Sharing is caring
3 February 2009
Filed under Books, Text
I’ve just paid for and downloaded a PDF book by Mark Boulton called Five Simple Steps: Designing for the Web. It’s a really nicely-designed publication, and although I’ve only glanced through it so far, it seems to be chock-full of great advice and examples. I’m also really impressed the way Mark’s gone about promoting it via his networks over the last six months or so.
The only sticking point for me is the application of a software-license-style fee structure: 12 pounds1 for ‘one user’, 25 pounds for five, and 50 pounds for a ten-user license. I haven’t really got that much to say about this, other than that books are surely meant to be shared, and in their sharing gain all kinds of attributes not as easily quantifiable as cash – influence over a broader audience, for example.
Compare Mark’s payment structure with that of Massimo Vignelli, who recently released a book-length PDF of his musings free of charge - I’m not for one second suggesting that Mark shouldn’t profit from his book, but rather that it may be interesting to try to gauge the comparative merits of reach and profit, to determine whether over time, reach leads to greater influence, and therefore – presumably – more demand for your services, and thus more money). Of course, Vignelli’s got both reach and (one assumes) cash in bucketloads, so perhaps he’s not the best example.
1No, I can’t be bothered finding the pound sign
Nom nom nomify
21 January 2009
Filed under Text
Nomify is a modest experiment in group-blogging that I’ve been fussing around the edges of for months - it started life as “Pretty Nice, Thanks”, but the verb ‘to nom’ (meaning, roughly, ‘to eat with gusto’) is one of my favourites, and I managed to secure what must be one of very few remaining word-like six-letter domain names during a spree earlier in the year; thus, ‘Nomify’ it became. That’s all that needs to be said, really: it’s a recipe-sharing blog with a bunch of contributors, all of whom are real-life friends of mine, and although the purview of the site is small, they’re just great recipes and I wanted to share them with a wider audience.
Recent Alerts
Short Eats
- I really like the cover for Readings and Writings, an anthology Readings bookstore is putting together to celebrate 40 years in the book business.
- I love these David Shrigley decals Third Drawer Down is making at the moment.
- "Women hit things", according to Volkswagen.
- An excellent graph shows Twitter's effect on regime change in Iran.
- I saw a teaser for 2012 a couple of months ago. The trailer is now out, and it looks just like the kind of film I'll be queuing up to see. Destruction!
- Schott's Vocab reports on Kevin Rudd's recent and painful use of the expression "fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate".
- St Vincent singing 'Salve', acoustically. Drool.
- Cake Fail at Alien Onion. Make sure you read the footnote for extra LOLs.
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