January 2010
105 posts
100 Best First Lines of Novels As chosen by the... →
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
My favourite, Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye
(via booklover)
Learning French: part 1
Bonjour! Salut!
I had my first French class. I found out I already know some French! The English language is 28.3% made up of French, including Old French and early Anglo-French.
Comment allez-vous? (how are you/how do you do?)
Tres bien/Ça va (very good/OK)
Comment vous vous appelez? (what is your name? Formal) Comment tu t’appelles? (informal)
Je m’apelle__
Enchanté(e)
Vous allez bien...
1 tag
Integrating email and social marketing: questions...
If we add “share this” links to an email, pointing at sites like Twitter and Facebook, do we have the kind of email content people will actually want to share?
If people are switching, how can we deliver as much (or more) value through these new social channels as we do via email, so we don’t disappoint people?
If people are adding channels and following us at various places...
A-List Bloggers Agree: ‘Entertaining...
The following is what Jon Morrow of Copyblogger concluded worked best for his own blog after much trial and error:
” … I gradually realized that my role as a blogger isn’t to educate the world. People will buy a textbook if they want to learn. They come to me if they want an interesting little diversion with a few valuable lessons.”
In an interview with John Chow, Eric Hamm of the...
Paying for content and the great password problem
Pat Kiernan has an interesting take on the New York Times’s official announcement that they’ll start charging frequent users to access online content starting in 2011. And that is related to the endless “passwordization” of our lives in a digital world.
By going the road alone instead of opting to use something like the collaborative pay system marketed by Steven Brill of Journalism Online, the...
London Review of Books' debts
I often note how baffled I am by the ‘business’-side of (book) publishing (i.e. how un-business-like management tends to be, even (or: especially ?) among the biggest houses), but compared to the world of periodicals even that can seem almost sane. I’m particularly fascinated by what amount to vanity (i.e. money-losing) publications, ranging from Murdoch’s New York...
“E” is for Experiment (Not E-books)
The year 2010 will undoubtedly be the year of “e,” but it’s not going to stand for e-book; it will stand for experimentation. Experimentation with contracts, rights, formats and distribution channels; experimentation that will certainly include e-books, and rightfully so, but they won’t be the central focus — for publishers nor readers.
“E” is for Experiment (Not E-books)
“I think it’s the wild wild west and it’s free game and who would...”
– New York Fashion Publicist Kelly Cutrone
Kelly has overseen such famous interns as Whitney Port and Lauren Conrad before a national audience, thanks to MTV’s reality programming. Before that, Kelly says, “Nobody really knew about interning in the outside world.” She adds, “I’m, like, the patron...
On Women and Working
“How Remarkable Women Lead” (Crown Business, 355 pages) has the whiff of a self-actualization treatise, but the McKinsey team, to its credit, does try to dissect what it is about women that sometimes holds them back in business.
Women tend to take criticism personally, we’re told, rather than use feedback about poor performance as a source of insight and an aid to getting ahead....
“It breaks my heart when I talk to energized young people who idolize the icons...”
– Jaron Lanier via Marginal Revolution (via somethingchanged) (via piccoloniccolo)
Is Gawker's "Apple Tablet Scavenger Hunt" Illegal?
OK, but Gawker is just a renegade site with a legal death wish. And the issues raised by its scavenger hunt need not concern mainstream journalists, who would never engage in such stunts. Right? Right? Not so fast. While Gawker’s approach is unconventional, it’s not so clear that it’s different in kind from what business reporters at mainstream publications do every day: convince...
The end of the office... and the future of work -...
The workers can be anyone with a cellphone - a secretary waiting for a bus, a Masai tribesman herding cattle, a student between classes, a security guard on a slow day, or one of Kenya’s tens of millions of unemployed. The jobs take at most a few minutes and pay a few cents each (payment is sent by cellphone as well), but a dedicated worker can earn a few dollars a day in a part of the world where...
2 tags
Why You Think You Need Grammar
When people needed to learn modern languages instead of ancient languages, they just applied the same teaching method they used for Greek and Latin to languages like French, Spanish, German, etc. This meant that students had to memorise verb tables, nouns, adjectives, know all the linguistic terms, etc.
However, the goal is to learn how to produce instead of just understanding these modern...
The Complete Guide to Self-Studying a Foreign...
Making Your Own Study Guide
A DIY study guide is often a more efficient tool than a store-bought book. Although I give some recommendations below, remember that different language types have their own quirks and parameters. Make sure your study guide is sensitive to the unique characteristics of your chosen language. Here’s what your study guide should contain:
* A table of verb conjugations...
iTunes: From 0 to 7.0 →
(via ayasha)
The Italian language is highly permeable, as you...
Indeed, owing to ongoing linguistic infiltration, it has become something of a hybrid tongue that proves hard to comprehend if the meaning of any given sentence hinges on an unfamiliar borrowing from a foreign language.
Every year a slew of new words – Anglicisms, for the most part – emerge and enrich – or contaminate, depending on how you look at it – the Italian language. With its marked...
Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted...
When Tim Berners-Lee created the Web in 1991, it was with the aim of better facilitating scientific communication and the dissemination of scientific research. Put another way, the Web was designed to disrupt scientific publishing. It was not designed to disrupt bookstores, telecommunications, matchmaking services, newspapers, pornography, stock trading, music distribution, or a great many other...
Why we watch movie previews
And this even explains why theater tickets are always general admission. Let’s compare the alternative. The theater knows we are “buying” our seats with our time. The theater could try to monetize that by charging higher prices for better seats. But it’s a basic principle of advertising that the amount we are willing to pay to avoid being advertised at is smaller than the amount advertisers...
