mip's scan

Turning Your Blog Into A Book

Let me tell you about Blurb, a service I'm really looking forward to trying. I spoke about it in this past week's podcast and thought I'd flush some thoughts out on this as well.  Quite simply Blurb allows you to create a book from your blog.  Using a tool / application they call BookSmart you import content from your blog (i.e., pictures, blog post, etc.) and then you can create a real hardcover book from that.  You end up creating a BlogBook.  I'm still waiting for an invite to this service so I can't tell you how effectively it works, but I do have some thoughts on why I find this very interesting. 

To me its twofold.  First, it allows you to extend the intellectual capital you've created by bringing it into the offline world.  I see it as a nice compliment to what gets created online.  Secondly, I think it's a powerful and effective way to to extend the conversation so to speak.  Yeah I know...I'm talking a lot about conversations...Scoble and Israel got it totally right.

Naked Conversations

I'd podcasted previously about how much I enjoyed the book by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel called Naked Conversations (and for my many Canadian readers you can find the book here).  I recently lent it to a co-worker as well and told him "You're interested in corporate blogging, you need to read this book."  I enjoyed the way it was written, but more importantly I liked the message for businessesan ,mely that blogging will become (or perhaps has already become) a necessary way of reaching out to  your customers.  To begin a real conversation with them.

I'm going to be writing a piece on blogging and the corporation, sparked by an interesting experiment that someone has started here (can't say much about it yet).  In the meantime, go out and read Naked Conversations.  Don't just take my word on it though, the Harvard School of Business also found the book to be a good one.

The authors show how blogs are now changing organizations and explains how readers can use blogs for a variety of business purposes, especially marketing and public relations.

To read the entire review from HBS just click here. 

Great job Scoble and Shel!

Publishers Confused?

I had found it amusing and slightly confusing that book publishers wanted to sue Google in order to halt the scanning of books and making them available online via searches.  I'm of mindset that if they allowed for this, it'd actually drive increased book sales.  It's like the argument for mp3 versions of music - the wider the distribution is, good content will always be appreciated and bought.  But ok, I was willing to acknowledge that the publishers were just trying to protect their content.

Then I read that HarperCollins is going to kick off their own initiative to scan their own books and make them available to the major search engines to crawl/index.  So now I really don't get it?  They are opposed to it and yet they are going ahead and doing it themselves?  To make the whole scenario just a little more perplexing is this...

"This is going to be a costly initiative," she said, adding that a budget had not yet been set but the cost was expected to run into millions of dollars. The publisher has invited proposals from vendors to carry out the contract to digitize some 20,000 or more books in the global back-catalogue as well as the 3,500 to 5,000 new books it publishes each year.

...so you didn't want Google to do it for you, for free, but your willing to spend millions of dollars to have some vendor do it for you? 

In all honesty, what I think this is really pointing to is that Google is suffering from what most companies who become successful suffer from: people start to hate you for that success.  People love the underdog right?  So when it was Google-the-little-guy battling Microsoft-the-big-guy, well everyone cheered for Google (go Google go).  But Google isn't the little-guy anymore and so we can expect people to want to oppose ideas from them, even when they make sense.  It's either that or the publishing industry really doesn't understand what they are doing - I'm not sure which state is the more comical.

If you'd like to read the whole article, just click here.

How Things Have Changed

I came across this an thought I'd post something here as a light technology topic.  Its a site that has the scans of an old book called How It Works...The Computer.  They show a number of pages from the original printing in 1971 and the second printing in 1979. 

The second printing from 1979 came out just when I was first writing my first computer program on an old CPM machine my uncle lent me from where he worked which was NCR.  I was nine at the time. God I feel old.

I loved the pics of the old punchcards.

For you old time programmers, enjoy this little trip down memory lane.

The textbook pages can be found here.