Letters Remain

Category: business

  • Deconstructing Managers

    Today and tomorrow I’ll be posting a few links I’ve saved on managing: on being a manager, dealing with managers, and how to be a better one. To begin, a six-part series from Rands in Reposeā€”Deconstructing Managers. There Is Evil, Your Manager’s Job I trust that, like me, you’re an optimist and you believe that…

  • Quiting Google

    As someone who works in IT (or on the fringes of it, at least), a job at Google is seen as the Holy Grail of positions: if it’s not going to be a job for life, it’ll at least set you up for itā€”after all, who wouldn’t want to hire Google alumni, right? And the…

  • The Ideal News/Media Outlet

    Describing his new rules of news, Dan Gillmore provides 22 rules that he would insist upon if he ran a news/media outlet (and, in turn, describes what many would believe to be the ideal news organisation). This particularly caught my eye: We would replace PR-speak and certain Orwellian words and expressions with more neutral, precise…

  • New Authors and the Web

    If you do happened to get signed by a publishing house, odds are you won’t get the attention you think you deserve. Once you finish your book and actually get it out there your job is just beginning: “Being an author has become much more of an ongoing relationship with your audience through the Web,…

  • Books, Printing, and Self-Publishing

    In an age of increasing digitization, objects become more valuable. And that value is the reason print media will not die, even if it does shrink. My prediction for print media, therefore, is two-fold: you will see small run, local editions of hardbound books and quick, cheap paperbacks.Ā Couple this with our new attitudes on theĀ democratizationĀ of…

  • Social Publishing

    You’ll hear more about social publishing from me in the future, but this is too fresh to hesitate showing you. Richard Eoin Nash, former publisher of Soft Skull press, has been trying to rally interest for a social publishing start-up called Cursor. In this interview, he defines “social publishing”: 1) Define ā€œsocial publishingā€ in terms…

  • There is something outside of the text

    To make a very long story short, I was a book luggingĀ LudditeĀ until about three years ago when I discovered that the internet was more than cats fiending after cheeseburgers. And, since then, I have become increasingly fascinated with digital culture’s scrolls and more than a little concerned about my friend, theĀ codex.Ā Over the next few days,…

  • Scarcity Marketing

    Neuromarketing has recently been looking at The Scarcity Effect: WORCHEL, LEE, AND ADEWOLE (1975) asked people to rate chocolate chip cookies. They put 10 cookies in one jar and two of the same cookies in another jar. The cookies from the two-cookie jar received higher ratingsā€”even though the cookies were exactly the same! Not only…

  • Kodak and Brand Naming

    While reading about the history of the Eastman Kodak Company (more commonly known just as Kodak) I came across this titbit about the Kodak name which seemed like sound advice for naming a product or brand: The letter “K” had been a favorite of Eastman’s, he is quoted as saying, “it seems a strong, incisive…

  • Information Gaps and Knowledge Rewards

    Starting with two great examples of marketing through curiosity (the Hot Wheels mystery car and California Pizza Kitchen’s Don’t Open It thank you card), Stephen Anderson looks at how you can use ‘information gaps’ to drive curiosity and then interaction with your customers. Information can be presented in a manner that is straightforward or curious.…