Month: July 2010
-
Become Comfortable with Incompleteness: Writing Tips from Rands
“Don’t write a book” is the first piece of advice Michael Lopp offers us in a post chronicling his writing process. Lopp–an engineering manager at Apple, author of Being Geek and Managing Humans, and more commonly known as Rands–details his tools and methods for writing a book and, as always, his advice is applicable to…
-
Equal Societies Good for All
The more unequal a society’s income distribution, the more health and social problems ail both the rich and the poor. With this theory brought to his attention through the “quite fascinating book” The Spirit Level, Nicolas Baumard displays the evidence to support the theory that economic inequality is bad for all inhabitants of a country before…
-
Privacy and Tracking with Digital Coupons
Data collection and mining can be quite lucrative pursuits for many retailers, and technological advances are providing them with more novel and extensive methods of doing just that. Data mining is a topic I’ve been fascinated with ever since I was introduced to it in university, and this look at how digital coupons track us…
-
Web Marketing Lessons from Cialdini’s ‘Influence’
No marketer should be engaging with people online without having read Robert Cialdini’s much lauded Influence, says SEOmoz co-founder Rand Fishkin. To this end, Rand presents his Illustrated Guide to the Science of Influence and Persuasion. The six main principles illustrated: Reciprocation: “The power of reciprocation relies on several conventions. The request must be “in-kind,”…
-
The Issues of the Self-Publishing Future
In 2009, 764,448 books were published outside of “traditional publishing and classification definitions”, according to Bowker. This plethora of self-published titles can be thought of as the ‘slush pile‘, says Laura Miller, and while this future offers authors better options than ever before, it’s the impact on readers themselves that we should be considering (e.g.…
-
Six Principles of ‘Sticky’ Ideas
In an excerpt from Made to Stick, brothers Dan and Chip Heath provide an outline of the six principles of creating ‘sticky’ ideas: Simplicity: “We must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. […] Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate…