Merlin Mann will be well known to the Mac-using readers of this blog. For those who don’t recognise his name, Merlin has long been associated with productivity and creativity. I’ve just finished watching his Macworld 2009 talk. He examines the dichotomy between being creative and wanting to be.
Scott Pack, publisher with The Friday Project (HarperCollins), has a blog on which he provides betting tips, reviews, and snippets of news relating to the publishing industry. His reviews are often detailed. Sometimes they are short. One of his short reviews was read by the author and storm of tea-cup sized proportions has broken out. [...]
Researchers at Reading University have built a model of how word use has changed over the last forty thousand years. Mark Pagel, the biologist behind the model, says: When we speak to each other we’re playing this massive game of Chinese whispers. The BBC report goes on: What the researchers found was that the frequency [...]
BubbleCow reports on the settlement agreed by Google to reimburse the authors whose works Google has been scanning, fiendishly, in the dead of night. Over the past years Google has been systematically scanning library books and making the digital copies freely available on the internet. The potential implications to writers, the impact on their sales [...]
Tom Saunders is that rare beast. He writes only short fiction. Rarer still, his short fiction is consistently excellent. His first anthology Brother, What Strange Place is This? (2004), received rave reviews upon publication, such as my own in Spike Magazine: This fine collection should prove thought-provoking and sad, musical and enervating. A kaleidoscope of [...]
It is my Web 2.0 dream to create a real-time representation of writing a novel1. I’d like a video, perhaps, that shows the letters appearing and disappearing. The tap of a stone mason’s hammer could accompany each new letter; a squeaky sound a deletion. Once the novel is represented in this way, the film could [...]
And it is a war. And we do cry “Havoc!” Ian McEwan, it turns out, has a triumvirate of friends whom he entrusts with his novels before anyone else, with the poet Craig Raine scolding him whenever his writing becomes too formulaic (the pair will mark FLF, “flickering log fire”, in the margins of each [...]
Mandy Brown writes a thoughtful post on reading in the digital age. The web is still a noisy, crowded place—but it’s also limitless, and surely we can find space enough for reading—a space where the text speaks to the reader and the reader does not strain to hear. The topic of online reading skills surfaces [...]
Jakob Nielsen, the Danish web usability guru, has been looking at the state of the web for mobile devices. He compares it to the desktop web of 19981. For the best user performance, you should design different websites for each mobile device class — the smaller the screen, the fewer features, and the more scaled [...]
You’ve probably gathered that I’m a fan of the audiobook. And, like most geeks, I’m equally interested in the process of creating them. (I’ve released my own book as a podcast, so I guess I should know a bit about the mind-numbing tedium of repeating the same sentence ten times.)