Librarian of Fortune

Proactively addressing the Geezer Issue

I have been reading a discussion on the excellent LIS Career Options LinkedIn group about the importance of proactively addressing issues or barriers when talking with a possible employer or client (or anyone else for that matter). That got me thinking of a recent experience I had, and how to address the issue it raised.

I'm approaching 60 and last week was told by a Gen Y'er that she was amazed at how tech-savvy I am for "someone my age." I could have gotten insulted, but instead I took it as good input from someone who probably blurted what others think. While I don't let what I imagine other people are thinking to rule my life, it's useful to be reminded that people do make generational assumptions.

I now make a point of surfacing my social media profiles, and I don't lead any marketing conversation with a recitation of my decades of experience. My aim is to show that I embrace new technology and that I'm not resting on her laurels and killing time until I can retire. ("Retire???")

Sure, some people may still assume I'm behind the times simply because I'm not 25, but at least I'm not contributing to the perception. Perhaps now is the time to take up hang-gliding...

Seth Godin to publisher: Buh-bye

Tuesday's Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about Seth Godin's decision that, going forward, he would solely self-publish. He no longer needs a traditional publisher like Penguin Books. Notably, Godin defines "publishing" far more broadly than a traditional publisher; he plans on distributing his content in a number of media -- audiobooks, apps, podcasts, PDFs, print-on-demand, etc. As long as some version of it appears in Amazon.com, it's on the same virtual store shelf as any traditional book.

As for the value of publishers, Godin comments:

Publishers provide a huge resource to authors who don't know who reads their books... What the Internet has done for me, and a lot of others, is enable me to know my readers.

I wonder if we're seeing the beginning of a disintermediation between the content creator and the content user, similar to the old one between library users and high-end digital information.

There's still a role for content aggregators, but perhaps a far different one than in the past. In an environment in which we content creators interact directly with our readers - in multiple settings, no less - any intermediary (publisher / news aggregator) has to show its tangible value to both the originator and the user of the content.

If publishers can't find new ways to create a market for an author's content, and if more successful authors shift to Seth Godin's model, we may get to the point where print publishers are seen as the vanity press and high-quality self-publishing is the new professional standard.

As someone who has had 6 books published by traditional print publishers, I have seen the transformation of a manuscript to an edited, indexed, laid-out publication. It is a sight to behold, and certainly something I couldn't do on my own. And there are other ways that I can distribute content directly to my readers.

Traditional publishers have all the tools needed to create vibrant communities for their content providers authors. Can they, in essence, get out of the way and help their writers make direct connections with their readers? Can they expand their vision of publishing to include the media in which ideas flow most easily, if not freely?

Who's more clued in, Old Spice or Fast Company?

Blog post about how companies use social media effectively (Old Spice) and really cluelessly (Fast Company).

Fast Company is a well known forward-thinking business magazine. Conventional wisdom says they should have succeeded in a social campaign. P&G is the corporate behemoth behind the brand Old Spice. They should have had trouble with a social campaign. Turns out, that is exactly backwards.

latest columns online

My November and December columns for EContent are up.

• "Of Moore and Magic">As a lifetime geek, two axioms have always offered me the promise of ever-expanding possibilities. The first is Moore's Law, in which Gordon Moore projected a doubling every 2 years of the number of transistors that could fit on an integrated circuit. The second axiom is Arthur C. Clarke's observation in 1973 that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I see correlations between us info pros and both Moore's Law and Clarke's law of prediction.... EContent, November 2009


• "Publishing 2.0"" These are interesting times for the publishing industry. Newspapers are shuddering after watching their classified ad revenue disappear, their subscribers die off, and their readers migrate to news content that is more current than the morning edition. Editors complain bitterly about the public's apparent preference for unverified crowdsourcing and (even worse) blogs over professional journalism.... EContent, December 2009

Twapper Keeper - Archive and Organize Your Tweets

Just learned about Twapper Keeper from Gary Price. (Twapper... like Twitter trapper) The love child of Google and Twitter - all the archive of searching Twitter on Google (using site:twitter.com) plus the hash-tag feature of Twitter (Google strips off hash tags when it indexes tweets, so you can't limit your search just to hash tags).

See twapperkeeper.com/il2009 for tweets from the Internet Librarian 2009 conference, and twapperkeeper.com/slaname for all the discussion of the SLA name change.

A use for Twitter

I was playing around with Twitter search and tried this out:

"swine flu" OR h1n1 near:denver within:25mi

Might be an interesting way to track the arrival of the Flu From Hades...

Twitter is a blog

I just posted a newsletter article on my take on Twitter. Twitter = blog host. Following someone = subscribing to their RSS feed. My Twitter page = my blog. Not a perfect analogy, but at least it moves past both "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn what you had for breakfast" and "If you aren't twittering, you're tragically un-hip."

Marketing 2.0 for Info-Entrepreneurs

The latest issue of my not-monthly Info-Entrepreneur Tip of the Month is out. I talk about some of the relatively painless ways of using the social web for marketing. Yes, one could write a book about it -- these are the ones that feel like the easiest ways to leverage an independent info pro's time.

Your own search clouds

Just learned about Search Cloudlet from Gary Price at Computers in Libraries. It's an extremely cool  Firefox-only add-on that displays a tag cloud of the results from a search in Google, Yahoo and Twitter. It delays the search results page a bit while it generates the cloud, but it's a cool way of seeing most frequent terms in the search results.

You can also display a cloud of the sites retrieved - a nice way of quickly finding a few key sites.

Yet another reason to switch from IE to Firefox.....

Social Media Intelligence Cheat Sheet

I recently learned about How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic, which appeared in ReadWriteWeb, a splendid Web technology news blog.

"We'll walk you through how we identify top blogs on any topic, how we quickly figure out what their most popular recent posts have been about, how we incorporate their blog archives into our knowledge about the field and how we find where else they are participating in conversation around the web."

This is a 13-step outline of how to determine.. well, what the blurb above promises. This is a fabulous cheat-sheet for any info pro who needs to know how to mine the blogosphere. (Yes, it's more than just Technorati!) The author of this post doesn't have a library/research background, but it's written specifically for info pros.

It sometimes lapses into techno-geek, but the structure is IMO spot on:

• Find The Most Popular Blogs in Your Field
• Rank the Blog Posts With Robots
• Banish Content Overload
• Check out the Hotness
• Make a Reference Search Engine
• Discover Community Leaders Elsewhere, Too

Great cheat sheet!