launched last fall, encourages the living to commemorate themselves, essentially writing their own obituaries.”
- How To Work From Home Like You Mean It. “I’ve been working from home, a few different homes, since late 2007. And the biggest thing I’ve learned during those four years is that working from home doesn’t have to change how you get work done, but it does change nearly everything else about your gig.”
- The Secret Bookstore. “Watch this beautiful video about Brazenhead Books, a secret bookstore that’s been tucked away in Michael Seidenberg’s apartment on the Upper East Side ever since the rent for his original retail space in Brooklyn was quadrupled.”
- Who Says Machines Must Be Useful? “On the roof of a small row house in Brooklyn, a black powder fuse flared brightly against the gray sky. Hissing and sparking, it burned through a platform installed inside a repurposed Ikea bookshelf, sending four colored balls into action, lighting camp stoves, swinging fly swatters and knocking over books in a frenetic burst of organized chaos. In less than a minute, the final ball had dropped to the ground and was pocketed by Joseph Herscher, 26, the kinetic artist behind this real-world Rube Goldberg machine.”
- An Author Explores Unique Codes to Enhance Memoir Experience. “Last week, Women’s Memoirs published an interview with memoir author Jenny Lynn Anderson, author of Room 939: 15 Minutes of Horror, 20 Years of Healing. When we looked at her book, we loved the innovative use she made of Quick Response codes.”
- The Bookshelf Rethought: 5 Innovative Designs. “We love books. We love design. And we love the intersection of the two. Some time ago, we looked at five examples of public library innovation. But what about the personal library? Today, we’re turning to five gorgeous bookshelves that put a twist on your home library with ingenuity and design innovation.”
- Master brings books back to life. “At the top of a narrow staircase on Sidney’s Beacon Avenue is a studio filled with vegetable-tanned leathers, tall glass jars of fermented dyes from plant extracts and a handcut lay press dating to about 1540.These are the tools and materials that master bookbinder Paul Tronson uses to bring rare books back to life.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged bookbinding, Bookcase, bookstore, death, home business, How to, innovative design, link roundup, memoir, memorial websites, QR Codes, Rube Goldberg machine, social media, Tips, traditional
It’s the beginning of another week and that means some fascinating new stories in Monday’s Link Roundup to get you started. My favorite is Dear Photograph. The picture that accompanies this article is particularly poignant. And don’t miss Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of the Self-Interview. It illuminates a little known side of the Russian – American writer.
- Whither Digital Video Preservation? “Finding appropriate digital preservation file formats for audiovisual materials is not an easy task. While much of the recorded sound preservation realm has agreed upon the viability of the Broadcast Wave file format for sound materials, the video realm is still kind of the Wild West in that there is no broad consensus regarding what kinds of file formats or codecs are appropriate for preservation.”
- Who’s on the Family Tree? Now It’s Complicated. “Genealogists have long defined familial relations along bloodlines or marriage. But as the composition of families changes, so too has the notion of who gets a branch on the family tree. Some families now organize their family tree into two separate histories: genetic and emotional. Some schools, where charting family history has traditionally been a classroom project, are now skipping the exercise altogether.”
- DailyLit. “DailyLit sends you bite-sized chunks of public domain books (including many classics) daily, on weekdays, or three times a week via email or RSS — for free. Each serving takes less than five minutes to read, and if you want, they’ll send you the next installment right away if you click a link.”
- Dear Photograph: A website with a window into the past. “In the past month, a summery, slightly sad website has made the trip from non-existence to international exposure. It’s called Dear Photograph, and its premise is simple: Take a picture of an old photo being carefully held up in front of the place it was originally taken, so it appears to be a window into the past.”
- Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of the Self-Interview. “Nabokov—to my knowledge—never conducted an interview without having received and answered the questions in advance. Even when he appeared with Lionel Trilling on a “live” taped interview on a 1958 program called “Close Up” to discuss the controversy surrounding Lolita for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Nabokov reads his responses—on television—from his index cards.”
- Immigrants to Canada Online. “Library and Archives Canada (LAC) holds the Canadian immigration records for the years 1865 to 1935. The lists are online, providing 23,482 references to immigration records held at Library and Archives Canada. Those passenger lists are the sole surviving official records of the arrival of the majority of people accepted as immigrants in Canada.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup, Uncategorized
Tagged Canada, DailyLIt, digital video preservation, e-books, family tree, genealogy, How to, immigrants, memoir, old photos, online, self-interview, social media, Tips, Vladimir Nabokov, Writing
How many of you could use some further training to enhance your personal history skills? I know I can!
Whether you’re starting out or well established, here’s a select list of sites that can help. I’ve combed the Internet to bring you some of the best. If you have suggestions for other resources that you’d like to see listed here, please let me know.
Interviewing
Producing an e-mail newsletter
How to build and use a blog
Marketing
Writing & Editing
Book production and design
Videography
Software
Social Media
Photo Scanning
Photo by Andrew
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Posted in How to, Personal historian, Resources, Tips
Tagged blogging, e-mail newsletters, Editing, How to, Interviewing, Marketing, Personal historian, photo scanning, Resources, social media, Tips, videography, Writing
This Monday’s Link Roundup is devoted to everything digital from publishing on iPad to the Associated Press Stylebook’s latest Social Media Guidelines. For those of you thinking about sticking your big toe into the Social Media waters, you’ll find The Small Business (Idiot’s) Guide to Social Media a terrific resource.
- The Small Business (Idiot’s) Guide to Social Media. “Are you embarrassed to say that you’ve never been on Twitter? Not quite sure what to make of Facebook? Relax. This irreverent idiot’s guide by a top former social media consultant will tell you exactly what you should — and shouldn’t — be doing to leverage the “global conversation” for your business.”
- Authors will soon be able to Self-Publish on the iPad Bookstore. “Apple is now an alternative to traditional publishers. The company this week opened a new portal for independent authors to self-publish their books for the iBooks Store open to iPad (and soon iPhone) customers. Best of all, the author/publisher receives royalties on every sale.”
- Those Unattached to Their Interior Story Get Addicted to Feedback. “One of the recent podcast interviews in Michael Margolis’s The New Storytellers series featured the wonderful Christina Baldwin, author of one of the seminal books in the current storytelling movement, Storycatcher…People are longing for a deeper conversation, Baldwin says. We need to push technology aside and just talk slowly face-to-face in a social space that creates connection…It’s a very worthwhile and thought-provoking conversation. Give it a listen.”
- 2010 AP Stylebook Announces “Website” is One Word; “E-Mail” Retains Hyphen. “The Associated Press announced yesterday that it has added a separate Social Media Guidelines section to its 2010 AP Stylebook. The new section includes information on correct use of such terms as “… app, blogs, click-throughs, friend and unfriend, metadata, RSS, search engine optimization, smart phone, trending, widget and wiki.”
- ‘Vanity’ Press Goes Digital. “Much as blogs have bitten into the news business and YouTube has challenged television, digital self-publishing is creating a powerful new niche in books that’s threatening the traditional industry. Once derided as “vanity” titles by the publishing establishment, self-published books suddenly are able to thrive by circumventing the establishment. ” [Thanks to Pat McNees for alerting me to this item.]
- Self-publishing via Amazon. “CreateSpace.com is the self-publishing arm of Amazon, providing a service that makes it easy for an individual to self-publish books, CDs, and DVDs. I’ve used CreateSpace for books and highly recommend it.”
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Happy Victoria Day holiday to all my Canadian readers! For those of you who have the day free, why not take a ramble through this Monday’s Link Roundup? There’s bound to be something to pique your curiosity. One of my favorite links is How to Take a Photo a Day and See Your Life in a Whole New Way. I’m seriously thinking of trying this.
- Social Media Toolkits. “From the National Association of Government Communicators list, I’m reposting information about a great resource: three social media toolkits from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” [Thanks to Pat McNees for alerting me to this item.]
- For Real Productivity, Less is Truly More. “As every great athlete understands, the highest performance occurs when we balance work and effort with rest and renewal. The human body is hard-wired to pulse, and requires renewal at regular intervals not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally.”
- 10 Simple Google Search Tricks. “I’m always amazed that more people don’t know the little tricks you can use to get more out of a simple Google search. Here are 10 of my favorites.”
- Narrative Medicine: Learning to Listen. “Dr. Rita Charon, professor of clinical medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, is well aware of the power of storytelling. She has a Ph.D. in English — training that changed her medical practice. Through literature, she learned how stories are built and told, and translated that to listening to, and better understanding, patients.” [Thanks to Elisabeth Pozzi-Thanner of Oral History Productions for alerting me to this item.]
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